Bountiful Season: Grandpa's Handmade Gifts

This book describes life with my grandfather in rural Illinois in the 1950s. My grandfather on my mother's side, Ulysses S. Moore, was a renaissance man for his time. Not only did he maintain the family homestead for future generations, he raised his children there, and still managed to make intricate wood carvings, build furniture, and even write and publish poetry. He did all of this in the Midwestern tradition of self-reliance. He didn't email his Word doc of poetry to his local Kinkos, and then pick up the finished product at the local counter. Instead he typeset every letter of every poem and created the finished product on his own manual printing press upstairs in his attic. I was the grandson who lived next door and was called upon to help him. This was the early 1950s in the Midwest, in the rural countryside of Illinois in the hills overlooking the Mississippi river. As I look back it was sort of a primitive childhood. I remember how things changed when I was in the fifth grade. I watched as power lines were installed from the power grid in the city, down the gravel road leading to our house. Before that in the winter time we had only wood heating stoves in the homes, and kerosene lamps for light . no electricity.…