John: Did you have dinner?

“In 1986 Grandma was worried I wasn’t settling down. So I told her I was having a relationship—with a woman. “I am settling down, in my own way.” And the sunlight settled on the dust on the mantlepiece and the cat settled in Grandma’s lap and Grandma said there were two nurses boarding in her mother’s house in Yorkshire in 1916. And Grandma said she was in love with one of them. 70 years later, she still remembered waiting at the bottom of the boarding-house stairs to blush and smile hello at the funny, dark-eyed nurse she loved. Love between women? Unforgettable.”

“Sometimes in later summer I won’t touch anything, not the flowers, not the blackberries brimming in the thickets; I won’t drink from the pond; I won’t name the birds of the trees; I won’t whisper my own name. One morning, the fox came down the hill, glittering and confident, and didn’t seem me—and I thought: so this is the world. I’m not in it. It is beautiful.”

“It feels good to think about you when I’m warm in bed. I feel as if you’re curled up there beside me, fast asleep. And I think how great it would be if it were true.”