Going up the hill to the farm she knew she was going back. Not home, which spread around her, running deep from the earth like streams into the air and through her each day with husband and children and livestock and livelihood; not home then, but back. Back, back, to a place not so much of memory as of the scrambled fraught dreamland of the last twenty-five years, back to seek sense of that jumble, back to unthread and reweave that nighttime fabric that often as not left her upright in bed re-skinned in sweat and a patina of terror ill defined or all too clearly marked out. Back to reclaim all this and make it her own. Back to learn fates, not least her own. Back to learn who was living and who dead, who was remembered and who forgotten, who remained and who drifted to dust. Who perhaps was sought and if so who was left to do that seeking. And to what purpose. And so to learn herself anew. Coming up into the dooryard of the farm looking over at the bright proud hurt daughter of herself already older than she was then, looking as if to see if a hint was there of how to compose herself for this trip. And there was. And there was none.

Knowing this effort to learn herself again might be empty, hands raked through cold coals. Knowing also it might prove disaster lying content these years until she returned to face it or be snared by it. Knowing this was the same risk and danger central to her life in the same way she followed the wounded Union soldier boy who proved to be Norman for days through the countryside of Virginia and then finally, with no greater proof than the notion she must, descending to find him again to see how and in what way he recalled her. And clearly calmly understanding that this one success held nothing toward a second. Which was in its own way more reason to go than not. Everything at risk. Everything to be lost. Which she knew was not the same as failure or mistake but rather the thing essential to being allowed each day to draw air into her lungs and put one foot before the other. Walking out from house to barn of a warm summer evening was a simple thoughtless thing, at worst offering up a dead hen or sick ewe or a bare foot glued with chicken manure. Walking out there in the midst of a January storm drawn inland off the coast lacked even the vague premise of reaching the gone-to-shadow barn. Each had to be done, the way every fall forkful of turned-up potato soil has to be hand sifted for the small buttons and larger caked clods to reveal the unbroken smooth-skinned food underneath.