When I want to rationalize my choice to raise my sons in the middle of nowhere, George Eliot always has the right words for me. But it's interesting to note that she had to live in London in order to be able to write so elegiacally.

from The Mill on the Floss

George Eliot

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it. . . . What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known, and loved because it is known? . . .

          These familiar flowers, these well-remembered bird notes, this sky, with its fitful brightness, these furrowed and grassy fields, each with a sort of personality given to it by the capricious hedgerows--such things as these are the mother tongue of our imagination, the language that is laden with all the subtle inextricable associations the fleeting hours of our childhood left behind them. Our delight in the sunshine on the deep-bladed grass to-day, might be no more than the faint perception of wearied souls, if it were not for the sunshine and the grass in the far-off years which still live in us, and transform our perception into love.

Don't be afraid to

Dawn Potter

lug a fat kid into rain, laugh when his mouth

flaps open like a chick's, stumble south

through weary dumps and truck-torn

roads, past autumn gnats who mourn

at Greaney's turkey farm, where redcoats

sling up roosters heel by heel, slit throats,

drain hearts, while maples twist an eye-

blue sky, a rush of wild geese swings by:

good enough day to kill or die,

perch shivering on a tailgate, fly.

[forthcoming in How the Crimes Happened (CavanKerry Press, 2010)]