Another holiday weekend has passed away, and once again I am home alone. A volume of Virginia Woolf's letters sits on my desk, watching me. I have much to do and nothing to do.

The trees glow in the mist--reds, yellows, oranges, flashes of green. Outside my window a fir tree sways beneath its burden of cones--tiny, fragile, no larger than Christmas lights but demure, darkened. They withhold; they refuse the sun.

The words I am writing pour out easily but are hard to recognize when they reach the air. A scab is not simply a memory of blood. It also hardens and thwarts.

I open Virginia's volume of letters. She tells Roger Fry, "I spent an hour looking at pots and carpets in the museum the other day, until the desire to describe them became like the desire for the lusts of the flesh." The year was 1918. She was 36 years old. Across the sea, in the Allegheny foothills, my grandfather was an infant lying across his mother's knees. After his death his daughter discovered that he had kept his eighth-grade penmanship certificate as a treasured relic. That was his last year of school. He was the age that my second son is now. But Virginia never went to school.

All of these incidents are bound together in me, but they mean nothing to any of the players. Neither Virginia nor my grandfather ever imagined the existence of the other. My son has heard their names but has no vision of either. The penmanship certificate is hidden away among my mother's papers, and someday I will find it and forget that I have written about it here. Or perhaps I will never find it.