Paragraph 1: When I was a girl-child, home was a street called Bluff View, the uppermost block in a terraced neighborhood of Southern Californian houses. In the summer, when I was young and untired and forced to bed before the sun went down, my lullaby was the view my bedroom window afforded of the hills behind my house. Desert oak, prickly pear, eucalyptus, sage: I fell asleep cataloging this place. In the daytime. I would scramble over one bluff and up the hill behind it, playing teacher in the caves my neighbors and I found, scratching lessons in the chalky sand that lined the walls. We played doctor with stethoscopes fashioned from rocks and the necklaced stalks of wild mustard. We knew the contours and passages of those hills like we knew the halls and classrooms of our other, inside, school.
Walking down a slope is different than walking on flat land, and each part of my legs recorded required positions until they could move as correctly up and down those bluffs as my tongue might move over the alphabet. My body memorized its place in those hills.
Paragraph 2: But even while I lived at the center of everything I knew, everything I knew erased itself. Before I entered high school, construction had begun on summit estates for our town's growing mogul class. The hilltop was leveled and two of my favorite raves lost. From my bedroom window I could now see the red tile roof of the pizza king's palacio. Less desert oak. A weaker scent of sage. When my parents bought the house on Bluff View, our backyard marked the edge of human landscaping. It was not uncommon to find tumbleweed resting in our lounge chairs, to leave wild poppies blooming along the margins of cut grass. Now the hills were asphalt and ice plant. The wild dogs we called coyotes moved down into our backyards, fighting with raccoons over scraps from overturned trash cans and preying on small pets.
Paragraph 5: I found myself in lowa and believed for a long time that I had lost my home. The language of place is a slow speech to learn. lowa is blue uninterrupted, blue talking all day and a darker blue still talking through the night. Just the waist-high tips of new corn there to listen, and they not saying anyting, only nodding their young heads. A new language. I moved to lowa andididn't write for months. When a poem finally came, It was written in a different tongue.
Paragraph 7: It is years later and I am a traveler, walking. I am on public land: a park, a knoll, a meadow. I am glad to own the memories I own and through those memories to belong someplace, to have some place belong to me. I am remembering, and I am writing a poem in my many tongues.
Which two quotations best support the idea that the author has a deep love for the California of her childhood?
1. "When I was a girl-child, home was a street called Bluff View, the uppermost block in a terraced neighborhood of Southern Californian houses." (Paragraph 1)
2. "My body memorized its place in those hills."
(Paragraph 1)
3. "From my bedroom window I could now see the red tile roof of the pizza king's palacio."
(Paragraph 2)
4. "I found myself in lowa and believed for a long time that I had lost my home." (Paragraph 5)
5. "I am on public land: a park, a knoll, a meadow." (Paragraph 7)
The two quotations that best support the idea that the author has a deep love for the California of her childhood are:
1. "When I was a girl-child, home was a street called Bluff View, the uppermost block in a terraced neighborhood of Southern Californian houses." (Paragraph 1) - This quotation establishes the strong connection the author had to her childhood home in California.
2. "My body memorized its place in those hills." (Paragraph 1) - This quotation highlights the intimate relationship the author had with the natural landscape of her home in California.