Love in the Country We live like this: no one but some of the owls awake, and of them only near ones really awake. In the rain yesterday, puddles on… - William Stafford

Lorene — we thought she’d come home. But it got late, and then days. Now it has been years. Why shouldn’t she, if she wanted? I would: something comes along, a sunny day, you start walking; you meet a person who says, “Follow me,” and things lead on. Usually, it wouldn’t happen, but sometimes the neighbors notice your car is gone, the patch of oil in the driveway, and it fades. They forget. In the Bible it happened — fishermen, Levites. They just went away and kept going. Thomas, away off in India, never came back. But Lorene — it was a stranger maybe, and he said, “Your life, I need it.” And nobody else did.

B.C.

The seed that met water spoke a little name.

(Great sunflowers were lording the air that day;
This was before Jesus, before Rome; that other air
Was readying our hundreds of years to say things
That rain has beat down on over broken stones
And heaped behind us in many lands.)

Quiet in the earth a drop of water came,
And the little seed spoke: “Sequoia is my name.

Always write in the wilderness.