Small Wonder by Barbara Kingsolver Read Free Book Online Page A

deranged I may be, but I know my place, and sometimes I go for days with no worldly exchanges beyond my walk to the mailbox and a regular evening visit on our favorite neighbor’s porch swing. Otherwise I’m content to listen for the communiqués of pileated woodpeckers, who stay hidden deep in the woods but hammer elaborately back and forth on their hollow trees like the talking drummers of Africa. Sometimes I stand on the porch and just stare, transfixed, at a mountainside that offers up more shades of green than a dictionary has words. Or else I step out with a hand trowel to tend the few relics of Mrs. Smyth’s garden that have survived her: a June apple, a straggling, etiolated choir of Augustlilies nearly shaded out by the encroaching woods, and one heroic wisteria that has climbed hundreds of feet into the trees. I try to imagine the life of this woman who grew corn on a steeper slope than most people would be willing to climb on foot, and who still, at day’s end, needed to plant her August lilies.
    I take walks in the woods, I hang out our laundry, I read stories to my younger child, I hike down the hollow to a sunnier spot where I look after the garden that feeds us. And most of all, I write. I work in a rocking chair on the porch, or at a small blue desk facing the window. I write a good deal by hand, on paper, which—I somehow can’t ever forget—is made from the macerated hearts of fallen trees.
    The rest of the year, from school’s opening day in autumn till its joyful release in May, I work at a computer on a broad oak desk by a different window, where the view is very different but also remarkable. In this house, which my predecessors constructed not from trees (which are scarce in the desert Southwest) but of sun-baked mud (which is not), we nestle into what’s called in this region a bosque— that is, a narrow riparian woodland stitched like a green ribbon through the pink and tan quilt of the Arizona desert. The dominant trees are mesquite and cottonwood, with their contrasting personalities: the former swarthy with a Napoleonic stature and confidence, the latter tall and apprehensive, trembling at the first rumor of wind. Along with Mexican elder, buttonwillow, and bamboo, the mesquites and cottonwoods grow densely along a creek, creating a shady green glen that is stretched long and thin. Picture the rich Nile valley crossing the Saharan sands, and you will understand the fecundity of this place. Picture the air hose connecting a diver’s lips to the oxygen tank, and you will begin to grasp the urgency. A riparian woodland, if it remains unbroken, provides a corridor through which a horde of fierce or delicate creatures may prowl, flutter, swim, or hop from the mountains down through the desert and back again. Many thatfollow this path—willow flycatchers, Apache trout—can live nowhere else on earth. An ill-placed dam, well, ranch, or subdivision could permanently end the existence of their kind.
    I tread lightly here, with my heart in my throat, like a kid who’s stumbled onto the great forbidden presence (maybe sex, maybe an orchestra rehearsal) of a more mature world. If I breathe, they’ll know I’m here. From the window of my study I bear witness to a small, tunnelish clearing in the woods, shaded by overarching mesquite boughs and carpeted with wildflowers. Looming over this intimate foreground are mountains whose purple crowns rise to an altitude of nine thousand feet above the Tucson basin. In midwinter they often wear snow on their heads. In fall and early spring, blue-gray storms draw up into their canyons, throwing parts of the strange topography into high relief. Nearer at hand, deer and jackrabbits and javelina halt briefly to browse my clearing, then amble on up the corridor of forest. On insomniac nights I huddle in the small glow of my desk lamp, sometimes pausing the clicking of my keys to listen for great horned owls out