Cogan's Woods

The tale begins with author and his father journeying from their home in a white Mercury to a largely fictional land beyond Maysville, Kentucky, where both father and son were born. This annual commute is ostensibly for the purpose of hunting squirrels, but they are seeking more, and in doing so they discover solace and legends in those wet, foggy woods above the Ohio River and in the loveable characters they discover there and in the nearby town of Persimmon Gap. The book offers a fond look back at 1960s small-town America: sweating red metal Coca-Cola coolers filled with bottled soft drinks whose caps are embedded outside the store in an asphalt apron paved with hundreds of flattened bottle caps, country stores where old timers of various shapes and sizes leaned into their stories, fresh-picked tomatoes that were still warm and tasted of the sun, and legendary baseball teams like the Undefeated Persimmon Gap Bobcats. Ellis offers lasting images and sensory paintings, all gleaned from this land where he and his father travelled, hunted, and rested. In the end, it is this simple mantra, offered first by a gravedigger and later by his dying father that settles into the boy's heart: It's important to remember, it's so important to remember.