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单击此处编辑母版标题样式,单击此处编辑母版文本样式,第二级,第三级,第四级,第五级,*,Unit 2:,Further Reading,Further Reading,Reading passage,Reading comprehension,You Must,Go Home Again,by,Ardis,Whitman,Unit 2:,Further Reading,You Must Go Home Again,by,Ardis,Whitman,1,“It is absurd to think that life begins for us at birth,”wrote the Irish novelist Kathleen Coyle.“The pattern is set far back;we merely step into the process.”,2,We have being driving in fog all morning,but the fog is lifting now and the little seaside villages are appearing,one by one.We go down a long hill,lined with dense trees,and then come out in a blaze of sunlight.To our left,a tranquil cove,(,小海湾,),spreads,sparkling,embraced by a semicircle of village houses.“There is my grandmothers house,”I say,pointing across the cove to a big shabby old house.,Unit 2:,Further Reading,3,I am in Nova Scotia on a pilgrimage with,Lise,my granddaughter,looking for a heritage,(,传统,),for her,retracing treasured memory for me.The deep roots of home have not been easy for,Lise,to come by.She was one of the mobile children,moved from house to house in childhood.Her parents were divorced when she was a child,and her father,my son,died when she was in her early teens.She has been attending a university in Egypt and is planning to spend her life in the Middle East.But she longs for a sense of home,and so we have come to Nova Scotia where my husband and I were born and where our ancestors lived for 200 years.,Unit 2:,Further Reading,4,Lise,pulls off the road abruptly and sits studying the house in silence.“It looks like a place to be happy in,”she says at last,wistfully,(,渴望地,),.,5,We sit a while longer and I tell her what it was like here,the memories rushing back,swift as the tide.It was not this village I saw as we talked.It was the village of childhood and a time long ago,when a little girl arrived in summer.We used to come,my mother and father and brother and I,in a chugging,(,发着嘎嚓声行使,),train,windows open,cinders,(,煤渣,),blowing in.,Firman,Whynacht,who delivered the mail,met us at the station,crowding us in among the mailbags in his old buckboard.,Unit 2:,Further Reading,6,Grandmothers house stood in the curve of a narrow road;the sea wrapped itself closely around.Across the cove,my cousins assembled,(,聚集,),to watch us arrive.Then they would leap into a rowboat and rush across,waving and shouting.,7,The house fronted on a wide,wonderful field full of flowers and apple trees and berry bushes and hiding-places;and there was a lofty veranda,(,阳台,),and a flight of flower-laden steps they could easily hold 50 or 60 aunts,uncles and cousins for family pictures.,Unit 2:,Further Reading,8,We cannot go into the house,but I can still walk through the rooms in my memory and see the sun pouring into the big dining room with its tall windows,its ancient stove and loudly ticking clock.,9,My grandfather and grandmother came here to live when they were very young,their family just beginning.Here my mother sat in her bedroom window and wrote in her diary,“I am sixteen today.How old that is!”My father met her when he came here for preach,(,布道,),and when they were retired,they bought a house next door to the old home.There I came with my own children to visit and there,on an autumn day,with wailing,(,哀号的,),sea and blowing leaves,my mother died.,Unit 2:,Further Reading,10,But that was long after those childhood days which now come back so sharply.I can still see the ebullient,(,感情奔放的,),family pouring into and out of the house.They my mothers family were short,sturdy,(,结实的,),attractive people of mixed French and German origin.I could never have enough of being with them from my grandmother who used to say,“Get all the learning you can;it wont be a burden to carry,”to Aunt Mabel learning Spanish and the“new math”for fun when she was 80.,Unit 2:,Further Reading,11,Lise,sits on the steps as I talk,running her hand lovingly over the railing,(,栏杆,),.,“,So this is where I began,”she says,“where I belong.”She is silent for a moment,looking out to sea and then she says,“Id like to bring all the flowers back and make it the way it used to be.”I am weeping a little and she turns to comfort,using her little-girl name for me.“Grand-mommy,I can hear all those cousins laughing and calling to each other and running up and down the stairs.They are still here,and I am part of them.”,Unit 2:,Further Reading,12,She had found her roots.To know where I come from is one of the great longings of the human heart.More than genealogical,(,家谱的,),data,we seek in the lives of those who went before us the meaning of our lives.Roots,the dictionary says,are“an underlying support”.To be rooted is“to have an origin.”,13,I am thinking so as we drive away,Lise,and I,looking back until the fog begins again to take the house and the sea.Then we continue our pilgrimage through this ancestor-sheltered homeland.We have both taken away from the house of my grandmother more than we expected.,Unit 2:,Further Reading,14,In the days that followed,we visited the ho
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