Always put in a recipe and other tips for living from Iowa's best known homemaker

In 1949, Iowa farm wife Evelyn Birkby began to write a weekly column entitled "Up a Country Lane" for the Shenandoah Evening Sentinel. Sixty-three years, one Royal typewriter, and five computers later, she is still creating a weekly record of the lives and interests of her family, friends, and neighbors. Each of the more than eighty columns in this warmhearted collection celebrates not a bygone era tinged with sentimentality but a continuing tradition of neighborliness, Midwest-nice and Midwest-sensible.