My brain was considering Del, but my heart was still at your Colorado picnic table under the catalpa last October, the checkered cloth under your mismatched dishes, black coffee, ham steaks, the visceral mustard of Mary Lou Vargas's famous potato salad. You were having one of your spells—do you remember? When you're there but not there, riding the thermals of your own mind, spelunking through your darkening memories? Either that or you were mentally rehashing what I thought was an especially boring sermon that day. I gave you my arm when you struggled up and down the church steps, but I could have been Aunt Mano, could have been Chris, could have been a wooden crutch. I felt wooden, for sure, puppet-like, hard and cold and splintered. When I stood up, you stood up too. The wind blew dried leaves off the tree, opening pathways to the sun so that it flashed like shagbark paparazzi, the image of you impressed with light like a reverse X-ray, into and through me, seared onto my bones.

You really looked at me then, and your eyes somehow twinkled pure blue, color flooding over the milky altostratus film that has settled into them over the past years. Your eyes, for that brief moment, were again blue like Chris's eyes, like your sisters' eyes. The NOAA says that altostratus clouds are thin enough to reveal the sun as if seen through ground glass. The NOAA says altostratus clouds do not produce a halo effect, nor are the shadows of objects on the ground visible when they are present. The NOAA dabbles in poetry, magic, and forecasting.

You smiled, placed your hands like cool velvet on both of my cheeks.

I don't know who you are exactly, you said, but I know I love you.

Your old dog, Cass, started barking at an invisible squirrel.

Turn green, dog, you scolded. It's my favorite of your insults.

Do you see shadows on the ground, Mom? Or do you see only hazy sunlight as if through ground glass? What do these questions, these stories (if you can read them, if Mano reads them to you), make you feel?