Five Thousand Days Like This One: An American Family History

by Jane Brox

Amid the turmoil after her father's death-decisions to be made, the future of the family farm to be settled-Jane Brox, using her acclaimed "compassion, honesty, and restraint" ( The Boston Globe ), begins a search for her family's story. The search soon leads her to the quintessentially American history of New England's Merrimack Valley, its farmers, and the immigrant workers caught up in the industrial textile age.

Jane Brox's first book, Here and Nowhere Else , won the 1996 L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and magazines, and has been represented in Best American Essays . She is a frequent contributor to The Georgia Review . Jane Brox lives in the Merrimack Valley of Massachusetts.

Genres: Memoir, History, Nonfiction, Nature, Biography

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

JANE BROX is the author of Clearing Land, Five Thousand Days Like This One, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Here and Nowhere Else, which received the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award. She lives in Maine"

Reviews

[Kristina · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author’s command of language in this collection of essays is remarkably beautiful. While I initially thought this to be a nature collection about farming, it is more of a melancholy ode to the passage of time and fond remembrance of things lost. The author presents a succinct overview of the histories of Lawrence and Lowell, Massachusetts as well as the cultural evolution of the Merrimack river valley. Her personal accounts are anchored in the recent loss of her father and the beautiful stories about her family farm hearken back to “what once was.” Thoreau makes several appearances here as well and the history of this complex New England community is greatly enhanced by the author’s poetic and wistful writing style.

[Christine · Rating 4 out of 5]

I race through some books, urged on by an exciting plot. I dally over other books, though—trying to prolong my time with a particularly memorable voice.

I have been lingering over Five Thousand Days Like This One, by Jane Brox.

What a pleasure to have found—via a Yankee Magazine list of “New England” reading—this collection of graceful, finely crafted essays, first published in 1999.

This “American family history” opens with the death of Brox’s father—a farmer in Dracut, Massachusetts—but meanders on, like the nearby Merrimack River, to other topics connected to the family’s twin legacies: the hard work of running a farm, and harder work still in the textile mills of Lawrence. Brox examines the city’s beginnings as a mill town, its 1911 strike, and the devastating flu epidemic of 1918. She broods over the fading away of New England’s farms.

A deceptively simple writer, Brox lets her epiphanies creep in quietly as she considers the external and internal forces that affect a family: place and poverty, but also nostalgia and dreams. She reflects on her father’s devotion to and frustration with farming. She writes of bread and boundary lines, soils and storms. She peels poetry out of an apple:

“Ripening as the fall itself slopes towards its close, Baldwins—a pie-apple, a keeper—taste better after the frost. They’re picked in October when the orchard grasses have already turned and morning frost lingers in the shadows. As the winter progresses, the skin of a Baldwin wrinkles in storage, but its flavor and crispness hold, and its wine-dark smell fills closed-in cellars and refrigerators.”

Left to determine the future of the family farm, Brox contemplates the past as a way to plot her future. But her memoir also serves as a poignant marker for readers who share similar family histories. As the granddaughter of immigrant mill workers—from another textile town, Fall River—I cherished this celebration of hard work and humble workers.

[Wendy Fontaine · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Jane's nature writing. I love the way she describes the landscape and it's place in history. This book is different from Here and Nowhere Else in that it's much more historical, with quotes from deed books and immigration records and Thoreau. Less happens in terms of plot points, so it's a much slower read (or, at least, it was for me). The most interesting part was about the flu epidemic in the early 20th century. Truly fascinating.

[Kimberlee · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is classified as a memoir. This reads like a history book with zero character development. Could not push thru it.

