A woman watches her neighbor decorate the street for Halloween and realizes she's neglected to celebrate the holiday, due to her deep immersion in a book about the 18th-century naturalist William Bartram. She muses that she loves Bartram more than her own husband, and she wants to tell her best friend, Meg, but Meg asked to take a break from their friendship a week ago. The woman's husband and sons leave to go trick-or-treating in the last-minute costumes she made, which the boys hate. She imagines Meg doing Halloween perfectly, unlike herself. She wonders why Meg needed a break. The woman found the Bartram book at an antique store she visited to cheer herself up after getting dumped by Meg. She imagines Bartram, whose nickname was Flower Hunter, wandering through Florida centuries ago. She remembers what it was like to look with awe at Florida's natural abundance. She reflects on her own jadedness, her anxiety, her unlovability; she judges passing trick-or-treaters. She is reeling in Meg's absence. A heavy rain begins, prompting the woman to remember the sinkhole behind her house. She ventures into the downpour to examine it, but she ends up lost in her own anxious thoughts. She relishes the inescapable physicality of heavy rain. She goes back inside and calls her husband.