Indie Next List

I could read The Orchard by Theresa Weir over and over again.  What makes this memoir so powerful and compelling is that it the story Theresa's of a life driven by her unbounded courage and strength to do her best with what little she has been given.  Her mother leaves the bedroom door open as her boyfriends slip through her life, eventually hating the sight of Theresa because she is a reminder of the husband who abandoned them. Theresa writes that "sometimes there are people you must forget because of the damage they cause - blood ties or not" and that "If my brothers and I had been dogs, she would have dumped us on a back road in the hopes that we would never find our way home."  Teenage life at her Uncle's bar revolves around moss in the toilet, pickled eggs, microwaved Stewart sandwiches and selling porn to customers in brown boxes with a beer at 8 in the morning.

Theresa can't resist the golden haired Adrian Curtis, scion of a many generational apple farm, although people warn her to stay away as the farm is cursed.  She finds herself married and living in a shack on a farm run by a domineering mother in law who "held people under until they gasped for air and succumbed to her will" and silent father in law who spends most of his day hiding from his overbearing wife.  Following long standing tradition, pesticides are used heavily resulting in tragic consequences "This is how we live.  This is how we do things.  It's how we've always done things." Weir writes.   As hard as Theresa tried to carve out a personal existence with Adrian, the farm held them tight and wouldn't let them go. Weir uses words to describe the ties to the farm so beautifully you want to read them over and over and savor them on your tongue.  You can almost taste the garlicky smell of the pesticide wafting through the windows in the stillness of night.  "It was always the farm that was more important than the individual.  The farm no longer existed to support and sustain the owners; it had become something the owners guarded and protected.  It wasn't working for them; they were working for it, keeping its secrets, building it up, making it more then it was because their self-worth and identity were tied to it.  Without the farm, they owners would cease to exist. The farm made them who they were, and they would keep its secrets."  And "Even the chemicals that saturated everything became in some strange way a part of the poetry, the man-made extrusion of death of nature."

Weir begins her memoir with the story of Lily, a young girl who drinks a glass of pesticide for her salesman father who is trying to convince the farmers that it is safe.  Pesticides abound in The Orchard, protecting the apples from coddling moths and fungus and rust.  No one wants to talk about he dangers of the spray and how "The chemicals were all around us.  In the cloths and sheets and towels  I removed from the line.  In the air we breathe and the water we drank.  We were all Lily."

The ending brought tears to my eyes and a realization that people can continue find strength to survive under so many different dire circumstances.  In The Orchard Weir manages to tell us her story in candid exquisite prose, so sublime that it reads like a love story about a marriage, love of nature and how we struggle to put adversity behind us even while running into it over and over again.  Weir describes life on the family farm in the Midwest with such clarity that you know such a life runs in her veins.  The Orchard is a perfect read, a life story so well written and told that you will succumb to its brilliance and beauty.

Middle-aged, overweight, and acrophobic newspaperman Tom Ryan and miniature schnauzer Atticus M. Finch are an unlikely pair of mountaineers, but after a close friend dies of cancer, the two pay tribute to her by attempting to climb all forty-eight of New Hampshire’s four-thousand-foot peaks twice in one winter while raising money for charity. In a rare test of endurance, Tom and Atticus set out on an adventure of a lifetime that takes them across hundreds of miles and deep into an enchanting but dangerous winter wonderland. Little did they know that their most difficult test would lie ahead, after they returned home. . . .