I take a warm cup of tea out to the porch, and I sit, and I listen to the wind moving through the Ohio trees the way it moved through them all the years she sat listening to it herself.

And I think of her — not the small frightened woman of the last winter, but the sharp, watchful, patient soul who saw everything, and said little, and in the end reached out of her own death to make sure that love was answered with love.

She told me once, on the worst night of my life, that God was going to look at me differently.

I did not understand her then.