BOOK PORTRAYS LIFE ON FARM IN DAYS GONE BY

"Around the wall hung pictures of stern-faced ancestors in ornately carved wood or gilt frames. These were hung high and tilted out at the top, so that one felt `watched' wherever one might be in the room."

-- Ruth Brown Shafer, "How I Became Whatever It Is I Am"

During Ruth Brown's first and only year of high school, an English teacher noticed her writing ability. Then the Great Flood of 1927 made her even more needed on their Southern Illinois farm. Besides, Ruth's mother didn't think girls needed an education.

Ruth settled in for the hard work of helping with the family farm, and later married a farmer named Elmer Shafer. Together they raised a family of six.

The self-published "How I Became Whatever It Is I Am" is Ruth Brown Shafer's account of her life and times as a farm girl and farm wife. The 354-page book is at once autobiography, moving family history and, almost incidentally, authentic portrait of Midwestern farm life during the heart of the 20th century.

Her account of her childhood on Half Moon Island in Jackson County, Ill., near Grand Tower, and of raising a family on a farm in Perry County recalls practices that are all but gone from modern farm life. And she tells both the good and the bad of the events that made her who she is.

Originally, Shafer simply wanted to pass along the family history to her descendants "so they'd know where they came from." She planned to have a few copies made for her children at a print shop. But, she says sheepishly, "It kind of got out of hand."

Shafer writes of hog-butchering days, wheat threshing, the time the water in the slough in front of the family home "began climbing the willows at the rate of an inch an hour," a Spanish influenza epidemic, charivaris and a life that almost reads like a latter-day Willa Cather novel.

"Papa was a man of many sorrows," she writes, recalling the parents, sister and two brothers he'd lost by the time he was 7 or 8. Her father's eyes changed color according to his moods, she write. Sorrow was charcoal gray.

Shafer's Mama was "mean-clean," a term that conveyed her attitude toward her daughter's chores around the house. "She wanted it really, really clean," Shafer said.

By 1937, Elmer Shafer had begun stopping by once a month and soon, in his way, asked her to marry him. "The announcement created about the same fanfare as would have the purchase of a span of work mules!" she writes.

Her book contains many pictures of the flowers that brightened farm life for her. "I had a big garden," she says. "I canned and froze foods, but I still wanted the flowers."

Shafer, who got her G.E.D. at age 63, began keeping a journal in the 1970s, but relied on her detail-rich memory for the earlier information. She started writing the book in longhand, then bought a typewriter and taught herself how to type.

"I never did get good at it," she says. "I kept typing right off the end of the page."

The book took Shafer 12 years to complete. Sometimes she went months without adding to it. One year, the year Elmer killed himself, she didn't write a word.

That was the hardest part of her life for Shafer to write about, and she debated with herself before going ahead.

"There are a lot of people in Perryville who knew him quite well," she says. "I was afraid they'd think the rest of it was made up. I finally decided to write the truth."

Shafer now lives at Chateau Girardeau and already has sold 20 copies of the book there. Her son Kenneth is organizing a local book-signing tour for her. All of which makes Shafer the homebody shake her head.

She turns 83 on Saturday. People have been asking her what she's going to write next but she says, "I'm done with it."

These words end her book:

"Though life often made me feel bent, spindled or mutilated -- I did not fold."