Selling the farm : descants from a recollected past / Debra Di Blasi.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Di Blasi, Debra, 1957- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Farm life--Biography.

Farm life.

Di Blasi, Debra, 1957-.

Di Blasi, Debra.

Genre:

Biographies.

Autobiographies.

Physical Description:

142 pages ; 22 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

[North Carolina] : C&R Press, [2020]

Summary:

Raised in a family of seven, in a small ramshackle farmhouse without plumbing, author Debra Di Blasi maps a candid and eloquent memoir of a Midwest childhood both land rich and dirt poor, both heaven and hell. Surrounded by creatures big and small, rolling fields and pastures, weedy lawn, deep woods and shimmering waters, she wrestles with the complexity of a crowded family shaped by place and doomed to tear itself apart. SELLING THE FARM explores the difficult intersection of grief and love, and the many contradictions in nature, life and death, and memory itself. Her lyrical recollections move from season to season with language visually and aurally shaped to reconsider the ways that we bear witness to any place and time-and to ourselves amid all. As personal and global extinctions loom in the foreground, and family farms become increasingly scarce, these elegiac ruminations remind us how much has been-and will be-lost to us all.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note: In Memoriam

I will rebuild the house

Overture

As I live and breathe

Autumn: It's all there

Farm objects, animate or not

We wrought destruction where we could

My brother taught me how to track animals

The pony named Smokey

We learned to distinguish the mew

Autumn begged destruction

The clays along the creek bed

If you don't mind might I suggest

Winter: Each time I dredge the farm

Not in spring but when the snows fell languorous

When a cow died my father wrapped an iron chain

You couldn't stop the winter cows from calving

That year winter stormed so dense

Where did the dogs go in winter?

All of the birds and foxes

The hill of the pasture in front of the house

When did the season's first snowfall not stagger me

A crow swooped down from a live branch

In those polished days

To be first to lay down your tracks

Interlude: Night Maybe death's the farm at night

Last night I dreamt those we called Indians

Just around the northwest corner

Thereby I enter impervious night

From: Here To: There

Brightest nights starlight swept

Days like this

Sure, I can summon the farm

One night, coming home late and careless

The night repeats itself

Olbers' Paradox

Summer: It was difficult, in that light

First, the bumblebees fussing at dandelions

Then the roads

Again, the roads

They're vultures, really

After life is life

I once rescued a young pig

It wasn't just the land that drew us

That fractured day

I cannot take back the killing

Summer rewarded

The roof shingles were green

All over America fathers were mowing

Sliver of a day: A picnic

As if a two-year-old drew a line

The friend I had was a town child

Summer heat radiated the sweet undulating stink

It's never the new house I recall without effort

Again memory's echo

Spring: A farm is a microcosm

I have been absent

Names of the wild plants escape me

Spring rained heavy and interminable

A rock pile grew

Spring meant thaw

This is not you here in my memory

Aside

Do the trees remember us?

Is spring then about forgetting?

Epilogue: It was a universe

While I write, my father dies

Elegy: Wallace's Line is "a hypothetical line dividing animals

There is no right language for grief

There's a bird trapped in the attic

Someone must have left a door open, so...

... now there's a bird trapped in the attic

That bird will not stop singing

Listen to me, there's a bird trapped in the attic!

We are that bird's lice

Will someone please, please, please let the bird out of the attic?

Someone left the door open, so, finally.

Notes:

Place of publication from publisher's website.

ISBN:

9781949540130

1949540138

OCLC:

1162517436

Publisher Number:

99987392525