Because, when her grandmother fell when reaching for a red fire truck, my three-year-old daughter shook. Because, for days, at unpredictable moments, she’d say Grandma fell. Because, each time, I’d say, And then what? until the memory flowered and rooted. Because I wanted her to reach further, to the paramedics who let her sit in the truck. To their kill-time smiles, to the homecoming. Because I want her to believe in reaching. Because memory is the housefly that dies dusty still climbing the muntin, a magician that resurrects with a hiss during spring cleaning. Because we are made of memory and each act of memory changes the memory. Because I am always after control. Because there is so little I can control. Because I seek to preserve something unchanged, but if I can’t do that, something that reaches. Because I have become reached for, my daughter’s brown arm wrapping my shoulders. Because I never knew much about gardening, except that the rhubarb returned every year without our asking, with the mint and the shoots of green onions and purple-headed chives, and that we begged from three peach trees for years until my father uprooted them, and my mother gave up on tomatoes when we couldn’t keep the deer away after all the cracking ice cream pails of water faithfully tipped into the sandy soil. Each spring we raked the year’s egg shells and banana peels in. The pine cast too much shade. I teach my daughter to root. Because when I smell mint, I misstep and reach for something to steady me.