Hannah Coulter... again

She takes from the stove a pot of green beans, another of cabbage, a dish of baked pears, a blackberry cobbler, and wraps each in newspaper and sets it carefully into a cardboard box on the table. As she works, her face is preoccupied, deliberative, lighted as if from beneath the skin by a serenity that lives upon her sense of being equal not just to what she is doing but to whatever she has imagined she may have to do. It is a beautiful face, wreathed by dark, heavy hair, radiant from the touch of the sun and her strong blood, the features clear. She is some years past the simple prettiness of her girlhood. Her beauty no longer has its source merely in her physical presence, though that is pleasing enough; it comes, rather, from some deep equanimity with which it has accepted the marks of an extraordinary knowledge of herself, her powers as a person and as a woman, her mortality. That understanding of mortality has been Hannah Coulter's great suffering, as now it is her peculiar gift; she has known and borne and accepted it upon the terms of her womanhood and flesh.
- from The Memory of Old Jack by Wendell Berry

One of my all-time favorite literary characters... I wish I could sit with Hannah Coulter for a spell.