On summer mornings when she was a child she stood on the cinder blocks outside the small bedroom window of the addition built onto the trailer which sat next to the old frame house, out there in the foothills.

She shaded her eyes – the sun rose to the right, over the pines across the field – and peered in to see the grandmother  sleeping quietly in the bed, in the room with the knotty pine walls.

The grandmother was sleeping still. The child went away and came back again later. Climbed the cinder blocks. Shaded her eyes. Peered in.

Groan. Groan.

The grandmother was waking up. She had a headache when she woke up, a bad one, one that went away only after her coffee was drunk, her cigarette was smoked, an hour had passed by.

If the grandmother was groaning, then she would be up soon. The child went inside and lit the tall, skinny oil furnace with a long fireplace match. She put water on to boil. She got down two teacups, two saucers, two spoons and a single plate.

The grandmother was getting dressed now, washing, brushing her hair.

When the water boiled, the child stirred Nescafe into one of the teacups and added Cremora. She tore open a hot chocolate packet and emptied it into the other teacup and stirred hot water into it. She added Cremora to the hot chocolate.

The grandmother came into the tiny rounded-end kitchen of the trailer and sat in her chair at the formica table. The child set the coffee before her.

“Thank you, dear child,” said the grandmother.

The grandmother tapped her pack of Lark cigarettes against her palm and shook one out and lit it. She leaned forward, supporting her aching head with one hand and smoking with the other.

The child put two slices of Roman Meal bread into the toaster and got the plastic tub of whipped margarine out of the tiny trailer refrigerator. She waited for the toast and she watched the Lark cigarette.

When half an inch of ash hung off the end of the cigarette the child said, “Flick,” and the grandmother tapped her cigarette on the ashtray.

The toast popped up and the child put it on the plate and turned her back to the grandmother, hiding the plate from her so that she could spread an inordinate amount of whipped margarine on it. This was her secret vice. When she ate the toast she would hold the slice, heavy with its over-buttered-ness, under the table so that the grandmother wouldn’t know how much butter she had spread on it.

Now she wonders if the grandmother knew anyway, and thought, let her eat as much butter as she wants to.

They sat together in mostly silence, the grandmother and the child. The grandmother often closed her eyes and groaned, waiting for the headache to dissipate. She let her coffee grow cold before she drank it. This was a peculiarity of the grandmother – she wanted her coffee boiling hot, but she never  drank it while it was hot.

When the grandmother had smoked her first two cigarettes, she would tell the child stories of her own childhood in the big city, the biggest city in the world, six hours downstate from the hundreds of acres of woods and fields that the child was growing up in.

The butcher down the block, who wrapped three slices of bologna in white butcher paper for a penny, can you imagine? The grandmother’s father, who stowed away on the ship from France, bound for the harbor where the Statue of Liberty raised her giant torch, and he dove into the water in the middle of the night, and he swam to shore, and he spoke to a man on the street in French, and the man answered in French. The child’s mother, whose hair had curled in long silky ringlets until that time she had the long fever, and it never curled again.

The child spoke, but not much. She listened to the stories she had heard so many times. She knew the inflection of each sentence, and she waited for the dip of the head and the brief smile that meant the story was finished.

The grandmother had been a model in her youth. She had married late after several engagements. She had borne her only child when she was nearly forty years old, almost unheard of back then. She had worn high heels and suits every day to her job as legal secretary. She was a sophisticated woman who could not have imagined she would ever leave the bustling streets of the biggest city in the world, a woman who carried the knowledge of that city and its life with her always, as she sat at that formica table in that tiny trailer kitchen, looking out at the woods and fields that were not the city, nothing like the city.

One day the grandmother looked straight at the child and leaned toward her.

“You don’t talk much,” she said. “But I want you to know that you can tell me anything. There is nothing I have not seen. There is nothing about you that would shock me, and I am here to listen to you.”

“I know,” the child said in a voice that she made bright and childlike.

