This started with the return of a book to the library, Rebecca Rule: The Best Revenge: Short Stories (1996). Both Patty and I tremendously enjoyed the book and when I mentioned having read it fellow Deering residents I learned that Rebecca Rule is well known and much appreciated in town; somebody suggested inviting her to read, because an earlier reading was very popular. So we did.
She loves to laugh and to get others laughing too! I was hooked after reading the first story in The Best Revenge. The first paragraph goes:
"A school district meeting, Miranda knits.
May your neighbors steal from your wood pile, Mort Wallace.
The points of her flexi-needle slide in and out of the heavy burgundy wool.
May they incinerate their garbage in a barrel at your property line. And may the wind blow in your direction.
She counts seventeen stitches. She re-counts, eighteen stitches. She remembers a musk of burning garbage, the red smoke blowing over, ash falling like snow.
May you choke on the smoke.
Miranda's thick hair -- bands of gray and white -- beehives in mysterious swirls that amaze the young parents sitting one row behind her. When she lifts her chin, the back of her neck straightens, and the lines of her jaw smooth into youth."
And so it goes: maybe you have felt this way toward some residents at Town Meeting?
Rebecca, as one Deering resident might put it, gets it! She 'gets' New Hampshire. She hears the voices of our state, and she speaks the sometimes peculiar local dialect. She is ofNew Hampshire. Her father and grandfather trapped beavers; Becky knows what that SMELLS like.
Rebecca
Rule brings her stories of New Hampshire and the characters that make
New Hampshire unique to Deering Town Hall on February 15 at 3:00 pm. Rebecca is a recent recipient of an Honorary
Doctor of Humane Letters from New England College and has been
collecting and telling stories of New Hampshire and New England for more
than fifteen years. She has several books to her credit in addition to The Best Revenge including her
popular Heading for the Rhubarb and Live Free and Eat Pie. Rebecca comes
from a long line of New England story tellers and has spent much of her
life collecting and telling stories which have their roots bedded in
the granite of New Hampshire. She is best known for her lively and
humorist style that has left audiences rolling in the aisles.
This event is open to all and admission is free, but those who care to donate to the Deering Library/Deering Association, co-sponsors of the reading, will be entered into a drawing for three of Rebecca Rule's books. A snow date is February 27. If you have any questions please contact me through this site or through the Deering town web site: http://www.deering.nh.us/Public_Documents/DeeringNH_Library/index
