It was the first day of seed collecting at Weber Marsh, and Andy was at the barn early to intercept any overeager volunteers. He had already crossed this mid-September day off his desk calendar; only eight more Saturdays to go, after this one. If an early snowfall struck before the last volunteer day, so much the better, though he didn’t count on it. He had learned over the last five years that if he so much as imagined the things he wanted—a return of normal water levels following months of drought, or the arrival of the snowy owl that sometimes hunkered down in Evans Prairie for the winter—the marsh wouldn’t give it to him. It had become a superstition: Don’t voice your desires aloud. Don’t let the marsh figure out what it is you’re after.
Andy was a man of science, but sometimes at his loneliest moments, he thought of the marsh as a powerful woman, one who liked to test his loyalty. She wanted him to prove his undying devotion to the land, and if his compass veered even a tiny bit off course, she would find a way to point him North again.
Ronald Schultz was one of those tests. A seventy-something retired arborist, Ronald now drove his Camry into the grass beside the barn where Andy waited with a stack of buckets. Ronald’s white mustache turned up in a grin as he killed the engine, honking obnoxiously before stepping out of the car. The sound was out of place here in the quiet; just over the ridge, the sandhill cranes bugled their morning hellos, and the Canada geese called out to each other as they flew in Vs over the water.
Andy checked his watch. Ronald was eighteen minutes early.
Ronald had been volunteering at Weber Marsh for nearly twenty years, and he didn’t let Andy forget it. He liked to offer little tidbits of information about the marsh as it “used to be” before Andy came to work here, and he often corrected Andy in front of the other volunteers.
As Ronald emerged from his car, he called out to Andy, “Prairie dropseed today?”
Andy had planned to collect prairie dropseed today, it was true, but now he decided to change the schedule. “Culver’s-root,” he corrected.
Both seed types were ready to be collected, though the volunteers tended to enjoy Culver’s-root collection much less. The thin, sparse plant could be difficult to see in the great ocean of blooming wildflowers, and it wasn’t as tactile as prairie dropseed, which you could run your hands through, filling your palms with brown seeds that smelled of butter and autumn.
Ronald made a sound like he was going to protest, but Andy busied himself with the volunteer sign-in sheet, writing today’s date at the top before passing it to Ronald to fill out.
A few more volunteers arrived, their cars kicking up dust on the gravel lane. Andy recognized the usual suspects—retirees, mostly—and even Janie had returned, though Andy had hoped she would finally throw in the towel this year. She was in her mid-eighties, and she didn’t do well walking through the high prairie grasses. She also tended to ask the same clarifying questions over and over, and he worried that she might contaminate their collected seeds by accidentally adding invasive species to the mix.
The morning was unseasonably warm, but this practiced group knew the drill: they wore long pants and tall boots, UPF shirts and sunglasses. The prairie at Weber Marsh was unforgiving, home to sneaky prairie thistle that could pierce your skin even through your pants, and there was no shade at all. Andy wore his usual long cargo pants and knee-high waders, a moisture-wicking long sleeve shirt, and a wide-brimmed green hat that his ex said made him look like Yogi Bear.
In the early days of their relationship, his ex claimed to appreciate the fact that he didn’t care about fashion. In college, she was the one who picketed with the Student Climate Action Coalition, and she was the one to sign them both up for the intro ecology course that led to Andy’s chosen career path. She was also the one who, after moving into their first apartment, bought a worm composting bin, which went awry and resulted in a maggot infestation as well as a rotten, blood-like smell in their kitchen that they could never completely get rid of.
And now she was a big-time lawyer at a commercial law firm, doing nothing to help the world as far as Andy could tell. She lived in Chicago, two hours away, which was too close for Andy’s liking.
A few more volunteers trickled in, and he busied himself distributing the buckets and scissors. It took him a moment to notice the unfamiliar Subaru Forester turning onto the lane. It moved slowly, and as it crested the small hill next to the barn, the glare on the windshield drew his eye like a flame. The reflection was too bright for him to see the driver.
“Anyone expecting a friend to join us?” he asked the group, but they denied it. It was unusual to have brand new volunteers. Weber Marsh was far from town, a good forty-minute drive down winding country roads.
The Subaru slowly eased into the grass where the others had parked. Andy’s stomach dropped as the driver’s side door opened.
A woman.
