This November morning, stepping out on the porch in the early light, the air was balmy, that tender place of a nascent day. In the dew on the car’s back window, my younger daughter rubbed a five-pointed figure. So I can look out through a star, she told me.

From the clear day on our hillside, we drove down into the thick fog along the Lamoille River, and then up through the Woodbury gulch, where the clouds thinned and abruptly ceased. When we got to school, she gathered her things, then stood for a moment outside the car, looking at the window where the star had disappeared, leaving no trace.

She tipped her head to one side and pressed her hand over the glass. I asked her name.

She shrugged and laughed, then went into school to begin her day. Overhead, a heron winged its silent way to the wetlands.

If gold has been prized because it is the most inert element, changeless and incorruptible, water is prized for the opposite reason — its fluidity, mobility, changeability that make it a necessity and a metaphor for life itself. To value gold over water is to value economy over ecology, that which can be locked up over that which connects all things.

— Rebecca Solnit