Remembering the Old Home Place
My old home places were all in the mountains. My childhood was spent in the Southern Tier of New York State, in the rolling hill-region called the Allegheny Plateau. I grew up in a gaunt farmhouse that housed a treasure - a home library of oddly assorted volumes. Narrow books of Poe and Longfellow, volumes of Stevenson, Emerson, Shakespeare. During the summers I ran happily wild on our seven acres, but in the winter I read, and can see how those books influenced my later writing – stories in which the homely and comforting were permeated by the strange and troubling. I can see the books in that dim room, among the old furniture and stored clothing. Thomas Hardy – Tess of the d’Urbervilles , with the dairylands so like my own home region, but overlying ancient and bloody history. Gene Stratton’s A Girl of the Limberlost , with a solitary teenager lured by the swamp and its exotic creatures, learning also about poverty and madness and violence. Hawthorne’s gloomy...