It’s been a homestead weekend on the farm — rendering fatback into lard, salting down pork bellies for bacon, harvesting crabapples and then making rosemary-crabapple jelly, all capped by watching a magnificent full moon rise over the hill pasture.

As I watch the moon emerge, I glimpse the shard of a boyhood memory. Sitting on the bank of Contraband Bayou, a mile back through the dark woods of the old Barbe property, I am 10 years old, and fishing for alligator gar around midnight, the light of another full moon laying out a path across the sluggish water.

The years between 8 and 12 are the best for boys. It’s a time when they are no longer kids (at least in their own eyes) and before the awkward teenage years of figuring out how to fit in. When they are just old enough to be gone all day during the summer and often out at night without occasioning a search party. When parents, glad to be shed of them, give them greater latitude to roam, and when any hints of what adulthood might entail are only lightning strikes over the horizon.

That the character of a boy’s life depends on the locale and time frame as much as on his parents and family, I am fully aware. It also depends on his reading habits. For there is a vast literature for boys (or there was, before literary sanitizers came into general use) to guide him in the spirit of adventure.

That literature, as much as the era and place, steered the ways in which I lived my youth. Days spent building forts, riding bikes across town on quiet streets, exploring the length and breadth of the bayou in a beat-up jon boat, running trotlines all night or fishing for bass all day. Alas, guided by such books, filching my father’s pipe tobacco and, from an old pipe found in a ditch, smoking it with my friends until the tears ran down our faces.

Tom Sawyer (he of the pipe instruction, among other wholesome activities) and other boyhood literary heroes loomed large in my imagination. Theirs were the templates for a well-lived life. I read scores of books during those years, and of them, five were my bibles: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Twain), Rascal: A Memoir of a Better Era (North), Ice Falcon (Ritchie), Rifles for Watie (Keith), and My Side of the Mountain (George).

How to survive being lost in a cave and then attend your own funeral. Build a canvas canoe in your own living room. Befriend a raccoon. Stow away with Vikings and explore medieval Iceland. Serve on both sides in the Civil War. Fall in love with a Cherokee girl. Run away from the city and live in the Catskills. All the life lessons I imagined I needed were found in those pages.

Indeed, each has shaped me in ways that I cannot fully touch, conjuring the ghost of memory, of innocence, of adventure, of a boy. One that even now I glimpse from time to time, usually, often, in the light of a full moon rising over the farm.

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Reading this past week: Three John Sandford mysteries, Holy Ghost, Bloody Genius, Neon Prey