During the Reign of the Queen of Persia by Joan Chase
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When we lived there, on the farm which was right on the edge of the city limits, we thought it the very center of the world, and green and golden land and wooded hollows which began two blocks over from the railroad loop and then rolled off to obscurity formed a natural barrier to the rest of existence, which we dismissed as the outer darkness. (2)

Often she'd (Aunt Libby) warned us that moments of happiness hang like pearls on the finest silken thread, certain to be snapped, the pearls scattered away. (36)

Before we got into the house there was the smell of coffee coming onto the porch. Grandad's straw-and-manure-crusted boots were set beside the fir-board cupboards and the shelves that overflowed with so much junk nobody could find anything. (62)

'Gram's baking pies,' we sang as we raced up the stairs to change, with still a full day ahead, a day holding everything we could ever want. (62)

Peaceable, we waited on the porch in the dappling noontime. In the Mason jars stacked up dusty and fly-specked on the side shelves, in the broken-webbed snowshoes hung there, the heap of rusty hinged traps waiting this long time to be oiled and set to catch something in the night, was the visible imprint of the past we were rooted in. (70)



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