This memoir shares the joys and struggles of growing up within a Scandinavian immigrant family, on the Alberta prairie, during the Great Depression. Marie's mother and family narrowly missed passage on the Titanic and spent their first winter in a dugout on the banks of the Shell River in Saskatchewan. Her father arrived in North Dakota to stay with relatives and eventually began farming in Alberta. His younger brothers followed him soon afterwards and in due course they bought the historic Two Bar Ranch. While Marie's parents and visitors swapped stories in the evening, around the kitchen table ornamented with a kerosene lamp, she eavesdropped through her bedroom walls with the same sense of wonder as today's children watch television. Marie includes stories about her own adventures, such as taking a nude bath in a wagonload of wheat and picking bones off the prairies for the war effort. These stories reveal why she wished she had been born a boy.