The River We Remember

by William Kent Krueger

“It’s wherever you are when you die. The place takes you in, all that energy, all that life. The land feeds us, then we feed the land.”

“Everybody says there’s something wrong with your heart, son. Well, the truth is that none of us has a perfect heart. But you’ve got a good one, and that’s more important.” He smiled. “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Give your mother my best.”

OUR LIVES AND the lives of those we love merge to create a river whose current carries us forward from our beginning to our end. Because we are only one part of the whole, the river each of us remembers is different, and there are many versions of the stories we tell about the past. In all of them there is truth, and in all of them a good deal of innocent misremembering.

Stories are like those seeds we plant in the soil.

Some of the players are no longer part of it, but the story goes on. The river continues to flow.