Sometimes in the woods, especially in the early summer and again in autumn, there have been deer here, and while I have never tried to touch them, I have held out food and watched them come close, cautious, sniffing, slow, until they are near enough to gently extend their necks and reach forward, noses velvet-looking and twitching, wary of a trap, and then quickly, carefully, taking the food and backing away, still close but out of reach. I have often left food out for animals, but they do not depend on me; they seem to know, and accept what I have when I have it, and do not expect more.

In the pasture, poppies miraculously appeared, red-orange and tall, maybe planted there sometime long ago, but more likely sprung up from blowing seeds — I don’t know how these things happen — but they were beautiful, standing above everything else although the pasture was deep in growth. After a while they shrivelled and disappeared again, but for a time, while they were full, I walked out to see them every day.

When the weed-flowers were in full bloom and common, I picked them sometimes and made bouquets. Funny bouquets in coffee jars, dandelions and violets and Queen Anne’s lace, in the kitchen and on the mantel of the fireplace. I glued remnants of wallpaper over the coffee jars and they became vases. There were feathery flowers in the fields that looked as if they would be attractive dried for the winter, if I knew how to dry them. I didn’t, of course, I didn’t know any of those things, but I picked some anyway and tied them together and hung them upside down inside the kitchen door, and some of them wilted and dropped and others survived, so I had learned something. I let them hang there for weeks, until I was sure which were right, and then I cut them down and put them in two jars and set them by the fireplace, out of range of sparks, and they softened the room.

I took some of the paper I had bought, and a pencil, and sat outside trying to draw what I saw. A bird, a flower, a squirrel, I tried the water striders but they would not be still and I rarely got what I wanted onto the paper. I have never been good at drawing, I can see what I want in my mind, but I can’t make my hands transfer it onto paper. But that wasn’t the point anyway. I looked closely and really saw; once I wondered if things would have been different, before, if I had been able to see this way. But it didn’t matter, was irrelevant; a multitude of things might have been different, but they hadn’t been, and it had ended here and that was fine.