"Mrs. Turner Cutting the Grass" - A Short Story by Carol Shields - included in The Collected Stories of Carol Shields - 2004

“Her stories have given me happiness, not just pleasure. They delight me at first by the clear and simple elegance with which they’re made. Then there’s something so bountiful and surprising about them, like the beautiful broken light of a prism.” —Alice Munro

'In all of her fiction, Carol Shields excels at character creation. She conjures up a character in a few lines of dialogue, in a pungent authorial aside." Penelope Lively

This year, Buried in Print, a marvelous blog I have followed for over ten years,will be doing a read through of the short stories of Carol  I hope to participate fully in this event.

http://www.buriedinprint.com/

"Mrs Turner Cuts the Grass" is the third story by Carol Shields I have so far read,  I like her work so much I am planning to do a post on all 60 of the stories in the collection. 

This story begins with a 19 year old woman being, in 1930, expelled from the family home for having an affair with a married man.  She left her small town birthplace and travelled to New York City.

"The journey was endless and wretched, and on the way across Indiana and Ohio and Pennsylvania she saw hundreds and hundreds of towns whose unpaved streets and narrow blinded houses made her fear some conspiratorial, punishing power had carried her back to Boissevain. Her father’s soppy-stern voice sang and sang in her ears as the wooden bus rattled its way eastward. It was summer, 1930. New York was immense and wonderful, dirty, perilous and puzzling."

The story ends nearly 50 years later, back in her home town, a widow, mowing her yard, 

I do not wish to relay much of the plot. Along with her siblings she begins to travel the world.  There is an interlude concerning a poet they meet.

The Carol Shields Literary Trust Website has an excellent biography 

https://www.carol-shields.com/biography.html