On weekends my parents took me along to open houses,mansions with winding halls, hidden alcoves, secret stairwells, and multiple kitchens. We wandered through imagined liveswhere pantries were shelved with canned beans and bottled jams,breads and teas, tiers of jarred food ordered to the ceiling, like ledged cliffsides lifting bushes from a thread of roots that snaked through cracks in the rock. We entertained a fantasy of histories in the banisters and landings, a presence pausing in its wet boots and wool sweater to recall the warmth of one who could make these empty roomscozy, the narrative of other lives older than ours finding lightin antique splendor. I nestled into remote corners shadowed in a depth of discrete wonder, a privacy as vast as a valley with a window seat. I climbed to the highest levels where an attic bedroom pitched cavernous walls and a turret. From that circle of windows streets stitched the outskirts of town to wheat fields dotted with red and rusting tractors, sparrows spiraled through the golden spears and up, threading sunlight into a tapestry, first words of a story so intricate, and colored with such nuance, I stepped into its tree-lined road and joined my song to the birds in their crowns.
