Published 1995
280 pages, hardcover
Anne Raver, with Barbara Kingsolver as a close second, defines who I mean by the blog category "We Would Be Friends". I badly want to jettison my 42 year old self back to the nineties (where 7th grade me wouldn't have had the same appreciation), open a pinot with her, sit in her Long Island garden with dog Molly and cat Mr. Grey, and laugh at the latest "shovel stuck in the half-dug rosebed". Gardeners are quite distractable, as she so charmingly describes.
I have a tendency to buy secondhand books twice, without meaning to. I keep saying I'll make a note in my phone with a list of all the books I have to avoid this, but that just falls among the many well intentioned ideas that will probably never happen, along with cleaning my keyboard or finish scanning of thousands of family photos.
In this vein, I found myself having bought Deep In The Green in hardback, not realizing I already had it in paperback. The paperback will make its way back to McKay's for store credit and more shopping, but imagine my delight when I opened the hardback version to find one of Anne's NYT articles clipped in the year of the book's publishing, as well as a book review by Ken Druse. Ken loves the same many things I do about her writing, though we differ in his concern about her "inappropriate subtitle", in his words. "An Exploration of Country Pleasures"? Ken, get your mind out of the overreaching gutter.
That aside, he sums the reading experience up perfectly with this. "It will be a shame if only gardeners buy this book...gardening, cooking, working, eating, driving, being born and dying: these are the parts of life chronicled in these stories. Reading them makes you feel good - through an occasional tear." And continued, "The three-page chapters beg to be shared and could revive the lost art of reading out loud. Oddly, some passages read silently seem hysterially funny, but sound melancholy when read aloud." Yes, Ken, exactly.
So said simply, find this book and read it, gardener or not. In fact, I have a paperback copy you can have.
As 2024 draws to a close, a year short of 30 years after publishing on New Year's Eve 1995, I'll leave you with an excerpt from Anne's article clipped and tucked inside this book I love.
"I guess that my New Year's resolution is not so much a resolution as a hope, that the spirit of gardening will seep into the souls of people who like to eat their lamb chops without thinking of the lambs who lived once, all cozy in the barn. I hope they will plant some carrots with their children - even if it's just in a whiskey barrel on the terrace - to realize that carrots don't come in plastic bags. (And if you're like me, and don't have children of your own, borrow some.) We all need to get into the country little more - to remember that eggs don't have to be laid in factories where the lights stay on all night long. That some hens, lucky souls, can still scratch around in the yard outside and go to sleep with the sun. Happy New Year."
The Bookshelf Rating: TOP SHELF
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