Prologue If you look at an atlas of the United States, one published around, say, 1940, there is, in the state of Indiana, . . . a small town called Mooreland. In 1940 the population of Mooreland was about three hundred people; in 1950 the population was three hundred, and in 1960, and 1970, and 1980, and so on. One must assume that the number three hundred, while sacred, did not represent the same persons decade after decade. A mysterious and powerful mathematical principle was at work, one by which I and my family were eventually governed. Old people died and new people were added, and thus what was shifting remained constant.

I got to be new there. I was added and shortly afterward the barber named Tony was taken away. This was in 1965. The distance between Mooreland in 1965 and a city like San Francisco in 1965 is roughly equivalent to the distance starlight must travel before we look up casually from a cornfield and see it. Sociologists and students of history imagine they know something of the United States in the sixties and seventies because they are familiar with the prevailing trends; if they drew assumptions about Mooreland based on that knowledge, they would get everything wrong. . . .

Not long ago my sister Melinda shocked me by saying she had always assumed that the book on Mooreland had yet to be written because no one sane would be interested in reading it. “No, no, wait,” she said. “I know who might read such a book. A person lying in a hospital bed with no television and no roommate. Just lying there. Maybe waiting for a physical therapist. And then here comes a candy striper with a squeaky library cart and on that cart there is only one book – or maybe two books: yours, and Cooking with Pork. I can see how a person would be grateful for Mooreland then.”

Everyone familiar with my childhood in Mooreland agreed with Melinda’s position. One woman even said that Mooreland “is a long way to go not to be anywhere when you get there,” and yet I persisted. I felt that there was so much more to the town than its trappings. There was one main street, Broad Street, which was actually not so broad, and was the site of the town’s only four-way stop sign. There were three churches: the North Christian Church and the South Christian Church, which sat at opposite ends of Broad Street like sentinels, and the Mooreland Friends Church, which was kind of in the middle of town, but tucked back on Jefferson Street at the edge of a meadow. There were . . . no theaters, no department stores. . . . When I was little there was a hardware store, and off and on there was a diner in what used to be somebody’s house. These days it’s a house again. We had a veterinarian, who could treat little animals, like cats and dogs, and big ones, like horses and cows. Mooreland was bordered at the north end by a cemetery and at the south by a funeral home. The spirit of the place, if such spirits can be said to exist, was the carnival, Poor Jack Amusements, that arrived at the end of the harvest season every August. Most people took their vacations during the week of the fair, and were there morning to night, working in a food tent or organizing one of the events, like the Horse and Pony Pull, or the Most Beautiful Baby Contest. . . .

My parents moved to Mooreland with my brother and sister in 1955, five years after they married. (Prior to living in Mooreland they had lived in the very, very big town of Muncie; I assume those were The Dark Years.) I wasn’t born until 1965, when my brother was thirteen and my sister nearly ten. My mother always cheerfully refers to me as “an afterthought,” which I consider a term of immense respect and affection, in spite of Melinda’s attempts to convince me otherwise.

The book that follows is about a child from Mooreland, Indiana, written by one of the three hundred. It’s a memoir, and a sigh of gratitude, a way of returning. I no longer live there; I can’t speak for the town or its people as they are now. Someone has taken my place. Whoever she is, her stories are her own.