The Rural Life, by Verlyn Klinkenborg

-
Memoirs or essays about living the country life can sometimes seem self-congratulatory, as the authors smugly detail their arcane knowledge of farm living and their simultaneously lofty and grounded connectedness to the earth (*cough*BarbaraKingsolver*cough*). So I had to temper my knee-jerk reaction to Klinkenborg's early paeans to baling twine. And I'm glad I did. After all, if I was living the very unusual life that he is, I'd want to write about it too, and there's nothing wrong with taking pleasure and pride in one's life, even if it's sometimes received by others as self-satisfaction.

Klinkenborg is on the board of the New York Times, but he bought a farm in rural New York some time ago and is fully engaged in its working. He's a beautiful stylist, a careful observer, and a lovely philosopher. His style is modest on the surface, but full of great vocabulary and turns of phrases. It's full of words like puddle, ditch, tree wrack, slush, woodchuck, soggy, crackle. He likes the construction noun-adjective as a modifier: the snow is "fox deep," the ice is "iron hard," and the colors of winter are white and "junco gray." His observations are true, like the way he describes the effect of a massive snowstorm: "As always when a storm of this dimension crosses the Northeast, what it brings in greatest abundance is a muffled hush, the sound of doing nothing." Having very recently experienced such massive blizzards, I can well remember the absolute quiet of the outside during those days, where no traffic sounds and few animal sounds pierced the air. He goes on to describe its effect on the residents: "Many seeds require a period of cold, called stratification, before they'll germinate. Thanks to this storm, residents of the Northeast can consider themselves properly stratified."

Klinkenborg tends toward metaphor more than simile, and his analogies are often extended but never feel forced. I like this one, from the March chapter: "In every ditch, every hollow, a cold, sepia brew of last year's leaves was steeping in a basin of discolored ice." And when he writes "the smell of rain is the catalyzed smell of the local earth and everything on it," you see that "catalyzed" is the perfect adjective, acknowledging that you have the earth containing the potential smells and the rain that activates them.

I'm also a sucker for sentences that aren't particularly clever or complex but simply lovely to read and vocalize in your head, like "Red-winged blackbirds crackled to themselves down along the boggy edge of a snow-covered field."

His philosophizing often centers on the past, parents and grandparents gone from the earth, and the experience of loss. He writes about how dialects are not just geographical but temporal: the way our grandparents spoke, for example, is gone, and "When a phrase becomes archaic [. . .] an echo from the past vanishes." He expresses his yearning for his childhood and his grandparents now gone from the world like this:  "Sometimes I wish I owned a weekend cottage in the country of the old-time tongue---a little cabin near my grandma's lexicon." "I'd like to go back to the past for a time [. . .] not to meet Mr. Abraham Lincoln or to interview the Buddha. I'd like to go to a small Congregational church in Iowa on a Saturday afternoon in May. Outside, my grandfather is mowing the lawn. Inside, my grandmother is practicing the Sunday organ, and my mom is sitting in the front pew with her children." In addition to the poignancy of this thought, I admire the way he slips in "Mr. Abraham Lincoln," a usage no one would use today but his grandparents surely did.

-