One night last April, I walked from my house in Gainesville, Florida, to the Matheson Museum, a shy brick building hidden by a thicket of palmettos and so small that the forty or so people seated inside seemed to make the walls bulge. I’d come for one of the first events in “The Year of The Yearling,” the seventy-fifth-anniversary celebration of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s 1938 novel. Someone had made molasses cookies from a recipe in Marjorie’s cookbook, Cross Creek Cookery, which powered us through a slide show: the backwoods Florida crackers who inspired The Yearling, the map of the…