I ran up against my ignorance when as an undergraduate student I enrolled in Philosophy 101, read a sentence in my first assignment, and said to myself, "I know the meaning of that word and that word and that word, but in this sentence, all three of those words are in a row, and I have no idea what they mean when they're in a row." After a bit, I realized that I didn't know what those three words really meant. I had the same realization when I read the words "age gracefully" in the title of Scoblic's book.

Lost Without the River: A Memoir by Barbara Hoffbeck Scoblic. Published by She Writes Press. Barbara Hoffbeck grew up during the Great Depression on a small dairy farm outside Big…