These August days are yet long, lingering exquisitely. Days of heat and sweat. Noon, we drag a picnic table beneath a maple tree, spread out our lunches, eat and talk with the sunlight dappling through the leaves, a small breeze kicking up. The nearby road is busy with pickups laden with ladders and mowers, suntanned arms crooked out unrolled windows, and the vacationers at their leisure. This August day hums magnificently, with that dappled sunlight and cicadas.

I receive an email about my novel Call It Madness from a woman in the middle of the country, not far from where my mother grew up, so many decades ago. We email back and forth a bit about class and working and how those two forces of writing and living can sharpen your eyes, if you lean into it.

Surviving cancer taught me countless things, too, made me both more tender and more ruthless, two things seemingly at odds but not. The world is a variated unfolding story of cause and effect. In my novel, a man mangles his hand in a sawmill accident. Decades later, his great-granddaughter struggles with the family fall-out of that accident: a farm lost, a penalty of impoverishment. I glean what I can of my own story — the murky details of my past (my mother’s changed name, a story my father shares of remembering his father burning his army uniform in a backyard fire) — and appraise how I fit into the terrain of the world around me. Swimming at twilight, the lake both golden and black, those elegant 1 Corinthians words return to me: When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

I’ve been swimming at this sandy stretch for nearly thirty years, once upon a time with children and sand buckets. The water is yet magnificent. Sand clings to my wet bare feet. The day has cooled, refreshing as quaffing water when you are thirsty. The sand scatters on my kitchen floor. Something, I think, I’ll need to sweep. This morning, the sand remains.