When I 1st glimpsed them, not in the meadow, exactly, yet under its purview and within its sphere of influence, Esme(e) stood strumming her guitar. Violet, too, was playing, hers an instrument of remarkable size and hue its textured wood startlingly red embedded with bright gold and darker braids and tenuous threads of secret amber. Fat-bodied, illustrious, imperious possessor of as long an ebony neck as any ancient Nubian within the night or upon strange shores whose purple curls lapped south of the sturgeon, far to the east of home, this, Violet's, could rumble and growl as though self-possessed Violet sat upon her box (or picinc basket) roling a cartographer's cartouche for a griffin.
 
        Whatever transpired, she did not play like that. She played as though upon a melodeon ensconced in her maiden aunt's parlor. She played with the touch of a former smile upon 1 corner of her mouth.She played thinking of the sheltering trees, unpollarded lives, and what they might be feeling of her music.
        Was she giving her song to them, the trees? It would go less unrequited than many offerings, talents, and tithes.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

paced, strolled, strode, and mounted heights of fallen trunks and once-lobbed stones becoming the music rather than creating it. When I 1st saw her she stood, stepped, strolled, her back to me so straight, so slender, long, with a sinuous power it moved beneath the garment that she wore. She had shed her cloak, dropped that extraneous layer for now for later it would encompass her closing but now unnecessary she had dropped it as though letting it drop and it lay in wonderful curves and folds, amorous valleys and fragrant summits redolent of her.
        Her essence I could not define for considerable time.

        The garment she wore, belted subtly for in seeing it, much like a braid of golden fabric, 1 did not really see it or merely see it and it was only the belt for the garment which Esme(e) wore like a tunic as easily and rightfully as the chosen troubadour long left the trenched roadways of rogue patterers and vagabonds. The opalescence covered her from her shoulders which were brave and straight and spare elegantly proportioned for the fall of wool and the cusp of satin and moved, they did, as though they knew well the tendencies and tyrannies and the grave tendernesses of all such fabrics of all such times, and many places.
        1 shoulder moved, so slight and stunning the angle it performed upon the farther green it caught my breath upon it and hung it there forgotten by me as I watched.
        Esme(e) turned.
        She turned.
        Only partially toward me, revealing a portion of her face, and line of cheek, the dark fall of roping hair in a salient loop converging temple and time and the straight pronouncement of her nose, passionate, worthy, enviable. Fascinating.
        I think it was Esme(e)'s nose that sketched and beckoned and promised her and once seeing it, and her, 1 was resistless to the self-challenge and the quest which was she.
        She played, turned, and Carrie laughed.
  moment, that vision and sound, the scents of the meadow bordering and feathering the odors of the coppice trees whose legacy of streams and thrushes they held close, the paleness and closeness, the distinctness and the illimitableness, of that moment, was my coming upon them.