Every new house needs a window. Every window a cornfield. Every cornfield needs a boy against which to compare height. Every boy needs a staple gun. Every womb the chance of striking the record. Against the row of small windows above the sill, my husband and I leaned album sleeves to block the light. Mozart, Beastie Boys, Dr. Dre. Cases we forgot to empty until the sun bent them into dizzying melodies that twisted into twilight on the day we realized what we’d done. We watched the sun go down, watched the birds as if it was a virtue. My daughter was experimenting with fear, testing shadows for firmness, so I tried to watch them the way she does and remembered no one was coming for me. I admit I’ve been lonely. I hate the word menopause the way some people hate moist. They say the big M is having a cultural moment. Maybe by the time I get there it will make good on what was promised. Maybe by then we will have taught roses to grow without thorns as if we didn’t just launch a rocket that carved a hole in the sky. The mothers will bed down in fields of them and listen to podcasts about birds and skip the ads for Zoloft and trace the shadows of each petal, trace the passage of light to the burning.

Bathsheba doesn’t have much to say about growing things. End Times always arrives before Advent, so she mixes the two—sheep, goats. Her man was a shepherd before he was a king, the way her son was alive before he was dead. Now, she plays a broken tambourine and cuts salt dough into snowflakes for the tree. No angel’s ever come to visit her, but she’s fine. She’s in her turmeric era. She has beet dye for her cookies. She’ll live forever. She has a spruce tree, and all of last year’s cranberries that caved in on themselves like slow, imploding planets. She saved them, as she saved all of you. Since none of this is real anyway, picture now her firstborn as if he’s grown and tightening the screws of her kitchen table. He is a carpenter too. He made the sun and moon with paper mâché. Someone once told her you must not like surprises. She just doesn’t like to be tricked. If it’s a dream, for example, she feels she ought to know. What child would you trade for a psalm? She’s so blessed, so ashamed. All of her sons are back from the dead, yet here she’s stuck on an endless loop, skipping the YouTube ads and drying orange slices and pressing salt and flour into the shapes of men to hang on the tree.

With a line from Diane Seuss

I soaked the cotton and sewed it into pockets to pin to twine, tucked in touchstones to take us toward shorter nights. Oh give thanks for the mineral kingdom, for mordants that bond color to fibers of fabric. For weld hiding a wooden bird. For eucalyptus holding Three Kings soap from a small business in Wisconsin. And hopi: local Honey Agate. Feld: stars. Black walnut: your name, reverse cross-stitched on a stocking so you’ll remember what I can make. Cochineal: the painted fox with removable tail we bought you in Mexico City. Marigold: summer cyanotypes preserving old wind. Turmeric: I looked up into the dark for something to bloom by. Madder: girls can do hard things. Cosmos: my uncle drove my cousins and me to our great uncle’s house to sing “Silent Night” in German on Christmas Eve when I was in college. He brought his trumpet, and we arranged ourselves into a respectable three-part harmony, and afterwards we got cookies, and that’s the great uncle who died last year of an unexpected stroke. Maya blue: an orange. Purple basil: street lights on the underside of a thousand nodules. Olive leaf: the Fibonacci sequence. Ochre: as a child I loved this book about a boy isolated in a forest with enviable survival skills, whose mother abandoned him, just walked out the door, but when he grew up he discovered she’d been a magician all along pursuing her important magician career, and his own destiny was to climb stairs into the sky to save her. Logwood: pencil sharpener. Indigo: the apron I salvaged from the box of grandmother’s old things after she died, reverse cross-stitched blooms stained brown with coffee or blood the way any bluestar turns at the end. Cinnamon: salt dough you threaded with pink ribbon. Sunflower: my voice, returning. Wine: folic acid. Carrot: my college choir director told us to “sausage” when he wanted us to shape a long note—to begin softly, to swell, then ease (the shape of everything—the three-act structure, the bridge, youth, copulation, volta). Black bean: a mother invented the first advent calendar for her son. Of course her son monetized it. Of course his mother sewed her gifts shut. Of course her son used doors. Lavender: benign. Blackberry leaves: they’re everywhere this year—the calendars I mean, in this economy. They’re magical, a way of gifting time, a method of slowing down, content for your story, commissions, all those samples for women with purchasing power who may buy full-sized in the new year. Foundation. Serums. Avocado: hope, the sort only an exterminator can kindle. Onion peel: the itch where the biopsy needle went in, the open tear duct, the coloring sheet of the nativity covered in stickers printed with my dead grandmother’s return address.