Edge Seasons

Naomi Brun is a freelance writer and a book reviewer for The Hamilton
Spectator.

In our Western culture, we tend to view time as a linear thing. We
celebrate birthdays and other milestones with unfettered joy in early
childhood, and then, as we age, with a little bit of dread. After all,
every year older is one step closer to the end.

Other cultures view time as a circular entity. Today is no closer to
yesterday than it is to any other similar day, so this Christmas may
feel nearer to last Christmas than it does to the following week, when
we go back to the 9-to–5 grind.

In her memoir, Edge Seasons, Beth Powning shares her own experiences
with circular time. As her grown son prepares to leave home to attend
art school, Powning herself enters the transitional phase of midlife.
She is still a mother, but no longer in the same way, and she is still a
wife, but her identity there is altering, too. She needs a “room of
her own,” a physical and emotional place to explore the Bethness of
who she is. To that end, she and her husband rebuild their old sauna to
include a studio of her very own.

Working on the sauna fills Beth with memories of its original
construction. Barely out of their teens, Beth and Peter married and
moved to New Brunswick to start their life. They bought the house and
land on impulse, established Peter’s pottery business, built the
sauna, and had a son. That phase of her life, the time when she was
young and just married, was a transitional phase, too, and in many ways,
perhaps the last transitional phase she experienced before the one she
is in right now.

Beautifully written and full of poignant insights, Edge Seasons drifts
between the past and the present as Beth grapples with what it means to
create a life of purpose. Fans of the author’s recent Hatbox Letters
will be delighted to watch the writer emerge out of that new room in the
sauna, but this book should not be limited just to those familiar with
Powning’s fiction. In fact, this memoir is at least as strong as any
of her other writing, and its content will certainly resonate with women
in transitional phases.