“You can tell how hard the winter will be by how long each black part is,” Grandpa informed my sister and I. We were small. One of my earliest memories is this. All three of us squatted in Grandpa’s garden and looked at the furry black and rusty red caterpillar. Each end of the caterpillar was black and its middle was rusty red. It marched along on its invisible caterpillar legs and feet through the marigolds, gone to seed in early September. Now, as I write this, I imagine the three of us from above. We are in a semi-circle…
