I picked up this gem
by Michael Perry eight years after its publication. Maybe I just wasn’t paying attention—I don’t
know how I missed this book for so long.
Not only is it a first-rate and compelling book, but I feel like Perry
is speaking directly to me. Needless to
say, his other books are now on my reading list. When I first cracked open the
cover, I was expecting a story about chickens.
That’s not what it’s about. To be sure, chickens are minor characters in
this book, but it’s a memoir—so it’s really about Michael Perry. Perry tells us the story of his first year in
an old house on a Wisconsin acreage with his new wife and daughter, with
frequent flashbacks to his childhood on a Wisconsin dairy farm amidst an
“obscure fundamentalist Christian sect”.
Along the way he discourses on home birth, milking cows, slaughtering
pigs, building a chicken coop, and even blowing one’s nose using a technique he
calls the “farmer snort”. And
ultimately, perhaps he offers us his perspective how one should live one’s life.
