Environment

"Do you love me?"

There was an awkward silence for a moment. Then Father gave a little chuckle. "Jonas. You, of all people. Precision of language, please!"

"What do you mean?" Jonas asked. Amusement was not at all what he had anticipated.

"Your father means that you used a very generalized word, so meaningless that it's become almost obsolete," his mother explained carefully.

Jonas stared at them. Meaningless? He had never before felt anything as meaningful as the memory.

-Lois Lowry, The Giver
"To those who live by the land there must always come times of hardship, of fear and of hunger, even as there are years of plenty. This is one of the truths of our existence as those who live by the land know: that sometimes we eat and sometimes we starve. We live by our labours from one harvest to the next, there is no certain telling whether we shall be able to feed ourselves and our children, and if bad times are prolonged we know we must see the weak surrender their lives and this fact, too, is within our experience. In our lives there is no margin for misfortune."

-Kamala Markandaya, Nectar in a Sieve
"My maternal relatives, said to have originally immigrated from Italy, were all farmers. My earliest memories are imbued with the smell of dark, moist earth and the image of red coffee beans growing row after row on my great-grandfather's hillside farm."

-Judith Ortiz Dofer, Silent Dancing

"During its early years, I could leap over [Grandpa's], kick my bicycling legs over the top branch and scream my fool head off because I thought for sure I was flying. I ate fruit to keep my strength up, fuzzy peaches and branch-scuffed plums cooled in the refrigerator."

-Gary Soto, A Summer Life

"You see that fig tree over yonder, Cassie? Them other trees all around... that oak and walnut, they're a lot bigger and they take up more room and give so much shade they almost overshadow that little ole fig. But that fig tree's got roots that run deep, and it belongs in that yard as much as that oak and walnut. It keeps blooming, bearing good fruit year after year, knowing all the time it'll never get as big as them other trees.... Cassie girl, 'cause we're like it. We keep doing what we gotta, and we don't give up. We can't."

-Mildred D. Taylor, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry

 

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