By Jessica F. Kane
Literary fiction
May 2019
Penguin Press
ISBN: 978-0525559221
Once again, the truth that a book finds you just when you need it was shown to me when I read Jessica F. Kane's Rules for Visiting. A story of friendship, family and reaching out, plus tree lore, what a lovely gift.
May is a 40-year-old who has been content in her job, working on a grounds crew at a university. Not being married and living in her childhood home, while her father lives in a self-contained apartment downstairs, has been the way she gets through her days.
Midway through my fortieth year, I reached a point where the balance of the past and all it contained seemed to outweigh the future, my mind so full of things said and not said, done and undone, I no longer understood how to move forward.
It is not an accident that she works with plants. The putting down of roots is central to this novel, and to this character.
But when I moved back to Anneville, something changed. Suddenly I wanted a whole garden. Years later it was pointed out to me that guardian and garden share a root meaning “safety, enclosure.”
There is something about gardening that May doesn't yet know that she knows. But she realizes it later on:
Why do I like gardening? Because I worry I’ve inherited a certain hopelessness, a potentially fatal lack of interest, that I’m diseased with reserve. Making a garden runs counter to all that. You can’t garden without thinking about the future.
An unexpected award of a month off at work, as a reward, at first throws May. But as someone who loves to investigate the roots of words as much as she understands and cares the roots of plants, May decides to do the unexpected. She will spend time with her far-flung friends, if they will have her.
Before the odyssey begins, Kane is an assured enough storyteller that we have a few short, yet meandering-seeming, chapters on May's life. As with all assured storytellers, there are good reasons for letting us know what we do. This format also serves the purpose of easing into Kane's calm narrative style. There is the sense throughout the book that our comfort matters.
This is an interesting contrast to the way May feels. She isn't quite prickly, but she has spent so much time by herself that she doesn't want to impose on others. She is not sure how people act around each other. How did the neighbors make friends so easily? How do people get along with each other?
Love stands apart; love lets you come to it. This isn’t wrong, exactly, but I wanted to learn how to stand closer.
This is what leads to her decision to travel to see her friends. After all:
Consider the word visit. It’s from the Old French visiter, which meant “to inspect, examine, or afflict.” You can visit a neighbor or a friend, but so can plagues and pestilence.
What a wonderful idea to explore in these days of staying apart so that we can support a common goal.
The first friend May visits is a super-busy mother who lives on social media and assuredly an acolyte of Martha Stewart and Joanna Gaines. She is stressed and the visit is slightly strained. She remains good-hearted, but there is not the connection that May seeks.
The next friend is even more distant, and the visit is rather short.
The third friend has a lot of adjustments to her own life going on, but it's obvious she and May want to remain friends even if they don't have the luxury of friendship without time constraints. That was something May sought in deciding to make her pilgrimage, thinking of the visits to country estates that Jane Austen characters make, the friends who stay for a fortnight. Indeed, the hashtag #fortnightfriend arises out of a local story about May's reward that embarasses her, and which she does not fall into taking up.
The fourth friend, living in London, brings it all together. This portion of the book was balm and came at a time when May is coming to better understand the wonderful value in visiting old friends, but also how soothing it can be to know that you care about those around you, and that they care for you.
It's not just people that are around us. Kane also writes with great admiration for the trees:
It seems the trees’ plight is to be always underappreciated by humans while working the hardest of any plant on earth for them. We cut them down, we poison them, we introduce disease and destructive pests. But we also plant them when someone is born, we plant them when someone dies. We want them to measure and commemorate our lives, even as the way we live hurts them.
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