Personal Country

Coming up on the thirtieth anniversary of its first publication, this book brings alive what one man feels about his childhood home. The place is West Texas, seen across a long vista in which today's events and people merge with the author's boyhood and young manhood. It is a harsh, remote country, where the weather is always very close and the horizon far away. The Brazos country of long-ago Fourth of July fishing expeditions; the grass-grown remains of a way station of the Butterfield Stage Line; the streets of Abilene; the sparse grazing lands under infinite skies -- all are made resonant by a native son's affection and understanding. It is a way of life -- resilient and persnickety -- that is almost gone. Above all, it is people: the author's grandmother, who had a mortal fear of bridges and whose premonitions of unnamed calamities (that as often as not happened), both alarmed and pleased the young boy; Uncle Aubrey, "who married late"; the blacksmith they awakened in the dead of night to repair the family Maxwell; the familiar neighbors; the rare and deliciously mysterious strangers. With humor and strong, unsentimental feeling, A. C. Greene conserves for us the priceless eccentricities of place and person that are being flattened out -- almost literally bulldozed away -- by the impatient, insatiable onrush of the twentieth century. His West Texas is a very personal country, but what he seeks to share will be familiar to all who take pleasure in the memories that tie them to their own special region of America.