While compiling the list in my previous post I came across these two books, which I had more or less forgotten about.
The books contain stories about life in Louise's part of Maine. Some of them are about her, but most of them are about other people.
'Happy the Land' starts with a short foreword in which Louse explains her life so far at Forest Lodge (if you have read We Took to the Woods you will now all this). She moved there after marrying Ralph Ridge. They had two children, Rufus and Dinah.
'Then (in december 1944) the bottom dropped out of my life. Ralph died. (...) I think I need not tell you what a terrible and shocking thing it was for me, nor underline the sense of hopelessness and loss that pervaded my days for months after that. (...) I can only say that in time I began to live again, and that this was a true rebirth: for all the things I'd loved about this life here, all the places Ralph and I had been together and the things we had done were restored with a freshness of novelty, but better than that - the clear definition of new vision brought to bear on things old and precious through association and memory and experience.
So I decided that I would write a book to please myself, about the things I love, while they still shone so brightly. This is that book.'
Both books are full of names of places but, most importantly, of people, for it is clear that, while Louise loves where she lives, it is the people that make the place special, and she could not do without them.
'Happy the Land' is the more personal of the two books, and this is your best bet if you want to know 'what happened next'.
After Ralph died Louise leaves Forest Lodge at very short notice as she feels it is foolish of anyone to live alone in this country, and because she wants to be with her children. By spring 1945 she feels a need to return as she has not left things as they should have been left. She hitches a ride with Larry Parsons when he is Out (Louise writes In and Out with capital letters). She takes Catherine (Gerrish's daughter) and her dog Kyak with her. 'The next two weeks were perhaps the queerest two weeks I have ever spent in my life - two weeks lifted entirely out of time.' Writing, working and sunbathing, Louise slowly begins to feel better. As the spring is unusually hot, the ice is expected to be Out a month early, which means all the "sports' will be wanting to come hunt and fish early too. This means her dear neighbour Alice has a problem getting the hotel ready. And so Louise and Catherine help her, learning all about the hotel trade in the process. Louise stays on to work as chambermaid, laundress and chef's helper.
'Then one day I looked at the calender and it was the second of June. Good Lord, the kids would be coming home from school at the end of the week!' And so her hotel work is over.
Other chapters cover Louise and Ralphs's second home Pine Point, having friends to stay, living Outside in rented accomodation with the children so they can go to school and small town life. Some people she obviously cares a lot about get a chapter to themselves, such as Gerrish, the 'hired help', who lived with them at Forest Lodge, and Alice Parsons, her friend and neighbour, who runs a hotel with her husband Larry.
My Neck of the Woods was written because it had occurred to Louise that in her first book she had mostly written about herself and that she had not 'paid enough attention to one of the chief factors in making life good, or even possible for me: my friends and neighbours.'
These friends and neighbours are game wardens, people running a logging camp, a guide for 'sports' (tourists who come for the hunting and fishing), a 'hermit', farmers, hotel keepers and teachers. Ordinary people 'like the large majority of their compatriots, quietly going about their business from day to day, doing their best to get along.'
My copies are paperback editions which contain no illustrations. If anyone out there has a hardback copy with photo's I would love to hear from you!
