Juggie Blue: We don’t want to leave our homes We are poor, but even poor people can love their land. You do not need money to love your home. - Louise Erdrich

When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.

Someone had cleared that hillside once to make an orchard that had fallen into ruin and was now only twisted silver branches and split trunks. I sat there and continued to watch the sky as, out of nowhere, great solid-looking clouds built hot stacks and cotton cones. I was sixteen years old.

How close the dead are. One song away from the living.