Judith Freeland

Try to Remember Judith Freeland

Try to Remember is a six-year journey through the memories and musings of a man diagnosed with Alzheimer's. It opens with a moment of Greg's forgetfulness, an early symptom of the disease that would exile him to a nursing home for the rest of his life. Mostly, it is stories told to anyone who would listen: of his boyhood in the early 20th century in a small village in Minnesota, spending summers from the age of ten with harvest crews throughout the grain belt states; his early adulthood during the Great Depression and the less-trumpeted dust bowl years when jobs were scarce and ill-paid. He remembers his joys during courtship, marriage, and fatherhood; his triumphs as an entrepreneur involved on the fringes of Canadian politics: his love of horses. His mind returns again and again to summers at the family lake cottage; the night a bear raided the icebox; the day he feared a daughter had drowned; the night the Northern Lights spectacularly outshone Fourth of July fireworks. The memories are funny and sad, exciting and mundane, terrifying and comforting. As scattered as his memories is his fleeting awareness that his mind was failing him.