From spring to winter, eleven-year-old Eldon shares his impressionistic views of life on his family's Minnesota farm. Paulsen's prose shines with a poetic beauty which contrasts ingeniously with his realistic description of Eldon's unglamorous world of mud and muck and machinery. By tradition the family gathers on long winter evenings to listen to the eldest family member tell stories from his past, a legacy to which Eldon is a proud heir, and the cycle begins anew. (Age 9 and older)