Reviewed by Susan J Tweit
Posted on: June 10, 2025
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“The core of living lies in what we love, and the key to knowing a place inside and out is to return to it over and over,” writes Dianne Ebertt Beeaff in Infinite Paradise. “I don’t know if it is possible to love the whole planet, but we can love a place we can see and touch and smell.”
Infinite Paradise is subtitled “a memoir,” and this lyrical and particular explication of the summer-place that has been in the author’s family for nearly seven decades is that—a memoir of land and intimate knowledge of the lives, wild and domestic, her family shares their 16 acres of southern Ontario with.
After a short prologue, the narrative opens with a tour of the land via the footpath that “meanders” through the place her mother named Paradise, “from Woods End in the west to Castor’s Landing in the east. Here at the west side,” Ebertt Beeaff writes, “we look out to the river, framed in cedar boughs, as through a window. … We hear northern cardinals, red-winged blackbirds, robins, house wrens, song sparrows, and many more.”
That footpath tour is an inspired way to introduce a place her readers will never know, and it works well—the names the family has given different spots are especially charming—though I did find myself wishing for a sketch map to follow along.
The rest of the narrative—the bulk of the book—chronicles a calendar year on the land, beginning with March 1. The entries are written journal-style, personal experience weaving with cultural and natural history, recording the passage of the seasons, of time, and the doings of the inhabitants of the land, from beavers to boxelder trees and hummingbirds to humans.
Ebertt Beeaff freely admits she is not a trained naturalist, but her love for this special place shines through as she explores its unique aspects, inhabitants, and changes over the years. As with this entry from 12 April, where after explaining the history of the name Easter for the spring Christian holiday, she writes,
“With warming days and still sub-freezing nights, our tree sap is rising, maple sugaring in full swing. The red squirrels negotiating an aerial freeway of interlaced trunks and branches have begun to chew at the oozing from Sugar and Red maples, some lapping at holes drilled by yellow-bellied sapsuckers. Red squirrels can even suss out the difference between maple species, singling out those with the highest sugar concentrations.”
Who knew those red squirrels, those voracious arboreal grazers, had such discriminating taste? That kind of specific knowledge is what fleshes out a connection to place and offers readers a taste (pun intended) of the relationships that make coming to know the land so rich and fascinating.
The one thing I would change in this deeply-felt memoir of a beloved piece of land is Evertt Beeaff’s tendency to sometimes stuff her prose with quotes from others, as if she doesn’t trust her own voice. Despite that quibble, Infinite Paradise is an engrossing read, a door worth walking through to help us reconnect heart and head with the community of the land wherever we live.
