It was three tall stories high and cylindrical, painted mission white, and sporadically draped with ivy and passion fruit vines. There were windows, both large and small, at odd intervals and of different shapes. The path leading to the front door was paved with white marble tiles flanked on one side by nine five-foot dwarf peach trees and on the other by plum. The lawn that once ran around the structure was now made up of rolling rows of beans, tomatoes, yams, potatoes, onions, garlic, the beginnings of an asparagus patch, and Louisiana hot peppers. I puttered in the garden every morning I could. And if I was away, one of the Longo clan made sure that the weeds were tamed and the plants and trees watered.

On the roof of the house, in large terra-cotta pots, I was cultivating twenty-seven different types of rosebushes.

Coming home never failed to make me smile.

I walked up to the plain-faced and thick ironwood door like it was an old friend welcoming me in.

My friend was ajar.

The foyer of our home had no walls but was simply a dais that stood three feet above the rest of that level. The entire first floor of our turret house was without partition, just a supportive pillar here and there. It was a kind of rambling living room that broke down into sections according to how the furniture was arranged. If we gave a party the entire level came together. But most times there were little areas where Feather entertained her friends and I mine.

The most amazing thing about this room, and the whole house, was a stream that ran a crooked path across it. The creek bed was rudely hewn out of mountain stone. The water originated from an underground well in a higher, neighboring mountain. It was fresh enough to drink and the stream itself was quite slender until it reached the koi pond near the open-air terrace at the far wall.

I followed the twisted pathway for its forty-one steps. This led to the sunlit verandah and the circular seventeen-foot-wide and three-and-a-half-foot-deep pond. There were more than eighty koi frolicking in the water. The fishes were white, black, blue, yellow, cream, orange, red, and many combinations of those colors. The huge bright-colored koi sashayed and flitted through the water like angels of a more primitive, more sophisticated time. Some were well over a foot long. My shadow reminded them of food so they crowded the surface near my feet.

The little yellow dog, Frenchie, toddled up to the edge of the water imagining a wriggling fish between his teeth. But Frenchie was too old and not big enough for that. At one time he hated me, but the years had mellowed him, and while he rarely greeted me, he no longer snarled at my scent.