As we walked from our classroom through the hall to recess, I delivered the big news to my fellow sixth graders who surrounded me: Did you know that I am related to one of the witches who was hanged during the Salem Witch Trials? It’s true–my dad told me the whole story last night. I’m related to a woman who was accused of being a witch! On an ordinary sixth grade day in autumn, news of this sort was a genuine show-stopper. Literally. Sixth-graders clogged the traffic flow to the recess door when they stopped me to get the rest of the scoop.

You are joking, right? You aren’t really related to a witch–are you? How does your dad know this? She was hanged? You aren’t REALLY related to a witch. . . 

This was the stuff that childhood dreams are made of. I garnered instant celebrity status and was chosen by the captain of the kickball team who had “first pick” that day. Perhaps I had inherited powers that would catapult our team to victory. Perhaps I could read the other players’ minds, anticipating which way a player would kick the ball. Perhaps I was gifted in ways my classmates had never begun to imagine.

Or perhaps this was some sort of genetic justification of my own idiosyncrasies and propensity for the unusual. Come to think of it, I did have an odd sense of humor at times and a definite penchant for solitude, even as a child. Not to mention the fact that I rarely missed an episode of the television show Bewitched. 

According to Wikipedia (my second claim to fame–an ancestor that made Wikipedia!), Anne Greenslade Pudeator was a well-to-do septuagenarian widow who was accused of and convicted of witchcraft in the Salem Witch Trials  in colonial Massachusetts. She was executed by hanging. Anne married Thomas Greenslade and had five children before Thomas’s death in 1674. Having worked as a nurse and midwife, she was hired by Jacob Pudeator to care for his ailing, alcoholic wife who died in the following year. Anne then married Jacob who died in 1682 and left her with money and property.

Some have speculated that her status as a woman of means was reason enough for the afflicted girls of Salem and other villagers to target her as a witch. Her accusers cited the following offenses:

• forcing a girl to sign the Devil’s Book
• bewitching and causing a neighbor’s death
• appearing in spectral form to the afflicted girls
• having witchcraft materials in her home (grease, she claimed, for making soap)
• torturing others with pins and causing a man to fall from a tree
• killing Jacob Pudeator and his first wife
• turning herself into a bird and flying around the village

She was accused by two of the afflicted girls, Mary Warren and Ann Putnam Jr., as well as John Best Jr. and Sr. and Samuel Pickworth. On September 19, 1692, she was sentenced to death along with Alice Parker, Dorcas Hoar, Mary Bradbury, and Mary Easty. Then on October 2, she was hanged on Gallows Hill in Salem Town.

Eighteen years later, the General Court reversed the convictions of those victims whose families had advocated in their behalf. Anne’s conviction, however, was not reversed at this time. It wasn’t until 1957 that Anne was finally exonerated by the Massachusetts General Court. Her exoneration was due largely to the efforts of Lee Greenslit, a midwestern textbook publisher and my father’s relative. [My paternal grandmother was a Greenslit.]

In an article which appeared on September 11, 1954 in the New Yorker Magazine, Lee Greenslit explained that the name Greenslit was far more commonly known as Greenslade during colonial times. As an amateur genealogist, he hit the mother lode when he discovered this fact and was able to trace his lineage back to Anne Greenslade Pudeator and the Salem Witch Trials.

There are many theories about why these Salem girls–the afflicted ones–accused their family, friends, and neighbors of consorting with the Devil. These theories surrounding the girls’ fits and strange behavior range from stress, asthma, boredom, epilepsy, delusional psychosis, to convulsive ergotism, a disease from the ergot fungus that invades damp, warm rye grain. Regardless of the cause(s), the girls’ claims of witchery resulted in the deaths of 24 villagers: 19 were hanged, 1 was pressed to death, and 4 died during imprisonment.

According to USLEGAL.com, spectral evidence refers to a witness testimony that the accused person’s spirit or spectral shape appeared to him/her witness in a dream at the time the accused person’s physical body was at another location. It was accepted in the courts during the Salem Witch Trials. The evidence was accepted on the basis that the devil and his minions were powerful enough to send their spirits, or specters, to pure, religious people in order to lead them astray.

