The Land, The People

I have just discovered that all three of Rachel Peden's wonderful books are being republished this year, and I am tickled pink.

"Who is Rachel Peden?" you are probably asking.  Well, even if you're not asking, I am eager to tell you.

Rachel Peden is one of America's sweetest nature writers, one who deserves to be more widely read.

To tell you more about how wonderful Mrs. Peden is, I have to tell you more about nature writing.

"Nature writing is relational. It is about the interconnections, the interrelationships, that form our world. Nature writing binds people to the natural world with words of understanding, respect, admiration, and love. These words may be formed in any literary type or style. The languages and forms of nature writing are many and varied, but each seeks to share what the writer has felt and known in times of living with nature."

From "What is Nature Writing", by Ron Harton 

Henry David Thoreau, Edwin Way Teale, Annie Dillard, John Muir,  and Rachel Peden are some of my favorite nature writers- I don't necessarily always agree with every one of their assumptions, their conclusions, or their ideas, but I am always enriched by their writing, and particularly by Mrs. Peden's. If you enjoy Borland and Teale in particular, you will appreciate Mrs. Peden.   If you like Wendell Berry, you'll enjoy Mrs. Peden.

These authors understand what Doug Robinson in A Night On the Ground A Day in the Open was getting at when he wrote: "To write meant then and still does, catching sparks of thought in a hard-backed notebook balanced on my knees.--"
Rachel Peden is a lesser known nature writer, perhaps because she writes specifically about her own cherished region- Indiana farm country. In the 1960s and '70s Mrs. Peden wrote a regular newspaper column for her local paper. She wrote about her farm, the land and people of her home, the seasons (did you know that Indiana has nine of them?), and local flora and fauna. She compiled her columns and perhaps some extra material into three published books; Rural Free: A Farmwife's Almanac of Country Living, The Land, the People , and Speak to the Earth: Pages from a Farmwife's Journal

She hoped to write a fourth, but cancer shattered her plans.

My Indiana grandmother majored in Botany when she went to college in the early 1900's, a time few people, let alone women, went to college. We still have her first pressed plant collections compiled for her college classes. Walking with her through the wild back acres of her farm, along the creek, and through the meadows was to walk among friends. She knew every leaf, every birdsong, and every tree or flowerbud by name, both common and Latin, and she was generous in introducing her grandchild to her friends in the natural world.

She read Mrs. Peden's newspaper columns and books and enjoyed them so much that she wrote to her to thank her for describing so well what seemed then to be a vanishing way of life. Mrs. Peden recognized a kindred spirit and she and my Grandmother wrote to each other from time to time. Unfortunately, they had other things in common, too, and both were ripped from their families by cancer within a year or two of each other, right around my 13th year. My grandmother is still very much missed by her surviving daughters and the grandchildren who were blessed to know her. She left quite a legacy.

A small part of that legacy is represented by the autographed copies of all three of Mrs. Peden's books which sit on my shelves. These volumes were formerly owned by my Grandmother (who continued to cut out clippings of Mrs. Peden's column and fold them gently and store them in the books, where they still are).

I believe we'd like Mrs. Peden's writing even without the emotional tie. Edwin Way Teale in Green Treasury - A Journey Through the World's Great Nature Writings said, "At best, the genre we call nature writing requires a rare mixture of scientist, philosopher, and poet."

Peden, I think, was all of these, and she was a home-body as well, a homely soul (homely in the sense of being cozy, comfortable, and unpretentious). Her nature writing is what I like best- words  written from a sense of home, a genuine feel for a connection with the land and the green and growing things on it that comes from having deep roots of one's own there.

Mrs. Peden certainly felt that deep connection.
Consider:

"Looking closely at the commonplace things of nature that are found on almost any small family farm, one becomes aware of a quality of miracle and infinity about them. The more one researches these small things, such as the purple-blue violet I picked in the yard this morning and brought in to examine under a microscope, the more clear it becomes that nothing on earth exists totally separate and unrelated, and that every living thing is
composed of ever smaller parts.
From the purple-striped deep tube of the violet's petal a naturalist could go on to an examination of the larger, related plant world, or a scientist could as easily discover the infinitely smaller parts of which the violet cells are composed. Either way, a thing as commonplace as an ordinary spring violet contains the essence of infinity."

Or this little gem written about a friend who purchased and restored 23 acres of formerly barren land:

"She wanted it because at heart she is an earth lover and wanted a more intimate relationship with the tulip poplars, maples, sassafrasses, sumacs, and white oaks, and the bittersweet and dewberries on the ground, the blackberries rising square stalked and thorny out of its woods, and the many birds that came to eat them. She wanted the splotches of reindeer moss and the gray-green lichens on the ground. She had familiarized herself with all of these. When I exclaimed about how much she knows, she replied modestly, "Well, you know, when you're interested in something, you learn about it."

Mrs. Peden writes of the homey things, the ladybug she found on her kitchen sink and examined under a magnifying glass, the spring beauties coming up in her yard, the grackles at her feeder, the quail calls she hears in June, and the rabbit tracks ( she calls them graffitti) she sees in the freshly fallen snow, and I nestle down cozily in a few pages of comfort reading. I have been doing this since I was a child and discovered her on my grandmother's shelves.
 

Mrs. Peden looks just a little closer at the things nearest home.

In Green Treasury - A Journey Through the World's Great Nature Writings Edwin Way Teale also said,

"Even the lifelong traveler knows but an infinitesimal portion of the Earth's surface. Those who have written best about the land and its wild inhabitants...have often been stay-at-home naturalists...concentrating their attention and affection on a relatively small area."

Rachel Peden, farmwife, homemaker, writer, mother, stay-at-home naturalist is a gem, a treasure who deserves to be wider known. I'm glad to learn her works are being republished.