The story of a woman's return to her childhood home. Seventeen years after leaving home "for good " self-sufficient single mother Janisse Ray leaves her comfortable life in Montana to revisit her cracker origins. Craving a life built on "land history and blood " she moves into the family's rundown 1920s farmhouse in Baxley Georgia. There she rediscovers the nearly lost pleasures of country life -- a Thanksgiving syrup boil alligator trapping and neighbors -- as well as family skirmishes. Wild Card Quilt is the story of her return and the adventures that follow as she ponders whether she will stay in Baxley "and die where seven generations of grandmothers had died" before her. Praise for Ecology of a Cracker Childhood: "The forests of the southeast find their Rachel Carlson."--The New York Times
