Dec 22, 2009

Harris and Me: A Summer Remembered | Setting

The time is the early 1950s. The era is suggested by the popularity of Gene Autry movies and by reference to America's foreign enemies as "Commie Japs," a ludicrous lumping of the United States' old enemy from the Second World War and its new enemy in the Cold War. Only summer's boundaries are marked: the ride in the deputy's car to the farm after the closing of school and the return of the deputy when school is set to re-open.

The place is a farm forty miles north of an unspecified Midwestern city, so rural that the road to the farm is eight miles of unpaved, mud rut track. The...