It’s the end of July (or, as we call it in Texas, “late spring”), so I’ve been thinking a lot about summer reading, which has almost become a sort of cliché. There’s a lot to be said for curling up with a good book on a cold, wet winter day, of course, but nobody talks about “great winter reading.” No, it’s summer reading that gets all the press.

For some, summer’s a time to dip into a book we would only read on the beach or in the vacation cabin, the literary equivalent of comfort food—meatloaf, say, with a big pile of mashed potatoes on the side. Thrillers and mysteries tend to fall into this category.

For others, summer’s slower pace is the perfect time to tackle the classics, those monumental books we’ve always felt we ought to read but have never quite gotten around to. Reading these books can feel a little bit like eating several helpings of healthy vegetables, instead of doubling down on the meatloaf and mashers; but that, of course, can make you feel very virtuous indeed. Proust? Sure! Tolstoy? Bring it, baby!

As for me, certain books will forever conjure summer in my mind, and I can’t even tell you why. Here’s my (very) personal top ten, with brief annotations, in alphabetical order by author:

Brendan C. Boyd and Fred C. Harris, The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book. What could possibly be more evocative of an American summer (if you’re Of a Certain Age, that is) than a book of color photos of baseball cards from the 1950s and 1960s, accompanied by wise-ass commentary? Samples: “Earl Torgeson’s two favorite activities were fist-fighting and breaking his shoulder, both of which he did whenever he got the chance.” “Albie Pearson would have been, had he been only six inches taller, almost 5’11”.” And so on.

Richard Bradford, Red Sky at Morning. In this coming-of-age novel, teenager Josh Arnold and his high-strung Southern belle mother move from Mobile, Alabama, to the mountains of New Mexico during World War II and try, with mixed success, to adjust to a new culture and climate. Perhaps the funniest book I’ve ever read, and also one of the sweetest and most moving.

Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. A brilliant examination of how Lincoln shrewdly and gently won over some of his bitterest political enemies. In particular, I found the depiction of William Seward’s change of heart—by the time of Lincoln’s assassination, Seward worshipped him—profoundly moving. Goodwin is a wonderful writer, capable of making the familiar feel new: while I was reading this book for the first time, Heather came home one day to find me sitting in a chair, the book in my lap and tears running down my cheeks. “What’s wrong?” she asked anxiously. “They just shot Lincoln!” I sobbed.

Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows. Probably my favorite book when I was a boy; I don’t know how many times I’ve read it, but it must be several dozen by now. The adventures of Mole, Ratty, Mr. Toad, Badger, and all their friends turned me into a lifelong Anglophile, and the drawings by Ernest Shepard (who also illustrated that other English classic, A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh) are masterpieces. Nothing evokes the gentle pleasures of an English summer like this book. Oh bliss! Oh poop-poop!

Tracy Kidder, Home Town. I love just about everything I’ve ever read by Tracy Kidder, who I think is perhaps the finest nonfiction writer in the nation, but this is probably my favorite: a close-up of Northampton, Massachusetts, through the eyes of native son Tommy O’Connor, a cop who loves his hometown and touches a diverse (to say the least) cross-section of its citizenry. Highly recommended for anyone who’s ever felt a deep connection to a place, or anyone who’s ever wanted to.

Dennis Lehane, The Given Day. This historical novel interweaves the stories of Danny Coughlin, a young Irish-American cop, and Luther Laurence, a young African-American fleeing criminal violence, in Boston at the end of World War I. Actual events (the flu epidemic, the Boston police strike, the Red Scare) and characters (J. Edgar Hoover, Calvin Coolidge, and, most notably, Babe Ruth) lend the book the texture of reality, while Danny and Luther and the women they love attempt to survive against long odds.

Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove. I confess I can no longer read this without thinking of the miniseries—Robert Duvall, Tommy Lee Jones, Diane Lane, et al.—but the book itself is wonderfully suited for reading aloud on summer road trips, as we’ve proven repeatedly over the years while driving to or from Colorado and New Mexico.

