Ever Yrs

Book excerpt: Fiction. A 99-year-old great- grandmother tells the story of her family through a series of photographs, notes, and family memorabilia, including old ads "altered" by a bed-ridden aunt. The photographs are all captioned, some at great length, by "Grandy," the family matriarch. They describe life in Butte, Montana, surrounded by the great copper mines of the early 20th Century, and, later, by the environmental devastation left behind when the mines failed. Here, in 1999, as the town awaits the Y2K meltdown and a "virgin birth" is apparently about to occur, Grandy hurries to divest herself of the secrets concerning both her good and bad contributions to Butte and her own descendants.