I don't know what to worry about most, what to cling tightly onto and what to let go. Will too many Oreos give Pop a heart attack? Will Henson burn the lek? Will his beautiful pigtailed daughter find a way to love both the damn birds and the damn cows? There, on the porch, I wanted Pop to help me. I wanted him to teach me, better this time, how to untangle emotion from carefully recorded facts, how to reconcile the things I feel when they aren't the same, exactly, as the things I believe.

But instead, I said, “How many?”

He lifted his index finger and drew numbers in the air in front of his face, but I didn't catch them. Finally, he said, “Fifteen,” then “No!” but I was already laughing, tears streaming down my face.

“Me too,” I said. “Let's have fifteen.” I wiped my nose with my sleeve. I felt greedy, ravenous. I wanted the most of everything.

“No. Ummm,” Pop held up four fingers and said, “Two. No! Son of a bitch!”

“I'll just bring the whole bag,” I said.

Pop can have as many Oreos as he wants.

IN 2005, SCIENTISTS BELIEVED they had confirmed an ivory-billed woodpecker, a single male, alive in the woods of Arkansas. Reports by amateur birders had been rejected for years by ornithologists, who insisted that ivory-bills were extinct, that the birders, lacking appropriate training, were simply encountering the luckier and still-in-the-world pileated woodpecker, an ivory-billed look-alike, and projecting (as humans do) their desire to see something both rare and lovely, declaring it ivory-billed. There are still, now, both believers and doubters. This, too, I'm supposed to read as a sign of hope, but again, I don't see it that way. I know exactly how lonely that poor bird must be, small in the world, the only one of its kind.

Alto Cumulus Standing Lenticulars

RUTH KNEW SHE WAS pregnant, but they'd driven the hundred miles from Gabbs to Tonopah anyway, for confirmation, she guessed, or for the change of scenery—though everywhere she looked there was desert and mountains, more desert, more mountains. At any rate, she was enjoying the small luxuries of the doctor's office—the glossy pages of a Good Housekeeping in the waiting room, a chalky mint from the reception counter bowl, a vinyl-cushioned chair that expelled air.

“Congratulations,” the doctor said. “Looks like late February, early March for this one.”

“Number four.” This from Del, her husband, who scratched at his ear, grinning. “Great news.”