Little things

In Mattagash, Maine, winter is like a weight that presses you down, holds you there until you think you can't breathe anymore. You just seem to black out, and when you wake up, it's spring again.

Cathie Pelletier, The Weight of Winter

For much of Cathie Pelletier's long 1991 novel The Weight of Winter, the title describes what it is about. The entire novel takes place before Thanksgiving, meaning that for most people in the Northern Hemisphere, it isn't even winter yet. But winter comes early to northern Maine, and already there are several deep snowfalls and days of bitter temperatures. Winter comes to Mattagash long before the calendar says so.

Pelletier's novel roams from one set of characters to another, demonstrating how winter weighs them all down.

If the story has a main character, it would probably have to be Amy Jo Lawler, a middle-aged woman who lives with her mother. She has neither a job nor a husband or children. She feels that her mother, Sicily, is even more of a weight on her than winter is. She wants to put her in the nursing home where Sicily's best friend lives. This might free her to find work and perhaps to develop her affair with a married man.At the very least, the two of them would not have to reman so quiet in her bed late at night.

Meanwhile Lynn Gifford does have a husband and children, but Pike is an abusive drunk whom she still loves in spite of it all. For her children, one son in particular, it is not so simple.

And then there is the Crossroads, the bar where Pike does his drinking and which local busybodies want to close down.

Yet if the novel has a theme, it is probably not so much the weight of winter — most of what happens here could happen in the summer just as well — than with another character's comment late in the book: "There ain't no murders and bombs and hijackers. That's why them little things is so important. When they're all strung together, them little things make up the whole of some people's lives."

Pelletier's novel makes me think of the old song Little Things Mean a Lot.