She had been mapping the same valley for twenty years and could not say whether she was nearly finished or had only just begun.
Each spring she walked it again. Not the trails — the trails were old work, settled long ago — but the seams between things. The place where the orchard ended and the wood began. The place where the river, in low summer, was less a river than a series of arguments between stones. She kept thinking she had the boundaries right, and each year the valley moved a little under her feet.
The boy from the post office had asked her, once, what she was looking for. She had said: nothing. He had said: nothing? She had said: I am looking for the shape of nothing, the shape between the things. He had nodded politely, the way one does to someone who is no longer entirely of this world.
That summer she had drawn the orchard’s outline three times and burned each one.
Her husband, when he was alive, had teased her gently about the maps. You’ll never finish, he’d said. I know, she’d said. That’s the point. He had laughed and not asked again.
Now she was older than he had been when he died, and the valley was more itself than it had ever been, and she was still walking.