Beard with a rifle—he always acted it out—aiming straight down into a stream teeming with salmon rushing upriver and shooting. “Honey, you could fire right down into them and they wouldn’t turn.” The rush of spawning silver, the tall man standing, firing his gun into the water—isn’t that crazy? And yet he never lied that I knew of, never even exaggerated the way us other Beards do. He spent the days wandering on his island and beyond, seeing bears and elk and fishing and filing away a lifetime’s worth of images to bring back to the land of dun, spelled both ways. Nobody died except one guy who apparently went off a cliff in the fog. The men searched and searched for him, heartsick and frantic, but all they found was his bag at the bottom of a cliff. A musette bag. And it’s funny, because I didn’t know that word and whenever he told the story—“Honey, all we found was his musette bag”—it became linked in my mind with music.

My dog in the back seat, the scents like music to her nose during our night drives, Dion’s doo-wop, and a book I read over and over as a kid, Jenny Lind and Her Listening Cat, which had illustrations of a little girl just like me, a blue ribbon in her hair, and her beautiful gray cat, sitting with paws perfectly together. Jenny Lind would sing to Kisse Katt in their little Swedish house, quietly and modestly, not knowing that she would grow up to be the most famous woman in the world for a while. I loved that book; Jenny Lind’s otherworldly soprano unfurling in the cold Swedish air, the devotion of Kisse Katt, the two of them at night gazing out their attic window at the northern lights billowing in the sky.

Neil Young pulled a song from his own music bag that I sang along to when I was younger, about the aurora borealis and about indigenous people being shoved from their land and their tribal ways.

I saw the aurora borealis once, driving on a highway outside Ithaca with my friend Sara; the sky became animate, bright curtains floating and changing color, a gauzy hem lifting and settling, then lifting again. Sara reached over and turned off the music and we were silent, the road droning beneath us, until it was over.

“Do you know what that was?” she asked me in a hushed voice.

“I think so,” I said.

Pure sensory experience. Who knows what it meant for Sara, but for me it instantly retrieved the fifty-year-old memory of Jenny Lind, the cold window of her garret, the soft gray cat, the blue ribbon that shone like satin, a clear soprano voice made suddenly visible in the black sky, her vibrato moving the drapes of time and space and color and light.