I make my trek to the water’s edge two miles from home, the promise of spring in the light air. I sit, pull out my lunch, and read my new book, a collection of essays by Leslie Jamison.

“There you were: an arrival, a cry, the beginning of another world.”

Nostalgia for my Elisif: such promise, so much pain.

My thrill at her birth (more than 30 years ago now) rendered by Jamison’s words. From them, my drawing: a seed becomes a child, her fate her own, flowing like a river.

(There she was, before she was not.)