[Kathleen F · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lovely, lovely, lovely. Brox deepens and layers her portrait of the Merrimack Valley (that she began in her first collection of essays, Here and Nowhere Else) through the lens of her family farm, and the life she and her parents have lived on it. Here we find meditations on apple orchards, her father's death, the mill towns of Lawrence and Lowell, the diminishment of the farming life in Eastern Massachusetts, and a moving account of the influenza epidemic of 1918. The latter essay, "Influenza, 1918," was something I stumbled across in The Georgia Review well over a decade ago, and I distinctly remember thinking at the time: WOW! There is a genre of writing that blends history and memoir, lyricism and real life? It knocked my socks off. Now it's the reason I'm trying to write creative nonfiction myself. I can only hope I might be able to produce something as moving and as elegant as Brox's Five Thousand Days Like This One. Highly recommended.

[Sandy D. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brox looks at the history of Lowell and Lawrence, Mass., and the surrounding farmland, and how her grandparents came from Lebanon and Italy to work in the mills, and deal with the Influenza epidemic of 1918 and World War I, and what Henry David Thoreau had to say about the farms and industry in the area, and her father's death and the development and loss of agriculture there, and it's all just beautifully written. It's good to read slowly and savor - a chapter (good as a free-standing essay) here and there.

Also, the excerpts from mill girls diaries are incredible. Brox did a great job of bringing in historical documents (and has a nice "Notes" section in the back so you can go and read the original stuff).

[Laura Sackton · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book tells the fascinating history of the folks who settled the Lawrence area, and Brox's own ancestors. After reading her other two books, this one seemed to fill in a missing link in the story. She goes into the detailed history of the town where she grew up, framing the sections about the farm in the larger story of other farms just like it. What I love about Brox's writing, and this book in particular, is the clarity of the love she has for the places and the histories she is writing about. Reading her books is a little blessing. They are simply-told, age-old stories, narratives steeped in hard work, tradition, and history. They don't cover a lot of ground, nor are they broad in scope, but the little histories and the specific places that Brox writes about come alive on the page.

[Li · Rating 4 out of 5]

I went to the library in search of another book and found this one on the shelf. It is about my hometown and Brox farm... I know that place. The story took my back to my childhood and beyond. Nestled in my heart and soul the beauty and peace of rural new england and the ebbs and flows of the seasons. I was hoping for more details about the farm, which I think I will find an her other books, but I found much more of the how and why of these rural farms and their past, present and future all nestled within the pages of this book. Jane's stories warm and comfort me and take me to the wonder of my hometown and surrounding towns.

[Linda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Growing up on a farm in Lawrence, MA, and living there still, after her father’s death, Jane Brox writes a memoir of Middlesex County, MA. She and her husband still keep a small orchard of fruit trees, but this is not all about farming. I picked it up because of the chapters on the mills along the Merrimack River, and the big strike that took place in Lawrence in 1912. She also writes about the flu epidemic in 1918. I believe that I may have read articles by her previously, perhaps in Yankee magazine.

[Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

This memoir, feels similar to Ondaatje or Guterson in the sense that it is Jane Brox's memoir, but she is not the main fixture, instead the land of the Merrimack Valley, and its orchards over the course of industrialization of the region are its focus. It's also an immigrant narrative, of sorts, as Brox tells stories of her own family's immigration to the U.S. and their interaction with the history of the land and landscape.

[Beth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh, I loved this book. It's about her family's farm in Massachusetts and about the area's mill history and about a million other things. You think it's about her life and her history but as you are reading you realize it is about yours too. Writes like a poet. Incredible.

[Mary Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jane Brox writes compellingly of her family's history and the history of their farm in Massachusetts.

[Rob · Rating 4 out of 5]

do you like massachusetts?

[Tara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Highly recommended to anyone interested in memoir, rural life, and family dynamics. Brox writes nonfiction from a poet's perspective.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read it a long time ago, but I remember well that I loved this book.

[Maureen Stanton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brox is a lovely, lyrical but plain writer and these essays her family's apple orchard hypnotyze you to a specific place and time.

[Jane · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the apple chapter and the fact that I knew most of the area that was being described. The references to Thoreau were good too. This was more a history of the land then family.