Prodigal Summer

The daughter of a college entomologist, 28-year-old Lusa Landowski is a lifetime lover of and student of insect life. When she falls in love with and marries Cole Widener, her life as a postgraduate assistant studying moths is completely uprooted, as she moves to rural Zebulon to become a farmer’s wife. Already overwhelmed by a community that disapproves of her strange, insect-loving ways, Lusa finds herself completely out of her depth when her husband dies and she inherits his farm.

Lusa, who proudly calls herself a “religious mongrel” (438), is the daughter of a Polish Jew and a Palestinian, and her heritage forms an important part of both her identity and her destiny. Lusa’s diverse religious background allows her to pinpoint a week when three major religions celebrate holidays that call for goat meat, and she combines her knowledge with clever scheming and a strong work ethic, making enough money to keep her farm afloat. Lusa also realizes that both sides of her family consist of farmers who lost their land: her grandfather lost his beet farm during the war, while her Palestinian relatives were chased off their olive groves. In becoming a farm owner, Lusa feels that she’s reclaimed what her ancestors lost, and returned to her rightful place. By the end of the novel, she sees the farm as “a place where she could walk surely on the ground of her life” (439).

In addition to her growing passion for farming, Lusa’s lifelong love of insects, and particularly moths, forms an important part of her identity. Lusa spent her childhood “catching butterflies and moths, looking them up in her color-keyed books and touching all the pictures, coveting those that hid in wilder places” (35). As an adult, her infatuation with insects—particularly luna moths—allows Lusa to see the world in an intricate and unique way, and to understand that there are truths deeper than words. As adults, Lusa’s favorite moths have no mouths, and live brief lives of “mute, romantic extravagance […] a starving creature racing with death to scour the night for his mate” (34).

Like her beloved moths, Lusa finds ways to communicate without words. She makes peace with Cole’s ghost, represented by the scent of the honeysuckle he uses as a peace offering, and silently converses with the ghosts of her own ancestors as well. When tasked with looking after her troubled niece, Crys, Lusa uses her knowledge of insects to forge a deep bond with the girl, one that extends beyond words. It becomes Lusa’s “secret challenge” to create moments “where you could see all the lights come on, ever so briefly, in this child’s dark house” (346). By the end of the novel, Lusa decides to adopt Crys and her little brother and deed the Widener farm to them. Thus, Lusa finds a way to both claim her own identity as a farm owner, a lover of the earth and its creatures, and to honor the Widener legacy she now considers her own.

Garnett Walker is a nearly 80-year-old retired vocational agriculture teacher, a widower of eight years who deeply misses his wife, Ellen. Garnett lives in the farmhouse he inherited from his father and grandfather before him—Garnett’s grandfather, the first Garnett Walker, made a fortune logging American chestnuts and bought and named Zebulon Mountain. The family lost most of their land after the chestnut blight, and Garnett has devoted his retirement to resurrecting the American chestnut by cross-breeding it with the Chinese chestnut. Just as Garnett believes God gave man dominion over the natural world—including the right to use pesticides and herbicides—he’s also certain his mission to resurrect the chestnut is “a part of God’s plan” (129). In a novel dominated by strong female characters, Walker’s dedication to his chestnuts presents a masculine counterpart. He vows that along with the chestnuts, “the landscape of his father’s manhood would be restored” (130).

While Garnett certainly has passion for his chestnuts, a greater portion of his thoughts is occupied by his next-door neighbor, Nannie Rawley. Attending the Unitarian church, wearing “short pants” (370) even though she’s in her seventies, and speaking her mind freely, Nannie is a modern woman who threatens Garnett’s faith in traditional masculinity. As Nannie and Garnett exchange a heated series of letters and conversations, arguing about man’s role in the natural world, Garnett finds his rigid opinions beginning to soften. While Nannie never convinces him to change his mind entirely, he does admit to her that “I didn’t find the fault in your thinking” (275)—a huge shift for a man who considered himself entirely certain of the world and his place in it.

By the end of the novel, Garnett has softened enough to admit that he actually cares for Nannie, and when he embraces her, he realizes that “holding her […] felt like the main thing he’d been needing to do” (427). In addition, after years of estrangement from his alcoholic son and his grandchildren, Garnett has agreed to welcome the children to his farm. As the novel ends, Garnett celebrates new connections and hopes for the future—even if, as Nannie playfully tells him, he’s still a “sanctimonious old fart” (427).

