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“Gentile or Jew O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.”

T.S. ELIOT

DJ spotted a deer trail that looked as if it led to the Menomonee River while I tried to think of a way to explain death. The space for my words imploded as my son moved away from me toward the passage through the trees. It is July 2, the date of a full moon in the month that Buddhists believe the dead return to visit the living.

This morning, only a few houses from our home on the way back from DJ’s summer orchestra lesson, a buck with just an inch of antler crossed in front of our car, grabbing my line of sight with his intent dark eyes and reminding me that my eleven-year-old son and I were overdue for a nature outing. Nature came to get us. DJ claimed the buck stared directly into his eyes as he passed, but I swore he glared into mine and even turned his head back over his shoulder to maintain eye contact as he traveled from parkway to suburban lawn. His interest in us evaporated as his front hooves hit the curb. We kept watching him, unaccustomed to seeing a slow-moving deer so near. Usually they bolt across our road or stand statuesque for a moment before darting back into the veil of trees and shrubs. This buck seized our attention and then became oblivious to us, as if we didn’t exist in the same dimension.

We saw the short spikes on his head that inspire the name of the July full moon in the Farmers’ Almanac: the “full buck moon.” This is the month the buck begins to re-grow antlers in preparation to fight, to the death if needed, for the right to mate. His coat was caramel with cream trim and scratched from shoulder to rear as if keyed by an angry hoodlum. He grazed on the neighbor’s lawn, and she came out on the porch and sat on her step with her chin in her palm to watch.

On the strip of mowed parkway in front of the woods where the buck had emerged, a red-tailed hawk swooped down for a touch-and-go landing, sporting a squirming mole in its clutches. A poplar tree with stark white undersides of leaves winked in the light breeze.

At home, the morning paper headlined “Five US Servicemen Killed in Attack at Iraqi Base” and “White Pelican returns to Wisconsin as Mississippi Wetlands are Restored.” And from the obituary page, “Beloved daughter departed this earth…born 1995.” I didn’t know this girl, but I scanned the death notices looking for a distance this “beloved daughter’s” age withheld. Ninety-eight was comfortable, sixty-nine was so young, and the iniquitous reality of a teenager as a corpse unsettled me. Death sometimes tries to shove itself to center frame in my life; I push back.

I’d been away from home for almost two weeks as a part of a graduate program. When I’d left, DJ’s voice seemed to play every sharp and flat note possible in the measure of one sentence, but when I returned, he spoke in a smooth, deep voice that I knew other women would come to love. On the day I returned from my residency in Vermont and drove to DJ’s bus stop from day camp, I expected a gleeful look and a hungry hug when he spotted me as the pickup person. He saw me, but he looked away and didn’t even bend to look in the car window. When he approached, I saw only his arm reaching for the handle and his blue Homer Simpson “This is your brain… on doughnuts” T-shirt. His greeting was a baritone, “Hi.” Moments later, I could see only the back of his head because he looked out the window and away from me. A block later, on a quiet, anonymous street, I pulled the car over and hugged and kissed my acquiescent son.

The following day, as I tried to work at the computer, he lingered next to me, and when I draped my arm across his waist, he crawled into my embrace, and all five feet two and a half inches of him lingered in my lap. In front of the window, a clattering of bikes and kids passed on the street that separates our house from the woods and river. He dropped, as if assault weapons were spraying the house with bullets. From the floor, my son inquired, “Anybody see me?”

“No one saw you hug your mom. They didn’t even look.” I closed the blinds and didn’t get any work done while DJ told me about camp and complained about too many little girls in his horse-riding group.

Although DJ had seemed enthusiastic when he’d agreed to walk with me in our neighborhood woods, he raised his eyebrows as he saw me stuffing a backpack with bug repellant, water, and field guides to trees, birds, and wildflowers. The weight of my hiking boots reminded me that this neighborhood walk was different from my usual morning walking circuit. This was my opportunity to explore the areas I usually buzzed by while trying to keep my heart beating at 70 percent of my maximum rate. While swinging my arms and discussing kids and dinner plans with my walking girlfriend, I often looked at the trails, ponds, and bridges with longing and intention to come back for a better visit. The route was a rectangle with a river running in the middle and bridges at each end. Today, DJ and I were going inside the rectangle, something I hadn’t done in almost two months.

DJ’s eyes looked up at me, but his neck and shoulders tilted down. “Why are you bringing all those books and stuff just to walk across the street?”

“Don’t worry. We won’t be more than a few hours.”

DJ’s exploration with me was a gift he’d promised to give, and he didn’t whine or try to beg his way out of it. Instead, he teased, and before we’d left the yard, he rapidly fired all the complaints he was too mature to say in earnest. “Are we almost home? How much further? I have to go to the bathroom.” That done, he elbowed me and pointed across the street to bright orange blooms of summer.

The blossoms of the day lily species each last only one day and often bloom in succession. They are so prolific along roadsides that most folks call them ditch lilies. Six buds on a lily could mean that in six days, the flowers would be gone for a year. Negative thinking, I told myself. Something else will come into bloom when the prairie lilies are done, and more buds may form on these plants to bring more weeks of summer blossoms. It’s only in July, though, that summer is this bold.

We crossed the black top road, and I silently recalled the mess we’d seen there on an evening dog walk last month. Perhaps DJ did too; his eyes focused on the same stretch of blacktop that revealed nothing of prior events, not even a faint stain. That night a possum lay split open on the street, and seven nubs of babies crossed the road ahead of the body, recreating an image of the impact. DJ had bent over one of the nubs, shook his head, and ticked the roof of his mouth. The mamma and her scattered pearls were gone by morning.

