Dirt Under My Nails: An American Farmer and Her Changing Land

by Marilee Foster

Overview

A woman farmer observes with a poetic and appreciative eye the transformation of the plant and animal life on her land through the changing seasons, and now through the encroachment of residential development.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781882593774
Publisher:	Bridgeworks
Publication date:	07/21/2003
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.52(h) x 0.59(d)

Editorial Reviews

After graduating from college in 1994, the author decided not to take any of the career paths usually followed by liberal arts students. Instead, she joined her brother in the family business, a 600-acre potato farm in Sagaponack, N.Y. In this engaging book, based on a weekly column she writes for the Southampton Press, Foster muses about the pleasures of farming, even on land at the eastern end of Long Island, where development is so rampant that her town seems like "a territory under siege." Although she is often tempted to block out mentally the sight of the "architectural eruptions" that surround the farm, for the most part she takes the changes in stride, ignoring the spackle buckets and pieces of cardboard that blow over into her fields from adjacent construction sites and observing with amusement the antics of the seasonal residents who jog past her in spandex outfits. These are, after all, the customers who buy her vegetables at the roadside farm stand she runs as a sideline to the main business of the farm. Instead, Foster tries to concentrate on the pleasures that make farming life so rewarding for her, chronicling the four seasons with entertaining accounts of farm activities. Her charming essays sparkle with insight and humor, and speak movingly of the enchantment she finds in the world around her, even when it is in danger of being lost forever. (May) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

After graduating with a liberal arts degree in 1994, Foster decided to join her father and brother in running their family farm, located on the eastern end of Long Island. Her weekly column for the local newspaper became the basis for this book. Like many gardening and farming journals, this one follows the four seasons of one year, commenting on weather conditions, planting activities, and agricultural pests. There are observations about the native flora and fauna and reflections on the tenacity of farmers. Foster repeatedly expresses her contempt for the growing number of wealthy summer visitors and for those without "ancestral connections" who, she claims, are turning the area into "a kind of high-end suburbia." Foster's account of farm life lacks enthusiasm, and her descriptions of nature are humdrum, having neither vitality nor lyricism. Much more insightful looks at the disappearing American farmer are given in Victor Hanson's The Land Was Everything and in the works of Wendell Berry and Gene Logsdon. The books of Hal Borland and Gladys Taber are far more appealing in their depiction of country life. Foster's title is recommended only for regional collections. Ilse Heidmann, Olympia, WA Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

From newcomer Foster, a keen and wholly lovely catalogue of seasons growing spuds in the midst of swells. Out on the South Fork of Long Island, the remaining farms are less likely to be bounded by stonewalls and hedge rows than by monumental architectural experiments. The Hamptons are schizophrenic, with 65,000-square-foot mansions plunked down on famously fertile soil in a region known for its truck farms as well as its summer homes. Foster's family has been cultivating this earth for five generations; she has "watched, a little dumbfounded, as our open spaces have given way to the infrastructure of an international resort." Though the author has done her part to resist the forces of greed, she does not overly dwell on that situation here. Rather, Foster agreeably evokes all that is worthy and special about the land on which she has always lived but still hungers to know better: the farm, the overgrown graveyard, the scattered ponds, the romance of out buildings and barns, the vivacity and annoyance of weeds, the weather. ("So much about Hurricane Floyd made me fear him. Even the name sounds like a pedophile.") Her account contains elements of the pastoral, but it also has plenty of quick, edgy material: "When contemporary beach houses fall into the sea, I compare it to the bitter divorce that often comes at the end of an exaggerated romance." The roll of the seasons is a constant in the background: the hundred chores that spring tugs at her to attend, the coming and going of birds (she gives their local names: crow-blackbird, golden-winged woodpecker, and, best of all, the browns), the care and maintenance of 600 acres of vegetables, the languid bliss of October to April. The tenacityand availability of life, amply admired and admirably evoked

Kirkus Reviews