“The Loved Ones”

A few years ago my friend Stephen and I were on a drive back from visiting the Kingston, Ontario hospice where his later mother had once spent time. Stephen pointed out a house with a blackboard out front: “they have a different Wendell Berry quote there every morning.”Had I heard of Wendell Berry before? Surely I must have, what with my connection to The Old Farmer’s Almanac and the Whole Earth Catalog.Yet Stephen’s mention was the first time I remember consciously thinking about him as anything other than “generic homespun American writer.”Then this morning, from Nova Scotia printer Andrew Steeves:I was heartbroken to learn of the death of the American writer and farmer Wendell Berry yesterday in Kentucky at age 92. I don’t think any living writer more shaped my own thinking, and life, than Wendell did. I feel very lucky to have known him a little, to have met and to have corresponded, and to have shared a little in each other’s lives. At the time of his death, a letter of mine…