Pursuing Daisy Garfield

"Follows unexpected twists and turns amid soaring contemplation and backwoods dialogue." — Dr. Brooks Blevins, Author

Pursuing Daisy Garfield uses the language and lore of nineteenth-century hill country to tell a tale as morally fraught as a backwoods tent revival and as filled with the pleasures of the unexpected as a float trip down a spring-fed Ozark stream. —Barry Bergey, retired former Director of Folk & Traditional Arts at the National Endowment for the Arts and co-founder of Missouri Friends of the Folk Arts

If Sheba MacPherson looked like a ham roughly carved and topped with an unpredictable tousle, well, Daisy Garfield was like unto an angel or a fantasy. William was first taken by her hair, "spun gold," or so he murmured to himself, though he had surely read such in a poem somewhere. She would put her hair up prior to housework, but soon enough curls and sprays of gold would come unhitched and dangle against her cheeks and fine jawline; so William observed when she stood framed in the roadward-facing window. Daisy had light brown eyes, closer to amber, with sparkles of green in the irises. Her skin was un-pitted and smooth, more like a persimmon than a lemon, not bone white but cream white, or better yet, peachy cream with hue of strawberries. But beauty is hard to capture, whether on canvas or in words. And, of course, beauty is everything. In the end we will be saved, if we are saved, by beauty.