“All the forgotten beauty of his twenty-nine years poured over Theo. The beauty of such memory filled him. He watched as the white cat with the electric-blue eyes turned away. There, in front of the cat, stood the bright bridge, the tie between the immense eternities, of time before birth, of time after death. The ghosts of the yet-to-be-born and the ghosts of the dead both hovered amidst the white-breasted nuthatches poking their pecking beaks into the snow, searching for seed.”
