“One summer morning when I was a child I lay on the sand after swimming in the small lake in the park. The sun beat down … it was almost noon. The water shone like steel, motionless except for the feathery curl behind a distant swimmer. From my position I was looking at a rectangle brightly lit, actually glaring at me, with sun, sand, water, a little pavilion, a few solitary people in fixed attitudes, and around it all a border of dark, rounded oak trees, like the engraved thunderclouds surrounding illustrations in the Bible. Ever since I had begun taking painting lessons, I had made small frames with my fingers, to look out at everything.”
—Eudora Welty, from “A Memory” in A Curtain of Green and Other Stories (Mariner Books, 1979)
