When I was very young, I walked with my father along the gentle crests and furrows of the hilltop farm where he was raised. Grandmother, too, would lead adventures into the far pastures, often with some specific bounty in mind. We might stain our hands fuchsia picking elderberries for afternoon tea, or return with a bucket of sweet, gooey persimmons fallen after first frost. In the evenings, we feasted on our spoils as paparazzi fireflies sizzled against a chorus of bullfrogs and whip-poor-wills. As August’s ceiling of stars rotated into full view, I would slip into the angular shadow cast by the barn and watch the Perseids slice the Milky Way wide open.
Even after daybreak wrestled away the night, some remnant of the darkness always persisted, slinking into a cave folded within the farm’s western flank. The cavern is small with jointed, jagged walls, and is often filled by the musty odor of sulfur percolating out of the stone through each burrowing raindrop. My father remembers a second, larger chamber from his childhood, though it is impossible to know whether its disappearance is the product of settling earth or shifting memory.