The love of Nettles

After reading the Nettles by Alice Munro, I was mostly impressed by what the protagonist finally concluded: Love that was not usable, that knew its place. Not risking a thing yet staying alive as sweet trickle, an underground resource. With the weight of this new stillness on it, this seal.

This essay is full of their complex and subtle feelings towards each other. By metaphor, Nettles represents something irritating and disturbing. Her mistaking joy-pye weeds implies that ordinary life is more like the insignificant-looking nettles that are stinging and piercing. Like nettles, it was not easy for both to deal with these feelings. The author employs a skillful but natural narrative voice, which effortlessly leads the readers on toward a natural understanding of love as the protagonist concluded about it.

When they were in childhood, Mike and she were good friends and had a time of happiness. She described the plot of game in details: she made weapons for Mike, and dressed his wounds. Mine was the name Mike called her. “There was a keen alarm when the cry came, a wire zinging through your whole body, a fanatic feeling of devotion.” She recalled. Her admirations for him and her emotional reliance on him——puppy love, were gradually founded in that time and in all the activities and games they enjoyed together. As a child, she did not know what that

feeling is. She thought she could accept future absence. That is because she had no idea of what absence could be like until Mike disappeared. From that time on, the “love trickle” began to flow in her heart.

As time goes by, she was confronted with problems of passions, confusions and dilemmas that most middle-aged women would meet. Her dreams and ambitions were distracted by noising children and fussy housework. Follow her heart, she left husband and house and all the things acquired during the marriage, in the hope of making a life that could be lived without hypocrisy, or deprivation or shame. When was asked by the children and husband“why can’t you just live at home?, she did not know how to respond. She was confused and lost herself. She called her leave a long necessary voyage from the house of marriage. Actually, she got into a common dilemma and struggled between natural desire for freedom and the confinement of marriage. As a middle-aged woman, she began to doubt the meaning of marriage, and was learning to take sex lightly, which was not easy for her because that is not the way she started out and she was not young, but she was learning. Just at this point of time, Mike appeared.

In these few days, she allowed herself to indulge in, in her words, light-headed imaginations as an adolescent girl’s, including being a wife, a role she was trying to escape, and sex which she was learning to take lightly. Now, she felt that he was the person she always loved, but she

didn’t know what was in Mike’s mind. She wanted to touch Mike when watching stars; her sexual desire for Mike was aroused when lying on the same sheet Mike had used. She just raised questions, supposed and then answered by herself. Anyhow, in her mind, mike loved her. Then by chance, they experienced together a rainstorm, in which Mike tried to protect her. After the storm, they kissed and pressed together briefly out of a ritual, a recognition of survival rather than of their bodies’ inclinations. Mike said, “There is something I did not mention to you.” Why Mike didn’t tell her before the storm.

It was because that of their childhood, the things Mike remembered were different from the things she remembered. They were not much familiar to each other now. Through the heavy rainstorm, just as through the clay cannonballs in their childhood, they knew something together and it bound them. The experience in the storm shortened the distance between her and Mike. In a sense, the rain washed away the lust of her and purified her mind, thus purifying their relationship. The storm provided a necessary circumstance for what would happen next. Having hearing about the death of Mike’s son, she knew that he was a person who had hit rock bottom which only he and his wife knew and it bound them together firmly. At end, she understood this was just what marriage meant——something in common that would bind you for life. She was the only person whom he told about his son’s death. She

realized she was a person he had, on his own, who knew. That was enough; that was all.

She finally knew the place of their love, and did not risk a thing. What happened or rather, what did not happen between them gives her a new perception of love and marriage. I believed, she would eventually go back to her family and live well with her husband and children.