J. K. Rowling, the Harry Potter series. Well. What can I say? We all loved all these books. Some of my favorite summer reading memories with the kids involve rushing out (to our neighborhood Randall’s, of all places) to buy multiple copies of the latest Harry Potter book on the day it came out, and then the hush—not quite absolute, but punctuated by occasional snorts and gasps and “How far are you?”s—that fell over the house as each of us burrowed immediately into his or her copy.

Alexander McCall Smith, The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series. Not really mysteries, despite the title, but the wise and gentle adventures of the sweet but determined and “traditionally built” Precious Ramotswe, the first woman private investigator in Botswana; Mr. J. L. B. Matekoni, her suitor and the proprietor of Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors; Grace Makutsi, Mma Ramotswe’s hyperconscientious assistant; and various others as they confront a succession of quiet moral and ethical challenges.

Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose. A heartbreaking novel about the American West and the people who struggle to live in it, and the most harrowing and realistic fictional portrayal of a marriage I’ve ever read. Framed by the narration of a retired and embittered history professor, the novel is really the story of his grandmother, a refined nineteenth-century Easterner who marries an ambitious young mining engineer and embarks on a peripatetic life of frustration and accommodation.

So there you have it: ten of my seasonal favorites, right up there with fresh peaches and gin and tonics. Won’t you tell us yours, Dear Reader?

What we’re reading
Heather: Ellen F. Davis, Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible (again)
Martin: A. J. Jacobs, The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World

There must be a story behind the sign at the front gate of the Stonewall Community Cemetery—I mean, who digs a new grave in a cemetery without permission?—but I don’t know it. Even though I wrote the entry on Stonewall for the New Handbook of Texas almost twenty years ago, I never saw the sign until last fall, because I’d never taken the time to go out there and poke around the town. (Even then, I only did so at the urging of our friend Dennis Fagan, a terrific photographer who’s been documenting the town’s annual Peach JAMboree for thirty years now.)

Stonewall, a town of some 470 people on the Pedernales River in Gillespie County and the self-proclaimed “Peach Capital of Texas,” marks the halfway point of the two-and-a-half-hour drive between Austin and Madroño Ranch. It’s one of the places we usually speed through without stopping on our way to or from the ranch, a wide spot in the road between Johnson City and Fredericksburg.

I suspect that is most people’s experience of Stonewall. Some may stop for gas, or to buy peaches at one of the numerous roadside stands, but the average driver who whizzes past on Highway 290 is too intent on reaching Austin or Fredericksburg to think much about Stonewall. If the town registers on his or her consciousness at all, it is as an annoyance, because the speed limit drops from 70 to 55 miles per hour there.

The chamber of commerce, having somewhat arbitrarily selected 1860 as the date of the town’s founding, will celebrate Stonewall’s sesquicentennial this year, but many accounts date the town’s birth to some time around 1870. That’s when Israel Nunez, a Jewish transplant from the state of Georgia, established a stagecoach stop a couple of miles south of the current town. Initially Major Nunez, as he was known, collected mail for the scattered local settlers from passengers traveling between San Marcos, Blanco, and points west, but by 1875 the local population had increased to the point that an actual post office was established there, and Nunez insisted it be called Stonewall, after Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, under whom he’d served during the War of Northern Aggression.

Or so the story went. The reality, it appears, was slightly different. Israel Moses Nunez, born in Florida in 1838, was the third child and oldest surviving son of Raphael J. Moses, Confederate general James Longstreet’s chief supply officer and a pioneer of the commercial peach industry in Georgia—an interesting historical note, that, given the future importance of peaches to Stonewall.

