And the light! For God's sake the light. Here it is on the ridges of my curdoroys, there on the white page; here the window is light, and the luminous gray curtain above.

My mother, once, drew a picture of her mother. It looked like she was frowning, a very stern woman, like in old portrait paintings before people started grinning for the camera. We looked closely and the curve of her lips was concave upward, like a smile—but still she was frowning.

"My mouth corners turn down," she remarked. I'd been wondering what scourge of pain ran through my family to cause so many frowns: hers, my mother's, my own. Grandmother's epiphany, then: "That's why people always think I'm unhappy. My mouth corners turn down" That was 88. In 91 or 92, the scourge began slowly to lift off me; today I find incredible light shocking my corduroys, and fields of pink hiding behind trees.