This may be my favorite photo in the book. You can see that I have just said something pithy and my sister is debating whether to pinch me. We used to play Confederates and Yankees with the Shannon boys–we were all Confederates, as were they, with one ancestor fighting in Barksdale’s Mississippi brigade, and Cayce named for him–and that is the photo’s relevance to a book about the Civil War.

My mother adored the Shannon boys, and the proof positive in this photograph is the Irish lace tablecloth she’s laid out. That was normally reserved for Thanksgiving and Christmas.

It’s dusk, and you can see the Santa Lucias beyond the glass doors. The view then was unencumbered by houses, and you could see Branch School, our two-roomed pink schoolhouse, in one corner of the Valley, a constant presence and comforting.

In the same direction, Dona Manuela Branch’s home burned down about that same time, 1959. This was the house that her sons had built for her after Francis Branch died in 1874. It happened in the early morning hours and the CDF trucks and their sirens woke us up; we looked out that door as the house burned, giving off a white-hot light that was as bright as a star, and then it was gone. A neighbor whose name I can’t remember–he always wore overalls–gave me a ride on his homemade motor scooter to the site, today marked by palm trees, and Mrs. Branch’s house was just a grey-black outline, with a few wisps of smoke, marking the foundation. It was tragic.

Out the side windows were my mother’s rose bushes and beyond that the little pasture where my sister’s horses grazed. Mrs. Harris lived across the street, the Coehlos a little beyond, the McNeils and then the Shannons near the end, near the junction of Branch Mill and Huasna Roads. The land beyond the pasture was planted, sometimes, in beans that climbed on their wooden stakes and on summer mornings, the ocean fog brushed the bean-stake tips until the sun burned it away. Sunrises were spectacular looking out those windows, and once snow dusted the foothills beyond the door. A place like this is a wonderful place to grow up and, for aspiring writers, like my friend Michael Shannon and me, it is a place rich with stories waiting to be told.