Later, I sat on the couch, wrapped in a blanket before the fire — although it was not cold I seemed to need these things to make me warm again — and watched the flames. I moved into them, became a flame, became fuel, also, for the fire, and was consumed and consuming, all brilliant colours and leaping heat.

Later still, in my bedroom, I watched the moon through the branches of the willow. The fire had been hot, the moon was cool. I cried softly, gently and with love. I said good-bye to my mother and my father.

After a while I slept and had no dreams. In the morning the sun was shining, a clear and perfect day. I lay quietly and felt the sun and listened to the birds; every day, it seemed, more arrived from the south, so that every day there was some new sound.

I got up and made tea, and then I went outside, taking the axe, for there was wood to chop, and my muscles stretched and pulled in the sunlight and were all in their rhythm again.

<dingbat>

One day a postman came with a registered letter. I signed the separation agreement it contained. Later, Stephen divorced me.

13

13

I recall that the first time I came down sick, the weather was warm but the garden had only just been planted. It must have been late spring, not yet summer.

With the garden in, bigger that year with corn for the first time, I took a day for a walk around the land. It was very green and plush by then, flowers and weeds growing taller, ready for blooming, the little early spring flowers like the crocuses gone now, bigger, brasher plants taking over for the summer. I walked slowly through the woods, seeing with one eye the fresh growth, and with the other the dead trees that I would cut in the next months for firewood. In the pasture I saw a rabbit, gray-coloured, standing very still, alert, and I stood still in the same way, watching, and it did not move, not a twitch, until after a long time I began to walk again, and then it bolted instantly, flying off in great leaps toward the woods. There were holes here, too, that groundhogs had dug, and I imagined the underground caverns where they lived with great dark-attuned black eyes, emerging occasionally to blink against the sunlight until the pupils narrowed to let in less blinding light. I found their entrances and exits, guessed at their underground trails from above, but did not see the animals themselves, hidden beneath or perhaps gone foraging.