Once: As It Was

Of all my far back memories two remain most vivid, as if they had just happened. The first is of an incident that occurred in a few minutes' time; the second, a matter of months. The first happening surely was the key to my survival of the second.... So begins, veiled in mystery, Griselda Jackson Ohannessian's beautifully rendered childhood memoir about growing up on a farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, beneath "the friendly blue bowl" of sky, and the dangerous, preternatural events of the summer of 1939 that changed her life forever.

Once: As It Was is narrated through the lens of the author's twelve-year-old self. Her farm-home was a world of little dirt roads, kerosene lamps, and visiting hobos. There is her dear father Bousie ("rhymes with Howsie"), her loving Ma, her two sisters and brother, and the Owls, the Cherokee Indian farmhands who were also part of the family, as well as many other friends and passers-by. Ohannessian's writing-memory meanders intently like a bright creek, through her schoolhouse where Margaret Toomer, the writer Jean Toomer's daughter, was one of two black students, through the living presence of books and pen pals, many secret places, a brief run-in with Professor Einstein, and even a little "s.e.x." Then the fateful day arrives when a band of writers, led by the poets Laura Riding and Robert Graves, moves onto the farm. Photographs, letters, newspaper clippings, poems, and a few bars of Morse code provide lively counterpoint to Ohannessian's endearing tale of what was-and is-Once.