The summer I was 18 I was driving down a country road with my mother. This was in the rural county where I grew up and all of the roads were country, the houses spread out over miles, hardly any of them in sight of a neighbor. Driving meant going past an endless stream of trees and fields and wildflowers. On this particular afternoon, my mother and I came upon a yard sale at a big house where a very old woman lived alone, her husband dead, her kids grown and gone.

Way back when my mom told me that she’d always be with me, it didn’t occur to me that the story I’d most long to tell would be about my love for her, my grief over her too-young death, my gratitude for her light in my life. I didn’t know that part of the way I’d make her present in her absence would be that I’d share her with others through my writing. That I’d make her alive in the hearts and minds of people she never met.