It all begins when the sandhill cranes leave, and it ends as they come back. When they leave, you plant. When they return, you harvest.
Evelyn Curtis Losack is an old farmer in an old village along the Rio Grande in New Mexico. She sings Italian arias among her apple and pear trees, swears it makes the fruit grow sweeter. She fights for the conservation of water as if it were her own blood. She pays for her perms with her apricot jam. “She’s from the old families,” people here will say, referring to the dwindling few who embody and guard the village’s heart. It’s a difficult mission holding down her family’s nearly 150-year-old farm in a place where small family farms have to compete with grocery stores that can produce shippable tomatoes and apples in February.
What would this place be without Evelyn? What is Corrales without her farm? She drags the hoe through the earth making her furrows, and we follow on hands and knees behind her, dropping in the seeds. This story shares with readers how someone finds fulfillment, happiness and a sense of self by connecting to those who came before her and those who will inherit all this when she’s gone, to the land beneath her feet and the water flowing, to the seasons, to her food and to those who grow it, to her community. In this way, it is at once a biography of a person and in the larger sense a valuable parable for our times, a story of one person in her magical little corner of the world, the guardian of a place we can believe in, who knows the way home.
"If There's Squash Bugs in Heaven, I Ain't Staying: Learning to Make the Perfect Pie, Sing When You Need To, and Find the Way Home with Farmer Evelyn" ~ Museum of New Mexico Press. Recipient of:
Best Book of the Year and
Best New Mexican Biography, New Mexico/Arizona Book Awards 2014
Fabiola Cabeza de Baca Award 2014
Alliance of Museums 2014 Recognition
“This beautifully told story about an eccentric matriarch-farmer and her village of Corrales is an absolute treasure. Anyone who has called New Mexico home, whether for a very short time or for generations, needs to sit down with “If There’s Squash Bugs in Heaven, I Ain’t Staying” for the sheer joy of reading it and for the portrait it makes of a New Mexican farming community and the values that make it so.”
~Deborah Madison, author of several books, including “Vegetable Literacy: Cooking and Gardening with Twelve Families from the Edible Plant Kingdom”
“Stacia Spragg-Braude’s lively homage to Corrales and its heroes and characters is a fine example of how to celebrate a small community through preserving its individual and collective memories for future generations.”
~Stanley Crawford, author of several books, including “A Garlic Testament: Seasons on a Small New Mexico Farm”
“Stacia has written about a place I truly love with graceful poetic insight. She sees through the lens of an artist and values farmers and their devotion to la tierra segrada. Gracias, Stacia, for getting your feet wet and muddied in order to record a great piece of history for us to remember and hold on to.”
~Gloria Zamora, author of “Sweet Nata: Growing Up in Rural Mexico”
“Stacia Spragg-Braude’s beautiful book is the tale of an ancient community situated near the Rio Grande whose orchards and cemeteries commemorate the generations, whose common waters are threatened by commoditization, whose vecinos still carry fire in their souls to resist the juggernaut that threatens both sacred landscape and cultural tradition. Down to Earth, of the Earth, and filled with compassion and lore.”
~Jack Loeffler, author of several books, including “Healing the West: Voices of Culture and Habit”
“Evelyn Curtis Losack is an unselfconscious octogenarian heroine, tending the land and the history of Corrales, New Mexico, selling her peaches, tomatoes and chiles at the Corrales’ growers’ market; making the best apple pies, writing letters, teaching music. I am grateful to know Evelyn through the enchanting story-telling hand of Stacia Spragg-Braude, who is willing to learn, and to teach us, about the uncertainties and inspirations of every season.”
~Margaret Wood, author of a “Painter’s Kitchen: Recipes from the Kitchen of Georgia O’Keefe” and “Remembering Miss O’Keefe: Stories from Abiquiu”
