Cypress trees of Orange Lake:
Photo: © 2004 Jeffrey Berger
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings made her home in Cross Creek and wrote a book of memoirs of the same name, which became a motion picture of the same name. Her American classic, The Yearling, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1939. Cross Creek is literally where you cross over from Orange Lake to Lochloosa Lake, or vice versa depending upon which way the birds fly.
Raised in a small country town surrounded by farms and woodlands, I have a special fondness for places where childhoods are spent “wide-eyed and breathless before the miracle of bird and creature, of flowers and tree, of wind and rain and sun and moon.” Perhaps this explains my interest in Nature.
