I used to think if you fell from grace it was more likely than not the result of one stupendous error, or else an unfortunate accident. I hadn't learned that it can happen so gradually you don't lose your stomach or hurt yourself in the landing. You don't necessarily sense the motion. I've found it takes at least two and generally three things to alter the course of a life: You slip around the truth once, and then again, and one more time, and there you are, feeling, for a moment, that it was sudden, your arrival at the bottom of the heap.

I don't think that talking to anybody can help you - a writer or a nonwriter. So what do I do in Wisconsin? I don't know. I just slug through it.

There is so much inherent drama in the matter of change. Disappointment in yourself and others, coping with the fact that life is essentially shipwreck, becoming a person you yourself could not imagine yourself to be, for good and for bad, and then ultimately there is the basic matter of loss.

I'm really glad I had those years working on the orchard alongside my husband.

'Never change' is the thing that probably high school students have written in each other's yearbooks for time immemorial. They think that command is possible!