It was still cool and damp outside. Poppy wore a white fleece jacket that made her look innocent and set off the amber streaks in her hair. The white also made her easy to find if she got too far ahead, something that seemed likely to happen in her current state of mind. She blew past all the education signs that Connie and Ed used to make them stop and read. That was how he’d learned about the shapes of leaves, how ferns grow in the shade, and how trees, like people, crowd each other out and battle for dominance.

“This was always my favorite part,” Poppy said as soon as they got to the elevated wooden footpath through White Cedar Swamp.

“Mine too,” he said. The cedars had a prehistoric quality about them, rising out of their mossy mounds, everything dripping. “Feels like I’m in a cathedral.”

Poppy stopped because she saw a bird that interested her. Poppy never missed a bird.

“I bet you wish you had your binoculars,” he said. He remembered that she’d had two pairs, one so old that the leather was worn off and the lenses had turned green, and a smaller, better pair that Poppy always insisted he use when they’d gone bird-watching together.

She looked at him, genuinely touched. “You remember.”

“I remember everything,” he said. “That’s my problem.”

Poppy looked up again, into the branches of an oak tree that Michael could tell had top rot and wouldn’t last many more years. “My mom was losing her memory.”

“Connie? That’s impossible. Her brain was a steel trap.”

“I know. Nobody told me about her dementia. It set in fast, I guess. I think about it all the time now. I wonder what she forgot first. I’ll bet it was hard for her to be here, knowing all her memories of this place were slowly being erased.”

“You don’t need to remember being here, though,” Michael said. “You can just experience it. I can’t think of a better place to be in the moment.”

“But can we really just be in the moment here? Isn’t it the past that makes this place so meaningful?” This was new: the last time he’d seen Poppy, she was sixteen and said whatever popped into her head. She was older now. More mature. She saw some movement in the branches and squinted to get a look. “I’ve seen two Eurasian wigeons since I got here.”

“Remember all the goldfinches that used to crowd around your parents’ feeder?”