Birdbaths and Paper Cranes:
A Family Tale
by Sharon Randall

Reviewed by Frances Rossi

 

Birdbaths and Paper Cranes is a sampling of Sharon Randall's columns for the Monterey County Herald written during the years from 1991 to 2001. "Sampling" is the word her son Josh uses in his Foreword, in which he calls this book a "testament to all families and the relationships that bind them." And so it is. Randall covers the life of her family in three movements. In "A Beginning," we hear the stories of family life-the bitter-sweet of Mother's Day in the empty nest; the tender memories embodied in an old family car; a confession relating to a barbed-wire fence. Towards the end of this set comes "The Birdbath," one of the two title pieces of the book. In it Randall recalls the old birdbath she broke and the love with which her husband replaced it, filling it with concrete and carving in its base their initials set in a heart.

In "A Middle," Randall unfolds for us the story of her husband's illness, concluding with "The Paper Cranes," a story of the healing that can "take place [even] in death." This story creates a poignant transition into the third set, "An End…and A Beginning," dealing with the years following his death.

For me, the most meaningful of all these essays may have been the first, "Writes of Passage," in which Randall tells of her relationship with her blind brother, who asked that she be his eyes. Accordingly, she described the sunrise for him each morning and whatever else he wanted to experience from a sighted perspective. In a sense, she does this for her readers as well, describing the joys and pains of life in metaphors that all can see and relate to: a road trip alone, dancing with a son, "swimming with fancy fish," planting morning glories.

As a children in Catholic school, we were often plied with stories of St. Therèse, the Little Flower, who did the ordinary things in the ordinary way, and, in so doing, became one of the world's favorite saints. Sharon Randall tells us in the Preface to Birdbaths and Paper Cranes, how, in deciding to write a column, she would write about "everyday people and ordinary things-family and friends, happiness and heartache, love and loss, and life and such." She may address ordinary things, but she manages to transform them into quintessential truths, deftly using language as a paintbrush to give us pictures in   few words. And as such, Sharon Randall fits neatly within my litany of sainted authors-Annie Dillard, Barbara Kingsolver, and Anne Lamott.

I'm reading your columns now, Sharon!

Sharon Randall's column can be read directly from the Scripps-Howard News Service website.

 

 

--F.R.