The Hedge, The Ribbon, by Carol Orlock. Broken Moon Press, 1993

This is a biography told in stages- although it’s not apparent at the beginning. An unnamed caregiver comes to the home of aged, bedridden Angela Maxwell. She suggests telling stories to her charge, and so the tales begin, along with her giving Angela a red ribbon to hold as a sort of worry stone.

The stories start with Angela as a child, convinced that as long as people want it to snow, it will. And so it does. The whole town of Millford is steeped in gentle magic, something no one finds remarkable. A tea-serving ghost, an artist who duplicates everything in the town in clay, a storm of feathers; all these are accepted as perfectly normal. The stories progress through Angela’s life, the ribbon always present (even if only for a moment), and the hedge growing ever more wild and blocking the way into- and out of- Angela’s house. In the end, Angela finally realizes she is old, and she is isolated. She can remember things from the past- the losses, of people and of being able to drive- but she cannot remember the aging itself. How has she come to inhabit this aged body; a body with memories of an 80^th, an 85^th, birthday party?

A pleasant book, with its chapters of connected episodes and people in Angela’s life. It won the 1993 Western States Book Award. What might have been slight tales of a small town are tweaked a few degrees off kilter by the magical realism. Four stars.