I won’t, though, the child thought, in a thought that was not childlike. I won’t tell you anything, anything that’s real.

She thinks about that now,  how the grandmother leaned toward her, the intent look in her eyes. There was so much that the child didn’t know then, and there was so much she had to protect and keep safe and contained and hidden.

And now? She thinks about the grandmother every day, usually at dawn. Sometimes she thinks about how unspeakably hard the grandmother’s life was, at times, but more often than not she simply sits and lets the grandmother come to her.

Which she always does, leaning toward her with outstretched hands and a genuine smile.

Wherever she is now, she is happy. That is the sense that the now-grown child, a woman now, has of her – happiness and light.

The woman talks to her now the way she never did as a child, about things that are real.  See the two of them, leaning forward in their chairs, hands moving, smiling and laughing, the toast and the cooling coffee and the silent cinder blocks forgotten.

They went to the fair in the late afternoon. That way, they could fly into the sky – or as close as they could come – when the Midway was lit up against the darkness. Two of them had been dreaming of the Kamikaze – which he termed “a truly horrifying ride” – since last year’s fair.

She had no such inclination. Why subject herself to the torture of dangling upside down, body held skyward by only a slender metal bar?

But the Kamikaze would come later, when the Midway was extravagant with colored lights beating back the darkness.

First, the food: for two of them, the traditional first-Fair-food foot-long hot dog, raw onions for the young one, fried for him, a stripe of mustard and a few pumps of ketchup for both. She looked at them eating their footlongs and thought, Will I go my entire life never having eaten a footlong?,  and stepped up to the window and ordered one.

And then it was on to the Fine Art, where the three of them scoffed at the prize winners and where they each gazed in awe at a magical, hand-stitched work of art on hand-woven cloth stretched over canvas, tucked away in a corner.

Ribbonless. Proving once and for all, in case there was any doubt left, that they lived in an unfair world.

Time for a beverage? Certainly. And what might she have, a rumless pina colada or an Orange Tastee? Why, a rumless pina colada, thanks. Feel free to have some, if you want.

On to the Amateur Talent Contest, where it soon became evident that the only kind of amateur talent remaining in the entire state was musical. Shall I sing this year?, wondered the amateurs statewide. I shall sing.

And they sang, all of them.  A skinny little 13 year old girl in cowboy boots, a country star in the making. A 39 year old security guard in tight blue jeans and a Stetson, a country star in the making. A retired man of 69 who took up the mandolin two years ago, a star of some kind in the making.

But wait. On stage came a sister and her twin brother in identical black suits and hats, tapdancing. I want to be that girl, she thought, I want to dance and smile like that. She wanted to be that girl because that girl’s joy was so evident, and so infectious, that the three of them sat on their hard wooden bench and laughed. The happiness of that girl made them all happy.

Laughing made them hungry again, so they journeyed on, on to the International Bazaar, and a giant cup of noodles for him, and another giant cup of noodles for the young one, and gyros sampler with tabouli for her.

He nudged her and pointed out the old couple next to them, the old couple with their coupon book, dozens of pages carefully sticky-noted in some sort of code known only to the two of them. She told him that watching the old couple confer over their coupon book made her want to cry, and he nodded.

Then it was getting dark.

They made their way to the Midway, where they carefully tore out the $6 off coupon from their own coupon book and purchased 80 tickets. She sat on the bench and watched as he and the young one were strapped in. She made a face as they gave her the thumbs-up.

She watched as they rose into the air, higher and higher, faster and faster, until gravity overtook the old steel cars and they whipped around and around and around, first forward, then backward, for many minutes on end. She watched as they grew silent and red-faced, split at the waist by that iron bar as they dangled upside down. Grim determination in the air.

She turned to the man sitting next to her on the bench and made big eyes of Never In This World to him, and he silently nodded in agreement. No Kamikaze for her, and no Kamikaze for the man next to her on the bench.

