The Ohio

Scott Russell Sanders, you are wonderful and your prose is inspiring. This from an essay called "The Force of Moving Water" about the Ohio River specifically and about our need for rivers and water generally:

"Watching Eva enter the world, and then, a few years later, watching newborn Jesse, I understood more deeply than ever before my love for water. We all ride the river, we are all born from a sack of water, and some of us never quit hankering for that original wetness. From birth onward, we are drawn to the wash of lakes, the heave of oceans, the hustle of streams, the needling drum of rain. I hike miles to see a creek slide over ledges, I gaze like a soothsayer into ponds, I slip into a daze from the sound of drizzle on the roof. When it storms and the street is running like a sluice, I go out barefoot or booted and slosh about while neighbors stare at me from the shelter of porches."

and and and!

"Riverness--the appeal of a river, the way it speaks to us--has to do with our craving for a sense of direction within the seeming randomness of the world. Narrative offers us the same pleasure, a shape and direction imposed on time. And so we tell stories and listen to them as we listen to the coursing of water."

Reading Sanders is getting me even more excited about my move to Ohio next month!