Read Online The Abundance by Annie Dillard - Free Book Online

all these generations later, we people could still see on our skin the inherited prints of the dust specks of Eden.
    I loved this thought, and repeated it for myself often. I don’t know where I got it; my parents cited Adam and Eve only in jokes. Someday, with the aid of a mirror, I would count the trapezoids and learn precisely how many dust specks Adam comprised—one single handful God wetted, shaped, and blew into, then set firmly into motion and left to wander about in the fabulous garden, bewildered.

    The skin on my mother’s face was smooth, fair, and tender; it took impressions readily. She napped on her side on the couch, her face skin pooled on the low side; it piled up in the low corner of her deep-set eyes and drew down her lips and cheeks. How flexible was it? I pushed at a puddle of it by her nose.
    She stirred and opened her eyes. I jumped back.
    She reminded me not to touch her face while she was sleeping. Anybody’s face.
    When she sat up, her cheek and brow bone bore a deep red gash, the mark of a cushion’s welting. It was textured inside precisely with the upholstery’s weave and brocade.
    Another day, after a similar nap, I spoke up about thisgash. I told her she had a mark on her face where she’d been sleeping.
    â€œDo I?” she said; she ran her fingers through her hair. Her hair was short, blond, and wavy. She wore it swept back from her high, curved forehead. The skin on her forehead was both tight and soft. It would only barely shift when I tried to move it.
    She went to the kitchen. The hideous mark on her face did not interest her.
    â€œIt’ll go away,” I said.
    â€œWhat?” she called.

    I noticed the hair on my father’s arms and legs; each hair sprang from a dark dot on his skin. I lifted a hair and studied the puckered tepee of skin it pulled with it. Those hairs were in there tight. The greater the strain I put on the hair, the more puckered the tepee became, and shrunken within, concave. I could point it every which way.
    â€œOuch! Enough of that.”
    â€œSorry, Daddy.”

    At the beach I felt my parents’ shinbones. The bones were flat and curved, like the slats in a venetian blind.The long edges were sharp as swords. But they had unexplained and, I thought, possibly diseased irregularities: nicks, bumps, small hard balls, shallow ridges, and soft spots. I was lying between my parents on an enormous towel through which I could feel the hot sand.
    Loose under their shinbones hung the relaxed flesh of their calves; you could push these and swing them like a baby in a sling. Their heels were dry and hard, sharp at the curved edge. The bottoms of their toes had flattened, holding the imprint of life’s smooth floors even when they were lying down. I would not let this happen to me. Under certain conditions, the long bones of their feet showed under their skin. The bones rose up in skeletal rays on the slopes of their insteps, long and miserable and thin. This terrible sight they ignored also.

    In fact, they were young. Mother was twenty-two when I was born, and Father twenty-nine; both appeared to other adults much younger than they were. They were a handsome couple. I felt it overwhelmingly when they dressed for occasions. I never lost a wondering awe at the transformation of an everyday, tender, nap-creased mother into an exalted and dazzling beauty who chatted with me as she dressed.
    Her blue eyes shone and caught the light, and so didthe platinum waves in her hair and the pearls at her ears and throat. She was wearing a black dress. The smooth skin on her breastbone rent my heart, it was so familiar and beloved; the black silk bodice and the simple necklace set off its human fineness. Mother was perhaps a bit vain of her long and perfect legs, but not too vain for me; despite her excited pleasure, she did not share my view of her beauty.
    â€œLook at your father,” she said. We were all in the dressing room. I