Today’s fine literary selection from writer Laura Oliver (via The Talbot Spy, here) is called “What The River Remembers.” It resonates not only because my own homestead lies just upriver from her family’s roots in the sandy soil near the mouth of the Susquehanna where it empties into the Chesapeake Bay. Fact is, Latimore Creek may be much smaller than the mighty Susquehanna, but it’s the same water flowing through each. And that almost sacred sense of “place?” The notion that land and water both remember US, as much as we remember THEM? Well: Same, same.
Echoing her opening lines:
I grew up in a house my parents built by remodeling an old green barn and stable on three acres of pine forest and pastureland overlooking a river that has run for a millennium into the Chesapeake Bay….
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I grew up in a farmhouse built by my great-great grandfather just after the Civil War, a mere 4 generations removed from the time when our German ancestors emigrated from the Black Forest to Penn’s Woods.
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Fact is, we are all just passing through. If there is any enduring memory at all, it lies deep within the land itself, far under the soil. That’s my story and I’m sticking with it.