But what about Big Ben? What about the tall, tall clock tower with the dangling-leg seats and the anti-gravity swoop straight up into the air? What about that ride?

Why not?

Up they swooped,  and then down they plunged. She could not stop screaming. He laughed at her. The young one laughed at her.

The Crazy Mouse hurled them around its square corners, and had they not been strapped in, would have hurled them straight out into the night and the lights, human cannonballs. The young one’s phone flew out of her pocket and straight into the air, and he caught it as it came soaring back down.

And finally, on their way out, they stood before the Freak Show as they did each year, waiting for the tiny man to eat fire. 79 years old. Poobah, the last performing pygmy on the carnival circuit. He sat as he sat every year, on his small chair, his legs dangling down, two black spokes of iron held in one hand.

The fire eater has been performing for more than sixty years. The fire eater dipped the black spokes in fuel, set them ablaze, turned to the crowd and, one by one, patiently swallowed the flames. Black teeth. Smoke-darkened face. Eyes that every day watched a thousand eyes looking back at him, expectant.

Late at night they trudged down the dark roads to their car. The young one shared her cotton candy with them. Fireworks exploded above their heads, and their eyes turned high to the lit night sky.

Come with us, if you want. You can carry the bag of groceries, camping food – a loaf of bread, peanut butter and jelly, potato chips, eggs and butter, graham crackers and marshmallows and bars of Hershey’s chocolate. We’d be happy to have some help with the groceries, because we already have our sleeping bags and our pillows and our notebooks and pens and matches and toothbrushes.

Cross the road where no cars go, and follow us on the tractor path straight through the cornfield. Are you surprised that the corn is above your head? That’s how it is with un-sweet cow corn: it’s tall, much taller than you would think.

Into the woods we go, on the old logging road that’s now more of a trail than anything else. You’ve heard that there are coyotes living in here? You’re right. But they won’t hurt you, and later tonight – later every night – you can sit by the campfire and listen to them howl.

There’s nothing like that sound, of coyotes howling at the moon, or whatever it is that they howl at, unless it’s the call of a loon across a lake.

You can stay if you want, but you will be the silent camper, the one we don’t see, the one we don’t need, because we are sufficient unto ourselves. We are two girls, one very tall and scrawny, with long dark hair, one very short, with crayon-blue eyes and silky blonde hair.

That’s her up there in that photo, the short blue-eyed one. I think about her so often these days, that girl you see there, running beside her horse. She used to do that – hold the reins and run across the grass, the horse trotting beside her. Sometimes she’d put the saddle on and ride through the fields and woods.

She was my best friend, back then. When did I meet her? I don’t even know. Until I did meet her, I would’ve said, had you asked, that I had many friends but that I wasn’t a best friend type.

And then she came along.

She lived in a trailer on Round Barn Road, an unwalkable and unbikable distance away, back when we were little girls. But she was always at my house, or I was always at hers, the trailer with the framed-up-with-2×4’s never-finished addition where her bedroom was.

We were inseparable in the way that you can only be when you’re that age. We had all our classes together. We walked down the halls together. We met at her locker or my locker before school.  We talked on the phone at night. She rode the bus to my house and I rode the bus to her house.

We played a game that we called the Word Game, a game that someone else told me, when I was a grownup, is actually called Jotto. All we needed for the game was paper and pencil. We were exactly evenly matched, and we played that game for years, everywhere we were.

There was the summer she had a stomach ache every night after dinner, which, because we were children, we accepted without thinking.  We used to sit quietly until the stomach ache got better, and then we swung on the swings, or played the Word Game, or lay in the treehouse talking.

But the stomach ache turned into those long days and weeks – was it months? – of chemo and radiation. I would go with her to the hospital, more than an hour away. Long gray halls. Fluorescent overhead lighting. Gray doors. Polished speckled floors. A tall dark door with a chickenwire window and one of those nuclear-radiation-triangle-warning things: don’t go in there. Stay away. Fear. Disfigurement. A power beyond your control.

