Prologue

My name is Thomas Steven Matthews. My life almost seemed to start the moment I turned fourteen. No, this isn’t a twisted tale of science fiction where I go back in time into the body of my past self or anything like that. My life up to that point had been good but fairly predictable and lacking excitement. This is the story of how I woke up one day and knew that my life was going to be better than I ever could imagine.

First off, I am the only child of John and Frieda Matthews. My parents met at Penn State as my mom was studying nursing and my father was a Political Science major. They were almost complete opposites. My mom was a scholarship student that came from a working farm family, while my father’s family was obscenely rich. My mom was about the same height as my dad (both just shy of six feet). She is the youngest and the shortest of four children (two girls and two boys), while my father was the oldest and tallest son of his family.

As the story begins, we lived on a more than three hundred acre farm, owned by my grandparents, Sven and Ingrid Johansson. My grandparents are third-generation Swedish Americans. Their great-grandparents were part of a group that settled in western Pennsylvania just after the Civil War. They were in their early sixties and while Grandpa was in great shape, my grandma had cancer and had been sickly for a few years. Thankfully, she is in remission now. Our family had originally moved in so my mom could take care of her mom, but we liked living there so much we decided to stay. My father is a lawyer who works in Pittsburgh, which is about a forty minutes commute, so we left the affluent suburb to move out to farm country.

My grandparents grew mostly grass, alfalfa, and corn for their cash crops. They also grew some wheat and a small batch of hops that they sold to some area breweries. The farm has a relatively small garden and an orchard of apple, pear, cherry, walnut, and peach trees, with some blueberry bushes and wild raspberry stalks. Additionally, they kept chickens and a couple of milk cows for their own dairy products. They also had four horses (my parents and my grandparents were avid riders). A few years ago, I learned to ride and now I enjoy riding almost as much as my folks.

Living on a farm, I had a number of chores. Over the last year, I had learned to operate a tractor with a plow, a seed drill, a harvester, and a baler. Being that I had only turned thirteen when I learned to drive the tractor, I was heavily supervised by my Grandpa and my older cousin Lars, who often helped on the farm with my Uncle Steve. Aside from that, my daily chores included gathering eggs and milking the cows.

My other uncle, Uncle Bo, had his own farm. He and my Aunt June took over her family farm after her mother died and when her father became too ill to run it himself. The McAndrews’ farm was much bigger than ours and bordered us. They raised more stock animals than we did, but had their own crops too. They have three kids, with the boys, Mike and James were eleven and eight respectively while the girl, Bridget, was ten.

Because Uncle Bo was busy with his bigger farm and Uncle Steve had his own business (Johansson’s Automotive Garage), Grandpa hired a fair number of migrants several times a year to help when things got busy. Aside from my daily chores, our family expected Lars and me to help out a little on Saturdays. Still, they understood that we both had school work and activities (Lars was a junior in high school and was on the wrestling team, while I played baseball). They all agreed we deserved to be kids first.

Chapter 1 »