String too short to be saved Book

When I woke every morning, I knew what the day would provide. The six days of work were followed by a Sunday when we went to church, read books, and received callers. The farm had an order to it, for the animals had to be fed and the vegetables had to be weeded and the hay had to be cut for winter. Everything done was part of a motion we didn't control but chose to implement --- a process of eating, mating, and dying. I liked the sense of necessary motion. The farm was a form: not like a set of rules on a wall, but like the symmetry of winter and summer, or like the balance of day and night over the year, June against December. My grandfather lived by the form all his life, and my summers on the farm were my glimpse of it.


Hall laments the passing of a world I could never visit again, then manages to revisit it once more through this series of essays about summers spent on his grandparent's New Hampshire farm. Old friends and loved ones long since dead spring to life to reside forever in his reminiscences. This is not my favorite of Hall's many memoirs; here he concerns himself mostly with people and incidents rather than rhapsodic descriptions of nature and the changing seasons. In all, it was a rather bittersweet read. Still . . . there's a lot to love. I particularly enjoyed the trip up a mountain to pick blueberries, and this anecdote told by his grandfather to a newlywed Hall:

At twilight after our early supper, my grandfather and I walked outside while the two women washed dishes. He had been thinking about weddings, and he told me how Washington Woodward -- in a youth I could hardly imagine -- had tied a cowbell under an aunt's bed and rung it every ten minutes during her whole wedding night.

The fact that Washington Woodward survived to adulthood makes me think that the cowbell must have been the highlight of that particular nuptial night.