My friend gave me a book for my birthday. Chickens, Gin, and a Maine Friendship is a collection of letters between writers E.B. White and Edmund Ware Smith that spans the mid-1950s and 60s. It was a poignant gift. My friend edited my last book and our friendship — like White’s and Smith’s — is built on words shared across distances. She and I live in different towns, and we've written to each other during the physical distancing in the coronavirus pandemic.
At the start of their correspondence, White and Smith were 20 years older than us. Their mutual admiration is clear from the first letters. As the title of the book suggests, they also shared certain interests and entertainments. Though White, an editor and essayist for the New Yorker, was popular for his children’s books about spiders (Charlotte’s Web) and mice (Stuart Little), he considered himself a “poultry man.” For decades, he had raised several dozen chicks every year for eggs and meat.
Smith, an acclaimed essayist, was a poultry beginner and sought White’s advice on matters such as the construction of a henhouse. At times, their letters become saturated with the exact measurements for roosts. But their gentle ribbing buoyed my interest. After congratulating White on the success of Elements of Style, a writer’s guide that frowns on the use of adjectives and adverbs, Smith added that he would have written earlier, but reading White’s book had led him to try and write sentences without words!
The men also shared an affinity for a stiff drink. In their letters, they saluted the success of the other’s publications, and they commiserated about writer’s block and henhouse woes. For two highly acclaimed and successful writers, they are refreshingly modest.
They are likewise honest about their health issues. Such talk of aches and pains is common among many older men I’ve known. But I don’t begrudge this. I find it endearing. In between their discussions of chicken breeds and cocktail recipes, Smith and White expressed their care and concern.
They also supported each other at the deaths of mutual friends like the writer and cartoonist James Thurber. White eulogized his New Yorker colleague by saying Thurber wrote “the way a child skips rope, the way a mouse dances.” For Smith, reading White’s tribute was a spiritual experience: “It lets light through the cloud around death.”
Smith died in 1967. As the years passed, he and White wrote less and less about the topics that had initiated their friendship. They no longer swapped recipes for lime rickeys. Smith stopped joking about his henhouse as the Chicken Hilton, while White ceased analyzing the egg-laying capacities of certain breeds.
As they corresponded less about their domestic birds, they wrote more about the wild ones. White spotted a rare Glossy Ibis. Smith witnessed an egret swoop down upon a field mole. White wrote about bluebirds that had nested in an old pear tree, Smith about crows rooting for crab apples. Both reported sightings of sparrows, robins, and chickadees. Two friends naming winged grace.
We should all be so blessed.
~
After my book was published in 2019, my friend has continued to edit my poems and essays. But I started e-mailing her regularly during the pandemic about life, not work.
Like White and Smith, we share running jokes. Ours are not about raising chickens but young children. We each have bookworm sons who lose themselves in Dave Pilkey’s books and feisty daughters who wish to grow up and become tigers. In addition to the joys, we write about the grind of parenting. But we cope with chocolate, not liquor. We call M&Ms our daily vitamins.
She’s a terrific writer. Her prose skips playfully from subject to subject, landing on insights all along the way. And she has a poet’s touch — comparing her dancing husband and daughter to pistachios, a flock of starlings as a “flying thundercloud.”
She is someone with whom I can share my struggles as both a parent and a pastor. She writes back and her words let light through the cloud around death in this pandemic.
The first parishioner died last May and someone either in the church or in a member’s family has died of COVID-19 every month since. Funerals have always been a part of my vocation, yet never have I sensed such a grim ticking of the clock, waiting for the next loss.
As I write, many of the oldest and most vulnerable parishioners are receiving vaccinations. They tell me about the light at the end of the tunnel.
I hope the light is not an oncoming train.
Parishioners do not look to their pastors to say such things. Speak instead of the light that shines in the darkness (John 1:5). In the words of Charles Wesley’s Easter hymn, “Tell the grim, demonic chorus: ‘Christ is risen! Get you gone!’”
There have been many days when I have needed to sing a dirge. I trust my friend to receive my lament without judgment.
Sometime in spring or summer — the pandemic months run together — my friend sent me a video taken from her phone of a squirrel in her backyard. As she and her two children watched from the window, this squirrel shimmied to the bird feeder only to slide back down the pole. Undaunted, this furry little Sisyphus climbed again and her video recorded the encouragement of unseen children: “Come on, come on! You can do it! Go, go, go!”
With apologies to Emily Dickinson, hope is a thing with a bushy tail and madly pumping legs.
In addition to the daily dose of M&Ms, my friend references this squirrel in her writing. We may slip and slide, yet we try again and again. We press toward the goal of the upward call (2 Cor 4:8).
My hope is not only lifted by the example of determined effort. I trust that people cheer and root for me, even if I can’t see or hear them. Maybe such a friend is even writing to me now, calling me to mind at this very moment.
Andrew Taylor-Troutman serves as poet pastor of Chapel in the Pines Presbyterian Church in Chapel Hill, NC. His fourth book, Gently Between the Words, was published in 2019.
