By rambling about, Tolitha discovered that there were things to be learned on the tangents and the extremities. She honored the margins; the wild side made all the difference. At the summer solstice of 1954, an amiable band of Sherpas led my grandmother on a two-week trek through the Himalayas where at dawn one morning on the brutally cold rooftop of the world, she watched sunlight disclose the snowy flanks of Mount Everest. A month later she saw a migration of sea snakes in the South China Sea and was on her way home.
