Tis the season

It's probably my long wait for spring... but what a breath of fresh air The Rural Life by Verlyn Klinkenborg is!

It takes the form of journal entries covering the author's natural world observations over the course of a year. It’s a quiet book. He notices and writes about birds and ferns and horses and 'mud season.' Though he lives in upstate New York, he sojourns to Colorado a few times and we get his impressions of both places (which actually have quite a bit in common with Wisconsin, natural-world-wise.)

Verlyn is great with metaphor, making the reader able to really visualize what he's talking about. Writing about volunteer plants in a farmer's field he says " I've always loved the personification lurking in that use of the word, as though a cornstalk among the soybeans were like a zealous schoolgirl sitting in the first row of desks, arm thrust in the air after every question."

Short and contemplative, this was the perfect spring book for me, and maybe you!