My sister Catherine ambled slowly toward us from the faded blue bench where she'd been sipping coffee. The road to Catherine's house, marked only by a row of mailboxes, was another few miles of single-lane dirt, treacherous in the early spring when it turns to mud.
Spring comes late in the mountains.
Irises are just beginning to bloom, some deep purple blossoms surrounding an old wooden crucifix that once held up a laundry line and now serves only to anchor perennials and to hang that most hopeful of garden ornaments-a hummingbird feeder. Catherine had just returned from a trip to England, which included a tour of gardens in Cornwall. She shows me where she has put in three small peony plants given to her by our mother, their tight round buds still small. The defining moment in Catherine's life happened more than 30 years ago, sometime in the mid- 60s. A neighbor in Nyack, New York, whose three children we baby-sat for, invited Catherine and me to spend a week or so at her family's summer house in Heath.