For a wild moment, Andy thought his ex had returned. But then he realized that this woman was younger, maybe in her mid-twenties, and she had dark, glossy hair, though she and his ex were about the same height and build: tall, lanky. He felt a spike of adrenaline that he tried to tamp down.
He didn’t mean to meet Ronald’s eyes, but when he did, Ronald gave him an exaggerated wink.
The woman approached them with some hesitancy. “Is this the seed collecting group?” she asked.
Her voice was huskier than he expected, and Andy’s stomach lurched again. But before he could formulate a response, Ronald replied, “Sure is. Welcome to the club!”
Andy’s face burned. Now she would think that Ronald was in charge.
Andy couldn’t figure out how to reassert himself as the leader. He also couldn’t remember how long it had been since he’d washed his hair. It was long now, down to his shoulders, and he hadn’t bothered tying it back. He was glad he had the hat.
The woman shifted from foot to foot. She was wearing sneakers and jeans and a cotton t-shirt, and Andy wondered if he should warn her. Even aside from prairie thistle, the tall grasses were soaked with dew at this time in the morning, and she was going to be very uncomfortable in those clothes. But he had never expressed concern over the other volunteers’ attire before, so he kept his mouth shut.
Janie handed over the sign-in sheet, and the new woman took it wordlessly and scratched down her name and contact information. Andy didn’t mean to look at her hands, but he couldn’t help himself. No ring.
She held the clipboard uncertainly, then made as if to pass it to Ronald. Finally Andy summoned his willpower and said, “I can take that.”
She looked at him with some surprise, and he worried that he’d been too brusque. She passed him the sheet, and he tried not to let his gaze linger on it. He didn’t want to express too much interest in her name, though he was dying to know it.
There it was: Lydia Stanhope. A flare of energy sizzled through his chest. It was like learning the scientific name of a new flower. No, becoming aware of a new flower. Here she was, right beside him—and maybe she’d been nearby all this time. Maybe they’d passed each other on the sidewalk in town, or stood in the same aisle at Woodman’s. FMaybe they had simply never noticed each other.
Now, though, she had a name. Now he knew her.
This feeling was why he had fallen in love with his job. Working at the marsh had given him a brand new color palette, a sixth sense. He could name so many plants and birds and insects now, and he could tell you exactly how everything fit together.
When Andy visited his mom in North Carolina after his first year at Weber Pond, he saw his childhood home in a completely different light, all the native plants in the yard suddenly taking on new significance. Those pearlescent, pea-like flowers growing on tall stalks outside his bedroom window were white baptisia, a tumbleweed. That greenish caterpillar on the baptisia leaf would turn into a wild indigo duskywing. In fall, brown seed pods would emerge from the calyx tube, and they’d have tiny weevil grubs inside, adapted to eat the seeds.
And all along he’d thought his mom was the neighborhood eccentric, growing weeds in the yard while everyone else cut their grass and pruned their shrubs.
Awareness, interconnectedness, unity. Andy was grateful to the marsh for giving him these gifts.
(“You really think you’re aware of things?” Andy’s ex said once, and he never did find out the thing he missed, the thing he hadn’t been aware of, that caused her to laugh like that.)
Andy checked his watch, then cleared his throat. “So, we’re collecting Culver’s-root today. Veronicastrum virginicum.” He flinched after saying the scientific name, trying not to make eye contact with anyone. Ronald snorted but thankfully didn’t comment.
A hand shot up.
“Yes, Janie?” Andy asked politely.
She slowly lowered her hand. Her voice wobbled even more than it had last year. “What does Culver’s-root look like, again?”
He tried not to sigh. “I’ll show you once we get out there. Everyone have a bucket and scissors?”
He didn’t wait for their confirmation, instead striding straight into Evans Prairie through the tall grasses that came up to his chin. It all sprang back almost immediately; prairies were surprisingly resilient. He knew the group would follow—they always did, whether he wanted them to or not—but he felt a heightened sense of awareness today, a prick at the back of his neck. Lydia was behind him now, sizing him up.
He told himself to focus. He waded through New England aster and showy goldenrod, twining together in bright purple and yellow, buzzing with brown-belted bumble bees. (Somewhere behind him, Lydia introduced herself to Janie. She seemed friendly. Why was she here?) An American goldfinch perched on a sawtooth sunflower a few feet away, and a red-tailed hawk soared in loops above their heads. (Lydia was saying that she had just moved to the area for a teaching job at the elementary school.) Behind him, a pair of wood ducks whistled their high-pitched flight calls, catching his attention as they winged their way to the marsh on the other side of the ridge. (Janie asked if she was single; Lydia laughed and said she was.)
