Animals spend a lot of time being still so when we do they lose their logical mistrust of us. - Jim Harrison

"Dad said I would always be "high minded and low waged" from reading too much Ralph Waldo Emerson. Maybe he was right."

He kissed her legs until neither of them wore anything. And the hawk now perched in a tree in the woodlot could see an imprecise circle of flattened green wheat and two bodies entwined until late in the afternoon when it began to rain again. The man tried to cover the girl with the coat but she stood up, did a dance and drank more wine. Such simple events last lovers a long time. Scarcely anyone can turn their backs on the best thing that has happened to them. So she went to California for the summer and he retrieved her for the last year of school in the fall after a hundred letters both ways.

Sitting there on the deck during intermittent periods of dozing I thought that it’s really hard on a soul to admit how much of life we have spent being full of shit.