This memoir chronicles a young woman's search for belonging in an age when places seem interchangeable and purpose is just a matter of "finding your passion."
Raised in a peripatetic environment by parents continually looking ahead to the next job, the next place, she tells those who ask where she's from, "Nowhere, really." This changes during a stay on an acreage in Montana purchased by her parents as a family retreat. "No one had any intention of living on the land until, one day, I did," she writes.
What sets this transformation memoir apart from similar works is the sensory detail she uses to describe the near-wilderness in which she lives.
"What had been a flat white field for so many months began to undulate in waves of yellow and white, revealing the places quick to change, the places slow to change," she writes in the April following her first Montana winter. Then, over a slope that obscured what lay ahead, she spies movement and something large, brown. "Only a few hundred feet away, a herd of elk sat for an afternoon snooze - heads starting to sway back and forth to understand what we were. They turned in our direction..."
What begins as a year-long commitment for the author changes with the seasons and the place has its way with her, forcing her to abandon old patterns of living and thinking, quieting her urge to wander. She remembers what her mother concluded: "You've always needed nature; it calms down that fire in you."
One Woman's Search for Place
by Molly Caro May. 320 pp. Counterpoint, 2015.