Fiscalini Preserve, Cambria, California
I stepped out of the house in the middle of the day, and it was unusually quiet. That can happen here if the wind is blowing in the right direction. The clouds and the cold air wisped through the pines and cypress with that haunting sound, the same sound from the beginning of wind and trees, and it rustled my bones and held me in its grasp, this remnant from an earlier time. I thought about all the people that came before so I could be here, walking down this road, my father’s mother and her father back before and all the tears blown in the wind, on and on leaving only this moment. That’s a lot of responsibility for one wispy sound.