If There's Squash Bugs in Heaven, I Ain't Staying

It all begins when the sandhill cranes leave, and it ends as they come back. When they leave, you plant. When they return, you harvest," writes Spragg-Braude in the opening to her deeply observant extended homage to orchard farmer Evelyn Curtis Losack and her village of Corrales, New Mexico. Corrales is an agricultural village where if you come on horseback to the local pizza place you get a discount. When she isn't in the fields or teaching piano to her students, or canning or making fruit leather or pickling, Evelyn loves to drive the roads between fields, scanning the landscape like pages in a scrapbook, moments and images fixed in time. She passes by the crumbled adobes of her ancestors that anchor old orchards where her grandchildren once played. This book is a journey with Evelyn as she drags the hoe through the earth making her furrows, and we follow on hands and knees behind her, dropping in the seeds. The story shares with readers how someone finds fulfillment, happiness, and a sense of self by connecting to those who came before her and those who will inherit all this when we're gone, to the land beneath her feet and the water flowing, to the seasons, to her food and to those who grow it, and to her community. In this way, it is at once a biography of a person and in the larger sense a valuable parable for our times.