The timing of the reading of this section, where Rabbit goes to work part-time as a gardener, couldn’t have been better for me. It echos the gardener’s love of the earth and growing things, the whole idea of rethinking life as spring rebuilds itself:
Funny, for these two months he never has to cut his fingernails, He lops, lifts, digs. He plants annuals, packets the old lady gives him–nasturtiums, poppies, sweet peas, petunias. He loves folding the hoed ridge of crumbs of soil over the seeds. Sealed, they cease to be his. The simplicity. Getting rid of something by giving it to itself. God Himself folded into the tiny adamant structure, Sef-destined to a succession of explosions, the great slow gathering out of water and air and silicon: this is felt without words in the turn of the round hoe-handle in his palms. (p. 127)
There seems to be a change in Rabbit, a mellow acceptance, a seeing of life as a continual renewal of itself. Oddly, he didn’t seem to see this in the birth of his son, the imminent birth of his second child.
Updike has made this first break in the narrative; there are no chapters, no other sequencing of note. Is this then a turning point? Does Rabbit feel as I do when my fingers are stained with the good earth?
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology