The winner of a copy of The Time Under Heaven is Alana Torraca. Congratulations, Alana! Your book will be on its way this week.
We lived in the same house for 25 years just outside of our small hometown of Castile. It was a good little neighborhood and was mostly quiet except for the traffic on Route 39. When the signs of spring arrived, it was also time to pile up tree branches, and clean out the garage or the shed of burnable miscellany. Each year there seemed to be a contest between my husband and the next door neighbor to assemble a burn pile of enormous proportions. Day after day I watched their piles grow until tepee-shaped woodpiles were just right to be torched. There was an art to the arrangement so that it would be totally consumed in a short amount of time. It was sort of like a bonfire on steroids. Now the neighbor enjoyed the element of surprise on the neighborhood and waited for quiet Saturday afternoons to begin his incendiary activity. KABOOM! You would have thought we were under attack by enemy forces. Then there was a rush of wind and the crackling of the k...
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