Sticks, Stones & Songs: The Corey Story

ISBN: 1490859772

Author: Corey, Eleanor

Condition: New

Product Description The author's parents come from respectable stock, God-honoring, community-centered and self-made. When her father Arthur Corey goes off the deep end of religion to become an itinerate preacher, his relatives don't understand. Nor does Margaret his wife, nor does her extended family--at least for a time.The story is told in three parts:      Chronicle One begins in 1937 with Arthur's purchase of an abandoned grange hall that becomes the Grange House into which babies, including the author, are born...one after another, after another. The children grow up within the shadow of a father's strong character and unpredictable style, and under the tutelage of their faithful mother, all the while living without electricity next to an outhouse where catalogs are used instead of toilet paper.  This clan becomes skilled in facing challenges with grit, in adapting throwaways into tools, and in building experiences into strengths.     Chronicle Two is the author's first-person story beginning with her earliest memory. The memory of taking apart the Grange House, while living in it, and carrying it down the highway piece by piece to build a barn-like temporary shack that becomes the Farmhouse. During the next twelve years, the family grows by two more babies, some in-laws, and multiple foster children. All the while working toward the day that: We finally have a real house.       Chronicle Three brings the entire clan together for the first time in 27 years at a family reunion--a time of re-acquaintance, restoration, and renewal. Reviews:"Eleanor Corey drew me into a multi-generational memoir of her rural American family. She has embraced candor in telling the story of her clan within the context of community and history in a way that is vulnerable and transparent. Sticks, Stones & Songs will inspire you to recover your own ancestral secrets."--Heidi Mitchell, Literary Agent, D. C. Jacobson & Associates, LLC."Sticks, Stones & Songs offers a rare glimpse of a bygone era and the people who made the woods of the wild Pacific Northwest their home. This is no sugar-coated account but life as it was with all its raw edges and loose ends."--Laura Frantz, Author of Love's Reckoning  From the Back Cover "Quick! Down in the ditch!"     I did as I was told--dropped the shingle I was toting, slid down the bank, curled up, and buried my head deep in the grass as fast as I could. I was three years old, so hiding was easy for me. Not so easy for nine-year-old David, who, in addition to covering himself, had to disguise the heavy plank he was carrying. I peeked. A car was coming around the corner on Highway 9A. It was the color of overripe raspberries--the kind you don't see until you step on them.     This is my first memory--an eye-scorching memory buried deep in the tunnels of my brain--a memory that, for the rest of my childhood, surfaced with a spasm of fear at the sight of any dark-reddish car, like the one that had sent us into the ditch.     At the time, I thought David was terrified like me. But David was not afraid. I learned later he was embarrassed to be seen by anyone--stranger or friend. Seen--moving our house, battered board by battered board, smashed-straight nail by smashed-straight nail, down the highway and around the corner.      One month earlier, before my memory kicked in, Daddy had decided that we would move our house to the farm, and we would have to do it without a vehicle, without a mule, and without new materials.      Mother had agreed--albeit with concessions. She needed to be certain that this would be a temporary dwelling, not a permanent home. Daddy gave his assurance. Then he took his first step in the house-moving transition. He cleared out a place in the cellar under the house--the former abandoned grange hall, known as our Grange House--and moved in a bed for himself. He led us children to believe his motivation was the hot weather, but in all likelihood it was one of his c