One of the wonderful things about living in a college town is that you can go out to walk the dog and come home with an armload of wonderful books for free. Someone down the road from me has set out a box of books and I found some for me and some to share.

“And Both Shall Row” by Beth Lordan is a sweet little volume of stories about some wonderful folks in a small rural town. Not sticky sweet like “Andy of Mayberry” but not your snarky “Sex in the City” types that are so popular nowdays. These are not stereotypes but characters fleshed out to br real people..
There are the sisters who find themselves sharing a life in their old age and finding that how we wish death to be may not be what we thought. The bachelor truck driver who keeps a barren cow to remind him of the home farm, and ponders what a deaf mute boy might find irresistible in a ventriloquists dummy.
I love the men in this book, there is a depth to their thinking. The text doesn’t shy away from introspection.
I finished this book in one rainy night wrapping myself in the familiar country folks. Though it made me homesick, in a way, it also filled my little rooms with the friends I love from back home, and added a few more.