A widow walked down her street and back to her house every day after work for five years, to commune with the memory of her husband, who’d gone missing on a nearby lake. Then they ripped up the street and put a café, gas station and ice cream place on it. That made it stop being quiet. She tried to be creative and come up with another place to walk, choosing instead to set behind her house into the woods, but soon came upon a river and couldn’t go any farther. The river ran out of the lake and reminded her of what took her beloved. She took up fishing thinking symbolically that might bring her loved one back to her in some form. But she never caught anything, and this only compounded her grief. Next, she bought a hot air balloon, thinking if she went up there nothing could stop her. But the city called her just after her first flight to remind her she was floating in a part of the city frequented by oft studied migratory birds and other weather agencies, and that the weather in this part of the valley was fickle and unforgiving. It seemed there was just no place for her to go and be by herself. But I haven’t tried down yet, she thought. So she grabbed a shovel and started digging in her dirt-bottomed basement. A month later she arrived at some water and beneath it what appeared to be a kind of underwater cave. She bought some scuba gear, took a scuba class, then set forth. Fifteen minutes being under there for the first time she surfaced into an underground cavern. Her husband was there. She threw her arms around him. “I knew you hadn’t died,” she said. “I was waiting for you,” he said. “Thanks for waiting,” she said. “It’s what I do,” he said. “I’m your rock.”