All Occasions, and: A Cracked River (review)

Schwartz’s words describe the simple scene around her, but the walk signifies life itself, the darkening skies portend a storm, something ominous ahead. Schwartz makes her way home through giant raindrops, contemplating her husband’s return, then imagining a possible delay in his return, and finally, she thinks the unthinkable: if her husband were never to return. Her final note about walking the towpath is both elegiac and hopeful: “I vow, as my shadow lengthens into dusk, I’d still come here.” Like the other essays in this charming book, the story that on the surface appears to be a meditation on the ritual of walking, underneath contemplates a more serious subject: the passage of bodies from one stage of life – one’s “prime” in this piece – into whatever lies beyond. Yet in spite of the challenges and vicissitudes of this couple’s shared life over four decades, Schwartz remains upbeat, her attitude imbued with the survivor’s instinct and forward-looking determination that she witnessed in her father, that she admires in her husband, that she nurtured in her children, and that she hopes for her soon-to-be-born first grandchild, whose spirit she imagines in the final essay: