Her plane comes over the trees, so distant and small as to resemble a bird that forgot to migrate, a lost bird stranded for the winter, dying. The airfield is just a strip of worn dirt surrounded by dense pine trees. The plane wobbles in the wind, bounces on the earth, sputters to a stop. She steps out and resembles a portrait of her great-grandmother that you once saw in her house all those years ago. You hadn’t thought of that photograph since the day you saw it. And yet here it comes, emerging from some cave. Gaunt and whittled away, only muscle and bone (mostly bone), hair gone white, eyes like hard and vibrant stone. You can only imagine what you must look like.

You are connoisseurs of Northern Michigan’s villages and collectors of Petoskey stones. We’ll meet in Traverse City and drink wine while driving down the peninsula, windows down, the quarter moon bays on both sides.

The lake comes ashore hard, cold and grey, breaking on the smooth, muted rocks. The water makes your fingers slow and numb. The wind takes hold of her hair and scarf. You think about all the poems you have loved that were ruined by one bad line. Now, of course, you think that that bad line was the best part of them.

She must know how fragile Petoskey stones are. How their beauty only comes out under water’s touch. But then the waves sunder them, and round them, and soon grind them to sand. How they are slowly worked to oblivion.

It has been at least ten years since you’ve seen her naked. But now she steps into the shower in front of you, skin stippled with cold. Her breasts have shrunk to almost nothing. Ten years and it’s still so easy to be naked together. You sit on the toilet, naked and wizened in your own way, and talk to her about nothing important while the warm water cascades over her.

Our passions outlive us in the veins of others. In the tendons of their fingers as they search the evening surf, rolling over stones, searching for one to bring home before the milky dusk calls us to dinner.

“I never thought I would live to be this old,” she says. You smile. “Me either,” you say. “It makes all the pain of my youth seem so inconsequential,” she says, “all the loss and torment. I think back so grateful for it all, wishing I could experience it again, wishing I’d handled it with more grace.”

In the woods it’s cold in the shade but warm in the splashes of sun that collapse like pools on the forest floor. You walk barefoot down a creek to languish in the sun. The water is cold and fast and clear so you can see schools of minnows flit, fleet as music. The banks are shaggy with long grass. She walks ahead of you, jeans rolled to her knees. The varicose veins on the backs of her knees are like minor roads on a forgotten map.

These landscapes mean nothing by their disorder or beauty. They ask nothing of us. A tall poplar spends its whole lifetime swaying in the wind for no one at all, twisting and turning, lambent in every kind of light the sun can offer, invisible. A cluster of cottonwoods like desert Bedouins is swallowed by the shifting dunes for no reason at all. Every year, one or two hikers vanish completely in these woods. Their memories and lovers swallowed whole by the wind, and the clear streams, and the tall yearning trees that cast their thatched shadows on the earth, day after day.

You remember losing her all those decades ago. How your soul thrashed about violently like a fish dragged ashore. How the pain was like the depth and clarity of the stars up here during January. You still wonder what a life with her would have been like. If it would have obscured the beauty. Maybe, but maybe not. There’s no use thinking like that. She’s here, and soon she will vanish again. And maybe one of you will die before you can meet again.

What we love will not go unloved in our absence.

You make a dinner together. Perch and lemons and potatoes with rosemary. You will remember the lone dinner, but would have forgotten the thousands. So which weighs more?

She tells you the old stories. About the schools of Patagonia. About the stone house on the island in Greece and the beautiful, shy girls who brought her water from their well. About the Turkish men and the scents of Istanbul. About picking fruit with the migrants and the impossible flatness of Texas. About the shacks and shanties where she has spent her life.

Your life has been these forests and these streams and these lakes and these dunes and the seasons. And you know nothing of them. Are surprised each year by spring. Are unprepared for winter. You find new trees on your property all the time, trees have you never seen before. Or find that you no longer recognize the old ones.

You walk in the dusk. There is a big oak in the yard, and she smiles, remembering it. Later the two of you go to bed. She still likes having her ears bitten. You still like it best when she is on top. In the morning she will go, and you will find mementoes of her everywhere. The glasses she left in the sink. The sock she forgot under your bed. You try to stay awake as long as possible, both of you do.

I hope someday you will walk past a similar tree and it will send your heart fluttering with the memory of hiding from your parents, or straining upwards from a blanket to kiss the first man you loved.

She leaves with a pocket full of Petoskey stones. Soon she realizes that the oil on her fingers, over time, draws out the stone's tortoise shell pattern. She spends her days walking with her hands in her pockets, slowly, methodically, revealing the ancient labyrinths.