Today on the way home, it snows. Big, soft caressing flakes fall onto our skin like cold moths; the air fills with feathers. - Margaret Atwood

As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day.

Stick a shovel into the ground almost anywhere and some horrible thing or other will come to light. Good for trade, we thrive on bones; without them there'd be no stories.

But who can remember pain, once it's over?