Just One Thing with Michael Meyerhofer

In his March issue memoir “Dispatches from the Heart of the Teeming Void,” Michael Meyerhofer gives his late grandmother the same gravity as a celestial body. Here he shares just one thing about the piece:

“One thing that didn't make it into the piece: my late grandmother lived all her life in a quiet wooded area that's remote even by rural Iowa standards, just up the hill from a river that shushes against the grassy bank and glistens in the dark. There are almost no streetlights for miles. So that if you go out walking after sundown, the treetops melt into shadows and you can't tell where the stars end and the fireflies begin. In the years and months before her death, I used to walk along those hills at night and feel such peace that of course, I wanted to hold onto it, make it last. But time doesn't work that way. Fireflies move; that's how we see them. Stars move, too, just more slowly.”