In the chapel I write to you on the back of an Isaac Watts hymnal, “Have I been so long with you, and yet hast thou not known me?”

Late in the fall, the sunflowers that fill a corner of the former hockey field will look like brown showerheads ready to shower seeds at the turn of a handle till the gardener clears them for compost. “A cold compost” is what Warren tells me to put on my head for a headache.

I have taken to making bouquets, with an eye to successful still life. I know it is not your strong suit, but turns out it is mine. The counselors and guests have told me as much. One school of thought says a flower arrangement should feature one type of flower—a fountain of white tulips, say, or, in the bath, one fragrant tea rose in a bud vase on a commode. But I get good notices for odd combinations: lavender cosmos and purple flowering sage, bright yellow yarrow and orange day lilies, red rambling rose spiked with flowering chive. Desperate for a hobby on a college application, years ago I wrote, “Gardening.” Because my mother used to make me rake the leaves! And suddenly it comes to me that my mother never cut flowers and brought them into the house. Frustration pulls weeds; it does not arrange bouquets.

In the Hostility Suite, Warren answers the phone. “Chatty?” he says, and holds out the receiver. He waits until she is beside him, reaching for it, before adding, “Phone call for Karen.”

We are teasing each other.

Maybe it is the gentle weather, but I notice we can give and take it. Dinner one warm night was a barbecue outdoors. Karen wore shorts and, for the first time, a top that was tight, a stretchy sleeveless knit. Warren looked at her chest and said, “That was a well-kept secret.”

And Karen, she’s been reading her current events, she looked at the plate of hamburgers Warren was reaching toward; she said, “I forget how, but to produce the meat for one hamburger destroys an area of rain forest the size of a kitchen.”

“That’s not very big,” Warren said, and helped himself.

I think of Karen, saying, “I finally solved my problem of how to talk with people,” and Warren coming back with, “The hand puppets worked?”

Our own wobbly tries.

We sometimes forget why we’re here. And when in a flash we remember, it is a feeling like something we’re not fond of that has gone away but will be coming back. A quarrelsome mate off on a business trip.

Diminution. This is often a comfort, to be satisfied with less. My grandmother told me that when I was born, she made my mother carry me straightaway up a flight of stairs. It is a superstition. You carry the infant up the stairs so the child will rise in the world.

“Are you sure?” I used to ask her, my grandmother, because it felt as though I’d been carried instead to the basement, my job to just break even, to rise to the place where the rest were pushing off. This is not a complaint, just the way it seemed to me. Whereas take a person like Chatty. At Scrabble today, she made the word hepper. We challenged her. She said, “That’s Southern for ‘assistant’—‘He’s mah hepper.’” She was playing with us, but Warren looked it up and found it really is a word, the name for a salmon in its second year. And Chatty got to keep her points.