by Martha Leb Molnar
Verdant Books, 2014
Follow-the-dream memoirs comprise a good chunk of North Country literature – probably because so many of us came here looking for a better life. Taproot is one such book, and from the first page it draws the reader in with warm and graceful prose that places you both in the landscape and the author’s heart. Martha Leb Molnar followed a dream with her move from New York City to a Vermont hilltop overlooking the Taconics and Adirondacks; and she indeed put down a taproot:
“I needed a new life in a place big enough, open enough, private enough to encompass all the old and new cravings, and future dreams too. The concept of a big piece of green and silent land began to grow, its taproot embedding itself in my brain. It grew and strengthened, spreading out multiple stems until I forgot that this was a buried childhood dream recently brought to light of day. I began to believe that it was the only logical direction for my life.”
We learn her story through vignettes, out of sequence in time but clearly showing the progression from dream to reality. Each chapter captures an experience and its associated profundity. (“[L]ife was better lived by the rising and setting of the sun.”)
You don’t need to be a transplanted Vermonter to appreciate the story. Anyone who has moved from city to country, who has built a home, who has made the transition from family and career mania to an empty nest, who enjoys the journey of discovery, will find the narrative poetic and insightful. Surely most everyone who lives in the Northeast knows this syndrome: “By November, I begin the countdown to the winter solstice…”
Unique to Molnar’s story is its historical context. She grew up in a part of Hungary absorbed into Romania, the child of Holocaust survivors. “The world of the garden was an escape from the adults…As living proof that Hitler had failed, I was expected to be radiantly cheerful, a chubby package of pink cheeks and beribboned laughter.
But I was thin, serious, and thoughtful, perhaps made so by the emotional husks with whom I lived, whose reliving of the horrors they’d experienced in words and glances, in tormented faces, accompanied every moment.”
Building her own life and following her own dream often brought a struggle against guilt and ancestral ghosts, whom she tells: “For twenty centuries you have endured so I can live free from terror.” This gives the memoir a keen edge and poignancy that remind the contemporary reader of a gratitude we must never lose.
In keeping with the taproot theme, the book itself is deeply embedded in place. The cover is by an important Vermont artist, the content was edited by a well-known Vermont editor and published by a local house, then printed by a Vermont indie bookstore/press. The author herself has become a commentator for Vermont Public Radio and a freelance writer on Vermontiana, after a career in public relations and newspaper reporting. Her skill shows in every word on every page.
The paragraph that most resonated with this reader likely will with others who have walked parallel paths:
“Loving the little daily miracles of a place is like loving a person. After the first flush of infatuation, a maturing follows, a deepening brought about through intimacy and understanding…Recognizing a plant among many others and knowing its name is like picking out a loved one from a hundred people walking away from a concert, knowing him by the tilt of the head, the swing of an arm.”
You might need multiple copies of this book: a pristine one for your library, several for gifts, and one to dog-ear the pages and highlight the many passages that strike your heart.