For those always eager for fresh words from the prophet, The Threepenny Review recently published a new short story by Wendell Berry, and it is available to read on their website. Berry writes about the beloved Port William community, about loss and healing, work, and how we use ourselves and our bodies. The story begins:
It was the still-living membership of his friends who, with Flora and their children and their place, pieced Andy together and made him finally well again after he lost his right hand to a harvesting machine in the fall of 1974. He would be obliged to think that he had given his hand, or abandoned it, for he had attempted to unclog the corn picker without stopping it, as he had known better than to do. But finally it would seem to him also that the machine had taken his hand, or accepted it, as the price of admission into the rapidly mechanizing world that as a child he had not foreseen and as a man did not like, but which he would have to live in, understanding it and resisting it the best he could, for the rest of his life.