I can't sleep…
I have this tremendous family gift. What am I going to do with it? …
This is the house that I grew up in. And the land that’s around us is something I’m attached to. When I grew up we knew everybody around us. There was a sense of community. I want to make sure that gets passed down as well as the watermelon.
~ Matt Bradford, The Bradford Watermelon Company (Sumter County, South Carolina)
Find story and video on cbsnews.com: The Return of an Heirloom Watermelon
Thank you Susan.
– Ron Rash, Above the Waterfall
Notes:
My strongest memory of our garden is not how it smelled, or even looked, but how it sounded. It might strike you as fantastic, but you really can hear plants growing in the Midwest. At its peak, sweet corn grows a whole inch every single day and as the layers of husk shift slightly to accommodate this expansion, you can hear it as a low continuous rustle if you stand inside the rows of a cornfield on a perfectly still August day. As we dug in our garden, I listened to the lazy buzzing of bees as they staggered drunkenly from flower to flower, the petty, sniping chirps of the cardinals remarking upon our bird feeder, the scraping of our trowels through the dirt, and the authoritative whistle of the factory, blown each day at noon.
~ Hope Jahren, Lab Girl
Notes: Photo: Patty Maher “Still Life with Corn 2013) (via My Modern Met)
Laddie was a useful dog on the farm for the next few years, and there were moments when he did good things and we understood each other— once we sorted two ewes that we needed for a show off a hundred others we didn’t need in a field and walked them home. But it was a rare moment, and I always knew he wasn’t as good as he should have been. Sometimes he’d run home when I lost my temper and shouted at him. He lost trust in me. I knew whose fault it was. Mine. I knew that I’d let him down. I look back and think he would have made a good dog if I had known a bit more. But a man’s life comes full circle; you can learn, and do better than your past. I am determined not to make the same mistakes again.
~ James Rebanks, The Shepherd’s Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape.
Notes:
At times these days I think of the way the sun would set on the farmland around our small house in the autumn. A view of the horizon, the whole entire circle of it, if you turned, the sun setting behind you, the sky in front becoming pink and soft, then slightly blue again, as though it could not stop going on in its beauty, then the land closest to the setting sun would get dark, almost black against the orange line of horizon, but if you turn around, the land is still available to the eye with such softness, the few trees, the quiet fields of cover crops already turned, and the sky lingering, lingering, then finally dark. As though the soul can be quiet for those moments.
All life amazes me.
~ Elizabeth Strout, My Name Is Lucy Barton: A Novel
Elizabeth Strout won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Olive Kitteridge. Her new book, My Name Is Lucy Barton, was selected as An Amazon Best Book of January 2016. The excerpt above is not representative of the storyline but Strout is a master at story telling. “My Name is Lucy Barton” is highly recommended.
Check out the book reviews:
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