“Don’t remember much,” she said again and the rocker moved lightly, as if the wind were blowing, which it wasn’t because it was October in Corvallis, in the middle of the Willamette Valley in that Garden of Eden laid out by God at some time in Western Oregon just for those who might go there to live and settle in, to settle in, plow the land, make farms and build houses, first mere cabins, then later frame houses with ship lap or other siding that made houses instead of cabins, though the first to arrive lived in cabins laid up from logs felled from trees that abounded in the valley and even more in the hills that stood about, the Coast Range to the west and the Cascade Range to the east, and the foothills that rose to each, the fir that stretched so far that some looking at it from the top of some mountain or ridge called it “The Green Desert,” then looked back at the valley where there was some prairie and the trees less abundant, though there were always enough to fell and raise into a cabin and as often as not, small enough and wide apart enough that the land could be plowed between the stumps, and sowed and reaped and made to provide a living (although meager at the beginning) for whoever had the temerity, the courage, the indomitable will, to cross the broad prairie to the east, climb the mountains also to the east, to endure the privations that came with crossing half a continent until crossing the last rise (though they stopped along the way at Fort Vancouver and Oregon City before setting out for the valley and finding that last rise) they could see the valley that was to be their home for there was no going back (though a few foolhardy folk did just that) and the homes of their children and their children’s children, for they would keep on coming even after the railroad was laid and they didn’t have to walk beside wagons rolling across prairies, climb mountains, slide into canyons just to get where they thought they wanted to go and finding hard work and deprivation too until they had endured long enough to become a part of the land, a part of the Garden that was Eden even if it was sometimes desolate and the winters long and the summers hot. And so she said again, “Don’t remember much.”
“I do remember some of Missouri, though I was only a little thing then. Two and a half years old when we left Missouri, so I’m told. We were slaves, you know. Slaves because Missouri was a slave state and everybody who was anybody owned slaves, and Boss, old Mr. Ford, was somebody back there, though he couldn’t have been too much somebody because he owed almost everybody in the county, don’t remember what county we come from but that doesn’t matter any at all, because that was back there and I don’t remember that much of back there, only what Daddy and Momma (or maybe it was Boss or Mrs. Boss, Lucinda, her name was) told me.
A gleam shone from a dark eye as she spoke, though there seemed to be no smile on her face at all, just a quiet stillness that went on and on like the stillness on a pond open to the sky on a day when the wind forgot to move and the waters lay smooth and still, though the skin of her face was wrinkled and scourged, if scourged could be applied to such as she who, for so far as could be inferred from her quiet voice, had never been scourged in any way at all by man or woman, only time, time that was irreversible and constant as the wind is irreversible and constant except for those times when He saw to it that the wind swirled about in ways that couldn’t be accounted for, at least then, and seemed to come from all directions at once, though it really came only from one direction, just changed that direction now and then to keep the men and women who lived with it aware that it couldn’t be counted on to do them much good, other than to cool their bodies in the heat of summer or dry the hay that lay in windrows for just that reason, or at least not to move at their command, puny and ephemeral as they were. The color of her skin was cordovan, long used cordovan that had no shine to it, but still showed that at sometime shine had been there though it was gone then and would never return for that was the way with growing old. Things changed, then stayed that way. Still the skin of her face did not seem to be dry and thin as so often happens to the aging. She had aged gracefully and without rancor.