If there’s squash bugs in heaven, I ain’t staying
Stacia Spragg-Braude,
200 pages, hardcover:
$29.95
Museum of New Mexico Press, 2013
Nestled amid the orchards of New Mexico’s Rio Grande Valley is the old farming village of Corrales, where 85-year-old Evelyn Losack harvests fruit on land that has been in her family for 150 years. This is the setting for Stacia Spragg-Braude’s new memoir, If There’s Squash Bugs in Heaven, I Ain’t Staying.
A former Corrales farmer herself, Spragg-Braude writes about her village and Losack, its matriarch and a dedicated water activist who struggles to sustain her small family farm in a rapidly changing agricultural landscape. In words and pictures, Spragg-Braude leads readers through the seasons: “It all begins when the sandhill cranes leave and it ends when they come back,” she writes. “When they leave, you plant. When they return, you harvest.”
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline “If there’s squash bugs in heaven, I ain’t staying” by Stacia Spragg-Braude.
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