The World is Planted in Pennies
The World is Planted in Pennies:
“When I was six or seven years old, growing up in Pittsburgh, I used to take a precious penny of my own and hide it for someone else to find. It was a curious compulsion; sadly, I’ve never been seized by it since. For some reason I always “hid” the penny along the same stretch of sidewalk up the…
I recognized the passage as soon as I started reading it. This was the first “grown up” book I read. I was visiting my mom on summer vacation; she always had a bookcase full of interesting books. On a whim one day I pulled it out and started reading, and it completely upended my world that a book could be like that. I recognized Dillard’s voice — she felt like me, the way she looked at the world, the lonely way she moved through it, amazed by frogs and trees and a mockingbird falling from a building without opening its wings. I was probably 9 or 10. I’m sure a lot of it went over my head. But I remember spending days lost in its pages, and this post took me back, the way a smell can take you back, the memory suddenly real, in my mom’s house, sprawling on the easy chair’s big footstool in the nook off the kitchen, reading while she made dinner, the chaparral outside stretching east from Crest Drive to Lomas Santa Fe and Leucadia and beyond, dirt roads and sandstone and curious round pebbles, roadrunners and white-tailed kites and coyotes, gone now, lost to diabetes and tract housing, to time.
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