My daughter, 19 months now, stands at a talking table, in a house by a swamp filled with tires watching curiously a baby two months younger and fifteen pounds heavier—a verbose redhead who falls constantly like an inverted weeble wobble but already speaks in complete sentences. Outside the island is saturated like a water balloon at the point of explosion, and I sit at the window spinning tales, like the mother who gave birth to me, while the rain falls for days on end.

Since the beginning of my time, my mother sits in her divided room crocheting miniature clothes so tightly woven that they can stand, almost jump and walk, on their own accord, as if tension itself is enough to create life. Unlike the dolls, I don't know my maker's name, but I often see her replicas—eyes, a mass of tangled thread with gaping mouths like buttonholes. They are all without a nose. I think this is because the only nose she has ever created was given to my daughter, an extraordinarily well functioning, perfectly asymmetrical nose that resembles nothing of my own. Her nose is evidence that there is magic in this life. Even when I'm apart from her, I continue to remind myself of this magic by sniffing the worn clothes she has left behind so that eventually the air itself will smell of miracles, and I will only have to remind myself that sometimes magic can disappear.

One could say that evidence of the rain—orange-spotted salamanders in mud holes; indentations in rock; leaves floating through gutters bearing aphids like the titanic—is proof of the movement of magic through the streets. Where does the rain come from? Clouds heavy with the sufferings of angels? Or as I read somewhere once, rain is Jesus' piss. Thank God for Jesus because we just planted seeds—more evidence that one must leap with faith to see growth—and with this rain they will push at the worms beneath the soil. Everything is in constant motion, but for the very first time, I am standing stock still.

I have told this story time and time again. It has occurred almost as many times as the events of my beginnings, a drawing of fine lines backwards, untangled and in whatever colors of my choosing: the colors of the rainbow, of Korea, of an American flag, or the stripe across the back of my dog, which after a bath is white. My mother was in labor for 27 minutes, fed me her colostrum for three, then locked herself in a room divided by allegiances and deforested hills, for the next 30 years. Until, I imagine, my daughter's birth—another thunderous labor pounded madly against the roof, though this one lasted 12 hours, 27 minutes, and began three years previous with the dreaming, longing, and attempt at a contact with skin like parchment filled with the leaves of a family tree. I believe that it took this amount of time to give birth to a daughter with an umbilical chord like an intestinal phallus, a fluffy tail that disappeared once dried, arms like wings with webbing that still stretches, and a cry that silenced the drumming on the roof. But this one, I will hold in my arms forever.

At first I held her until the chord dried up and fell away, the colostrum turned into boring old milk, and her shit turned from the color of oil into the color of a well-fed horse's dung. I held her as we ran away from a room smaller than the one my own mother sat in for thirty years, as horns honked, and people gave each other the finger all the way from San Francisco to Portland, Maine.

What I'm trying to say is that the decisions we have made, created the shape of our lives, a moving spiral; the location, a small island off the coast of Maine; the texture, like the mud between our toes; the smells of it, of seaweed baking on the sand; the flavor, orange pekoe, which have everything to do with lists of ingredients on packages: my birth, her birth, this man who walked barefoot on the beach, through the mist, the blaring of fog horns, the snapping of tourist cameras, like a man who has fallen off a cruise ship. All of this thoroughly mixed, spiced and fried, has created what sits outside my window on the backshores of this island: rain, an overgrown yard, foliage that is accustomed to swamps and vernal pools, and toads hopping through the wild strawberries, the ocean, and the bay, and on this part of the coast of Maine, islands like stepping stones to Canada.

We arrived here on a December day when nobody was sailing. We tumbled out of our van like waterlogged explorers unsure of how to view the native Mainers, raucous and red like lobsters. They offered us beer and invited our child and our dog over for afternoons of tea and Legos. A woman who also arrived here from Korea via California, Costa Rica, Chile, and China, hired me to work in her kitchen when it was still snowing, which in Maine is akin to throwing a raft to a kayak in a raging storm.

There was a time, before we had jobs, when the island was crusted over in a clear glaze of water and wherever you went you needed skates. I briefly ventured onto the mainland leaving my husband and sick daughter behind. I missed the last ferry back home and was rescued by a madman with a heart of substance, a mind of mazes, and pockets full of drugs, who paid for a water taxi to skid us across the bay back home, on the condition that I never tell a soul of his kindness. His children were all grown, he said, that's why he could pay for my water taxi. He visited them on Sundays to watch football, a sport that he detests. After Robert Kennedy went the way of the dodo, he said, he stopped paying taxes and working legal jobs. He loved Kurt Vonnegut, found alien encounters fascinating, knew a whole lot about biodiesel and wood alcohol processing and believed that the best way to raise children was by a tree with forgiving switches. I can tell all this now because he's locked up somewhere in jail.

Now I know that none of this is of my own doing. I am not a single mother stoic and strong amongst a world of mothers clutching their children to their chests, their memories of birth placed delicately into a box with old photos and sewn into the padding of their bras. I have my husband, my daughter, my dog, my mothers, the babies that have followed me around since I was fifteen, my grandmothers dead and murdered, and a step one still alive though forgetting the arrangements of her furniture as she remembers more clearly the cry of her three-year old before she was taken by the war, her fifty-year old taken by cancer, another consumed by baking; and one mother in-law who also remembers burying boxes in black soil where only perennials will sprout.

Lately though, all my mind has been occupied by is boat rides and a baby that won't stay in my arms. The wind picks up and she wants to spread her arms, still webbed and a little furry, and ride behind us like a kite tied to the stern. It makes me think that perhaps my own mother has ceased knitting. Though I do not know even her date of birth, the color of her walls, her current or previous addresses, or what she drinks in the morning, I am guessing at the passing of her hobby simply by how the rain falls. It is like our studio apartment in California that morning I first saw my daughter fly disguised as something that once belonged to me. That room was so wet water was running from every seam into the house—through shower heads and hoses, faucets, and toilets—beneath the crack in the door with the leaves that were blown in by a earsplitting leaf blower. Now it comes through our ceiling as well from a different place each day. But with the onset of spring, the recentness of Mother's Day, a hallmark holiday fraught with generations and lineages of mothers crowding into our subletted living room like ghosts expecting just one more drink, a certain form of death has arrived.

My husband's grandmother died of a stroke last Wednesday. He plays endless hands of solitaire in the evenings, climbs a tree, and talks about his college days. Before her heart stopped beating, after her mind had returned to rain drops, she opened her eyes and looked towards Naima. As a mother, there are certain things I have learned to put down: boxes, like rain buckets to catch the skies; lilies in my first garden; a California drivers license from a time when I weighed just a little more than a dog; my Honda Civic that motored me across deserts and mountains so I could eventually see that I was never the one steering; and a certain focus of vision that clouded the landscape of death's country: small sailboats set upon declining grasslands that require a particular poise of vision, a peering down a wrinkled nose to gaze at a part of oneself, the part we all must leave behind like the tail of a rocket ship, to see the lines drawn behind us in seaweed finer than thread of unimaginable color.

Can you believe that it's still raining after all this time? And I still must go pick up my daughter, walk through the woods and along the coastline, past a million houses each with their own personal swamp, and take Naima away from the talking table, unlike any toys in our home, though she's figured out how to change the ring tones on the phone so that every time someone calls our house a different electronic tune at varying volumes sounds curiously through the house. Perhaps she will hear me walking, the dog by my side, through a lightless thunderclap, and delight at the prospect of a warm belly to rest her head on and a nipple like a mother's kiss that brings sweetness, then warmth, then a drowsiness that precludes dreams like a steady boat floating on pages of tales spun by an anxious artisan.