Spring is for waiting, and watching. Here in New York, our magnolia tree, which bloomed only the month the gardeners planted it two years ago, and last summer stood as an extravagant stick in our front yard, is showing fuzzy green buds. In Seattle, our friend sits in the hospital, after a bone-marrow transplant, watching his white counts go down to zero and back up again.

His wife has been my best friend for the last twenty-five years. We are usually physically distant; we don’t always talk; each has parts of her life the other can't comprehend. It doesn’t matter: We see the other as she would be seen, as she sees herself.

My parents offer to buy me a plane ticket to Seattle with their miles, so my father and I are now, together, on hold. When the woman comes back on he encourages her to help us. I know you can do it, he says. You can do this. She puts us back on hold while she transfers us.

In Seattle it must be spring, too, cold spring, damp spring, spring before anything has happened, spring that might as well be winter, except for a few small signs. The secret of early spring is not that warmth is here, or growth, or ease, but that it’s possible to imagine these things again, and to want them very badly.