Whether our relationship is strained or easy, hostile or amiable, we need [our mother] if only in memory or fantasy, to conjugate ...our history, validate our femaleness, and guide our way. We need to know she's there if we stumble, to love us no matter what, to nurture the child that resides within us even now without infantalizing us.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Tell me of the height of the mountains of the moon, or of the diameter of space, and I may believe you, but of the secret history ...of the Almighty, and I shall pronounce thee mad.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
After this rough walking in the dark woods it was an agreeable change to glide down the rapid river in the canoe once more.... It ...was very exhilarating, and the perfection of traveling, quite unlike floating on our dead Concord River, the coasting down this inclined mirror, which was now and then gently winding, down a mountain, indeed, between two evergreen forests, edged with lofty dead white pines, sometimes slanted half-way over the stream, and destined soon to bridge it. I saw some monsters there, nearly destitute of branches, and scarcely diminishing in diameter for eighty or ninety feet.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Getting up some time after midnight to collect the scattered brands together, while my companions were sound asleep, I observed, p...artly in the fire, which had ceased to blaze, a perfectly regular elliptical ring of light, about five inches in its shortest diameter, six or seven in its longer, and from one eighth to one quarter of an inch wide. It was fully as bright as the fire, but not reddish or scarlet, like a coal, but a white and slumbering light, like the glow-worm's. I could tell it from the fire only by its whiteness. I saw at once that it must be phosphorescent wood, which I had so often heard of, but never chanced to see. Putting my finger on it, with a little hesitation, I found that it was a piece of dead moose-wood (Acer striatum).... Using my knife, I discovered that the light proceeded from that portion of the sap-wood immediately under the bark, and thus presented a regular ring at the end, which, indeed, appeared raised above the level of the wood, and when I pared off the bark and cut into the sap, it was all aglow along the log.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We soon after saw a splendid yellow lily (Lilium canadense) by the shore, which I plucked. It was six feet high, and had twelve fl...owers, in two whorls, forming a pyramid, such as I have seen in Concord. We afterward saw many more thus tall along this stream, and also still more numerous on the East Branch, and, on the latter, one which I thought approached yet nearer to the Lilium superbum. The Indian asked what we called it, and said that the "loots" (roots) were good for soup, that is, to cook with meat, to thicken it, taking the place of flower. They get them in the fall. I dug some, and found a mass of bulbs pretty deep in the earth, two inches in diameter, looking, and even tasting, somewhat like raw green corn on the ear.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »