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The Rural Life
This "luminous, brilliant" meditation on life in the countryside will encourage you to see the natural world -- and our place in it -- anew ( New York Times Book Review ).
With an eloquence unmatched by any other living writer, Verlyn Klinkenborg observes the juncture at which our lives and the natural world intersect. His yearlong meditation on the rigors and wonders of country life -- encompassing memories of his family's Iowa homestead, time spent in the wide-open spaces of the American West, and his experiences on the small farm in upstate New York where he lives with his wife -- abounds with vicarious pleasures for the reader as it indelibly records and celebrates the everyday beauty of the world we inhabit.
"In a voice reminiscent of E.B. White, Klinkenborg paints a picture of a fading world in colors that are solid and authentic. His joy is evident throughout." -- Los Angeles Times
With an eloquence unmatched by any other living writer, Verlyn Klinkenborg observes the juncture at which our lives and the natural world intersect. His yearlong meditation on the rigors and wonders of country life -- encompassing memories of his family's Iowa homestead, time spent in the wide-open spaces of the American West, and his experiences on the small farm in upstate New York where he lives with his wife -- abounds with vicarious pleasures for the reader as it indelibly records and celebrates the everyday beauty of the world we inhabit.
"In a voice reminiscent of E.B. White, Klinkenborg paints a picture of a fading world in colors that are solid and authentic. His joy is evident throughout." -- Los Angeles Times
224 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2003
About the author
Verlyn Klinkenborg
44 books89 followersVerlyn Klinkenborg is a member of the editorial board of The New York Times. His previous books include Making Hay, The Last Fine Time, and The Rural Life. He lives in upstate New York.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 86 reviews
September 11, 2011
Ok, I couldn't resist a book with "luminous" quoted on the front from the NYTimes. I just never realized that luminous prose is not enough to hold my interest.
The descriptions, metaphors and elegant word-craft are lovely. In fact, it's probably one of the most artfully written books I've ever read. What it lacks, for me, is a semblance of plot. I'm not sure if I'm just not in the mood for a memoir, or I'm hopelessly addicted to fiction, but I just can't stay motivated to keep reading this. I'm, sadly...bored.
Perhaps, if I give it another shot, I'll find that the story of this man's rural life will finally start to hold some meaning larger than a beautifully written diary. But a chronological rendering of glimpses of the outdoor world (the weather, the farm's changing condition, the animals' antics) is just not doing it for me, however wonderfully these glimpses are written. I guess in a memoir there might not be a plot, but at least a philosophical/emotional/spiritual growth pattern would lend a sense of movement toward a goal - provide a justification for the arrangement of chapters, other than "well, it happened in that order."
The descriptions, metaphors and elegant word-craft are lovely. In fact, it's probably one of the most artfully written books I've ever read. What it lacks, for me, is a semblance of plot. I'm not sure if I'm just not in the mood for a memoir, or I'm hopelessly addicted to fiction, but I just can't stay motivated to keep reading this. I'm, sadly...bored.
Perhaps, if I give it another shot, I'll find that the story of this man's rural life will finally start to hold some meaning larger than a beautifully written diary. But a chronological rendering of glimpses of the outdoor world (the weather, the farm's changing condition, the animals' antics) is just not doing it for me, however wonderfully these glimpses are written. I guess in a memoir there might not be a plot, but at least a philosophical/emotional/spiritual growth pattern would lend a sense of movement toward a goal - provide a justification for the arrangement of chapters, other than "well, it happened in that order."
August 7, 2013
Enchanting. It makes you feel connected with something more than just the landscape and the seasons, but with what it feels to be a living creature. In one wonderful essay, he begins by discussing something simple: a rope across your hand and what it can connect you to. He always carries twine in his pocket. Then he describes an incident when his horses escaped from their field one night, and he searched across the countryside. When they were finally found they were like spirits of the night, nervous, big-eyed skittery creatures, suspicious of every sound and crackle in the hedgerow - as if they had crossed to some realm away from domesticity. He approached them and haltered them. Roped, they seemed to become tethered to mankind again; solid, docile companions once more. Only he describes it better than I do.
I return to this book again and again.
I return to this book again and again.
March 26, 2023
My favorite line: "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 have that particular longing too, and as Dee reminded me, Grandma would have been 100 this week. I would love to visit her distinct style and dialect of speaking again.
So many little moments that Klinkenborg enlarged so well, I just wish the essays hung together more. I could have read a whole book about his horses in pasture.
So many little moments that Klinkenborg enlarged so well, I just wish the essays hung together more. I could have read a whole book about his horses in pasture.
November 29, 2018
For years I enjoyed Verlyn Klinkenborg's columns on life as a farmer in the New York Times. When I discovered this volume, which I believe is adapted from several of those dispatches from the (hay)field, I looked forward to it. The book is full of the lovely prose that marked the columns. The book takes its structure, much like a farmer's life, in month-by-month chapters. While the writing sparkles there is little drama to the proceedings on the Klinkenborg farm. As a reader I needed more than a listing of how each month differs from the one previous (spoiler alert: not that much). Except for a few pages of his own family history in the chapter on June, there is precious little to hang your hat on for readers. The Rural Life is as well-written as the columns that spawned it but otherwise lacking in appeal. Three and a half stars.
May 1, 2021
This collection of essays about daily life on a small farm in upstate New York is filled with beautiful observations of nature. Interspersed throughout are stories of time on a ranch in Wyoming and other western spots. A lovely book.
