My mother kept a book that was not exactly a diary and not exactly a ledger. She wrote in it on Sundays, in a slanted hand that always seemed to be arriving at the page a moment before she did — from October, when they closed the house in Buffalo, until the first cold snap in April sent them north again. There were recipes for key-lime pie in the back, and, near the middle, a list of the birds she had seen from the lanai, in the order she remembered them rather than the order they appeared.

When she died I read the book from the last page forward, which is not a natural way to read anything, but it seemed proper — as though I were unspooling the thread she had spent forty winters winding. What I learned was not a life so much as an inventory of attention: the leak above the pantry, the neighbor's grouper stew, the way the light fell across the enamel bowl on a Wednesday in November, once the tourists had gone home and the island was ours again.

My sister, who had wanted no part of the book, asked me what was in it. I said: everything, and also nothing that would help. She nodded, and poured the sweet tea, and we sat for a while without speaking, in the Florida-room where our mother had made her lists.