"The Memory Place" by Barbara Kingsolverpublished in High Tide in TusconThis is the kind of April morning, no other month can touch: a tinted print water worldcolor pastels of redbud, dogtooth violet, and gentle rain. The trees are beginning toshrug off winter; the dark, leggy maple woods are shot through with gleamingconstellations of white dogwood blossoms. The road winds through deep forest nearCumberland Falls, Kentucky, carrying us across the Cumberland Plateau toward HorseLick Creek. Camille is quiet beside me in the front seat, until at last she sighs and says,with a child's poetic logic, "This reminds me of the place I always like to think about." Me too, I tell her. It's the exact truth. I grew up roaming none hollows likeThese, though they were more hemmed-in, keeping their secrets between the wide-opencattle pastures and tobacco fields of Nicholas County, Kentucky. My brother and sisterand I would hoist cane fishing poles over our shoulders, as if we intended to makeourselves useful, and head out to spend a Saturday doing nothing of the kind. Wehaunted places we called the Crawdad Creek, the Downy Woods (for downy woodpeckersand also for milkweed fluff), and-we'd, because once thrillingly found big bones there-Dead Horse Draw. We caught crawfish with nothing but patience and our hands, boiledthem with wild onions over a campfire, and ate them and declared them the best food onEarth. We collected banana-scented-paw paw fruits, and were tempted by fleshy, fawncoloredmushrooms but left those alone. We watched the birds whose names we didn't knowbuild nests in trees whose names we generally did. We witnessed the unfurling ofHickory and oak and maple leaves in the springtime, so tender as to appear nearly edible;We collected them and pressed them with a hot iron under waxed paper when theyblushed and dropped in the fall. Then we waited again for spring, even more impatientlythan we waited for Christmas, because its gifts were more abundant, needed nobatteries, and somehow seemed more exclusively ours. I can't imagine that anydiscovery I ever make, in the rest of my life, will give me the same electric thrill I feltWhen I first found little righteous Jack in his crimson-curtained pulpit poking up fromthe base of a rotted log. These were the adventures of my childhood: tame, I guess, by the standardsestablished by Mowgli the Jungle Boy or even Laura Ingalls Wilder. Nevertheless, it wasthe experience of nature, with its powerful lessons in static and predictablesurprise. Much of what I know about life, and almost everything I believe about the wayI want to live, was well-formed in those woods. In times of acute worry or insomnia orphysical pain, when I close my eyes and bring to mind the place I always like to thinkabout, it looks like the woods in Kentucky
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