THE BEGINNING

(Kit's Version)

Just northeast of Lyon, overlooking the Ain, there sat a medieval village called Pérouges surrounded by walls of honey-gold stone. And within those walls, there was a house.

The house was smallish and modest, with flower boxes that spilled green vines down its cobbly front like tipped watercolor pigment. The garden too was painted a lush, impossible green, and the hills outside the village's walls were green and amber and the bruised bluish black of wet soil. Somehow the flowers never wilted or browned when I pressed my fingers to their petals, even though we'd been told not to touch them when they were in bloom. When I opened the shutters each morning, the air tasted of irises and sage.

(One day, the love of my life would say this explained everything about me. You can take the boy out of the fairy-tale hamlet, but you can never take the fairy-tale hamlet out of him.)

When we came to California, nothing was green. It was all dust and sand, all rocks. Brown and pale slate, pebbly and craggy, like the alien planets my dad wrote stories about. The only familiar things were the ones we'd brought from home, the mixing bowls and big wooden spoons, the eggbeaters that had to be turned by hand, the dimpled ceramic trays cradling eggs on the pantry's highest shelf. When I missed home, my maman would open her book of French pastry recipes, and we would stand together at our new kitchen counter and bake something. Still, I missed the colors.

Then came Theodora.

The first time I ever saw her, she was the brightest thing in the classroom. The only spot of full saturation I'd seen since we got to the desert. Brassy orange-blond, rose flush and cinnamon-dust freckles, her lip bitten angry red by the bumpy edges of new teeth. She had eyes like the hills of Rh?ne, blue-green on the outside and honey-gold at the center. I wouldn't find the right English word for her until spring, when Maman took us out to Antelope Valley to see explosions of wildflowers on the hills. It was the biggest thing I'd ever seen, bigger than the ocean out of an airplane window or the bottom of my own heart. So deep and wide, so much of everything at once. We were eight years old, and Theodora was smiling.

I learned the names of all the growing things I never would have seen back home. Lupine, fiddle-neck, Western blue-eyed grass, California poppy, Theo. Superbloom.

Love took root in me before I even knew its name. Theo was a superbloom. The petals stayed.