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The Story of Opal: The Journal of an Understanding Heart

Chapter 48: POSTSCRIPT
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About This Book

A reconstructed childhood journal chronicles a young girl's life spent moving among lumber camps and in rural woods, where she forms intimate bonds with animals, plants, and seasonal phenomena. Entries combine keen natural observation, fanciful fairy-tale meditations, and candid records of loss and fostered family life. The manuscript survives only as thousands of pieced-together scraps, written in cramped capitals that gradually give way to a more adult hand and irregular spelling. The published selection presents the diarist's early years in vivid, childlike language that alternates wonder, solitude, and resilient affection for the natural world.

Now Brave Horatius and me and Thomas Chatterton Jupiter Zeus are going to prayers in the cathedral. The great pine tree is saying a poem, and there is a song in the tree-tops.

POSTSCRIPT

After this I lived in a great many other lumber camps, and there were new people and new animal friends and new nurseries and other cathedrals. I studied in the woods and wrote down what I saw and heard. In the spring of 1918 I went from Oregon to Southern California, to do more research work in natural science, earning my way by teaching nature classes. In the winter of 1918 I published my first nature-book, paying for it by taking orders for it in advance.

In the summer of 1919 I came East, hoping to be able to get another nature-book published. In my going to see publishers, I came to the editor of the Atlantic. While I was telling the editor about this book, he asked me if I never kept a diary, and this is the answer.

After the seventh year and far on into other years I continued the diary; but perhaps some other time the story of all these things will be pieced together and made into another book.