The field is flattened like a book too long left open. There is the newly painted white crease of the spine, there the muddy dog-eared corner. The boys wait in their lines. The shouts are just beginning.

Never was there such a ship. From the marshes, where it rests parallel to the river, the hull rises above the advancing crowd like a black, iron cliff. It forms an escarpment that blocks the people's view

A seven year drouth plagued East Texas in the ’50s. The rich, black, river bottom land crusted and cracked like a near-emptied paint can. Boll weevils scourged the cotton fields year after year and the farmers grew dry and tired and hopeless with the land.

My brother is a horticulturist. From where nobody knows. We are a family of merchants, shopkeepers, purveyors of service; none of us is concerned with growth. But my brother keeps two hundred healthy

Mrs. Belway walked to the door of the boys’ washroom, started to go in, and thought better of it. 

“Willie?” she called. “Are you in there, Willie?”  

Willie said he was. He was running the water in the basin. 

The Services of Security of “Santa Isabella,” that parched and brutalized island satrapy, are notoriously efficient. But Manuel Andrada, who came to me in Boston, was the exception to this cold, deathly rule. He had known only failure and frustration since leaving home on a mission for which he was the least qualified, the most unsecretive “special agent” conceivable. 

One afternoon during the rainy and cold summer of 1977, I set out with my son Joen in a white painted, but very leaky motorboat, out of Amanningen at Flodhall, through Virsbo Lock, where the big trucks rumble over the bridge and where the children splash in the sluice basin,

The dead came to her summons so promptly, even Mrs. Atabal questioned the nature of her calling. Do you suppose .. .I am a fake? she asked herself in the kitchen, bracing her weight, her considerable

We drove for hours; whistling over a ribbon of tarmac mea­ suring the perpetual embrace of the shore and the sea, bounded by a fretwork of undulating coconut trees, pure un­ adorned forms framing the seascape into a kaleidoscope of bluish jewels 

On dairy cream nowadays, they write “Best if used before . . .” Well, honey, my last safe-fresh year was, oh, around nineteen and fifty-one.