On Brassard’s Farm by Daniel Hecht.

3/5 rating. 421 pages.

Book #29 of 2022. Read July 5, 2022.

This is a novel about a teacher who moves to the woods in Vermont as a respite after large portions of her life have fallen apart.

Ann was a teacher in Boston but had an issue in her school which made her want to leave it. After her bad breakup, she decides to buy a tract of land just above a farm. Because of some bad luck she is forced to pay off the last portion of her land by working on the farm. Completely unprepared for what she is up for, she is able to use the solitude, hard work, and camaraderie of the farm to begin her healing.

As Ann continues to work on the farm, she begins to fall in love, not only with the place, but one of the owners of the farm. While she never expected it, her move to Vermont set up the rest of her life and allowed her to find herself again.

As Ann says: “Insight frequently requires preparation in the form of a gradual melting of habitual stupidity. And when real revelation comes, it may not be something you can name; it may not make sense except in the deep places where our souls forge coherence from the world’s various pieces.”

This was a cute book, just not as much substance as I would have liked to make it truly great.

Quotes:

“We all knew things were going to hell in a shopping cart, and like everyone else, I soothed the pangs of this awareness with the balm of cynicism, resignation, and a high tolerance for my own hypocrisy.”

“Earnest had explained that the owners of this kind of land had clear-cut the trees and sold them off as logs or fire-wood – an indication of financial distress, trading the forest’s long-term productivity for quick cash. Just what Jim Brassard had refused to do. It’s no longer an ecosystem, but an aftermath of a place, ugly and desolate.”

“I have a theory that we grow much like trees, that every period of our lifetime remains fully intact inside us, just covered over with the next layer and the next.”

“Do. The. Job. Skip the extraneous emotions. The work is real. It’s simple. It’s Zen. It is necessary and it is good and it is enough.”

“Then I wondered whether a stream is the water in it, or the bed in which the water travels. The bed is a place and is always there, but it has no life or function without the water. But the water is transient, here now but miles away by tomorrow…I have no answer except that what I love is the whole, both the thing that stays and the thing that goes, which ultimately cannot be understood except as a unity.”

“Things separated connect again.”

“With deep friendships, years apart make no difference. You start up right where you left off. There may be plenty of new detail to relate – the life you’ve lived since you saw each other last – but the fundamentals remain unchanged.”

“Because the time has come, Ann, to talk of love and loneliness, of woods and farms and yearning, and why your blood is boiling hot and what you’re going to do about it.”

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