Our daughter imagined how the blind read with the touch of a finger. She asked which words were written in the creases of the trees' bark. Her hand moving slow across the trunk of a persimmon. She asked about the rippled water our footprints made in shallow puddles. We told her they were songs. Her hair was growing long and she liked to weave ribbons of grass into her braids. It was summer then, evening light beginning to dusk. Her mother was sitting on the side of the porch, bare feet combing the lawn. The air damp from afternoon rain.

Our daughter was afraid to blow dandelion leaves and make a wish. She worried she would take a breath too close, that the hairs of the flower would fall into her mouth. That they would take root inside her lungs. She held a bouquet at arm's length. A  car passed and the woman driving waved. My wife raised her hand.

"Does mama know them?"

"I don't think so," I said.

"How do the blind say hello?"

I watched her leave dandelions in the mailbox and raise the flag. She had strawberries in her pocket that were bleeding through her dress. My wife patted the porch boards beside her. The sound of her wedding ring. I sat.

"The neighbors cut down the elm," she said. "Worried about pollen on the windows of their car."

She spat the words into the grass. Our daughter picked the petals of a clover and dropped them onto the sidewalk.

"It was an old tree," my wife said. "They cut it down."

I imagined my fingertips tracing the ridges and valleys of the tree's skin. What words the blind would see if they touched the teeth of a saw.

"It's your turn to do bedtime," I said.

"A few more minutes," my wife said. "I'll tell her the story of the tree thief, stealing leaves until there was no shade left in the world."

Our daughter tugged the hem of my wife's dress. The choir of night bugs already beginning. The two of them chased fireflies and sang a song about a grasshopper jumping to town.

Hop to the left
Hop to the right
Hop down main street in the middle of the night

Grass came loose from our daughter's hair. Another car passed and our daughter raised both hands. I wondered how the word dusk might feel.


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