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Our lives were a cycle- the cycle of the day, the cycle of the seasons-circles of perpetual change that, when complete, meant nothing had changed at all. The snows that fell in winter always melted in the spring. The same sun appeared each morning, swept over the valley and dropped behind the peak. I had been educated in the rhythms of the mountain, rhythms in which change was never fundamental, only cyclical. When the World of Men failed, my family would continue on, unaffected. I spent my summers bottling peaches and my winters rotating supplies. I had grown up preparing for the Days of Abomination, watching for the sun to darken, for the moon to drip as if with blood. When I am nine, I will be issued a Delayed Certificate of Birth, but at this moment, according to the state of Idaho and the federal government, I do not exist. We have no school records because we’ve never set foot in a classroom. We have no medical records because we were born at home and have never seen a doctor or nurse. Four of my parents’ seven children don’t have birth certificates. I am only seven, but I understand that it is this fact, more than any other, that makes my family different: we don’t go to school.ĭad worries that the Government will force us to go but it can’t, because it doesn’t know about us. On the highway below, the school bus rolls past without stopping. I picture my father hunched by the back door, lacing his steel-toed boots and threading his callused hands into welding gloves.
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I imagine my mother at the stove, hovering over bran pancakes. My brothers are awake, testing the weather. Turning toward our house on the hillside, I see movements of a different kind, tall shadows stiffly pushing through the currents. The shape of that dent lasts only a moment, and is as close as anyone gets to seeing wind. If the conifers and sage- brush are soloists, the wheat field is a corps de ballet, each stem following all the rest in bursts of movement, a million ballerinas bending, one after the other, as great gales dent their golden heads. If I look up, I can see the dark form of the Indian Princess. Behind me a gentle hill slopes upward and stitches itself to the mountain base. Meanwhile our farm dances: the heavy conifer trees sway slowly, while the sagebrush and thistles quiver, bowing before every puff and pocket of air. Down below, the valley is peaceful, undisturbed. The gales are strong this close to the mountain, as if the peak itself is exhaling. The wind soars, whipping my hair across my face and pushing a chill down the open neck of my shirt. I’m standing on the red railway car that sits abandoned next to the barn. “But it can’t, because it doesn’t know about us.”īelow, Westover annotates the first page of “Educated” to show readers how she chose her language and imagery, and explain the themes and ideas she wanted to set up from page one: “Dad worries that the Government will force us to go” to school, she writes in the prologue. This was in part due to the harsh landscape, but also to the fact that her family did not believe in formalized education or traditional medicine. It is an evocative picture that sets the scene for how different her childhood was to many others. The memoir “Educated” begins with the image of author Tara Westover as a young girl, standing on a railway car beside a barn beside the mountain in rural Idaho where she grew up.