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feet up and even then the sky was beginning to be darker and more curved than I had ever known it to be. That night, I called Harold on my satellite phone and spoke to him directly.
    It was that next morning that I began to see the flora of Nepal. We had left our campsite at half past six in the morning and started walking toward what, I did not know yet. It was ninety-six degrees by seven, according to the watch I wore, and we walked up and up for two hours straight. In fact we were just walking through, and also just walking toward, the end of our journey, but I did not know this yet. I still had the idea that we would walk to something and then leave it for something else. But that was never so. We were walking, and every place we walked was something, every place we walked was important, certainly from the point of view of a gardener. It was just that this gardener lives in Vermont. In any case we were walking, and it was very warm and I kept my eyes closed, in a way, because the climate I was walking in was not the climate in which I make a garden. The climate in which I was walking, the things growing there would count as annuals for me. As a gardener, I have a fixed view of annuals. They really are ornamentals. That is, they are ornaments for the more substantial and, so, really real perennials. In any case, we were walking and I was with Sue. For Dan and Bleddyn had raced ahead as would always be the case, and suddenly I saw these pink flowers everywhere—at my feet when I looked down and somewhat above eye level when I looked up, and then alongside me when I was just going forward. I recognized them from shape and texture, only I had seen them in another color, deep purple. I had seen those same flowers in a nursery in Vermont and in a garden in Maine but only in deep purple. To see them now in pink while remembering them in purple enhanced my feeling of anxiety and alienation, and so when I said to Sue, “What is this?” and she answered me matter-of-factly, “That’s Osbeckia ,” I was comforted.
    The plant I had seen in the nursery in Vermont and in my friend’s garden in Maine had a dark fleshy-colored and coarse-skin stem with deep purple flowers. I had always wanted to plant them in my garden, but they seemed as if they were not really annuals, they seemed too late-blooming and too woody in stem for my climate. On the whole, in my garden (and all the time I was walking around in Nepal I was mostly thinking of my garden) annuals need to be delicate-looking, while at the same time bearing flowers non-stop as if they do not know how to do anything else. Now as I trudged along, not knowing really where I was going, I was thinking of something I had known in passing, a plant seen in a nursery, and in a garden in Maine, trying to latch on to it as if it were one of the certainties in the whole of life. Much later I learned that the deep purple form of Osbeckia comes from Sri Lanka, the one before me was native to the place in which I was seeing it.
    That day we walked eight miles going gradually uphill. We stopped for lunch in the middle of a village and I asked for a cola soft drink, and received it. That was the last time such a thing happened. It was then that I began to notice this phenomenon. I saw a girl, about the same age my daughter was then, seventeen, combing the hair of someone else with much carefulness; she was combing through her familiar’s thick head of straight hair because it was riddled with lice. This was all done with a loving fierceness, as if something important depended on it. The person combing the hair used a comb that was fine-toothed and carefully went through the hair again and again, making sections and then dividing again the sections into little sections. This engagement between the delouser and head of hair made me think of love and intimacy, for it seemed to me that the way the person removed the lice from the head of hair was an act of love in all its