the beginning of my story I never forget a face. I am a retired biologist living in the Smoky Mountains located in the middle of nowhere, like an abandoned cat. Here, you can never find any smartly-dressed office workers running for the morning trains, you can never smell the fume and dust from any factories and you can never be troubled by the noise from the traffic and airport. In fact, I can’t remember when was the last time I heard a car horn honking. No wonder the kids here have a hard time understanding things like population explosion, or energy crisis or anything like that. Normally, the only regular visitors here are a bunch of hares, squirrels and occasionally some vultures which seem to be flying westward in a weird line. I don’t know why they do that. I love the peace of the great wilderness, though. The cool morning air clears my head; the full moon reminds me of my mother’s pear pancake; the delicate aroma of the wild tulips puts me to a sound sleep; the spring drizzle nurtures my dry throat; the summer breeze gives me an afternoon nap , and even the sudden drop of temperature never fail to make me spellbound. The maple trees in my backyard are quite something when autumn arrives. Sometimes they talk on rainy nights. I hear that a lot. And in winter, the apple trees in the porch give me a lot of wood that can last 3 months. I spend a day like I spend every other day, quietly running my errands and deliberately dragging myself farther and farther away from the public eyes. I am happy here, but sometimes I get moody or even irritated because I keep forgetting things, I mean, things really important. Yesterday when I was in the kitchen I found the roof was leaky and then I climbed all the way up there and discovered that the rain-collector was no longer where it should be, and it took me quite a while to come to the painful realization that I indeed took it down for my walnut harvest and never put it back. Despite this, I never forget a face.