Miracle Country A Memoir of a Family and a Landscape

Kendra Atleework

eBook - 2020

WINNER OF THE SIGURD F. OLSON NATURE WRITING AWARD“Blending family memoir and environmental history, Kendra Atleework conveys a fundamental truth: the places in which we live, live on—sometimes painfully—in us. This is a powerful, beautiful, and urgently important book.” —Julie Schumacher, author of Dear Committee Members and The Shakespeare Requirement Kendra Atleework grew up in Swall Meadows, in the Owens Valley of the Eastern Sierra Nevada, where annual rainfall averages five inches and in drought years measures closer to zero. Her parents taught their children to thrive in this beautiful if harsh landscape prone to wildfires, blizzards, and gale-force winds. Above all, the Atleework children were raised on unconditional love... and delight in the natural world. But when Kendra’s mother died when Kendra was just sixteen, her once-beloved desert world came to feel empty and hostile,... more