finshed Jayber Crow

A few days ago I finished reading Jayber Crow. I really enjoyed the narrative of the book, as well as the thoughts on a slower, community-centered life. As a person just leaving her 20s behind, I've come to learn that things don't happen as fast as I wanted them to when I was 21. They take time. Relationships take years to develop. And you can't force things. I heard this loudly echoed in this book and appreciated gaining some insight. The river was a constant thread in the life of Jayber, the main character...and here's one more thing he had to say about it...

The river and the garden have been the foundations of my economy here. Of the two I have liked the river best. It is wonderful to have the duty of being on the river the first and last thing every day. I have loved it even in the rain. Sometimes I have loved it most in the rain.
No matter how much it may be used by towing companies and water companies and commercial fishermen and trappers and the like, the river doesn't belong to the workaday world. And no matter how much it is used by pleasure boaters and water-skiers and the like, it doesn't belong to the vacation world either. It is never concerned, if you can see what I mean. Nothing keeps to its own way more than the river does.
Another thing: No matter how corrupt and trashy it necessarily must be at times in this modern world, the river is never apart from beauty. Partly, I suppose, this is because it always keeps to its way.
Sometimes, living right beside it, I forget it. Going about my various tasks, I don't think about it. And then it seems just to flow back into my mind. I stop and look at it. I think of its parallel, never-meeting banks, which yet never part. I think of it lying there in its long hollow, at the foot of all the landscape, a single opening from its springs in the mountains all the way to its mouth. It is a beautiful thought, one of the most beautiful of all thoughts. I think it not in my brain only but in my heart and in the lengths of my bones.

-Wendell Berry