January 6, 2017
This is poetry disguised as a book of essays. On just a single page Klinkenborg describes both the "unsolicited abundance" of nature and the "cross-conspiring... metabolisms" of an ecosystem in spring. My favorite vignette was his most personal and reflective, in which he wrote about his evolving relationship with his father.
December 25, 2012
Verlyn Klinkenberg and I couldn’t be more different. Just the title of this book implies the primary difference: I’m City, he’s Country. But the differences go deeper, and more regional. We reside on opposite sides of the great New York State divide — I’m New York City, and he’s an upstater.
But for a city boy, I have some definite country leanings. My family has a roughly 30x20-foot enclosed plot of land with our rented apartment, and last year I cultivated the flowers that bloomed there naturally while growing a nice yield of tomatoes. Our CSA and coop glean the bounty of farmers like Klinkenborg. I’ve been an avid fisherman since I was able to walk back in my home state of Kansas, and I now also fish and crab off the coast of Long Island and Jersey.
I discovered Klinkenborg via his essay “Our Vanishing Night” in The Best American Essays 2009, a sublime 4-page piece on “light pollution” and how a surplus of light has changed our world over the last 100 or so years. This book is divided into chapter/essays devoted to each month of the year; I plan on reading one a month this year, and adding to my review as I go.
He begins the January essay with a meditation on the lost art of journal-keeping, as if to justify to himself the words he was putting to paper, then spends a good portion of the essay doing what I do a lot of in January: making lists. Things he wants to do when the ground thaws, represented by the multiple mail-order plants catalogs he keeps inside and the “ruins of the garden…still just visible above the snow” that he observes from his window. He also writes a beautiful section in which binding twine becomes both metaphor and daily reminder of the things he could be doing outside. I also found interesting the sounds he equates most with winter—snowplows, ice skate blades, banging radiators—all of which are mechanical intruders on the peace of the snow, ice, and cold of his rural world.
Much of his February essay meditates on the art of waiting: “It’s a dull soul who hasn’t checked sunrise or sunset against his watch several times by now, struck by how early the light comes and how late it begins to go…One day soon the rain will let up, and the frost will leave the ground as stealthily as it came…But all of this hides somewhere on the next page of the calendar. The The good news now lies deep within the beehive, where the workers, their dead cast aside into the melting snow, have set the queen laying eggs once again.” Klinkenborg’s eye searches the landscape through the multiple winters of the essay for signs of life and renewal, from the trees he taxonomizes to the woodpeckers who plink them. I will say here that the two sections on his sojourns through the Sonoran Desert seemed a bit ponderous and superfluous, removing us from the landscape of his own to one he’s visiting to escape the month about which he’s writing.
For me the March essay, at pages the shortest of the book, was also one of the most intensely affecting personally. Perhaps this is because much of it is about the ice melting, the earth getting into motion, daylight returning — all things about which I’ve written myself, though not as well. The other reason, which is the first major payoff of reading it with each month of the year, is that most of the rest of the short essay is about the early expectation that comes to the gardener in March, which I read while looking over my tomato, pepper, and eggplant seedlings in the window and seeds germinating in wet paper towels on the radiator. As he says, “The early bulbs seem desperate just now. Nothing else catches the hint of spring from them,” I look out my window into our bathtub flowerbed, where the first tulip bulb is poking its horny shoot out of the soil. This essay, like the rest of them but perhaps more so is filled with aphorism, none more affecting to me than, “A garden is just a way of mapping the strengths and limitations of your personality onto the soil.”
April continues the theme of movement, with motion starting to win the war over immotion, revealed through the slow plunging forth of two-leafed seedlings or the violent early-spring Nor’Easter winds: “That’s half the pleasure of a spring Nor’Easter: knowing that all that snow has fallen on an irresistible season.” A funny thing, though: Klinkenborg himself, watching the world spring forth into motion, seems stirred into complacency: “I’ve been trying hard, like everyone near here, to bring out my dead during the last few weeks, to rake out the flower beds and borders, to collect the litter of winter. But some days it’s been too nice to do anything but sit on an old locust log, still unshaded by the tree above me, wondering about the season ahead, how it will flourish and what it will bear.” He also writes in this essay about cutting firewood, which makes me think of my childhood going into the woods with my grandpa with a chainsaw and two axes to cut and harvest cords and cords of locust, hackaberry (so he called it), and elm that he’d sell to stretch his VFW check, and about wanting to raise pigs, which makes me think of E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web and Death of a Pig.
About midway through the May essay, Klinkenborg takes a strange, beautiful detour out of May and into his family’s past, describing some of the colloquialisms of his mother and grandmother that have been lost; I was wondering when reading this what it had to do with rural life or the month of May, when he capped the section with this nugget: “But the power of common speech doesn’t grow from the soil or from a simple life or from any other virtue rooted in the past. It stems only from the irrepressible human urge to talk. To find the casual poetry of the past, all you need to do is listen closely to the present. Any day, anywhere, people will say anything.” Elsewhere, he reflects on the descent of late-spring night, the rising of the trout for the spring mayfly hatch, the exit and reentrance of his bees from their hives, even a meditation on the slow evolution of our conception of time and space — but nothing struck me so completely and suddenly as his digression away from the month of May and into his timeless past.