Raphael changed his son’s surname to Nunez to perpetuate the family’s Sephardic heritage; “Major” turns out to have been Israel’s childhood nickname, rather than his military rank. In 1906, his younger brother recalled, “When we moved to Columbus [Georgia] in 1849, Israel had on his first pair of boots and he was so proud of them and strutted so up and down the deck showing them off that all the passengers nicknamed him the ‘Major,’ a name which has curiously held on to him the balance of his life.” (Perhaps coincidentally, major was also the rank his father held in the Confederate army.)

Moreover, Israel never actually served under Jackson. He didn’t enlist as a private in William W. Parker’s Virginia artillery battalion until December 1863—a full seven months after Stonewall was cut down by “friendly fire” at Chancellorsville. Israel did serve in the trenches during the siege of Petersburg, but he was back home in Georgia when the war ended. Sometime thereafter he and his wife Anna Marie, who bore him eleven children between 1860 and 1883, moved from Columbus to what was then considered western Texas.

Of course, whether or not he actually served under Jackson, there’s no reason he shouldn’t have named his new home after the Confederate hero. As for the persistence of the nickname “Major,” well, perhaps he didn’t go out of his way to correct those who assumed he’d attained that rank in the Confederate army, but then the post-Civil War years saw a fair amount of romantic historical revisionism. He and his family moved to Austin in 1890, and he died fifteen years later. Israel and Anna Marie Nunez are buried in one of the Jewish sections of Austin’s Oakwood Cemetery.

In 1924, when Highway 290 was completed between Austin and Fredericksburg, Stonewall hosted the official celebration. Thirty-three years later, the highway was moved four hundred yards to the south, and several businesses followed it. Most people who know Stonewall from the establishments along Highway 290—peach stands like Burg’s Corner, Gold Orchards, Vogel Orchards; restaurants like Lindig’s Café and the One Stop diner; vineyards like Becker, Grape Creek, and Woodrose—might not even realize that the town also boasts a number of establishments aimed primarily at the town’s inhabitants rather than tourists: the Trinity Lutheran, St. Francis Xavier Catholic, and Stonewall Baptist churches; Nielsen Automotive, Stonewall Body Shop, and Eckert and Son Used Auto Parts; the Stonewall Smokehouse; Weinheimer and Son general merchandise; Stonewall Mutual Farm Insurance; the Stonewall Volunteer Fire Department; Stonewall Head Start; Gordon’s Welding; J. Bolton and Associates wholesale furniture; Vogel Tractors.

Similarly, my Handbook of Texas entry on Stonewall, while more or less accurate as far as it goes, doesn’t come close to giving the flavor of the place. Nowhere in it do you learn that the locals are trying desperately to keep the peach industry going in the face of terrible and persistent drought; that they’re facing pressure to quit growing peaches in favor of grapes, that pernicious totem of yuppie agritourism; that as the memory of local boy LBJ fades further into the past, the number of visitors to the nearby Lyndon B. Johnson National Historical Park keeps dwindling. What’s missing from that entry, in other words, is the real human drama you can find in Stonewall right now, every day, if you just know where and how to dig.

What we’re reading
Heather: Richard Rohr, The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See
Martin: Spike Carlsen, A Splintered History of Wood: Belt Sander Races, Blind Woodworkers, and Baseball Bats

As we approach the end of the year (and decade), we thought a look back at what we’ve accomplished and a look at what lies ahead for Madroño Ranch: A Center for Writing and the Environment might be of interest.

This year was a significant one for us. In 2009 we both turned fifty (or, as Heather put it, celebrated our joint centennial); in addition, we experienced both great personal loss and also tremendous excitement and optimism about Madroño Ranch.

We spent much of the year networking—sort of a new thing for a couple of reclusive nerds like us. In February, we attended the Alliance for Artists Communities’ conference for emerging programs in Charlotte NC. Meeting and talking to Caitlin Strokosch and Russ Smith of the Alliance, and the other attendees, was a galvanizing experience—so many bright, creative people! So many great ideas! So many things to think about!

