If I were to condense her life into a moment, a floating speck suspended in the gallery of time, where would I find her? Would she be the still frame of a child playing barefoot in a shallow creek, tossing the contents of cupped hands airborne? Does she live in bits of dry grass and plucked hydrangea floating overhead, waiting to be pulled inward in the soft gasp of summer? Or maybe she is the exhale of autumn, echoing in brisk leaves that scamper across a dirt path. Is she caught in an updraft of warm reds and browns burnt with just a tinge of orange? Does she waft over muddied footprints as if she's extinguishing a flame so fragile, you might wonder if it's there? Maybe. Yet, I do not recognize her in the freezing lungs of winter. Not in the indifferent way it holds its chilled breath far longer than it should. To me, she doesn't look like the icy lake or the snow dancing over chilled sand that piles like white ash beneath a fading pyre. I refuse to see her in the silhouette of life frozen against the nothingness of night. No, she isn't that. Instead, I believe she may be the first inhales of spring, gifting existence in its blossoms, tiny, imperceptible, blooming like small rays of the divine. I feel her in the petals of every lilac born sacred in the dawn. Here, I find comfort watching her resurrected in each moment as a perfect being, perfect in the way that the final breath of summer is sometimes all we have to last us until spring.