She lay down with blackbird song and wood pigeon call and bees in clover. She thought all of existence in this bucolic trance was a poem. Timeless, resolute, universal. The image would be repeated over the decades: women seeking solace, a safe place, bodies unclothed and held by nature. All the women she’d ever cared about had come with her here at some time or another. Not Livia, of course: that beautiful flyaway puffball, who’d deposited the seeds of first love across her life.
