Parents' Guide to Soaring Earth: A Companion Memoir to Enchanted Air

SOARING EARTH begins in 1966, as Margarita, the daughter of a Cuban Catholic mother and American Jewish father, is a high school student in Los Angeles. Surrounded by blond surfer girls, her dark looks have set her apart from other students. So she dreams of finding bookish friends and of traveling to faraway places, especially back to her beloved Cuba, where she spent vacations and her grandmother still lives. Margarita has always found joy in writing poetry, but when students in her honors creative writing class make cruel comments about her work, she stops writing and vows that if she ever begins again, she will keep her words secret. In 1968, at 17, she begins college at the University of California, Berkeley, working in the kitchen of a co-op dorm to pay for her room. She studies Hindi and Urdu and swears off boys -- not wanting to take the chance of getting attached to someone who might be sent to Vietnam. She tutors the children of migrant farm workers and skips the many campus anti-war protests, as taking part might mean missing an exam. Soon, the protests and unrest at Berkeley begin to frighten her and she drops out of school. She drifts, living in a commune in Haight-Ashbury (where she's the only sober resident) and then moving to New York City. In New York, working at a switchboard and living in chaotic conditions, Margarita realizes she's traveled too far from the loves of her childhood: poetry and nature. She returns to Los Angeles in 1970, moving in with her parents and enrolling in community college. There, she starts over, studying botany and geology and finishing her education as an agronomy major at a polytechnic university. And, after long years away, she begins to write poetry again.