week 1: book club!

this week on the little dream farm

Happy New Year to YOU!

Here we are again, this time for Season 3 of the weekly Farm Note. How exciting! Thank you for joining us here on Sunday mornings with your favorite morning beverage, snuggled up with your pet(s) for a read of the goings on here on the Little Dream Farm.

Do you have someone in mind you’d like to read/share the Farm Note with? Use the button below to share it with them and let them know I personally said “Welcome!” and “Thank you!” when they come join us! Yay!

---

Just before Christmas I was invited to an evening at our village coffee shop for a candlelit showing of Little Women (the 1994!) on a projector screen set up by a beautifully lit giant Christmas tree, a potluck of some light snacks and drinks, and some time to wrap presents with a small group of seven women.

It was one of the more magical evenings I’ve enjoyed since we moved here, and it was such a joy to meet and make a couple new friends. It’s funny, because a few of the other ladies said, “I had no idea this town was full of such amazing women!” and while I couldn’t help but laugh and think the very same thing, it’s such an exciting and welcome chapter going into our fourth year here on the farm, now that we’re all settled in ourselves and I’m craving more friendship.

Such a special and memorable evening!

I introduced myself to one woman and it turns out she knew me (hi K!)—she just so happened to follow the farm on social and reads the Farm Note. She said it wasn’t until more recently that she began to have a hunch that we likely live close to each other and perhaps even in the same town. Turns out we’re in neighboring towns, which out here in the country means we call ourselves neighbors!

Coincidentally, years ago before she and her husband bought their current property—a big old house, an Airbnb, lots of land, and an orchard they’ve been working on through the years—they’d strongly considered a house that was for sale at the time just down the road from where we currently live.

What a hoot the whole cute story is and even better is the instant connection we had and a brand new friend made just like that.

As we got to talking, she told me about a book she was in the middle of reading for the village bookstore’s Book Club.

We have a Book Club?!

Sign me up!

I told her I’d head to the bookstore with Chris the very next day and pick up a copy and that I’d happily join Book Club.

We’re so lucky here in our little town of 2,000 people to have one of the very best small, independent bookstores owned by a remarkable woman.

So off I went to the bookstore to pick up January’s Book Club pick—The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon.

It’s a historical fiction set in Maine in the late 1700s and is based on the diary of Martha Ballard, an 18th century midwife who delivered 1,000 babies in her practice and never lost a mother—an astounding feat for that period in time.

Should you like to go down the rabbit hole of the real Martha Ballard, the book A Midwife’s Tale by Laura Thatcher Ulrich is a Pulitzer Prize winner and details the life of Martha Ballard based on her diary from 1785-1812.

I devoured the novel in just a few days and very much enjoyed it, which made me look forward to Book Club even more.

This week I headed down to the bookstore just as it was starting to snow and walked into the cozy warm shop where a circle of chairs had just been set up in the front corner nook for Book Club.

The Book Club dreams are made of!

There were about ten women there and for an hour we all sat and chatted about the January pick. I so enjoyed the energy of the group and the friendship and fellowship among the ladies. It was a real treat to hear all the different perspectives about the book, things I hadn’t noticed or thought of, and just generally to have a wonderful chat with a lovely group of women.

I’m so glad my new friend thought to mentioned it and thought to invite me, too—it’s just the thing I didn’t know I needed but am thrilled to be part of.

I also couldn’t wait to tell you about it in case you’d like to read along with the Book Club picks! I’ll share them here with you in the event you’d like to read them.

Normally, I’d happily share a link with you to purchase the book, but might I encourage you to head to your own local bookstore where you live and pick up a copy, in the spirit of supporting our local businesses.

Who knows, maybe you’ll discover a wonderful little book club right where you are!

Two other great options are to check your local library or take a look on thriftbooks.com.

I’ll leave you this week…the first week of the year…with the Book Club pick for February. I just picked up my copy the other night while at the shop and will be cozying up to begin reading it today.

February Book Club Pick: Ursula Under by Ingrid Hill:

In Michigan's Upper Peninsula, a dangerous rescue effort draws the ears and eyes of the entire country. A two-and-a-half-year-old girl has fallen down a mine shaft—"the only sound is an astonished tiny intake of breath from Ursula as she goes down, like a penny into the slot of a bank, disappeared, gone." It is as if all hope for life on the planet is bound up in the rescue of this little girl, the first and only child of a young woman of Finnish extraction and her Chinese-American husband. One TV viewer following the action notes that the Wong family lives in a decrepit mobile home and wonders why all this time and money is being "wasted on that half-breed trailer-trash kid." In response, the novel takes a breathtaking leap back in time to visit Ursula's most remarkable a third-century-B.C. Chinese alchemist; an orphaned playmate of a seventeenth-century Swedish queen; Professor Alabaster Wong, a Chautauqua troupe lecturer (on exotic Chinese topics) traveling the Midwest at the end of the nineteenth century; her great-great-grandfather Jake Maki, who died at twenty-nine in a Michigan iron mine cave-in; and others whose richness and history are contained in the induplicable DNA of just one person—little Ursula Wong. Ursula's story echoes those of her ancestors, many of whom so narrowly escaped not being born that her very existence—like ours—comes to seem a miracle. Ambitious and accomplished, Ursula, Under is, most of all, wonderfully entertaining—a daring saga of culture, history, and heredity.

We’ll catch you right back here next Sunday and until then, I do hope this brand new year is off to a nice beginning for you and yours and that you’re moving about the energy of a brand new year in exactly the way that feels best for you.

Love ya, mean it!

---

To go along with your new books, might I suggest this incredibly cozy wearable blanket. I picked one up last year and I practically live under it all winter long, while each of the Furmers take turns paw hugging and laying and sleeping all over me on top of it!

---

Do us one favor? Give this post a heart so that Substack will share it with readers on the Substack network and we can gather more great friends here together! Thanks!

---