These mornings, my mornings, usually begin with thoughts like these. Images, bright and clear, markers of my past and present; or images, dark and murky, symbols of indecision and doubt. I usually rise at five—not that I wake easily. I just like it, the morning. Just before dawn. I look out the window to the dim woods, and it’s almost sacred, especially those mornings you catch a thin mist rolling down under the trees.

But I don’t appreciate the scenery until I have bumped around a bit, drunk a glass of orange juice, taken a long shower, dressed and made a cup of coffee. Then I sit on the porch and wait for the sun. All the while pondering my dreams of Anne. And Horace. And of my grandmother. It’s as if I were a mathematician contemplating the equation of eternal life. Why? How?

Our house. We bought it when it was on the verge of collapse. It sat here, on the edge of the wood, only four hundred yards from where I grew up, abandoned for seven years. The Crum family had been its only owners. Mr. Josiah Crum himself built it (he had married one of the Greene sisters, Virginia, in about 1910 with the customary help from the community). All seven sons had left home by the mid-fifties. Josiah died in ’66. The sons put Aunt Virginia in a rest home in 1970. She lingered there for three years. No one even visited the house until we bought it from the sons in ’75.

The money we spent restoring it could have easily built a new house. But Anne had fallen in love with it. The way it sat back from the road, down a little trail that cut through a soybean field, perched there between the field and the woods. She liked the way the porches circled the house, and the ancient long-leaf pine that sat in the front yard. She put so much of herself into the rebuilding, painting, sanding; making little window-boxes and picking out furniture and curtains, all with such loving attention. It really surprised me the way she made the transition from urban radical to backwoods hausfrau. Now when I think about it everything fit a little too perfectly, as if she had had some preplanned scenario worked out in her head, her personal myth, down to her death, about the number of places, the sorts of places she would live in, and to the exact nature of her life from the gifts she gave on Christmas to the color of the bathroom. It was not cosmetic. She genuinely loved the power she had over her life. Her social work continued, fitting in easily between trips to the garden shop and the hardware store and the post office. She was fine, to the last hour. Fulfilled. She almost glowed at times, she was so full of purpose. Life was so smooth, so damn near idyllic, that it unnerved me.