A flower is not merely decoration. In Emily Dickinson’s hands, bloom is result: the visible outcome of timing, endurance, hidden conditions and everything that had to hold before becoming could appear. At Midsommar, her poem arrives for me with thread, inheritance, memory — and the women who left something behind by hand.
A toddler’s bad morning changed our plans for the Boston Marathon. Thirteen years later, an old newspaper brought the afternoon back, along with a question that relief alone cannot answer: what do we owe one another when we get to go on living?
