Finally, by August, the one bud on my bonsai began to show signs of its blossom. Small white tendrils began to pop through its hooded sheath. When I watered it, drops clung to the white tendrils and I would watch them disperse into the bud where no one could see. The way the bud absorbed the water showed me the truth of understanding: how covered with a clearness from experience, that clarity disperses beneath our skin to coat everything. I showed the white beginnings to Robert.

Just as the one bud began to open, I went away for our annual week on the lake, and there was something karmic about the fact that I would not see the bud fully opened. I thought about delaying our vacation, but felt that this was as it was supposed to be. For the lesson seemed to be in the acceptance that certain forms of truth remain out of reach, though their onset is what we know as beauty. So I packed the van with books and clothes and groceries, watered the budding dwarf tree, and drove north . . .

The second night there I had a dream in which Robert came to tell me that his cousin’s daughter had been diagnosed with leukemia. Robert was upset, distressed, and I offered to go with him, to talk to his cousin. They lived in a suburban home. It was early fall, and the air was crisp, the color in the yard just emerging. As we entered the house through the kitchen, the screen door slapped a familiar slap, though I couldn’t quite locate where I’d heard it before. Robert’s cousin was a fallen, stocky man, somewhat heavy, though it appeared he was quite strong physically. He was at the sink stirring a cup of coffee with a spoon, and the spoon hitting the side of the cup sounded like a metronome of doom, a small, incessant, pinging underneath all the feeling that no one acknowledged.

The young woman with leukemia was seated at the kitchen table, more concerned for her father than herself. Our eyes met, and she seemed wise beyond her years. I really wanted to spend my time with her. I could see that Robert was struggling in his own way with the unanswerable tragedy of such a young life being threatened. She was the one who needed our attention. Her father, though understandably sad, was being self-indulgent, pitying himself. I put my arm around the fallen, stocky man, more to divert him than to soothe him, while Robert went and held the young woman, who either didn’t quite realize what having leukemia meant or realized more deeply than the rest of us how fragile our moment of living can be. I woke to the sway of morning pines on the lake, the early mist rising.