By the June essay, one of the longest of the book, Klinkenborg has dispelled any adherence to uniform time and place, going in small sections from meditation on the character of New England at the turn from spring to summer, to a memory of his late stepmother prompted by a dead elderberry tree, to the difference between driving on a highway past a farming area and driving slowly through it in a tractor, to a short study of Thoreau and Walden as seen through the eyes of Bill Clinton and Don Henley at dedication of the Thoreau Institute, to a leisurely acknowledgement of the hope inherent in a summer sunrise, to a brief sojourn with the bison at Yellowstone National Park, to an inquisition into the musicality of storms after drought, to a juxtaposition of nature’s tendency toward variety and his own (and most farmers’) desire for uniformity. These brief mini-essays make up fourteen of June’s twenty-five pages; the last eleven pages do what he did midway through May, taking the reader away from his adult home, and the month of June really, and sallying back through his family timeline, this time excavating his father’s and grandfather’s rural lives and their connection to (and disconnect from) his own. And again, this is probably the most masterful part of the essay.
The month of July is perhaps Klinkenborg’s meditation in full stride. This is the longest essay so far, and all the pieces I’ve pointed out so far — meditation on time and space (literally, in one section he writes on the moon landing of 1969), American history and custom, family, and of course the natural world — all in abundance, which makes sense for a month that features all of this in abundance. As in other essays, he flits from time to time (past, present, speculation on the future) and place to place (his upstate New York farm, his Iowa childhood home, his Badlands summer getaway spots), only standing in one place long enough to get a kernel of wisdom and aphorism from it before moving on. The enigmatic constancy he finds in rarely keeping the reader in the same place for too long has by now in the book become, er, Klinkenborgian.
The August essay is a collection of short, image-driven meditations; of its fourteen pages, no section is more than two pages long. It’s as if, in this time of ripe abundance, Klinkenborg simply doesn’t have much time to write. The images, though—his garden’s version of ripeness compared to his own, grasshoppers on the Western landscape, the idea of the American West and the question of where it begins, exceptionally rainy late summers, sweet corn glut, weeds and vines irreconcilably tangled (“This part of the garden isn’t the least bit pastoral”), the eternal battle between bears and bees—are uniformly apt for the season and rendered with a touch I’ve come to look forward to each month.
In his longish essay on September, Klinkenborg covers most of this month’s bases as a time of change, transition, and looming death, writing brief sections on 9/11, Labor Day, high school football, shedding cottonwoods, tomatoes waiting for the first frost, and other signs of the end of summer. And as usual he flits from place to place—Wyoming, Colorado, his farm in New York—but also as usual it’s when he allows himself the space to explore the boundaries of history, his own and the larger world’s, that the shining guideposts of his own personal mythology reveal themselves. Toward the middle of the essay, he meditates extensively on the dichotomy of the gardener vs. the conqueror, starting by watching his own pumpkins and autumn squash race headlong into their harvest and destruction, then going back to Ruskin’s conceptions of the garden, to Louis XVI’s commissioned paintings of his garden restoration sixteen years before he was beheaded, to his own painting, Grant Wood’s Spring in Town, a figure of a young man harvesting his crop who will be sent to war the next year, 1942.
In keeping with his time-play, Klinkenborg list-meditates in Daylight Savings Time in a section of the October essay, concluding a long list of historical calendar systems with the observation, “Daylight Saving Time is the ultimate flat tax. Everybody pays up when it begins on the first Sunday in April, and on the last Sunday in October everybody reaps a one hundred percent refund of their hour, not a second of it lost to overhead.” In this relatively short essay, Klinkenborg clambers wildly through time and space, with almost every short segment taking place in a different geographical region, and many time shifts, into the autumn in 1819 when Keats composed “To Autumn” and the Fourteenth Century when Joseph Justus Scalinger invented the Julian Calendar and other points between.
If there is a thematic link to the sections of the November essay, perhaps it’s Going Inside. For the first few pages he meditates on the work that must be done before winter: “Going into winter takes confidence, even in a normal year, even if it’s nothing more than confidence in one’s own preparations.” Those preparations consist of things like getting the stove ready and getting the ground ready for its frozen hibernation, all while “racing daylight,” as he calls it, which brings to mind another major trope of this month’s essay: the interplay between light and darkness. This of course is related to the theme of going inside. The light — symbol of warmth, day, life — is still putting up a struggle against the impending darkness of the approaching winter: “This time of year the light is always coming and going. Dawn swells until noon, and then, after a brief hesitation, twilight takes over…Summer, in memory, seems almost like a plain of sunshine, without undulation. There’s an astronomical explanation for it all — the sun cuts a much lower angle across the sky in late autumn and sets farther south. But it’s simpler to say that at this time of year, in the country at least, emotion and light are one and the same.”
Much of the December essay concerns a subject Klinkenborg describes with the prescient zest most people can only allow in the month of December: snow. “Some people love waking to the sight of new snow. Fallen snow is fine, but I like the sight of it falling, fine as dust or so fat you can hear it land against the kitchen window. I like the tunnel of dry snow you drive through at night, the headlights blanking out a few yards ahead, and the feeling that you’re driving into some abysmal vacuum. I like the ground-blizzards and the snow that slithers down the road ahead of you. What I like is the visual impairment snow brings with it, the way it obscures some things and defines others, like the wind.” This, I think, is one key to Klinkenborg’s voice as in The Rural Life — the continual shifting of voice to suit the seasonal point of view. “The urge to quarter the year into seasons is nearly irresistible, whether the impulse is astronomical, agricultural, liturgical, or fiscal. Instead of inhabiting the divided plain of time, humans prefer to live in the rooms the seasons make, and nearly everyone loves to be reminded of that fact.”
