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"A week later I stood outside a crematoria, a place which called itself an animal funeral home, but which had at its heart a giant furnace, the muffled roar a constant presence, industrial fans humming and chimneys venting into the sky. I couldn’t see it as anything else. I wanted the fields behind it to have an owl—perhaps a short-eared owl or a snowy one, the kinds that like open spaces—because my sister loves owls and surely she deserved something good. The fields were empty though; the only bird I saw was a raven perched on top of a storage tower across the street, magnificently large and strikingly dark. I wondered if the view from where they sat was lovely, or at least interesting: an expanse of snowy fields and woods on one side, roads and industrial buildings on the other, all cast in the muted light of a pale winter day. I don’t know what’s lovely to a raven, though I hope one day I find out."