The women walk. On this day we walk through grassy meadows and soft pale sand at a neighboring ranch, trails dense with brush and branch, the muck where cattle trod, the shoulders of mud that slope into a vernal pool. We stop to ponder a pond whose surface is distinctly bifurcated into a section of clear glassy water and one of chartreuse algae as vivid as paint, an oddly dissonant composition, weirdly beautiful. There is a dead coyote on the ground, its fur still healthy and thick, its stomach bloated in death, flies just beginning to investigate. Behind a barbed wire fence stands a shed from a century ago, sagging slightly at the seams, its door hinge rusted, a small square of window dark with dust; the exterior timber turned green, gray, and russet, a testament to how time and weather can transform everything into art. There are wildflowers in abundance: Bushes of purple lupine, cream cups, and baby blue eyes in an electric blue imbued with violet, an incomparably delicious color, a color that delights and invites, and we drink it in.