Heather Lende - Take Good Care of the Garden and the Dogs: A True Story of Bad Breaks and Small Miracles

Here is the real thinggood old-fashioned American values coming from small-town Alaska. In a cozy, chatty voice, Heather Lende tells stories of life in Haines, Alaska... Accepting life and rejoicing in the world are her preferred modes of thinking and feeling.

The Boston Globe

[Lendes book] is about her community and her family, the supporters who helped her get back on her feet with love, compassion, faith and humor... Her writing style is crisp and clear.

The Seattle Times

Heather Lende continues to explore small-town life in the last frontier, with profound reflections on motherhood, mercy, and the art of mending. Take Good Care of the Garden and the Dogs will touch your heart and soul and give you much to think about long after youve turned the last page.

Jo-Ann Mapson, author of The Owl & Moon Caf

Take Good Care of the Garden and the Dogs celebrates the resilience of ordinary people, gathered together to help one another with the business of living and dying. Reading this memoir is like listening to an old friend... The effect is pleasantly intimate, as if we were sitting next to her on the Juneau ferry.

Book Page

A multilevel look at serendipity, coincidence, irony and the power of friendship and faith.

Rocky Mount (NC) Telegram

Fifteen well turned essays about living in the shadow of death in a world both harsh and beautiful... An uplifting, even cheerful book. Lende has a knack for subtly illuminating the remarkable in the commonplace, the transcendence in tragedy... Her voice, which alternates between folksy and formal, playful and prayerful, entertaining and elegiac, is reminiscent of Garrison Keillor, Krista Tippett, Tom Bodett, Kathleen Norris and Anne Lamott. But Lende has a freshness that keeps her from being too derivative, and Alaskas geography, history and culture strongly flavor her work.

Minneapolis Star Tribune

[Lende] conveys in her newest book, Take Good Care of the Garden and the Dogs, the importance of spirituality and community in lifes lessons.

Alaska magazine

Lende writes emotionally but never sentimentally, giving us the best Alaska memoir of late, maybe the best ever.

Booklist, starred review

The book is full of vivid characters (a librarian who collects overdue books in person) and strange, sad deaths. Lende is not one for looking back. She has a simple, chatty style most readers will find oddly comforting. Life does, in fact, go on.

Los Angeles Times

[Lende] proves a skilled observer of nature in the wild and nature in human form... Her cozy whimsy is refreshing... Amiable in Alaska and slightly left of center, projecting the warmth of a well-made campfire.

Kirkus Reviews

This book is a wonder. It opens a door to Alaskan living, a world that, for most, will be both surprising and beautiful. As a person of Alaska and a person of faith, it is one of the best books of theology and spirituality that I have read in a long time. But the non-religious or the non-Alaskan shouldnt be hesitant. They will also be glad to walk through this door to a world that is certainly and recognizably theirs, but will seem to hold much moremaybe things new or maybe things forgotten.

The Rt. Rev. Mark MacDonald, formerly
the Bishop of Alaska, now the National
Indigenous Anglican Bishop of Canada

Take Good Care of the Garden and the Dogs had me both laughing and crying, sometimes on the very same page... The genuineness of Heather Lendes experience and her thoughtfulness about lifes bad breaks and unexpected giftsexpressed so well in her fine and funny writingmake me want to ordain her as goddess of good sense and song. It would be a lucky thing to live by the water in Haines, Alaska, and have Lende as a neighbor; the next best thing may be reading this book.

Nancy Lord, Alaska Writer Laureate
and author of Fishcamp: Life on an Alaskan Shore

We hope you enjoy this preview of Heather Lende's latest book, Of Bears and Ballots: An Alaskan Adventure in Small-Town Politics, available in June 2020 wherever books are sold.

HEATHER LENDE

Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

Published by
ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

a division of
WORKMAN PUBLISHING
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014

2010 by Heather Lende. All rights reserved.
First paperback edition, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, April 2011.
Originally published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill in 2010.

The Library of Congress publication data is available.

eISBN 978-1-61620-065-7

For my father, Robert Vuillet,
and in memory of my mother,
Sarah Jane Smith Vuillet,
August 26, 1934-April 20, 2006

Haines, Alaska, and the Chilkat Valley are known for exceptional scenery and wildlife, but the people are even more extraordinary. I have lived here for all of my adult life and until fairly recently, as you will soon read, have never been on the receiving end of the communitys care and generosity. Without all the help and support our family and I were given, this book would not have been written. I am more grateful than words can convey. Im afraid to list everyone who helped me back on my feet physically and emotionally because Ill surely miss someone. Please consider this story my gift to you.

I do want to name the people who contributed to the work of writing and publishing this book: Amy Gash, my wise, faithful, and very patient editor, and everyone else at Algonquin; my editors past and present at the Anchorage Daily News, Kathleen McCoy, Julie Wright, Mark Dent, and Mike Dunham; Tom Morphet, editor of the Chilkat Valley News; Valerie Miner, my mentor from the University of Alaska, Anchorage, creative writing program; Nancy Nash, Liz Heywood, and Sarah Tigger Posey, who read each page and carefully corrected grammar and spelling mistakes I made; gentle readers Ellen Borders, Beth MacCready, Jo-Ann Mapson, and Melina Shields; Matt Davis for the great photo; my family near and far, especially Chip; and, finally, the Reverend Jan Hotze of St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Mission. Thank you all for showing me, as Jan says, All is Grace.

Dear God, have mercy on me.
The sea is so wide and my boat is so small.
Fishermans Prayer

The first day of spring was not March 20, and it wasnt one day but a handful of early April days so bright that the residents of this little seaside Alaskan town crawled blinking out of our snow caves and welcomed it like sleepy bears. Spring fever hit so hard that everyone was smiling and doing their best to push winter out the door. Blankets and pillows were aired, decks were shoveled, and icy walks were chipped off. Anglers post-holed through the snowy riverbanks to cast for the first fat Dolly Vardens. The Public Works Department foreman even took a snow-blowing plow truck to the high school track and carved out a four-hundred-meter oval in the shoulder-high snow so the team could practice.