How lovely, the portraitist kept saying. How lovely.

And that was the point of children, thought Caroline Middey: to bind us to the earth and to the present, to distract us from death. A distraction dressed as a blessing: but dressed so well, and so truly, that it became a blessing. Or maybe it was the other way around: a blessing first, before a distraction.

We do not belong to ourselves alone, she wanted to say, but there was no one to speak to.

The narrow bed with its purple, red, and green quilt, the bedside table with its jar of rocks, piled books. The porcelain basin near the window where she washed her face, the pitcher with the brown rose painted on it, the large crack like a vein in the bottom of the basin. The apricot orchard, the buzzing bees like a haze in spring. The barn – the smell of hay and manure, grease, old leather. The sun streaming through the slats. The mule’s nose in her palm.

Objects too at times, after all, like the landscape, held the potential for meaning- she took out the first object now- and were able to comfort.

When one is young, he thought, one thinks that one will never know oneself. But the knowledge comes later; if not all, then some. An important amount.

She revered solitude, but only because there was the possibility of breaking it.

She was both more assured and quieter, deeper. It was as if the distance she had traveled had ironed out some of her foolish impulsiveness, her flippancy.

The night has made up its mind. It’s we who are too slow, who move in the wake of events already decided for us, who refuse, who are too weak or too simple, or are perhaps, strictly, unable to understand.

He did not go after her himself, but those months after he fell out of the tree, though his physical wounds more or less healed – though he walked with a slight limp afterward – a kind of vacancy, a silence, hung around him, like a mantle on his shoulders.