Now, at thirty, I'd found all I needed in the sweet, real world of Cedar Valley, where I lived-the mountain peaks forming a torn-edged horizon, like a castle's crenellated walls, protecting me within a bowl of neatly laid out streets lined with well-established homes and mature trees.
Verrazzano, an Italian in command of a French ship, smelled America before he saw it: "A sweet fragrance, " he wrote, wafted out to sea from the dense cedar forests of the Carolinas.