Fresh garden fruits and vegetables and colorful swaths of blooms are only part of the impulse for the gardener to dig in the dirt. The temptations and rewards are as individual as the gardener. I’ve confessed to a collector’s impulse (hey! I did NOT say “a hoarder’s impulse”), which moves me to acquire many—indeed, sometimes way too many—species and varieties of a plant type in order to experience with my own hands its range of peculiarities, requirements and rewards. It provides an avenue for pursuing new knowledge and experience, and frequently introduces us to new people with similar pursuits and impulses.

Though it has existed since the beginning of time, this particular word is way too prevalent these days. It’s likely touched your life in some way that you may – or may not – be aware of. The word is “loss.” A number of losses that are obvious can result in feelings of grief, overwhelming sadness, and physical maladies. They may even spark major life changes. Others are not necessarily recognized as such and though insidious, can evoke the same responses. 

“This is a work of fiction. However, with a single exception (and as outrageous as some of them may sound) all the incidents described here really happened”… Thus begins the Author’s Note introducing The Chronicles of Willow Point, a new novel by Beaufort’s E.T. Baysden. The following is an excerpt from that novel.

“By whom or by what had I been impelled to disrupt the normal course of my existence?” the globe-trotting French anthropologist Clause Lévi-Strauss asked in his 1955 memoir, Tristes Tropiques.  I asked myself the same question every few days over a ten-month period in the mid-1970s when I was trekking around a small chunk of West Africa, cassette recorder in hand, seeking professional story-tellers (generically, griots) and village elders to recite what they knew of family, village, or state history.