Maeve was having a white dream. She had had them her whole life, from the time she was very young and struggling to wake up from a very sound sleep. White dreams usually came on nights before exciting, wonderful days. For example, Maeve had had a white dream the night before she went to the statewide spelling bee in fourth grade, and won on the word “pyrometallurgical.” She had had one the night before she won a tennis match her senior year at Black Hall High School. And very early in the morning of the day she married her husband.

White dreams were harbingers of great joy. They came in different forms—they might take place amid light-infused cumulus clouds, or in the sea foam of gentle waves off the west coast of Corsica, or in the softest white feathers of a dove's wings—but the feeling they imparted was always the same. They filled the dreamer with the most exquisite sensations of life—every particle of existence that filled a person's soul with love and light and wonder, and made getting up in the morning worth doing.

Today's white dream took place in a garden. Maeve stood on a path surrounded by white roses. She felt the weight of her clippers in one hand, and she heard the reassuring slap, slap of the waves on the rocks down front. It was her own garden, and she was pruning the White Dawns, climbing the trellis by the stone chimney. The air was brilliant and clear, softened with salt. Her hair was white, and so was that of the woman working beside her. Clara, of course.

They didn't even have to speak. They were a team. Oh, they had had their fights over the years. They didn't see eye to eye about everything, that was for sure. But in white dreams, all strife is secondary to love.

“Mara,” Maeve said, clipping back some thorns and briars.

“That means ‘sea,'” Clara said. “In Gaelic.”

“Ard na Mara,” Maeve said, “is where my son and his wife died in Ireland.”

“But you sound so happy!”

“I am,” Maeve said. “I'll see him soon.”

“You can't leave now,” Clara said cheerily. “Your granddaughter is here.”

“Mara,” Maeve said, and heard herself say, her voice echoing in her ears, as if she were half awake, as if the white dream were coming to an end, as if real life were calling her down from the bliss of it all. “Mara, Mara . . .”

“Granny,” came the voice, and it wasn't Clara's. “Granny, I'm here!”

“Sweetheart,” Maeve said. Someone squeezed her hand. Oh, it felt so wonderful and real. She would know that touch anywhere! It was the hand she had held on walks to school and the beach, the hand she had held at doctors' visits and dentist appointments, the hand she had held at the funerals of her son and daughter-in-law.