Fiona’s Wake

At half past two in the morning, on the twenty-fourth day of September 2022, as I watched from my living room windows, blurred by the rain, branches and trunks were twisted and tossed, thrashing one another, the wood crackling — clacking — and splintering, as summer’s lush greenery caught too much of the wind.

For days, we had been warned of the hurricane, exceeding all others in its force, the forecast had said, but this one was delicately named: Fiona. What could she do? What harm would she bring?

From the Gaelic fionn, meaning white, fair, or beautiful, the name Fiona might also be rooted in the Gaelic fine, designating a vine, as does the Latin vinea, which also resembles, rhythmically, Fiona. Vines flourish, twist, and intertwine with beauty, sometimes producing white flowers and fruit among their lustrous leaves.

Trees are meant to bend in the wind, swaying with supple grace, fluid in their motions, as if orchestrating a harmony among their separate selves: the leaves brushing, emitting a watery wavelike sound, resembling rain. Perhaps Fiona would enrich and enhance that leafy sensation.

But that wasn’t the case.

Throughout the long night, in between the weather reports, the radio offered a program of music, intervals of tranquility, but that fair and lovely sound had stopped altogether at a quarter past twelve, when the power failed. Apart from the wind, silence set in. When the storm passed directly above us two hours later, its winds at 165 kilometres per hour, the water was surging.

At daylight, I witnessed the fallen trees, flat on the ground or caught on the way down, lashed and toppled or split, or severed in places, the roots upturned, leaving massive holes in the earth, brown mud puddles, where raindrops were dripping from circular cakes of soil into the pools below. The ground had clung to the roots, even as they were withdrawn: with suddenness, or was the removal slow? Encased by mud, these threads of life were tangled and wet, firm and robust, though not strong enough to hold up the trees, the disc that came up with the roots seeming so thin.

September 26. Should we go or not?

It was three o’clock. Rain was still falling, streaking the sky; the greyness across the hills was heavy and thick. All afternoon, the showers were pausing, then starting again.

“But the air is warm,” my friend said. “I think you should come.” We’d take a shorter route than usual to the pond, he assured me.

He wanted me to see its colour.

“Orange,” he called it, a strange and unusual radiance, from sediment in the water, stirred by the storm. He had saved that detail —“the best”— for last, at the end of his long account of his solo hike in the woods on Sunday, one day after the hurricane had come and gone, the damage still fresh.

“The trees were smashed,” he said.

I didn’t like the word “smashed,” which was harsh and inaccurate, I felt: fallen, perhaps, or snapped or uprooted or leaning, but not smashed, exactly.

“I think you should come,” he said again, his jacket and pants and runners and hair already drenched from the short walk to my office. “You’ll get wet.”

Yes, I would join him, follow him into the forest, where I couldn’t safely go on my own, to see the extent of the frightening infliction: the outcome of a unique and disastrous event. So I rushed home and changed. Then we set off, at half past three. I had dressed in layers to prevent a chill when wet, but I walked under my umbrella with bare hands. What would be the point of gloves that are soaked?

The route wasn’t short, even though he had said, when enticing me to come, “It won’t take long. We can’t get through to parts of the trail.”

At the fork, where we might have turned left for the other loop, he led us to the right, to the east side of the forest. Although I didn’t know why, I suspected something dramatic — or tragic — where wind and rain had left the woods in a wreck.

“Just up here,” he kept saying, as if he intended to turn back at that unidentified point, so we walked and walked in our usual direction, as I felt my tension and frustration rise, with delays and meanderings off the path, to avoid the puddles and pooling water or to search for the trail itself, lost entirely in places.

Finally we stopped, unable to proceed.

My treasured little ravine, on the easternmost edge of the circular trail, was inaccessible — unrecognizable. Trees were tangled in a colossal upheaval. The lovely rolling hillside, revealing the contours of the land, with a deep but gentle valley at its base, had disappeared; it was blocked from our sight. We didn’t know where or how to look.

And how to get through?

“We might as well keep going in this direction,” he said, as if he had planned, all along, to attempt the more daring, arduous option.

“But we’ll just have more of these obstacles,” I replied, urging him to go back.

