Likened by critics to Garrison Keillor—only more “deliberate and elegiac”—Jim May writes the stories of his youth, growing up in the rural Midwest between the Truman and the JFK eras, where trading stories was as common as trading horses, and frequently required the same skills. “Neighboring,” as his mother called it, was part of the social fabric. These 18 poignant and humorous stories of life's joys and trials—told with the freshness of youth, yet tempered with the wisdom of age—evoke a simpler time in our nation's history without romanticizing its inherent hardships.