Wildlife update. It was a cottonmouth! Three days later, the yard man killed it with a hoe. Its severed head opened its mouth, as white as cotton inside, to prove it. Faster and deadlier than a rattler. The book says water snakes are often needlessly killed because they so closely resemble the cottonmouth. Both hide in fallen leaves and among rocks, where they are practically invisible. We are consulting experts on how to control them. Some say sulphur keeps them away. The smell of hell.

This landscape is almost sexual, so deep is the emotional pull it exerts. Driving along the late evening roads, peeking through roadside trees to curving meadows, the sun a bright disc thrown against the sky, sometimes a lonely tree in full leaf silhouetted against the growing dark, I feel my womb contract as if I were trying to birth the world or take it as a lover.

Then I went swimming. As if in the Pacific Ocean. If the earth were glass, this is what the sun would look like, shining below the horizon. Yet even with the pool light illuminating the water, I imagined other creatures in there with me, quick black dangerous. Lie still, I thought. They are attracted to motion.

They are attracted to blood.

Snakes give off the smell of sulphur when they die. Or when they are angry. That's why sulphur can keep them away.

Walls of separation divide us. Matter divides us. It is our fundamental condition, the condition of creation. It is the human mission to lower the barriers, destroy the walls, get as close to one another as we humanly can. To feel that we are all swimming, that we are all water, that we are all attracted to one another. Not in anger but in love. But we are furious at our separation, we are lonely in our isolation, and we take it out on one another, not recognizing our need, not recognizing our situation, which is spiritual, which is one, which is why we must be kind and just to one another.

But peaches are the smell of heaven, believe me.