Can a busy man of forty, with a family to look after, really make a life among hills, fields and fruit trees? In The Hills of Hingham (1916), naturalist and essayist Dallas Lore Sharp answers with warmth, wit and a generous dose of self-mockery, drawing on fourteen years of country living near Boston.
Here is a hill that is hardly a hill, a household learning season by season what the land will and will not give, and a narrator whose romantic ideas of country life meet the stubborn realities of pests, crops and chores. Across sixteen essays, Sharp carries us from the glow of the open fire to the cutting of the winter ice, from the arrival of the seed catalogues to the first spring ploughing, from the humble bean row to the humming beehive, with a pilgrim from Dubuque and a pair of pigs along the way. Every chapter is a small adventure, found not in distant lands but a few steps from the kitchen door.
Part memoir, part nature study, part gentle comedy of rural life, this is classic New England nature writing in the tradition of Thoreau and Burroughs. Sharp watches the soil, the weather and the creatures of his hillside with a naturalist’s eye and a storyteller’s heart, and he keeps his household at the center of every tale. Beneath the laughter runs a quiet question: what does it mean to truly settle into a place and call it home? Funny, tender and quietly wise, it turns the small dramas of an ordinary year into something worth savoring.
Perfect for lovers of nature essays, rural memoirs and slow, reflective listening, this audiobook invites you to leave the hurry of the day behind and walk the Hingham hills at the pace of the seasons.