I don’t mean this to sound like a “dance macabre,” an old late-medieval allegory of death. I swear it wasn’t. Don’t think of that Saturday

If you’re a prairie kind of person, some ordinary flat-lander, and if you consider Iowa’s rolling landscape as the very definition of normal, then you can’t

Part of the shock that first morning at a rural medical clinic in Ghana grew from my innocence and perhaps my substantial prejudices, the hefty

Her apparel suggested a sect I didn’t recognize. Her husband wore a great bushy beard. He appeared to be a man not afraid of work—farming

Out here on the eastern emerald cusp of the Great Plains, on some balmy early fall days it’s not hard to believe that we are

A few scrappy, three-foot cuttings, no bigger than buggy whips, are coming up from the front yards of a half-dozen houses that, together, may someday

And this, you have to believe, was one of the grandest moments of her life, the day that Dutch royalty–King and Queen–visited Michigan and called

It might be fanciful. No one who was there was alive when the book was written, but let’s just assume the writer did her homework