THE RIVER IN WINTER

First time in paper these essays are an extension of the author s previous books Mayordomo and A Garlic Testament This book is like Stanley Crawford s floor The floor began more than thirty years ago when Crawford moved his family to New Mexico after selling movie rights to his first novel The history of their home made house is written in the hand plastered floor patched and sealed over the years At first a reminder of how little he and his wife knew about working with mud the floor has become beautiful in the years since 1971 It embodies their lives the ways things have changed and the ways things have stayed the same A mud floor is perfectly sustainable being infinitely repairable and finally recyclable Reflections in Mud Crawford s essay about the floor is one of the many pieces collected in this book about his life in northern New Mexico The novelist who didn t know how to lay a mud floor is now a seasoned farmer irrigator and northern New Mexico villager and the essays on these subjects that he has been writing since the 1980s continue the work he began in Mayordomo and A Garlic Testament as an articulator of values that are out of synch and out of scale with the suburban lives of most Americans in the twenty first century Whether he is wri