In spectral evidence, the admission of victims’ conjectures is governed only by the limits of their fears and imaginations, whether or not objectively proven facts are forthcoming to justify them. [State v. Dustin, 122 N.H. 544, 551 (N.H. 1982)]

 Spectral evidence was not only accepted in the courts but was often the only evidence provided in the trials of those accused of witchery. And it was more than enough to secure a conviction. You could simply claim that you saw the specter of another in a dream or vision and that the physical body of this individual was present at another place. You could claim that this specter flew, coerced someone to sign their name in the Devil’s Book, or caused another to harm him/herself or another. In truth, you could claim anything, and this claim–limited only by fear and imagination–would pass legal muster.

The Sanctuary of Spectral Evidence is a name-it-and-claim-it-safe-place. From the safety of your dedicated space, you can make claims–any claims–and sit back with a beverage of your choice to watch the fireworks. You don’t like your neighbor, your employer, your legislator, your teacher, your doctor, your parent, spouse or relative? Name an offense and let the accusation wound as it will. And if an individual is genuinely offenseless? Create an offense. The more outlandish, unbelievable, and unjustifiable, the better. Name it and claim it. It is just that simple–and just that deadly.

The Sanctuary of Spectral Evidence is an equal opportunity employer. You can be a libertarian or librarian. You can be a vegetarian or a veterinarian, a Parisian, a Philadelphian, or a Poughkeepsian. All are welcome, and qualifications are graciously waived. If you can accuse, if you seek to wound, you can work your accusational magic alongside other passionate employees. Health care and retirement packages are commensurate with your accusational prowess and experience.

Actually, spectral evidence has nothing to do with evidence, and everything to do with specters. If there is a ghost of a chance that the accused has said or done or felt something, one can face the judge and jury with confidence: Here is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. So help me God. 

In the Sanctuary of Spectral Evidence today, social media reigns. One can launch accusations into cyberspace from the safety of home, office, or wherever a smart phone may travel. Where once we would have cried foul at such groundless accusations, today we may shrug and mutter But what can you do? Such is the way of the world now. 

But when a 13 year old in Missouri takes her life after weeks of public shaming through Facebook and Instagram, it is we who should be shamed for our careless acquiescence at such acts. Today, as in the past, spectral evidence kills. At best, it robs unsuspecting, undeserving individuals of hope and kills their faith in humanity; at worst, it robs the world of precious lives.

Years ago, a student told our class that he admired a coach because–in the coach’s words–he meant what he said, and said what he meant. When the rest of his class nodded approvingly, I asked: Is it admirable to simply say what you mean and mean what you say? Anything you say and anything you mean? Just say it with conviction and passion? So I could say that it is o.k. to steal my friend’s car, I could mean it, and this would be admirable?

Silence. The class just looked at me until I persisted: This would be admirable? This would be o.k.? Finally, a student admitted that she’d never thought about this perspective. Others looked on, the foundation of this smug aphorism crumbling before their very eyes. Where there is no logic, there is no value or truth.

Logic and sufficient, relevant evidence matter deeply. Yet, those who live in the Sanctuary of Spectral Evidence don’t know this. Or they simply don’t care. For them, there is no need for opening or closing arguments, for witnesses and cross-examinations. They don’t need to make their case, and there are no documents, depositions or photos to enter into evidence. The accused never take the stand, and judgment comes quickly and without contention. Name it and claim it, baby.

As much as we look back on the Salem Witch Trials with awe and horror, we should look first at the log in our own eyes. Spectral evidence of the modern sort abounds. We may not hang, press, or drown the accused today, but we punish and wound them nonetheless. We try them through social media, through the press, and through gossip. And the accused are left broken with their hearts in their hands, their reputations in tatters.

Anne Greenslade Pudeator was guilty of nothing but living during a period in which a group of afflicted girls held her fate in their hands. But in the Sanctuary of Spectral Evidence, those girls could confidently wield their power. When there is no need for evidence or logic, accusation rules in this vacuum.

As a descendant of Anne Greenslade Pudeator, I can take heart in Lee Greenslit’s resolve and ultimate success in clearing the family name. Though I can no longer blame my weird sense of humor on Anne nor claim any special mind-reading powers. My celebrity status was memorable but short-lived.

