Elizabeth’s Reviews > A Countryman's Spring Notebook > Status Update

Love The Roof Garden essay!

I like the essay Autobiography in Nails. It made me chuckle.

"Then he offered me a swig of tea out of his bottle and even began to talk to me, bringing slow old weathered words out from the depth of his throat...It was interesting tea, unique tea, unchlorinated, loam-and-clay filtered, laced with milk which was in the cow that morning. And when, forty years on, I forget my last cup of tea until it is stone cold...I return for a minute to that fourses' time in midwinter" (155).

Luke's Bottle may be my new favorite essay. It's rather exquisite.
"Luke was an old man who belonged to the generations that were given biblical names. His beard was black, although he was 70: it hung on him like a swarm of bees. His mind was so unmolested by thought that there was a sort of splendour about him battling with wild nature in that lonely place" (153).

"For months the garden has run itself: birds have played in it, beasts have slept under it, snails have sat tight. But everything is waiting, I know, to burst forth with a rush. I must get to work, I suppose. But as soon as I put in my fork I stir up trouble. I turn out pink gelatinous worms...I panic ants and start them rushing to and fro with burdens. What I took for a stone heaves itself up and is a toad" (131).