But she was in there, lying still.

And then back at her trailer, where she lay still on the couch and I sat next to her, talking, telling her about the days. I once had a new pair of hiphuggers, white with fake graffitti all over them – Kilroy was here, Darwin failed – and I waited for her to admire them, but she closed her eyes and tried to hold back the nausea until she had to sit up and use the bucket.

And then it was over, the radiation and chemo were done, and her growing was done, and her ability to bear children was done, but I, being a child, didn’t think about that. Did she? Back we went, to school, to the hallways, to the classes where we were the ones always to raise our hands, to our notebooks and our pencils and our endless, endless Word Game.

Then she  moved to Florida.

I can only write it like that: Then she moved to Florida.

I can’t feel what it felt like,  I can’t remember. I can’t remember what it was like for me to go to seventh grade without her, to walk those long hallways without her, to climb into my treehouse without her. Did I  go camping down through the woods again? I don’t remember.

I don’t remember how it felt when Mr. D the science teacher looked at me that fall and said, “What are you going to do now, without your leaning post?”

I remember those words, though: my leaning post.

There were the years of the endless letters. Letters of many pages, flying back and forth from my mailbox with its red flag to hers on that dusty dirt road, letters written over days, a line here, three pages there, illustrated, written on yellow legal paper or torn-out notebook paper or tiny scraps of paper numbered up to the hundreds, or toilet paper, unspooling and unspooling, so easily torn, each envelope also containing the Word Game, sent back and forth between us, one move per letter.

There was the single trip to Florida to visit her. The smell of orange blossoms brings me back there, to the orange groves that surrounded the trailer where she lived with her mother and her sisters and her brothers. There were seashells, a school where the hallways were outside and uncovered, where shorts were worn year round. There was a can of Florida sunshine, and sponges from a place called Tarpon  Springs.

Where are you now, first best friend, girl who showed me how it could feel to have a kindred spirit, a boon companion, someone to see you through your days, no matter what comes?

Look at you up there in that old photo, running beside your horse. You were the magnificent companion of my childhood.  Beautiful girl, where are you now?

Greetings, feet. Look at you, dangling off the end of the bed like that. Long toes. Sandal tan. Badly-painted toenails.

How many miles have you walked in your life? Many. Many-many.

You were just feet when she was a child, and she didn’t think about you. Pedaling her bike, pushing against the bark of the tree when she climbed into her treehouse, dangling above the floor until her  legs were long enough. Running in the dusk when she and the others played tag or hide and seek or sardines. Catching fireflies.

Then came the years of days and nights when she started out walking and just kept on. Up the steep hills of the city in which she once lived. Down that dirt road in the Green Mountains. Around the alleys and side streets of Taipei, where it was so easy to get lost.

She walked herself out of places, and messes, and states of being. She walked herself from one life into another life, and then another. She walked herself away from things she wanted rid of. She wished she could walk away from her head, sometimes – more than  sometimes – but walking was as close as she could come.

Miles and miles along rivers, and oceans, along continents that once were covered with seas. Once, a woman came up to her as she walked along the low tide line. “You are the most intent walker I have ever seen,” she said.

But the intention was unintentional. She was walking away from what she could, walking her way into the calm that, for her, only comes from walking.

For fifteen years now she has watched a man walk the city she lives in. Once, a decade ago, she passed him as he sat on a bench by the lake with his hands on his knees. Apart from that, he walks, and so far as she knows, he does not ever stop.

In the last three years he has grown gray and gaunt, and his legs have bowed. He was once a handsome man, and now she thinks of him as he is in winter, with the dusty parka and no mittens.

Where does he go at night? She doesn’t know. She hopes that there are some quiet hours for him.

There were years in there when she couldn’t sleep, and when those she loved were not with her, and she clipped the leash to the dog and walked the lakes at 4 a.m. Others were out then too. Could they not sleep either? Were they coming off the late shift? Rising early, or about to go to bed?

