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The landscapes of our youths create us, and we carry them within us, storied by all they gave and stole, in who we become.
But I’ve come to understand how the exceptional lurks beneath the ordinary, like the deep and mysterious world beneath the surface of the sea.
love is a private matter, to be nurtured, and even mourned, between two beings alone. It belongs to them and no one else, like a secret treasure, like a private poem.
He rarely looked to the future, and to the past even less, but gathered up the current moment in both hands to admire its particulars, with no apology and no sense it should be otherwise.
Then he stood and eyed me so long I thought I’d melt like chocolate in the last rays of sun reaching low across the porch.
Try as we might to convince ourselves otherwise, the moments of our becoming cannot be carefully plucked like the ripest and most satisfying peach from the bough. In the endless stumble toward ourselves, we harvest the crop we are given.
he was not handsome in a Clark Gable It Happened One Night kind of way but irresistible in a Fred Astaire Swing Time kind of way.
I was a girl alone in a house of men, quickly becoming a woman. It was like blossoming in a bank of snow.
I had picked peaches my entire life. It came as naturally to me as breath.
“I’ll go as a river,” said Wil. “My grandfather always told me that it’s the only way.”
Just as a single rainstorm can erode the banks and change the course of a river, so can a single circumstance of a girl’s life erase who she was before.
“Go as a river,” I whispered to her, as Wil might have done, and, I swear, I felt her spirit rise.
The old house smelled like only old houses do, like stories, like decades of buttery skillet breakfasts and black coffee and dripping faucets, like family and life and aging wood.
That length of the great river told my story. I felt equal parts love and anguish for its winding path, and awe that it had followed me here.
Light slants differently through an autumn window than at any other time of year.
Part of me wanted to take it all back, tuck my story deep into the solid earth where it had rested like a fossil all these years.
“A woman is more than a vessel meant to carry babies and grief.”
against obstacle was not my whole story. For, like the river, I had also gathered along the way all the tiny pieces connecting me to everything else, and doing this had delivered me here, with two fists of forest soil in my palms and a heart still learning to be unafraid of itself.
I wondered at the sense of it all—this journey I have called my life, so like this drowned river that keeps being a river even as it is forced to be a lake, moving forward against obstacle and dam, continuing to flow with all it has gathered because it knows no other way.
