Love, Mary Elisabeth

Even though most of the characters in Love, Mary Elisabeth are fictitious, the events actually happened.

Mary Elisabeth’s adventures that I shared with you in these pages are real stories from my father’s growing up years on the family farm. The farm is the same where I spent my childhood summers. The log house Mary Elisabeth moves to is the one my father was born in. The school she attends still stands—though it is now a Grange Hall. The bridge where she leaps into the Kettle River is the very one my siblings and I jumped from as well.

Ranger Al was my mother’s father. The account of he and the other firefighters racing to a mine shaft to escape a forest fire is true.

Read on for more of the stories behind Love, Mary Elisabeth.