The United States, once upon a time not long ago, was filled with family farms. You could walk along a country road and pass family after family. They'd maybe be working in the fields or around in the yard. They might be lounging on the porch drinking sweet cold tea. No big operations on houseless land, no amalgamations, no paved roads, no total efficiency, just home. They'd wave, and you'd wave. Growing fills a child's day all the way up. Years later we might -- or might not -- remember what was happening in the big world. Like the Great Depression, which (for some) was gone. And World War II, fought by Americans (mostly farm boys) far from home. In the 1940s, a child was growing up hungry to learn. She already knew that mules, herd dogs, and turkey gobblers don't like children but nanny goats and little dogs do, that bare feet are best, and that money is 'way less important than freedom and good grownups. Soon as she could read and print, she filled a dime-store diary every year. Each had a tiny clasp and key. At the end of summer 1949 she unlocked her diaries and found them tricky to read but full of true-to-life telling about animals, clashes, bravery, tangles, crops, shadows, lightning bugs and lightning. She spent 4 months translating their jumble into 20-some notebooks. Being in school by now and seeing differences, she added fierce defenses of feed-sack playclothes, outdoor toilets, and country ways. Being so young, the child couldn't grasp these further challenges of the 1940s: Farms are where the Great Depression hit first and gripped longest. Family farms depend on people who belong on the land, who brave its uncertainties. Those people are not considered good credit risks. Others without a clue how valuable farm life can be might get title. This means the ones with the most to lose often lose. Far more Americans went to war from farms than cities. Many came home eager to take up the lives they laid down. But post-war farmland could be bought up cheap by outsiders. On this confusing new battleground, who is the enemy? The Depression and the Duration combined to teach a dangerous double lesson: Take life day by day. Don't look too far forward. MINERAL SPRINGS ROAD 1940s is a little girl's notebooks, put together and expanded from memory. Its characters are tame, half-tame, and wild. At age not-quite-10, she's only half-tame herself, and too busy growing to realize how much she knows. Some chapters in her book: Reddish-Goldilocks Walking-Distance People How We Got Toby Pee Dee Country Nanny and the Soft Top Cap's Luck How Not To Ride a Mule Day of the Mad Fox The Army Air Base, the WAC, and Lassie Darlington Auction Market The Mint-Green House Storm, Lightning, Fire and Rain The Smell of Singed Fur The Mineral Spring Red Leather Pony And the last -- 28 December 1949 MINERAL SPRINGS ROAD 1940s is first in M B Spears' planned series MEMORY IS MY NAME.

It's April 1957. Memory will graduate from high school at the end of May. At this bend in the road, she's between her lost-farm childhood, her life here in Darlington, and a future of journeys. She finds herself going back over the past 7 years, since 1950. True to her name, she remembers everything: -- teenage stuff: boys, the school newspaper, a wreck, beaches, peanut boilings - creation of the first international stock car raceway by a local genius - love, death and loss, family and belief - music and music and more music - Hurricane Hazel smashing the Carolina coast - the Shutdown that could spin her town into permanent decline. What continually darts around the edge of these pages is the murder she can neither leave behind nor begin to comprehend.