I'm a kid, drying dishes for my mother. On summer evenings a slow caramel light plays across the yard and dapples the narrow two-lane out front. Cows stand in the north corner of the hilly field across the macadam, leaning up against one another in a velvet shamble and scratching themselves on the barbed-wire fence. All day the shade of a giant somnolent oak casts shadows across their broad, dumb faces. Evenings they stand as though sensually stunned, in light so thick and sepia gold they can't move.

In winter it's pitch dark by five and the cattle huddle in shelter on the other side of the hill. My brothers are wrestling across the twin beds in their room at the end of the darkened hallway; I hear their metal bed frames lurch on groaning wheels. We have a Maytag dishwasher but my mother prefers to wash dishes by hand; she says she gets them cleaner than any machine. And besides, this is our time to talk. It's when I hear all the stories about high school, her boyfriends and suitors, our town and everyone in it. I hear all she knows about my father's people and his other life, the one he led before he met her in 1948. I hear about her eccentric father, wealthy before the Depression ruined him, her much older sister and brother and the three siblings born after them, all dead before she drew breath: stillborn twins and a toddler who died of diphtheria. I hear about the woman who lost those babies and feared in the beginning that she would lose my mother as well. She was nearly 40 when her last child was born, as the Depression came on and the money was gone; the infant was scrawny and sickly, and her much older husband increasingly eccentric. I used to worry so, my grandmother told my mother, and the neighbor woman would tell me, "Don't you fret, she'll be the joy of your life." And it's true, you were.

My mother refers always to my grandmother as Mother but the term seems neither formal nor distanced. The word is her comfort. I learn early that a woman who loses her mother aches. Much happens in life and miracles unfold, but that central absence of voice and image persists. It's as though a room of the spirit remains just as it was the day my grandmother died, the day her long illness was over and my mother had nursed her through it into the mouth of time. In that room possessions are undisturbed and the August air smells of roses. The town stands still; the hour, closed like a bud, pulls softly shut. You only have one mother ... As Mother used to say ... I don't know how many times Mother told me ...

I know her through words. She died when my mother was three months married, but her story is my mother's story. Together they chose my name when my mother was 12, and referred to me as someone who would exist. Their story is so complex and layered and shot through with luminous sorrow that I will exist and become a writer to make sure the stories don't vanish. I grow up believing that I too will have a daughter. After all, a woman with no mother or daughter is a woman alone on earth.

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