But for a city boy, I have some definite country leanings. My family has a roughly 30x20-foot enclosed plot of land with our rented apartment, and last year I cultivated the flowers that bloomed there naturally while growing a nice yield of tomatoes. Our CSA and coop glean the bounty of farmers like Klinkenborg. I’ve been an avid fisherman since I was able to walk back in my home state of Kansas, and I now also fish and crab off the coast of Long Island and Jersey.
I discovered Klinkenborg via his essay “Our Vanishing Night” in The Best American Essays 2009, a sublime 4-page piece on “light pollution” and how a surplus of light has changed our world over the last 100 or so years. This book is divided into chapter/essays devoted to each month of the year; I plan on reading one a month this year, and adding to my review as I go.
He begins the January essay with a meditation on the lost art of journal-keeping, as if to justify to himself the words he was putting to paper, then spends a good portion of the essay doing what I do a lot of in January: making lists. Things he wants to do when the ground thaws, represented by the multiple mail-order plants catalogs he keeps inside and the “ruins of the garden…still just visible above the snow” that he observes from his window. He also writes a beautiful section in which binding twine becomes both metaphor and daily reminder of the things he could be doing outside. I also found interesting the sounds he equates most with winter—snowplows, ice skate blades, banging radiators—all of which are mechanical intruders on the peace of the snow, ice, and cold of his rural world.
Much of his February essay meditates on the art of waiting: “It’s a dull soul who hasn’t checked sunrise or sunset against his watch several times by now, struck by how early the light comes and how late it begins to go…One day soon the rain will let up, and the frost will leave the ground as stealthily as it came…But all of this hides somewhere on the next page of the calendar. The The good news now lies deep within the beehive, where the workers, their dead cast aside into the melting snow, have set the queen laying eggs once again.” Klinkenborg’s eye searches the landscape through the multiple winters of the essay for signs of life and renewal, from the trees he taxonomizes to the woodpeckers who plink them. I will say here that the two sections on his sojourns through the Sonoran Desert seemed a bit ponderous and superfluous, removing us from the landscape of his own to one he’s visiting to escape the month about which he’s writing.
For me the March essay, at pages the shortest of the book, was also one of the most intensely affecting personally. Perhaps this is because much of it is about the ice melting, the earth getting into motion, daylight returning — all things about which I’ve written myself, though not as well. The other reason, which is the first major payoff of reading it with each month of the year, is that most of the rest of the short essay is about the early expectation that comes to the gardener in March, which I read while looking over my tomato, pepper, and eggplant seedlings in the window and seeds germinating in wet paper towels on the radiator. As he says, “The early bulbs seem desperate just now. Nothing else catches the hint of spring from them,” I look out my window into our bathtub flowerbed, where the first tulip bulb is poking its horny shoot out of the soil. This essay, like the rest of them but perhaps more so is filled with aphorism, none more affecting to me than, “A garden is just a way of mapping the strengths and limitations of your personality onto the soil.”
April continues the theme of movement, with motion starting to win the war over immotion, revealed through the slow plunging forth of two-leafed seedlings or the violent early-spring Nor’Easter winds: “That’s half the pleasure of a spring Nor’Easter: knowing that all that snow has fallen on an irresistible season.” A funny thing, though: Klinkenborg himself, watching the world spring forth into motion, seems stirred into complacency: “I’ve been trying hard, like everyone near here, to bring out my dead during the last few weeks, to rake out the flower beds and borders, to collect the litter of winter. But some days it’s been too nice to do anything but sit on an old locust log, still unshaded by the tree above me, wondering about the season ahead, how it will flourish and what it will bear.” He also writes in this essay about cutting firewood, which makes me think of my childhood going into the woods with my grandpa with a chainsaw and two axes to cut and harvest cords and cords of locust, hackaberry (so he called it), and elm that he’d sell to stretch his VFW check, and about wanting to raise pigs, which makes me think of E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web and Death of a Pig.
About midway through the May essay, Klinkenborg takes a strange, beautiful detour out of May and into his family’s past, describing some of the colloquialisms of his mother and grandmother that have been lost; I was wondering when reading this what it had to do with rural life or the month of May, when he capped the section with this nugget: “But the power of common speech doesn’t grow from the soil or from a simple life or from any other virtue rooted in the past. It stems only from the irrepressible human urge to talk. To find the casual poetry of the past, all you need to do is listen closely to the present. Any day, anywhere, people will say anything.” Elsewhere, he reflects on the descent of late-spring night, the rising of the trout for the spring mayfly hatch, the exit and reentrance of his bees from their hives, even a meditation on the slow evolution of our conception of time and space — but nothing struck me so completely and suddenly as his digression away from the month of May and into his timeless past.
By the June essay, one of the longest of the book, Klinkenborg has dispelled any adherence to uniform time and place, going in small sections from meditation on the character of New England at the turn from spring to summer, to a memory of his late stepmother prompted by a dead elderberry tree, to the difference between driving on a highway past a farming area and driving slowly through it in a tractor, to a short study of Thoreau and Walden as seen through the eyes of Bill Clinton and Don Henley at dedication of the Thoreau Institute, to a leisurely acknowledgement of the hope inherent in a summer sunrise, to a brief sojourn with the bison at Yellowstone National Park, to an inquisition into the musicality of storms after drought, to a juxtaposition of nature’s tendency toward variety and his own (and most farmers’) desire for uniformity. These brief mini-essays make up fourteen of June’s twenty-five pages; the last eleven pages do what he did midway through May, taking the reader away from his adult home, and the month of June really, and sallying back through his family timeline, this time excavating his father’s and grandfather’s rural lives and their connection to (and disconnect from) his own. And again, this is probably the most masterful part of the essay.
