:: All that I was taught about Time is false. The truth about Time is the same truth as growing up on a farm; it is easier said than done.

:: You can rescue a dead dream, it turns out, even if you don't want to. My dream died with the death of my first husband. It died a second time with the death of my first son. Had I not had this son to start, I would have forgotten the dead dream. But he made me remember it, so it became alive again. After he died, the remembered dream did too, this time for good.

:: All of those years spent living in a cemetery's backyard. How could I have been surprised to bury my own? At the Woodlawn house, I put my first son into the ground. Eight years later, I put my second husband next to him. After this, I packed up the pieces of what I owned and moved on. My other children had grown. They can find me if they care to look, I said back then. So far they haven't.

I went as far West as I could, until I found a place I call The End of the World. Here, straw hills and sea trees slide down stony cliffs and sink into the Pacific. When settlers reached this place a century ago, they must have said, "This is as far as land was ever meant to go."

:: Last spring, a bony dog found me on the way home from church. She turned out to be more comforting than church. I started calling her Betsey and she took to it. One day a man dog starting hanging around. After this, I had a family on my hands [again]. I named the man dog Nixon because he never looked at me right. Whatever food he could steal from the smoke shed he would too, even though I fed him each evening at dusk.

:: My closest neighbor is Don Locke. His place is at the end of my north pasture. He is a polite young man with three sons. I gave each of his boys a puppy from the litter; now he's really got his hands full. But he still finds time to bake pies and ask me over for conversation. There is no wife or mother. I've never asked about either.

:: It's the first day of a new decade and the New Year. Betsey is curled up beside me. Most of her has turned gray. We are the two gray things this side of the Olhone River. I write now, five years behind my last entry, because I have something worth writing about.

Late last night, the woods steeped in black, Betsey went off like a firecracker. Between trying to quiet her and the barking, I couldn't hear anything else. It wasn't until she started whining with her nose pressed against the door that I heard the light rapping. "Isabel," the voice said. "Isabel!" It was Don. It was urgent in a way that my heart knows. I opened the door and let him in. The whites of his eyes lit up the dark room. He trembled from head to toe.

I took him into the kitchen. He squatted down to the floor, covered his face in big hands and cried. He cried the way my youngest son did when he saw the life bleed out of his big brother. He wailed the way I did too, until I had only one breath left in my chest. I reached for his hands and took them into my own. I held onto him and his wetness tightly. "Start from the beginning," I said.

Don's wife died in a car accident when his youngest son Carl was two. That was eight years ago on New Year's Day. He said that when her Cadillac burst through the railings on the San Benito Bridge and sank to the bottom of the river, the only dream he ever had sank with it.

Tonight was the first time he left his boys alone on New Year's Eve since the drowning. It was the first time he attended a late-night gathering in all of the eight years period. When he got home, he heard a strange noise coming from the river. He walked to its edge and found Carl up to his shoulders in icy waves. His head was lolling and he was calling for his Mama, but the words came out like moans. This is when he realized his boy had a plastic bag over his face. He grabbed up the limp body and yanked off the bag. He was still alive but near frozen.

He rushed him into the house and hollered at the other two boys, waking them up. They gathered all of the blankets they could find and made him a makeshift bed on the couch. "It took a good while," he said. "But he finally warmed up and came to." Then Don stopped talking and sat quiet. I thought the tears would fall again. But instead, he just looked at me. His eyes told me, I can't do this alone.

I walked to the closet and put on my old woman's coat. Betsy and I climbed into the cab of his pickup truck while he started the engine. We bumped along in silence.

*The River Years is loosely based on the character Isabel from Michael Cunningham's short story, White Angel. This memoir account occurs nearly two decades after Cunningham's story ends.