The program from the picture was on the writing table when she sat down.

She had made her notes in the margins in the dark — the handwriting small and certain, the way it always was when something needed to be set down before it got away. She looked at them now in the morning light. Not much. A few words. Enough to remind her of what the film had called up in her that she had been circling for twenty-five years without quite finding the door in.

But the house was sixty-nine years old when she sat on that porch for the first time. Sixty-nine years of seasons and people and a road that did not know she was coming. The land it sat on had been Creek country until ten years before the bricks were laid. The man who built it had surveyed and purchased and cleared ground that had been someone else’s entirely, on a frontier that was still making itself into a county when he arrived. The ledger she found in the desk in 1914 ran from 1847 to 1866 — filed with the Court of Ordinary in Perry and kept in the courthouse record books where it remains. Forty-one names in the 1847 inventory, each with a dollar amount beside it.

She arrived in the middle of the story. The story was already old.

She picked up her pen.

The land came first.