The month of July is perhaps Klinkenborg’s meditation in full stride. This is the longest essay so far, and all the pieces I’ve pointed out so far — meditation on time and space (literally, in one section he writes on the moon landing of 1969), American history and custom, family, and of course the natural world — all in abundance, which makes sense for a month that features all of this in abundance. As in other essays, he flits from time to time (past, present, speculation on the future) and place to place (his upstate New York farm, his Iowa childhood home, his Badlands summer getaway spots), only standing in one place long enough to get a kernel of wisdom and aphorism from it before moving on. The enigmatic constancy he finds in rarely keeping the reader in the same place for too long has by now in the book become, er, Klinkenborgian.
The August essay is a collection of short, image-driven meditations; of its fourteen pages, no section is more than two pages long. It’s as if, in this time of ripe abundance, Klinkenborg simply doesn’t have much time to write. The images, though—his garden’s version of ripeness compared to his own, grasshoppers on the Western landscape, the idea of the American West and the question of where it begins, exceptionally rainy late summers, sweet corn glut, weeds and vines irreconcilably tangled (“This part of the garden isn’t the least bit pastoral”), the eternal battle between bears and bees—are uniformly apt for the season and rendered with a touch I’ve come to look forward to each month.
In his longish essay on September, Klinkenborg covers most of this month’s bases as a time of change, transition, and looming death, writing brief sections on 9/11, Labor Day, high school football, shedding cottonwoods, tomatoes waiting for the first frost, and other signs of the end of summer. And as usual he flits from place to place—Wyoming, Colorado, his farm in New York—but also as usual it’s when he allows himself the space to explore the boundaries of history, his own and the larger world’s, that the shining guideposts of his own personal mythology reveal themselves. Toward the middle of the essay, he meditates extensively on the dichotomy of the gardener vs. the conqueror, starting by watching his own pumpkins and autumn squash race headlong into their harvest and destruction, then going back to Ruskin’s conceptions of the garden, to Louis XVI’s commissioned paintings of his garden restoration sixteen years before he was beheaded, to his own painting, Grant Wood’s Spring in Town, a figure of a young man harvesting his crop who will be sent to war the next year, 1942.
In keeping with his time-play, Klinkenborg list-meditates in Daylight Savings Time in a section of the October essay, concluding a long list of historical calendar systems with the observation, “Daylight Saving Time is the ultimate flat tax. Everybody pays up when it begins on the first Sunday in April, and on the last Sunday in October everybody reaps a one hundred percent refund of their hour, not a second of it lost to overhead.” In this relatively short essay, Klinkenborg clambers wildly through time and space, with almost every short segment taking place in a different geographical region, and many time shifts, into the autumn in 1819 when Keats composed “To Autumn” and the Fourteenth Century when Joseph Justus Scalinger invented the Julian Calendar and other points between.
If there is a thematic link to the sections of the November essay, perhaps it’s Going Inside. For the first few pages he meditates on the work that must be done before winter: “Going into winter takes confidence, even in a normal year, even if it’s nothing more than confidence in one’s own preparations.” Those preparations consist of things like getting the stove ready and getting the ground ready for its frozen hibernation, all while “racing daylight,” as he calls it, which brings to mind another major trope of this month’s essay: the interplay between light and darkness. This of course is related to the theme of going inside. The light — symbol of warmth, day, life — is still putting up a struggle against the impending darkness of the approaching winter: “This time of year the light is always coming and going. Dawn swells until noon, and then, after a brief hesitation, twilight takes over…Summer, in memory, seems almost like a plain of sunshine, without undulation. There’s an astronomical explanation for it all — the sun cuts a much lower angle across the sky in late autumn and sets farther south. But it’s simpler to say that at this time of year, in the country at least, emotion and light are one and the same.”
Much of the December essay concerns a subject Klinkenborg describes with the prescient zest most people can only allow in the month of December: snow. “Some people love waking to the sight of new snow. Fallen snow is fine, but I like the sight of it falling, fine as dust or so fat you can hear it land against the kitchen window. I like the tunnel of dry snow you drive through at night, the headlights blanking out a few yards ahead, and the feeling that you’re driving into some abysmal vacuum. I like the ground-blizzards and the snow that slithers down the road ahead of you. What I like is the visual impairment snow brings with it, the way it obscures some things and defines others, like the wind.” This, I think, is one key to Klinkenborg’s voice as in The Rural Life — the continual shifting of voice to suit the seasonal point of view. “The urge to quarter the year into seasons is nearly irresistible, whether the impulse is astronomical, agricultural, liturgical, or fiscal. Instead of inhabiting the divided plain of time, humans prefer to live in the rooms the seasons make, and nearly everyone loves to be reminded of that fact.”
July 24, 2020
Every so often I run across a book that GRABS me. This is one of those books! Filled with wonderful insights and beautiful descriptions. Verlyn writes the way I wish I could! He has a great ability to put the things he has observed into great descriptive words. Many a time I stopped just to savor a sentence he wrote. I will be suggesting this book to many!