Still, witch hunts continue, and there are afflicted girls, boys, men, and women too countless to name. They take sanctuary in spectral evidence and the power it affords them. We need more Lee Greenslits who will doggedly pursue the truth, a truth founded in real evidence. The Anne Greenslade Pudeators of the world deserve no less.

In the days before Holy Week, I have found myself thinking about what might have been: a mother whose son outlived her; a teacher and friend whose days were just beginning; a Savior whose love and mercy would knit the unraveling world together. As it should have been and as it should continue to be, sacred stitch after sacred stitch.

I have found myself thinking about my own children who might have been. Conceived in love, knitted together in a mother’s womb, fearfully and wonderfully made. [Psalm 139: 13-16] I have found myself dreaming again of who these children may have grown to be and have imagined them seated at Easter dinner beside my other children, a cozy clutch of sons and daughters, brothers and sisters. And again, I have mourned their absence. Perfect-buds-yet-to-be returned to spirit.

In her novel, The Light Between Oceans, M. L Stedman gives us Isabel, a woman desperate to be a mother and destined to miscarry all of her children. Stedman writes:

[the] losing of children had always been a thing that had to be gone through. There had never been any guarantee that conception would lead to a live birth, or that birth would lead to a life of any great length.

This is the biological reality of it all: there has never been any guarantee that conception would lead to a live birth, or that birth would lead to a life of any great length. And the fact that countless women experience this thing that had to be gone through is cheap solace in a world of bubbling and bonneted babies. In truth, no guarantee lives too quietly alongside hope. It fails to be heard in the midst of life songs. And for a time, it ticks in the shadows in a dreadful and inevitable countdown to death.

Stedman profiles Isabel’s loss throughout several miscarriages. This passage, in particular, took me back to my own grief:

The old clock on the kitchen wall still clicked its minutes with fussy punctuality. A life had come and gone and nature had not paused a second for it. The machine of time and space grinds on, and people are fed through it like grist through the mill. Isabel had managed to sit up a little against the wall, and she sobbed at the sight of the diminutive form, which she had dared to imagine as bigger, as stronger – as a child of this world. ‘My baby my baby my baby my baby,’ she whispered like a magic incantation that might resuscitate him. The face of the creature was solemn, a monk in deep prayer, eyes closed, mouth sealed shut: already back in that world from which he had apparently been reluctant to stray. Still the officious hands of the clock tutted their way around. Half an hour had passed and Isabel had said nothing.

Daring to imagine your child as bigger, stronger–as a child of this world and not merely a child of your dreams is the courage of one who dares to thumb her nose at biology, striving, instead, towards love. For as Stedman writes: Once a child gets into your heart, there’s no right or wrong about it. There is just love and what might have been.

When a child who has lived solely in the heart and dreams of a mother dies, grief is often solitary and veiled in shame. Why did a body meant for child-bearing fail? What sins have manifested themselves in this death? How can one legitimately grieve in the overwhelming face of platitudes: You wouldn’t want a child to be born with such defects; You are young and can have more children; This is God’s will–who are we to question? 

When there is no tangible evidence of a life lived, grief is often swept away quickly. No child, no real reason to give yourself to the grief that is expected and acknowledged when a child has lived–if even for a day, an hour, a single moment. In the eyes of many, what might have been is a but a wisp of love and loss.

When there is no funeral, no memorializing of life, loss is silenced. Others too soon forget that you would have been a mother in five months, that the name you have held in your heart will go to another woman’s son or daughter, that an ultrasound picture is all you have to fill the empty pages of a baby book. You bear no stretch marks, and you wear your real jeans. Once again, you are a mother-in-waiting. You dread the visits to your OBGYN office where you are surrounded by beautiful, burgeoning bellies and smiling receptionists.

In her collection of poetry, Conquest, Zoe Brigley writes:

So many women come to me saying, “I have lost too,
and this one, and this one”. So many embryos retreat
to flesh: the live cell of the mother. Don’t tell me that it
will happen for me, when the only sure thing is a miracle:
the sperm nuzzling in its nest and the egg that opens, explodes.

