On a wooded deck by the pool, I hold a glass of chilled rosé and Uri rolls a spliff. I stand up and take my glass to walk around the pool and step off the deck down onto the grass that has overgrown the vineyard.

The grapes were infected by a germ the past year, but it is the middle of March in Sonoma and the other vineyards too are barren at this time of year, leaving behind short tree trunks with their top branches sawed off at the bases where they curl around the wires and would otherwise grow upward and bear grapes, but instead are cut short and look like gnarled menorahs—treacherous, if not for the beauty that surrounded the off-season trees on all sides. Nothing but shades of green on all sides, freckled with all colors of various flowers. The rows of another vineyard drawn into the hillside across the gravel road by which we had arrived.

My eyes taking in all this, with my fingers holding onto the same wires which the grape tree fingers would hold in season and had already held in seasons before. I thought to myself, ah, what a life of a grape tree in Sonoma.

And I kept holding onto the wire and looking upon the hillside across the road until some time had passed and I feared my toes might take root and my hairs grow into vines along the wires so I turned to step back onto the deck and resume conversation with Uri.

He had finished with the spliff. He handed it to me already burning. I pressed it in between my lips and inhaled deeply, looking back at where I stood in the vineyard. I held the smoke in my chest and wanted to choke; I was not usually keen to add tobacco into my joints, precisely to avoid the burn that I now felt in my lungs. But Uri preferred them this way and I liked Uri more than I didn’t like tobacco. I pursed my lips around the spliff and inhaled once more, then handed it back to Uri and exhaled deeply into the day and the hillside and closing my eyes to memorize it.