Jack's Farm
Joan Levy Earle
(Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
2006 Creative Bound, Inc.
ISBN: 0921165870

Memories of a husband & an abandoned farm deep in the oak forests of Canada.

Come to Jack's Farm where author Joan Levy Earle remembers her life, her marriage, her work & her love of God.

Every fall, Jack would take off from his telephone repair job & go grouse hunting. Joan learnt to cook, with a delicious recipe, the sweet-tasting birds. She stayed home raising their son & daughter, teaching baton twirling, learning to be an artist, attending church, discovering the nature of love & how to nourish her marriage.

One year, Jack came upon an old homestead at the end of a forested driveway where a solitary ancient woman lived, & she gave him permission to hunt, which he did every fall, until the year he learnt she had died. That's when Jack told Joan he really wanted to buy the property even though there was no running water, no electricity or any plumbing. There was, however, a classic clapboard farmhouse, several well-built, if dilapidated, outbuildings & a functioning outhouse. & so Joan's adventure in pioneer life began.

While they continued to manage The Sanctuary, their book & stationary store in town, Jack moved out to the farm to start renovating with the help of their grown son, while Joan stayed in town to run their business, visiting on weekends, when their marriage of thirty years, flowered even more.

Eventually, it was time to sell the property in town & for them both to move out to the homestead permanently, & that's when Joan became, quite suddenly, quite gently, a widow.

With its gladsome cover photo & its hardcover pocket-size, Jack's Farm is one of those rare & radiant gems that make me feel inadequate as a reviewer because it is so quietly, gently & lyrically written that each page is a hymn filled with compassionate self-reflection, humor & insight into marital blossoming, neighborliness, & trials & tribulations set before us, & simplicity & serenity that comes with letting God take the wheel.

I love this little book which Creative Bound has so elegantly presented. It is a profoundly satisfying read of a woman's flowering, a flourishing of a marriage, a thriving of a spirit. It will bring gladness to all who wander into its pages, especially widows facing solitude & grief, yearning for an opening to God's grace.
(04/09/06)

Rebecca