John Barth - The Development

And her husband?

Yes, well. In the beginning (that chap believes he was saying once upon a time) there was this place, this "development." There were these people: their actions, inactions, and interactions, their successes and failures, pleasures and pains, excitements and boredoms, in a particular historical time and geographical location. Nothing very momentous or consequential in the larger scheme of things: one small tree-leaf in the historical forest, it's particular spring-summer-and-fall no doubt to be lost in Father Time's vast, ongoing deciduosity. But just as, now and then, one such leaf may happen against all odds to be noticed, picked up, and at least for some while preserved — between the leaves of a book, say — and may with luck outlast it's picker-upper as the book may outlast it's author and even it's serial possessors, so may this verbal approximation of the residential development called Heron Bay Estates and of sundry of it's inhabitants survive, by some fluke, that now-gone place and it's fast-going former denizens — whether or not it and they in some fashion "rebegin," and even if this feeble re-imagining them of, like the afore-invoked leaf-pressed leaf, itself sits pressed and scarcely noted in Papa T's endless, ever-growing library—

Or, more likely, his recycling bin.

—[Good]By[e] George I. Newett