A month before I was born, in spring 1951, my family bought a farm in Pennsylvania. Through the 1950s it was a weekend operation, worked as best they could with the help of tenants. In 1960 we moved there permanently and from the age of 9, I was a farm boy.
Eventually, I went to the city to work and based myself there for many years. … Yet, I was never far from our land, and never for long. Like every farm kid, I was made by the landscape I grew up on. To not see it, to not be walking it, would feel like not seeing the sun. The fiction I wrote in those years was always about that landscape, the farm, the shape and rolls of the fields, the woods and ridges, the rocks and streams. The inhabitants I wrote about were like me; the land was the presence, we just moved upon it.
A lot of years have passed, those old original days of 60 and 70 years ago are far gone now. I’m grateful that I’m still there, I’m grateful there’s a new generation getting to work on the place. Of the old days, there are buildings and tools we still use, but of what we did, and those who did it, there are now just photographs, some of my mother’s letters, and, still, some living memory.
“Time is enormous, my mother said, we saved what we could.” She did not say that really, but in a novella after her death, I said it for her in her voice. Thinking over these notes, I came to that line, and there found the name of this series of memories and recoveries, this notebook. As in our memories, it’s about a landscape, some buildings and work we did, and tools. And ourselves, we’re still there too, now like shadows.
Two Winters Woods 