Where I live, in the Sierra foothills, this is the most magical time of year. Spring comes to us like a rising tide, up from the flowering almond orchards on the valley floor, through blossoming plum trees and vivid mustard to the cheerful daffodils sprinkled in front yards and along highways. The plum trees break open first; willow fronds turn neon yellow. Then the pears bloom, the magnolias, and a week later the apples and crabapples start. At this time of year the fruit trees blooming in out-of-the-way places show you where old homesteads used to be. I always think of the ghosts of people who lived here before us: miners, laborers newly come from China or County Clare, the shadows of the Maidu and their forebears. I think of native women beating their washing on the Yuba's granite rocks and those tough pioneers stooped over cast iron kettles stirring whatever someone had managed to shoot and skin.

I think of my own ghosts, too, at this time of year — especially my mother. This was the month it became clear the chemo wasn't working, that her system was too worn down for alternative efforts. She flew back from a clinic in Arizona to live her last weeks at home, with her children around her. Her sister and brother-in-law came out from Boston and stayed a whole month, saving our sanity. We all dosey-doed around each other like square dancers who couldn't quite hear the caller but were doing their best not to trample each others' toes.

My mother had an old Japanese plum tree outside her bedroom window, underplanted with foxgloves. In the intermittent fog and sun of early spring, that tree put on the show of its life. Mom, even when she could keep down nothing more than popsicles and morphine, would look out the window from her hospital bed and whisper "plums!"

It's not an accident that my heart rolls over when I see a flowering tree, or that my sister can tell you what little brown anonymous bird is scratching in the dust. We grew up watching our mother appreciate the world's beauty. It was part of her nature — something so essential we picked it up without noticing. Our brothers have it, too. It's both a kind of reverence and a bargain with the world. As if my mother was able to take beauty in twice: first whole, as "what God hath wrought," and then piecemeal, item by item. I can almost hear her saying under her breath, eyeing a tide pool or a stand of pampas grass backlit by sunset: "OK, if you're going to make something this gorgeous, I'm going to remember it." I think, in a fairly difficult life, beauty kept her going.

When I was a kid and we went shopping for fabric, my mother always turned the material over to see the wrong side. She did this with leaves, too, on walks in the woods. She told me that sometimes, unintentionally, the back was lovelier than the front.

It was kind of a secret between us.