If you were to meet me, coming over from that distant road bordering this tract of squash patches from the lemon orchard, and the scarecrow the crows have made into a flannel home, then I would give up and go the way of the physician and tend to any wound or peasant fever from an apothecary of bad habits. I would not think of offering fraudulent prescriptions in a name I don’t recognize, measured out in dark vials, safe against the sun. The stacked-stone sign posts, pointing out the way to the ancestral farm, have toppled and need at least four hands to be rebuilt, and we could manage. If you come with me into that needless country denying passage to none, I will go embarrassed of my riches, unadorned. I will go agnostic and glad.