It didn’t matter that she was single. He wasn’t a land steward for the dating opportunities.
Andy felt himself turning red, and, seeing a brown seed head shaped almost like a devil’s pitchfork, he cut it off with an overzealous snip. Then he trudged back to show the group.
He refused to meet Lydia’s eyes as he held the Culver’s-root aloft, explaining what to look for, where to cut. He hoped his telepathic message to Weber Marsh was received: I am here for the land and nothing else. This is all I will ever need.
The second weekend of seed collecting was something of a special time at Weber Marsh, as it was the peak of monarch migration. The butterflies roosted here in the thousands, drinking nectar from prairie plants in order to fuel their journey to Mexico.
It was Andy’s job to “tag” as many butterflies as he could. It wasn’t high-tech—he had thousands of tiny stickers, each with a 7-digit ID, that he would place on the butterflies’ wings and enter into a database online. In the late fall, around the Day of the Dead, the monarchs would appear in droves throughout the Sierra Madres, and volunteers there would go out to the roosts to look at the tags and report which butterflies survived. It was part of an international effort to better understand the movements of monarchs and assess how close they were to extinction.
When Andy started working at the marsh five years ago, this kind of work felt special—it had a global impact, and he was helping to save a whole species. But now even this seemed like drudgery. In his master’s program, his advisor often said that being a land steward was like being a bricklayer for a cathedral. You spent your life doing backbreaking labor, laying one brick after another, but at least you could take heart in the knowledge that you were building something beautiful.
It was true that the marsh was his cathedral, his church. But lately the sermons were all about hellfire. Temperatures were rising, the marsh was drying out, the grassland birds were disappearing, and the community didn’t care enough. Though Andy lived on the land by himself, he was technically beholden to the nonprofit that had bought this land for conservation purposes—and the nonprofit never had enough money. The folks in the main office were underpaid and overworked, burnt out, ready to give up at any moment.
Which is why they needed so many volunteers, and also why Andy wasn’t allowed to complain about them.
So on that second Saturday, when his seed collectors had finished collecting dropseed, Andy asked if they could stay to tag monarchs. He would rather have done it all himself, but he was running out of time; the weather was starting to turn, and the butterflies would take off any day now.
He also wouldn’t mind the extra time with Lydia, though he told himself that it would be in his best interest if she went home and never volunteered again. He had a bad feeling that she was just like his ex, the kind of person who was here only to feel good about herself, to check a box and be done.
But when he asked the volunteers if they could help, Lydia seemed eager to tag the monarchs, saying, “There’s nothing else I’d rather do today.” It was noon, and they were back at the barn, dumping their individual buckets of dropseed into an empty blue kiddie pool.
Ronald gave Andy a wicked grin, his bushy white mustache dancing like a creature all its own. “I’ve got somewhere to be,” he told Andy.
Janie chose to stay. The others headed back to their cars.
And so Andy found himself leading two women—some fifty years apart in age—into the prairie across the street. There was a stand of pines at the corner where hundreds of monarchs roosted, though they’d all be out in the field now, nectaring on wildflowers in the sun.
He explained how to use the nets: wait until the butterfly perches on a flower, then swing the net gently from right to left, twisting the handle up so that the material of the net blocks the opening. Simple.
He looked at Lydia the whole time he was talking. Her dark hair was tied up today, high and airy, drawing more attention to her heart-shaped face.
She did a few practice swings, her net careening through the goldenrod, and he was tempted to stand behind her and correct her grip like in the movies. But then Janie took a swing and—accidentally or not, it wasn’t clear—hit him in the shoulder, causing him to lurch toward Lydia. He reached out and grabbed her elbow.
She laughed and stumbled back, and he immediately released her, then gave them both a thin smile. His face was burning. “It takes practice,” he said.
They spread out, and in the span of a few moments he had lost sight of both Lydia and Janie. The flora was so tall that even he couldn’t see over it, and he was taller than both women by at least half a foot.
