An excerpt from Wendell Berry’s novel Jayber Crow:

Chapter 31, The Nest Egg —

I was walking in a field of October flowers. I was gathering them and laying them in the crook of my left arm. The sun was shining.

Among the drying stems and grasses and the fallen leaves, I saw scattered some whitened bones.

I laid down my bouquet and began picking up the bones that still had the reek of death about them.

As I gathered them up, the bones hurt me. I wept and my tears fell on them.

I thought I would die of the pain of them, but I picked them up, one by one.

From my tears the bones took life and flesh. They became a little girl in a pretty dress, lying asleep in my arms.

My tears fell on her and she woke. She looked up at me and smiled.

And then the light changed, and the vegetation of the ground. It was April and the freshest flowers of the year were blooming under the trees. The little girl was Alice.

I set her down and she ran about among the flowers, picking the blossoms and putting them in her hair.

She looked at me and laughed.

She said, “Mama! Look how beautiful I am!”

…

This is a book about Heaven. I know it now. It floats among us like a cloud and is the realest thing we know and the least to be captured, the least to be possessed by anybody for himself. It is like a grain of mustard seed, which you cannot see among the crumbs of earth where it lies. It is like the reflection of the trees on the water.