Summary

“Seeing” starts out with Dillard remembering a childhood compulsion she had of hiding a penny in a tree and then drawing arrows to it on the sidewalk. But she never did see who picked up the penny, but she would check later and it would be gone. From this topic she makes the leap to walking around Tinker Creek on a January afternoon. She notices the ripples in the water, the flash of a fish, insects hovering midair. She wonders about poverty and the worth of a penny, how poor one must be not to even want a penny—how poor one must be not to see the beauty she now sees.

She thinks about lovers and how only they can see their connection, of how once she was with a group of friends who owned horses and they were all cooped up on...