He swung his net and easily snagged a monarch. He knew he should demonstrate how to tag it, but—still smarting from his previous embarrassment—he thought he might just keep quiet. He was carrying the stickers, after all, and the chart to fill out with every monarch’s information: gender, time of capture, type of flower it was perched on.
The monarch struggled in the net, and he clasped a hand over the material, keeping her there. She was female—she didn’t have black spots on the surface of her hindwings.
He hunched there, paralyzed, watching the monarch flap against the material of the net. He could do this alone.
But did he want to?
He took a breath and called out, “Got one!”
And Lydia was there almost immediately, plowing through the prairie like a badger. He heard Janie far off to his right, struggling through the overgrowth. It would take her a while to make it back.
In the meantime he showed Lydia how to pinch the monarch’s wings to keep her immobilized. Lydia made a startled noise as she fought to hold the butterfly, and she commented, “My mother always told me not to touch a butterfly’s wings.”
He nodded. “A well-intentioned myth.”
“You’re sure it’s just a myth?” She asked this with trepidation, as though she was worried he was playing a prank on her. As though she might find out she was hurting the butterfly even now, melting its wings with her fingertips.
“I’m sure. The wings have to be strong to travel so far.” He looked at the first sticker on his sheet and wrote down the 7-digit number on his chart, then peeled it off and handed it to her.
“Put it right there,” he said, “on the discal cell.”
“Here?” she asked, quietly now. He looked up and noted that Janie was still a ways off.
This was Andy and Lydia’s private moment.
“There,” he said, reaching in and placing his hand, so lightly, on hers. He steered her towards the correct part of the wing, and she pressed the sticker on. Then he released her hand.
“I don’t want to hurt her,” Lydia said, and the breeze gusted, and for a moment Andy thought the marsh was listening.
“It’s okay,” he assured her. “You’re not.” But something about Lydia’s touch seemed to disturb the monarch, and they watched as the butterfly struggled, six legs running and running, treading air.
When she let the monarch go, it floated up and into the sky, disappearing against the blue like a speck.
“What did I miss?” Janie panted, finally appearing at Andy’s side.
“We just tagged a monarch. Don’t worry, I’ll find another one,” he told her, seeing the dismayed look on her face. He was annoyed at her intrusion, even though he knew he shouldn’t be.
“How do the monarchs know when it’s time to leave?” Lydia asked now, her eyes still focused on the sky.
“It’s an instinct,” Andy said. He’d been thinking about it a lot these days.“There’s a German word for it, zugunruhe, which means migratory restlessness. Scientists believe that butterflies and birds and a few other species can feel when it’s time to travel.”
“I’ve felt that before,” Lydia said. “That’s how I came here.”
He made a noncommittal noise of understanding. He wanted to tell her that humans don’t experience zugunruhe. They migrate when they have to, when it’s a matter of survival, but there’s nothing inside them telling them when and where to go.
He was thinking of his ex now. He couldn’t help it. They had grown up together in the Research Triangle in North Carolina, and they went to college together, and then, when he chose a master’s program in Wisconsin, she followed him there. Andy got only one job offer after that, at Weber Marsh. His ex wanted him to decline it; she said she didn’t want to be so far from the city.
But he accepted, and still she chose to follow him.
Sometimes he wondered what he’d been thinking. He had known, all along, that his ex wouldn’t be happy here. They both did.
But the marsh had called to him. He couldn’t explain it, even now.
“This is all yours,” his boss had joked that first day, standing on the farmhouse porch at the top of the tallest hill. They could see prairie, marshland, and forest, all at once. The sun touched down on the fields just so; the light glittered on the water like a thousand jewels.
Even if he’d gotten a better job offer in a more interesting place, he might not have taken it. Not then.
Andy knew the marsh wasn’t his. Rather, he was hers.
The first spring they lived at Weber Marsh, Andy and his ex witnessed the migration of the eastern tiger salamanders. The salamanders could reach up to eleven inches long, and they lived in burrows in the forest for most of the year. But after the first rain in March, when the temperature was just above forty degrees, they emerged from the trees, crossed the prairie, and slipped into the marsh to breed.
It happened at night. Andy was expecting it, and he made his ex stay up with him. They walked out to the field, and he wouldn’t let her use a flashlight; the moon was enough.
He and she were the only two people in the world, but there were eastern tigers in the hundreds: huge and black with yellow spots, struggling through the dead grasses, wading through the brush. It was less than half a mile for them to migrate from the forest, but it seemed like an impossible distance—they moved so slowly, each step an effort, instinct driving them forward.
