0ne day, during a quiet moment in what was to prove our last visit together before her death, my grandmother looked up from her coffee and spoke of her son...

It begins in the sky, a cold, dark sky in a Northern latitude, a sky so still its once-bright stars now seem aged, no longer fixed but slowly failing, drawn into themselves. It begins on the ground...

Mukilteo, Suquamish, Puyallup, Pt. Defiance, Driftwood Key,Shilshole, Bothell, Commencement Bay: the map of the city of Seattle and its surroundings, like the maps of other territories to which travelers have laid claim...

In 1870 Edla Alida Svensson, native of Norro Mellandgard, Sweden, sailed the Atlantic with husband Gustave and settled in Norway, Kansas, where they were thereafter known as The Nelsons....