Seventeen Acres at the Edge of Universe: A Memoir in Thirty-One Snapshots

eventeen Acres at the Edge of the Universe is a collection of thirty-one memories from an American childhood shaped by family, work, faith, curiosity, and the freedom to explore.The seventeen acres surrounding home were small enough to know intimately, yet they opened into a five-hundred-acre world of woods, fields, farms, roads, streams, storms, and neighboring families. Within that world were ordinary days that, with the distance of years, proved anything but ordinary: sledding on a rare crust of snow, gathering maple sap, loading hay, watching summer storms, fishing from a quiet lake, sitting around a table crowded with family, and discovering for the first time what war, courage, faith, and death meant.These are not stories of a remarkable childhood. They are stories of the remarkable things that can be found in an ordinary one.Memory is imperfect, and those who shared these moments may remember them differently. These, however, are the memories that remained: thirty-one snapshots of a boy discovering that seventeen acres was only the edge of a universe.