Her father's laughter tessellated the very days, the sun-filled sky, the rumpled mountains, the warm, rich Earth waiting, surely, for citrus roots and foundation stones.
        The redcars rumbled west to the sea on ivory-gold veins, lanes, over the horses' contented heads nodding the light waters sparkled in little peaks jumping for the quick feet of clever gulls.
        Elaine stood by the driver with her small hands upon the reins. She stood behind her father in his carved mahogany chair with her delicate hands upon his shoulders. She watched the flowers in the Japanese vases and the sun slants spin barring the hardwood.
        Moving pictures, artists' pictures, new colleges and universities well-funded religions of mind, science, philosophy, unity very like a carnival it was to young Elaine repulsed and drawn, that is to say fascinated, by the might and magnificence of building life.
        It was the time of Einstein becoming relative and uncertain, of a sea birthing in a stony desert, of meteors, a time surely suited for a comet though spectacular Halley's was not yet due yet in the meadow it had already passed and we knew it.
        We remembered.
        Elaine had eyed it from the French sculptress' hacienda. 
 

Rose, with Geronimo, Vittorio, Murietta, Miller and London capturing her, trapping and comforting her like a West Mexico serape never freed of shaman's legacy nor was she who ran from the city to the hacienda standing spring to the little rivers running north into the bay.
 

Elaine would admit no bulk to her life. The veils she smoothed beneath her shapely chin curved with infinite grace from her hat brim. So had the hand-wrought veil spun with loving care for her grandmother who searched through the sapling fields sun-slanting and -spinning oddly emphasizing twisted shards of tender bark and pulped spring leaves fallen like chewed medicinals upon the boots, legs, shredded tunics and smashed caps of the soldiers.
Sapling fields, sapling forests, forced to stand fence and phalanx in the incomprehensible.

Rose went to look at the Oakland Hills once.
        She went just to look.