There’s enough time to go out for about an hour. I head out the door and start walking out the road, not knowing exactly where to go. The sound of a car coming down the road behind me feels intrusive. To avoid it, I take a turn into the field on the right, and can decelerate into “looking” mode.

On this late November morning, a few spiders are still spinning webs. They shine, bedewed, in the grass. I walk to a grove of evergreens. Underneath a spruce tree that I helped plant, with my mother and my sister, about fifty-five years ago, is a chunk of bone. Its surface is marked all over, inside and outside, chewed by calcium-craving rodents.

From the grove to the edge of Look’s Pond is a few hundred feet. Little bluestem grass is russet, lowbush blueberries form maroon patches, and green notes come from mosses…