“It is quite possible that an animal has spoken civilly to me and that I didn’t catch the remark because I wasn’t paying attention” – Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White

Three or four books lie on my nightstand, commingled with hand lotion, emery boards, and lavender oil. The tabletop suggests the luxury of self-indulgence and the whimsy of arbitrary reading. I always have a thick hardbound book ready, a big long story whose purpose is completion. Self-improvement books also sprawl there, usually by Brene Brown or Gretchen Rubin, explaining how to get happier in my head or in my home. Sometimes I swap out the self-help book for a book about writing, hoping that reading about writing will overnight, subconsciously, develop my skills. A plastic-covered library book gathers dust, my interest as casual as my financial investment. Underneath the scatter, in permanent residence, grounding the assortment rests the Full Color Paperback Edition of Charlotte’s Web.

I don’t remember who first read me this book; maybe a teacher or my mom. I didn’t pay attention to the “who,” but I do remember the warm, full feeling of being read to, a shared, connected moment. How wonderful to have imagination released, the brain freed from the work of reading. Two people exploring a world together but separately. When I am old and feeble, I hope someone will read to me.

My mother was a second-grade teacher. Her favorite time of the school year was reading Charlotte’s Web to her class. With 21 chapters and 20 eight-year-olds, it took perseverance and more than a month. Our family dinnertime banter often included a funny or poignant quip a student made about that day’s reading. We would hear about Tommy the Troublemaker unable to sit still while Mom was reading, or Susan the Sensitive One crying, fearing Wilbur’s demise. Every spring afternoon, settling in after recess runarounds, my mom picked the book up from her desk and brought those kids’ minds back to the barn. Every year when Charlotte died, she cried. She was always quiet at dinner that night.

When I had children, Mom nagged me to read Charlotte’s Web to them. I resisted the suggestion out of stubbornness born from mother-daughter parenting tension. Did I need advice about everything? Eventually, I succumbed. As usual, a mother knows best.

For me, Charlotte’s Web was a commitment, more so than Goodnight Moon. I promised myself I wouldn’t skip pages when I thought they were asleep. I read every word to my daughter, Melissa, when she was about four. Five years later, it was our son Jamie’s turn. Melissa remembers; Jamie “vaguely.” I remember. I cherished the calm, the comfort, the snuggles.

I come from a long line of book lovers. We passed that on to our own children. Melissa devoured everything Jane Austen wrote, and Jamie found Raoul Dahl and the Guinness Book of World Records. With my husband, Brian, in tow, we entered the Harry Potter world together. My mother and I enjoyed the same bestsellers in our two-person book club.

Suddenly, on Thanksgiving, at 82 years old, my mom died. I was unable to read anything for months. I got through the days and months on autopilot, operating numb. I feared that reading might stir my emotions and that my internal dam would break. I couldn’t imagine how I would ever stop crying. I shut down. Months into this state, on one of the first warm spring days, roaming through the house, I spied Charlotte’s Web waiting for me in Melissa’s bookcase. Perhaps I could start slowly with a children’s book. Perhaps the calm of a good read might dissipate some grief. Maybe I could feel my mother again. I found both of those things by re-reading Charlotte’s Web. I remembered my mother’s love of the book, the story’s simplicity, and the prose’s beauty. I remembered the comfort of someone reading to me.

As we buried my mother’s ashes on her June birthday, I shared E.B. White’s words with the gathered family. Standing over her gravesite, voice quivering, I read:

“Won’t it be wonderful to be back home in the barn cellar again with the sheep and the geese? Aren’t you anxious to get home?” For a moment Charlotte said nothing. Then she spoke in a voice so low Wilbur could hardly hear the words. “I will not be going back to the barn,’ she said.”

E. B. White wrote with simplicity and tenderness. “We’re born, we live a little while, we die.” The ending to Charlotte’s Web is sorrowful (spoiler alert), not because Charlotte dies, but because no one will ever love Wilbur the way Charlotte did. Ever. That kind of loss is heartbreaking. And beautiful. And unforgettable. It is life and death and inescapable. Strangely, something about that is comforting.

