A Stone Bridge North - Tapa dura

Through the lenses of the seasons and reawakened Quaker faith, a midlife escapee from a "straight-edged" to a more fulfilling lifestyle in the Vermont woods reflects upon her journey of "miracles found and fears allayed" including an Internet connection to a new love. Maloy is the author of Birth or Abortion: Private Struggles in a Political World ." Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

A middle-aged woman with a teenage son rediscovers her Quaker faith, and quits her urban life for a homestead in the woods of Vermont. . "I lived a straight-edged life, a cubist arrangement of familiar rectangles: office, computer screen, paycheck, city blocks, mortgage, calendar pages, television screen. These were more confining than I knew. Most confining of all, for most of those years, was the four-square house I occupied like a resentful ghost through half my marriage...I am no longer a ghost in my life. " --from the Prologue A Stone Bridge North is the author's own story of "miracles found and fears allayed" in the journey out of a confining urban existence and into a simpler, more joyous life. To tell this story fully, she must look through changed eyes at her past-at childhood anxieties, family disaffections, failed marriages, late motherhood, restless boredom, and, paradoxically, a native talent for joy. She learns that she has been guided by faith even when she thought she had none. She begins to discern purpose and design both in her stories and in the light by which she sees them-a light refracted through a Quaker lens that searches for the sacred in all people. As the four seasons turn, she celebrates the loves of her new life-family, friends, language, silence, and the extraordinary landscape of Vermont.