Finds him waking up cold. He knows that his innards have already turned to ice. And that his interior weather, in whose steadiness he once took great pride in, has turned capricious; this is the only way he can explain those sudden thaws he experiences between the shopping aisles.

Yesterday it happened between baby needs and baby food; he sat down, his face heavy with this sudden sadness. Is this what it entails, belonging to the tribe - "the tribe Maeve Brennan once called “travelers in residence” — men and women suspended between continents; suspended, too, between memory and forgetting" - whose name he only discovered via reading yesterday?

There is no cost to be liquid again, to allow himself to flow into the shape of a life, of affection, of giving, and of grace. But there is a reluctance now that he must wait out. There is this need to be stone, to live out an ice age before summer arrives, and spring departs.