Still Water Bending - 9781939632050

In the river-born community of Ophelia, Virginia, on the Chesapeake Bay, there are three religions: The Water, The Family, and The Land. This trinity has bound and sustained a community of proud, independent people for generations. But in the face of dwindling fisheries, falling prices for the catch, and land speculation by outsiders, a way of life is dying. Jines Arley Evans, a third generation waterman, clings to what is left of his past. His wife and young son are long dead, his estranged daughter far away. The family land and its silent house, the workboat called Jenny Rae after his wife, and the rhythms, mysteries, and seasons of the water are all that remain of a life that long ago lost any real purpose. His daughter, Lily Rae Evans, fled her father, the family home, and Ophelia fourteen years ago. Bitterly angry at Jines for his emotional abandonment, Lily Rae lives in Portland, Maine, where she works as a journalist. Like her father, disaffection and silence are her allies; the past remains a vault in which any kind of future is locked. When Jines suffers a stroke while fishing, the trajectories of their isolation from each other and from the rest of the world abruptly change. As Jines¿s only surviving family member, Lily Rae is called home. Thrown together, they must come to terms with their isolation from each other and the rest of the world. They begin to find a common language in an unlikely place¿in a shed where Jines, now land-bound and needing Lily¿s help, begins to build a traditional deadrise skiff. As Jines¿s powerful life slowly recedes and contracts, Lily¿s expands as she becomes reacquainted with the place and people she had left behind, including Jamie Cockrell, her best childhood friend. Now a divorced father of a beautiful young daughter, he¿s yearning for what few other young men of Ophelia still want¿a chance to run his own boat and work on the water. Lily is falling in love, not only with Jamie and his daughter but with her home.

• | Author: Wendy Mitman Clarke
• | Publisher: Head To Wind Publishing
• | Publication Date: Sep 23, 2017
• | Number of Pages: 340 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 1939632056
• | ISBN-13: 9781939632050