Whispers on Woodsmoke is a wonderfully touching comedy/drama about life in a small, rural town safely crouched beyond the city’s reach.
People often remember their lives through the places they’ve lived. In Whispers on Woodsmoke, however, it is one special, charming house that measures time by the families who have called it home. The house becomes the narrator that tells the stories of all of the families who’ve shared their lives beneath it’s roof and between it’s walls. Sadness, wonder, despair, happiness and love: they’ve all blossomed and unfolded with the people who’ve said I’m home.
Sitting on the edge of a gruff and rumbling moraine left over from the last ice age, Whip-Poor-Will Falls is comfortably nestled between a patchwork of interlocking farms and endless acres of Christmas tree ranches. The people are as irreplaceable as the town is itself.
The reader quickly learns how country houses communicate. The people, naturally, gossip, tell embellished stories and enjoy an endless game of “telephone”. Houses, however, are more discreet: they whisper things they’ve learned or heard on drifts of woodsmoke from their fireplaces, from one house to another.
Symbolic of rural anywhere, Whispers on Woodsmoke talks about the life of one particular house on the very edge of town, a bungalow getting dangerously close to ninety years old that has been home to more than seventeen families since it’s foundation was first laid back in 1924. The house sits on a river bend on top of a small hill over-looking the town that gives it a rather unique perspective on all the comings and goings that make Whip-Poor-Will Falls such an extraordinary place.
Whispers on Woodsmoke is a gentle, humorous reminder of simpler days when people cared about each other and the world actually marched to the sound of a different drummer.
