Cee-Cee the cat sleeps all day on a round cushion near Margaret's chair. The cat is old like Margaret and walks slowly with arthritis. She is fed the best cat food and catnip grown in a box.

Cee-Cee "shows off" for company: she rolls onto her back and looks at visitors upside down. Margaret laughs.

Margaret is almost blind from glaucoma. I see through a muddy screen, she tells me. One eye can't see at all, because of strokes.

When she wakes in the morning, her ritual is to open her eyes and see if she has gone blind.

Sometimes when I go to visit she is sitting in her darkened bedroom. I startle her, and then she is glad to see me: Come in, she calls to me, and I open the door and find her sitting in that darkness with her walker beside her. Cee-Cee walks slowly to me and lies down in front of us to "show off." Margaret touches Cee-Cee's head with her foot. "Show-off," she says; Cee-Cee purrs.

One morning I find Margaret in her living room, holding a letter in her lap. She has written down a dream, and she cries as she gives the letter to me.

The letter says,

"This morning I had a dream. I am writing this before it fades from my memory. I saw Charles again.

"I was walking on a little track, like a railroad track, but more narrow, and to my left were great white waves, lashing up higher and higher to a white misty sky. Charles came walking to me, in his nice jacket I always liked. I told him I was afraid, but he said, Come with me. I am afraid, I said, and he showed me how to sit down on the track and dangle my legs over the side. I told him we would ruin our clothes if we went out into the waves, because the little track began to move towards them. Charles left me then, and disappeared into a crowd of people. They were talking, and out of the crowd came a man who seemed familiar to me. He helped me up and said, Your trip has been postponed. There is something you need to do.

"Then a pretty young girl came to me, wearing a white dress, and she led me down a path to a beautiful park where rocks were all around a deep pool. I climbed on the rocks like a girl, without worrying about falling or being old and dizzy, since I wasn't.

"These are the most beautiful rocks, I told the girl. Then I saw the pool and was drawn to it. I wanted to go inside it, but the girl took my hand. I'm going to take you home, she told me, and then I woke up in my bed."

I could see, she told me, and Charles was young again, like me.

What a beautiful dream, I said. It was real, wasn't it?

It wasn't a dream, she agreed: it was so clear, I can see it now, just as clearly as anything. . .

I said, Charles loves you, and others love you, not just here; and when it is time, it will be so easy, as easy as your dream.

Christmas time, and Margaret's neighbor brings her cookies on a plate, flowers in a pot that will grow and have white blooms during the winter; I bring her a newspaper clipping about a squirrel on the courthouse lawn that steals candy canes off the county's Christmas tree. I type up her dream and she mails it to her sister.

Birds sing outside her house; her neighbor fills a feeder with sunflower seeds. Margaret makes instant coffee for a friend who brings her three Christmas cards and reads them to her.

Three doves sit on the wire near her house: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, loving her.