I was a gypsy. I lived among a group of people, sometimes loosely sometimes tightly associated. We camped--everything we owned could be packed into a backpack apiece or so. We lived among crags and boulders along a long, sunny swooping beach before a great, blue, possibly inland sea. I had just recently established residence in a cave, built or refurbished by me and the guy I lived with, a slightly bearish guy with a big head of dark hair, thick guy, a good swimmer though--today he swam across the main channel of the bay and back just for kicks. I wandered on up the boulders to the top of a promontory where the lodge was, a huge log building with beautiful gleaming woodwork inside, and many wide tables. I tried to help a teenaged girl named Fern do her homework. It was related to physics, fractals, chaos, the patterns of sunlight raking across the edge of a dried-up oak leaf held at arm's length. She said, didn't you pay attention in your physics class? I said, Honey, it's been a lo-o-o-ng time! Outside, there was a giant boulder, big enough to be an island (resembling the one in the middle of Sylvan Lake), with a great wooden pole atop which sat a crows' nest of a sort, where anyone who wanted to could climb and look out over the undulating sea. It was a good life. I was relaxed, alert. It didn't occur to me conspicuously that I was happy, because I just was.