Sweet childish days, that were as long, As twenty days are now.

I am suddenly comsumed by nostalgia for the little girl who was me, who loved the fields and believed in God, who spent winter days home sick from school reading Nancy Drew and sucking menthol cough drops, who could keep a secret.

While Pickstown may not be what it once was, it still is framed by the natural beauty of the ancient river, the sweep of the Great Plains, and the long, unbroken shoreline of the lake behind the dam. It gave me a 19th-century childhood in a modern mid-20th-century town, and for that I will always be grateful.

There is a town in north Ontario,_x000D_ _x000D_ With dream comfort memory to spare,_x000D_ _x000D_ And in my mind_x000D_ _x000D_ I still need a place to go,_x000D_ _x000D_ All my changes were there._x000D_ _x000D_ _x000D_ Blue, blue windows behind the stars,_x000D_ _x000D_ Yellow moon on the rise,_x000D_ _x000D_ Big birds flying across the sky,_x000D_ _x000D_ Throwing shadows on our eyes.

The dotted line my father's ashplant made On Sandymount Strand Is something else the tide won't wash away.

When the fiddle had stopped singing Laura called out softly, "What are days of auld lang syne, Pa?" "They are the days of a long time ago, Laura," Pa said. "Go to sleep, now." But Laura lay awake a little while, listening to Pa's fiddle softly playing and to the lonely sound of the wind in the Big Woods,… She was glad that the cozy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.