And here you are, feet. Look at you. Do you hurt? You hurt. No matter what kind of shoes she puts on you, they are never just the right shoes. No matter how she vows to keep your toes painted, she doesn’t.

Chipped and calloused and aching, still you walk on. She never has to tell you what to do or how to do it. You just know, and what you know is to keep on walking.

That a person could spontaneously combust. That the word “absurd” was spelled and pronounced “absurb.” That the circular file referred to an actual file that went around and around, similar to the revolving spice rack in her sister Oatie’s cupboard. That she could write the beautiful book she dreamed of writing. That she could one day repeat that once-in-a-lifetime night in her childhood, when she closed her eyes at bedtime and opened them again to morning. That Phoebe was pronounced Foe-Eeb. That she would take her children on long road trips and they would all sing rounds in the car. That she would one day encounter Cindy S., magnificent companion of her childhood, in an airport. That she would have a 50-year marriage. That she would one day iron the green and brown shirt that for many years she had been meaning to iron. That she would overcome her fear of headstands.  That she would host a potluck gathering on the second Sunday of every month. That she would live in the country. That she would live among mountains. That she would live on the ocean. That she would never yell at her children. That she would buy an around-the-globe plane ticket good for an entire year. That she would have a signature dish or three. That she would speak fluent Spanish. That she could get over it. That she could get through it. That she could get past it. That heavy cream with her coffee was bad for her. That her sisters would remember the time all that water spilled down from the maple tree onto David C. That the piece of broken-off lead in the palm of her hand would fade away and disappear. That she would someday be good enough. That she would learn to appreciate wine. That she could live across the street from her best friend. That the next time she traveled alone, she would take photos of her shadow wherever she went. That she would always be able to comfort her children. That she would always be able to cheer them up. That the squirrels living in her eaves would move away of their own volition. That she would have a car with heated seats. That she could make others happy. That if only she tried hard enough.

And so we come again to our regularly scheduled Pick a Photo, Any Photo day. Who knows when a Pick a Photo day will occur? Not me. Pick a Photo days just happen, like squirrels invading your eaves will just happen, if you, like me, are not ever vigilant.

The rules of the pick a photo day are very simple: open up the old slides-transferred-to-digital file, choose a numbered slide at random, insert it into the post, and write.

So very simple. And yet some of us, some of us meaning me, can’t seem to follow such simple rules. Some of us, meaning me, descend upon slide #49, open it up, gaze at it and think, Nah, and close it down following only the briefest of soul wrestling matches. Flagrant disobeyal of rules.

Back to the slide file. I shall descend upon the number that reflects the age to which I hope to live without infirmity of any kind and with everyone I love still alive – laugh if you must, but why not dream large? – and here we go.

The problem, if it can be termed a problem, is that this slide is so very, very tiny that I can’t tell who it is. It may well be Oatie on the left, and me on the right. (Oatie? Hello through these many years – is that you?)

At any rate, these children are swinging in their little wooden swings. Sand beneath their feet. Trees surrounding. Cool air blowing past them when they lean back and get going again.

Outside the frame of the slide, their parents and grandparents are setting out a picnic. This is the annual Transfer Day, when the children go to stay with their grandparents for a week while their parents go. . . where? do. . . what? The children have no idea. So far as they know, their parents are placed on Pause during the seven days that their children are not with them, in that creaky old house in the foothills upstate.

Swing, children, whoever you may actually be, because you’re too young to have to do anything other than be children. Potato salad awaits you, along with already-prepared sandwiches from the downstate kitchen of the grandmother. Fruit salad and iced tea with lemon and Sweet ‘n Low. A cake, perhaps. Watermelon.

After the picnic has been eaten, you will get into the backseat of your grandparents’ car. You will travel another hour and a half to their house, while your parents are either on Pause, remaining frozen in time at this state park until seven days have passed, or off on an adventure of which you know nothing.

