On The House at Otowi Bridge by Peggy Pond Church
by Shelley Armitage
This is Shelley Armitage for Radio Readers Book Bytes Summer Reading wishing you a good day. In my latest book of poems, From a Sandstone Ledge, I explore the ways in which landscape draws us into a greater understanding of ourselves and others by experiencing a deeper connection with the places we inhabit.
One of my inspirations for writing about nature and place is the book by Peggy Pond Church, The House at Otowi Bridge. This memoir has been called two memoirs in one as Church explores the life of Edith Warner, a Pennsylvanian woman who came to NM for her health in l922. In telling her story Church says, I try “to join the broken threads of her story together and weave them with my own.”
To do this, Peggy quotes prodigiously from Edith journals and letters. And because Peggy was herself a journal keeper, she understood the depth of such personal writing. Both women witnessed the creation of Los Alamos and the coming of the scientists who built the atomic bomb. For Church this meant the loss of her home on the Pajarito Plateau where she had grown up and married as it was commandeered by the US government. For Warner she experienced the friendship of the scientists and their wives who came down from “the hill” even as she shared daily life with her San Ildefonso companion Tilano and friends made at the pueblo.
For Edith organized a tea room—a quiet place near the river where the scientists could dine and enjoy fellowship and calm away from their taxing pursuit. But the simplicity of this description denies the spiritual depth of the book. Through Peggy’s lyrical prose and Edith’s reflections, we learn about the quietude and peace of nature, and a wisdom born of twenty years of living near Native neighbors and the mesas which gave Edith her strength. Thus, the ancient and modern worlds convened over Edith’s famous chocolate cake. When Edith and Tilano must move due to the development of the road and new bridge to Los Alamos, both the scientists and the Native people join together to build their second home.
For Church, Edith’s inner strength was a model, one she fell short of. She reveals her many grievances over the war, her family’s removal, and her woman’s role, one she later learns to respect and enjoy. These two stories form a larger back story to the atomic age. What a hearth means in winter, the generosity of friends, the profoundness of the landscape. Peggy’s poetic language, the richness of the repeated images of Awanyu, the San Ildefonso dances, the blooming of the mariposa lily make this an exceptional memoir--indeed memorable.
I hope you will enjoy this book, The House at Otowi Bridge. Wishing you memorable reading from Shelley Armitage, Radio Readers Summer book bytes.
