It was a gray day, the kind that holds its rain a while before letting go. I'd spent the afternoon on my knees in the wet earth, clearing weeds from the edge of our little pond, the work going on mostly without me - my hands in the soil, my mind far off in a room where my sister Sally is learning the shape of her last season. When I looked up, there it was: a wild columbine, hanging its head near my shoulder. People sometimes mistake the way this flower grows for sorrow. It blooms facing down, its red and gold lantern turned toward the earth instead of the sky. But that bowing isn't defeat. It's how the columbine offers itself - leaning low so the small winged things can find it, giving its sweetness to whatever comes from below. It looks down in order to give. The old name comes from the Latin columba, the dove. Those five upturned spurs were once seen as a circle of doves gathered close, wings raised. So even as the blossom bows toward the ground, the doves point up - peace lifting where the flower leans down. That undid me a little, standing there in the damp. Because over the past 15 years, Sally has lived that way. Bowed low by what her body has carried, and somehow still turned upward. Still a believer. Still certain of the light she's headed toward, even on the grayest day. The flower made sense of something I didn't have words for: that you can hang your head and keep your hope at the very same time, that looking down toward the ground and looking up toward heaven are not opposites at all. I didn't go out that day to find a photograph. I went to pull weeds. But grace tends to meet us in the low places, on our knees, in the rain - a small red flower lit from within, doves rising out of it, bowing toward the ground and toward the light all at once. This one is for you, Sally, with much love.