Buckskin Press

A memoir told in two voices, Our Stories traces the parallel lives of Mel and Kay across more than four decades of American life.

Their childhoods unfold on opposite sides of the country-one marked by clay dust and cellar houses in Ohio, the other by Los Angeles streets and wartime factories. Mel serves as a military policeman in Cold War Germany before returning home to rebuild. Kay makes her own way west. Through the slow work of starting over, they find each other in the semiconductor industry of the early 1970s-two lives that had been converging without knowing it.

Together they build a family, raise children, and navigate the demands of careers in a fast-moving industry. Then, when the noise of working life finally quiets, they take on something they didn’t expect: the backbreaking restoration of a forgotten cabin on a dirt road in the Idaho mountains. What begins as a project becomes a place-and the anchor for everything they’ve made together.