I carried a couple of boxes and stood on a porch.

You did the part that actually mattered.” She was quiet a long moment, and then a real smile broke across her face.

“You always did have a way,” she said, “of making hard things sound simple.” “It wasn’t simple,” I said.

“No,” she agreed, looking out at her garden.

“But it was worth every second.”

For more than ten years I had believed that strength was a thing measured in endurance and training and the ability to keep a cold head in a violent moment.

My mother taught me a different definition of it, and hers was harder-won than mine.