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“Not sure,” I confessed, lacking the skill to bullshit someone who would surely see right through it.

“Well, at least you’re in possession of yourself.” She nodded and gave me back my hand, again leaving the reading undone.

So she read Clara’s instead, commenting, I think, that her career line was rather weak. Clara rolled her eyes, resigned to her current fate of joblessness. She would go on to have a family and successful organic farm of her own, but that was still years away.

Helen just clucked her tongue.

“Your life is only just begun,” she said to Clara. “The lines of the hand can grow and change, you know.”

I didn’t fully understand what she meant then, but I do now.

The lines of our hands, and of our lives, are not predetermined and final, but can change as we do. We are, in fact, already creating what we will become.

Now when my sister and I go to Cape Rosier to visit Papa—Gumpa to the grandkids—we might go with our husbands, Robbie and Eric. My young twin daughters, Heidi and Emily, and Clara’s boys, Bode and Hayden, run out to the garden to find their grandfather with his shock of white hair and eyes still as bright blue as theirs. They pull candy carrots from the greenhouse to eat on the spot, and help him plant hopeful rows of seedlings in the dark soil, as the white-throat calls out spring’s return.

“We were young and strong and we were running against the wind,” Papa says of the homesteading years, now that much of the past has composted to foster the present. Over the years, Papa’s books on organic gardening and his enduring enthusiasm for healthy soil have inspired many people of all ages and backgrounds, no less his own family, to grow their own vegetables in ways that feed the soil, as well. Even Skates’s conservative relatives are known to admit, “Eliot turned out all right.”

Mama, too, has made her way to peace. Grana Sue, as the kids call her, is often found sewing squares of fabric into elaborate quilts, “in the Batcave,” as my step-dad Tom refers to the studio in their comfortable home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In the halo from the lamp, she reaches out with a sure hand, arranging the swatches in combinations that ease her soul, trying perhaps—like me—to unite the pieces of the past into a pattern that makes sense of things. Here, this print reminds her of a shirt she had then, with a blue fleur-de-lis pattern; this one of a dress she sewed for Heidi; here, the cloth she used for the chambray Russian peasant’s shirts that Papa so loved. As the pieces come together, she thinks of her grandchildren accepting her so trustingly, and realizes that with the release of her secret guilt she can learn to love like them again, without fear of loss.

“Time present and time past,” T. S. Eliot wrote, “are both perhaps present in time future.” But in the end, all we really have is the present.

It was Pam who recently reminded me of the day before Heidi’s passing, when Heidi and I had been playing and Heidi fell in the pond. Pam, who heard the crying, came and brought Heidi up to the house, but never said anything to Mama, not wanting to add to her worries, and so the incident was forgotten. I gasped at the recollection. Those two days had long ago blended in my mind, leaving me thinking I’d been there at the pond, that we’d fought and I’d splashed her and she died. That everything that happened was my fault. Now I, too, have been set free.

“This is the use of memory,” Eliot also said. “For liberation— From the future as well as the past.”

Someone once told me that as raindrops fall toward the surface of a pond, the water actually rises up to meet the drops—a magnetic attraction of sorts—welcoming the rain back into itself. When I think of my sister Heidi that day, reaching for her little boat, I can see the water rising up with joy to meet her, to take her back, and I no longer begrudge it. Joy is what remains.

Acknowledgments

This book is offered in gratitude to so many people. To my parents, Eliot and Sue, who chose to live as they did, and Helen and Scott Nearing, who inspired