The Driveway Diaries

by Tim Brookes

Overview

When my family moved out from Burlington, Vermont, to a dirt road in rural Essex Center, our life immediately began to suffer the series of challenges and small disasters that quickly sort out the clueless city guy from the true Vermonter. This collection of stories is mainly about those challenges, almost all of which I failed - and about the most important, most evil challenge of all: our driveway. A gravel driveway, especially a steep one, is an umbilicus between home and the outside world, an index of change that can wash out or burst into flower overnight, and the cause of more sweat and backache than all the rest of the property combined. In many ways, this book celebrates the glories of the countryside; in many ways it is appalled. If Thoreau had read this book, he would never have made the mistake of moving to Walden Pond - or at least he'd have made damn sure not to have a driveway.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780990442851
Publisher:	Endangered Alphabets Project
Publication date:	09/26/2015
Edition description:	2nd Expanded ed.
Pages:	220
Sales rank:	707,817
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.01(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Brookes was born in England and worked as a singer, songwriter, guitarist, dealer in used instruments, and a tour guide before moving to Vermont. In Vermont he lived for two decades in the college town of Burlington, teaching and writing. Nothing prepared him or his wife and two daughters for life in Essex Center.

Editorial Reviews

The British NPR essayist, living in the U.S. since 1973, moves to Vermont and evolves into a true old Down East philosopher. The premise: an innocent writer buys a rustic plot. But don't confuse this with the story about a naive scribe who acquires country premises. Still, either way, page by page, the resolute author constructs a book of days from seven years of life at home in the land of homespun truth-seekers, the Green Mountain State. Present here is the requisite supporting cast of canny local service people, sharp merchants and loyal family. Early on, a scary hummingbird appears. And there are everyday matters like snow, of course, and ice, pollen, wasps, balky furniture, lawns as ecosystems and a dry well. Inventories of plants, rocks, rusting vehicles and floating clouds are fodder for down-to-earth musings in the boonies. Brookes (Guitara, p. 206, etc.), employing the solipsistic attention typical of the genre, wrestles manfully with nature, electrical wiring and a bit of bird's-foot trefoil. The recurrent theme, however, is the driveway: the driveway down to the house, the driveway as historic artifact, the ecologic driveway, the taxonomy of driveways and the metaphysics of driveways. His driveway becomes a "kind of Advanced Vermont Living Test" that he's bound to fail. Concluding the Sisyphean uphill battle with roadwork, Brookes gives over his penultimate chapter to words from the builder of his home that overlooks the verdant, self-regulating valley. A sophisticated writer, like many before him, moves his family to Vermont and cranks out an elegy to the simple life. Not quite E.B. White among the chickens, but pleasant enough.

Kirkus Reviews