Threshold: A Memoir

"A Family Like a Prairie." Our families and communities serve as the threshold we cross into our lives. Whether it’s a metaphorical threshold or the actual physical threshold that marks our front door, the crossing informs who we choose to become. This memoir is a series of eighteen stories, with an introduction and a conclusion, about one family. From five-year-old Joseph Swope, kidnapped and adopted by a war chief, to Cecil Colburn blasting up U.S. Highway 41 with a turtle for a co-pilot trying to save a marriage, this memoir reveals what happens when communities fail and how they thrive. These are the stories of people who worked together and shared resources. There's the smell of wheat dust and sweat and the ozone that precedes a storm; neighbors and family members caring for each other in death and disease. Threshold is full of compelling individual portraits—the midwife Grandma Hendricks, homely George Colburn, and the uncaring doctor who commits an unforgivable atrocity . . . and portraits of individuals seeking to establish the connections that might create the community needed to enhance life beyond the survival mode.