all necessity and possibility of saying any of it.

The train comes to a stop where we are standing,

and Ollie swings my suitcase up onto the train

as the conductor yells his All aboard!

I step onto the train and turn to wave goodbye,

then pick up my suitcase and go to find my place.

Epilogue

Epilogue

Muriel arrived in Washington, D.C., in time to be a part of the final push for woman suffrage. A combination of courage, determination, and careful strategy helped the suffragists win the support of President Woodrow Wilson on January 9, 1918; the next day, the House of Representatives passed the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The women, and the men who supported them, continued to work until, on August 26, 1920, the Amendment was signed into law, granting women the right to vote.

Like Muriel, and the other characters in Crossing Stones, Frank Norman is fictional, but his war experience reflects that of the more than eight million people who were killed in battle in World War I. By the time the war ended on November 11, 1918, over sixty-five million people throughout the world had fought in it, and total casualties (including deaths, wounded, and prisoners of war or missing in action) added up to over thirty-seven million.

In addition to the war itself, a deadly influenza epidemic spread through the battlefields, killing millions, and when the soldiers returned home, many of them carried it back to their families and communities. The flu spread worldwide, killing between twenty and forty million people in 1918 and 1919.

I considered continuing my story until Muriel casts her first ballot. But when I look closely at this image—a ballot in a woman’s hand—I see that the hand is not Muriel’s, or not only hers. It is my grandmother’s hand, voting in her first election when my mother was three years old; my mother’s hand, my aunts’ hands, my sisters’ and nieces’, my own—and now, your sister’s, your daughter’s, your own.

So I leave them here: Ollie and Emma in the circle of their new love, and Muriel moving with confidence toward all that she will accomplish in her life as a happily unmarried woman.

Notes on the Form

Acknowledgments

Notes on the Form

Notes on the Form

I’ve created a formal structure to give the sense of stepping from stone to stone across a flowing creek. I think of this kind of writing as painting with words, a process involving hands, eyes, ears, thought, and emotion, all simultaneously working together.