When we moved out of my first home my mother went room to room saying goodbye. She stood a while on the patio, by the too-warm pool where some of my stories have lingered.

She used to keep pieces of wood she’d rescued from riversides in a “prayer area” in the den: gnarled with ripples, endlessly ebbing. Hers was a practice saved from Baptism, soaked in quiet Methodism, rubbed with Buddhist oils, beginning and returning to breath.

She went room to room offering farewells and I trailed behind, clutching a branch, leaving childhood like removing a hand from a stream.