It never happens before the garden is planted and there is a small space in my life with room for it. Afterwards, the summer and especially the fall, are too busy, no time for illness. And it never comes in the winter, nothing comes except for that incredible sinking into the event, the action, the object, the calm, the cold, the flame.

I have been alone. My days and seasons and years have spun gently, unbroken, no time, only rhythm. I am rooted in a moment, and in a pattern of moments. I have been alone, and it is good.

Once I found a squirrel dying in the woods. A leg was broken, and it lay helpless under a tree, unable to move and starving. I carried it carefully back to the cabin, put clumsy splints on the leg, fed it, hovered over it, willing life into it so hard that it seemed there was almost an electricity, a current running from my body to his, my mind running into his life, like the electric jolt sometimes given to a failed human heart.

Slowly, he recovered. Once he bit me, in the fleshy part of the hand between thumb and forefinger. He began to follow me around the cabin, out into the garden, and he learned to be touched and to take food from my hand. I was not trying to tame him, I thought, only to make it safe for me to have him there, without fear of being bitten again.

But gradually and almost imperceptibly, he became a responsibility. Not onerous or consuming, but a presence nonetheless. He required some attention. His bright eyes watched me move around the cabin, and I was conscious of his watching. I was lulled by his company, comforted by it, felt a seductive pleasure in caring for him; I recognized the danger of the false comfort.

I turned him out. I cut away the splints, watched him walk until I was sure he was all right, and led him outside to the bird-feeder, where I showed him where I scattered nuts and sunflower seeds beneath for the squirrels. He began to eat. And then I turned while he was eating and ran, without looking back, to the cabin, slammed the door behind me. I think I may have been crying a little at the time.

Later I went to the living room window and looked out. There was a squirrel on the front lawn, standing crouched, one leg a little straighter, stiffer than the other, watching the door, his head cocking now and then from side to side. He took a few steps forward, stopped again, watched; and then it was almost as if he shrugged inside himself, said “What the hell,” and turned away, back to the feeding place.