Cedar County: A Memoir of Iowa

Cedar County is the story of a newspaper reporter who quit his job in Seattle and went home to Iowa for a while. He lived alone for 13 months in Cedar County, a place where he had lived as a boy of 8 and returned to as a man of 52. The narrative wanders through family history, memories of life on a Cedar County farm in 1945, the good and bad of newspaper work, road trips from Iowa to the West Coast. It's about life in Tipton, Cedar County, Iowa: a ghost story or two, conversations at the Maid-Rite cafe, the ways of modern farming, spending time with aging parents, listening to people talk about themselves. By the end of his sojourn, the author realized he was someone who didn't quite belong in Cedar County but was never quite a stranger.