“Everything repeated and repeated again. My family had lived within these hills for centuries. I knew that there had been many other girls who had made their homes on this ground before me, girls who were grown now and gone into the ground themselves, their babies - my great-grandmothers - grown and gone the same way. Nothing I knew was ever truly new; every path I followed had been written by the bodies of others, the course of every track sculpted by the footfall of those who came before us.
For-ev-er. For-ev-er. To the well. To the haggart. To the shed. To the hill. Along these ways, grassed hummed their old tunes, blackthorns pointed their warnings, and every well held the memory of whispered human desire. Maybe I was a strange child, feeling the constant hum of the past just beyond me, real as a bee, or maybe every child shares that feeling. All I knew was that I felt safe there, in the echo of their company.”