Word: perrins
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People who grow their own anything are usually good for about seven minutes of conversation before they suffer an attack of smugness. Apparently their listeners are required to feel inferior because they do not render their own lard or weave their own shirts. Author Noel Perrin, who putters at Vermont farming when he is not teaching English at Dartmouth or writing graceful scholarly books (Dr. Bawdier's Legacy), deserves a longer hearing. True, Perrin sometimes sounds like a country snob who would be horrified if the supermarket patrons he patronizes actually swarmed to New England in search...
...Yorker, range from meditations on the metaphysics of farming to shopping guides on the purchase of chainsaws and pickup trucks. Taken together, they sketch the education of a greenhorn who was "once a New Yorker, now a peasant" in the rigors of owning and running his own farm. Perrin recalls the winter morning he awoke to find the temperature outside-26°F., his house at 37° and falling, his oil tank empty. He recounts his early, inept attempts to fence off land from deer, other predators and the forest-making impulse that still thrives in the stony...
Such detailed anecdotes keep Perrin from falling victim to his "Wooden Bucket Principle": "By this I mean a tendency to imagine almost anything in the country as simpler and more primitive and kind of nicer than it really...
...farmer makes cutting up fence posts and driving them into the ground sound like fun. Similarly, he stresses the serendipitous surprises that rural life can offer. Cursing himself for overcooking a batch of sap, Perrin discovers that ruined syrup can still be turned into first-rate maple candy...
...also willing to allow some modern conveniences into his Eden. When his wife makes butter, she uses a blender in stead of a churn. "If I were to move to an old-fashioned farm," Perrin writes, "and could bring just one piece of modern machinery with me, I wouldn't hesitate a second. I'd bring my chainsaw. It's noisy, it's dangerous, it pollutes the air-and I love...