And I shall always feel a carrot next door is better than a carrot from Ames, Iowa, all things being equal.” But I have instincts about supply and demand which I believe in. Taber’s concern with fresh, local food seems amazingly contemporary. I venture to say also that great fiction illuminates life in a way no other form can do.”Īnother thing that impressed me was how much of a foodie Taber was, especially as we tend to think of the 1950s as a grim culinary era in the United States. And there is a great satisfaction to a writer in creating characters which no amount of good reporting could duplicate. Here is Taber’s take on fiction: “I think novels and short stories will probably be around as long as men can read at all. Her thoughts about poetry-Keats was a favorite-world peace, literature, and other larger subjects are folded into the homely details of life at Stillmeadow, and they bring depth to this charming book. But Taber, a writer and a creative writing teacher, had other things on her mind, too. To me, these are subjects that never grow old. If Stillmeadow Daybook were only about country living-cooking, family, and food-then that would certainly be enough. At one point they had thirty-six cocker spaniels, although in Stillmeadow Daybook, they are down to eight cocker spaniels and one Irish setter. According to the book’s forward, when both Gladys and Jill became widows, they decided to live together at Stillmeadow, which became their “refuge and a haven.” Jill and Gladys had gardens where they raised all their vegetables, and they raised dogs as well. Even more amazing, over the years, the friendship between the two families didn’t fray with the tensions that must inevitably come with joint ownership. As the children in both families grew and went to “various schools and colleges,” Stillmeadow was the home they could come back to. So the two families pitched their fortunes together, bought the house, and, amazingly enough, they all got exactly what they wanted. Both families wanted a house in the country, “a week-end place where we could have outdoor living in peace…where vacations and holidays could be, we felt, very economical.” Taber, her husband, and her daughter were living in New York City as were Taber’s good friend Jill, her husband, and two children. Taber loved the white farm house, built in 1690, from the moment she saw it: “ith its steeply pitched roof, little windows with bubbly glass, and worn lintel, I knew I belonged to it.” But how Taber came to own this house and live there is a little unconventional. I wondered how many tons of potatoes I had pared since we put our roots down here in these forty acres of stony Connecticut soil.” In her forward Taber writes, “There is something about the task of preparing vegetables that gives a woman a reflective mood. She starts with April, which is a good place to begin when gardening is central to your life. Lippincott Company, and in it Taber chronicles each month of the year on her farm. The book I am reading, Stillmeadow Daybook, was published in 1955 by J. Thanks, yet again, to Nan and her blog, Letters from a Hill Farm, for introducing me to the books of Gladys Taber, who lived and wrote at Stillmeadow, an old farmhouse in Connecticut.
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