"Little Patti Post has just been adopted by a disillusioned railroad engineer; a fainthearted homemaker; and a slightly derailed, older brother. Add to that mix a handful of raunchy, rural relatives, a knot of uneducated educators, a gaggle of ghosts, a witch or two, and a dutiful doctor who diagnoses her rare psychic ability to smell people's secrets as a form of epilepsy, and you have the prescription for a spellbinding and mystical memoir. Patti arrived on this Earthly Plane with a sarcastic sense of humour and the energy and determination of a lone ant at a church picnic. At seventeen, attempting to escape the monotony of a one-caboose railway town, she marries a handsome soldier who convinces her that he is destined to die in Vietnam. When he turns up alive, they head for Toronto, where he hangs out with the rats and she falls in with the witches. After almost a decade buried in the Big Snowbank at the top of the world, it's no surprise that more than the ice cracks up in the spring of 1979 when the little family is forced to head back east to regroup and picks up the scent of their biological beginnings."--Page 4 of cover