A Garlic Testament: Seasons on a Small New Mexico Farm

Only when Stanley Crawford died a year ago, at age 86, did I realize that the same person was the author of two very different books that had long intrigued me: the notoriously weird experimental novel from 1972, Log of the S.S. Mrs Unguentine, and this much more straightforward memoir of garlic farming, published twenty years later. And so, intrigued, I finally read both. Mrs Unguentine is indeed fascinatingly weird (I'll say more when it's rereleased later this year), but I loved A Garlic Testament. It is a romance of sorts, built around the dream of remote self-sufficiency, on the small farm in the mountains outside Santa Fe that Crawford and his wife Rose Mary operated for fifty years, which also allowed him quieter winters for writing. But the true beauty of his story, as Crawford knows, is not their isolation, but their many connections: with friends and family who help with the work, with neighbors who share their scarce water resources, and with the people who buy their bulbs and flowers. In this, it reminds me of the best thing about running a neighborhood bookstore.