Take a milky dream of homesteading, stir in a background of blueberries, add a pinch of desire for community, and you'll have a milkshake of the contents of "The Blueberry Years," a memoir by Radford University writing professor Jim Minick.

A freelance columnist for The Roanoke Times New River Current for 13 years, Minick chronicles a dozen years of his life, starting when he and his wife, Sarah, bought a 90-acre farm in Floyd County.

They hope to quit their day jobs and live off the land. The plan? An organic, pick-your-own blueberry farm that will help them find an environmentally sound and less complex life.

Minick, a poet whose honest prose sings with the rhythms of cicadas on a sultry summer eve, writes of their efforts with love and longing. Short essays about blueberries and huckleberries punctuate his narrative. He notes the berries' worth as a health food, their history in America and the value of organic farming.

The farm becomes Minick's church, his temple where he contemplates life and religion as he fells trees to create an acre fit for his blueberries. While he and his wife mulch, plant, prune and finally harvest fruits that are as sweet as ambrosia, his mind worships the beauty and solitude around him.

He also remembers his family and childhood. He grew up on a Pennsylvania farm where his grandfather raised blueberries. When he started out, he believed he was stepping into something familiar.

He could not have been more wrong.

Throughout this journey, Minick makes a few friends, a very few, it turns out. His search for community is heart-rending and familiar, particularly to a rural reader who understands how difficult it is for a so-called "newcomer" to break into long-established enclaves of family and friends.

It is an attitude best explained by a single crushing passage. When a neighbor informs Minick after a bad snowstorm that, "The best neighbors take care of themselves," meaning they should never ask for help, Minick writes, "You just stood there dumbed into silence by this very contradiction of the word neighbor."

Fortunately, Joe, the strawberry farmer down the way, is more accepting, though he waves off organic farming as a type of religion. He's also an older gentleman who seldom leaves his farm, thanks to a hard life and old bones.

It's man against nature, and this battle permeates the book and gives it soul. Minick and his wife are seekers, searching for truths in organic farming but also in the stories of the people who come and pick their berries. They are warriors attempting to tame a wild piece of ground, a farm long abandoned and overgrown,

The heartache, headaches and backaches often give way to simpler tales as Minick turns his pen to the stories of others, those folks who visit his farm from as far away as Ohio to pick his berries and to talk about the reasons why they eat local and organic.

Some of their recipes for tasty uses of blueberries are in the back of the book.

While it is tempting to place this story squarely among others concerning themselves with the local food movement, Minick's book deserves something more.

This is a sweet and important story of hope and fortitude, love and determination, loneliness and heartbreak. It's a story of a ripening desire, one echoed in the hearts and minds, if not the actions, of poets, dreamers and homesteaders everywhere.