In the beginning there must have been a word, though what it was I can’t recall. An introduction. Some pleasantry, banal. In the beginning was a word—and then another, and another. We talked and talked and talked.

She always came to our house as the New Year approached. Alone—she never brought her daughters with her.

The landscape is legend, each valley and hill the stuff of myth. Here, below the tombs that honeycomb the cliffs of Lycia’s second-largest city, Pinara, says the Iliad, roamed the raging Chimaera, “a bane to many men.” There, in the port city of Patara, Santa Claus, or Saint Nicholas of Myra, was born.

On the 6th of October—after almost a year of war—tanks surround Jabalia camp for the second time, attacking hospitals and preventing anyone from entering or leaving. People flood into our area laden with belongings, barrels of water, crates of food and drink, blankets and mattresses.

If verb tense is language committing to time, it’s as though she’s refusing to commit to time. She has entered, instead, an elemental state, a kind of threshold space vibrating with emotion.

It’s difficult, impossible really, to live on acreage in a rural place and draw a firm line. This side: orderly, civilized, tidy, clean. That side: the wilderness. Some days, you mow the patch of lawn in front of the woods, admire its smoothness, its edge of sweet clover left for the bees.