The Good Daughters

There is something about the act of studying an unclothed body, as an artist does, that allows a person to appreciate it as pure form, regardless of the kinds of traits traditionally regarded as imperfections. In a figure drawing class, an obese woman's folds of flesh take on a kind of beauty. You can look at a man's shrunken chest or legs or buttocks with tenderness. Age is not ugly, just poignant.

By now I had lived half my life without Ray Dickerson, and it was not even Ray I missed. It was the young woman I had been when I loved him. She had disappeared. I missed the way the world had seemed to me then, the richness of the possibilities, the hunger I had felt, the capacity for longing. I had inhabited a wild and beautiful country once, one that I could never find my way back to. I had spoken a language no longer known to me. Somewhere on the planet, music was playing that my ears could not hear.

Those times a person feels most afraid for their life? Those are the times you know you’re alive.

place in him where memory remained, like a patch of soil the tractor has missed, where a few dry stalks of last summer’s crops still stand in their withered rows, the soil not turned over.

So I drove off that day with precious cargo in the back of my truck: three flats of Edwin Plank’s lovingly tended daughter plants—“my good daughters,” he called them—headed for Smiling Hills Farm.

Age is not ugly, just poignant.

Each strand of corn silk is actually a hollow tube connected to the undeveloped mother cob. The pollen travels down the silk to the cob, where it forms a single kernel. Each kernel has its own silk attached to it. Someone up there thought of everything, because they even made it so the silk is covered with a sticky substance that catches the pollen. To make sure it doesn’t just blow away.

Even as a kid, I always had the ability to see down the line to where trouble lay, or truth. George used to complain that I expected the worst out of life, but it wasn’t that. I simply recognized that just because the sun was shining one day didn’t mean it would the next. Frost would come, and so would snow. The fact of rain did not rule out the possibility of drought. You could call it pessimism. I based my attitudes on what I saw in the world around me. Not what I dreamed up.

Normally I wore my swimsuit at the pond, but that afternoon I let my uncovered skin feel the water. When I came up for air, I could hear the slow grinding sound of my father’s tractor over the other side of the hill and the lowing of the grazing cows. Just above the surface of the pond, a little cloud of bugs hovered, the wings of one catching the sunlight in a particular angle that made it beautiful as a jewel, and I could smell the fresh-cut hay. Remember this moment, I told myself, though only in my head. Young as I was, I knew that I was witnessing a kind of perfection that a person might experience only a handful of times in her life.

missing a crucial layer of skin other people had that allowed them to get through the day when he could not.

We lived less like husband and wife, it seemed, than affectionate brother and sister. I told myself there were worse things a person could say about her life than that.

His badness thrilled and amazed me.