A series of linked vignettes ranging across a continuum from 1955 to 1960.

It’s about my family, and what life was like constantly on the move, scrambling to evade bill collectors and unsavory types seeking to enforce my father’s gambling debts. By the time I was seven, we had lived at seven different addresses, often going to sleep in one place and waking up in another. That was the year, sporting a black eye, I was sent away to live with my grandparents, without explanation or knowing for how long.  Several months later my family arrived at my grandparents’ house, what little we owned strapped to the roof of a car. In the ensuing year, we would move two more times, ultimately to an ancient, ramshackle house on a hundred-acre cattle farm. It had stood empty for decades. There was no indoor plumbing, no central heating, and only one cold water tap in a makeshift pantry above the only sink in the house. We were thirty miles from the nearest city.  A rural route address made it nearly impossible to find us without a specific directions. 

Despite the challenges and dangers, city kids wandering free and naïve around the acreage, barn, out buildings and animals, I loved the farm and am eternally grateful for those years. My lifelong love affair with the outdoors and nature started there and was not diminished in the least by the isolation and hardships. These years were the foundation in shaping who I am today. 

This work is into its third, restructuring draft.