Nightly visits to Dairy Queen await you at your grandparents’ house, along with scrambled eggs every morning, should you wish them, and you do wish them. Jody the dog. A blue glass bowl full of wrapped butterscotch candies. Lessons in the correct folding of towels. Visits to the summer-house-neighbors, who are never there, but whose pool always is, and which you are allowed to swim in. Visits to your great-aunt’s house, the one attached to the lawnmower repair shop, so that the smells of motor oil and baking cookies intertwine. The closet with its stacks of board games, including Mousetrap, your favorite. Back to your grandmother’s house, and the cool green pleather chair in the basement, where you are allowed to read as long as you want.

Swing high, swing low, swing as long as you like and don’t worry for a moment about swinging too high and falling out, because that wooden bar will keep you safe. Yes, how lucky you are, you children who may or may not be me and Oatie.

A long time ago she lived in a fourth-floor walkup on a steep hill in the middle of a city on the ocean.

The city was bisected from another, smaller city by a river. The river was a few blocks steeply downhill from her steeply staircased apartment building.

She got up before dawn every day, not out of a sense of moral obligation but because she always woke up before dawn.  To pay the rent on the steep apartment, which she shared with her sister and thousands of cockroaches, she typed papers for college students.

The college students took the subway to her steep apartment and dropped off their penned or penciled papers, and she called them when the papers were neatly typed. She was only a year out of college herself.

This was a long time ago, when she was trying so hard to be what she wanted to be.

She had a part-time job a few miles away, in the city across the river. Instead  of taking the subway she liked to walk to the faraway job, and she started walking at dawn, down the steep hill and across the river on an arched bridge.

The bridge was old, with old stone turrets built onto the sides. She liked to stop at the turrets and look down on the river below. The turrets reeked of urine and fish and the salt breeze off the ocean.

After she crossed the bridge she made her way along the other side of the river, two, three, four, five miles to the busy square where her part-time job was.

It was quiet at dawn – it usually is, no matter where you are in the world. Even the birds cease their singing, if only for a little while. She was usually alone at dawn, green paths to her left and a highway to her right. Scullers stroked by her on the river, their long boats silent and swift.

At some point the geese appeared. They lived by the river, and they disliked her. Fowl of all kinds had always disliked her, beginning with the chickens she had raised at age nine.

These geese would hiss at her and even chase her. Lest you accuse her of poultry savagery, rest assured that she was innocent of all crimes when it came to the geese. Yet still, she knew in her heart that had they managed to corner her – against one of the turrets on the bridge, say – they would have gladly killed her.

She was tired by the time she turned from the river and onto the busy streets that surrounded the bustling square. It was a good tired, though, a stretched-out-muscle-beating-blood kind of tired.

She was young, and trying hard, and full of questions, and sometimes she felt lost, and walking was something that wasn’t lost and wasn’t full of questions. Walking was always good. Walking was what she depended on.

When she got hungry in the busy square she walked to a sandwich shop a few blocks away: curried tuna salad, or tomato and cheese on heavy wheat bread. They were the best sandwiches she’d ever eaten.

Some afternoons, before the took the subway back to the steep hill where she lived, she went to the old bookstore a few blocks away.  Straight downstairs she went, to the many tables and wooden shelves of discounted books. Novels and poetry and essays and scholarly treatises on subjects she’d never heard of, in languages unknown to her. She could spend hours there, in that bookstore, the best she’d ever been in.

Once, she had an errand to run on the busy streets of the busy square. She was looking for the address, which she couldn’t find, when the skies opened up. She skittered from doorway to doorway, peering up at the numbers, huddling against the sides of buildings, trying to avoid the deluge.

“Are you lost?”

It was her friend, materializing off the cobblestones, holding an umbrella and laughing, which made her laugh too. She gave up on the errand and took shelter under the umbrella.

