Little Heathens(ISBN=) 英文原版

I tell of a time, a place, and a way of life long gone. For many
years I have had the urge to describe that treasure trove, lest it
vanish forever. So, partly in response to the basic human instinct
to share feelings and experiences, and partly for the sheer joy and
excitement of it all, I report on my early life. It was quite a
romp.
    So begins Mildred Kalish’s story of growing up
on her grandparents’ Iowa farm during the depths of the Great
Depression. With her father banished from the household for
mysterious transgressions, five-year-old Mildred and her family
could easily have been overwhelmed by the challenge of simply
trying to survive. This, however, is not a tale of suffering.
    Kalish counts herself among the lucky of that
era. She had caring grandparents who possessed—and valiantly tried
to impose—all the pioneer virtues of their forebears, teachers who
inspired and befriended her, and a barnyard full of animals ready
to be tamed and loved. She and her siblings and their cousins from
the farm across the way played as hard as they worked, running
barefoot through the fields, as free and wild as they dared.
    Filled with recipes and how-tos for everything
from catching and skinning a rabbit to preparing homemade skin and
hair beautifiers, apple cream pie, and the world’s best head cheese
(start by scrubbing the head of the pig until it is pink and
clean), Little Heathens portrays a world of hardship and hard work
tempered by simple rewards. There was the unsurpassed flavor of
tender new dandelion greens harvested as soon as the snow melted;
the taste of crystal clear marble-sized balls of honey robbed from
a bumblebee nest; the sweet smell from the body of a lamb sleeping
on sun-warmed grass; and the magical quality of oat shocking under
the light of a full harvest moon.
    Little Heathens offers a loving but realistic
portrait of a “hearty-handshake Methodist” family that gave its
members a remarkable legacy of kinship, kindness, and remembered
pleasures. Recounted in a luminous narrative filled with tenderness
and humor, Kalish’s memoir of her childhood shows how the right
stuff can make even the bleakest of times seem like “quite a
romp.”