“…my life is rich with happenings. For example, a bat like a small black rag has been fluttering back and forth through the yard light all evening, harvesting the stars of tiny moths, catching one tiny star in its teeth with each pass. They jerkily fly this way and that, but they can’t escape this hungry little piece of darkness. Local wonders.” – from Local Wonders : Seasons in the Bohemian Alps, by Ted Kooser
Local Wonders : Seasons in the Bohemian Alps, by Ted Kooser (Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, 2002 hardback, 2004 paperback)
About seventy miles in from the eastern edge of the state is a north-south range of low hills known with a wink as the Bohemian Alps. These ‘alps,’ which in the late 1870s began to be settled by Czech and German immigrants from that region of central Europe once known as Bohemia, run about forty miles north and south and five or six miles east and west. No more than a hundred feet from bottom to top, they’re made up of silty clay and gravelly glacial till with small red boulders that look like uncooked pot roasts. – from “Preface,” Local Wonders : Seasons in the Bohemian Alps, by Ted Kooser
Ted Kooser and his wife, Kathleen, “own two of those hills and a wooded crease between.” They have “two dogs, a house, a barn, a chicken house, a corn crib made into a studio for art projects, and a shack where I read and write and look out over a small pond shining in the sun.” In Local Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemian Alps, Kooser follows the seasons, beginning in spring and ending with winter. It’s a book about change, the changing seasons of a person’s life, of a family, of friends and neighbors, as well as the landscape. Kooser, in his sixties, thinks about his own life as a child, young man, father, and the approach of old age. Memories of his family – grandmother, mother, father, sister, aunts, uncles, son – inhabit the pages, as does the landscape as he watches the seasons pass.
Spring comes suddenly as “fat slides of snow plop from the wet tin roofs of turkey sheds;” in summer pickups raise dust, “headed for Branched Oak Lake, three miles east.” Autumn is Kooser’s favorite season. On the first “official morning of autumn, sunny, cool, and breezy, the leaves [are] just beginning to fall” and “the last of the barn swallows have finally set out for the south.” In winter, “a crow shakes loose from a tree and flaps away cawing, five slow croaks like a frozen starter motor” and the “coarse frosty pastures” are “as gray as coyote skins.” It’s no wonder Kooser sees the color of coyote skin in the pasture. Readers learn that coyotes are some of his “closest neighbors,” along with “raccoons, opossums, badgers, field mice, fish, frogs, and birds.” Some “neighbors” reside year round in the Bohemian Alps, while others simply pass through on their yearly migrations, including geese and monarch butterflies “stroll[ing] in the air.”
Local Wonders : Seasons in the Bohemian Alps is a quiet book that has the power to transport readers to this “north-south range of low hills.” The book connects readers to the landscape beginning with the first page. Pack it if you’re traveling to the area, or simply visit vicariously from far away.
The color of the fruit when ripe is sometimes red, sometimes reddish orange, and sometimes the same warm red-into-violet that the thickets turn in midwinter, as if each frozen branch were a long tube storing up color for summer. To the glassy blue of a winter sky, to the black fields, to the smoky gray-brown stands of trees along the creeks, to the white scraps of snowdrifts lying in the furrows, to the gold of grasses and weeds, the plum thickets add their own primary color, a deep burgundy like nothing else on the plains. You could squeeze out only those six hues on a palette and it would immediately look like winter in Nebraska. --from Local Wonders : Seasons in the Bohemian Alps, by Ted Kooser
Related Websites
Ted Kooser’s Official Website
http://www.tedkooser.com/
University of Nebraska Press
http://unp.unl.edu/bookinfo/4202.html
“So I offer this snapshot of life in the alps north of Garland, Nebraska, on the hot first day of June: a sixty-one-year-old man in bib overalls and a black and white puppy bargaining over a pickup full of sticks and branches, the old guy laughing at the dog and the dog laughing back.” --from Local Wonders : Seasons in the Bohemian Alps, by Ted Kooser