He turned to me and rubbed his left thumb and index finger together as if he were crushing the essence of what he was trying to convey. “Romantic homesickness? Nostalgia?” He narrowed his eyes, looked sideways at me. “But not so broad. Not so vague.”

“Saudade,” I mumbled.

“Sa-u-what?”

“A deep emotional state of nostalgic or profound melancholic longing for an absent something or someone that one loves.”

His eyes widened as if he’d just watched me do a magic trick. “Yes. That. But. Imagine it . . . evolving . . . a big, swelling bridge. . . . It’s the longing, and then the afterparty of that longing . . . like, if we start out with this feeling of loss, of that word you just said—”

“Saudade,” I repeated, and was instantly back at October’s kitchen table, so sure of myself as I read her the list of words on my phone, her warm breath causing the hair on my neck to stand up. “It’s Portuguese.”

“So, we capture that Portuguese feeling . . .” He laughed and then got rightly serious again. “But the song crescendos to the sound of the thing being found. And the realization that it was never lost at all, that it’d been there all along. Make sense?”

“Absolute and total.”

Cal smiled with pride. “I knew you’d get it.” He moved his weight from his left to right foot. “Can you play it?”

I started off doing something bluesy, a lot of minor thirds and sevenths, but that turned out to be nothing, a warm-up for my fingers, a tilling of the emotive soil inside. And then I imagined myself a cryptographer, searching for a code to express something only I could express.

From there I started a strumming pattern focused on two chords—Asus and Dsus—and I fretted it in a way that left the high E string open throughout, so it rang and rang, and no other chords were necessary.

Cal said it sounded like my guitar was accompanying itself, and he plugged in and started playing along, singing non-words, trying to come up with a vocal melody that wrapped around what I was doing in a compelling way.

I threw in a weird key change during the bridge, and Cal practically lost his mind over that, spinning around the room like a whirling dervish, snapping his fingers and howling, “That’s it! That’s it!”

We slogged over the song for a while, experimenting and refining it, but eventually I was too bleary-eyed to keep going. Cal asked me to play it once more so he could record it on his phone and work on the lyrics when he got home, and I did. After that he took a shower, and I took a ten-minute nap on the couch.

The woods next to my cabin were alive at night. As we headed out to the truck, I could hear rustling in the bushes, probably a fox or a coyote, or the family of bandit raccoons that ransacked my garbage on a regular basis. A couple of night birds were singing a duet in one of the trees, and the katydids sounded like they were furiously typing on tiny little insect typewriters all around us.