Once, late in the season of that distant summer, when the days were getting shorter and the nights cooler, when the last of the tomatoes were harvested and the apples were beginning to be picked, I observed my uncle watching my aunt. She was wearing dark pants and a fuchsia cardigan over a white blouse. Her blonde hair was pulled back from her sculpted face, on which there was just a trace of makeup: eye shadow and lipstick, blue and red. The delicate gold band of a small watch surrounded her left wrist and moved slightly when she lifted her arm. Each gesture, as she bent to clear plates or turned to speak to her sons or her daughter, was a study in grace. Her poise, her demeanour, was perfect.

I had given little consideration at that time to how one mature person might respond, in an unspoken, inner way, to another. The whole adult personality was to my sixteen-year-old mind so fixed, so certain – even my uncle’s volatility had its own predictable patterns – that the idea of one citizen of that community causing a hidden reaction in another, especially within my own family, was unthinkable. I had my own secret moods by then, and believed that the journey I had found myself taking into privacy and preoccupation was something uniquely mine, perhaps because I was not old enough to shake it. For the previous month while I had talked and laughed with my cousins, or played soccer after supper in the yard, or swam, or dried the dishes, there was something beyond my control growing in my mind: a variety of longing, though I wouldn’t have called it that at the time.

My uncle looked at his wife, and for the first time I was able to read his thoughts, dark fish swimming behind the solemnity of his blue eyes. He needs her, I thought, and he admires her, but he is not at ease with either his need or his admiration. Her beauty and her strength diminished him somehow. At least that is what I remember thinking, though admittedly these may have been observations nurtured in hindsight being, I now see, far too complicated for the girl I was then. Still, regardless of how I might have interpreted that look, I noted it and was startled and vaguely frightened by what it might hold, by all that remained unexpressed between that couple and would remain, I knew, unavailable to me.

What can I do now with all that ambiguity and doubt? There is no information I can bring to it, no light I can shine on it to make it any clearer. Despite the evidence of subsequent events, each theory I have developed lies discarded somewhere in the shadows. I have even attempted to examine the opposite of what I intuited and later observed, believing that if I could at least disprove that, I might strengthen one hypotheses or another. But it is impossible to follow this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion. There is no scientific method by which to establish that the look I apprehended was not one of uncomplicated adoration without even the rumour of approaching contempt to interfere with its clarity. She was beautiful and talented and intelligent in ways that he admired, and he loved her. End of story.

But it is not the end of the story. The story ended in the sorriest of ways out on Sanctuary Line, the road I drive each day to the research station at the Point. Or perhaps it ended before that while we romped through the summer days and clung to the furniture of the past. Yes, perhaps, even then it had ended. The minute that boy put his hand in my hair and his face next to mine, for example, I could feel something change and close up behind me, I could feel something ending. But perhaps that was only the beginning of the end; perhaps the true finish was the military pomp, the ceremony that marched poor, exquisite Mandy from a country whose name we barely knew as children to the old graveyard where her mostly forgotten ancestors awaited her arrival.

After two full decades of life experience it still astonishes me to admit that I brought no more insight to what happened to Mandy while she was over there than I brought to the night everything fell apart all those years ago. In spite of the lengthy phone calls placed in the early hours of the Afghan morning, phone calls during which Mandy, a brilliant officer and ambitious military strategist, barely mentioned the war, her passion and obsession having eclipsed even that ongoing catastrophe. In spite of the times when she was home on leave and making every effort to pay attention to each of her old friends while her mind was thinking, thinking, thinking about one man. In spite of the way she returned to this house and collapsed into an orgy of confession with me as her unlikely priest, I couldn’t really hear what she was saying. Except, when one is set apart by passion and goes into the world of that secret, there seems no reason to take heed of anything beyond those gestures that protect the secret. If I believed in destiny, I would be compelled to call it destiny. There seemed to be no tools with which to examine it, you see, and no weapons with which to blow it up. I could only assume that hidden, unknowable forces were at work. But I am a scientist. I am supposed to believe that what appears to be unknowable is merely that which has not yet been thoroughly examined.

The thing about scientific system taxonomy — Life, Domain, Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus — is that while it pretends to inject predictability and comfort into our world, it can’t really cause either of these states to come into being. I’ve been taught that we can define every life form in this manner, by simply moving in a deliberate way, down the list. Everything, that is, except for extinction, which carries out its own scientific duties in an opposite manner. Working its way slowly up through the divisions, it is creation in reverse. First a species disappears, then a genus, then a family, an order, a class. Extinction is relentless, and it is flourishing. I believe it will win in the end.

I spend my time now moving back and forth between the field and the lab, between the quick and the dead. Everything is at risk, not just the orange and black Danaus p. plexippus of the Lepidoptera family, but everything. The old barns – those that have not burned or been taken down – sag and collapse. The small white churches are almost empty on Sundays, if they haven’t already been sold and turned into cafés or antiques stores. All of my ancestors and their houses sleep in closed and unexamined albums. Neither my much-loved cousin nor my enigmatic, haunted uncle is ever coming back.