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A friend once described me as a few-thousand-words-a-week man, an appellation I have accepted as fairly accurate, though it’s often more and sometimes less, depending on the projects at hand. Assembling those words to describe thoughts or scenes would be pure pleasure if it weren’t so darned hard to do. Knowing that difficulty makes me admire all the more the works of those who write essays about the rural life.
John Gould, for example, entertained readers of the Christian Science Monitor for 60 years — a column that I enjoyed during the many years Gretchen and I subscribed to that paper. His eye for the ridiculous tinged his sense of humor. And his stories from rural Maine, where he lived most of his life, were often extraordinary tales about ordinary people.
Gould died in 2003 at the age of 94, but not until the state of Maine had declared a John Gould Day and L.L. Bean had named the library in its Freeport store after him.
In recent times, Verlyn Klinkenborg writes about the rural life for The New York Times. His essays often appear at the bottom of the editorial page. I just read his book, “The Rural Life,” and that started me thinking along these lines.
He writes of his life on a small farm in upstate New York, where he keeps bees, chickens and horses. Reading him, one encounters lines such as these describing a wet July: “Everything fungal is having a high old time.” Or, “It’s been like living under a rhubarb leaf.”
Or, about a morning in June: “When the early bird sings at 4 a.m., the only other sound is the dogs running out their dreams at the foot of the bed.”
But of all the essays I read about the rural life, I have to say that my favorites are ones that don’t get nearly the amount of ink of Klinkenborg or Gould. They’re the weekly musings of my cousin Anne, who writes “From the Garden Gate” for the Alden Advance newspaper in Alden, Minn.
Anne, who is four years older than I am, has been the big sister I never had. We played together as children on her family’s farm near Alden. And even into my adulthood, Christmas was usually celebrated there.
Her father, Clive, would hike through the snow from the barn dressed in sheepskin coat and an awful Santa mask to deliver a sackful of presents. Almost 10 years ago she asked whether I thought she could write a column. Knowing well she was never at a loss for words, I encouraged her. And she’s been at it ever since.
In this week’s column, Anne wrote that she thought about her column while confined to bed with flu. She had seen on “Oprah” an interview with Michael Pollan, the author and critic of industrial agriculture. And she recalled a conversation last year with Gretchen and me about Pollan’s ideas, which she described as a “tough sell to a daughter of agriculture.”
Still, she wrote, “As an old member of the NFO (National Farmers Organization) from the ’60s and ’70s, I know that we preached then that the government was after cheap food, and soon all of our food would be produced by a few corporations leaving the average farmer the opportunity to work for them. And it has come to pass.”
Anne acknowledged Pollan’s recommendations — such as not to eat anything our great grandmothers wouldn’t recognize as food — are highly controversial in an agricultural community. Then she concluded, “Perhaps it is not a good thing to leave me in bed to think.”
On the contrary, that’s what makes a few thousand words a week possible. Essayist S.J. Perelman once said, “Misery makes copy.”
We’d prefer that it not be the flu.
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