Children ten years old wake up and find themselves here, discover themselves to have been here all along; is this sad? They wake like sleepwalkers, in full stride; they wake like people brought back from cardiac arrest or from drowning: in medias res, surrounded by familiar people and objects, equipped with a hundred skills. They know the neighborhood, they can read and write English, they are old hands at the commonplace mysteries and yet they feel themselves to have just stepped off the boat, just converged with their bodies, just flown down from a trance, to lodge in an eerily familiar life already well under way.

I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world and forgot them, and discovered them again. I woke at intervals until, by that September when father went down the river, the intervals of waking tipped the scales and I was more often awake than not. I noticed this process of waking and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again.

~From Annie Dillard's, An American Childhood

I first read Ms. Dillard freshman year of high school. Doing so, changed me. Her words have been as profound to me as any of the storied novelists - any of the Faulkners, O’Connors and Austens. Every few years, I find, I return to her writing. To the old dog eared copies of her works that line my bookshelves. I re-read and skim the margin notes made by my high school self and see where I first picked up the words so dear to me today. Words like, “littered,” “ornament” and “mistook.”