Living the Questions
Some books seem uninviting by their age or lack of presence. The pages on the library shelf have yellowed, or the bookstore has but a single copy, not stacks and stacks like the latest bestseller.
Such a book is A Country Year by Sue Hubbell, originally published in 1986. Sue Hubbell lived in the Missouri Ozarks for 25 years, 
pursuing a gentle, sane life while carving out a modest living for herself as a keeper of bees.
One day at a time, she rebuilt her life after her husband left her. The warm tone of the author's voice, and her observations on herself and her surroundings, have made this book a classic.
If you've never heard of this book, find a copy. Unlike most bestsellers, this is a book worth owning and revisiting. If you read this book years ago, 
this may be all the nudge you need to pick it up again.
From A Country Year:
--"I have lived here in the Ozark Mountains of southern Missouri for twelve years now, and for most of that time I have been alone. I have learned to run a business that we started together, a commercial beekeeping and honey-producing operation, a shaky, marginal sort of affair that never quite leaves me free of money worries but which allows me to live in these hills that I love."
--[After her husband left] "I went through all the usual things: I couldn't sleep or eat, talked feverishly to friends, plunged recklessly into a destructive affair with a man who had more problems than I did but who was convenient, made a series of stupid decisions about my honey business and pretty generally botched up my life for several years running.
My mind didn't work.
--"And for a long, long time, my mind didn't work. I could not listen to the news on the radio with understanding. My attention came unglued when I tried to read anything but the lightest froth. My brain spun in endless, painful loops, and I could neither concentrate nor think with any semblance of order. I had always rather enjoyed having a mind, and I missed mine extravagantly. I was out to lunch for three years."
--"My bees cover one thousand square miles of land that I do not own in their foraging flights, flying from flower to flower for which I pay no rent, stealing nectar but pollinating plants in return. It is an unruly kind of agriculture, and making a living by it has such a wild, anarchistic, raffish appeal that it unsuits me for any other, except possibly robbing banks."
Also by Sue Hubbell - A Book of Bees: and How to Keep Them
