About the author
Ron Balthazor, Ph.D., is retired from the faculty of the University of Georgia, where he was an award-winning teacher of Composition and Environmental Literature. When not playing drums with his jazz band, Ron is happiest when marking the seasons on the 10 acres he tends with his wife, Jane.
A Book of Seasons
Mercer University Press, May 2026
This book is not what you think it is. Or rather, it is more than you think it is. You will find here not just stories about living on a small farm in the Georgia Piedmont, but about life on that small farm. Ron Balthazor’s close observation of the inhabitants of the land—from earthworms to armadillos, honeybees to black vultures, pea seedlings to soaring oaks—nurtures curiosity and wonder that invite even closer concentration and contemplation. These meditations on the natural world (both cultivated and wild) all, ultimately, point toward connection: between writers ancient and modern, humans and nonhumans, elemental forces and our beating hearts. Balthazor’s ideas and stories might be funny or solemn, sour or sweet, but all are keenly crafted and disclose his deep interest in the connections hidden in the histories of words themselves. In the spirit of Henry David Thoreau (he’s funnier than you remember) and in the tradition of Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, these chapters invite you into a year of discovering the holiness suffusing even the humblest parts of creation and reflecting on its implications for ourselves and others of all kinds. This is a book about attention. It is a book about communion.
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