Truths Everyone Should Know (Delia Owens)

Truths Everyone Should Know
For the rest of the summer Kya and Tate did the reading lessons at the tumbledown cabin.  By mid-August they had read through A Sand County Almanac, and although she couldn't read every word, she got most of it.  Aldo Leopold taught her that floodplains are living extensions of the rivers, which will claim them back any time they choose.  Anyone living on a floodplain is just waiting in the river's wings.  She learned where the geese go in winter, and the meaning of their music.  His soft words, sounding almost like poetry, taught her that soil is packed with life and one of the most precious riches on Earth; that draining wetlands dries the land for miles beyond, killing plants and animals along with the water. 

Some of the seeds lie dormant in the desiccated earth for decades, waiting, and when the water finally comes home again, they burst through the soil, unfolding their faces.  Wonders and real-life knowledge she would've never learned in school.  Truths everyone should know, yet somehow, even though they lay exposed all around, seemed to lie in secret like the seeds.

                                                             Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing, 2018