Carla Emery: Author of the Old Fashioned Recipe Book
(Page 5 of 17)
May/June 1975
By the Mother Earth News editors
PLOWBOY: Well there's probably more than that to it. After all, this is an extremely useful and lively, warm and witty, wise and slightly whacky book. It's worth waiting for. After all, where else are you going to find God under Apple Butter?
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EMERY: Yes, I know. I've had comments about that.
See what happened was, right in the middle of doing the book my whole world seemed to come apart. My husband had come to hate the project because I had taken money and not really delivered what I had promised . . . and I felt guilty about that too. Everything seemed wrong somehow and, for one solid year, I didn't touch the book at all. I just wanted to return everyone's money and call it quits . . . but I couldn't!
You see, I didn't have the money to return . . . and I didn't even know how much I owed anybody because I had kept raising the price of the book as I had gone along and made it bigger and bigger than I had originally planned. First the price was $3.50 . . . then $4.00 . . . then $5.00.
I kept intending to write a mimeographed letter to everyone and ask them to individually bill me for the amount I owed them . . . but I couldn't even type and run off and mail out that one simple letter. By then we had four children and I was expecting the fifth and we were poorer than ever and money was such a problem that I didn't even know where we'd get the postage so that I could mail the one letter. My life was just in a shambles and I didn't know which way to turn.
And so I just gave myself to God . . . I had this tremendous personal finding of God and everything started to fall in place. He didn't give me the simple, direct answers I asked for . . . but once I accepted His will, He made a way for me to finish the book under what turned out to be even greater handicaps than we had faced up to that time.
For instance, Dolly—one of our children—came down with either rheumatic fever or rheumatoid arthritis—the doctors didn't know which—and she couldn't walk. She couldn't use her hands, she couldn't feed herself, she just lay on her couch. Then the baby got this mysterious diarrhea that, again, the doctors couldn't figure out. We were poor, desperately poor, and Mike and I were having our differences. You would have thought the Old Man Himself was just sitting on top of my house, trying to make me quit.
Still I had this strong feeling that it was God's will for me to finish this book. So I went back to it . . . and I began to write in a whole new way! The words just started to flow out of me. The book started to move like it had never moved before and people started to come forward to help me run it off on the mimeograph machine and mail it out. Neighbors came in and typed and cranked the mimeograph eight hours a day for months strictly on faith. I had no money to pay them but they said, "Well, this is something that should be done and we're going to help you do it."
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