The Well: Poems from Twin Pines Farm

This book written by Nancy Huxtable Mohr is an evocative suite of poems illuminating the lives of an American farm family drawn from her own experience growing up on the farm in the 1950s and from the contents of a pine trunk filled with family papers, letters, and diaries of her ancestors who established the farm and made it flourish for more than two centuries. The first half of the book includes poems that recount the lives of four grandmothers beginning with Rhoba Williams McKoon who with her husband Martin McKoon traveled by foot and oxcart from Rhode Island in 1797 to settle the farm in the wilderness of Upstate New York. The poems in the second half of the book trace the author’s own life at Twin Pines and the lives of her parents James and Adeline Weaver Huxtable along with her siblings. Throughout the volume, the author focuses on the lives of the women on the farm–how they sustained life, the land and the people who lived there. Her poems reveal how through faith and tenacity these women endured great hardship, as in the loss of children in childbirth and war, showing what these women accomplished through the sweep of history and the cycle of seasons in the evolution of the farm and the country. In these poems, Mohr describes her family’s aspirations, their contributions of hard work and ingenuity, and their unconquerable ability to thrive whatever the circumstances they encountered.