This is a guest post by Brooke Binkowski.
November Grass
Many years ago, I read a beautiful little book written about an unnamed girl (“the girl”) who lived and worked on a ranch and mused about life and death and its cycles. It was in the middle of a phase in which I had been reading a lot of Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa books, and so I thought that it was one of those. When I re-read Blixen’s books, I enjoyed the prose just as much as I had remembered, but I still came away dissatisfied: It was missing that original magic. Had I changed so much in ten years that I was unable to recapture it? But as with so many things, I fretted about it for a while, decided that change was inevitable, and then dropped it with some sadness at being unable to remember the surprised delight of those perfect little turns of phrase that take you right to where the author wants you to be. It’s difficult to explain without feeling like I’m damning Blixen’s writing with faint praise, and I don’t mean to diminish her work at all, but particular book was luminous and special, and I couldn’t even recall its title.
It took me until this year to figure out why, and it was by the barest chance. I passed by a free library and took out a slender little volume with the title November Grass, which sounded very familiar. About twenty pages in, I discovered why: It was my lost Blixen book. Only it isn’t Blixen, and it isn’t set in Africa, or even out of Africa. It’s a book set in and about where I live — San Diego. The deciding factor in taking the book home to read was an introduction by Ursula K. Le Guin, a lifelong favorite author of mine. She said she had found that book at random much like I did, and loved it for its clarity and beauty. The author, Judy Van Der Veer, has more or less been lost to the sort of obscurity that happens to a lot of women writers over time, and I hadn’t heard of her elsewhere. But that old, soft, luminous magic and the surprised delight I felt at her writing still exists on every page, and her rural San Diego is so vivid and recognizable to me that I can almost reach out and touch it beneath the malls and highways that now cover much of it. (Sorry, Karen.)
The book does contain some signs of its time with its discussions in some chapters of the girl’s thoughts about “Indians” and “Mexicans,” though the bigotry is through a soft-focus lens of care and concern for the people and their animals. All told, it is a beautiful piece of history as well as literature.
I also suspect that “the girl” showed up as Myra in Ursula Le Guin’s lovely story, “Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight?” At least, that’s who she will always be for me now.
Brown Hills
Now that I have discovered Judy Van Der Veer’s writing, I want to keep reading her books. Brown Hills was published before November Grass, and it is longer and more personal, making it clear who “the girl” in November Grass is, as if there were any doubt.
Brown Hills is a year’s worth of thoughts and observations, written as vignettes with a larger theme — life, death, and their cycles — intertwined through each story. Van Der Veer, using that same simple clarity of language, describes the world around her and frets over the health and well-being of the animals she cares for on her ranch. It makes the hills around here, whose shapes are as familiar and welcome to me as the faces of old friends, seem like something new and exciting, picked out in old gold leaf by the California sun. She almost never mentions the names of towns or cities; the ranch could be set anywhere, but of course she mentions the names of those mountains and canyons that are so dear to me, and seeing their names in these chapters was like running into childhood friends.
I have rarely seen rural San Diego written about anywhere, so to be able to read these stories was wonderful, especially since in the course of reading the book I became aware that these were places still around, places I knew and was able to see in my mind’s eye as I read, lit from above by the evening star rising over Black Mountain. In one chapter, the author describes a single huge cottonwood tree that grows resplendent at the end of an otherwise open field and litters its golden leaves every autumn. I know and love that particular tree, which now lives by the side of a freeway in eastern San Diego County, very well.
This is a “quiet book,” with no grand adventures or journeys sustaining it, unless you count the journeys of life toward death and death back to life again a grand adventure, which Judy Van Der Veer clearly does, and so do I. The simplicity and clarity of the language in this lovely book and the vividness of her descriptions connected me to her through time and reminded me that I was once a barefoot child running through the canyons and hills of Eastern San Diego County too.
Perhaps the next time I pass that glorious tree, I’ll stop by and say hello.
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Brooke Binkowski is a third-generation San Diego journalist who loves Southern California, writing, and animals. |
November Grass
New York: Longman, Green and Company, 1940
Reissued by Heyday Books, 2001
Brown Hills
New York: Longman, Green and Company, 1938
Both by Judy Van Der Veer
This sounds like an author I want to visit. I find more and more that the older books are so much more worth my time than the contemporary titles. Perhaps because they have no competition and no quota to meet with the sales.
What a wonderful blog, thank you. I also loved November Grass, and will pick it back up to be immersed again, and to remind myself to be more present in the wild property that surrounds me, especially necessary in today’s global torment. I did not know of Brown Hills, but will search for it as soon as I hit the period at the end of this sentence.