Non-Fiction, 2018

Those few who drive past Puttygut Road most likely muse at the strange name, if they notice the road at all. Those fewer who live there most likely remember little of those who came before and less about the name itself. But the history of that place in rural China Township, Michigan is written in old tree lines, rotting fence posts, abandoned bridges, and fragments of story still floating at the back of memory. When the young McMaken family moved into an abandoned farm on Puttygut, they had no idea how the land and people of that road would shape their lives. A map might have looked empty, but the landscape and stories of that place were wide and deep enough to get lost in.