Unless. Carol Shields

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      UNLESS

      CAROL SHIELDS

      

Dedication

       For Ezra and Jay

       Epigraph

      If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

      GEORGE ELIOT

      Table of Contents

      

       Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Here’s

Nearly

Once

Wherein

Nevertheless

So

       Otherwise

       Instead

       Thus

       Yet

       Insofar As

       Thereof

       Every

       Regarding

       Hence

       Next

       Notwithstanding

       Thereupon

       Despite

       Throughout

       Following

       Hardly

       Since

       Only

       Unless

       Toward

       Whatever

       Any

       Whether

       Ever

       Whence

       Forthwith

       As

       Beginning With

       Already

       Hitherto

       Not Yet

       Acknowledgements

       About the Author

       The Work of Carol Shields

       Copyright

       About the Publisher

       Here’s

      IT HAPPENS THAT I am going through a period of great unhappiness and loss just now. All my life I’ve heard people speak of finding themselves in acute pain, bankrupt in spirit and body, but I’ve never understood what they meant. To lose. To have lost. I believed these visitations of darkness lasted only a few minutes or hours and that these saddened people, in between bouts, were occupied, as we all were, with the useful monotony of happiness. But happiness is not what I thought. Happiness is the lucky pane of glass you carry in your head. It takes all your cunning just to hang on to it, and once it’s smashed you have to move into a different sort of life.

      In my new life—the summer of the year 2000—I am attempting to “count my blessings.” Everyone I know advises me to take up this repellent strategy, as though they really believe a dramatic loss can be replaced by the renewed appreciation of all one has been given. I have a husband, Tom, who loves me and is faithful to me and is very decent looking as well, tallish, thin, and losing his hair nicely. We live in a house with a paid-up mortgage, and our house is set in the prosperous rolling hills of Ontario, only an hour’s drive north of Toronto. Two of our three daughters, Natalie, fifteen, and Christine, sixteen, live at home. They are intelligent and lively and attractive and loving, though they too have shared in the loss, as has Tom.

      And I have my writing.

      “You have your writing!” friends say. A murmuring chorus: But you have your writing, Reta. No one is crude enough to suggest that my sorrow will eventually become material for my writing, but probably they think it.

      And it’s true. There is a curious and faintly distasteful comfort, at the age