Susan Benson 
My Little Blue Branch, A Texas Memoir 

In her memoir, My Little Blue Branch, Susan Perry Benson describes the pleasures, perils, and pitfalls of owning a small ranch in the Texas Hill Country. Written over a twenty-year period, her essay collection unfolds with the idyllic childhood weekends at the Blue Branch along with bonds sometimes stretched thin. Her narrative also touches on the lives of her grandparents who settled there in the early 1930’s, her mother’s struggle with clinical depression and sudden death at the ranch to her father’s declining health and managing elder care from a thousand miles away. While it’s a sober look at death and aging, the narrative is laced with humor throughout.

Though marriage took her to a tobacco farm in North Carolina, Susan Perry Benson never forgot her Texas roots. In her memoir, My Little Blue Branch, she relives the halcyon days of her youth at the Blue Branch, the family ranch in central Texas. Through oral history, old letters and personal experiences, her essay collection is told with warmth, empathy and humor, and explores the peaks and valleys of lives well lived despite some hardships along the way.