May Days

by Samuel F. Pickering Jr.

Reaching into the past for anecdotes that live on and ranging in his personal experience from rural Nova Scotia to a New England college to small-town Tennessee, Sam Pickering finds his lessons in suburban and rural life, in the pressures of the workaday world, and in the temptations of nature. In his quest to further understand and appreciate our rich natural world and our roots in the past, he examines the many ways in which we are all kind and callous, loving and faithless, foolish and wise. Whether writing about Miss Kitty and Miss Jo Sewall, E. W. Childers and the fish he caught in Difficult Creek, or the naming and renaming of flowers, Pickering reveals an inquiring, gentle regard for nature and humanity. These eleven wry essays illuminate the ordinary, uncovering some of the subtle truths that lie unnoticed in the common events and realities of life.

ebook

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Sam Pickering is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Conneticut.

Samuel F. Pickering Jr. (also known as Sam) was born in Nashville, attended Montgomery Bell Academy and the University of the South, and took advanced degrees at Cambridge and Princeton on his way to becoming a scholar of children's literature. In addition to scholarly books and articles, his writing life has been built on the familiar essay, where his wit, crusty affability, and sense of wonder often tinged with mischief shine through what he calls "forthright, workaday sentences." His topics range from wildflowers in Nova Scotia to small town gossip in Tennessee to the fusty pretensions of university life. As exercises in "gilding the mundane," Pickering's essays discover subtle ironies, juxtapose delight and melancholy, and wander afield but always return home.

Pickering's allegiance is always to the essays themselves, which are often based in fact but are not slaves to it. In "Composing a Life" from his first collection, A Continuing Education (1985), he writes, "The trouble is that I'm not sure if the things I remember actually happened." His blend of the madcap and mundane, as he says in another piece, can "thrust him against the actual." Pickering sees truth as composite, to be picked apart by language. His books include May Days (1987), Still Life (1990), and Walkabout Year: Twelve Months in Australia (1995). His life, he says, is like his writing: "slow, relaxed, punctuated by fits of pique and occasionally lust, but all in all meandering and gently contemplative."