“We get birds passing through,” my cousin said. “Some do sing.”

Standing in the vast wheat field he’d inherited, our eyes on the treeless plain, I said, “Mom told me grandma heard birds here, singing, ‘See how pretty I am.'”

We left mom’s ashes where those song birds still sing.

Janine writes from Portland, Oregon. This month she is thinking of her mom, and all of the aunts whose ashes have come home, back to the farm.