She wandered and roamed the days away, but she took care to dust the book shelves, scrub the bathtub, brew hot coffee, and keep a supply of food that never entirely dwindled, a roasted chicken turned into a pie, then into a soup, and on again.

Until she came here, she didn’t know she was alone. It’s a gift to know this, but in the beginning, it unsettles everything. After her first day on the beach she wanted to live out of the house. She knew it wasn’t how things were done. She had a snug home and it was for living in. She was pulled out each morning and could not have disobeyed the pull, just as the water in our inlet cannot disobey the tide. Then, she was pulled back in each night. She didn’t know what brought her back at first, but when she came into her kitchen, always at dusk, she’d find a sink of cold dish water, the last of the morning’s tea dark at the bottom of her cup. She shook her head at this, not remembering the moment of departing.

During the day, when she walked on the beach, the inside of her mind was like this:

I love the waves. How many seals are swimming underneath? I’d like to see them. I wonder if we might get a little boat I could row and I could look down into the water—if that’s safe, to go out in a boat alone. If they got used to me, the seagulls might perch on the bow and I could lean back and sleep and when I opened my eyes there would be sky.

She was very young and was just getting to know her own mind. She couldn’t tell if she sounded silly or not. She wasn’t thinking about that. Because she did not have a small boat yet, in those days, she stayed on shore. She got to know certain trees growing on the bank. Some of these grew outward over the rocks with great thick arms like bridges and she’d sit on them, her legs swinging over the water. She knew sunny places where the rocks were sure to be warm if the sun came out at all, even in winter. She knew places where foxes darted out from the underbrush to the beach, or back from the beach to the underbrush, the white tips of their tails last to vanish. All day she followed her nose, and at the end of the day was pulled back to her house where she and Sam lived.