“Something hit the window,” Liz said. We stood up and put on our shoes, went outside to see. We gathered around it—Terry and Julia and Lee, Emma and Hunter and Jackson, Blanca and Darius and James and Mackenzie, Billy and Liz and me.

A bird.

Eyes forever open with a broken wing. Scattered feathers and a little yellow beak. A gray, dead thing at our feet.

“I’ll dig a grave,” Terry said.

___

I wanted a bird-ghost. Night fell and I returned to my cabin with the record under my arm, carrying the player by the handle, watching for a glowing, flying thing.

I wanted a kind of logic. A reason. An assurance that things worked the way they were supposed to. Creatures lived and they died and sometimes they returned in a different form. Sometimes they haunted the living, and sometimes they let us be.

I set the record player on my little writing table and stretched out the hand that had carried it, rubbed at the indentations the handle had made. I plugged it in, slipped the record from its sleeve, and lowered the needle. Here was that piano again, that mournful, strange voice. I sat at the wooden chair and watched out the window.

That poor little bird. Still black eyes and a fragile, broken wing.

I wanted a bird-ghost. But it never appeared to me.

good things take time

MY ALARM CUT THROUGH THE DARK: five a.m. My first farmers’ market morning.

I didn’t bother building a fire. I brought my clothes with me to the shower and made quick work of the soap and shampoo—shivering all the while—and dressed quickly in jeans and a thermal shirt and a navy corduroy jacket Julia had chosen for me from the closet upstairs. It was worn and soft and I wondered how many interns had used it in these early morning hours to keep themselves warm as they headed to town. I laced up my boots and crossed the field, found the truck untouched since the night before. I could see the light on in the kitchen and Liz inside, brewing coffee. I was glad I wasn’t late.

I headed to the refrigerator around back and made trips to and from the truck with the wheelbarrow of flowers. By the time I’d carried the last of the buckets, Billy was letting down the gate of the truck.

“Morning,” he said.

“Morning,” I said.

He hopped up into the truck bed and held out his hands. I passed him bucket after bucket, silently calling the flowers by name so I’d remember. Heirloom chrysanthemums. Dahlias. Zinnias. Yarrow. Anemones. Icelandic poppies.

The mudroom door opened and there was Liz, three thermoses in her hands. She saw how I’d moved all the buckets already.

“Thank God there are three of us now,” she said, and I forgot all about the cold.