In this deeply affecting memoir, Larry Woiwode addresses his son as heir to his emotional interior. With beautiful language and a poet's sensibility, Woiwode begins his story by relating a near-death experience with a malfunctioning hay baler—the kind of mistake that can kill a novice farmer. This episode launches a delicately woven series of memories, from snippets of Woiwode's days in New York as a young writer working with the late great William Maxwell, to his days as a young father, husband, and teacher trying to scrape enough together to buy a ranch in western North Dakota, and finally to the prospect of an empty nest and the step from death that he finds rapidly approaching.