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A burying ground was the true mark of an established town.
In time the apples that came from these trees, the same fruit that had tempted Adam and Eve, came to be called the Blackwell Look-No-Further.
John Chapman,
aka Johnny Appleseed
He eschewed things made by man and yearned for a more godly and natural state. He believed that every creature belonged to God equally, a product of divine love and wisdom. Man and beast, insect and tree, all of it reflected the face of the Maker.
Swedenborg,
The divine was in every human, as it was in him. The closer he was to the natural world, the closer to heaven.
she felt an odd calm spirit here in the wilderness.
“I fear myself more than I fear any bear,”
From then on when she thought of anguish, Mattie would think of the way he had dipped his head to glance away, as if the world was much too vast and wide, and the only thing contained within it was loneliness.
People thought they were hearing coyotes, or one of the dozens of panthers that remained in the woods, but it was my mother, standing in the yard, crying.
At some point, as twilight was falling, my mother would call my name and we would go down to the cellar the way some people do in towns where there are tornados, except in our house my father was the tornado.
She said she wanted a man like that, someone who understood sorrow, not someone who caused it.
He said he himself had always preferred pie to cake and could eat one in its entirety at one sitting, just as I had done.
People didn’t notice. They didn’t look him in the eye. They were gone before that.
Plus the bear was so beautiful the boy was glad not to have run him over. A car was just a car.
The girls who never included Carla were turned into sluts, kleptomaniacs, and runaways. It wasn’t payback, not really. They were more interesting that way.