“I can’t believe this is happening in our backyard,” his ex said, and he heard something in her voice that he hadn’t heard in a long time: wonder.
He wiped his hands on his pants and picked one of the salamanders up, cradling it in his palms. He never wore lotion or used hand sanitizer, and he was confident that the salamander’s skin wouldn’t absorb anything harmful. It wriggled sluggishly in his hands.
“Enlarged cloaca,” he said, observing the base of the salamander’s tail. “It’s a male.”
“Ew,” his ex said, disgust taking the place of amazement. “Put it down.”
Instead, he held the salamander out to her. This amazing creature lived in her own backyard. It was incredible. She’d said so herself.
But she screamed and begged him to get it away from her.
He released the poor fellow back to the ground. It crawled indignantly away.
Lydia returned over the next several Saturdays to collect wild bergamot and purple coneflower, rattlesnake-master and prairie dock, but Andy still couldn’t bring himself to ask her out. He hardly had a moment alone with her, in fact, and he knew only the most basic information about her, mostly gleaned from overhearing her conversations with the other volunteers: she spent two years in Ethiopia with the Peace Corps; she had a cat named Pickles; she had found out about Weber Marsh by Googling “things to do outside.” He suspected she was avoiding him after their day of monarch tagging. Maybe he’d come on too strong. Maybe it was too painfully obvious that he liked her. He’d been washing his hair more often now, so he hoped his hygiene wasn’t the issue.
September passed and then October. He grew more and more anxious as the weeks progressed; he wasn’t sure what had gotten into him. Finally he vowed that he would make a move on the last day of seed collecting. He would wait until all the other volunteers were heading back to their cars, and then he would call out to her innocently and claim she’d forgotten something—“Lydia, did you forget your gloves?”—and then he would ask her to have dinner sometime.
And if an extreme weather event forced him to cancel that last volunteer day, it was a sign that he and Lydia were not meant to be.
The forecast for the final Saturday of the volunteer season was warm, far warmer than it should be in November. Goldenrod was the only thing worth collecting now: the seed heads had lost their color and were now gray-white puffs, which took to the wind and drifted like snowflakes. All color had drained from the prairies, since most of the other plants had senesced, but the grasses were still tall. The monarchs were long gone. Three types of goldenrod created a shoulder-high field of faux snow.
He waited by the barn as usual. Today was the day. In a way, it would be nice to put this all to rest, to resume his normal life at Weber Marsh: isolated and content. Pretending that Lydia never existed.
The volunteers began to arrive. There was smug old Ronald, but Andy didn’t care about him anymore. His brain didn’t have enough space to think about anyone but Lydia. The others rolled in, chatting about the woes of climate change and how strange the weather was, but he paid them no mind. He didn’t have time to dwell on the impending destruction of the natural world.
He looked at his watch: two minutes after. Three.
She was late sometimes. He pretended to adjust the buckets and scissors, and then, to buy time, he claimed he needed to look for something in the barn.
Ten after. No Lydia.
“Should we get started, Andy?” Ronald called.
Andy emerged from the barn and pretended that he’d lost track of time. “Sure, I was just waiting for a call. From my boss.”
Ronald grinned. Andy would have made a swing at him, if he weren’t so old.
Andy led them, blindly, back into Evans Prairie. This was where it had all begun. This was where they had collected Culver’s-root, that first day, that day when he—
When he fell for—
He pushed down the thought. Goldenrod seeds gusted around him, carried on a cold breeze. It hadn’t been cold all morning, but something in the air was ominous.
It was imperative to push down all thoughts of Lydia.
He tried to refocus. “So, we’re collecting stiff goldenrod today.” He reached into the grasses around him and clipped one. “It’ll have a stout stem, and you can see that the inflorescence has a flat top. Whatever you do, don’t mix this up with Canada goldenrod. It’s invasive, and it takes over prairies because it’s a cloneformer, which means that its root systems spread underground.”
“Did you say stiff goldenrod?” Ronald asked.
“Showy goldenrod isn’t as populous right now, but if you do find one, it’s going to be straighter and more erect.”
Ronald guffawed at this, and Andy realized he was the butt of the joke. Rather than give any further instruction, he barreled into the prairie with his bucket, gesturing for them to get to work. He snipped the stiff goldenrod around him with a fervor. He was far out in the field in minutes, so far that none of the volunteers could speak to him without shouting.
