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Show 69 down the wide boughs, green boughs of pine. Another grossbeak took flight! Now a junco found freedom! Wings beat! And rose! And Leah, cut and mud-spattered, found herself spinning, hurling, falling, but shouting: "Fly! Fly! Please fly!" And though many of her friends, of the birds she had worked to feed and who had been savaged by the storm, didn't. Didn't fly. Still Leah didn't stop her possessed mission of release a minute. True: Many didn't fly. But over half the trapped creatures rose and circled. Leah had secured the boys early and had fallen into a deep, exhausted sleep. She woke just before midnight and found Hunt sitting by their bed, watching her. "You've been so still," Hunt said. Leah listened for wind. In the rafters. Quiet relieved her. "How was the painting?" she asked. "You need to know I love you," Hunt said. "Not anyone else: You're constant." And he told a story about almost freezing on the beach, painting, then, with the storm, breaking in - "It was called The Cliffside" - through a loosely boarded window, finding - "Crazy!" -- an old banjo player sitting in the patched, vaulted space, playing "My Blue Heaven." "He was crying," Hunt told Leah. "His name was 'Hal,1 and he'd been drinking, and he kept saying, 'All they leave you is the frame. All they leave you is the structure. And the memory.' -Almost bald. Hair like ice in the weird spills of light. Just so sad. So sad, somehow, Leah: Awful. And the rain beating on the |