Stories About Liviing In Rural Essex!! - Our 1st ZOOM speaker!!
Tim Brookes has agreed to be Essex Rotary's ZOOM speaker "guinea pig"!! You will have Tim, his style, and his story. You may have heard Tim before - as a NPR commentator. Who knew he would write a book about his Essex, VT driveway. A long trip from London and Oxford. We are lucky to have him. Based on what I know, one of your questions can be about what Cricket is all about!! I'll post a link here if you want to order his book. And, thanks to Bob Mulcahy and President Heidi for the nudge and direction.
Best, Greg
Tim was born in a small house in London, of parents who were poor, honest and liked going for very long walks, preferably in the rain. My education consisted of being forced to take written exams every five or six weeks, and eat school lunches of liver and onions–until I got to Oxford, where we had written exams every eight weeks and had lunches of pickled onions and Guinness.
This was quite enough to make me flee the country and seek gainful employment in Vermont, where I have lived for 29 years, writing a great deal and trying to grow good raspberries. Summary of The Driveway Diaries:
When my family moved out from Burlington, Vermont, to a dirt road in rural Essex Center, our life immediately began to suffer the series of challenges and small disasters that quickly sort out the clueless city guy from the true Vermonter. This collection of stories is mainly about those challenges, almost all of which I failed–and about the most important, most evil challenge of all: our driveway. A gravel driveway, especially a steep one, is an umbilicus between home and the outside world, an index of change that can wash out or burst into flower overnight, and the cause of more sweat and backache than all the rest of the property combined. In many ways, this book celebrates the glories of the countryside; in many ways it is appalled.
The Driveway Diaries had a bizarre publishing history: it was excerpted in Harper’s and read aloud on Martha Stewart Radio, and sold out almost immediately, but the original publisher decided not to reprint it and it stalled at the height of its success. I have added three more chapters to round out the period of my rural experiment, and it is now finally available again, in this expanded second edition.