I begin at an open window, leaning on the sill to feel the air outside, a cold breeze on my skin. I'm looking out across a fenced zone, barbed wire and concrete wall, beyond that a road I can't see but for the tops of vans, small trucks going by, the sound of tires, and beyond that a field fringed by trees in the middle of February, gray and misting, near freezing, but not quite. Beyond those trees, maybe a river. I don't know.

I'm finding likeness, looking at a scene that, but for the wall and wire, could come from the late February landscape of central Pennsylvania, let's say in the early sixties when I was ten or so and out roaming the woods, so often confidently by myself or with the family dog following trails and bushwhacking, climbing, sliding, tramping across the stream that ran through our property, warmed by my exertions but feeling also the marvelous edge of cold. This memory returns often enough to be emblematic of a self I understand to be the girl I carry with me as I'm aging. There she is — agile, cheerful, thoughtful, a spring in her step, excited by the heat she can build inside her against the cold, but delighted also by what the cold gives her, the sense of living in her own skin. Her body creates itself, is its own weather system pushing into the bank of frigid air.