In silence, he carried on, climbing on top of the fallen trunks, slippery and mossy and wet, or snapping the branches that hindered our way, as our feet slid in the mud. Often we stopped in quiet wonder, in awe of the scale: trees so extensive that we couldn’t see the beginning or the end of the long logs, horizontal at our sides. We stood face to face with the roots, now vertical, embedded in soil that had stuck to the matting when the trees had tumbled. Feeling our human smallness, we couldn’t interpret the chaos: complexity and confusion.

“Bones,” he called them, “the bones of trees.” Not flesh but bones.

Splintered and moist, the trunks were rotting already, surprisingly soft in our fingers, delightfully sweet when we held the dampened fragments to our noses.

“Trees die gracefully,” I dared to say. Human mortality is hidden, the flesh set underground and out of sight, but trees meet death before our eyes, and as detected by other senses. “With beauty,” I said.

He wasn’t convinced of “beauty,” so I mentioned the aspect of suffering. Trees must feel, endure the snap. The fall, the leaning, the collision, the breaking. Only a few were caught in neighbouring arms, supported by other trees, their roots not wholly ripped or exposed, though partially severed from the soil.

“These trees might live,” I said, with hope.

“They might,” he replied, hesitantly.

Some of the trees had fallen together, side by side, embracing each other, including the silver-spotted birch on the west end, where the trail ascends to the ridge: three trunks, tumbling in parallel, in death.

“A tree graveyard,” he called it.

At every step, we witnessed the wreckage — the strangeness — with no way forward sometimes, while more and more holes appeared in the canopy overhead, altering a setting that we had known so well.

Although I resisted and struggled against his determination to forge ahead, all the way, to complete the entire loop —“This isn’t what you promised when you said a short, partial hike in the other direction”— I was also aware, by the end, of the rarity: an exceptional encounter that no other hikers had likely experienced. We were entirely alone in a forest — a castle of crumbling trees — that had been ruined and reconfigured for our eyes alone.

In contrast to my cautious acceptance of his audacious sense of adventure late in the afternoon, when I would tire quickly, he became a Viking — a woodsman, a warrior — determined to break the branches, to move what he could, to get us through.

With multiple interruptions.

Not only to manoeuvre, but also to look.

And to listen, mostly to blue jays, and to running streams, and to a newly gentle breeze.

And to talk. Quietly. From time to time. At irregular intervals. Our thoughts and our words not chiming. Not yet.

October 1. Five days later, we left in a flash, a quick agreement, not needing deliberation this time, setting out at half past two, without an umbrella or gloves or additional layers of clothing. The afternoon was warm, dry, and sunny.

“We’ll take the shorter route,” he suggested, meaning to the west, all the way to the pond and back.

Determined to meet his friends at the pub, he didn’t have time, he said, for a longer hike, so he didn’t deviate from his intent as he had before. Neither of us had returned to the woods yet. What would we find, and what would we feel?

“The storm is gone,” he said.

“We’ve made the break,” I replied, suddenly regretting the loss, grateful for the earlier experience, before Fiona had fully withdrawn: when rain was steady, the air moist and warm, the mud slippery and soft, the clouds heavy and grey, the roots of the upturned trees dripping with water, the green leaves on the fallen trunks shiny and wet, the wood inside the bark tinted with amber, some of it smelling sweet.

Now the freshness of the tempest, including its moody, atmospheric weather, had disappeared, for a bright — too bright — sunny sky, which I didn’t like, with leaves, dry and brittle, under our feet.

“More like fall,” he said.

Yes, not lush and summery and solidly green, in the way that the setting, right after the storm, resembled a moment in mid-July, but we came to welcome the sunny warmth, the rays of light relaxing us, putting us at ease.

While wandering off the trail to skirt the fallen trees, we got lost on higher ground, losing sight of the path altogether, until finally we found the pond on its north side, where we’d never been. We scrambled on the slope of a hill, crackling the branches (as deer do), stumbling on a rusty fence, progressing slowly, arriving, in the end, from the opposite direction, at the spot that we knew: the bench.

It was holding a massive trunk.

“Not for people anymore,” I said, looking for a corner to sit a moment.

Again we were the only two on the trail, and we watched a pair of ducks swim from side to side of the pond, “with no sound,” he remarked.

“And no disturbance in the water,” I replied. Less orange, the deep pond was now rather red and reflective.

“As if they were swimming on the surface of a mirror,” he said.

