Years back in Idaho I met a guy who sold antique bottles at the flea market. Every day except for flea market days he drove his rusty pickup into the sagelands looking for abandoned homesteads, where he’d dig in the trash middens for bottles. He shyly confessed to me he’d been an alcoholic, and that it cost him his former life.

I didn’t ask what that life was, but knew a kindred spirit when I met one: someone with a life they’d set aside, yet would nonetheless spend their days digging for it, emptied, seeing it in a new light.