Revisiting "Five Thousand Days Like This One": A Deeply Felt Chronicle of Family and the Significance of Its History

Five Thousand DaysLike This One: An American Family History by Jane Brox
Paperback, 182 pages
Published by: Houghton Mifflin Company
Price: $13
Publication Date: 2000

Jane Brox’s Five Thousand Days Like This One is a melancholic and beautiful celebration of her family’s farming history in the Merrimack Valley of Massachusetts. Brox weaves together the historical records of the mill cities of Lowell and Lawrence, Massachusetts; citations from Henry David Thoreau’s nature and travel writings; conversations and family stories memorized from childhood; and her own elegantly simple chronicle of life. These variations make Five Thousand Days Like This One a wonderful portrait of rural life as it once was and encroaching urban sprawl as it threatens now.

Nominated for 1999’s best nonfiction book award by the National Book Critics Circle Five Thousand Days Like This One has moved beyond its dedicated small-town appeal. It’s been given a national spotlight—and thankfully so. This book matters because it lays down history and memory and delivers them to us for our present-day consideration. It reflects on New England farming and preserves for the record the routines of this nearly bygone way of life—the “sturdy, self-contained world that spoke for hope”—before it passes into the way things were.

As the book begins, Brox, subdued by the death of her 85-year-old father, sits at his desk, trying to figure out how “to carry on the workings of his home and farm.” Her father’s “three houses, forty cleared acres, a hundred in woodland, and a dozen in fruit trees” are hers now, and Brox is faced with working out the tangle of her new responsibilities. She decides which seeds to order for the spring planting, travels to the apple orchards of the Nashoba Hills to share trade ideas with fellow orchard growers, and gets ideas on how to better arrange the family farm stand. In the process, Brox realizes with keen sadness that change and the future can obliterate identity, memory, and perhaps even whole lifetimes:

And then a day comes when I have to erase [my father’s] name from
another account. First it was the checking account, then the Agway
charge, and the Harris Seed charge. Sometimes it feels as if I’m erasing
him everywhere until his name will remain only in his last place, on
the hill, behind the white birch. I hate it, both the erasure and my
realization that if we are going to go on I can’t make the same decisions
he would have made….I’m thinking of selling a piece of far land as
soon as the market’s better….

…Always the future is its own bewilderment, and has its own
rewards and sorrows. Not long at all since my father died, and
already I sometimes feel he wouldn’t fit back into this world, that
we’ve arranged our lives beyond him.

In chapters that meditate on the immigration of her Syrian grandparents to Lawrence—the nineteenth century’s “worsted and woolen capital of the world”—and the story of the Merrimack Valley’s textile mills, sewing factories, dams, and boarding houses Brox packs a lot of history in a short space. She writes about this “Immigrant City” with its fifty or so languages and dialects, the workers’ strike of 1912, and her father’s boyhood recollections of Armistice Day in 1918.

Brilliantly rendered is Brox’s chapter of the influenza epidemic of 1918. The Lawrence Board of Health consigned the sick to a “tent hospital” on Tower Hill. There were some days when influenza deaths outnumbered soldier casualties from World War I. With devastating clarity, Brox describes the scene:

…Boardwalks had been laid down between the tents, and footfalls,
softened by the drenched wood, came near and receded. The nuns’
habits swished. What country was this? A cough. A groan. The
stricken tossed in their fevers. Their muscles ached. One moment
they had the sweats; the next, chills. In forty-five different languages
and dialects they ca called for water and warmth.

The valley’s “legacy” is as much a part of Brox's own personal history as her maternal grandfather’s Italian toast “May we all have five thousand days like this one” and the breads of her Syrian culture called simsim and zaatar. Connecting to, and energizing the memory of, one’s complete history—that of place, family, tradition, lifestyle—is Brox’s abiding concern. Where does a loved one’s knowledge go once they’ve passed on, and how can we hold on to the significance of their lives if we don’t know their stories or learn their histories? Similarly, the possessions that adorned a loved one’s life are not trinkets; they are the things that “brought us here and forward,” yet after death they become the “mute things that had lost the one who could best speak for them” and “[f]rom now on they’ll only be partially understood.”

Five Thousand Days Like This One rounds out as a moving tribute to family and its importance. It’s at once joyous and disheartening, for it honors a New England history yet reminds us of its waning tradition.


This book review was originally published in MotherTown in 2000.