"Exactly, so I agreed, and looked back twenty years Where I had been a girl.
****
Now I live in Northern California, close enough to the coast to bicycle over in the evening. Salt comes in from the ocean and stirs up the long grass, draws my eyes back toward the redwoods beyond the low hills. It is not the landscape of my childhood but always brings that memory back to me. If I close my eyes I can remember a place where the water was almost sweet, standing brackish around sunken trees and the half-buried nests of wood storks. The approaching twilight brings back the smell of shallow water darkened by tannic acid, mud-stained tree roots, and glistening full-bellied frogs. Live oak, sycamore, and palmetto shelter fern and Spanish moss.
Satyr in the Woods, Wendy Morthorpe
55