A a loopy line of ink, stretching on and on, referencing the past and demanding a future. Memory and hope spinning out in an endless trail of paper. It would have been easy to see all those blackened pages as something highly abstract, having at best a specific reality expressed only by other paper in the form of currency. But the reality was otherwise. It found its truest expression in something as fundamental as dirt. Land. And, ultimately, the life – plant and animal and human – that can exist atop it. I never let that slip from my mind.

p. 303, Thirteen Moons, Charles Frazier