To the woman I passed while driving the back road in the mid-afternoon, the woman with the banjo across her shoulder and tight to her chest, strap atop her backpack, the woman framed in the rear-view mirror plucking arpeggios as she walked along the yard of grass between the storm ditch and the ashphalt–

I’ll remember you as a spirit playing a sendoff, a visitor from the elseworld that feels close in the mountains, that makes the mountains strange.