Jane Brox explores the legacy of her family farm in the Merrimack Valley

Jane Brox’s memoir trilogy revisits her roots, revealing the enduring connection between land, memory, and identity.

John Brox and his daughter Jane Brox inspect apples in their orchard in Dracut, Massachusetts, on September 1, 1995. Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images

By Anna Fadiah and Hayu Andini

Authors are often encouraged to write about what they know, and for Jane Brox, that knowledge begins with land—specifically, the farm where she was raised in Dracut, Massachusetts. A short distance from Boston, this fertile ground became the backdrop for three powerful books that trace the intertwined legacy of her family and their agricultural heritage. Now republished as a single volume titled In the Merrimack Valley, Brox’s trilogy examines the emotional terrain of home, the passage of time, and the quiet rituals that define a life rooted in place.

Jane Brox family farm memoir encapsulates a body of work that is both deeply personal and richly historical. Brox’s storytelling emerges from an honest acknowledgment that, while the farm was intimately familiar, much of its history remained a mystery to her. Her investigation into this shared past reveals not just her family's story, but also a broader meditation on what it means to leave—and what it means to remain.

A return to roots and a reckoning with change

The first book in the trilogy, Here and Nowhere Else, published in 1995, explores Brox’s return to the family farm after spending years away. Her homecoming is marked by emotional weight—aging parents, a troubled brother, and a property filled with ghosts of past generations. The memoir doesn’t offer easy answers or resolutions, but rather opens a dialogue with the land and its layered histories.

By the time she published Five Thousand Days Like This One in 1999, Brox had turned her attention to the earlier origins of her family’s connection to the land. Her Lebanese grandparents purchased the farm in 1902—a leap of faith emblematic of many immigrant stories. Her father’s disbelief at how they ever managed to afford the land speaks volumes about the improbability of the American Dream and the sacrifices it often required.

The third volume, Clearing Land, released in 2004, widens the narrative lens to place her family's story in the context of New England’s agricultural evolution—from the Pilgrims to suburban sprawl. While other writers might have used this as a platform for activism or nostalgia, Brox resists both. Instead, she offers a clear-eyed depiction of a vanishing way of life, one marked not only by loss but by adaptation.

Memory, migration, and the work of preservation

Though each book in the trilogy stands alone, In the Merrimack Valley is unified by its focus on the meaning of place and the act of remembrance. Brox sees her family's farm not just as a plot of land, but as a symbol of endurance, labor, and belonging. As she writes in Here and Nowhere Else, “all leavings are a questioning of what is left behind,” a statement that captures the emotional complexity of migration, both voluntary and necessary.

In honoring her Lebanese-American heritage, Brox adds another layer to the Jane Brox family farm memoir. Her work becomes not just a personal history, but also a cultural one. The land, with its rows of tomatoes and jars of honey, becomes a vehicle for exploring the immigrant experience in rural America. Her maternal grandfather’s wish for “five thousand days like this one” is less a plea for stasis than a desire for continuity—a longing echoed in the routines and rituals of the farm.

A sensory archive of the past

Part of what makes Brox’s writing so vivid is her attention to sensory detail. Whether describing ancient glaciers that shaped the local geography or the cold brook water used to make her mother’s pie crust, she paints a world that feels almost tactile. In her description of the farm’s roadside stand, she recalls the layout down to the arrangement of honey jars: “a diamond pattern, then straight rows, and again in staggered rows.” These mundane moments take on a sacred resonance, becoming acts of devotion to a way of life slipping away.

Unlike the self-assured declarations of Henry David Thoreau—whom Brox occasionally references—her prose is thoughtful, modest, and grounded in observation rather than judgment. She may cite Thoreau’s disdain for the grand farmhouses that sprouted in the region, but she chooses instead to see her family’s compound as “a sturdy, self-contained world that spoke for hope.”

No easy conclusions—just clarity

Brox does not use her memoirs to issue manifestos or sentimental farewells. There’s no grand call to preserve family farms or condemn the expansion of suburbia. Instead, she offers a nuanced understanding of change. Farming, she suggests, has always been an exercise in resilience. From season to season, generation to generation, the work goes on—not because it’s easy, but because it matters.

That persistence is written into every line of her prose. In Five Thousand Days Like This One, the repetitive nature of farm chores becomes an act of reverence. In Here and Nowhere Else, she writes: “perseverance is built into the work.” It’s a sentiment that informs her approach as both farmer’s daughter and chronicler.

The digital age and the value of the tangible

In the afterword to In the Merrimack Valley, Brox reflects on how the world has changed since the original books were written. She notes the rise of what she calls “computer-also-connected-to-the-world,” a phrase that encapsulates the alienating blur of digital life. Against that backdrop, her trilogy serves as a refuge—a place where memory and material reality converge.

Her father, she recalls, “was used to the habits of the land.” He understood its patterns, its limitations, and its quiet offerings. This accumulated wisdom—passed down from her grandfather—is etched into the fields and carried through Brox’s prose. She reminds readers that history is often hidden in plain sight, in the cold spots where frost lingers or the rocky soil where only gourds grow.

A tribute without claim

The trilogy closes with a powerful pair of words: “Not yours.” It is a recognition that nothing, not even land or legacy, can be held forever. But through In the Merrimack Valley, Jane Brox has offered readers something more lasting than ownership—she has offered understanding.

The Jane Brox family farm memoir is a quietly revolutionary work, one that sees in the rituals of cultivation and the act of remembering a path toward healing and meaning. In telling her story with humility and grace, Brox reclaims a vanished world—not to possess it, but to honor it.