The phrase "stayers-at-home" I take from Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of Pointed Firs, specifically the story "A Winter Courtship" therein. the story is a slight one, told between two elderly parties on a wagon ride between North Kilby and Sanscrit Pond, Maine, one frozen December morning. I've just reread the story, which is charming.
Sarah Orne Jewett is a reliable pleasure to read and reread, and strangely still unknown to many contemporary readers who might otherwise know the classics of American literature well. Her novels and stories, and even her poems as it turns out, are just the sort of tartly sentimental reading, it seems to me, called for at this Holiday Season; deceptively simple stories of good people, in a granite hard place, salted with humor and solid American optimism, told in a spare and reliably satisfying prose. Not every story ends as happily as "A Winter Courtship," but they're all satisfying, each in it's way, hard cider or soft.
Her books are perfect reading for just such days as we're having now.
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