A friend lent me this book to read, knowing how much I'd enjoy it. She knows me well! I will be buying a copy of this to add to my own collection and will be looking forward to reading it again.
As I was reading this, I wanted to rush through it, but at the same time, I never wanted the book to end!
A friend lent me this book to read, knowing how much I'd enjoy it. She knows me well! I will be buying a copy of this to add to my own collection and will be looking forward to reading it again.
As I was reading this, I wanted to rush through it, but at the same time, I never wanted the book to end!
August 20, 2016
This was an enjoyable book. I live in a rural area, moving from suburbia. I'll never forget my observations of nature that a simple hike cannot offer. How living in the country ties you into the changing of the weather and the changing of the seasons that suburban folks may not appreciate. What stuck me the most was the author's ability to pinpoint all of the same observations about weather that I've made, that I thought were my own, and went unnoticed because they were so subtle. The movements in dead of winter, the early days of spring, the final days of summer. Things that you only appreciate if you notice. Insects, animals, plants, trees, clouds, light..all these are portrayed by the author in a sensory fashion, which hits the mind eye and the heart. He also talks about history surrounding holidays and his family. All this is patched together from times when the author lived in the west, the east and the farm on the prairie. I loved it!
October 22, 2009
Gracious, I enjoyed this book.
Here's one of my favorite passages:
"What decided me on pigs was meeting a farmer who still raises pigs on pasture. 'I have a pasture,' I remember thinking. What all this means is that I'm giving in to the logic of where I live and the land I live on. place like this is always asking of me 'What can you do yourself?' I didn't even hear the question at first. All I meant to harvest was lettuce and metaphors and peaches in a good year, and, of course, bushels of horse manure. But each added layer of complexity - reseeding a pasure, or keeping bees - points toward other layers of complexity, like pigs, that lie just a short logical leap away. I have no illusions of attaining self-sufficiency. The only sufficiency I want is a sufficiency of connectedness, the feeling that horses, pigs, bees, pasture, garden + woods intertwine."
Here's one of my favorite passages:
"What decided me on pigs was meeting a farmer who still raises pigs on pasture. 'I have a pasture,' I remember thinking. What all this means is that I'm giving in to the logic of where I live and the land I live on. place like this is always asking of me 'What can you do yourself?' I didn't even hear the question at first. All I meant to harvest was lettuce and metaphors and peaches in a good year, and, of course, bushels of horse manure. But each added layer of complexity - reseeding a pasure, or keeping bees - points toward other layers of complexity, like pigs, that lie just a short logical leap away. I have no illusions of attaining self-sufficiency. The only sufficiency I want is a sufficiency of connectedness, the feeling that horses, pigs, bees, pasture, garden + woods intertwine."
December 10, 2020
My dear friend Nan (Letters From a Hill Farm) gifted me this book many years ago and back in January, I decided to read a chapter each month. I've tried to read other books like this over the course of an entire year and this is the first time I've succeeded! As with any collection of essays, I enjoyed some more than others, particularly those that remind me of our early years in Nebraska. We lived on three acres, just outside the city limits, and after living in San Diego for 20 years, it felt like we were living the rural life. We had a creek running through our backyard, turkeys visiting on a regular basis, and even a small herd of cattle showing up one day as I was mowing on our John Deere tractor. As I read Klinkenborg's ruminations, I found myself nodding in agreement, recognizing situations from my life as a "country mouse."
Notable Passages:
Every year about now, I feel the need to keep a journal. I recognize in this urge all my worst instincts as a writer. I walk past the blank books--gifts of nothingness--that pile up in bookstores at this season, and I can almost hear their clean white pages begging to be defaced. They evoke in me the amateur, the high school student, the miserable writerly aspirant I once was--a young man who could almost see the ink flowing onto the woven fibers of the blank page like the watering of some eternal garden. It took a long time, a lot of pens, and many blank books before I realized that I write in the simultaneous expectation that every word I write will live forever and be blotted out instantly. (January)
All the days with eves before them are behind us now for another year. The grand themes--rebirth and genial carnality--have come and gone like a chinook wind, bringing a familiar end-of-the-year thaw to body and spirit. Now the everyday returns and with it the ordinary kind of week in which Friday doesn't turn into Sunday--and Saturday into Sunday--as it has for two weeks running. It's time for a week in which each morning throws off a magnetic field all its own, when it's no trick telling Tuesday from Wednesday just by the sound of the alarm clock or the mood of your spouse. (January)
If deep cold made a sound, it would be the scissoring and gnashing of a skater's blades against hard gray ice, or the screeching the snow sets up when you walk across it in the blue light of afternoon. The sound might be the stamping of feet at bus stops and train stations, or the way the almost perfect clarity of the audible world on an icy day is muted by scarves and mufflers pulled up over the face and around the ears. (January)
From solstice till equinox, summer lasts only ninety-one days and six hours, a little longer if you count from Memorial Day till Labor Day. It seems like so much time. but the closer you get, the smaller summer looks, unlike winter, which looks longer and longer the nearer it comes. From a distance--from April, say--summer looks as capacious as hope. This will be the season we lose weight, eat well, work out, raise a garden, learn to kayak, read Proust, paint the house, drive to Glacier, and so on and so on and so on. This will be the season in which time stretches before us like the recesses of space itself, the season in which leisure swells like a slow tomato, until it's round and red and ripe. (May)
Beside a country road near the town of Hygiene, Colorado, stands a cottonwood that turned completely yellow the second week of August. To southbound cyclists that tree lies hidden, lurking beneath a sharp dip in the road. They coast along in summer's full incumbency--the scent of hay practically creasing their foreheads--when all at once the asphalt slopes away, and that lone cottonwood presents itself, its leaves shimmering in a bright wind that suddenly seems autumnal, full of the brittleness, the clarity, of fall. (September)
For some reason, every stage in this advancing season has brought with it a feeling of incredulity. A few weeks ago it seemed unbelievable that the leaves should be turning so soon and then that they should have dropped so promptly. Now, just this week, it seems incredible that snow should have fallen out of a goose-gray sky, skidding eastward toward the missing sun. I wake up thinking, "November already," and realize that "already" is a word that's been with me all autumn long, always measuring how far behind the season I feel. (November)
It takes no imagination to stay synchronized with the shifting of the season, with the retracting daylight or the sudden gathering of a wet morning wind that gets behind your ears and under your hair when you feed the animals. You don't really even have to pay attention to keep up with the calendar. But you do have to be ready to part with the days that have already passed. September took far more than a month this year. It probably took two months, the one our bodies lived and the wholly different month we lived in our minds. Time fell out of gear for almost everyone.
