My cousin died today. Only 51, only 10 weeks since the first suspicion of the cancer. She lived in Arkansas, and I haven’t been in Arkansas since the year Carter ran his big grin for president. I don’t know her favorite color, or what she may have seen in the clouds that hang over the river, where it escapes Oklahoma and falls away to waste itself in the Mississippi. I rarely feel so small, confessing what I do not know, and having no defense.

It’s hard to say, but let’s imagine blue. Sometime maybe I’ll find out if I’m right. And animals – let’s believe in dogs, evaporated from the lakes I have lost in thirty years of sedimentary forgetting. That explains everything, except why it seems to be so cold tonight.

Well, she’s met up with good company, there beyond the fields. But it’s not for us tonight. Somebody get the gate, and let’s go in.