Sue Hubbell's A Country Year

The Year of Sue

A Country Year was written by Sue Hubbell about a year of her life as a divorcee beekeeper. The book starts in the spring “As wildflowers began to bloom in the spring…” (Hubble,12) and goes thought out the year describing her struggles and life’s questions, the book ends the second spring, “It is springtime again” (Hubble, 221). This shows that the book goes full circle and throughout a full year.

Sue Hubbell was a brave woman who lived in the Ozarks. She ran a beekeeping business where she sold honey. She worked alone and was her own boss and employee. Sue would harvest, process, bottle, and deliver her honey all across the U.S. Sue had many other jobs in her life in order to get things done she was her own mechanic and would service her old Chevy truck when it needed upkeep. She also did her own

She often would blame herself for the loneliness and grief that she went through from time to time. Sue said, “Quietly, gratefully, I discovered that a part of me that had been off somewhere nursing grief and pain had returned” (Hubbell, 12). This is part of this book was written to show how to recognize the pain of divorce and how to heal from

She expressed that one of her favorites was the lore about a copperhead spitting out it’s venom onto a flat rock before getting a drink. The same lore is found in Vance Randolph’s text Ozark Magic and Folklore, “A number of sober backwoods farmers told me seriously that before a copperhead takes a drink of water, it discharges its venom carefully upon a flat stone; a moment later, having drunk, the creature sucks the poison into its fangs again” (Randolph, 255). Hubbell later found the same lore “in a Physiologus, a medieval bestiary. It is a snake story least eight hundred years old, perhaps more” (Hubbell