Some of the reluctance that comes with this autumn is mere uncertainty, a sense that no one really knows the score. Going into winter takes confidence, even in a normal year, even if it's nothing more than confidence in one's own preparations. Somehow that's not good enough this year. Like everyone, I find myself wanting the world to be right with itself again, even if only in the wrong old ways. In the heart of the reluctance I feel and hear in the voices of my neighbors, there's a longing for the inconsequential summer we were having not so many weeks ago. Longing is probably too strong a word. Better to say that the memory of what was, for many Americans, an uneventful August exerts a certain attraction right now. But the present is irrefutable. The leaves won't rise again, except on a cold wind. Before long, I hope, that won't seem so regrettable. (November) [Klinkenborg was writing of 9/11, but he very well could have been writing about any month in 2020!]
Notable Passages:
Every year about now, I feel the need to keep a journal. I recognize in this urge all my worst instincts as a writer. I walk past the blank books--gifts of nothingness--that pile up in bookstores at this season, and I can almost hear their clean white pages begging to be defaced. They evoke in me the amateur, the high school student, the miserable writerly aspirant I once was--a young man who could almost see the ink flowing onto the woven fibers of the blank page like the watering of some eternal garden. It took a long time, a lot of pens, and many blank books before I realized that I write in the simultaneous expectation that every word I write will live forever and be blotted out instantly. (January)
All the days with eves before them are behind us now for another year. The grand themes--rebirth and genial carnality--have come and gone like a chinook wind, bringing a familiar end-of-the-year thaw to body and spirit. Now the everyday returns and with it the ordinary kind of week in which Friday doesn't turn into Sunday--and Saturday into Sunday--as it has for two weeks running. It's time for a week in which each morning throws off a magnetic field all its own, when it's no trick telling Tuesday from Wednesday just by the sound of the alarm clock or the mood of your spouse. (January)
If deep cold made a sound, it would be the scissoring and gnashing of a skater's blades against hard gray ice, or the screeching the snow sets up when you walk across it in the blue light of afternoon. The sound might be the stamping of feet at bus stops and train stations, or the way the almost perfect clarity of the audible world on an icy day is muted by scarves and mufflers pulled up over the face and around the ears. (January)
From solstice till equinox, summer lasts only ninety-one days and six hours, a little longer if you count from Memorial Day till Labor Day. It seems like so much time. but the closer you get, the smaller summer looks, unlike winter, which looks longer and longer the nearer it comes. From a distance--from April, say--summer looks as capacious as hope. This will be the season we lose weight, eat well, work out, raise a garden, learn to kayak, read Proust, paint the house, drive to Glacier, and so on and so on and so on. This will be the season in which time stretches before us like the recesses of space itself, the season in which leisure swells like a slow tomato, until it's round and red and ripe. (May)
Beside a country road near the town of Hygiene, Colorado, stands a cottonwood that turned completely yellow the second week of August. To southbound cyclists that tree lies hidden, lurking beneath a sharp dip in the road. They coast along in summer's full incumbency--the scent of hay practically creasing their foreheads--when all at once the asphalt slopes away, and that lone cottonwood presents itself, its leaves shimmering in a bright wind that suddenly seems autumnal, full of the brittleness, the clarity, of fall. (September)
For some reason, every stage in this advancing season has brought with it a feeling of incredulity. A few weeks ago it seemed unbelievable that the leaves should be turning so soon and then that they should have dropped so promptly. Now, just this week, it seems incredible that snow should have fallen out of a goose-gray sky, skidding eastward toward the missing sun. I wake up thinking, "November already," and realize that "already" is a word that's been with me all autumn long, always measuring how far behind the season I feel. (November)
It takes no imagination to stay synchronized with the shifting of the season, with the retracting daylight or the sudden gathering of a wet morning wind that gets behind your ears and under your hair when you feed the animals. You don't really even have to pay attention to keep up with the calendar. But you do have to be ready to part with the days that have already passed. September took far more than a month this year. It probably took two months, the one our bodies lived and the wholly different month we lived in our minds. Time fell out of gear for almost everyone.