“Gentle, faithful companions,” I replied, the same two, perhaps, that we had watched in the past, when we sat on that wooden bench.

This time we crouched on the platform beneath it. The seat was upended, dismantled by logs, clutched by roots, embedded in soil. The boardwalk beside it was broken in half, forming a peak in the middle, a steep incline, which we couldn’t have followed anyway. He looked at his watch and turned us around.

“How could they snap?” he asked at almost every fallen tree, the matting at each base upright before us — like a wall or a painting to study. We pondered the mystery of the impossibility, the largeness of the formerly hidden anchor rising out of the ground, while the tree itself lay behind the saucer, requiring a different sort of peering and probing.

Death had exposed what life concealed.

Beautiful deaths, I still felt, the sadness admitting a little joy, though I wasn’t ready to utter the word.

“I’ll hug this one,” he said, bending over a massive trunk. Wrapping his arms around the lichen-covered white and silver bark, he couldn’t embrace the circumference, so he stood up, smiling and enthralled by the tactile experience of, and proximity to, nature’s ruined magnificence. Three large poplars had collapsed together, their roots intertwined in life, we could see, one likely knocked over first, bringing the other two with it: death for all three, their length beside us, their bottoms above our heads.

The woods had been turned upside down.

While climbing under and over the obstructions, we would slow and stop, not wanting to leave the forest enclosure, our words fewer, our silences more prolonged, the mystery mingled with faint familiarity.

Blue jays. A throaty raven. Woodpeckers. Black-capped chickadees. Wrens and other small birds. Ruffed grouse. Ducks. Mushrooms. Lichen. Fungi. Ferns. Red squirrels. Sweet cedar and balsam fir needles.

He most liked the silent glide of the ducks. And I? What was the definitive moment for me? The warm, gentle, intermittently sunlit, moderately moist atmosphere, which had put me at ease with every step, in the company of a friend: our eyes and ears shared, and enlarged, as we walked and perceived in tandem, one behind the other.

Having returned to the woods one week after the storm, we were already watching the forest evolve. Previously demolished and rearranged, it was stirring, minutely, to a splinter of new life, to a little artistry and a semblance of music, like the insects’ activity under the bark: their own minute cavities and tunnels and patchwork designs.

Had Fiona opened the fallen trees like books, as sources of knowledge, formerly hidden, now revealed?

I walked home on my own for part of the way, as he rushed ahead to meet his friends. “Already late,” he announced, even before we left the woods.

October 11. In a flash, he was on the ground: a crumpled figure. He had stumbled on fallen branches, still scattered across the trail, his right knee bent and jammed into the leaves, his backpack banging on his body as three yellow quinces, picked earlier, rolled out. His hat had fallen off, and his hiking poles had tumbled out of his hands.

As he lay on the ground — startled, I was sure — I rushed to his side. This strong man, honoured by his Viking ancestry, taking brave, bold adventures into the wilderness, seeking remoteness while knowing the ways of nature, never (rarely) flinching.

Until now.

I couldn’t have anticipated the accident, and so suddenly his frailty was apparent as I had never seen it before. He had been talking and looking backward, as I followed behind, his mind likely distracted when his feet became tangled in the debris. Remnants of the hurricane still cluttered the forest floor, humbling a nature lover — a strident walker — reduced to the helplessness of a child: a broken human being among the broken trees.

He didn’t cry out as a child might, though I would have preferred that honest response to his quick rise. Stoically determined not to stop, he bent to collect the ripened fruit and his hat, when I gestured to do that for him.

“Stand still for a minute,” I said as I held his arm. “Take a breath.”

But he marched on, a little more slowly, as if nothing had occurred.

He had tumbled among the trees. Once so sturdy, they too were brittle: snapped and split and overturned, their branches and leaves now dead or dying, dried and drained of colour. I had witnessed the weakness — the vulnerability — of his muscular form, folded on the ground, which he couldn’t see, of course, too eager, I felt, to show off his strength, to carry on.

“Did you hurt your weak knee?” I asked.

His “good” knee had hit the ground, he said, with relief, a little humanity emerging in those frank words, but he buried the deeper feeling (of fear, perhaps) as we walked along the eastern trail, where green and coloured leaves still hung in the canopy, the intermittent rays of light bringing a fleeting brilliance to our eyes.

We looked and looked but didn’t sit and didn’t see the pair of ducks.

