Back to Where I Came From

I’m going back soon to Minnesota, specifically to the formerly rural, now suburban, area just west of Minneapolis, to promote the book I’ve written about growing up there on my family’s dairy farm. It’s going to be a profound experience for me, I think, as, sitting here at my computer in the funky little house my wife and I built in the 1970s as "back-to-the-landers" on our 9.7 acres of mountainside in British Columbia -- some fifty years and 1500 miles removed from that time and place -- I contemplate my trip back to where I came from.

It’ll be sad in a way, as well as profound, sad because the place and most of the people I’ve written about (my folks and grandfolks, my aunts and uncles and my sister Joyce, and not least the little sister we all lost on the farm) are gone.

So from my point of view the "triumphal" return of this native will be a little like going back for a funeral. And reading from my book there will be a kind of eulogy.