Growing Upcountry: Raising a Family & Flock in a Rural Place

This book is a collection of short essays that detail Mitchell's adventures with sheep and children on his farm in Vermont. Like many new Vermonters, Mitchell was an urban transplant, and upon arrival in Vermont, he didn't have a lot of the accumulated "country-sense" necessary for survival on the farm. Undaunted, Mitchell talked to his neighbors, read all he could, and slowly learned how to make a living off the land. In this book, Mitchell struggles to figure out the best way to raise kids-how to tell when they are ready to drive a tractor, or deal with life's passages in the sheep barn. He also spends a lot of time in the sheep barn, working out the guidelines for efficient animal husbandry and marketing his sheep products. Mitchell's first book, Moving UpCountry, kept me in stitches for days, as I recalled such scenes as procuring fresh chickens for out-of-town visitors. There's nothing spectacularly funny like that in this book, but there are several points to ponder. In a story about deciding whether to collect a pile of skipping stones from a park to take back home to his own pond, Mitchell writes "having my own private supply of stones might make them hard to share. Could I gracefully stand by while visiting guests fired stone after stone from my pail out across the water?...Would I have to remind myself, each time I skipped a stone, that now I possessed one less stone to skip?" When he realized the work and worry a stone supply would cause him, he gave up the enterprise at once so that he could enjoy the immediate pleasure of skipping stones with his kids on the beach. Small lessons like these make up the measure of a truly educated person.