In your world of brutal biology, when the only sure thing is a miracle, when so many embryos retreat to flesh, you drown in what might have been. It pulls you under just as surely as any loss. What might have been does not forgive the fact that your child was an embryo or a fetus–not a real child.

Still, as dark as Mary’s loss at Golgotha was, her child torn from the love and life that might have been, it gave way to life more glorious than she could ever have imagined. This is the promise of Easter: that death is overcome, and what might have been has come to be in life everlasting, in grace and peace beyond measure.

This is the promise that sustains all of us in the midst of pain and loss. And this is my prayer for others who grieve what might have been–children, dreams, loves and lives: that we never mistake the absence of the tangible for what is real and true and life-giving and that, each day, we claim Easter’s promise of what has come to be.

When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.”

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

from “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost

I am a child of metaphor, born from magic and genetic instinct so strong that it shatters the literal, sending shards of otherness into living space. And each shard is a sacred facet which holds its own, offering a way to grace, a path beyond the thing into a nether world of possibilities. This knocks my socks off every time.

American author Bernard Malamud writes: I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. The Sanctuary of Metaphor is a bountiful one in which one can feed the multitudes with a single loaf. Not just choosing between two roads in the woods but taking the one less traveled by, choosing a life path that has made all the difference. [“The Road Not Taken,” Robert Frost] Not just fog but yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes. [“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” T. S. Eliot] Not just faces in the crowd but petals on a wet, black bough. [“In the Station of the Metro,” Ezra Pound] Not just the hands of a man and a woman but their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark. [Rabbit Run, John Updike] Two loaves where there seems to be one. 

As a child, my play was grounded in metaphor. Nothing was ever as it was, as it seemed. Narratives spun naturally from rocks-turned-precious gems, boxes-turned-doll palaces, a single piece of rope-turned-tourniquet-for-battle wounds. Some may call it make-do-ness, but I prefer to think it was more magic than utility.

One particularly muddy morning in the park as I was working with a group of preschoolers in a city-sponsored program, I had to tell the kids that we couldn’t take the balls or jump ropes out that day. When they whined, I offered up a solution: We could pretend that the merry-go-round is our spaceship. Thirteen preschoolers said nothing but their faces said everything. You’re crazy, lady. There’s no spaceship here. I persisted: But we can pretend this is our spaceship. Still, no takers. So, I jumped aboard the merry-go-round and called out: We have to take off in two minutes! Two minutes until the storm hits! Let’s go everyone–take your places. Hurry! And that was all it took to double the loaf we had been dealt that muddy morning. We rode that merry-go-round-turned-spaceship until snack time, when I led a then reluctant and sweaty group of three and four-year olds to the shade for Kool-aid and graham crackers.

The metaphor is perhaps one of man’s most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him. [Jose Ortega y Gasset, Spanish philosopher and statesman]

I do believe that metaphor is one of man’s most fruitful potentialities. It is, indeed, a tool for creation that transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary, the literal into the symbolic, the concrete into the abstract. There is little more magical than this transformation in a world gone soft from those who continually attempt to rescue us from all that is difficult. Well-intentioned as these folks may be, they are no lovers of metaphor.

The magic of metaphor requires investment, a willingness to see a thing for what it is and what it may be, to work with the writer or speaker to uncover the intended meaning. Metaphor asks for a willing suspension of disbelief: It is a field of lavender, but what else? What more? Seated before the magician, we wait expectantly for the rabbit to be pulled from the hat. We invest ourselves in the act. We hold fast to the truth of metaphor: one loaf will become two right before our very eyes. And when it does, there is no applause greater, no celebration more pure than that born of metaphorical magic.

Aristotle writes that The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor; it is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in the dissimilar. In his essay, “Education by Poetry,” Robert Frost claims that metaphor is all there is of thinking. It may not seem far for the mind to go, but it is the mind’s furthest. The richest accumulation of the ages is the noble metaphors we have rolled up.

To relish noble metaphors, to apprentice ourselves to the masters of metaphor, to train for the mind’s furthest–this is truly all there is of thinking. With apologies (somewhat sincere apologies) to ACT, SAT, and any other standardized intelligence tests, there should be but one true test for matriculation: that students successfully read, understand, and elaborate upon a noble metaphor. Give them a great poem, a literary or philosophical passage, and charge them with going the distance, probing and performing their magic on a thing until it becomes the intended other. Frost called this process ulteriority: saying (or seeing) one thing in terms of another. Ulteriority is not for sissies, and it literally separates the men from the boys, the women from the girls. It is more than sufficient to discern the genuine graduate from the pretentious pretender.

