A Little West of Eden

[FlowerChild]

Steinbeck wrote of the Salinas Valley, and you know it reminds me a lot of the Panhandle; in the good years we tended to forget the bad and in the bad years the good, wet, windy years were a figment of the dreamer's imagination. 

If you were intimate with that wide, flat, lonely country you would know its crevices, those canyons that would sneak up on you and drop the bottom out of the ground, the beauty of a spring morning where the sun has nothing to hide its face behind, and the silent progress of cattle seen but not heard miles away. 

There were gifts of that land, the bermuda grass, tough and strong and hardy as the cattle from over the southern border who ate it, the wide shallow dirt tanks that filled up when it rained, saving the cowboy days upon days of hauling water, and the wind, both a curse and a blessing to all who lived there. 

The people of that land, who cannot imagine life beyond it, who told my father when he said he was pulling up his roots to fly that it was dry for 20 miles around there so where was he going to go?

There are girls barely older than me having babies, and going to community college and here I am, years and miles and a whole world away it seems to me, the girl who barely escaped.

The Salinas Valley sounds a lot like the Panhandle, only we're a little West of Eden I think. 

[Cita]

Oh, my dear.  Oh, my dear.  Strongly worded.  Good sense of place. And excellent but surprising wrap.  

[Brad Rose]

I agree with Jamie. This is really very very good. It evokes the power of place extremely well. As a native Californian, now a long time Easterner, I've been thinking about the power of place, the power that places exercise on our biographies and our writing. I just listened to JJ Grey and Mofro whose music is evidently deeply rooted in the land of Northern Florida, and it seems like this sense of place is a pretty amazing thing--even if its seems a bit anachronistic in this era of the internet and globalism. I think however, that all biography is local (to paraphrase the late Tip O'Neil's statement about politics. I think we are all creatures of place, or at least "places." Dirtfloor Craka http://youtu.be/bIEeOHe0bmw

[Jeanette Cheezum]

Beautiful job on this vivid essay of a place I'll never see.

[Jamie Hogan]

"those canyons that would sneak up on you and drop the bottom out of the ground." That is simply fantastic phrasing. I love the melancholy of this.

[Stephen Torelli]

John Steinbeck, champion of the poor. Nice account!