Prologue
The Thinking Bench

Sometimes when I'm sitting on my hillside bench, the rest of the world fades away. The falling leaf and scurrying lizard become more important than two-inch headlines, or even what I must do tomorrow.

I can lie on my bench—it's a foot longer than I am—and on warm days its granite coolness feels good against my back as I look up at tree lace against the sky.

However, most of the time I sit, content to listen and watch as a multitude of creatures fly and scamper, the wind bounces leaves on the opposite hillside, and ripple circles widen in the tiny pond where our creek pauses below me in the valley.

The bench is, as I am, a refugee from the big city called Tulsa, Oklahoma, just a hundred miles away. It was left at a demolition site there, and the workers were glad not to have to load one more heavy pile of stone. Perhaps people will wonder someday how a granite bench came to rest on an Ozarks hillside.

I needed the help of good friends to drag and tug it through the trees to the edge of the valley below our house. Visitors marvel that only four of us were able to move it here, and thinking back, I marvel too. The bench is, in every sense, a monument to friendship.

Back in Tulsa it is too easy to ignore everything but the necessities of a busy life. Time to commune with nature is not easily won there, no matter how great the reward. People in big cities are sometimes too far from their bond with the earth.

In the city the weight of concrete, metal, and glass makes the natural world difficult to find. Trees and flowers must be planned for, clouds are noticed most when a storm is forecast, and bugs and growing grass are often more annoyance than pleasure.

Here on my bench everything easily fades away except the cloud and the tree and the flower. Beetles and spiders are marvelous neighbors working at living, and the grass, tall and unbothered, nods in the breeze.

Even I can fade away here. After I sit quietly for a few minutes, the chipmunks and squirrels ignore me as they move about, doing their gathering and storing. Here, they are the ones who hurry, but I don't feel out of place in this landscape full of creatures at work. I am at work too, though busy with thought and not with hands and feet. Here, the big world has become my little world to think and dream about.

When I read about a president who is away at a mountain camp, a prime minister who has gone fishing, or some other official who visits the seashore, I am always glad that they vacation.

I hope that they are taking time to let this natural world, with its understandable sequence of happenings, speak as it always does.

Then they must surely know, as I do sitting here on my bench, what is most important about our life on this beautiful planet, Earth.

Chapter I
A Place on This Earth

It didn't happen because we were planning an escape. We didn't know we needed one.

I did believe what Grandpa told me. He said it was important to love the land. To prove it, he bought a farm.

Most people in the city would have said Grandpa was poor, at least if you were counting money. I noticed, though, that his chickens had a bigger yard to run in than his city grandchildren did. On Grandpa's farm there were pastures, woods, and a creek. Playing at the farm on weekends, I began to think like Grandpa: "The land is wealth."

When I was five, my father dug up part of our backyard and planted a vegetable garden. I followed behind him in the freshly turned dirt and helped push bean sees out of sight. A few days later I saw the bent stems of bean sprouts backing up out of the ground, pulling casings and embryo leaves behind them. Even in the city the earth was full of miracles.

I think the real reason it happened, though, is that John and I are dreamers. We have both known that for a long time.

When we were first married, many people were talking about going back to the land. John and I read books about homesteading. The idea of living in the country sounded romantic, but homesteading made us think of cutting firewood with an ax and milking goats. Neither of us wanted to milk goats, and we were trained for city jobs. How could we live in the country?

I compromised. We dug up a square in the backyard and I planted tomatoes. My few tomato plants, protected and fed by chemicals in bottles, eventually expanded to two hundred square feet of organic garden with all kinds of vegetables growing in manure and compost.

One summer when vacationtime came, John and I drove east. We were looking forward to L. L. Bean and all the lobster we could eat. We found a log cabin on the coast of Maine, and sat on its porch dressed in jeans and T-shirts, looking out at acres of forest and a patch of blueberries. As we sat there we began talking about owning a log cabin and living in it, and about what kind of jobs we might find. Two weeks later we drove two thousand miles so we could put on our oxford-cloth shirts and go back to work in the city.

And we kept doing that. Every summer during vacation we found a remote spot, and before we had been there a week we were pretending we belonged. We always talked about buying land, and building a cabin, and moving. We talked about jobs we might find. Then we went back to Tulsa, our city in the center of the United States, and to the same jobs we had returned to the year before, and the year before that, and...

When I think about it now, the three weeks each summer when we were pretending are clearer and more real to me than any of the other forty-nine weeks of the year ever were.

One April we went on a weekend camping trip in the Ozarks highlands, one hundred twenty-five miles from our home city.

We came to the campground after dark on Friday. In the morning we woke up in a grove of dogwood trees in full bloom. We sat together in the open door of our van and looked out at acres of dogwood blossoms, and we began talking about buying land, and about building a cabin, and about what kind of jobs we might find. When we went back to work on Monday we were still only one hundred twenty-five miles from the dogwood grove.

Four weeks later, an Ozarks real estate agent showed us the tree-covered hillside that tilted down into a hollow holding a spring and a tiny creek. The hollow was filled with dogwood trees.

The following Saturday we were signing papers at the bank.

On the first of June our place had a name. We called it Spring Hollow.

Now it was time to stop dreaming. We still had city jobs and a home and garden in the city. Spring Hollow was our future. The land was ours; it could wait. We could now tend to business in the city without dreaming.

Until Friday.

On Fridays, most city dwellers finish planning weekend activities. There is housecleaning, and maybe yard work. In a city full of working people, the most pleasurable diversions take place on weekends, and city newspapers have long lists of things to see and do.

On the Saturday after we bought Spring Hollow, John and I didn't discuss weekend plans. We got out the picnic basket and made lunch. Before nine A.M. we were in our old van, heading for the Ozarks highlands.