Gene Stratton-Porter and old fashioned farming

Some months ago I came across these paperbacks published by Indiana University Press at the BYU Bookstore. They had reprinted Freckles, A Girl of the Limberlost, The Harvester, The Keeper of the Bees, and Laddie by Gene Stratton-Porter.

I ended up buying the three titles pictured, but the first to catch my eye was The Keeper of the Bees. This is a picture of a book that is a part of my favorite memories of book reading during my childhood. I first came across it while staying with my grandmother. She had moved to a new home in Idaho Falls and during the summers I was often invited to stay with her for a week at a time. She took daily naps and grandpa worked at the furniture store full time, so the afternoons would get very long.

There was a bookshelf of books in a closet by the front door and it saved me from boredom. That is where I first found The Keeper of the Bees. You can see by the signature that it was purchased before my grandmother married, so it was already over 30 years old when I first found it.

I loved the book so much and never forgot it. Move forward about 40 years, long after this copy of the book had become my own, and I read A Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton-Porter which I love almost as much as The Keeper of the Bees. I go looking for The Keeper of the Bees and realize both books were written by the same author.

Gene Stratton-Porter not only gave me characters that I enjoyed, she also made the natural world come alive. I just reread Laddie. The farm life it described made me homesick for my childhood on the farm.

I recently read The Dirty Life by Kristin Kimball. It is the true tale of a couple who find a farm and decide to farm the old fashioned way, not just organically but also using horses instead of tractors. It made me think of Laddie, the story (closely based on the childhood of Gene Stratton-Porter) of a family farm in Indiana after the Civil War. Both books describe a life of hard physical labor, but satisfying hard physical labor. There is something truly special about working the soil.