Late afternoon arrives. The rays of sun pour like amber honey over the plain. Mary and I are sitting in the garden on a worn, wooden bench sinking into the prehistoric landscape of this place. A shepherd with a crook in his hand and a goat with arced horns and delicate hooves lead the flock over the rocky terrain toward the cote for the night. The tinkle of bells around their woolly necks comes from just below us. The flock raises a cloud of dust that looks like gold particles lit by the setting sun. Tiny butterflies come to the lavender… the sun gilds their wings as if they are fairies. It is that magical time of day before the light fades when things reveal the possibility within. The light passes. A sharp wind picks up. It’s time for dinner.

We’ve wheedled the reluctant Frenchman to cook for us. He lays the table with cloth and silver, china plates and starched napkins… balloon glasses. He decants the wine… lays out the food. We sit at the wide, wooden table on ornate chairs with Mary in the place of honor at the head. The candles cast deep shadows into the dark corners… the narrow stone, walled passage to the rooms carved into the mountain barely lit. Mary presides after dinner. She begins to quote stanza after stanza of Milton’s “Paradise Lost” and, later, “Paradise Regained” from memory. Soon, I am as blank as the verse lost in drowsy thoughts of “obdurate pride and steadfast hate” and “fair empires won of Earth and Air.”

That night I curl up with the memory of my mother and fall into fragrant sleep. The cave smells of my mother’s dried flowers… bergamot… rose… lavender… of frankincense and oranges. Everything here… the bed… the flowers… the bric-a-brac on the walls… the sun over the plain, reminds me of my mother… a life created of layered scent… practiced to effortlessness… nothing too little… nothing too late.

I think it has been a perfect day before I fall asleep in the blackness of the cave. I am in the time of my life back then when I still divide things… the perfect from the imperfect still believing a paradise that was lost can surely be regained. Years will pass before I realize that finding perfection and avoiding imperfection are notions that will become useless in helping me live my life as it is now. This later knowledge will lead me to cast aside the continuum dividing happiness from sadness, joy from sorrow, the good from the bad. What will come into its place is an awareness of underlying contentment in any state I am that will, in turn, sustain an inquisitive will to live squirming, wriggling life without insisting that I be entitled to a singular, preferred state forever.

Something else will change, too. I stop making plans after the overnight trip to the cave until I see a sign… an overturned rock… a snap of a twig in the distance. I sense my way sometimes crossing rushing rivers in danger of being swept away, wary, but so steady that I will rarely worry of imminent disaster. But mostly, my life will form itself around small, mindful acts of familiarity like rain dripping from the tree branches in spring… a clear string of beads, each one fully formed before falling to the earth… indistinguishable.

I am unconscious at the time that I’ve made these changes. Consciousness from then on only comes in retrospect… and, then, even retrospect becomes unnecessary and falls away discarded.

I wonder about the scale of such changes in a person like me… one who lived her life with the alarm clock set earlier year by year… planning her day… making long lists checking off completed items only to devise more… working beyond tiredness until she fell, almost dead, into bed at night, but not before worrying herself to sleep… waiting for the other shoe to drop… an old war horse who knew her purpose and her role… a thoroughly reliable, capable person…

… one in never-ending motion.

Is it good or bad… this change? How to answer that question? The heart for that kind of thinking is no longer in me. I have Mary to thank for that.