Together they walked in that awkward sharing-an-umbrella way to the nearby bakery, the one where the old men played chess by the clock. She, the non-chess player, watched them and marveled at their intensity, and how they seemed to know exactly what to do.

They were  driving south, keeping to the river as it made  its way to the Gulf of Mexico. They had the dog with them. They had fled the bitter temperatures and ever-gray skies and were driving south until they hit 60 degrees, his personal number of temperature happiness. It took them a few days, and when the magic number appeared, he did a little dance  in his seat and she laughed.

Sometimes they opened the window for the dog so that he could stick his head out. There was little he liked more than a road trip. He liked snuffing in the air of a new place, and all the places they drove through were new.

They stayed at dog-friendly motels at  night, and they checked in late, so that they didn’t know what the surroundings were. She was  the early riser and she took the dog for a morning walk and then partook of the free continental breakfasts.

Just as he had waited for 60 degrees, she was waiting for grits, her personal barometer of southernness, to appear on the continental breakfast buffet. When they did, she ate two bowls of them, buttered and salted. But not cheesed.

They had a trucker’s atlas with them. They were hugging the river, that was the plan, so they didn’t consult it much except when night came and they had driven their limit. Where was the next small town, and would it have a pet-friendly motel?

They knew they’d consult it more when they reached the Gulf and began the eastward trek to their destination, but for now, they didn’t have directions. The trucker’s atlas had all kinds of useful information, some they didn’t need but read aloud anyway, such as the weight limits for various roadways in various states.

It was dark when they approached Mobile and they fake-argued about the way Mobile was really pronounced and if the accent lay on the first or second syllable: Mo-beel. Mo-beel. Mo-bye-ull. Mo-bull. They came to no consensus.

The city lay before them, shining. Two onion-domed buildings made her feel she was in a new and strange place.

Traffic slowed to a crawl. Police were everywhere. Barricades blocked streets. People everywhere were walking steadily toward an unknown destination.

Far off they heard music, brass bands and zydeco. The highway ahead of them was now blocked off. Their small car had joined a car river, threading its way who knew where. And then all the cars began pulling off the road, parking wherever there was space. Ahead, the music grew louder.

Ways in and out of the city had closed down. The stream of people grew bigger.

“What’s going on?” she said to him.

She was nervous. There were many, many miles to go before they reached their destination, and it was already late, and she was already very tired.

“I don’t know,” he said, “but we’re about to find out.”

He opened the door and got out. The dog leaped after him. She followed. The  three of them joined the stream of walkers, past the police roaming in pairs, the barricades, past trailers hooked up to thrumming generators, toward the steadily louder music, the lights.

“It’s Mardi Gras,” he said in wonderment. “Look.”

It was Mardi Gras. They were in Mobile, the city that they would later find out was the city of the original U.S. Mardi Gras celebration.

They joined the throngs of people standing on the sidewalks, small children on shoulders, big men brandishing beer, women swaying to the music.

Parades threaded their way through the streets of Mobile, outlandish floats and outlandish costumes and music everywhere. Was everyone they saw smiling? Everyone they saw was smiling.

Beads snaked through the air and they jumped up to catch them. Dolls and moon pies and all manner of candies came sailing through the dark air and they caught those too.

A big man standing next to her caught an enormous rag doll and looked about the crowd: “Where’s a little girl?” She pointed to one with dark hair, sitting on her father’s shoulders. The big man offered her the doll, and she took it without smiling, and then she smiled.

“Happy Mardi Gras, little girl,” the big man said, and took another swig of his beer.

The dog stood patiently between them, watching the floats as they passed by. She draped some shiny purple beads around his neck and he graciously accepted them. She draped some shiny green beads around her companion’s neck.

“This is what happens when you don’t have a big plan,” he said to her. “This is what happens when you wander your way.”

Parades. Big, strange, beautiful floats carrying dancing costumed people. Beads and moon pies and dolls flying through the air. Music rising high in the dark southern sky. Magic.