ville, back toward the end of . A chance viewing of the movie version
of Rawlings’sThe Yearlingand a rereading of the novel a little later, then a
road trip down to the Okefenokee and on to Cross Creek, fully loosed the
obsession. Later, two fortuitously timed conferences, at Mississippi State
University and the University of Mississippi, gave me opportunity to present
early, compressed versions of the epilogue and Chapter in this book. The
first has been published, the second is forthcoming, and I thank Connie
Lester and Charles Reagan Wilson, generous hosts at Starkville and Oxford,
for permission to include now-expanded forms here. Two other generous
friends, Tim Silver and Constance Pierce, read and marked up an early ver-
sion of the manuscript to my considerable benefit. Then Pierce read the
whole again. Herself a writer of criticism, fiction, and poetry, she has also
been my boonest companion in agro- and ecotourism through much of the
United States and substantial parts of several other countries, not to men-
tion principal landscapist and sister gardener on our successive plots in
Indiana, Ohio, and Florida. She has ever been my best reader.
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