She held on to the walls as she made her way through the house, her two beloved dogs following her as she went, pushing their noses into her hands and thighs. At one point, at a PCT campsite, she sees herself in a cracked mirror for the first time in many weeks, and ends up "wondering whether I was a babe or a gargoyle". It’s eighteen dollars for now, then,” she replied, “but if a companion joins you, you’ll have to pay more. By then we lived in a small town an hour outside of Minneapolis in a series of apartment complexes with deceptively upscale names: Mill Pond and Barbary Knoll, Tree Loft and Lake Grace Manor.

She’d think she was hungry and then she’d sit like a prisoner staring down at the food on her plate. I dragged her body, caught on a jagged piece of metal underneath, until it came loose, and then I put my truck in reverse and ran her over again. The vented metal box in the corner turned itself on again and I went to stand before it, letting the frigid air blow against my bare legs. I’d sat in the flowerbed in the woods on our land, where Eddie, Paul, my siblings, and I had mixed her ashes in with the dirt and laid a tombstone, and explained to her that I wasn’t going to be around to tend her grave any- more.

We left the apartment complexes with fancy names and moved with him into a rented ramshackle farmhouse that had a dirt floor in the basement and four different colors of paint on the outside. In spite of my recent forays into edgy urban life, I was easily someone who could be described as outdoorsy. And yet, here was my mother at the Mayo Clinic getting worn out if she had to be on her feet for more than three minutes. That it stood like that instead of slumping over onto its side as other packs did provided me a small, strange comfort.

The end of my marriage was a great unraveling that began with a letter that arrived a week after my mother’s death, though its beginnings went back further than that. So when Paul and I finally moved to New York City a year after we had originally intended to, I was happy to go.I drove home and fed the horses and hens and got on the phone, the dogs gratefully licking my hands, our cat nudging his way onto my lap. Today, almost 35 years since she settled in London, Jung still delights in the prettiest parts of the city and works at home in Notting Hill at a window overlooking a cherry tree. I loved him, but I’d been impetuous and nineteen when we’d wed; not remotely ready to commit myself to another person, no matter how dear he was. We pulled into town in the early evening, the sun dipping into the Tehachapi Mountains a dozen miles behind us to the west. All through my childhood and adolescence I’d asked and asked, making her describe those scenes and more, wanting to know who said what and how, what she’d felt inside while it was going on, where so-and-so stood and what time of day it was.

That is much harder for them to control so they are trying to stay a step ahead of this freedom and at the same time clamp down harder on printed matter.

When Cheryl arrives in Ashland on August 9th, 1995, she is greeted by locals and hippies alike turned out in droves to both celebrate and mourn the death of Jerry Garcia, lead guitarist of The Grateful Dead.