There are spirits that surround me, leading, following, watching out. They are part of my story, the story that I am creating by living—stories they started before me.

I am thirty-five. I walk through the basement doors of the Presbyterian Church on Capital Hill. I immediately feel seven. I am here to join in the craft sale. There is free soup, bread, a cakewalk, kids laughing, people hugging, chatting, comfortable, a lovely buzz of the familiar. Feeling a longing, faces blend, I am surrounded by people I knew, people I once loved.

These spirits buffer me from the world, a protective layer sheltering, keeping me afloat. I often feel I am unable to make it on my own.

I am sixteen. My grandpa has been dying for ten years, most of my life. This year is his final. I spend nights in his hospital room, in the opposite hospital bed, listening to his labored breathing, handing him his portable urinal when I hear him become restless. I have been watching him get sick, get a little better, fight, live to see me grow up, and fight some more until we finally come to one last hospital stay. He says he is ready. After he leaves us, I never walk back into the church that I shared with him and my grandma.

I have come to know their love in the warm wind, in the winter snowfall, in my daughter's far-off gaze. It repeats, this love they send, like the bright hued patterns in nature, like the echoing flow of the river.

I am thirty-five. I am a teacher. As I make a snack for my class, the smell of the Welch's grape juice sends me back to my church basement... and I am twelve. My grandma and I lay out the silver platters, the silver cups, in perfectly aligned rows. We break the crackers, we pour the juice, getting the communion ready on Saturday night. Just us two, our hands working silently, communing together.

Sometimes this remembering, this visiting hits me in the middle of a busy moment. Other times I conjure, with wants, with words, with silent wishing wands.

I am sixteen, I am twenty-one, I am twenty-nine and my grandpa visits with me often in my sleep. I feel safe, comforted and calm. I can smell him when I wake up, the way his white t-shirts smell a little oily even fresh out of the drawer. I can feel him waiting, being his patient self, taking time to check on me while he waits for his wife.

This magic fills me. I am threaded into their spirits just as they are threaded into my bones. I have walked with them for so long, I would be lost without them.

I am twenty-nine. I sit with a baby growing inside of me, beside my grandma, as she too gets ready to leave me. She has lived so many years without my grandpa. She has been unable to function without him for the last thirteen years. The past few months, instead of eating, she goes outside and offers her plate to the heavens. For someone to take her to the home she knows in her heart is waiting for her.

Sometimes, I fray by their pull. I keep a vigil on the waiting, on the passing, on the daily click of time as we all grow up, older, leaving moment by moment.

I am thirty. My grandma comes to visit me only once in my sleep. She is in her favorite red poppy shirt. She shows me around her room. A room so familiar with furniture I know I have sat upon it before. She shows me her mom, her dad, her brother, all people I dearly loved myself. Then she shows me my grandpa. They are all together. I never get another visit from my grandpa.

I am pure cellular memory. I recall their feelings, their happiness, their sorrow, what they wished and wanted for us all.

I am thirty-five. I walk into a yarn store with my friend. She tells me that her seven-year-old son asked her if they could have a meet-up place after she dies someday. She explains how together they picked a place to meet, a place significant to both of them in their day-to-day lives. As she tells me this story, I am shaken and I begin to sob. I start to panic that my daughter and I do not have a meet-up place yet and that I did not set up a meet-up place with my grandma and grandpa. I take some breaths to try to get back in control. I choose some yarn. I have not crocheted since my grandma taught me to when I was seven.

These memories are like treasures, wrapped up in secret, holding still inside. Treasures often too sacred and fragile to pull out in the light of day.

I am seven. I hold the yarn wrapped around my two hands as she rolls it into a ball. She shows me how to hold the hook, how to move it in and out of the yarn, the rhythm of the movement. We make granny squares. I do not remember how much I actually did but… I am thirty-five. I am in my bedroom with my new yarn. I start a row, and then I turn off the light. I crochet in the dark. Feeling her hands on mine, moving the hook in and out of the yarn, guiding me, showing me that we do have a meet-up place after all. Then, as if for proof, my bedroom light switches on. I have to get up and walk across the room to snap it off.

These moments surface, crack, melt, mold into something that is other. The caul is lifted. This fine sheath between the spirit world and this one brings an ache so penetrable, it is as if I am taking my first breath.

I am thirty-five. I am standing in front of my white-lit tree, the one that reminds me so much of the tree my Grandma always had flocked. I am hanging crocheted garland and birds with my husband and my daughter. I no longer believe in one all mighty god as I was taught. We have taken this holiday of giving and tried to recreate it. I have wrapped all the handmade presents that I have crocheted in the last few weeks. Gifts that will go to my mom, my dad, my sisters, my husband, my daughter, gifts that were made with love, warmth, pride, blessings, longing, memories. Gifts that were stitched with a little bit of help from the spirit world I have come to know in my own way.

I am five, fifteen, twenty-five, thirty-five, and I am theirs, from afar. A gleam in the grey winter night. I know wherever they may be, I am part of them, a mystery, a spirit, a longing, a link backward, a link forward, forever.