Five Thousand Days Like This One

by Brox, Jane

• ISBN13: 9780807021071
• ISBN10: 0807021075
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2000-04-07
• Publisher: Beacon Press

Summary

Wnen her father dies and leaves her to decide the fate of the family farm, Jane Brox wonders how family identity--language, food, a grandfather's wish for "five thousand days like this one"--can endure when so few traces of former lives are left. With a poet's eye and a historian's hunger, she is driven to search out her family's past in the fascinating and quintessentially American history of the Merrimack Valley, its farmers, and the immigrant workers caught up in the industrial textile age.

Author Biography

Jane Brox, who lives in the Merrimack Valley in Massachusetts, was the recipient of a 1994 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship.

Table of Contents

I
Afterwards	3	(9)
The Quality of Mercy	12	(8)
Armistice Day	20	(10)
Milk	30	(7)
Last Look	37	(6)
At Sea	43	(4)
What Is Kept	47	(6)
II
In the Current	53	(1)
White Mountain Snow Dissolved	54	(23)
Five Thousand Days Like This One	77	(17)
Influenza 1918	94	(11)
The Pure Element of Time	105	(14)
III
Baldwins	119	(4)
By Said Last Named Land	123	(10)
Storm	133	(11)
White Clover	144	(6)
Twilight of the Apple Growers	150	(13)
A Tour of the Farm Stands	163	(12)
Notes	175	(8)
Acknowledgments	183