Braiding Sweetgrass

impatient for the real thing.

change my clothes before my mother could think of a chore, and jump across the crick to go wandering in the goldenrod

red plaid book bag,

Behind our house were miles of old hay fields divided by stone walls, long abandoned from farming but not yet grown up to forest.

Not to exclude the maples, hemlocks, white pines, goldenrod, asters, violets, and mosses of upstate New York, but it was the wild strawberries, beneath dewy leaves on an almost-summer morning, who gave me my sense of the world, my place in it.

introduce himself simply as “a boy who was raised by a river.”

Chief of Arctic Village, a small village in northeastern Alaska—

THE GIFT OF STRAWBERRIES

Like an embryo provisioned and protected inside layers of stony shell, we have survived the lean years and flower together

elders the pecan