Prodigal Summer

Solitude is a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot, a tug of impalpable thread on the web pulling mate to mate and predator to prey, a beginning or an end. Every choice is a world made new for the chosen.

How pointless life could be, what a foolish business of inventing things to love, just so you could dread losing them.

If you never stepped on anybody's toes, you never been for a walk.

I lost a child," she said, meeting Lusa's eyes directly. "I thought I wouldn't live through it. But you do. You learn to love the place somebody leaves behind for you.

Now I'm starting to think he wasn't supposed to be my whole life, he was just this doorway to me.

Thanks for this day, for all birds safe in their nests, for whatever this is, for life.

I thought I wouldn't live through it. But you do. You learn to love the place somebody leaves behind for you.

This is how moths speak to each other. They tell their love across the fields by scent. There is no mouth, the wrong words are impossible, either a mate is there or he is not, and if so the pair will find each other in the dark.

A breeze shook rain out of new leaves onto their hair, but in their pursuit of eternity they never noticed the chill.

The loudest sound on earth, she thought, is a man with nothing to do.

I've always found people love you best if you can laugh at your own foolish misfortunes and keep mum about everyone else's

she's never forgotten, either, how a mystery caught in the hand could lose its grace

A bird in the hand loses its mystery in no time flat.

Feminine' was a test like some witch trial she was preordained to fail.

Her body moved with the frankness that comes from solitary habits. But solitude is only a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot; every choice is a world made new for the chosen. All secrets are witnessed.

Solitude is a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot, a tug of impalpable thread on the web pulling mate to mate and predator to prey, a beginning or an end.

His scent burst onto her brain like a rain of lights, causing her to know him perfectly. This is how moths speak to each other. The wrong words are impossible when there are no words.

Lusa turned to Crys, her eyes shining. "That was a luna." Crys shrugged. "So?" "So? So what? You want it should sing, too?

How would you even begin to make a hush puppy, what in the world was in one? Nothing to do with a puppy, surely. Garnett had long known, though he didn’t much like to admit it, that God’s world and the better part of daily life were full of mysteries known only to women.

From what he could see she had the legs of a much younger woman. Certainly not what he would have expected in the way of Unitarian legs.

I will never understand it,” she said. “We’re the top of our food chain, so you’d think we’d relate to those guys the best. Seems like we’d be trying to talk them into trade agreements.” Eddie laughed at that. “So you’re telling me that as a kid, you were rooting for the wolf to eat the Riding Hood babe?” “My last name was Wolfe. I took it all kind of personally.

The spiraling flights of moths appear haphazard only because of the mechanisms of olfactory tracking are so different from our own. Using binocular vision, we judge the location of an object by comparing the images from two eyes and tracking directly toward the stimulus. But for species relying on the sense of smell, the organism compares points in space, moves in the direction of the greater concentration, then compares two more points successively, moving in zigzags toward the source. Using olfactory navigation the moth detects currents of scent in the air and, by small increments, discovers how to move upstream.

You knew me well enough to find me here,' she said. And his scent burst onto her brain like a rain of lights, and his voice reached across the distance without words: 'I've always known you that well.' He wrapped her in his softness, touched her face with the movement of trees and the odor of wild water over stones, dissolving her need in the confidence of his embrace.

Don’t you miss it, any of it?' … 'I couldn’t say.' She thought about it. 'Not cars or electric lights, not movies. Books I can get if I ask. But walking around in a library, putting my hands on books I never knew about, that I miss. Any thing else, I don’t know.

Oh, man, don’t get me started on the subject of childhood brainwash. I hate that. Every fairy story, every Disney movie, every plot with animals in it, the bad guy is always the top carnivore. Wolf, grizzly, anaconda, Tyrannosaurus rex.

And you came over to make sure I was all right, is that what you're telling me? You came over here with your shotgun to protect me from my scarecrow?" "I had to," Garnett said, spreading his hands, throwing himself on her mercy. "I didn't care for the way Buddy was looking at you in your short pants.

She never wore a watch, and for this she didn't need one.

was after they discovered the world was round. I’m not scared of big words.” “I didn’t say you were.” “You did, too! ‘I realize you’re no scientist, Miss Rawley,

she considered a language that could carry nothing but love and simple truth.