Nannie Rawley is a seventy-something, independent woman who runs the organic apple orchard she’s inherited. Nannie has a deep respect for nature, or, as Garnett puts it, Nannie’s “the sworn friend and protector of all creatures great and small, right down to the ticks, fleas, and corn maggots, evidently” (86). She believes that human meddling in the natural world will only upset its inherent balance, and she’s not afraid to share her opinions, as she does quite vehemently with Garnett Walker. At the same time, Nannie, unlike Garnett, tempers her indignation with kindness: she bakes Garnett a pie, offers to help him when he’s plagued by a snapping turtle, and gives him a cure for his dizzy spells.

Nannie is also Deanna Wolfe’s surrogate mother—she was the longtime companion of Deanna’s father, Ray Dean Wolfe, after his wife’s death—and Deanna says that Nannie “lives her life how she wants to, no matter what people say” (263). Though Nannie loved Ray, she never married him, always “knowing her mind and wanting to be on her own” (262). In addition to Ray’s death, Nannie has had to deal with the death of her own daughter, Rachel, an event that profoundly influenced her life and darkened her otherwise optimistic outlook. As she tells Garnett, “When you’ve had a child born with her chromosomes mixed up and spent fifteen years watching her die, you come back and tell me what’s good and just” (281). However, Nannie is nothing if not “tough” (263), and she’s persisted through the pain of losing Rachel to eventually find new hope. As the novel ends, not only is Nannie’s relationship with Garnett budding into a possible romance, but Deanna and her unborn child are also coming to live with Nannie. As Nannie joyfully exclaims, “I’m going to have a grandbaby!” (425), and Nannie will be able to watch a new generation grow up on her farm. 

Eddie Bondo is a 28-year-old sheep rancher from Wyoming who arrives in Zebulon to hunt coyotes, and who engages in a passionate affair with Deanna Wolfe. In one sense, Eddie is portrayed as a strong hunter and a potential threat: he is the only man who’s managed to sneak up on Deanna, carrying a rifle onto her peaceful mountain, and his body is “just one long muscle, anywhere you looked on him” (15). Yet at the same time, Eddie is twenty years younger than Deanna and “half a head shorter” (27), and on first encounter, Deanna instinctively thinks of him as her “prey” (5). In fact, the power dynamic between Deanna and Eddie shifts back and forth throughout the novel, until, by the end of their relationship they’re “like predator and prey closed tight in a box, waiting for word on which was to be which” (364).

Above all else, the defining aspect of Eddie’s character is the fact that, as he puts it, “hating coyotes is my religion” (323). Despite Deanna’s efforts to convince Eddie that coyotes are valuable parts of the ecosystem, he continues to see the predators as his “enemy” (176), and his relationship with Deanna cannot grow into anything beyond a physical one. Deanna chooses not to tell Eddie she’s pregnant with his child, and he leaves with only the acknowledgment that he has “met his match,” without specifying whether he’s referring to Deanna, the coyotes, or both.

Cole Widener, Lusa’s husband and the heir to the Widener farm, dies in an accident early on in the novel. He’s significant mainly for bringing Lusa to Zebulon and to the Widener farm, where she feels like she’s found her home. Cole also represents a compromise between the traditional methods of farming in Zebulon and new methods like Nannie’s and Lusa’s. At the beginning of the novel, Cole defends pesticides and herbicides. During an argument about honeysuckle, Cole asks, “Why tolerate a weed when you can nip it in the bud?” (45). Yet he’s also interested in more progressive, chemical-free methods of farming; in fact, he met Lusa while attending her seminar on the subject. By the end of the novel, Lusa has learned the lesson Cole tried to teach her: she must compromise, tearing down the honeysuckle weeds she previously tried to protect at all costs. Now seeing the plant as “nothing sacred” (440), Lusa knows the honeysuckle will be “back here again, as soon as next summer” (440), and with the flowering weed will come the memories of Cole, memories Lusa carries with her in her new life on the Widener farm.

Jewel is the youngest sister of the Widener clan, and the one Lusa becomes closest to after Cole’s death. Jewel was abandoned by her husband, Shel, and left to raise two children on her own, so she empathizes with Lusa after Cole’s death, and Lusa is struck by Jewel’s “wise compassion” (77). Jewel was also closest to Cole, and she shares her memories of him with Lusa, allowing Lusa to see a new side of the husband she never truly got to know. Over the course of the novel, Jewel becomes increasingly ill with cancer, until she eventually accepts that she is “not going to see another summer” (379). Even with her debilitating illness, Jewel’s love for her children shines through, as she asks Lusa to “make sure [the children] know that having them, and being their mother, I would not have traded for anything” (405).