A Bit of Earth

After 40 years in Los Angeles, New York, and Portland, a prairie town in Minnesota and a college town in Oregon, the author inherits a family farm and returns to her hometown—population 1,500—on the far northern California coast. There, for 15 years, she has written a weekly newspaper column, “From the Back Pew,” for the Ferndale Enterprise. Many of the stories in this humorous and personable memoir were first told as columns.