I began the memoir with a sense of who and what I am that I received sitting in my favorite place to be: in the maple tree. And when I wrote my memoir, I began it right then. With every passing year, I am more grateful for that time. I felt I was open to there having been a lot of time, and my people going back, and my world filled with brother/sister beings of kittens and dogs and the calf we were growing. This is like the stuff of my neural assemblies in my brain: just where the sun would be across summer as it moved south, as it set. And images from that time-the way the stream would come down through around a bend and all the little crawdads in it-still comes to me or wandering into a corner of a stand of the woods and seeing one of our horses disappear into it. He was excused from his draft duties of drawing, and I was allowed to ride and take care of him. So the quiet of it, the soil of it-There was quite a bit of boredom for a girl my age, which I now think was just fine, because I would wander a lot. And that journey up from Grand Central on the Empire Express by train to Buffalo-eight hours-was like approaching the Pearly Gates, getting out of prison. We didn’t have a car, so we would just wait till school was out and go up for the summer. So it was the same time I’d been taken to live in New York City, and I hated it: the noise, the grit, living high in an apartment. And it was very simple: no indoor plumbing in the first years, a horse-drawn plow, a few pigs, a dozen cows, chickens, horses, and so forth. It was in western New York a couple of miles north of the Erie Canal. JMI was nine when I started going for the summers to my grandfather’s farm.

Joanna macy memoir