Writer Joseph Campbell says that If you want to change the world, change the metaphor. And just what metaphors will we change? America was once a melting pot that became a salad bowl. Finding these metaphors lacking, some argue that we must change the metaphor now. To what? Only time and the multicultural lobby will tell. But as Campbell claims, this metaphor will undoubtedly change the world.

And as much as I love a great metaphor, I admit to also loving really horrible ones. Like these that came from the Washington Post Style Invitational Bad Simile and Metaphor Contest:

1. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.
2. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just
   before it throws up.
3. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry
   them in hot grease.
4. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant, and she was the East
   River.
5. McMurphy fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.
6. It hurt the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple it to the wall.
7. She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs.
8. He hung from his arms like a piñata, and Mary was the birthday-boy with the stick.

These student writers may not be ready to matriculate with their peers, but oh there is a place for them in this world! Metaphors-gone-wrong have sustained me through many lonely hours of paper-grading. Alone, after everyone else had gone to bed–or retired to more entertaining things–I laughed long and loud and, for years, kept a notebook of the hall-of-famers. What more can you say to a student who has just given you hailstones that leap like maggots when you fry them in hot grease but thank you! From the bottom of my heart, THANK YOU!

Years ago when our church van broke down at noon in a small Nigerian town, we were told that it would be hours until someone could make the repairs, and we could be on our way. When others saw defeat, I instinctively saw opportunity. I tore a single sheet of paper from my notebook, and muscle memory took over as my fingers folded, creased, and folded until an ordinary piece of paper became a sleek aircraft. I could feed the 5,000 (actually more like 25) with this. For an hour, this paper airplane–made precisely the way my dad had taught me–transported all of us from the oppressive noonday sun and the tedium of nowhere to go and nothing to do. We traveled to places we had only seen in picture books, exotic places of fairy tales and dreams. Until a well-meaning Nigerian gentleman shooed the children away when he thought they had worn out their welcome.

You see, I have lived with and trained under a metaphor master, my dad. His paper airplane-making skills were only the tip of his craft, though. He taught my siblings and me to see the ordinary objects of our world in terms of something else and to use language well so that we might take others with us as we transformed one loaf into two. In his composition handbook, A Shape A Writer Can Contain, he writes:

Let’s say you want to write, or try to write, or are asked by your teacher to write. You sit there in your desk. Throughout your elementary school years, you have sawed, squared, and planed that oak which is the English sentence. And you have stored those sentences in your mind. But now you don’t know what to do with the lumber in your attic. What you need is a blueprint, some shape you can contain while you go on and inward with your thinking.

This metaphor has sustained me throughout my life–as a teacher and an individual. It has served me well when I desperately needed a shape to contain my wonderings and wanderings and when I strove to lead others who also needed such a shape. I have lived as a two-loaf person, blessed among single loafers.

How do you begin to measure the worth of such an apprenticeship? Honestly, I’m not sure that you can. But I am convicted that you must share the wealth by apprenticing others in metaphor. There will be those who turn their backs and hold their noses, preferring anything and everything literal and one-dimensional. And then there will be those rare ones whose astonishment in the presence of a great metaphor is reward enough for your efforts.

In the Sanctuary of Metaphor, I think it best to let Robert Frost to have the last word here:

       Unless you are at home in the metaphor … you are not safe anywhere.

As I was blow-drying my hair one morning about 15 years ago, my son Quinn appeared at the bathroom door–fully dressed, backpack in hand–and announced, You need to get going, Mom. Remember, you have a faculty meeting this morning. And he was right. I was running late, and I did, indeed, have an early morning meeting. But when did he change from son to personal assistant? When did he willingly turn off early morning cartoons, pack his own backpack, and wait on me?

