I think of the deadening grass, brown. Full of November.  How it lays thick and straight as a thatched roof arching down toward the creek. The sort of roof I marveled over in a book that showed cutaways of castles and homes people lived in centuries ago, when everything was handmade and at least as different as breath. If you love the worn footprints in a marble staircase how can you not be thrown into euphoria by the sight of a river? I think of the eddies and movement of brown water that slides beneath those rusting rail bridges across the Spoon River, and how when Edgar Lee Masters wrote about it he made it seem as if the towns they built the bridges for were already so worn and tattered. I think of the shuttered storefronts of these little drive through valley towns now, boarded up decades already when I was young.  And I remember that the last thing to escape Pandora’s box was Hope.