when you've put the rake away, the crackling sheet of plastic neatly folded, and you walk under bare trees where crows are cackling, coughing, rattling branches, it's good to feel your body as only an over-floating sense of satisfaction, mind buried in its warm earth, in a quiet that's flesh, that's spirit, that's what a crow might feel for a minute or so in sunshine—belly full, perching a chimneypot, out of danger—or what you'd find among the small stones and yew bushes of a well-tended cemetery, or in an old dog spread in dreamless sleep, or in any settled something that's hardly breathing, just feeling body-heat hold itself easy in the last hours before the first snow. "