MAIDEN RUN
When the Adams family is approached on an ordinary summer
day in 1935 by a pair of representatives of a mining company about investigating the family farm for deposits of natural gas
or oil, none of them suspected this would be the pivotal summer of their lives.
Filled with a cast of colorful characters surrounded by the
beauty that is rural America, written with the engaging style of a natural storyteller, Maiden Run will call to your
own story of roots that can't be pulled thoughtlessly from the ground, and the love between siblings.
Three members of the same family with three vastly different
views of their places at Maiden Ru, and just as varied views on life, find themselves changed over thirty years. Each
must find a way to continue without the home to which they have always been able to return.
From MAIDEN RUN:
1966
I’m
on my way home for the first time in many years. There’s a nagging voice in the back of my mind that I try to hush telling
me it’s probably for the last time. It’s this sense of an ending that makes me determined to preserve whatever
I’m able to by recording it—for us and for our children, and for their children. Besides the desire not to forget
how we were, there’s the suspicion that some of what I set down might provide material for stories I haven’t written
yet. These might, in turn, lead to entertainment, if nothing more, for readers who won’t know any of the actors in these
tales I imagine growing like accretions in a stream. Like most writers, I’m always afraid I’ll let an opportunity
escape. So that’s why, as memories unfurl across my mind’s eye like the miles on the odometer, I resolve to do
my best to preserve them—even those that are incomplete, even with the imagined details there’s no way I could
have seen at the time.
I’ve read that the sense of smell is the most effective one for reviving the past. Soon I’ll be able to
test that theory. It isn’t as if I’d never come back here over the years, but now there seems every likelihood
that if Maiden Run is still here in ten years, it will be all but unrecognizable, at least to us—my brother and sister-in-law
and their children, and to me and my husband and daughter. As for our sister Estelle, I have no idea what to expect when she
appears among us again. Her affinity for our home place was always ambivalent, and I’ve thought, sometimes seemed to
be nonexistent.
A journey
like this is fraught, at least for me, with an amorphous burden, not just of the past, but of the unknown. I think of Roberts
Frost’s wonderfully sad and true poem in which he said, Home is the place where, when you have to go there,/ they
have to take you in. Like a Jungian memory, that knowledge has persisted with me all my life, at least until now. And
at this point, as images gather in my head, they revive with them many questions that hovered only at the edges of my consciousness
at the time they were happening. The surprising and humbling gift and grace of increasing age is hindsight, with its improved
perceptions. I’m thinking as I speed along that maybe recovering that summer on the site might now reveal more to me
than I was ever able to understand while we were all going through it together.
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