The cabin had been a compromise with myself , remote enough to escape the city's noise, close enough to a town that I wouldn't lose my mind. What I hadn't accounted for was her. The first morning I saw her, I was on my porch with coffee, still in yesterday's shirt, and she stepped out of the house across the gravel lane in nothing but a thin cotton nightie the color of pale wheat. It fell to mid-thigh. The morning air in the mountains has teeth, and I watched the fabric do things fabric does when it's cold and thin and she's warm underneath. She didn't hurry. She picked up a green watering can from beside the steps, walked barefoot along the flower beds, and watered each one like she had all the time in the world. When she bent to reach the marigolds, the nightie rode up, and I forgot what my coffee was for. She never looked my way. Not once. Which is exactly what makes you wonder. By the third week I'd rearranged my mornings around hers. Coffee on the porch at seven-fifteen. She came out at seven-twenty. It became a kind of liturgy. The sun cresting the ridge, the mist peeling off the pines, and this woman moving through her garden like the whole mountain belonged to her, with which the way she carried herself, it did.
