And so I have had to consider: what does the expectation of this young girl who is, or was, my daughter, mean to me? Why do I watch for her? What is it I am expecting from her? I go to sleep with the questions still in my mind; there is no logic to what I am feeling. No, the clues must be in the feeling itself, but I do not have a label for it, knowing that love the way I remember it does not fit. I keep wondering what the lack has been here that I did not see, and that Katie has now arrived to point out or to fill.

I dream. I dream that in the morning I wake up to a huge explosion. The earth is rocking, the cabin is swaying, and what I see out the window from my bed is just dust, dust everywhere, swirling, obscuring everything. I get up and make tea and wander around the cabin, holding the cup, looking out various windows, trying to see through the dust. It is as if the windows have been painted rusty-beige, there is so little to be seen through them. It would be like that except that it is possible to see the movement, the restless whirling of the dust particles, each separate and impenetrable to the eye.

I go to the kitchen to have breakfast. There is no point, I have decided, in going outside into this cataclysm; it is warm and safe inside, obviously dangerous and painful out there. Later I walk again, still trying to peer through the dust, but it is impossible; it seems, however, that the particles are slowing, moving in larger sweeps, more graceful than frenetic. I assume they are subsiding, that everything will be all right shortly, and then I will be able to go outside. I wonder how deep the dust will be, once it settles on the ground. Will I sink into it? What will it have done to the garden? I worry about the birds and squirrels, and think that the stream must be choking with it, clogged and muddied so that the water striders will be trapped. The dust seems as if it must suck up the water and the air both.

Suddenly it is gone; no, because I peer out the window and see that it hasn’t disappeared, but is lying all over the ground, and it is almost to the level of the window sill, so deep. I will have to wade out into it, I want to see what it is and what it has done. And I remember the explosion, and wonder what that was. An earthquake, perhaps?