Pun on “riddle, man” and reddleman (ruddleman), the character who appears in the first pages of the Hardy novel we read each other in the idyllic few first days of marriage before the call to Michigan, days (daze) when we thought it would be possible to make a marriage so: reading to one another, living in the slant light on a second floor of a prairie house across the street from my mentor’s older house and marriage, living there, as now (a latter Irish farmhouse, two old marrieds in a new apartment and an old house) sheltered by the branches of old trees.