Clabbered Dirt, Sweet Grass

This book paints a vivid picture of life on a farm, back around the turn of the century. Aunts, uncles and grandparents lived with the family. Most of the crops and animals raised on the farm were for their own sustenance; old clothes were sewn into warm quilts, many things were mended and made by hand. The little money needed for school supplies, flour and salt was hard-earned cutting cordwood or picking potatoes on other farms. People worked very long, hard hours and all the families came together once a year to help harvest grain, the team moving around from farm to farm until everyone's crop was in. Close association with the animals, upon whose lives they depended. The great workhorses. The pigs and cattle- living breathing animals show more for so long fed and cherished, then transformed into meat for the table. The horror of accidents from men caught in farming machinery, small children wandering into danger (one toddler gets eaten by a hog), people lost in the snow simply trying to walk from one building to another. But they don't strike home too much because none of them are known personally- only stories told of other's misfortune. Through the whole book there aren't any real characters that you follow or come to know, overall it's just a portrait of a way of life. A simple book that you can read in one day (I managed it, and you know how little reading time I have nowadays!) yet its images stay with you. I keep thinking now of how dependent the farmers were upon the weather, how precise their timing had to be in order to get things planted, harvested, etc at the right moment so things wouldn't fail to grow or spoil or be lost in some way. It was a difficult, back-breaking way of life, and yet it had its own sweet rewards. The cold swimming hole. The warmth of a cow's flank during milking. The fabulous meals cooked up for harvest teams by wives and daughters. The beautiful warm heaps of quilts stitched with memories that children piled under in shivering attics.... show less

Ah, life on a farm. Plowing, planting, praying for rain and luck… “So terribly much of it is luck that even when the weather is perfect, when a Sunday comes around, God is honored.” Picking, canning, eating… “The pie is religious, something from God.” Country dances, first love, sudden deaths of both people and animals… “Bread is good, but nothing runs without meat and there can be no meat without killing but nobody except the dog and the barn cats like it.” Farm life is not for the faint of heart, nor is this book with its graphic descriptions of farm accidents. The focus in this book is the small family farm that used to be much more common in past times.

Gary Paulsen writes about the hard work that never ends in such show more poetic language, it almost makes one long to live this quickly disappearing way of life. This is a nostalgic book complete with some lovely full-page paintings by the author’s wife of simple things found around the farm: chickens, children skinny-dipping in the local water hole, a rustic barn, and the corn shocks in the snow which can be seen in detail on the book cover. This book can be read in an afternoon and provided me with a trip down memory lane to good times spent as a child on the farm in Michigan owned by a relative and to the farm in Southwest Missouri where my husband grew up. Seeing how people used to make a living from the land through the harshness of the different seasons gives me a new appreciation for the men and women who settled our country by the strength of their backs and the hopes of better lives. show less

Paulson writes (hate to use this word, but here goes!) lyrically -- almost poetically about the rhythm of life on a turn of the century farm. A time when horse-pulled farm equipment began to give way to horsepowered farm equipment. Work rules; the type of work governed by the seasons, from which no hands are exempt from the smallest to the oldest in the continuous effort to make sure there is enough food, because there surely is no money.

The foreword almost put me off with its central feature a large dead horse, but there is a reverence to Paulson's writing about the circle of life that pulled me on. This is a book to sit with and enjoy, to read and be grateful while reading that better machinery makes life a bit easier for the hands show more and backs that struggle to fill our nation's plates -- but the passages about luck, about fate, about the horrible accidents that can befall the careless or inattentive on a farm... those still ring as true, pure, and gruesomely cautionary as ever. Ruth Paulson's accompanying illustrations are a lovely series on their own, and compliment the text beautifully. show less

I am a huge fan of Gary Paulsen. When I saw this at a used book sale, I thought, wow, where’d this come from? I would not classify it as young adult. This book is a wonderful, long poem. An ode to farm life—I could see my Grandfather and Grandmother who raised my mom on a dairy farm in south western Minnesota clearly in this book. So much about it resonated with stories from them and my mother. A way of life, a way of living, done in by the industrialization of food.

Tho it is on paper you "hear" it as you read!! The cycle of life, beautifully described, is a gift to "city folk" who have not had the experiences Paulson relates. The illustrations are lovely, meaningful, and well printed. It is an unusual book that I was pleased to discover, having been a fan of Paulson's adventure books (usually in YA section of library but good reading also for old-adults!).

This book accurately describes my early life. I do miss the good old days and the interaction of community life.