The Quiet Season

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Remembering Country Winters

Jerry Apps

A classic memoir of farm life and wintertime stories from a beloved author.

160 pages, 5.5 x 8
Paperback: $19.95 | ISBN: 978-1-9766-0069-2
Ebook: $15.99 | ISBN: 978-0-87020-608-5
Publication Date: 8/26/2025

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Description

Frost-covered windows. Crunching footsteps. Warm cow barns. Stacked wood piles. Animal tracks in the snow. In vivid prose, celebrated rural historian Jerry Apps recalls the sights, sounds, and sentiments of winters growing up on a farm in central Wisconsin in the 1930s and early ’40s. His memories are of a “quieter season”—a winter world where farmers milked cows by hand by lantern light and a major part of every winter’s work was “making wood” to heat drafty farmhouses and country schools. Winter was also a time of reflection and slowing down, of planning for the busy seasons to come, and of families and communities coming together..

Enduring the harsh northern winters taught Apps self-reliance and patience and inspired in him an appreciation of home and family and a deep respect for the natural world. And the season was not without its pleasures: the first snow, holiday celebrations, snowball fights, sledding, and ice fishing on a frozen pond.

Filled with warm memories and Apps’s gentle wit and wisdom, The Quiet Season is a delight to be savored year-round.

Author Bio

Celebrated storyteller and rural historian Jerry Apps was born and raised on a central Wisconsin farm. He was a former county extension agent and professor at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Apps authored more than fifty fiction, nonfiction, and children’s books, including Every Farm Tells a Story: A Tale of Farm Family Values, More Than Words: A Memoir of a Writing Life, and Barns of Wisconsin, all published by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press.