I read for pleasure at some point every day before I go to bed. I try not to waste my time on insignificant books (“So many books, so little time”. . .).
Because I try to choose my books carefully, I tend to get involved in the situations I’m reading about. I take them personally, which means I get emotionally involved and insert myself into the characters’ lives or the historical facts I’m reading. I “feel” what’s in a book.
That’s fine if I’m reading Woodburn and Mackenzie’s How Clean Is Your House? It is actually about cleaning your house, which is the least emotional topic I can think of. I didn’t feel anything. I didn’t see it as impacting me, so I wasn’t at all disturbed to read it at bedtime for information, in case I ever did clean.
Reading William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, though it tells about millions of people dying at the hands of the megalomaniac Hitler, didn’t bother me either. It made me morally angry, but it was an objective report of facts that didn’t involve me personally. I could read it at night without feeling distress or fear.
But some books I read do disturb me greatly, especially if they touch at all on cruelty to animals or a frightening situation that could happen to me. If I unsuspectingly pick up such a book that turns out to be a psychological thriller, like Sanatorium by Sarah Pearse, or a book featuring an abused animal, like Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, I can’t read it just before bedtime. It’s too anxiety-producing.
So somewhere along the way, I devised a simple scheme for myself called “Bedroom Books and Sunroom Books.” The book about house cleaning didn’t involve my emotions at all. I could comfortably read three or four chapters and go right to sleep. So books like that, or charming human stories without dead dogs are designated as Bedroom Books.
I quickly learned that books like Sanatorium should not be read after dark, much less right before turning out the lights. I could only read it in daylight when birds were singing and I was hours from lights out.
I can tell with the first few paragraphs whether a selection is a Bedroom Book or a Sunroom Book, and I keep a sharp delineation to protect my emotional well-being.
So I knew after reading the first page of the Prologue for the book my former boss, Pat Brown, loaned me that it was a definite Sunroom Book when the author describes the collars of dead family dogs and recalls what happened to them. I would require plenty of sunshine and chirping birds to get through this one.
But the title intrigued me so I sat down in the sunroom and began to read The Delta in the Rearview Mirror: The Life and Death of Mississippi’s First Winery. It’s the true story of the dreams of a young Mississippi Delta couple, Sam and Di Rushing, who wanted to establish the state’s first winery near Merigold, Miss.
Their situation immediately pulled me in. I was in Merigold two months ago, visited McCarty Pottery as well as Mound Bayou and Cleveland, all of which figure largely in the book. I attended Delta State and lived in the Delta for about seven years. So the landscape and the Delta culture were familiar to me, and I’ve been to Ouray, Colo., where the Rushings find refuge later.
All is well in their venture until Sam fires a disgruntled employee, Ray Russell. Ray is representative of too many men of his type— resentful, jealous of successful people, able but not willing to improve his lot in life. Di Rushing says that Ray and his father are, to their own minds, “perpetual victims of a society that seemed anthema to their lifestyle.”
Ray’s firing sets off his growing antagonism toward the hard-working and increasingly successful Rushings. First, they come home to find their family dog bleeding out on the porch, shot through the throat, and their house vandalized. Several of their other dogs have disappeared and been found dead, and they begin to see why.
They don’t go to the police until they come home another time to find the entire year’s wine harvest draining into the Sunflower River and their successful tea room smashed. After Ray is found not guilty in court, he begins boasting, “Them Rushing kids are next.”
That’s what was so frightening about the story— that sense of creeping, unstoppable evil that can come for any of us when we’re just minding our own business.
The couple makes the heart-wrenching decision to leave their business and their Delta home to save their family.
This is a sad but beautifully written and insightful memoir of a dream destroyed but a family that triumphs and rebuilds their lives.
I strongly advise you to put this book under your Reading Lamp, but I also advise that if you connect with emotional stories, as I do, you find a sunny corner in which to open to page 1.
