"As Simple As That" by Edie Clark

A collection of Edie Clark's essays that appeared over 25 years in Yankee Magazine

This winter, put another log on the fire and reach for Edie Clark’s latest book, “As Simple As That” [Benjamin Mason Books, $19.95]. You’ll find it’s a great read for any time, but perfect for the season’s cold, dark nights.

In the book, a series of essays that appeared in Yankee Magazine over a period of 25 years, Clark takes the reader through her life on what she calls “a barren chicken farm” in Chesham and then to her still-ongoing life on “Mary’s farm” in Harrisville. Both, she says, have been “my lily pond at Giverny, my Walden Pond, my sanctuary from a world that sometimes changes too fast for me.”

Implicit in Clark’s writing is a message to slow down, take notice and divine meaning from the small things — changing the clocks, fixing frozen pipes, rehabbing an old wood stove, anticipating a snowstorm and other quotidian experiences. The places those experiences happen is, she says, “where we can find a stillpoint, a place of quiet refuge.”

When you turn the last page, you feel you’ve found a friend, so well do you know Edie from being with her day in and day out.

And in the course of those travels with her, you also feel you’ve been taught (very gently) how to live life more mindfully, more deeply, more wisely.