I can almost hear her humming.
It’s like she’s still here.
If I close my eyes.
If I pretend for just one second.
And what place could be better for pretending than Foxglove?
I see her standing in the kitchen, filling the old cookie jar. Happy. Loved.
Grandma Billie. Stubborn, loud. Half sunshine, half steel.
She died quietly in her sleep, the way she always said she wanted to go. Mom called me at school yesterday, voice trembling like I hadn’t heard since the night EJ died. I booked a flight as soon as we hung up.
Grandma Billie asked that we bury her in the ground by the old willow. Right next to her mother. And the others.
The same place where generations of women lie under wildflowers, their graves marked with stones and pieces of wood and carvings that can no longer be read.
It’s kind of beautiful, I think. A way of returning to a home where we all might be waiting someday.
A Wilde woman belongs to Foxglove until the end.
And after.
I cross the porch and head for the meadow. I walk the path barefoot, same as always, letting the grass brush my ankles. It’s late spring, and the air carries the scent of the old cedar tree and this morning’s storm. The soil is soft—eager, almost. It’s ready for her.
Mom’s already there, waiting for me. She’s kneeling beside the grave she dug, her hands muddy, shoulders heavy. I give her a lopsided smile, my chin quivering, tears welling in my eyes. Her broken expression mirrors mine as she reaches up and takes my hand, squeezing it once.
She has pieces of silver in her hair now—like moonlight—and it’s beautiful and magical, but it also makes me scared. I can’t help watching her, noticing that she’s aging. Remembering we can’t stop it.
It’s the first time it’s worried me. Made me think of losing her someday.
We place Grandma Billie beside her mom, Hazel. Beside Hazel’s mother, and hers, and hers. We don’t know how far back the names go. It’s sad how many have been forgotten through the generations, whispered only between daughters in the dark.
But I take a bit of peace from knowing the earth here remembers. That pieces of their legacies, their lives, are scattered here. That we still interact with them in ways we’ll never know.
That they live on within us. Within Foxglove.
We scatter rosemary. Place a sprig of foxglove on her chest. Mom braids some of the wildflowers together. We cry.
The wind shifts through the grass, dry and noisy.
I hear it then—faint, but clear. Maybe it’s just my grief, my wish, but I swear I hear her voice. Then, the echo of a child’s laugh, a lullaby hummed in another time, pages of books being turned, chopping of vegetables and grinding of herbs, stories being read, the rustle of skirts on floorboards of passages known only by us. The voices of all the women who’ve lived here.
Billie. Hazel. Ruth. Martha.
My grandmothers and aunts whose names are written on the doorframe of the closet. Lyddie. Hannah. Josephine. Katherine.So many others we can’t see. Can’t remember. So many others we’ll never know.
I hear them all.
Their lives are in this place—in the carved letters, in the beams of the house, the roots of the trees, the seeds they sowed, the dust between the stones. They’re in the cracked dishes and the worn spots on the floor, in the hidden doors and the soft creak of the loft stairs. In the moon I look at each night standing where they once stood and in the smoke of the fireplace that has filled Foxglove for hundreds of years, feeding us, protecting us, warming us.
They are in the safety they left for us—knowing what would come for us without ever really knowing. Without ever seeing if they were right.
They are in me.
Later, after the sun has fallen low, I sit alone on the porch, my legs curled beneath me, watching the trees sway in the pink-and-amber sunset. The lavender, rosemary, and wisteria dance in the breeze, almost like they’re waving hello.