Some of the reluctance that comes with this autumn is mere uncertainty, a sense that no one really knows the score. Going into winter takes confidence, even in a normal year, even if it's nothing more than confidence in one's own preparations. Somehow that's not good enough this year. Like everyone, I find myself wanting the world to be right with itself again, even if only in the wrong old ways. In the heart of the reluctance I feel and hear in the voices of my neighbors, there's a longing for the inconsequential summer we were having not so many weeks ago. Longing is probably too strong a word. Better to say that the memory of what was, for many Americans, an uneventful August exerts a certain attraction right now. But the present is irrefutable. The leaves won't rise again, except on a cold wind. Before long, I hope, that won't seem so regrettable. (November) [Klinkenborg was writing of 9/11, but he very well could have been writing about any month in 2020!]
April 10, 2010
One of the most incredible prose writers I've come across. He's not an author that you can read straight thru and often I found myself just reading a paragraph and then stopping to think about the images he brought up.
He also has an occasional essay column over at The New York Times. Wonderful,thoughtful writer.
He also has an occasional essay column over at The New York Times. Wonderful,thoughtful writer.
December 18, 2018
This was a lovely collection of non-fiction prose observations and meditations on rural living. Makes me want to pack up and buy a farm in Iowa! I'll re-read this one some day. Klinkenborg makes simple things like a compost heap, mud, tomato cages, and the subtle changes of weather feel like momentous grand important things.
October 1, 2016
Beautiful writing. Profound thinking. Simple observations turned magical and real. Reading this book made me want to stroll through the fields around our farm once a day. Highly recommended.
May 2, 2021
When the English Civil War broke out Izaak Walton closed up shop in London and took off for the countryside with his fishing gear and ultimately gave us ‘The Compleat Angler’ - a delightful meditation on life and nature. In these days when it seems that the world has lost its mind a book like ‘The Rural Life’ let’s the reader escape to the countryside to contemplate the simpler things of life. As a compilation of different essays written over several years, it jumps back and forth across different parts of the country each month. While this may not appeal to everyone’s taste in writing style I enjoyed the broad perspective that it gives.
September 5, 2017
I'm glad I read the second collection of these essays first, because I think it was a little stronger. There were more pieces about specific aspects of the farm in that book, rather than the more general observations prevalent in this one. However, these were still a delight to read, as Klinkenborg's poetic ruminations always make the farm feel a bit like home to the reader--comforting and familiar--while retaining a bit of mysterious wildness.
November 8, 2021
Three Cheers for Rural Life…
I came across this work while searching for another Klinkenborg work. Since I have lived for most of my life in rural areas with periods of urban life I decided to give it a read. Excellent book with many of the essays bringing back memories of growing up on my parents property or helping my neighbor with their farm. Alas, eventually you grow up and have to make your own way and now we are their in our own rural life. Highly recommended…SLT
I came across this work while searching for another Klinkenborg work. Since I have lived for most of my life in rural areas with periods of urban life I decided to give it a read. Excellent book with many of the essays bringing back memories of growing up on my parents property or helping my neighbor with their farm. Alas, eventually you grow up and have to make your own way and now we are their in our own rural life. Highly recommended…SLT
May 19, 2017
good flourishes, but tends to lavish us even with trivial details
verlyn: it isnt necessarily snowfall or the sudden drop of temperatures..- its the sound of the plowguy!
me: sentence is unnecessary when it is common knowledge
I assume verlyn is someone who tends to go on long rants much to the disproval of those who have to endure listening to him
verlyn: it isnt necessarily snowfall or the sudden drop of temperatures..- its the sound of the plowguy!
me: sentence is unnecessary when it is common knowledge
I assume verlyn is someone who tends to go on long rants much to the disproval of those who have to endure listening to him
December 26, 2018
A well known and highly regarded author writes of his life in an upstate New York rural refuge. His digressions to other locations, presumably for work or family, are confusing in the context of Klinkenborg's intentions.
September 6, 2022
For all of us wannabe naturalists and gardeners VK has written a book that exquisitely captures life far from the suburban world. Time again I was moved by his brilliant descriptions and language. A master writer.
March 4, 2018
Gorgeously written and sparse, this reminds me of Kent Haruf's works. Klinkenborg explores each month through the happenings of the natural world.
March 28, 2019
Some bright points and enjoyable use of language. I like how the author talks about his horses and describes the seasons.
May 3, 2020
Klinkenborg can write one hell of a sentence—so clear, so perfect. Every word is necessary. This is an easy read written in journal form following the four seasons.
May 11, 2021
An enjoyable read. The quieter side of life and the road less traveled. He truly did give me “a fresh view or the ordinary beauty of daily life,”
May 25, 2022
it is nice
it is soothing
it was a nice lunchtime read...
no revelations, no drama,
just the pace of a full rural home
it is soothing
it was a nice lunchtime read...
no revelations, no drama,
just the pace of a full rural home
June 28, 2022
A must read for any city dweller or suburbonite curious about rural life. The author is an exceptionally knowledgeable and talented writer.
January 4, 2023
Our 41st Retirement Read Aloud. Bought this book at the Lincoln Library in Lincoln MA on our Maine trip in 2022
March 23, 2023
Poetry in non-fiction form. Lovely.
The beauty of ordinary life.
The beauty of ordinary life.
October 17, 2023
I live the rural life and this book was boring. Couldn't hold my interest. Luckily it is very short.
November 1, 2023
Such lovely, peaceful prose! I love his metaphors, especially how the snow in the woods is fox-deep. I reread this book periodically and always find it comforting.
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