Weekend Folk Reading: Harvest Home

Some distance away, I glimpsed the Widow Fortune sitting behind a booth, talking energetically with Sophie Hooke, and at the same time doing a sharp business in the honey trade. Other booths had pickles and preserves for sale, fresh garden produce and dairy things. Strolling among the tents and booths, I was interested in the workmanship embellishing the canvas sides: primitive, country-type designs, crudely but gracefully executed with the naivete of cave paintings. There were suns and moons and stars, various animals, a horse here, a cow there, a barn, a stick-figure man. And, everywhere, corn: sheaves of corn and shocks of corn and ears of corn, people growing, harvesting, cooking, eating, storing corn. Corn not only in its facsimile, but in reality, some of the tent entrances being framed by bound shocks and festooned with garlands of dried husks and leaves, and bunches of unshelled ears, their kernels yellow, red, brown, some variegated with all three.

- Thomas Tryon

A book recommendation by Wren, so I grabbed a used copy and got this beautiful old smelly thing with a neat (and strange) sticker on the inside.  Hoping it's cursed.  Love Tryon's writing style.  Very relaxed and believable.  I haven't gotten very far as yet, but am loving the slow-building mystery and tension.  That said, I'd still love to move into the town in the book.  I feel like country folk would get me.  Even if they ended up burning me in a pyre.

The weird sticker inside.