Literary Ruralism (Part XIX): Lab Girl, by Hope Jahren

This fabulous 2016 book, Lab Girl, is a hybrid memoir, sometimes sub-titled, "A story of trees, science and love."  The book alternates chapters of memoir with chapters on botany that often serve as metaphors for life, for what is happening in her life.  Dr. Hope Jahren grew up in Austin, Minnesota, population 24,718, and she offers a memorable and sometimes poignant description of the small city, a few miles north of the Iowa state line.  In the first chapter of the book, Jahren describes one aspect of her upbringing in Austin. It reminded me the lack of anonymity that marks rural communities, about which I have written so often on this blog. 

Context:  Jahren's father was a science professor at the community college in Austin, and every night of her childhood, they walked home from his lab at 8 pm.  Here's a description of part of that journey, from p. 11:

We made our way down hand-shoveled sidewalks, past thickly insulated houses that sheltered families who were no doubt partaking of silences similar to our own.  In almost every one of those houses lived someone that we knew.  From playpen to prom, I grew up with the sons and daughters of the girls and boys whom my mother and father had played with when they were children, and none of us could remember a time when we hadn't all known each other, even if our deeply bred reticence kept us from knowing much about each other.  It wasn't until I was seventeen and moved away to college that I discovered how the world is mostly populated by strangers.