And Marie clutches the letter and presses it to her, because she believed her aunt must have died long ago, she is at least sixty-five years old, and it is an unexpected gift of god to find she is not alone, that there is someone else on this earth alive who knew what it was to swim in the willow-hidden bend of the river, what it meant to gallop after a doe’s tail springing through the forest, to love the great calm intelligence that had been Marie’s mother.
