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74 Letter to Dave B. from the Karen Noonan Center on the Chesapeake Bay The last two days out on the bay I observe tundra swans leaving the flat horizon of this water, arcing over tidal pools and the inescapable prairies of marsh grass. You’re on your mountain to the north, closer to their calls as they wing their way away from this estuary that saves them each winter. After so many months of shifting land, of rising and falling tides, their heavy bodies must ache for release, a reprieve to our comings and goings, whether by boat or air or, oddest of all, by car, which looks nothing like the way these birds travel. It’s the unyielding tundra where they’ll give themselves over to their own desires. I suppose most of us need the solid earth beneath our feet as we choose a mate. The undulating waters of the heart make it hard to remember which flyway to follow: how to spend these transitory days in the halflight of summer, brooding over what we’ve made between us. ...

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