Your opinion...

Okay, here is a snippet of the book I'm working on that is in first person. Tell me what you think.


I have lived all my life in search of something. I never knew what it was, why the longing in me would never cease. I just knew I wasn’t whole. My mom died when I was 15 and after that I lived with my aunt until I was old enough to hit the road and scratch the itch that had been burning inside me for so long. I had no other family so I was free to land wherever the breathless wind took me.

Not knowing my legacy, my history, had always galled me. Always made me feel even more empty. Like a coffee cup sitting on the counter next to the pot, waiting for it’s dry spell to end. Which is only one of the ways I know to describe it. I needed to be filled. I wanted to lay down and absorb every piece of me that I could find. I wasn’t finding anything in random states and seedy cities like I had hoped when I had fled five years earlier. When I realized this, I made the decision that has me standing here, looking up at a gabled roof on a farmhouse that is so old I swear it creaks like it has bones.

I can see the lights of the main house way off in the distance. I think of the old man. What was his name? Clyde. With the graying hair and smiling eyes who laughed as if he hadn’t a care in all this miserable world. It would be so wonderful to smile and laugh like that. I found myself wondering what it was in his life that kept him so happy, so light. Fulfillment is what ultimately came to mind.

Clyde was the owner of Willow Elm Ranch and from the looks of the place, he had a real first class operation going. The fences lining the drive out to my new rental were freshly painted, a gleaming white that had me pushing the visor down in an effort to stop the mid-day glare that was bouncing off the cross-hatched rails. The farmhouse looked magnificent for it’s age, although the weariness of it’s posture and the sounds it made when the wind blew through gave me a good guess as to it’s senility.

Looking forward to living in this spirited place, I hauled two suitcases from my failing car. The air smelled sweeter here, the scent of autumn, earth dying and giving way to new birth and cycles that would repeat themselves for centuries afterward. Continuity. Sacrifice. Contentment. Perhaps that was why I had always been intrigued by the season of golden leaves and crisp breezes, it held in it’s possession all the things I did not.