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By Root 1162 0

of water resources along the Mekong River as it flows from China through Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia. What happens with these dams will matter to the future of this river and the people who live here for generations, and Yoshi comes home every day full of energy and ideas. My work, too, is good, though my own job came, surprisingly enough, not through any of my former contacts but through Suzi, who knew of an ecumenical group here working to improve the lives of rural women. I travel into the countryside and help set up foot-powered treadle pumps. They are made of bamboo and metal pistons and families take turns running them to collect fresh water from their wells. Everything begins with water. It helps the gardens, and when the families sell their surplus vegetables, they use the money to buy chickens for eggs or a cow for milk or to send their children to school. The program has grown so much that lately my focus is shifting to training others to demonstrate the pumps and travel to the provinces.

We live at the edge of the Mekong, one of the world’s great rivers. Every year when the monsoons come, the river fills and presses so hard against the sea that it changes its direction and flows north to flood the Tonle Sap, the great lake that the Cambodians call Creator Lake for its profusion of life. Graceful boats travel across the surface of the water and men lean to cast their nets, fishing. I think of my father, of course, but without the sadness I carried with me for so many years.

The boats are vessels, carrying the fishermen out each dawn. Long and narrow, they curve at the ends, arced like crescent moons. The heart is a vessel, too, pulsing blood in its orbit through the body, and in English the word to bless comes from the Old English blestian, or “blood.” The challenges in this place are real and sometimes very difficult, but I’ve learned to slow down and look for beauty in my days, for the mysteries and blessings woven into everything, into the very words we speak. I stand each morning at the edge of the balcony and watch the boats skim across the water. I feel the blood beating through my veins—vessels, too.

I listen. Not to locks anymore, but past the stillness to the deepest longings of what the mystics would call my true self, something I have come to understand as prayer. This is Rose’s greatest legacy to me. Her cloth hangs in our house, against the painted concrete wall; Iris gave it to us as a wedding present. Last year, during the slow, hot season and then the sudden time of rains, as I grew as round as one of Rose Jarrett’s interlocking moons, as I swelled like the river beyond our little house, I thought of Rose so often. When our daughter was born at the end of the cool season, we named her Hannah, after no one at all, though it’s true that we got the idea from the Japanese word hanashobu, which is a kind of iris that grows in marshy land. It’s true, also, that we sometimes call her Hannah Rose.

A few months after she was born, we had a lunar eclipse. Yoshi and I sat all evening on the balcony to watch the great pale moon rising over the river, a shadow falling over its edge, slowly eroding its light. I thought of Joseph Jarrett, waking from his dream to the light of the comet, and of Rose, walking home alone through the vineyards on that same night, more alive and terrified than she had ever felt before.

Near the end of the eclipse Hannah stirred from her sleep. Yoshi went inside to get her, moving through the rooms, talking to her softly. Then he brought her out to the balcony. “Look,” we said to her that night. “Sweet girl, look, the moon.” She saw it, emerging slowly from the mouth of the shadow, and laughed, reaching for the sky as babies will, as if she could grasp the moon in one small hand and slip it into her mouth like a wafer.

She laughed again when she couldn’t catch it, and reached higher, and we held her up. This would not last, of course. Soon, she’d be frustrated or hungry and we’d go inside, leaving the night sky with its burning stars. But for that moment the river flowed like