Like fanning through a deck of cards, my mind flashes on the thousand chances, trivial to profound, that converged to re-create this place. Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere; I would be different. Where did the expression "a place in the sun" first come from? My rational thought process cling always to the idea of free will, random event; my blood, however, streams easily along a current of fate.

A Chinese poet many centuries ago noticed that to re-create something in words is like being alive twice.

I had the urge to examine my life in another culture and move beyond what I knew.

Splendid to arrive alone in a foreign country and feel the assault of difference. Here they are all along, busy with living; they don't talk or look like me. The rhythm of their day is entirely different; I am foreign.

As travel pushes me forward, memory keeps dragging me backward.

Sometimes the valley below is like a bowl filled up with fog. I can see hard green figs on two trees and pears on a tree just below me. A fine crop coming in. May summer last a hundred years.

When I was twelve, I started reading Eudora Welty, Thomas Wolfe, Flannery O'Connor, James Agee, and - do we dare breathe the name - William Faulkner.