Analysis Of A Country Year, Living The Questions, By Sue Hubbell

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Sue Hubbell, an amateur botanist, a bee keeper and a heart torn women, who decides to stay on her Ozark 105 acre “something more like ninety-nine”(3) farm in the Ozarks of Missouri after her long term marriage ends in divorce. In her book, “A Country Year, Living the Questions” Hubbell describes how her life as a 50 year old women living alone over comes heartbreak and poverty living off the land that she alone doesn’t own “ that those who inhabit the land and use it have a real claim to it in a nonlegal sort of way.”(6)

The poem in the beginning of the book by Rainer Maria Rilke pretty much explains where the sub title came from that Hubbell used “Living the Questions.” She not only used it as a subtitle but lived it as teaching guide to get her through her break up, that in her words put her “out to lunch” (9) for a spell. The poem says, “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not seek the answer, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” On her …show more content…

She identifies with frogs, snakes and spiders with an almost sympathetic attitude towards them, seeing the beauty and necessity behind what they have to do to survive. Like her helping out a three legged frog with food and water and giving him the shelter of her barn, knowing when the inspector comes it could cause her problems with the honey business she runs so she too can survive. You can almost hear her having a conversation with each one of them. They in turn give her “answers” to her own dilemmas by watching them get in and out of situations such as, the snake that just wants to get away when she is smoking her hives; and they have a “quick but meaningful stare

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