There are certain special-and rare- books that refresh our understanding of how children see the world. This is one of those books. It's the story of a boy growing up in a lost time in an idyllic place-rural Virginia of the late 1940s. Charlie Lewis is the only child of city people who, after the war, choose to live at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains on a "gentleman's farm" near Charlottesville. Six years old when his family settles in the renovated corn crib on old Professor Jame's place, Charlie grows up in his personal version of heaven. His innocence is, of course, lost in the process. And so is his version of heaven. But, as the old saying goes, still waters run deep, and Charlie runs deep, with a natural (almost supernatural) affinity for the land and its animals. For knowledge , he instinctively turns to a group of older black men, some of whom work the farm, others who are neighbors. Jim Crow laws and "the curse left on the land by slavery"-as old Professor James puts it-are still very much in evidence. Even so, Charlie's passions endear him to these men. They understand that he is lonely even if he does not. They watch out for him. And more-they love him. Winter Run is a story that lets us escape for a moment our own noisy and complicated contemporary lives. Like The Red Pony, like Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals, it takes us back to the joys of childhood's unrestricted enthusiasm and curiosity. Robert Ashcom was raised in Albemarle County, Virginia. A graduate of Brown University, he has taught school, bred and raised thoroughbred horses, and served as a master of hounds and huntsman to the Tryon Hounds in Tryon, North Carolina. He is the author of Lost Hound, a nonfiction collection, and his prose and poetry have appeared in a variety of journals. He and his wife, Susan, now live on a farm near Warrenton, Virginia. Prologue Gretchen's Arms It was a dark day. Water glistened black on the sidewalks. The naked branches of the trees lining the street hung overhead like webbed fingers on crooked arms. Another two degrees and it would all be frozen. Everything was close, everything held tight, bare hands clenched in pockets. There were new buildings and a lot of construction around the hospital. But I couldn't mistake the smell once I walked through the doors. The color-coded lines on the walls were supposed to guide me to my destination. They didn't make any sense. Finally a nurse gave up explaining and just took me to the ward. And there she was. I would hardly have recognized her. The disease had taken her away. Who would have ever thought that so much flesh was necessary to make a face. Hers was gone. Skin stretched taut over the bones that everyone said were the source of her beauty. Bones. People had talked about them. She was unmistakably Scandinavian. In youth her creamy white blond hair had fallen to her shoulders. She wore it that way even after it turned silver. She had been tall, willowy, with slender arms. Arms always waiting for me, reaching out to take me back. But not now. It was too late. This time I was sure. Her rings were gone. They had looked foreign on her long, tapered fingers, anyway. I watched her. Her cool slate-gray eyes were closed, her breath rising and falling, the kind of breathing you do when you are in pain. Tubes. The whole nine yards. All my life I called her Gretchen except in loaded moments. Then she became Mother-the Swedish orphan, raised by friends after her parents both died of cancer within a single year. The friends were Catholic and strict. Gretchen was expected to understand the doctrine of the Trinity. But she never had. How could one thing be three? Or the other way around? She was defiant. And so for the rest of her life she received the sacrament in her left hand although she was right-handed. "Hello Mother." He

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