The Alliance’s annual conference in New Orleans in November was perhaps even more inspiring. Not only did we reconnect with some of the friends we’d made at the Charlotte gathering, we met many more fascinating and brilliant people, some of whose ideas we plan to rip off shamelessly.

But so many questions remain to be answered…. For example, while we highly esteem the visual arts and those who work in them, we’ve been assuming we’d only accept writers as residents at Madroño, on the theory that they require less in the way of infrastructure (i.e., kilns, darkrooms, printing presses, etc.). Now, however, we wonder if we shouldn’t rethink that decision. What if we were to invite, say, sculptors and environmental artists to come out and create place-specific, perhaps ephemeral, works?

And what about size? We’ve agreed that, at least initially, we should restrict ourselves to two or three residents at a time. But should we aspire to more? If so, how many more? Six? Eight? Ten? And how long should they stay? Two weeks? Four weeks? Longer?

The answers to these questions will obviously drive many other basic decisions, such as the center’s physical layout. Our working idea is to provide a central facility with sleeping, cooking/dining, and library facilities, etc., and smaller “satellite” structures (sheds, cabins, pods, whatever) which would serve as secluded places for the residents to work in solitude and quiet.

At first, we assumed we’d build this central facility from scratch, tricking it out with all kinds of cutting-edge off-the-grid technology. Now, however, we’re wondering if, at least initially, we can repurpose the ranch’s existing main house, which is, alas, very much on the grid; doing so would require some structural modifications but would still be significantly cheaper than building from scratch. (Presumably we’d still need to build the satellite workplaces.)

Another fundamental issue to be resolved is what the center’s governance structure should be. A nonprofit? LLC? Foundation? We’ve been talking to various leaders in the nonprofit and small business sectors, in hopes of figuring this out, but at this point it’s still an open question.

And then there’s the whole food thing. (Those of you who know us know that food is never far from our thoughts.) Madroño Ranch is teeming with sources of protein—our herd of twenty-seven bison, our trusty chickens, uncounted feral hogs and deer—and we hope to begin distributing some of it in some fashion. Our first bison harvest will take place in the spring, though we haven’t yet figured out what to do with the meat: give it away? Sell it to restaurants in Kerrville, Fredericksburg, and Bandera? And the meat is only one part of a larger scheme. What if we go into small-scale farming—say, pears, peaches, and apples—and set up a CSA to distribute the produce, with the proceeds (if any) helping support the residency program?

And—here’s an idea we heard in New Orleans and really liked—what if we set up a culinary residency as well, whereby a chef who wants some non-restaurant experience comes out to the ranch and helps develop a truly local cuisine, using only foods grown on the ranch or nearby, while cooking for the other residents?

And how about engaging the local community in some meaningful fashion? Could we offer classes or workshops on the ranch? Invite the ag students at the local high school out to gain experience in organic farming?

Last month we met with a couple of graphic designers to talk about getting a logo to use on business cards, a website, brochures, and letterhead—and (why not?) also on T-shirts, coffee mugs, water bottles, etc. But even that turns out to be more complicated than we’d thought. For one thing, do we need a logo, or two (one for the residency and one for the farming operation)? Or more? Until we figure out how all these ideas and moving parts fit together, coming up with a visual “brand” will have to wait.

Sigh. Sometimes the tasks still facing us seem overwhelming. But we hope to keep forging ahead, slowly if not always surely. Perhaps our first and most tangible accomplishment to date was starting this blog, which we conceived as a way to spread the word about Madroño Ranch and keep our friends and other interested parties abreast of our progress. The fact that you’re reading it now suggests that—what do you know!—it’s working.

Obviously, we still have to do a lot more thinking about all of this. But on the theory that many heads are more likely to produce wisdom than one or two, we’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions on these and other issues.

What we’re reading
Heather: Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge
Martin: Dylan Thomas, A Child’s Christmas in Wales