Started on a porch. Still runs on porches.

The Bottom Book began the autumn Ruth Elwood passed. She was ninety-one and had farmed the bottom ground her whole life, and after the funeral a handful of us were sitting on her daughter's porch looking at a shoebox of her old farm ledgers — small green-cloth ones, the kind the co-op used to give out — and realizing we don't know a tenth of what that woman knew, and now she's gone, and the books are the only bit of her voice we've got left.

We got to talking. How many Ruths are still with us? How many books are stacked in how many attics, growing silverfish? Somebody — nobody remembers who, though Edna swears it was her — said, well, somebody ought to write it down. And that was that.

What we do

We visit folks in their own kitchens and on their own porches. We bring a little recorder (a handheld one, the kind with a foam windscreen), a clothbound notebook, a soft pencil, and usually a pie. We ask about the land, the weather, the people who came before, and what they wrote in their books and why. If a family is willing, we borrow the old ledgers for a weekend, photograph them page by page on a copy stand Marlin rigged up from a camera tripod and a sheet of milk glass, and return them clean.

Then — slow as molasses in January — we transcribe. We cross-reference. We put things together. A flood mentioned in one book gets corroborated by a birthday in another. A field called "the Goose Lot" turns up in six different households and we start to figure out whose goose. A recipe for rivvels shows up in three kitchens within a mile of each other and we start to trace the aunt who carried it across.

What we don't do

We don't sell anything. We don't take donations. We're not a 501(c)anything. We don't publish anything without the family's blessing, and even then we go slow. We don't use people's full names unless they want us to. We don't post anybody's private business on the wide internet. We don't keep a mailing list and we never will.

If a family asks for a book back, or asks us to burn every copy we made of it, we do it that day. No hard feelings ever. It has happened twice and both times we were sorry and both times it was still the right thing.

Who "we" is

There are seven of us at the moment, though the edges are blurry:

• Marlin Beck — retired from the county ag-extension office. Keeps the press running. Thinks in crop rotations.
• Edna Pratt — librarian at the county branch thirty-odd years. Grew up pulling catfish out of the slough. Does most of the cross-referencing. Keeps the fair-copy binder.
• Alma Whitt — a hospice nurse. Has been writing down her grandmother's stories since she was twelve. She's the one who thought of asking for blessings before publishing.
• Jody Sorrel — youngest of us by a decade. Works the scanner, keeps the file cabinet in order, knows how to make the old press cooperate when it sulks.
• Hollis Turner — farms the bend. Doesn't write much. Listens well. Drives the truck when there's a book to be fetched.
• Ruby Halverson — bakes the shortbread for the sortings. Also the best speller among us and the only one who corrects gently.
• A couple more who drift in and out depending on the season and whose hay is down.

None of us is an academic. None of us is in a hurry. We meet once a month at whoever's house has the coffee on.

Why "bottom book"

Because that's what folks around here called the ledger they kept for the bottom ground — the rich flat land along the river, the part that floods now and then and pays you back for it the next summer. Everybody had one. You'd write down what went in and what came out and who owed what, and sometimes on a blank page in the back you'd tuck a recipe, or a note about the weather, or the day a baby was born.

It's also, we like to think, the book underneath the official books — the plain one, with the real numbers, and sometimes a recipe in the back.¹

¹ Bottom book is local usage. An older neighbor, Mr. Ostler, says his father called it the undersong book — the one you keep underneath the one the bank sees. Either way.