SHE REMEMBERED the Bible, its pages, and the smell a little like damp splinters of wood and the way fingers could slip across those pages or linger on them, the way she would slightly bend her index finger and put its tip to the corner of a page and turn and the soft snapping sound of that turning and then another white page, more paper.

I had loved the gray-black letters on the page, their straight lines and curves, the pride of knowing them and the questions they raised, and the thoughts.

JESUS had obviously had thoughts. Jesus had said, “Woe unto you, scribes and pharisees, hypocrites! For ye pay tithe of mint, and anise, and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith. . . .”

Jesus said exactly what he thought. Why had her mother hushed her for doing the same?

Amazing that Jesus had known the names of the different herbs.

All the record of these things lost to me forever. My white mother’s dismay when she appeared in my dreams was warranted. Why had I not been more diligent in reading and writing at home? Why had I succumbed to sleep at night instead of holding my lamp above the pages?

BUT WHAT if she could still, for instance, write? She had thought of telling her story. What would people think?

It was a fact: she could no longer read nor write. So she would have to do something different to satisfy her heart. She would have to find new ways. Grieving for reading and writing was like doing the previous thing, the thing that could no longer be done. Old it was, and impossible.

She would cut herself free of a yearning that could waste her, she would scrape it off with the nearest thing to hand, say, a beaver-tooth tool.

There. The previous thing was shed now, had dropped away, was lost and gone. Let it be lost. Her heart would move on. For she loved the world.

She loved the open air and the contrasts of its temperatures; earth dry and sodden, loamy and rock-like; fire and its warmth and scorch; water, cleansing and flooding. The closer she came to these things the more she realized that words were not the same as the real wild onion, the actual rabbit fur, the coiled fern frond, the lightning.

I had never known moss as I learned to know it among the Seneca. From my new family I learned to diaper my babies with it. Moss was soft and did not irritate the skin. It held much of the wettings and dried out quickly. I had known the word for moss first in English and then in Seneca and I had seen moss and had touched it, but only now, dressing my own baby with it, did I know it. And the word “moss” was but the richer in my sight.