My true home is here in Simancas where Pyrenees joy bursts into air like wind carries Spain's oceanic light. In this place the moon wolf cries at nightfall in a voice of hunger. The sky moves like weeping blankets of folding white snow. Rain falls in silver thread and feeds our valley of farmland and silent homes with smile. Here is where the conquistador spirit is born, set free from the edge of shore, and like a woman's sunlit beauty, is captured and carried away by the warm ebb and flow of fragrant word.
So we pushed it as far as we could, and we survived—which means something, I guess, but not much beyond a good story...and now, having done it, written it, and humping a reluctant salute to that decade that started so high and went so brutally sour, I don't see much choice but to lash down the screws and get on with what has to be done. Either that or do nothing at all—fall back on the Good German, Panicked Sheep syndrome, and I don't think I'm ready for that. At least not right now (Thompson 2003).