This book is memoir, meaning that the facts and events stand on the old creaky chair legs of memory. In fact, I’d say that writing this book involved a careful readjustment of every false assumption I held about my own history.
Piecing together my past, especially after Mr. Wanderlust pulled up in his 1973 Buick hardtop, was a job for a historian more skilled than I—and I can’t even use old age as an excuse. Aaron and I moved often enough in our early years to make an editor’s head spin. Going back to my journals, I discovered that the year 1997 alone seemed to contain eight seasons rather than four, each with its own adventures, some of which—including the time I almost started a restaurant with a hippie couple from Park Rapids—were cut because they clogged up the greater narrative flow.
I compressed a couple of summer gardening seasons into one, mostly out of concern for the reader’s patience for consecutive dim nights of non-electric living. I changed a few names out of respect for individuals’ privacy. I reconstructed dialogue, but only when I remembered complete phrases with total clarity and when the entire full-bloom conversation felt true to its real-life characters.
Those creative licenses aside, this account of my life is as true as I remember it—which is to say, a lot more loyal to time and fact than my old prememoir memory would have had it.