History works itself out in the living.

Old love, middle love, the kind of love that knows itself and knows that nothing lasts, is a desperate shared wildness.

I have brothers and was a tomboy, if that's still a designation. It wasn't a stretch for me to think and write as a 13-year-old boy - it is freeing.

What is this life but the sound of an appalling love.

Coming down off the trail, I am lost in my own thoughts and unprepared when a bear chugs across the path just before it gives out on the gravel road. I am so distracted that I keep walking towards the bear. I only stop when it rears, stands on hind legs, and stares at me, sensitive nose pressed into the air, weak eyes searching. I have never been this close to a wild bear before, but I am not frightened. There is no menace in its stance; it is not even curious. The bear seems to know who or what I am. The bear is not impressed.

Veils of love which was only hate petrified by longing--that was me.

I did not choose solitude. Who would? It came on me like a kind of vocation, demanding an effort that married women can't picture.