I have been looking into schedules. Even when we read physics, we inquire of each least particle, What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.
~Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
A
On the first of each month,
a guest writer
shares
how they spend the day.
xA
October 1, 2026: Denise Smith Cline
X
In Chapter 1 of Denise Smith Cline’s debut novel, The Resettlement of Vesta Blonik, a man knocks on the door, and from inside the house, through a side window, thirty-year-old Vesta watches. It’s September of 1937 in Itasca County, Minnesota.
She was alone. Pa had taken the wagon into town; they’d sold the Ford the year before so the driveway to the house was empty. The man knocked again. Vesta rubbed the top of one dusty shoe against the wool of her stocking and did the same with the other. She cracked the door and in the cool, early fall air, she smelled the damp wool of his coat. “Yes?” she said.
The man at the door is from the Resettlement Administration, part of the New Deal under the US Department of Agriculture. But things are already changing even though Vesta doesn’t yet know. Two years earlier, after her mother died, at first her father had stayed closed to home, but recently “he’d started to brush his old hat” and stay out late.
We learn a lot about Vesta when she describes herself in terms of what she can do.
Vesta knew other women might feel worried about a strange man on the property, with her pa gone to town. But she was heavy-set. Pa called her a big old girl. She could handle a plow and hoist a bale of hay on her own, a source of secret pride, and she didn’t usually feel afraid.
Her life on the farm is hard. She and her father live in a shanty made of “a patchwork of odd pieces of lumber, tar paper and strips of tin, like a desperate, dull quilt.” But Vesta does what’s needed, what is expected of her. And she loves her time with their cow Lottie.
Increasingly, the only comfort she took from home was the time in the barn, out of the wind, where she milked Lottie and told her about her day.
Chapter 5 takes us to October and introduces a new point of view, that of Burgess Crenshaw in Raleigh, North Carolina, whose brother Gordon we hear from in Chapter 6. Gordon’s wife died in childbirth, as did his child, and Gordon was so overwhelmed by grief that his family committed him to the state hospital in Raleigh.
I won’t tell you the connection between what is happening in North Carolina and what is happening in Minnesota, but I will tell you that pages turn easily as we watch Vesta, in the middle of the Great Depression and faced with situations out of her control, make decision after decision on her own and in favor of herself.
Take a look at the slow but sure way Vesta experiences emotions.
She hadn’t let herself name the feeling before because it wasn’t proper to hate your own pa. But the strong bitter taste of it felt thick in her throat, and she couldn’t swallow it away.
A
When the night turned quieter, Vesta lay awake, overwhelmed by exhaustion and a deep ache. It was loneliness, she decided.
I cheered for Vesta as she took each new step out into the world. The Resettlement of Vesta Blonik is well-written and easy to read, a wonderful story about a woman figuring out how to make a life for herself. It is longlisted for the Crooks Corner Book Prize.
Denise and I were in the same class at Davidson College. After graduating, she went from newspaper reporter to law school. In her writing, she is drawn to “characters who find their way through impossible situations, who can see the shiny bits in what looks to everyone else like rubble.” Her work has appeared in Prime Number Magazine, Carolina Woman, The Shoal, the News & Observer and Mamalode. You can listen to an interview with Denise at Bookish Flights. Currently, she lives and practices employment law in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Come back on OCTOBER 1st to read how DENISE SMITH CLINE spends her days.