“We stood there at the graves of our ancestors; these people who died 120 years ago. What is there to say, after all, about people we’ve never met? And yet…we are them. They came from County Cork and County Clare, which already tells you something: two Irish traditions, two counties, brought together in the diaspora that flung people from the old world through Erie and Iowa and the Dakotas, scattering them like seed. They stopped here, in Perkins County, in a place called Seim. Down the hill from where we stood, the reservoir was calm and silver in the afternoon light. Seim is somewhere underneath it. That’s the kind of ending a place can have in the American West.”

“Betty Bob Buckley—Bebo, to those who knew her best—was a reporter until the very end, and she always wanted to know what came next. She lived to be 99, which means I spent almost seventy years never knowing a world without her.”

“A friend of mine read our mother’s obituary, and the list of her many accomplishments, and he said to me, “Norm, your mom stomped the earth” —and I like that image. She indeed joyfully stomped the earth. She came to participate. And she left everything on the field.”