Several years later, my husband and I sat in our car in the mall parking lot behind the Air Force Recruiting Office where a bus traveling to Lackland AFB in San Antonio was soon to depart. We watched as our daughter, Marinne–all 95 soaking-wet pounds of her–lugged her gear to the bus, boarded without looking back, and left us for basic training. When did she get such resolve, such courage, such fierce confidence? And when, weeks later, we attended her graduation ceremony and heard her address adults as ma’am and sir, saw her stand at solemn attention in dress blues, somehow taller and older than the girl we had known, I turned to my husband and said, When did she become this woman? 

It was shortly after this that I joined my daughter, Megan, in Switzerland for a short European vacation. She had just finished a semester of study abroad in Spain and flew to Zurich to meet me. From there, we rented a car and drove through the country to Geneva. Megan drove, Megan handled the money, Megan ordered the food, Megan led. And I followed. I recall a moment in which, childlike, I opened my hands to reveal a palmful of euros and said What do you need? And when she suggested that we tandem para-glide in the Alps? I followed her lead, and we leapt off an alp into brisk, Swiss air, strapped to two guides who (thankfully) were veteran gliders and appeared to have all limbs still intact and no visible scars. When did she become the mother and I, the child? When did the strong-willed child become the fully competent adult?

A few years later, my daughter, Collyn, gave birth to my first grandchild, Gracyn. I stood at her hospital bedside, heard the doctor deliver the news that Gracyn was breach, and he had just ordered a c-section. And I watched her fear give way to the sacrificing love of motherhood. When did my baby become a woman who would bear a baby? When did the girl I had taken care of become a caretaker herself?

The past years have been a progression of transference, each year, each event giving way to another watershed moment of child-becoming-adult, of those who-needed-cared-for becoming those-who-care-for. Such is the progression of time and the natural order of release. But oh, how the years have flown! All parents say this. And cliched as it is, it is nonetheless a bittersweet truth.

It is this handing over of care-taking and decision-making that both amazes and scares the living hell out of me, though. For I know there will be a time when I am wholly dependent upon my children to check up on me, drive me, care for me. And as grateful as I am for my four glorious caretakers, I also lament the inevitable final transfer from mother to child.

In a season of transference, I don’t think it is much about power but, rather, about purpose. When you are the mother-in-charge, you have a clear purpose that guides your every moment. You go to bed thinking (obsessing?) over the parenting decisions you made–or failed to make–and you mentally run over the calendar of events and appointments that you must not forget. Lest one of your children doesn’t get a fluoride treatment or you miss the Muffins with Mom event at school or someone’s PE clothes aren’t washed and packed for the next day. Your purpose is to stay on top of things. One step ahead of the game, always. You are needed to run your family, for most mothers understand that most fathers will fall into bed and, within seconds, snore their way into oblivion. No mental calendaring for then. No siree.

This season requires deliberate repurposing. When your daughter calls to ensure that you have told everyone about upcoming Christmas plans and when your son asks you to text him when you arrive at your destination (to make sure you made it in one piece!), you repurpose. You have raised responsible, caring young adults, and your new purpose is to celebrate this. Some may whine about being relegated back into a kind of childhood, but not you. You relish the transfer. You wear a coat of many colors: joy, comfort, peace. Look at my children, the responsible ones! See how they care for me! 

The season of transference begins when we are often too busy, too preoccupied with the daily grind to notice. But it begins and inches forward, the tortoise in our world of hares. Its slow and steady feet move imperceptibly, but they move. And on that day, in that moment in which you catch sight of the tortoise, you blink hard, and your breath catches.

In “Letters to My Daughters,” poet Judith Minty writes:

I give you this to take with you:
Nothing remains as it was. If you know this, you can
begin again, with pure joy in the uprooting.

In a season of transference, there is joy in the uprooting, for nothing remains as it was. In many ways, I am an uprooted woman. My children are grown, my life’s work retired, I need transplanting, to begin again.

If tomorrow brings some sun, I will separate the hostas that have overgrown their bed and transplant them under the lilac bush in a spot where grass doesn’t grow. In this season of transference, I’m looking for a spot where grass fails to grow, where I might plant my uprooted self for repurposing.

And I will take much solace in the fact that my children-turned-caretakers will see that I’m regularly mulched, watered, and fertilized. Indeed, one could do worse.