I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpk… - Willa Cather

Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge.

Beautiful surroundings, the society of learned men, the charm of noble women, the graces of art, could not make up for the loss of those light-hearted mornings of the desert, for that wind that made one a boy again. He had noticed that this peculiar quality in the air of new countries vanished after they were tamed by man and made to bear harvests. Parts of Texas and Kansas that he had first known as open range had since been made into rich farming districts, and the air had quite lost that lightness, that dry, aromatic odour. The moisture of plowed land, the heaviness of labour and growth and grain-bearing, utterly destroyed it; one could breathe that only on the bright edges of the world, on the great grass plains or the sage-brush desert.

Her husband had archaic ideas about jewels; a man bought them for his wife in acknowledgement of things he could not gracefully utter.

He knew he would always remember her, standing there with that expectant, forward-looking smile, enough to turn the future into summer.