E.h.M.

-Far back as I remember, and as I have been faulted in most general qualities except for memory, it can be held as truth that I have always been moving. Moving away from, and, at the same time, towards the numbered events that have staked out my life. Some such events that I have sided up upon, and other such events that have sided up on me. As to whether any exercise of control, in regard to these happenings, has either laid inside or outside of my person, is not something for me to know. My progress from, and to, is only my own.
-So far as I have been told, I was born and brought up, the whole of my youthful years, on a farm in southern West Virginia, which had belonged to my mother’s father. I never knew him, as he had passed before my coming. And I only knew of him from a masoned and moss-worn granite marker that sat towards the back of one of the fields, upon which was scrawled the name Edward H. Morrow. It was also by the circumstance of my old man inheriting the plot that I came to know of my dead grandfather.
-Anyway, I was raised up solely under my old man’s oversight. See, something of an unagreeable nature came between him and my mother, when I was still new to the world, to which they drew a line in the dirt. On this division, I sat, with a mind yet unhardened and a body still wobbling. It just so happened that I fell in my father’s direction, as he held his ground, and my mother went the other way.
-Being a steadfast woman, she was both unwilling and unable to rid herself of the farm and me, and so she kept a home at the opposite end of the spread from the main house, in which I was boarded by my old man. As far as I can mind, she and the old man never saw nor spoke to one another after their division, but when they broke I suppose they decided it would be best to stay in a close approximation on my account. The end of which suited me just fine, as my mother was near enough that I could reach her, if and when things with the old man turned sour.
-And so the first of my movement was held in traveling from one parent to the next. The length of such a journey stood about three quarters of a mile, as a crosscut through one of my father’s fields, and endured my passage on a basis of four or five times a week. As a child then, I was inclined, as most children are, to measure my life in small strokes, such as these. Counting steps, and cowtails, and cobbles along the way, the amount of which did not amount to anything. But beyond the consequence of such smaller events, for which time holds little remembrance, the greater years of my life were marked by the birth and death of summer, between which I existed.