On a field trip that summer, we were a group of exchange scholars from 47 countries, many of us still blinking from jet lag. Yellow school buses spilled us out on the lawn in front of a marble memorial in the capital. In the drizzle, I didn't wonder about whose statues sat on pedestals and if, looking down on us, to them we might resemble a slow- moving cluster of insects from all over the world. I was more curious about the names of trees whose branches arced overhead as if inviting us to make a parade of our bodies under their wild yet formally jubilant light, but no one could tell me for sure. Later in the evening, after a picnic on the grass while John Williams conducted the orchestra onstage at Wolf Trap, the linguist from Guatemala showed us a barred owl he'd whittled with a penknife, on a twig he'd picked up in the grass.
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