John Elsing

Keeping Time John Elsing

In his first collection, Keeping Time: 70 Little Stories (2012), John Elsing writes about his children. The stories in this second collection begin with his grandparents crossing the Atlantic from Holland to settle in Minnesota (Nobles County) in the late 1800s. The stories end with Elsing visiting Paris in 2015 with his daughter and granddaughter. The 20th Century passes quickly. In 1910 Theodore Roosevelt visits Rushmore where three of the Elsing brothers have settled. In 1914 Rock County (Rock River is 15 miles west of the three Elsing farms) suffers the first of two devastating floods in the twentieth century. Two great wars are fought and won by 1950, and Elsing tells how both conflicts touched his family in poignant ways. Elsing remembers the transition from farming with horses to farming with tractors, and he shares boyhood memories of fox hunting and the Wicked Witch of the West. As the decades pass, he takes the reader to Boulder, Colorado, and then to New York and its sister city, Berlin. He also visits the vineyards in Burgundy (France) and those in the Wachau (Austria) and makes numerous trips to Charleston, South Carolina, and Seattle, Washington, to visit family and friends. The stories are arranged in rough chronological order, but there is a Table of Contents that makes it easy for readers to find a story they might enjoy. Some of the stories will foster smiles. Others are sad. All of them remind us of the universal aspects of the human predicament.