Vol. XIV — sewn this November at Marlin Beck's barn
Every year since the back end of the nineties, a handful of neighbors has taken turns writing down what happened down here in the bottomlands — when the river ran high, what the orchards did, who passed on, what supper folks set on the table. Come November we sew it up by hand at the grange and pass copies around. That's the whole operation.
The Bottom Book is a community ledger. That's an old word for it, but it fits. Once a year the keepers gather up everything that's been jotted down — in margins, on feed-store receipts, on the back of a seed catalog — and we sort it into chapters. The weather chapter. The kitchen chapter. The remembrance chapter. The doings-and-undoings chapter, which is where the funny stuff lands.
It isn't a newspaper. There's no rush in it. If something happened at planting time and didn't get written down till the second cutting of hay, well, that's still a thing that happened, and it goes in. We aim for true, not timely.
We keep it to the bottomlands — the strip of ground that lies between the ridge and the river, from the old Sorrel Mill site down past Turner's Bend to where the creek meets the slough. It's a small country. About six miles long if you count the crook. Roughly three hundred households, give or take who's home.
Thaw to frost, roughly — and the binding month besides.
Anyone who lives in the bottoms, or used to, or has people here, can submit. Most contributions come in on paper and get walked over to whichever keeper lives nearest. We've gotten entries on napkins, on the inside of a cereal box, and once on the back of a hymnbook flyleaf. We take them all. There is a shoebox at the grange marked "for the book" and it never empties all the way.
Three or four of us meet every other Sunday at the grange from spring thaw till first frost. We read aloud, copy clean into the fair-copy book, check spellings gently, and decide what fits where. Disagreements get settled with pie. The fair copy is kept in a green cloth binder on the shelf by the coat hooks.
Come October the pages get printed on the old Chandler & Price platen press that lives in Marlin Beck's barn. November, we sew them up by hand — Coptic stitch over four stations, linen thread waxed with beeswax from Edna Pratt's hives, a pasteboard cover the color of river silt. About ninety copies a year. We've never made it to a hundred.
Copies go first to anyone who contributed, then to the families of folks who were written about, then to the little reading shelf at the grange, and the last few to the county library in town. We don't sell them. Never have. If you want one, the way you get one is by helping to make one.
Pulled from past volumes, with the contributors' permission. Names trimmed where they asked.
Weather · Vol. XI
"River come up Tuesday night without warning anyone. By Wednesday morning the low road had a foot of brown water on it and a single rubber boot floating along, going nowhere in particular. We watched it from the Sorrel Mill bridge for a while. It was that kind of week."
— D.M., upper bottoms
Kitchen pages · Vol. IX
"Aunt Rilla's pickled crabapples: a peck of small ones, stems on. Vinegar, brown sugar, a stick of cinnamon broke in half, six cloves, a pinch of mace if you've got it. Boil the syrup, pour it hot, lid them up. She always said wait two months. Nobody ever did."
— submitted by the Halverson cousins
Remembrance · Vol. XIII
"We lost Howard in February, which surprised everyone except Howard. He'd been telling people for a year he was about done. He left his fiddle to the grange and a note that read somebody play it now and then, it doesn't like to be quiet."
— the keepers
Things found · Vol. X
"A child's tin lunch pail, painted red, dredged up from the slough below the Pratt place. Initials E.W. scratched on the bottom. If anybody knows whose, the keepers would like to know too. It's sitting on the shelf above the coat hooks at the grange till someone claims it or stops wondering."
— anon.
Orchard · Vol. XII
"The old russet in the back of the Sorrel orchard bore for the first time in six years. Seven apples, small, perfect. We divided them. Margaret took one home and put it in a bowl just to look at for a week before she'd eat it."
— keepers' notes
Marginalia · Vol. VII
"Penciled in the corner of a 1962 household book, in a child's hand: tomatoes is a fruit but mother says not for pie. Left as written."
— from the B— family ledger
The Bottom Book runs on volunteer time, donated paper, and the patience of whoever is hosting Sunday's sorting session. We're not a charity in the official sense — there's no board, no letterhead — just neighbors keeping a thing going.
If you're from the bottoms and you've got something to put in, the way to do it is to hand it to a keeper. If you don't know who the keepers are this year, ask at the grange on a Sunday afternoon. Somebody'll know, and if they don't, they know who will.
We aren't taking on new outside helpers at the moment — the sorting table only fits so many elbows. New hands considered through existing keepers, by introduction, when a seat opens up.