It would have been better, though, to be around the others, to hear their conversation, to answer their annoying questions. Now, alone, he couldn’t stop his thoughts from swirling up and away with the goldenrod. He could still reach out to Lydia after this. He had her contact information, after all. But would that be unprofessional, a breach of privacy? Surely it would. And she knew where he lived; she could find him if she wanted to.
The fact that she wasn’t here today seemed to be a final confirmation that she wanted nothing to do with him. And he should have been fine with that.
But maybe her car broke down on the way here. Maybe she had caught a cold. Maybe her cat was sick. A thousand maybes took root inside him.
Maybe she saw him as he was: a thirty-year-old man who was trapped at Weber Marsh with no foreseeable way out. Conservation work was long-term; all these seeds they were collecting would be planted this winter, and most of them wouldn’t mature, wouldn’t become anything, for at least ten years. If he wanted to see this through—if he wanted to make a difference—he would stay.
When his ex had dumped him, that was what she’d said: “You’re stuck here. Can you not see that? You’ll be here forever if you’re not careful.”
He clipped a stem of goldenrod and another gust of wind hit him across the face. The seeds flew off the stem, and he thought of dandelion wishes, the kind he made as a kid back in Raleigh, before his life had turned into this. I wish summer didn’t have to end. I wish my dog would come back to life. I wish my parents would get back together.
I wish, he thought now, I could have more than this.
At five ’til noon, he asked Ronald and another volunteer to help him with the bins—they had collected three garbage bins’ worth of stiff goldenrod seed—and they dragged them back across the prairie to the barn. Andy didn’t realize, until everyone was about to leave, that they were missing another volunteer.
“Where’s Janie?” he asked.
The group looked around at each other, blinking.
“Has anyone seen her?” he asked. “Did she come across the road with us?”
The volunteers shook their heads, confused. There was a small outhouse connected to the barn, and he banged on the door. Nothing.
“She was here this morning, though, right?” he asked. His voice seemed to be getting thinner. He strained to be heard.
“She was out there with us at the beginning,” Ronald said. “She was clipping some Canada goldenrod, and I told her not to.”
“When was that?”
“9:45, maybe?”
Andy felt something coming on, a wind or a shadow of some kind, like a belt of cumulonimbus clouds racing over the hills. He looked at the parking lot and saw Janie’s minivan, locked up with no one inside.
He ran, then, into the vast prairie. The grasses seemed even taller than they had this morning, brushing against his face, snagging in his hair. Janie, who was much shorter and whose spine bent forward like a C, could walk into the prairie and disappear completely.
He called Janie’s name over and over, but he heard nothing in response. Even if she had replied, he couldn’t possibly hear over the wind.
The others were behind him, and Ronald was giving orders now, telling everyone to form a chain; they would canvass the prairie until they found her. It wasn’t a bad idea, but somehow Andy knew it would be futile.
His awareness expanded for a moment across time and space: He saw monarchs flying south, all the way down to the oyamel fir forests in Mexico. He saw the eastern tiger salamanders stumbling slowly through the prairie. He saw the damselfly larvae crawling from the marsh to begin their metamorphosis, the shorebirds arriving to eat the damselflies, the birders arriving to watch the shorebirds. He saw his ex in the passenger seat five years ago, their boxes piled in the back of the truck and their hands clasped over the gearshift.
And finally he saw his future: his boss’s empty face staring him down, Janie’s bereft family members begging for answers. Journalists, probably, and policemen. Lawyers.
He wouldn’t stick around for that. The wind rushed through the high prairie grass, and he heard the marsh telling him, fiercely, like a woman scorned, Just go.
As the intrepid volunteers took their cues from Ronald and began the search for Janie, Andy crept back up the path to the farmhouse. He grabbed his keys from the worn wooden hook just inside the door, and then he stood on the porch, gazing out at the marsh one last time. The wind gusted mightily, and he climbed into his pickup.
His tires sent up a cloud of dust that followed him on the way out, and as he turned away from Weber Marsh, he saw a line of sandhill cranes soaring through the sky above him, going in the same direction. He synced up with them at the back of the line, as if he, too, had wings.
He was finally going. He only wished, with his windows down and the cranes calling in their ancient language above him, he knew exactly where.