Our pair-ness, too, had broken.

The hike that day wasn’t the same. From the start, his harshness, as I saw it, clashed with my sensitivity, so I was upset before we stepped on the trail, the conflict continuing once we had set out. Even there, he insisted on making his point, repeatedly, pausing only when we passed the intricate, orchid-like, pearl-coloured mushroom growing on the end of a wet log.

“Exactly where it appeared last year,” I recalled, before admiring its layers of petals.

Then, when he fell, we stopped talking altogether. Were the two related, the tension (with me) distracting him from his feet? Nothing was the same after that, although still lovely and pleasant and quiet and beautifully aromatic, even if, in the end, a little chilly.

On the following morning, a watercolour drawing on stiff white board appeared at my door: An image of a single wild apple, no larger than a quince, collected on one of our hikes before the hurricane. A gesture of friendship and peace.

The painted apple was a little lopsided, its brown stem noticeably angled, as if the fruit, though not bruised, had fallen long ago, its skin lined with amber and gold.

December 3. For the first time in almost two months, our hiking resumed. What would we find in the forest? The chaos intact? A semblance of order? A measure of both?

In October, most of the trees still had leaves, and the woods were terribly tangled in places. Going left, not right, at the first fork, after the first ravine, for a freer path, we would turn back at the pond to come out the same way, only occasionally completing the entire loop with manageable variations.

Invigorated, though saddened, we had climbed under or over or around the trunks, where trees — in pairs or triplets or groups of five or six — were blocking the way, as my friend snapped the branches to get us through. Sometimes he crawled on his knees, catching his backpack on broken twigs. I gently unhooked the mesh pockets from behind, hating to find him trapped on the ground, looking a little tenuous — and aged — and not as agile and as strong as I once imagined him to be. In these moments, I was quietly troubled, all over again, by a vision of human fragility.

But not when he said, on that December day, “Nature loves to hide.”

Four words: his words. Familiar, but fresh in this moment, this context.

He had crouched to the ground when he uttered the thought, not to crawl or to negotiate pieces of the fallen forest but to turn over a nearby rock.

“Look underneath,” he remarked. “Nothing,” he said, except for the moist, rain-drenched soil. He tried again. “Too small,” he muttered, dropping the stone, as he found another, which looked like the first, but it too revealed only a vacant hole in the mud.

“For what?” I asked, intrigued by the mystery and his determination.

“Salamanders.” He had found them under stones in the past.

Right there, I wondered, so close to the pond, and is that where they went when Fiona came? But he didn’t reply. We climbed up the slope, looking down from above, where dozens of trees had collapsed, though moss was growing profusely, brightly, freshly.

The mushrooms, like the salamanders, were gone. Not one remained, apart from a couple of remnants, charcoal in colour, “as if burnt,” I said, their stems dislodged from the earth and lying, discretely, in tatters. The ducks too had vanished, and the leaves underfoot were wet and flat, in various tones of brown.

By early December, much had changed. But those four words —“Nature loves to hide”— offered an echo of former hikes, when he frequently said, “We hear more than we see. Animals hide.” This time, though, he ascribed a verb, “loves,” to nature, as if to capture intent: deliberation and deliberateness.

We came down the hill to the wild apple tree, which no longer held its yellow fruit, and none remained in the mud at its base, to be kept — embraced — for the winter, in the warmth of the earth. And his thought came again, more simply this time: Where had the apples gone?

“Things disappear into nature,” he said.

“But nature itself disappears,” I replied, thinking of the blackberry bushes ahead, the limbs of the shrubs, without the fruit, now twisted and bare, like the wild apple tree.

Ages — and stages — of people and plants: my friend looking older, sometimes, as the woods in December appeared to be grey and exposed, the trunks that had snapped — folded in two, cracked in half — now revealed, without any leaves to hide the disfiguration, the crumpled linearity.

“The destruction,” he asserted.

A design, of sorts, I countered, and wind, not human hands, had exerted the force.

The hike had a quiet purity — as we paused and progressed and shared back and forth. While he fingered the rotting bark —“So soft,” he would say — I cherished the rings on the stumps: delicate patterns in perfect circles or more organically traced, circuitously, like spiders’ webs, the lines in the wood as thin as threads, altering in tone from orange to amber to cream.

