Three New Memoirs Bring the Farm to the Page - The New York Times

FARM GIRL
A Wisconsin Memoir
By Beuna Coburn Carlson
216 pp. University of Wisconsin. Paper, $21.95.

My grandfather died many years ago, but I still remember his stories of growing up in the Texas Hill Country in the early 20th century, walking two miles each way to a one-room schoolhouse and doing chores that were, to me, unfathomable: making laundry soap out of lard and lye, plucking chickens, hauling water from the well. I thought of him often as I read “Farm Girl,” Carlson’s spare, charming memoir of her Depression-era childhood.

Carlson grew up on her parents’ farm outside Plum City in western Wisconsin, where she was born in 1926. (Family lore has it that the doctor who delivered her exclaimed: “Well, this is a nice, big one! Nine or 10 pounds.”) She and her three siblings roamed through “80 acres of beautiful, rich, fertile Wisconsin cropland, pasture and woodlot” while their parents shielded them from the worst economic woes of the period. Her memories, mostly rosy, are punctuated by descriptions of the era’s terrible droughts. “We could hear the cattle bawling as they searched the dry pastures for a bit of grass,” she recalls, and “we saw the leaves on the stunted corn plants in the sun-baked fields curl to conserve moisture.”

“Farm Girl” isn’t chronological. It’s split into two sections — one on her family, the other on the seasonal rhythms that define life on a farm — and divided into thematic chapters, some as short as two pages: “The Party Line Telephone,” “Butternuts and Maple Sugar Candy,” “Sunday Dinner,” “Long Underwear” (“nothing, nothing separated the farm kids from the town kids like the dreaded long underwear … the scourge of Wisconsin winters”).

Her memories may be sweet, but Carlson’s prose isn’t treacly; she’s got the same brisk “let’s get it done” tone my grandfather did. If this makes “Farm Girl” sound like “Little House on the Prairie” set a few generations later, well, that’s exactly what it is — a plain-spoken firsthand description of a not-so-distant past that few of us can imagine.

THE GROWING SEASON
How I Saved an American Farm — and Built a New Life
By Sarah Frey
251 pp. Ballantine. $27.

Like Carlson, Frey was raised on an 80-acre family farm, only hers lacked indoor plumbing for years and was heated only by a wood stove during the frigid Illinois winters. By the time she was 5, she was used to chores like gathering the eggs. “When people think of chickens, they think of decorative little hens in the pretty little houses that you see on Instagram,” she writes. “No. We had a shadowy henhouse full of spider webs, mice and the occasional egg-sucking varmint — a raccoon or possum.”

Eager to get away from her dysfunctional family (especially her controlling and abusive father, who once made her load an enormous snapping turtle “the size of a trash can lid” into his truck when she was small), Frey moved out at 15 and began supporting herself with a produce delivery business. She was so good at it that several years later, as the family farm was sliding into foreclosure, she stepped in and bought it.

“I couldn’t just bail my parents out,” she recalls. “It would have to be my land. I would manage it how I saw fit. I wouldn’t let my father be in control.” She got to work. At 19, she negotiated a deal to deliver melons to a Walmart distribution center (never mind that she didn’t have either the trucks or the necessary produce); shortly after, she asked her brothers to come work with her. They began to expand, acquiring suppliers and hiring workers. “Some women buy shoes,” she says. “I buy farms.” These days, as The Times has noted, “if you have bought a pumpkin at Walmart or Lowe’s, the odds are good that it came from Frey Farms.”

Although “The Growing Season” — whose publication has been delayed until August — is a gutsy success story, it’s never over the top. Frey relates everything in the same matter-of-fact tone, even when she’s describing something that doesn’t reflect well on her. “Here’s the thing — I get to a certain point with a problem and I just think, Burn it down, break it up, start over, get a new one,” she admits, whether it’s a lawn mower or a marriage. Still, it can be discomfiting to see the sudden flashes of her father in her own behavior.

It would have been so easy for Frey to sand off the rough edges, to buff this story into something shiny and sparkly. She refused — and I admire her for that.

ON THE RED HILL
Where Four Lives Fell Into Place
By Mike Parker
400 pp. Windmill Books. Paper, $16.

In the opening pages of this lovely memoir, Parker and his partner, Peredur, are in the small Welsh market town of Machynlleth, witnessing the same-sex civil ceremony of their friends Reg and George, who’ve been together almost 60 years. “Despite the half-century age difference” between the couples, Parker writes, “we’d recognized each other the moment we’d first met, and had fallen overnight into a well-worn friendship.” He and Peredur soon “became regulars” at Rhiw Goch, or Red Hill, Reg and George’s 18th-century stone farmhouse, “hanging out over cake and the fruitiest of gossip, and, when the time came, easing Reg and George as softly as we possibly could towards the end.”

“On the Red Hill” is many things: an examination of the intertwined lives of the four men and their rural town; a portrait of an unforgettable landscape; a social history of the queer community in Wales over many decades. It’s divided into four sections, each featuring one of the men, all steeped in the natural beauty and rhythms of the countryside. Though the story is a complex one, Parker never loses track of its many threads. Just when you begin to wonder how he will bring the story back around to Rhiw Goch, he does it, time and again casting the textures and smells and colors of the farm into sharp relief.

“Had someone drawn me aside at the age of 20 and asked me to imagine my improbable dream for a quarter of a century hence,” he writes, “I would have hesitantly talked of Wales, of an old stone house, of night skies and open fires, of a man I loved and who loved me back.”

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