“I dream,” Rae says, “that I am a water source. Not a spring in the mountains, but a clear pool in marshy country from which rivers flow.”
“Like the Okefenokee,” I say, “a bowl of water, from which rivers flow.”
“No,” she says, “a dream source, small and rounded with indeterminate banks, set in a golden marsh, from which rivers flow endlessly in all directions.”
I look out the window at the park. Wind blows harshly through the tree tops. Some of the maples have lost their leaves in the crowns, like old men gone bald.
“I am exhausted, yet inexhaustable,” Rae says.
I’m scared to death most of the time, but go on anyway.
—Charlie Smith, from “Park Diary”
Art Credit Honoré Daumier, Mother, c. 1855
