To catch life unawares, the California impressionists would set up easels across the poppy fields of Antelope Valley. They’d mix their best paint under the same sun shining on the flowers, hoping to mirror their shade and glow, the mystic art of capturing time.

This year began with some of the worst fires in the state’s long history of burning. When I called to see if my niece and her new wife were safe, she sent me a video from their front porch, a line of blazing trees several miles away. “It’s almost beautiful,” she says to herself, the video cutting the tail end of beautiful.

She didn’t come out until well into adulthood. Though, as it goes, everyone will swear these days it was obvious—the soccer games, the close girlfriends, the dearth of romances. People will tell you that they always saw what you were, but they’ll never offer up why they kept the information to themselves. Who are we to give a thing a name?

The Poppy Reserve skirts the Mojave Desert. Most of the year the landscape is unremarkable except for its barrenness, the dry earth showing little promise of life. When she stopped dating, nobody took much notice. She seemed happy. I know a little of that seeming.

When my sister, her mother, talked with me about my suicide attempt, she didn’t know her youngest daughter was a lesbian, but she brought that daughter up just the same, “What would I tell Christy?” The question has haunted me for decades since, has maybe even kept me alive a time or two. But Christy never asked about it, never asked how it was to discover yourself or to claim yourself, to come out.

If the painters want to get the best view of the poppies, they have to hurry before the afternoon winds turn the petals up, which turns the color down. Christy’s new wife comes from a family that doesn’t believe in lesbians. To them, my niece is a fantasy, an imaginary friend to an imaginary daughter who will, eventually, stop believing she is a lesbian.

Part of me is relieved Christy didn’t look to me to be “the wise old gay uncle.” What the hell do I know about it all anyway? I’d probably try to explain the world in a clunky metaphor about flowers and hard ground, about trying to name or capture the essence of what makes it all worthwhile, what makes it beautiful.

But she doesn’t need to hear that from me. I get another video message, “Sorry that last one cut off, Uncle. Look,” the fires are closer and higher, “Isn’t it gorgeous?”