There is never a wrong time to read Port William stories, and this collection of characters worked its way toward the top of the list of my favorites from Wendell Berry. I’m especially enamored with the preacher’s wife Laura Milby from “A Desirable Woman”. As a preacher’s daughter and now a preacher’s wife, and even with many different life circumstances I totally understood this woman.

“For nearly the whole congregation, or for all of them, and especially the men and children, there was a disconnection between the little white clapboard church with its steeple and bell, its observances and forms of worship, and the world’s daily life and work. . . . Laura recognized these disconnections in the people because she felt them, and labored over them, in herself,” Berry wrote.

and

“And when, having done all he could do to help a family through a quarrel or an illness or a death, performing services he was not paid for and could not have been paid for, he might never hear from them again, let alone see their faces even for the courtesy of one Sunday among his hearers, Laura felt herself wounded with sorrow for him and anger at them for their ingratitude.”