Charlotte excelled as a pupil and had helped run the little schoolhouse from the time she was 16. She most ardently loved geology, natural history, biology, and botany. She drew with a steady, scientific hand. The only present she ever asked for on any birthday or holiday—and she had to be compelled to even ask—were textbooks which treated those favorite subjects. Over time, she accrued a small, but prized, collection.

Charlotte shared her small collection of textbooks with me as though they were her most private diaries or religious texts. Indeed, in them she had scrawled the names of her foster siblings, as one might in a family Bible.

[He pauses momentarily]

They were the saddest scribbles, starting with a youthful, girlish hand on top and transitioning to a woman's at the page's bottom. Along with names and dates of arrival she had listed dates of departure and death. That list constituted the most pitiful attempts at a stable family I had ever seen—

[He falls silent; the fiddler takes notice of the unusual length of this pause.]

We spent Sunday afternoons celebrating the Sabbath as Charlotte wished, shaded by Pacific dogwood blossoms, leaning back against a mossy stone we honored as our outdoor sofa in the meadow near the river's edge. Charlotte would be encircled in my right arm and I would slowly sip wine from a glass in my left hand, and with her leaning against me, so that I could feel her warm, low voice. In this fine classroom, she would give me geology lessons—or botany or whatever book she decided to take out of doors.

I would drink slowly and listen, but mostly just feel her voice and watch her hands, her unbound hair, her ivory wrists, and nearly succumb to the shock and joy of those moments when she'd crane her alabaster neck around and lock his eyes to make sure I was paying attention...How couldn't I to a woman such as she? By the same token, how could I to her lessons when all else she was drove me to the most delightful distraction?

I told her how I longed to be her favorite pupil, at which she would invariably remind me I was now her only.

Once during that first year, a whale became disoriented in the Bay and was briefly lost in the river by our little home. As an Ohio boy, I was utterly floored by our mammalian caller, but Charlotte assured me it was perfectly normal—something I did not always want to hear. (Charlotte never could understand the joy in being an exception to the rule, so hypnotized was she by ebbs and flows!)

I fretted at the hazard to my ferry captains, but Charlotte simply talked of geological time and the mysterious life cycle of whales. She spoke of how the Great Salt Lake used to be a sea and how whales live to be a greater age than most men; she then wryly remarked that perhaps our visitor had simply forgotten that formerly great body of water was now but a terminal saline lake, lost and landlocked with a snow-white desert for a shore.