In 1959, when Emily Morgan is six, her family moves to Muskoka, Canada, on the fringe of the Canadian Shield. They’ve purchased a fishing resort north of Toronto. For Emily, it’s a move as exhilarating as it is frightening. But her mother, Katie, raised as an orphan in Alaska, knows a thing or two about life in the near-wilderness.
 
Emily’s parents met and fell in love in Dutch Harbor, Alaska during the early months of the Pacific War. When her father’s job with the Navy moved to San Diego, Katie wrote scores of notes and letters to Charlie, sometimes twice a week. Charlie saved Katie’s letters. Charlie saves everything.
 
Emily is like her mother in many ways, and so she, too, writes. Initially she writes about the resort. But over the course of thirty-five years she writes about growing up in Muskoka, about canoeing with her moody older sister, and about bicycle adventures with her exuberant older brother. She writes about her father’s family, including his difficult mother and his blind sister, Dora. She writes about her mother’s upbringing at the Presbyterian Children’s Home. She writes about her parents’ love affair and about others at the resort and around Muskoka.
 
Moving Parts is Emily’s stories—funny, entertaining, often heartwarming and occasionally heartbreaking. Emily never meant them to be anything more than stories. But now her own children have assembled them into a book. And they’ve included some of Katie’s letters to Charlie, to fill some gaps. Even so, it’s a bit like turning pages in a family album of old photographs, wondering who some people are, wondering if things are in the right order and if something’s missing.