Wild Card Quilt
The Ecology of Home
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
This account of rediscovering her Georgia home and its landscapes is "another must-read book" by the author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood (Tulsa World).
Seventeen years after she'd left "for good," Janisse Ray pointed her truck away from Montana and back to the small southern town where she was born. Wild Card Quilt is the story, by turns hilarious, heartbreaking, and ambitious, of the adventures of returning home.
For Ray, a naturalist and an American Book Award–winning author, it is a story of linking the ecology of people with the ecology of place—of recovering lost traditions as she works to restore the fractured ecosystem of her native South. Her story is filled with syrup boils, quilt making, alligator trapping, and the wonderful characters of a place where generations still succeed each other on the land. But her town is also in need of repair, physical and otherwise. This memoir recounts Ray's journey as she works to save her local school, sets up a writing group at the local hardware store—and struggles with whether she can be an adult in a childhood place.
"Alive with good imagery and colorful characters." —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"This is nature writing at its best . . . Her book will make you long for home." —St. Petersburg Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Seventeen years after leaving her childhood home in southern Georgia, Ray (Ecology of a Cracker Childhood) moved back to raise her nine-year-old son. The author delivers a lively account of her return to "a place that as a young woman I had gladly left behind." A naturalist and activist, Ray writes eloquently about the region's forests and waterways, places she works to protect from annihilation. She's also a community advocate and embraces rural traditions. In episodic vignettes, Ray tells of attending a syrup boiling, judging a pork cook-off and struggling to keep her son's small school open. Neighbors, cousins and assorted eccentrics populate the narrative, and Ray's affectionate portraits of them are memorable: her uncle Percy, who mows grass and attends church "with great joy"; her brother and his efforts to grow a giant tomato; and the photographer who lives in an old school bus. The eponymous quilt appears throughout the book, serving as a metaphor for Ray's attempt to reassemble her life. "Making a quilt is about being able to talk," she writes. "rying to create a beautiful thing... mother and daughter, in spite of our differences." Though she doesn't delve into her relationship with her son and barely addresses the issue of race and contact with local black people, Ray celebrates the richness of the natural world and the comforts of family.
