High Country News

Origin stories

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Exploring the intersection of race and family in the interior rural West.

“THEY DIE. They not good guys,” my daughter Marigold says solemnly.

I nod.

“We put them in the soap,” I tell her and her sister, Juniper.

Marigold is 2, and at times her speech is hard to decipher. She forgets verbs. When she wants to be picked up, she shouts, “Carry you!” And when I ask her to do anything, she almost always replies with a resounding “WHY?” — as she does now.

“They eat our plants, Gogo!” exclaims Juniper, nimbly picking up a shiny beetle and plopping it into her bucket.

All summer and into autumn, our evenings had a kind of order.

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