"Various Miracles" - A Short Story by Carol Shields first published 1985-7 Pages- Included in The Collected Stories of Carol Shields- 2013

"This ability to strike two such different chords at once is not only high art, it’s also the essence of Carol Shields’ writing—the iridescent, often hilarious surfaces of things, but also their ominous depths. The shimmering pleasure boat, all sails set, skimming giddily across the River Styx. Carol Shields died on July 16, 2003 at her home in Victoria, British Columbia, after a long battle with cancer. She was sixty-eight. The enormous media coverage given to her and the sadness expressed by her many readers paid tribute to the high esteem in which she was held in her own country, but her death made the news all around the world. Conscious as she was of the vagaries of fame and the element of chance in any fortune, she would have viewed that with a certain irony, but she would also have found it deeply pleasing. She knew about the darkness, but, both as an author and as a person, she held on to the light. “She was just a luminous person, and that would be important and persist even if she hadn’t written anything,” said her friend and fellow author Alice Munro." From the introduction by Margaret Atwood 

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

http://www.buriedinprint.com/

The Various Miracles" is a beautiful very imaginative story. I look forward to reading many more of the author's stories next year.

The Carol Shields Literary Trust Website has an excellent biography 

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

"SEVERAL OF THE MIRACLES THAT OCCURRED this year have gone unrecorded. Example: On the morning of January 3, seven women stood in line at a lingerie sale in Palo Alto, California, and by chance each of these women bore the Christian name Emily. Example: On February 16 four strangers (three men, one woman) sat quietly reading on the back seat of the number 10 bus in Cincinnati, Ohio; each of them was reading a paperback copy of Smiley’s People."

There is no conventional plot, just a series of marvelous Miracles.

"She was the kind of young woman who reads everything, South American novels, Russian folk tales, Persian poetry, the advertisements on the subway, the personal column in the Globe and Mail, even the instructions and precautions on public fire extinguishers. Print is her way of entering and escaping the world."

Mel u