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Hildegard Flanner (1899-1987) http://tinyurl.com/Flanner

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The Spell Cast

From A Vanishing Land, 1980.

Reader: Jessica Teeter

California is just as much a product of myth as it is of fact. It is also just as much a product of imagination and wistful memory.

Hildegarde Flanner arrived in southern California in 1925, where she expected to find a "choice landscape in a choice climate." She found both and wrote movingly of her memories of the land before progress and pollution changed it forever.

. . . on a green afternoon of winter I followed the trail in Rubio or Las Flores Canyon and found proof that a mountain is not a towering monument of solitude and time but a small and perfect gift for a moment of exquisite pleasure. On the moist bank and close to see were ferns no broader than a squirrel's foot, and tiny pointed flowers and fruits of moss on little slopes of velvet, and in a frail fungus goglet one diamond, one drop of brilliant rain, a deep drink for Oberon of the mountains. The spell cast by the sylvan weathers that made this pretty thing lay on my mind as I went home, and lies there still.

Poet Hildegarde Flanner wrote A Vanishing Land in the 1950s.