Return to Summers Run

From the author, Summers Run, the series Crafting a novel to come full circle is easy: simply pick a motif. I chose a weathervane. This rooster atop the barn is introduced in Chapter Three of Summers Run: An American Boyhood. “Mister Rooster” maintains his vigil over the Summers family and the Kinkades throughout Return to Summers Run until he breaks silence within the final pages of the sequel. Return continues the story of Claude Kinkade taking up residence as a farm boy at age twelve. The setting for his new life is historic Shadeland where he is nurtured by family members cloaking him with the tartan left by his father, favorite son of the community and MIA war hero. Complications arise. War widow Daisy Kinkade, Claude’s mother, is now engaged to a Las Vegas hotel magnate. Claude is torn. As First-Person Narrator, he journals life at his new home while dreading re-location to Nevada. Shadeland and Summers Run present the lad with permanence, something unknown as an army brat. . . . “In early August, 1992, I’d begun planting myself in Summers Run, a place of deep roots and rich soil, watered by timeless springs, and nurtured by traditions extending back into the bedrock of family and folkways. “The desert where my mother wanted me to live sounded barren and brittle, a place where life was constructed by imports, not cultivated from within.” Return to Summers Run: * Employs a dual narrative. Claude, at an inquisitive, sensitive, perceptive age twelve, coupled with a perspective gained from twenty years later and following the technique of Harper Lee’s Scout Finch. * Encompasses Claude’s boyhood and those of Jeff, Aaron, Tim, and Kevin, the fatherless boys of Summers Run. Plus that of Trent Smythe, suffering deeply within his dysfunctional family marred by alcoholism and the death of his little sister, Shadee. * Depicts when these six trekked together between Little League and the cusp of manhood abruptly intruding into their boyhoods. * Continues the premise boys learn best from models while seeking clarity and direction. No conflict, no novel. Claude’s boyish loyalty to bucolic Shadeland pits him against Daisy’s yearning for them to be reunited in the lifestyle of high-end Las Vegas. Daisy and her retired parents living there extol: *The benefits of year-round youth baseball in the desert. *The kinship uniting the family around its only grandson, an obligation Claude wants to honor. Nonetheless, Claude challenges the durability of Daisy’s marriage. He describes one of the family’s several long-distance conference calls: “A long silence and in the space left vacant for our thoughts, I could see Mom’s pensive expression cocking that one eyebrow; my grandmother Ronnie’s troubled study of the floor at her feet; my grandfather’s thoughtful scowl. “I sensed they were taking their measure of me and my concerns. They knew such were valid. They shared them.” Daisy’s euphoria is eroding. Her new marriage, to a charming but manipulative Don of a wealthy and clannish family, one bristling with high expectations of its wives and daughters, is raveling. After a disastrous wedding reception and aborted honeymoon, Daisy, Claude, and the in-laws become torn. Consequently, for his mother’s sake, Claude concedes he’ll try Little League Baseball far from his beloved Panthers of rural Pennsylvania. It does not go well. School in Las Vegas, however––thanks to his friends, Seth and Sarah Haupleton––creates a much more pleasant memory. Sarah, the insightful one, tells Claude: “‘Ties to the land . . . lead to the heart,’ she said, studying the distant hills across the desert. ‘I might like marrying a farmer.’ She turned toward me. ‘You won’t fit here, Claude, not if you live a dozen years in Las Vegas.’” So, Claude, during the summer of 1993, leaves the troubled marriage behind and reunites with his teammates and the fields and forests of his departed father in Pennsylvania. Ever present, the longing for his father’s presence and the depth of loss Claude hides daily: “Did he pass by this thicket, climb this wall of stone, drink from this pool? Was I tracing his faded footsteps of forty years ago? Does his shadow follow mine across the fields and woodlands he trod as a boy my age? He’d been here, took his lunch under this very tree, and felt the warmth of the sun within the fallen leaves where he napped.” When I was editing fiction, my clients would ask, “What sets a work apart?” My short answer: Style. Return to Summers Run is a work: * Of Literary Fiction, more Intergenerational than Coming–of–Age as there is a strong linkage between the oldsters and those who will carry the banner of Shadeland and bear the responsibilities of family and rural enterprise across the fields and farms of Summers Run. * Appealing to parents, seniors, and junior high readers Claude’s age who seek deeper themes with characters and story lines that stick. * Written about men, women, boys and, yes, girls one would like to know, girls of young Claude’s acquaintance: Mary Anne, the Mennonite and Lynlee Chung, the violin virtuoso. He remembers them thus: “Mary Anne exclaimed over dirt: ‘It brings us such magic. How the stuff we sweep out of the mud room and off the steps will still raise a tomato is amazing . . . don’t you think, Claude?’ The earth and its mysteries became Mary Anne’s composition while my violinist cultivated beats and measures to create something equally as beautiful as jars of golden peaches laid up for winter row on row.” * A memoir written as a novel, a feel-good account that does not need harsh language to convey its realities. Sprinkled with nostalgia, perhaps, but unblinking in its depiction, it’s sliced from the time capsule of boyhood many would return to if possible. As Claude says: “We were brought together for a purpose. We would teach each other the ways of our brotherhood. I knew tonight, I would lie in the bed of my father and ponder those things that enter every boy’s life.” Turns out, the rooster motif bears fruit. Mister Rooster turns his arrow toward the future for Claude, Shadeland, and Summers Run. He never crows like his barnyard counterpart, but he makes his voice heard at the end.