In my Commonplace...

"I remember when I was a child at Coolin or Sagle or Talache, walking into the woods by myself and feeling the solitude around me build like electricity and pass through my body with a jolt that made my hair prickle. I remember kneeling by a creek that spilled and pooled among rocks and fallen trees with the unspeakabley tender growth of small trees already sprouting  from their backs, and thinking, there is only one things wrong here, which is my own presence, and that is the slightest imaginable intrusion--feeling that my solitude, my loneliness, made me almost acceptable in so sacred a place.

I remember the evenings at may grandparents' ranch, at Sagle, and how in the daytime we chased the barn cats and swung on the front gate and set off pitchy, bruising avalanches in the woodshed, and watched my grandmother scatter chicken feed from an apron with huge pockets in it, suffering the fractious contentment of town children rusticated. And then the cows came home and the wind came up and Venus burned through what little remained of the atmosphere and the dark and the emptiness stood over the old house like some unsought revelation."


 --Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books