Rushworth Kidder essays a collection of backyard magic

IN THE BACKYARDS OF OUR LIVES, by Rushworth Kidder, Yankee Books, 148 pages, $19.95.

This collection of essays by prize-winning Christian Science Monitor columnist and founder of Camden’s Institute for Global Ethics is as refreshing as rain on a hot summer’s day. The genial Kidder admits he likes writing personal essays for the same reason he likes walking in the woods: “You don’t do it to get somewhere, but for the sake of the walk itself. It slows you down and forces you to notice little things … it makes you look hard at your own backyard.”

This seemingly casual nouveau roman style is art concealed for the sake of wisdom revealed. Search out the small details, he advises in the book’s title essay — the torn pocket on the overalls hung out in the dooryard to dry … the attics and pantries, the cobwebs in the woodshed window, the china left by children under the spruce — these follow the personal curve of life.

Kidder was reared in Amherst, Mass., home of reclusive poet Emily Dickinson (1830-1886). Daily, on his way to school, he passed her brick house wreathed in gardens. Back then, he confesses, he had no idea who she was. In the essay, “Emily up the Street,” he observes that his teachers never took students there, nor did they link her name to the brilliance of her genius. It was not until he was in graduate school (“immersed in poetry”) and had returned home to spend a weekend with his parents — who had sold their old home and were living temporarily in the Dickinson house — that the force of her poetry came to him in a blinding flash. It happened after lunch on a gray Sunday heavy with darkening clouds. As he stepped out into the Dickinson garden, bleak and overcast, his mind suddenly blazed with lines she had written: “There’s a certain slant of light,/ Winter afternoons,/ That oppresses, as the heft/ Of cathedral tunes.”

The perfection, precision, and power of Dickinson’s words gleamed like prisms refracting joy — “joy in the fact that language works, joy in the fact that I had seen it work…” And joy that he had finally met “the long-lost neighbor up the street.”

This delightful sense of discovery is ever-present in Kidder’s 35 essays. Often they are laced with remembrance, as in “Squirrel Bananas,” a piece about the sticky brown penny candies by that name. Wrapped in yellow and brown wax paper, these globs were among the passionate temptations of his youth, winking at him lustfully from the glass jar, one of many on display in the local candy store, “beacon of our school-day afternoons.” Although Squirrel Bananas were clearly the front-runners in his boyish affections, others also vied for his attention — gumdrops, jelly beans, taffies, hard candies enrobed in gaudy wrappers, chocolate kisses — sirens all, beckoning to a boy who ardently believed they were “among the best things in the world.”

In “Ways to Buy Nails,” the author examines the fascination males feel for hardware stores. “You must understand … that I’m not wild about shopping…,” he cautions. “For one sort of shop, however, I have a peculiar weakness: that catchall emporium of tools, paints, and kitchen supplies known as the small-town hardware store.”; “New England When It Runs” recalls his rollicking love affair with a 7-year-old Jaguar two-seater in his sophomore year at college (“when romance exceeds rationality”); “The Raccoon Shrugged” describes his strange confrontation with this inscrutable creature; while “Dawn and the Lady-Slipper” glows with the sense of epiphany he felt when, on a spring paddle in Maine, his eye fell on a lady-slipper: “Solitary, pink, and rare, it stood quietly on its niche on the ledge.”

When he was 7 Kidder and his father went camping in Ontario to a wilderness site where each camper had an outdoor cookstove. “Kindling Wet Wood” remembers the ease with which his father fired up the campstove, inspiring young Kidder to surprise his father by getting up early one morning and starting the fire himself, only to find that it would not ignite. That was the day, he writes, that his father taught him how to lay a proper fire and inducted him into the challenge of wet, green logs. From this episode the author says he learned that while making a good fire is a skill, redeeming a bad one is an art. He goes on to extrapolate that he knows now there must have been many days that his father regarded him as “pretty wet wood.”

The minister in Poe’s “Purloined Letter” successfully hid his stolen missives by keeping them in full view. In much the same way Kidder conceals his profundity by camouflaging it in garb familiar to all. Like Shakespeare, this master of the essay form finds tongues in trees, books in running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything. Never once does he let on how much he is teaching us. And therein lies the magic of Rushworth Kidder.

Author of three prvious books, he received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University, and makes his home in Lincolnville.

Bea Goodrich’s reviews are a monthly Books in Review feature. She also writes a review column, and is the author of the award-winning nature story series, “Happy Hollow Stories by Judge Tortoise.”