You are shelter and source, and this is the smell of only you. The hands that hold and lift and swaddle, the mouth that smiles and sings me, the eyes that look me into being: yours. This is the skin to skin. I cry to make the hungry stop and you come. This is the We.

Weekdays were often ravaged by the sounds of tearing down and building up and out, by sanders and nail guns, saws and drills. Aluminum ladders expanding and contracting. Grumbling motors and idling trucks. The incessant noise often made the newspaper column I worked on in my makeshift home office a mere aspiration.

After everyone has spoken, we turn to our afternoon’s work with meditation. “Close your eyes,” one of them says. “Picture yourself in a green meadow, feeling the sun, the grass, the summer breeze.” He banishes the wasteland of prison and conjures color, life, peace.

I remember a cardinal I saw once, from the corner of my eye. Pay attention, Avis, it seemed to whisper, this can happen, this kind of red. It was gone so fast, and the flash of it, so surprising, so beautiful, it kind of hurt.

I could always talk real good, and come to think of it, I could conversate with just about anybody. I knew how to break the ice, knew what to say. Knew how to stir things up, too, how to get at someone right where they lived, like a stun gun. I was always good with words.

Those who have been around long enough to hear the stories know about what a fighter he was, the badass nobody would mess with, back in the day, a man who could get respect by the way he entered the room, seeming to rearrange space, owning any territory he chose.