None Of Us Seem To

The Strange Thing About My Life Is That I Came To America At About The Time When Racial Attitudes Were Changing. This Was A Big Help To Me. Also, The People Who Were Most Cruel To Me When I First Came To America Were Black Americans. They Made Absolute Fun Of The Way I Talked, The Way I Dressed. I Couldn't Dance. The People Who Were Most Kind And Loving To Me Were White People. So What Can One Make Of That? Perhaps It Was A Coincidence That All The People Who Found Me Strange Were Black And All The People Who Didn't Were White.

It Is True That I Am A Writer, And I Was Married To A Composer, And I Have Lived In A Small Village In New England, But My Children Are Not Named Heracles And Persephone, And My Daughter Doesn't Disappear Underground Every Six Months And Emerge In The Spring.

I Read About Writers Who Have Routines. They Write At Certain Times Of The Day. I Can't Do That. I Am Always Writing-but In My Head.

Most Of The Nations That Have Serious Gardening Cultures Have, Or Had, Empires. You Can't Have This Luxury Of Pleasure Without Somebody Paying For It. This Is Nice To Know. It's Nice To Know That When You Sit Down To Enjoy A Plate Of Strawberries, Somebody Got Paid Very Little So That You Could Have Your Strawberries. It Doesn't Mean The Strawberries Will Taste Different, But It's Nice To Enjoy Things Less Than We Do. We Enjoy Things Far Too Much, And It Leads To Incredible Pain And Suffering.

In A Way, A Garden Is The Most Useless Of Creations, The Most Slippery Of Creations: It Is Not Like A Painting Or A Piece Of Sculpture-it Won't Accrue Value As Time Goes On. Time Is Its Enemy' Time Passing Is Merely The Countdown For The Parting Between Garden And Gardener.