Yes, beautiful ruins. The wreckage had started to chime for me, as if a little harmony might emerge, somehow, from beating wind and thrashing rain.

Wind chimes, maybe: music that needed a current of air to reconfigure and slowly expose nature’s reclusive intent.

Moments later, he saw the bird, a tiny grey thing on a damp, dark tree.

“With a white breast?” I asked. “Is that how you saw it, or through its darting motion?”

“The white breast,” he confirmed.

The bird’s diminutive movements and small sounds — chirps and squeaks — countered the gusts of wind, its roaring, rolling fullness far above the little creature, and above us, in our own stillness. We were hidden from the wind, as the bird was hidden, almost, from our eyes, and we from it, maybe, but our senses were sharpened with every step — which ones to use? — as we stayed alert to the setting.

While watching the tilt at the tops of the trees, with feathery softness, I realized that we felt not even a little breeze ourselves — a lovely sensory contradiction.

“Like the ocean,” he said.

“Or like waves,” I replied, having put that thought in my mind before he mentioned the ocean. We had made the comparison to water in the past, though never using precisely these terms.

Then we too were gone, home by three o’clock, chilled but refreshed, the sun having swiftly retreated, disappearing behind the clouds, which had come with the wind. Withdrawn from the world for two hours, again the only hikers on the trail, we were finding an art in the woods, a cloistered, inherent design, unearthed and exposed and rearranged by an inhospitable stranger: an exotic tropical storm, flush with vinea, a feminine touch.

December 16. We weren’t sure: Should we go or not? Snow had covered the ground during an unusual early blizzard, with blustery wind and the risk of heavy rain.

“The last hike, for a while,” he said. He would leave on the train the following afternoon.

“A shorter route,” I suggested, thinking of the railway tracks as an alternative, a more manageable option, out and back — not a big loop — and possibly free of snow.

“Dress warmly,” he said, which I did, though my layers were never enough at that time of year, while he arrived without a hat and with fingerless gloves. Both of us walked in runners, not boots, soon to get wet or soaked, we knew. After meeting at the usual spot, in front of the library, we stepped into the vigorous wind.

“Let’s try the trail,” I said, not liking the wind. “We can always come back if the snow’s too deep.” So we didn’t turn off at the tracks, after all, hoping for shelter inside the woods.

Trekking through knee-deep snow as soon as we entered the forest, we followed the footsteps already there, which stopped at the base of the first ravine, while we went on. I tried from behind to place my foot inside his bigger print, a vertical tunnel into the snow, as if my friend were placing it there for me, for my smaller feet and slender legs.

Upward. Then flat. Then to the left.

“Not the whole loop,” I insisted, wearied by the effort, the physical challenge, along with the bothersome feeling of cold, clammy feet.

“Silly to wear runners,” we agreed, but we didn’t turn back.

Astonishing beauty held us there: snow on the dark coniferous trees, snippets of lime-green moss spotting the ground, slivers of wood, still damp and decayed, crumbling and soft in our hands.

“And look,” he remarked, “the white of the ice is different from the white of the snow.”

We were standing on the slope above the pond, having gone down and come up. His poles were unable to pierce the surface.

“Creamy,” I said, searching for a word. “Like porridge, almost.”

“Milky,” he thought, offering the slight variation, “or chalky.”

“Yes, chalky,” I exclaimed, liking the term, “or cloudy.”

He preferred that final word, which led me, later, to notice another instance of white, in the clouds. When we looked to the west, expecting a gust on that open edge, which didn’t come, they were tinted with pink, though he didn’t detect the tone of pale rose that I saw, instead finding a lighter white in the lichen, inflected with green, blotched on the bark of the poplar trunks.

More whites appeared as we stepped through the snow. We weren’t exposed to the wind, but we watched the tops of the tallest trees visibly rocking, creating the sound of waves, that marvel — and paradox — persisting from hike to hike, as we roamed freely, like animals.

“They’re hiding,” he said, “seeking shelter.”

We too were sequestered, and we were right to have endured the climb, to get out of the wind, rather than to have taken the railway tracks, which wrap, without trees, around the base of the harbour.

“This might sound odd,” he said. “The water sounds like broken glass.”

“After yesterday’s heavy rain,” I reminded him.

“Yes, that’s right. Like shattered, broken glass — tinkling,” he added, and I said that I thought the image was lovely.

