“But most of all I love what Anastasia calls the music room. The walls are painted pale cream, the carpet is light blue, and sitting in the middle is a black Steinway baby grand piano. The keyboard is more than four feet long, while the rest of it stretches at least six feet. The lid is like a wing of a bird ready to fly, propped up to show the golden strings that create the sound. The piano, waxed and polished every week, gleams in the sunlight from the curved bay window. I swear that piano smiles at me” (51).

“Before us the narrow, sun-splotched road wound like a lazy red serpent dividing the high forest bank of quiet, old trees on the left from the cotton field, forested by giant green and purple stalks, on the right. A barbed-wire fence ran the length of the deep field, stretching eastward for over a quarter of a mile until it met the sloping green pasture that signaled the end of our family’s four hundred acres” (6).

“The grass in the field prickled my barefoot. The dampness felt cool on it, and seeped through the bandage on my other foot too. The ground was soft; it moved when I stepped on it. Squishy, like new bread. Trees bordered the field, and their tops waived in the sun. Birds twittered. I knew about birds, we had them in the lane, but I’d never heard so many at once. There were flowers” (45).