Why are you going? friends ask. Because I must, I answer.

My back pasture was graced for a short time by a blue roan mare called Maeve. She was rescued from still another field by her present owners, the largely forgotten result of an ill-funded pony breeding operation whose proprietor’s interest evaporated when it became apparent that pony breeding did not lead to instant fortune.

Alice Walker hasn’t arrived yet.On this warm, wet October evening, a patchwork quilt of people is gathering at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Macon, Georgia. The mayor is here, along with several members of the City Council.

From the start, when the dog first arrived, small, white and shaking, he would sit by the stairs and wait for my father to come home. When he heard the car pull in, he would dash down the stairs with high-pitched squeals, half-tumbling, half-falling, until, with calm expectation, he would face the door and wait for my father to appear.“We

It is much easier to point to the exact moment of her birth than it has been to realize the moment of her conception. That moment that is the last secret I’ve held to.

I often—while soaking in a hot bath—orchestrate a fantasy of visiting with my younger self. These tête-à-têtes degenerate quickly into lectures. After a perfunctory inventory of the indignities that seven years of childbearing have inflicted on my present body, we move on to a more cerebral plane. (I have no patience for reminiscing about her firm, unwrinkled abdomen.

A man and a woman on the telephone, he in Los Angeles in a film production office in Beverly Hills, she in New York in an apartment on the West Side.

This is me. This image tells a lot about me, but what it doesn’t say is that I’ve had cancer. Just after I turned 30 years old, my right breast began to feel painful and swollen. I couldn’t feel a lump.

“So, just how big was the knife?” she asked me, sometime during our second interview. “Was it this long?” She held her thin, manicured hands six inches apart.“No. Longer,” I said and shook my head slightly.

The day after graduation she packs up her nursing degree and single suitcase, a reluctant gift from Fritz and Rose, watching their first leave the farm.