We did not descend to the wild apple tree, but we stopped to watch the clear water running through plants somehow not covered in snow, trickling down the hill.

Again I had been thinking about wind chimes, an instrument that makes its music from dangling shapes of porcelain or glass, as my dictionary describes the effect, using the word “tinkling,” which my friend had also chosen.

For water.

For its bubbly, vivacious tumbling descent, along the gentle slope, under the wooden footbridge that we had just crossed: running water, in mid-December.

“Like a small waterfall,” I remarked, remembering the voice of the wind in the trees earlier on —“sweeping,” I had called it. 

He likened the tiny waves to clinking glass: sharp-edged fragments musically clashing and colliding.

Twinned sounds.

Visually, too, they resembled each other: clear, colourless glass, and a clean stream, though the water was streaked with emerald, from the grasses and mosses and plants.

That’s when he heard a rustle, “a squirrel or a bird,” he said.

“Not a squirrel.” I was sure of that.

Six feet away: a pileated woodpecker with a scarlet crest on its head, and black and white feathers on its body and wings, pecking at the bark at the base of a tree, nearer to the ground than we had ever seen.

“For insects?” I asked.

With a nod, he agreed, not wanting to speak, to disturb the bird, to send it away.

“I can’t stay still for much longer,” I whispered, shaking in the cold, not feeling the pleasantness of the forest anymore but knowing how long he would stop to watch wildlife — fifteen minutes for the owl he had seen weeks ago, on his own. So I led us ahead.

At dusk, we came down the final descent, never having hiked in that much snow, hearing the distinctive crunch of the wetness as our feet sank with every step. Our footprints were the first, even before the tracks of the animals, which we hadn’t been able to find.

Unlike squirrels’ feet or foxes’ paws or deer’s hooves, our shoes were clunky and heavy. We were clumsy in the woods, asking more questions than finding answers, never knowing absolutely, chastened by mystery: why wind blows where it does, catching certain trees and ravines, while skirting others, and why the animals rarely come out to make their presence known during our awkward but respectful intrusion on a quiet, wintry day.

Then we too disappeared.

As we left one season and entered another, had we forgotten the chaos in early autumn, when Fiona had flourished and quickly vanished, within a span of a couple of hours?

Green coniferous trees were holding the snow, a lovely duality of tones, the needles and limbs weighted and slumped, “umbrella-like,” I noted, curving down, not springing up. The effect was majestic: fresh, invigorating, and stately, in the smallest and largest ravines, where wind hadn’t upset the artful arrangement, linear whiteness on the arms of trees, poised in stillness.

My friend and I had trekked through mud that was under the snow, slipping and sliding, grasping the branches that lined the trail. We were mucking the beauty with our feet, stirring the reddish earth, while looking around to see, so close to our mess, what hadn’t been altered since the fresh snowfall.

In fact, Fiona hadn’t slipped out of our minds.

For three months, we had witnessed the contradiction. Although wind and water had battered the woods, destruction led to creation. Fury came first; then the beauty. Redemption followed the trauma — the suffering. Could either stand on its own, without the other? By then, I thought not. The woods, with time, began to chime because of the strength of the wind, which had broken and rearranged the trees, revealing the essence — and craft — of a forest.

We had found an internal design: tracery in the tangled trees, insects’ tunnels under the bark, new niches and hollows for rodents and birds, green leaves on the ground on the toppled trunks for deer to eat, pine cones on the earth for squirrels to collect, decay to nurture the soil, radiant colours in the circular pond, new light coming in.

The story, this time, belonged to the wind: destroyer and artful creator.

As it blew from the north, on that final hike, I dreaded the exposure on the way home, which we felt in the open field. I hadn’t dressed properly, I knew, which troubled my practical friend, who stopped to lean on his poles to make his point, his voice approaching a tone of frustration. “I’ll buy you a winter coat,” he called out, while I hurried along.

Leaving the woods to come home in the dark, I thought I heard a sweet sound bewitching our ears.

Yes, chiming.

For three months, pieces and parts of the fallen forest, like fragments of porcelain and broken glass, had mingled freely, creating — together — a little symphony of sorts.

Chamber music. Woodwinds and strings.

Baroque, of course.

Per sonatori, perhaps: a small, select ensemble, for a few players, chosen by Fiona, with her exquisite, singular sense of beauty.