Kids grew, parents passed, and careers quieted. Everything changes. But White’s name kept popping up, like when you learn a new buzzword and start hearing it everywhere you go if you’re paying attention.

I began a writing hobby. Under the guise of improving my craft, I read about writing rather than writing myself (procrastination with a feigned purpose). I stumbled on a book called On Writing Well by William Zinsser. It is funny and instructional. (When talking about clutter in writing, he warns, “’ Experiencing’ is one of the worst clutterers. Even your dentist will ask if you are experiencing any pain. If he had his own kid in the chair, he would say, ‘Does it hurt?’”) Zinsser introduces his book by describing a photo of E.B. White writing at a plain wooden table in a boathouse. The picture reflects “the simplicity of the process.” Not that good writing is simple to create, but that the process is to simplify your writing, editing repeatedly. The photograph is lovely.

A few months later, after an energized, cathartic start, my creative process waned. I picked up a writer’s prompt book. I serendipitously opened to “You might want to take another look at E.B. White’s list of 21 reminders about style in The Elements of Style. It is the most complete and eloquent writing lesson you will ever have.” Time Magazine named The Elements of Style one of the century’s most influential books. Originally written in 1918 by White’s Cornell University professor, William Strunk Jr, White updated it forty years later. What a wonderful thing for writers, and even more so for readers that these two men met in Ithaca, NY:

Far above Cayuga’s waters,
With its waves of blue.
Stands our noble alma mater
Glorious to view
Hail, all hail, Cornell!

About the time I found Elements of Style, my husband and I were entering a new phase and a desire to lead a different life at a different pace with other priorities. We settled on the idea of living on a lake. It would be new to both of us, an experiment. So we bought a house on the northern end of Cornell’s Cayuga Lake in rural New York State and left our suburban Philadelphia lives behind.

Four years into lake living, driving the country roads into town for groceries, and listening to the radio, I heard a reading of White’s essay “Once More to the Lake.” White described, in his inimitable way, his childhood lake house. It is a place of “peace and goodness and jollity.” I now have the words for what we searched for.

Last week, sitting in a doctor’s waiting room, I skimmed the summer edition of “Real Simple” magazine. I paused on an article on summer book suggestions, with subsections like Great Beach Reads, and Great Travel Reads. There, under the somewhat pretentious “Hamptons Hideaway Reads,” at the bottom of the page, was a paragraph on Charlotte’s Web. The author wrote, “I’m going to read my kids Charlotte’s Web. I’m confident the boys will be hooked on the story…but I’m not totally convinced I will be able to read it without crying.” Yep.

The universe regularly offers me a seemingly random E. B. White pop-up reference. I believe in all these little points of light, all these dots. If I pay attention, they will teach me something. They connect things; past, present, and future; my childhood, my mom, my kids, my lake, my writing. They create a continuous thread, a web (!), confirmation that life is going according to some grand plan. As if the universe is whispering, “Keep going, keep looking, and keep learning. You are on to something.” 

At a yoga class just this week, Julie, our instructor, read to us from The Celestine Prophecy. She had never read to the group before, and I had never heard of this work, but once again, a “sudden coincidence and synchronistic encounter” slapped me upside the head. The words set fully and deeply in my heart. “We can discover an inner intuition that shows us where to go and what to do and…brings a flow of coincidences that open the doors for our mission to unfold.” I wait for the next E.B. White encounter and wonder what it will offer me. I know it will come. I just don’t know from where. Nevertheless, I will pay attention.

A copy of Charlotte’s Web sits on the nightstands in  our guest rooms. I hope our visiting friends and family pick it up for a few minutes before they turn out the light and find warm comfort in a beautifully written story about a pig and a spider.

Postscript

I also pay attention to spiders as a physical connection to Charlotte, E.B. White, and the natural order of things. Last year, Brian and I went to the Crystal Bridges Museum of Art. A giant iron spider sculpture stands in the courtyard. The artist, Louise Bourgeois, explained, “The Spider is an ode to my mother. She was my best friend.”  

There was a spider on the chair in front of me at my niece’s outdoor wedding. Hello, Charlotte. 

– Debbie Hoke