Excerpt: Yes, You Must Eat The Whole Cow

She picked up her shoes and shook the sand out of them. This was the beginning. She had settled her feet into place, and she would take her position among the other temporary residents to feel her annual entitlement. How quickly things became hers: my beach, my cabin, my bridge. Her parents paid rent for a week in a glorified shack, and an entire world of life in the forest opened up before her. She owned all of it. The squirrels that were trusting enough to eat nuts from her lap, the whiskey jacks that stole shiny change from picnic tables, the red fox that pilfered garbaged table scraps: these were all her domain. At home, she was a stranger, but out here where wild things rubbed shoulders with domesticity, she was in command of her time and her heart, and all things spread from beneath her feet with fast fingers, mapping her life along the forest floor.