The Witness of Combines

Wind, weeds and worries are the lot of the small farmer, and this memoir of a Minnesota childhood doesn't glamorize the details. Meyers baled hay, pitched silage, welded machinery, fed cattle, cleaned chicken coops, shoveled oats, and thought that a town kid who could claim to have as many chores as a farm kid was, in playground parlance, a Retard. Meyers, now (safely?) a writing teacher at Black Hills State University and author of The River Warren, was one of nine children of overworked parents. His mother, who had lost a lung to TB, canned hundreds of quarts of her own produce every year, and outlived his father, who died when Meyers was 16. These essays pay tribute to his parents' diligence, honesty, and selflessness. They also affirm the compensation of farm life--neighborhood solidarity in the face of calamity, children and parents getting to know one another as they work side by side, and the intimate connection to the physical world. Fortunately, his own material breathes life into these oft-exalted themes. He writes tenderly of the fleeting beauty of baby chicks, wryly of getting stuck in a snowdrift or of hurrying to sweep flies off the porch just before company arrived. The generally earnest tone may not win everyone over, but unhurried browsers should find healthy pickings in this little garden. (Sept.)