Playing cards, considering remains.

In the darkness, I slide the barn door shut. The world is redolent with cut grass, the wet earth where I watered grape vines. Embers flicker in the fire pit; low laughter moves through the night. June, oh loveliest June, endless varieties of leaf and blossom.

On a hike, we meet a stranger from Maine, and we swap stories about climate change and marriage. He sees my brother’s dog has no water, and shares what he’s carried for his dog. The afternoon gleams with storybook colors of emerald, cobalt, gold. We drive to the lake, to the general store, to a brewery where we sit outside. My brother drinks beer. My daughter and I sip lemon sodas from stemmed glasses, so sweetly yellow I imagine my hand cups sunlight.

I have my mother’s ashes in my possession. Our conversation bends back again and again to her ashes and her life, and the very different relationship that each of us had with her. Lacking a religious framework, I’m treading in open water. My mother, in fact, might have been fiercely opposed to the chain of circumstances that landed me keeper of her remains, or not. I am her second daughter, her match in stubbornness.

All day long, this tender beginning to June, we do the things we love to do. We drink coffee and eat buttered toast, play cards. The sunlight crosses over my house. The day is both chilly and hot. The days spin on, rich with the illusion that there is no finality. Mercy, I think, shutting the barn door to keep the raccoons from the recycling. Another day, the nightsongs of frogs serenading.