I finally finished my book. Well, it’s a collection of fictionalized stories from my youth. A memoir, but told the way I remember it, rather than the way it happened. I’ll probably edit it for the next five years. Here are the opening paragraphs from a story.
The town I was born in, three thousand people and three stop lights, was too big, too hurried , and too civilized for my father, so when I was five years old, he moved us out to the country. My dad knew a family from our church who owned acres upon acres of barren pine about fifteen miles out from the city limits, and like most Christian revivalists, that family wanted to escape the corruption of the world they were born into and found a new community, a New Canaan, a shining city on a hill.
My dad bought into that promise of renewal, and with it came a few acres of his own in the burgeoning community. He paid a man with a Caterpillar to bulldoze a one-lane dirt road from the highway out into the far edge of New Canaan. Mr. Banner, the man with bulldozer, charged my dad five hundred dollars and one jar of moonshine to cut the trail, clear cut an acre or so, and haul away the underbrush. Aside from that one acre clearing, he left the rest of the land as it was, a muddy creek bed, sickly pine trees, swamp land, and misquito breeding grounds. Dad paid the city to bring in electricy, running water, and sewage. He would have been happy to live by candlelight, water well and outhouse, but my mother insisted, so we hauled civilization out into the sticks, kicking and screaming all the way.