Introduction, by Charles Kuralt, Page 4 of 4

All my memories of that farm are happy ones. I was a child. At night, in the dark, I wondered at the universe of brilliant stars overhead; only a few times since, in other places devoid of artificial light, have I seen the stars so vividly. By day, I had a corncrib for rolling around in, and a woodpile for making imaginary forts against Indian attacks, a hayloft for hiding out, and a sycamore tree for climbing. There were dangers to watch out for, too -- sandspurs in the grass and spiders in the barn. There was even a snake in the apple orchard, which made the place, almost literally, a kind of Eden.

I would willingly go back to that place and time if I could be a child again. But I realize I would not wish it on any adult. For my grandparents, it was a place of unending and back-breaking physical labor, relieved only by my grandmother's mental exertions as a school teacher. Leisure was a concept alien to them both, and they could have no hope for an easier future. I see now that they must have spent their lives in a state of near exhaustion, turning to despair as illness struck their family, and death. My mother was one of three sisters. The other two died in their twenties of a form of tuberculosis they would not contract today, and which, if they did, they would easily be cured.

The odyssey of science arrived late on that farm, too late to provide my grandmother with so much as a dishwasher or vacuum cleaner, too late to erase my grandfather's burden with a chainsaw or a tractor. After my grandfather's death (also of tuberculosis) my grandmother left the farm to move in with us in a city far across the state. She lived long enough to enjoy reading for pleasure, as she had last been able to do as a child growing up in the late nineteenth century. Before she died, she came to take for granted the assorted miracles of the twentieth century: she traveled on a jet plane and discovered a couple of favorite television programs.

Once, we went back to see if we could find the farm. We could not. The dirt road that passed the house had become a paved four-lane boulevard. Among the fast-food restaurants and strip malls, we could not guess where my father had once plowed his fields, or the old sycamores had once shaded the old house.

I was overcome by nostalgia for the scene of my childhood, and dismay at what had become of it. I don't think grandmother felt that way.

"Well," she said, "that's progress for you."

My grandmother did not have an ironic turn of mind. She and I looked at the suburban jumble and saw different things. I saw asphalt and traffic and garish advertising signs. She saw ease and convenience. I think she compared modern life along that road to the life she had lived there, and meant what she said:

"That's progress."

-- Charles Kuralt June 1997

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Foreword by Charles Osgood

Excerpt from Chapter One, "Mysteries of the Universe"