My wife and I are in kind of constant state of Thanksgiving. That sensibility - that we're always aware that if we have a roof over our head and shoes on our feet and food on the table, we should be giving thanks - I've never lost that. In my extended family around the town of Minooka, as well as my nuclear family, we would always say grace before dinner. That's a kind of Thanksgiving.Ī: Absolutely. Q: There's a moment in the book where you get to college and realize that all of the lessons your parents had taught you - which at the time you hadn't much appreciated - had prepared you for the challenges of being an adult. On three sides of our yard was a cornfield, and the fourth side was a gravel road. We had a three-acre piece of land that a generous farmer gave us for a song. Q: You say in the book that you grew up literally in the middle of a cornfield in Minooka.Ī: Yes. When I'm sitting in traffic on the Los Angeles Freeway, it's easy to idealize my days in my grandfather's barnyard. But it's true that the more urban and cosmopolitan my life gets, the more I long for the quietude and bucolic smells of northern central Illinois - the soybean field, the corn crib, the pig barn.

A couple of them we would save out for the butcher, and come home with a cooler full of meat. Fortunately we never slaughtered our own we took the pigs to market every year. Do you miss that?Ī: I don't particularly miss the uglier parts of raising hogs. Q: Another thing we have in common is that we grew up on farms on which pigs, among other things, were raised.

Nick offerman canoe book