If my sister was a tree, then this woman was the wild wind in her branches.

At first she was a friendly face, existing in a liminal time, just outside of everyone else's clock. I'm not sure when she arrived, but it was sudden, with a splatter of toner ink on my purse and profuse apologies. (Personally, I thought it made the thing look cool and grungy.) Once she did show up, however, it was as if she had always been around, a half hour's conversation I could sometimes look forward to at the end of the day.

The steady hum of the ballgame on TV in the other room, or the distant banging of a hammer against a nail, always let me know where he was. Sometimes, on summer evenings, his song rang out over the open countryside, his fingers strumming an accompanying rhythm on his guitar strings. When I walked in the door, he greeted me with a booming hello. When I had to leave, he never said goodbye, just “see you later.” Because of course he would see me later.

He was a point of stillness in a maelstrom. To find him in a whirling, busy crowd, you had only to look for the one anchored to the earth like a steadfast pillar. When he smiled, and stretched out his hand, it was to the quiet ones, the displaced ones, the rejected ones. He helped us up and brought us into his place of peace.

Between the silvered trunks of a mighty, alien forest, I came upon a wounded man. He sat next to a small campfire, one he had built himself. Pensiveness filled his eyes. A heavy, lead-lined cloak dragged at his shoulders, the red and gold hem crusted with mud. He had one hand pressed to his side and a puddle of crimson surrounded him, too much for him to still live.

His was a voice that often followed mine. I could drop a snappy comment and he would snatch it up, shift the trick sideways, and lob it back at me. You had to be quick on your toes around him, because you found that you didn’t want to disappoint him by dropping the ball.

Forever in my mind, he relaxed at a table surrounded by friends, the neck of a beer bottle held loosely between long fingers, his other hand gesturing a narrative point to support his story. He had an intensity about him, the electromagnetic capacity to hold his audience spellbound in a way I never could. But no matter the gravity of a topic, he couldn’t remain serious for long, often dissolving into laughter, along with the rest of us. When he listened, he listened. When he spoke, he spoke. But, I thought, when someone could make him laugh, that person gifted us with something small, yet wonderful.

I came upon a solitary scarecrow in the middle of an empty field. At first, he wasn’t there, and then he was, just in the corner of my vision. He hunched against the elements, head bowed in the red evening sunlight. When I approached him, he seemed nearly translucent, so faded with the sun and the wind. But in his very human eyes I found a glint of mischief; humor was tucked into the corners of his smiling mouth.