EXCERPT:
I was sick once, as a child. And after, as the snow was beginning to melt, my mother promised to take me to the country. One cold morning, we got lost on a mountain road that snaked up through cliffs into the heart of the sierra. It was like something someone had dreamed.
We arrived in a different world. Or that was what I thought of the valley, of that mud-filled town between the mountains. We stayed in a house that seemed on its last legs, where in order to go up the staircase—dark, warped, creaking—I had to hold myself up with both palms splayed open against the walls. There was a light at the top, and I was a child; I had to reach it.
I remember the smell of hay and manure, the dreadful black cows, the horses’ yellowed manes, and the thick breath of the barn. I remember a woman shrouded in shadow as she fed the chickens, calling them in with a gruff word, leaning against a wooden door, grains hiding in the deep creases of her dirty hand. And I remember, farther off, under the sun, on the shore of the canal, a half-naked boy hitting a rock against an empty can.
But all of these, and the bridge in the town square, and the boy under the eaves, and the breathless river, are just shreds of memory buffeted by the passage of time. The thing that still pulses in me is that life out in the fields, under the sky, on the earth.
