Hello yes it is a reminder that you DO want to enter my next giveaway for three paperback copies of Isaac Fellman’s incredible book Notes from a Regicide.

Do you want spooky worldbuilding, such as a mysterious machine which keeps a dystopian equivalent of the electoral college alive under the dirt for hundreds of years? Do you want oil painting? Do you want GENDER? Do you want tender, frustrating, stinky love?

Do you want REVOLUTION, as carried out by people you have probably met?

THEN YOU WANT THIS BOOK.

Many of my writing fixations, such as livestock, farms, cheesemaking, and other such domestic food labor, could be categorized as inheritances rather than inventions, and there is nothing like a trip back to Iowa to remind myself of that fact.

Nearly all branches of my family are both recently and historically agricultural. “Recently” in the sense that the one conversation I had with my brother while I was in my home state happened in a combine while he navigated a muddy field full of soybeans; “historically” in the sense that my family has accumulated a vast store of documents linked to farming over the past hundred fifty years. This includes an assortment of outdated agricultural and livestock manuals as well as literature like “Home Canning of Fruits and Vegetables,” a pamphlet published by the United States Department of Agriculture in 1923.

But the hardest to parse and most riveting of these documents are the multiple farm journals, in which my ancestors kept detailed (if sometimes inscrutable) notes on the daily activities of their farms. The most recent, which makes me tear up a bit while reading, is my grandmother’s, which contains her notes on her garden, egg, and chicken production from the 1970s to the early 2000s. (The year I was born, she canned 28 pints of pizza sauce.) The earliest of these which I have access to is from my great-great-great grandfather, who was born in New York in 1819, and whose journal covers a period in the 1850s when he was logging and clearing a portion of land near Albany. His spelling is often creative.

In between these two is a document I did not know existed until this most recent trip, which is the farm journal of my great-great grandfather’s older sister, Emma Odell. From 1906 to 1935, she kept detailed notes in beautifully legible handwriting on every single thing she bought and every single thing she sold. And friends: this woman sold a LOT of eggs and butter.

During the same periods she is listing (as above) selling seven pounds of butter in town a week, she has separate pages noting that she was also, every week, selling two pounds of butter each to three women who I suspect were her neighbors (hopefully I can find addresses to confirm this.) In April of 1909, she sold between twelve and twenty-seven dozen eggs per week.

The journal is also a fascinating window into the consumption habits of a very different time. All clothing was being made at home, as witnessed by her regular purchases of fabric, thread, needles, and notions. She bought $0.10 to $0.35 of candy every week. (She doesn’t specify exactly which candy, but given that twelve years later, a Hershey’s 1-oz candy bar cost $0.05, it seems to me it was a decent amount of candy.) She buys a lot of lemons in the first decade of the century, but by the 1930s bananas are also available.

There were also a few entries which did not make immediate sense to me under the heading "Business of all kinds;” such as the entries from December 28 of 1910 and January 4 of 1911, "Lady will come in fresh" and "Beauty will come in fresh." After a minute of discussion with my parents, Lady and Beauty were revealed to be cows, and “come in fresh” is the date when their marketable milk would start flowing, after their newborn calf had finished off the first few days of colostrum. (She also had cows named Gurley, Star, Cherry, Rosy, Susie, and Red.)

To state the obvious: it’s hard to fully comprehend the range and depth of things I don’t know about the past, even the recent past. Until this last trip back to Iowa, I didn’t realize that my maternal grandmother didn’t have a modern washing machine until my mom was in junior high; until then, she made do with an electric agitator, a wringer, and a wash tub, a process which took the entire day (and well into the next, to finish the ironing.) I didn’t know that two generations before her, my electricity-free ancestors were storing their butter in crocks in a brick-lined well behind the house.

The entire shape of a person’s life looks different with a couple pieces of information. My great-times-three aunt, she of the gorgeously tidy handwriting, sold ten pounds of butter a week. A gallon of milk yields (optimistically) six ounces of butter, so that’s about two and a half gallons of milk per pound, or twenty-five gallons of milk (probably more). This is a woman whose day was bounded by an hour of milking on either end, and who was probably kicking something like a five-gallon swing churn for another hour every day.

This is a woman who, as per her farm journal, once in a decade took a train to a town thirteen miles south of her farm.

When could she leave, after all? She had all those cows to milk!

I am, as you probably know, writing another historical romance right now, and I spend a lot of time (probably too much time) trying to put myself into the world these people lived in; not just the physical details of the environment they walked through, but the little routines they would have started the day with, the assumptions they would have made about how the world worked, the things which would have bugged them or not registered at all in their minds. Some of that comes from fiction or from narrative journaling, but it’s also incredibly illuminating to see the exact numerical details of the milk and eggs leaving the farm and the fabric, sugar, and lemons arriving on the farm.

I want to know! I want to witness my ancestors and the ancestors of others. I want to know where we came from, and how we got here.

Y’ALL. Those elections. I barely dare hope, but it does seem that a pathway toward national change might be opening up.

The thing I found most hopeful about this election was the evidence that many long-running efforts to enfranchise and mobilize voters are bearing fruit, mostly particularly Stacey Abrams’ Fair Fight organization, which focuses on voter suppression in Georgia, but which has branched out across the south. Aside from the incredible election of Keisha Lance Bottoms as the first Black woman to govern any state, Mississippi may elect their first Democrat senator since 1982, and their first Black senator since 1875 — in a state which, in 2020, was almost 40% Black.

Stacey Abrams has been working on this problem for eight years; her work is founded on activism going back decades. I am weirdly comforted by the reminder that it sometimes takes a very long time to get where we need to go.

Best of luck and best of hope,

Sharon

P.S. I do write books and sometimes they have farms in them! What is your favorite farm you have visited?