Book Signing for If There’s Squash Bugs in Heaven, I Ain’t Staying: Learning to Make the Perfect Pie, Sing When You Need to, and Find the Way Home with Farmer Evelyn by Stacia Spragg-Braude at the Silver City Museum on Friday, December 6, 2013 at 2 pm.
The Silver City Museum invites you to a book signing for If There’s Squash Bugs in Heaven, I Ain’t Staying: Learning to Make the Perfect Pie, Sing When You Need to, and Find the Way Home with Farmer Evelyn by Stacia Spragg-Braude. The signing will take place on Friday, December 6, 2013 from 2 pm to 3 pm at the museum, located at 312 West Broadway in downtown Silver City. The book will be available for sale in the museum store.
“It all begins when the sandhill cranes leave, and it ends as they come back. When they leave, you plant. When they return, you harvest,” writes Spragg-Braude in the opening to her deeply observant extended homage to orchard farmer Evelyn Curtis Losack and her village of Corrales, New Mexico. When she isn’t in the fields or teaching piano to her students, or canning or making fruit leather or pickling, Evelyn loves to drive the roads between fields, scanning the landscape like pages in a scrapbook, moments and images fixed in time. Evelyn Curtis Losack is an old farmer in Corrales. She remembers the legendary cherry trees in Miguel Griego’s orchard planted
in 1914, long gone. She passes by the crumbled adobes of her ancestors that anchor old orchards where her grandchildren once played.
Evelyn sings Italian arias among her apple and pear trees. She fights for the conservation of water as if it were her own blood. She pays for her perms with her apricot jam. “She’s from the old families,” people here will say, referring to the dwindling few who embody and guard the village’s heart. It’s a difficult mission holding down her family’s nearly 150-year-old farm in a place where small family farms have to compete with grocery stores that can produce shippable tomatoes and apples in February, or at a time when the younger generation wants or needs jobs in town.
What would this place be without Evelyn? What is Corrales without her farm? This book is a journey with Evelyn on her farm. She drags the hoe through the earth making her furrows, and we follow on hands and knees behind her, dropping in the seeds. The story shares with readers how someone finds fulfillment, happiness, and a sense of self by connecting to those who came before her and those who will inherit all this when she’s gone, to the land beneath her feet and the water irrigating the farms, to the
seasons, to her food and to those who grow it, and to her community. In this way, it is at once a biography of a person and in the larger sense a valuable parable for our times.
Stacia Spragg-Braude is a photographer and writer along the Rio Grande in Corrales, New Mexico, where she lives with her family and animals and lots of unscanned film. For many years, Stacia worked for the Albuquerque Tribune, where she took much delight in exploring the state with a camera and shamelessly avoiding having to shoot all but one football game during 8 or 9 years of employment. These days she spends her time on projects exploring our connection to the land, plunking along acequias with a cold beer and a couple of friends, drawing parallels between digging potatoes and rediscovering dreams, lost happily in the circles of life. She is also the author of To Walk in Beauty: A Navajo Family’s Journey Home (Museum of New Mexico Press).
Funding in part for these programs and exhibits is made possible thanks to the members and volunteers of the Silver City Museum Society.
The Silver City Museum creates opportunities for residents and visitors to explore, understand and celebrate the rich and diverse cultural heritage of southwestern New Mexico by collecting, preserving, researching and interpreting the region’s unique history. For more information, please contact the museum at (575) 538-5921 or