Of Farms and Books

 

The days were long and fine and very warm. They practically abandoned the house. They worked together, all three of them in the hay-field.

- Adrian Bell, Shepherd’s Farm

If Shepherd’s Farm is, as I suspect, typical of Adrian Bell’s fiction, many readers I know would not care for it. I can easily imagine some literary critics calling it a weak novel, if a novel at all. There is little drama; what there is of conflict never boils over. Our main characters work hard and strive patiently and gradually achieve their goals, and while they ultimately lose, in a material sense, all they have gained, it is not through tragic flaws of their own or wickedness on the part of some antagonistic force or other character in the narrative, and they are not driven to despair or madness by their losses. Simply, life goes on.

Since I don’t believe Shepherd’s Farm has ever been published in the U.S. (Bell's stories are set in England), I'll give here what would be ‘spoilers’ if I expected any of my blog readers to be picking up the novel: 

We fear initially that Miriam will choose the wrong man and create tragedy for three people. She does not. When the wrong man marries elsewhere, it seems he may go frightfully more wrong and lose himself entirely. Nothing like that ensues, and his life goes on as it was expected to go on, in conformity with his family values. When Miriam’s uncle, who is her guardian, opposes her marriage to Luke, threatening to have Luke's dear-won farm bought out from under him if she persists in wedding plans, she and Luke quietly agree to wait, not seeing each other at all for the time being. Eventually the uncle dies, and they marry. Again, quietly. Everything is done quietly, without, as I say, drama. The gypsy girl does not seduce Luke. The horse does not trample the child. There are no murders, no suicides, no hatred-fueled feuds. 

I loved the book and only wish it had been three times as long and three times fuller of agricultural and environmental detail, all those descriptive passages that readers longing for action find tedious. 

All summer, market day at Winslowe was desultory and unsatisfactory. People would run in for half an hour and then hurry back to their hay-carting. There was a sense that the centre of gravity was elsewhere. But now winter bore in; the town was cheery; farmers came early and left late. Down the street pigs and cattle went in droves; barley, wheat and oats lay spilled about the steps of the Corn Exchange, where farmers appraised each other’s samples.

Or --

…It was a bad time with the ewes. The weather had been so wet that they had strained themselves heaving their heavy bodies through the mud from the field to the yard, and several lambs were born dead. In the living room of the farmhouse there were always one or two new-born lambs before the fire hand their bleating sounded loud indoors.

On the shepherd’s farm, horses are of prime importance. It’s horses that make or break a farm, and it’s best to have a pair that pull well together, plus a third that can do other jobs when the pair are harnessed together. Feeding the horses is Luke’s first job every morning. Miriam will make the fire, milk the cow, and churn butter. Luke loves the feel of the horses’ oats running through his fingers. Miriam pitches into the hay-making from the start of the book to the end.

A dear, loyal bookstore customer and reader of this blog once mused that perhaps I romanticize farming life, which is in reality dirty, hard, repetitive work, but I don’t see the contradiction. A career in fashion design or event planning would never have suited me, but if I had married differently and had farm work all my life, I don’t think I would have been discontented. Outdoor work that challenges physical strength and perseverance is much more to my liking than housework, although without livestock or poultry and with no field crops, my work life outdoors is limited to mowing grass, planting and tending gardens, pruning my apple trees once a year, picking fruit in season (soon, black raspberries; later, apples), and keeping the dread autumn olive at bay—that last a never-ending chore but one I keep at, year after year, because I will not give over my small piece of land to the invader. There is satisfaction both in the work and in surveying the results, temporary (the grass grows back, and the autumn olive rears its head in new corners) though they will always be. 

The other day I was thinking of books I love and feel are not well enough known, and I realized how many of them have agricultural or at least outdoor themes: Mary Webb’s Precious Bane; Louis Bromfield’s Malabar Farm; Conrad Richter’s The Trees and The Fields. Richter was awarded the Pulitzer for The Town, the third book of his “Awakening Land” trilogy, but it’s the first two that I love. Even in Mary Norton’s series of children’s books about the little people called borrowers, it’s the second in the series, The Borrowers Afield, that is my favorite, the time in the little family’s life when they live out-of-doors and must live off the land. 

Why would anyone think life has to be easy to be good? Where is the pleasure in not working? In my winters of seasonal retirement with the Artist, our seasons in the Arizona ghost town cabin, my days were filled with hiking, learning the desert vegetation, feeding wild birds, cooking and baking and writing and studying Spanish, all that indoor activity with sun flooding through the windows and, whenever possible, doors open to the air, so that—not in the middle of winter but as winter segued into spring—indoors and outdoors became one.

Indoors and outdoors as a seamless whole, going from one to the other without putting on or shedding extra clothing—that is another glory of summer, along with the outdoor work. “They practically abandoned the house,” writes Adrian Bell, and I smile happily at that sentence, although I certainly do love my porch!

For now, the grass in my yard is mowed (hours of satisfying work for me, my exercise, lots of “steps,” as people say) and Sunny’s jumps set up again so we can keep at our agility teamwork, also. She and I did well at last Monday's session after a winter away from the sport.

Getting there --

Black raspberries are beginning to ripen, and I have warned Tree Guy that soon we will be harvesting berries morning and evening, day after day, filling the freezer against the time of jam-making. In the orchard surrounding me, many varieties of grasses grow tall, and there is alfalfa blooming now, its flowers from deep purple to pale lavender and even a light yellow. Alfalfa is so lovely! Farmer Tom Koch down on South Lake Leelanau (he also has the Polish food truck in Cedar, behind his wife’s wonderful shop of Polish wares) feeds his animals on barley, not corn. It was good to enjoy Polish food and farming talk one evening with Tom. I'll bring photos from Cedar the next time we go.

Grasses in morning rain

Adrian Bell again --

Hill Field was the best of it: this field would grow the finest malting barley, with that delicate almost silky look to the skin and pale golden. And when one cracked a grain it was not steely inside like that which grew on the light land, but white and mealy.

Meanwhile, of course, for me, my bookshop life continues, and lest I grow melancholy over reminders that I am not a farmer and don’t have time left in my life to become one, I thank my lucky stars ever day that I am a bookseller. (Especially, yes, a bookseller lucky enough to live in the country!) Schlepping heavy boxes of books, I think of my graduate school friend James, who when we were graduate assistants to professors called us “donkeys for philosophy” and then of the Artist, who, loving James’s phrase, when joining me in a big book move (such as Tree Guy and I undertook last week), called himself a “donkey for literature.” Bookselling is a much more physical line of work than many casual shoppers might imagine! 

Just as many people claim affiliations to larger groups, groups so large they can never know all the members personally, some political, and others consider themselves related by a sports team or a university (and of course there are many other possibilities), thinking it over I realize that book people are my tribe. 

Ah, yes, book people are my tribe, farmers are my neighbors, and I am a lucky woman!

In the shop

Outdoors

Visual fruits of my labors