I haven’t done this in a while. Thumb-typed a missive into the drafts folder abyss, let alone posted those hastily hewn passages. I don’t have small ones to rock anymore in the mostly dark, faces nuzzled against my collar bone, bodies circled in the belt of my arms, buckled in with a brightly lit phone in my hands. A Botticelli madonna and child for the digital age, with iPhone-supplied halos. I miss those nights, and I don’t.

I have teenagers. I have more time, and less. But I’ve had these swirling thoughts for some time now, like a storm brewing. The good kind. Electric air, moody watercolor skies, and the anticipation of rain on a long-dry night.

And just now the boy who is taller than me headed out to fish, nodding in compliance with my plea to be careful as the sun is setting in an hour and it might storm. As the door swung closed it smelled like rain. Man, she loved that smell.

I don’t have babies anymore. I am entering the decade my mom was in when she last held me. She never held this boy, long gone before he was here. And yet she’s here. Her wise words and worst-case warnings, her crinkled nose and giggle, her songs. His curiosity and adventurous appetite. Their juxtaposition of kindness and wicked sense of humor. The traces of her, clues to where we go…where she went, hiding in plain sight, and in all three of them.

Sure it could all be DNA, with an injection of performance enhancing grandmother lore. I’ve been micro-dosing them all for years with her stories. But I don’t think that’s all of it. It’s definitely more. Some electric bit of her is in each of them. Sometimes a low frequency hum, other times like lightning.

Storms can leave a path of destruction or renewal. Sometimes both. Always though, they spark wonder snd anticipation. You can choose to be scared or excited, she’d say as a storm approached. I used to fear she’d be lost to them or even to me as time went on. Become a two-dimensional image and occasional story. But she’s become more than that. Amplified, muted and expanded. Streaks of bold pigment, stretched by the addition of water and spread across a larger page.

The boy came back in. Shrugged as he said he didn’t catch anything but it was still good. It hasn’t rained but it will.