Sam Pickering was born and raised in Nashville, but he has spent the past fifty years of his life living and teaching in New England, most of these last years at the University of Connecticut. He resembles an old tree knobby with burls of books and worm holed by hundreds of articles and reviews but thriving, host to greening mosses, startling polypore funguses, and to paragraphs rich with observations and thoughts. “Writing,” he once wrote, “has enriched, if not made my life—not quite as enriching as dressing a field with manure, but nevertheless enabling me to harvest almost endless nourishing days. I hope my pages will similarly perk up readers’ curiosities if not their digestions. If they don’t fancy corn or cornpone, maybe apples will do. ‘Of all the delicacies which Britons try / To please the palate or delight the eye,’ William King wrote at the end of the seventeenth century. ‘Of all the sev’ral kinds of sumptuous fare, / There is none that can with Apple pie compare.’”