YOU CAN STILL SEE THAT PATCH OF DIRT ON HIS KNEE:

CALISTOGA, Calif. -- The walk takes about 20 minutes, clockwise, uphill then down, and it induces a healthy amount of sweat when the temperature cracks 90, as it does on this late September afternoon last year.

"This is what he did every day," Anne Seaver says, accompanied by three black labradors. "He walked the vineyard with his three dogs. So what I do, every day, is I walk the vineyard with my three dogs."

The walk offers exercise, a remarkable view atop Calistoga's Diamond Mountain and communion with the past. When Tom Seaver made this walk each morning, he chatted along the way with his late mother or his older brother, Charles, who'd died from cancer decades ago.

A little more than three years ago, Seaver passed away from Lewy body dementia and complications from COVID-19. Now, for his younger daughter Anne, that same walk is a chance to reconnect with Tom.

"All the little things I took for granted about Dad, now I appreciate so much more," she says. "I can hear his laugh in my head, especially up here.

"I feel almost closer to him now than when he was alive."

As we walk past the rows of grapevines that constitute Seaver Vineyards on a still and cloudless day, the crunch of the ground under our feet the only noise, Anne leans down to pick up a feather.

"Since he's passed," she says, "I've been finding all these feathers." He loved birds, she explains, enough to coo at them when he came across them in the wild, enough to put a quail on the front gate at the vineyard. His favorite poem, the one written by Charles that hangs in the barn at the vineyard, is about watching the geese:

Oh I wish you could have been here on that day

to share the feelings that we felt

to see them fly away.

"The feathers are the symbols," Anne says. "He leaves the feathers."

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