The boy loved to walk in the woods.
He savored the gurgle of the creek as the water tumbled over the rocks, the sweet melody of birdsong, the wind rustling the leaves in the trees that soared high overhead.
It seems a faraway place to him now — now that he has grown into a man, a place of dream stuff.
Five years ago, Kenneth Carl Crawford III returned to that woods behind his childhood home in Oklahoma, but only in his mind — the only way he can go back now, perhaps the only way he’ll ever go there again in his time on this Earth.
After a storm, he had been gazing at a thick forest about 100 yards away when he noticed a bunch of leaves had blown over the high electric fences topped by razor wire and landed in the prison yard at the State Correctional Institution-Greene, here in the southwest corner of Pennsylvania.
Crawford picked up one of the leaves. “It had been a long time since I had touched a part of a tree, let alone held a piece of it in my hands,” he would write in his journal.
He kept looking at the leaf, mesmerized, nostalgic for so much of a bit of boyhood paradise lost.
[For more of this story, written by Gary Gately, go to http://jjie.org/a-portrait-of-...venile-lifer/108538/]
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