Thinking of those Russian schoolchildren. How can what we call depression be approached directly? It can’t. I have this triumverate of ghosts–John, Rose, Suzanne Wilson–who visit me. Mortality is gravity, the weight we bear up under daily. I can only create lightness out of doors–walking, fishing, standing in the yard looking at Linda’s flowers or the Absaroka mountains, or in the Upper Peninsula looking at the peculiar vastness of Lake Superior, the night sky, watching my grandsons. How can I lift my weight each day when my own words began to fail me this year, or my perceptions began to fail my words? When both my inside and outside worlds became incomprehensible? But then the source of all religion is incomprehension. The first day of school for the Russian children. Their dogs walk halfway, figure it out, return home to wait in the just-beginning-to-wane summer heat, with all flowers shedding themselves and neglected wheat stalks in the corners of fields dropping their grains, some dogs howling at the fireworks, and then the parents of the children joining them. My voice becomes small as a molting bird’s, barely a whisper until I can fly again, if ever.