Katie has been reading her textbooks for next year, “getting a head start,” she says. She seems quite practical. She says she will never make much money as an archeologist, but doesn’t think that matters. She will like to be working outdoors, working carefully, a fraction of an inch at a time, being very thorough, a small-sized discovery painstakingly made can be a very important thing, she says. She says she likes the kind of thoroughness and patience it requires. I thought at first it was an odd choice of profession, digging up the past; now I look at it again and see perhaps what she means. It is like my garden, slow, delicate, careful work, protective work, and in the end something may come of it and something may not. It is the work itself, each movement, that is the point, that is the joy, and I see where it is all right. I do not know if that is just what she anticipates; I hope that is how she will see it.

I have no right to hope anything for her, she has her own goals. She has become more sure of something, and perhaps it is herself.

She is getting dark, like me. She wears shorts and a halter top most of the time, or else her bathing suit, and she lies out in the sun, reading. Once, after the incident in the garden, she tried to help me gather in firewood I’d cut. I asked her if it were something she really felt like doing.

“Not really,” she answered, “but it seems like such a lot of work for one person. I don’t mind helping.”

I sent her back to the lawn and her books. “I want to do it,” I told her, “and you don’t.” I don’t know if she understood, but I think she is learning some sense of freedom. I hope so.

I have no right to hope anything for her.

It is not even as if she is my daughter. I don’t have any reaction to the word “daughter.” But there is a connection between us.

I felt it also with my own mother, that there was something between us — a current of common experience? I know that Katie is testing the word “mother” on me, using it to see if it fits, and I think that’s how she sees it, that we have a connection because she can use the word more and more comfortably. I don’t think that’s it. Katie was a little girl; now she’s a young woman, and I was not part of most of it. And yet something has grown between us, a special affection that does not necessarily reflect itself on the surface of our talk. All that we have in common, apparently, is our blood background and our femaleness: is this what creates the connection?