But I think I've learned not to grieve on the world's ways, at least not when spring is at hand.

It rained hard the third week in March, then the sky broke clear and one morning the new season was upon us and the swamp was green again, the new leaves on the flooded stands of trees rippling in the breeze off the Gulf, the trunks of the cypress painted with lichen.

Alafair and I rode her Appaloosa bareback down the road, like two wooden clothespins mounted on its spine, and put up a kite in the wind. The kite was a big one, the paper emblazoned with an American flag, and it rose quickly into the sky, higher and higher, until it was only a distant speck above the sugarcane fields to the north.

In my mind's eye I saw the LaRose plantation from the height of Alafair's kite, the rolling hardwoods and the squared fields where Confederate and federal calvary had charged and killed one another and left their horses screaming and disemboweled among the cane stubble, and I wondered what Darwinian moment had to effect itself before we devolved from children flying paper flags in the sky to half-formed creatures thundering in a wail of horns down the road to Roncevaux.

That night we ate crawfish at Possum's in St. Martinville and went by the old church in the center of town and walked under the Evangeline Oaks next to the Teche where I first kissed Bootsie in the summer of 1957 and actually felt the tree limbs spin over my head. Alafair was out on the dock behind the church, dropping pieces of bread in a column of electric light onto the water's surface. Bootsie slipped her arm around my waist and bumped me with her hip.

"What are you thinking about, slick?" she said.

"You can't ever tell," I said.

That night she and I ate a piece of pecan pie on the picnic table in the backyard, then, like reaching your hand into the past, like giving yourself over to the world of play and nonreason that takes you outside of time, I punched on Alafair's stereo player that contained the taped recording of all the records on Jerry Joe's jukebox.

We danced to "Jolie Blon" and "Tes Yeux Bleu," then kicked it up into overdrive with "Bony Maronie," "Long Tall Sally," and "Short Fat Fanny." Out in the darkness, beyond the glow of the flood lamp in the mimosa tree, my neighbor's cattle were bunching in the coulee as an electric storm veined the sky with lightning in the south. The air was suddenly cool and thick with the sulfurous smell of ozone, the wind blowing dust out of the new cane, the wisteria on our garage flattening against the board walls while shadows and protean shapes formed and reformed themselves, like Greek players on an outdoor stage beckoning to us, luring us from pastoral chores into an amphitheater by the sea, where we would witness once again the unfinished story of ourselves.