Maggie Says There's No Such Thing as Winter

If you believe in snow, you have to believe in water as it's meant to be, loosed from clouds arranged like asphodel. Because that's what it's like to come back: a slow surfacing, memory spiraling away. You can sleep so long, whole seasons are forgotten like a hospital-room plaster, spidered with cracks in Portugal shapes. You can love sleep like water, love your heavy limbs pushing river and ocean aside. After Maggie woke, the doctors had her stringing bracelets of semiprecious beads, and she couldn't stop counting the kinds of blue. Here, summer, in the high shade of a ginko, she pulls up a handful of stones on silk and we drink grapefruit seltzer, listening to the tinny chime of bubbles rising to the air. She can't remember autumn, so we tell her someday this tree will drop its fan-shaped leaves all at once, golden in the October crush of every plant's frantic strip show. Later we'll see mountains through the scrim of empty branches, and if we can look straight up into the atmosphere, see the same plain old sky revolving. When we ask Maggie what color it is she always says iolite, picturing beads like raindrops, shining azure on the table. She forgets that sometimes things don't stay where you leave them, that the sky fades to white even before snow begins to fall. It's hard, but we have to tell her even sapphires don't glow blue without some kind of help.