Brother Rabbit , William Morris. “You live, you flourish, you bloom.” The refrain her mother used to sing when she was still a child. In retrospect those words seemed to belie an admonition of imminent danger- there was no guarantee that everyone could smoothly ascend from “live” to “flourish,” and rarely, she thought, could one’s blooming maturity last well after the tail-end of summer. Musingly she stared out of a dormer window and stretched her tired back. Ladylike elegance made every woman look like a wooden crane. Her listless gaze landed on a tree overladen with burnished leaves; so plastic they seemed that one had the illusion of time finally ticked away to its finality- life only lived on as a pure artificial image. If so, she refused to become anything but a piece of cherished memory. The scenery from ...