Once There Was a Farm: A Country Childhood Remembered

Nearly fifty years after she left the family farm of her childhood, Virginia Bell Dabney was compelled to write a memoir. She and her two sisters were raised on a Virginia farm during the hardscrabble years of the 1920s and 1930s. Her determined, independent mother managed to make a life for her famiy, despite hardships such as the Depression and a fire that destroyed their home. Although raised in a spare environment where leaky ceilings and cold winter nights were the norm, Dabney finds much to love, and to rejoice over, in her country upbringing: the wonder of hens laying eggs, the sensations asscoiated with milking a cow, her warm friendship with her mother's black maid. The remarkable clarity of her half-century-old memories and her simple, unaffected tone bring this country childhood unforgettably to life.