I sat down on my stool and glanced across the yard. As I studied the house, I thought of the first time I’d visited it on that summer day when I was boy—how grand and glorious it had seemed; how I could hardly believe anyone might actually live in such a place. I thought of walking up the driveway with my mother heading toward the kitchen, and Jim calling out to us, desperate not to let my mother enter through a door meant for servants. I thought of our years in the carriage house, and how I had been lulled into believing that my time in that place and that world might be more than temporary—that I belonged there. I thought of the day I returned after my sojourn in Mexico, of how much my absence had altered my view of the things that had not changed and seemed as if they never would. I thought of how, soon, the house would look so different—how, at that very moment, it already belonged to someone else, someone who knew nothing of what had taken place there, just as I knew nothing of what it had meant to others who had known it before me. Those people were long dead, the moments of joy in which they delighted and the sorrows for which they suffered now forgotten. Or perhaps they were sealed away somewhere, in lost letters or old diaries moldering in a box somewhere to remain unread, unknown, unremarkable, just as mine were destined to be, but for whatever trace of them might flow from my heart to my hand onto the bare white canvas over which I gazed as I prepared to make my final offering at the temple in which I and those I loved best were formed.

The sun lit up the facade of the house. A breeze whispered through the trees, sending golden leaves cascading around to rest, suspended, on the tips of the long blades of grass. I bowed my head and cast up a silent prayer. A deep calm came over me. I opened my eyes and picked up the brush and began.

Acknowledgments

Deepest thanks to Gail Hochman, for your faith, your wisdom, and your inestimable kindness. Thanks to the good people at Algonquin, past and present, especially Betsy Gleick, Michael McKenzie, Lauren Moseley, Stephanie Mendoza, Brunson Hoole, Elisabeth Scharlatt, Craig Popelars, and Andra Miller. I am so very grateful for Kathy Pories, the kind of editor that isn’t supposed to exist anymore.

Many thanks to Maria Browning, Tim Henderson, and all the good people of Chapter 16 and Humanities Tennessee, stalwarts of literary life in Nashville and beyond. Thanks to my dear friends at Parnassus Books for providing a home away from home and a place of belonging to my family and so many others. To the American Booksellers Association and to all the independent booksellers: thank you for keeping the culture of books and ideas alive and thriving.