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SEEING

The house is larger now, as it needs to be not just to make room for Sam but also to accommodate his seven dogs. The expansion was paid for by the proceeds from the sale of his residence.

They work the placer mine together. She has taught him how to process the raw stones into beautiful gems.

He still offers a search service, although not to the likes of the Bead crime family. He has taught her how to work the dogs, which adore her, and always together they find lost children and wandering adults with Alzheimer’s—and even an occasional escaped prisoner, for she fears no one or anything other than losing what she loves.

Lupo visits with and without his pack, but when Vida and Sam set out to pick wild blackberries, a full complement of wolves always accompanies them in expectation of their generosity.

They cut wildflowers to put on her uncle’s grave and drape the headstone with holly on Christmas.

They give no thought to the buried Trans Am or the Plymouth Superbird Hemi with their eternal occupants. This is a world of many wonders and mysteries and miracles, but there are no ghosts.

From time to time, Vida is inspired to dress in a white T-shirt and white chinos and the yellow sneakers. She sits in one of the rocking chairs on the porch, sipping a mug of coffee. Although she has neither a decorated van bearing words of wisdom nor a banner with silver moons and stars, and though she doesn’t ask for what a visitor values least, she never has to wait long before someone—usually a local but now and then a total stranger—comes to sit with her. Each visitor has something she or he needs. Often, they don’t know why they have come, but Vida always knows, for she has a way of seeing.

With deep woods all around, she feels safe here and at peace.

Most people regard the primeval forest as a threatening domain of wilderness trails that often lead bewildered hikers to their deaths, nests of poisonous snakes, dens of sharp-toothed predators—a realm where Nature is red of tooth and claw. To Vida, however, the forest is a place of solace and succor where she is welcome because she has knowledge of—and deep respect for—its ways. In her experience, it is civilization, riven by human arrogance and greed and envy, that is, at its worst, a forest of lost souls.