Susan Kolodny

Three memories:

I was eight and on an outing in the mountains. I wandered away from the others into a grove of pines and looked up.  Sunlight filtered through the tree limbs and needles to the forest floor and lit the ferns growing there. The air smelled of resin and pine.  I sensed something, a presence I both feared and felt as one with, and I was sure it sensed me back.

My mother took me to see tidepools. As we looked into one, she said, “Describe it to me.” I looked again and noticed bits of seaweed swaying in that small world of water, the searching tentacles of two anemones, the slow, careful movements of a starfish. I remember that tidepool now, a lifetime later, because my mother invited me, at eight or nine, to put it into words

.

We third graders visited a small canyon to see what grew there. Glancing up the canyon wall, I noticed stalks of pampas grass waving and bending, and I wanted, suddenly, to write about them. Words seemed to come from a source outside myself and I sensed that that source and the grasses and the canyon knew things they might tell me if I listened, things essential to hear.