I didn’t know much about what I was seeing then or how the sight of an old barn or leaves turning could hold me, not when I was a child, but those days were the start, the beginnings you might say of when some parts of my own country, my own thin tracks on this thinning earth began to open up and open into those places where the heart begins to know itself as something more than a heart and where I find some of these same things still, but they are mostly quiet now, or more quiet than what they used to be, and I can look over all this country and see parts of it were mine once, not that I owned anything then or even now, but that I am with them, and even as I am with them, I understand a day will come when all of them are gone, and I will be also.