Back in B.C.

We’re back in temperate Canada, back in our little house on Laird Creek above the West Arm of Kootenay Lake in southeastern British Columbia, and tropical Mexico, the village of Yelapa just south of Puerto Vallarta on the west coast of Mexico, is now just a pleasant dream we had for three months this past winter.

We came home last week to find bright, early, chilly spring weather here (chilly to us; not so for folks on the streets of Nelson, many going about without jackets). Though the weather continued warm (it’s since turned cold again), it took a couple of days before we ventured out in our spring, rather than our winter, jackets. Yesterday (or was it the day before?), April put on shorts and lay comfortably in the hammock on our front deck as if she were still in Mexico. I sat in the sun nearby, and read, as if I too were still in Mexico.

My book is out. My free copies, and additional copies I’ve ordered at the publisher’s forty percent discount, are on their way to me. My book launch, in Nelson, is April 20. In May, unless something intervenes, I’m off to my native Minnesota to flog my book there, where the boyhood I describe in my book, Leaving the Farm: Memories of Another Life, happened. It’ll be strange reading it to people there – in many instances, I’m sure, to people I grew up with, all of whom doubtless have their own memories of that time and place of more than fifty years ago.

I have few illusions about the reception of my book. Its readers will be limited, I’m sure, on both sides of the border, and the best I can hope for are a few positive reviews and enough sales to justify its publication. It’ll make a small splash, I suppose, locally if not elsewhere, then sink, like most books do, quietly, even quickly, out of sight. Still, I’ll have the book to keep; I’ll be able to hold it in my hand. I may even reread it from time to time, and no doubt cringe at parts of it, marvel that it was ever published. My relatives will read it. Some folks back in Minnesota who knew my parents and remember our farm and maybe me as a boy will read it and get a laugh or two out of it. That’ll be enough. I wrote the book, finally, and finally it was published, and now I can look to other things – try to write, among other things, another book.