There’s a man in Milwaukee who drives an old truck under contract with the county and picks up offensive refuse that can be handled by one man: dead dogs, bloated raccoon carcasses, and all manner of carrion and objects dumped on the street. I saw his picture in the paper a few autumns ago when he found a garbage bag holding a cold newborn baby with a smidgen of cry left in her. He called the Rescue Squad. She lived. I wonder if that man still considers that baby girl, in a warm home, her light brown hair grown in. She must be walking, already talking like crazy, now almost ready for kindergarten. I wonder, as he scoops up death with his dark flat shovel, if he looks for life, if he turns his head and bends so that his ear grazes each found garbage bag, and if he stops to weigh discarded parcels with his large worker hands. Does he sometimes tear open bags of litter dropped in arrogant thoughtlessness, just in case? I’ve never seen this man who works vampire hours, but I recall the strange reinterpretation of an American Gothic picture: man, upturned shovel, and pickup truck.

His services may not be needed so close to our woods. Our small road kill is always gone by morning. When a deer dies, we have to call the DNR, and the carcass may sit a few days. For our smaller corpses, foxes slip out of their dens under cover of night, spill down the curb like quiet dark shadows. And with their long sharp canines and incisors, they drag the unsightly dead out of sight and into the woods we were about to enter.

We found a trail after crossing a secondary stream. DJ jumped across, chiding me, “Come on. It’s easy.” I followed, showing him with my clumsy landing that I couldn’t cross a stream even a hair wider than this one. I windmilled my arms forward to pull my heels up from the soft bank and to prevent my seat from splatting in the muck. As soon as my feet were planted solidly under me, I swung my arms straight up and hyper-extended my back in a gymnast pose. At my current weight, I must have looked like a Soviet shot-putter pretending to be gymnast Courtney McCool. McCool and I both have blonde ponytails.

DJ offered, “I give you a two point two,” and pointed to our trail. He picked out deer tracks of different sizes, trying to count how many different deer had left their mark. A raccoon’s front paw left an impression that resembled a small human hand with long, pointy nails. We shoved and jostled, competing for the lead spot on the trail, which was too narrow to allow us to walk abreast.

He loves to push and pull almost as much as he used to like to cuddle with me. His latest thing is to catch me standing near the bed, which he perceives as stunt mattress. He assumes his lineman position, runs, and tackles me, knocking me onto the bed. The same adolescence that’s sprouting hair all over his body has lengthened him so that his aunt and grandmother look up to his face. Where there used to be baby fat, firm muscles now define his flesh. He’s private about his body now. We have video of him, my last child, dashing down the hall naked and slapping his own butt. That playful freedom has been replaced with pride in his increasing strength. So, I played and let him knock into me and pull and push me on the trail.

I took a wide step in front of him, cutting him off with my leg, and ran ahead. Low to the ground, I spotted two triangles of reddish tan fur. Oh, ears, I thought, and a head. But the body flattened, so the whole thing looked like a red fox rug lying askew on the forest floor and assuming the entire width of the trail. For a second I was fascinated, but then repulsed by busy maggot eyes and black carrion beetles feverishly animating the fur with their group undulations. Flies formed a buzzing helmet-like force field around the death. I realized I hadn’t breathed and couldn’t inhale. I ran back on the trail; maneuvering around DJ, I said, “Euww, I don’t want to be near it.” I didn’t want to smell the rotten pungency either. A few yards behind my son, I turned around.

DJ stepped toward the carcass, closer than I’d been, and he stood transfixed at the consummation of this body. “Dad and I found a deer in here last year, but it was just bones. It wasn’t gross like this fox.” He’d saved the deer skull in a shoebox. He’d taken it to school where the teacher allowed his classmates crowd around the cleaned-up death.

I’d acted like a girl, and he knew it was his job to be my antonym. He calmly walked back to join me in the place I’d found my breath. “Mom, how do you think he died?”

“Don’t know, but foxes in the wild only live about five years. Usually, they crawl back into their dens to die.” I told him what I knew, but not what he asked.

We pushed aside the thick brush beneath a canopy of maples and bur oak trees. The brush was replaced by sparse grass, and then the forest floor was cleared of all small vegetation. Light diminished where a few immense gnarled trees created a room with a ceiling of dense leaves and a floor of compact gray dirt with hundreds of underground roots surfacing just enough to create a shallow labyrinth that could only hint at the enormity of the tree-life below the soil. DJ touched the furrowed bark of the largest tree and asked what it was.

“Looks like a big old elm tree,” I answered while searching the backpack for my Trees of Wisconsin guide. “I don’t think it’s an America elm. Most of those were wiped out by Dutch elm disease.” I explained that I’d only heard of the elm-lined streets of the Midwest and Northeast that provided elegant shade to my grandparents’ generation. While I babbled on and searched through the tree book, DJ interrupted me.

“Look down here.” He nodded to a series of diminutive chalky batons scattered near the base of the tree, four bones from limbs and one rib. “Too big for a squirrel. Maybe a groundhog.” We both bent down forming a silent huddle while we inspected the bones.

DJ spoke. “Everything dies.”

Right here is the place where I’m supposed to have the answers, I thought. I should give him the wisdom that will offer comfort at my death and insight that he’ll pass on to his children on a summer walk in decades to come.

As a nurse and daughter, I’d seen death. Two years earlier, my stepfather—the man I called “Pop”—died from prostate cancer. Anomalous cells grew in his body. The aberrant proliferation killed him, and only then, by their own rampant quest to take over his body, did the cancer itself die.

Pop lived at our home most of the last six weeks before his death. DJ had passed his report card over the bars of the hospital bed to him and played Christmas songs on his keyboard to cheer him up. Pop closed his eyes to listen and name the tunes:

“‘O, Holy Night.’ That’s so beautiful.

‘We Three Kings.’ I haven’t heard that in years.

‘Silent Night.’ That’s tremendous, DJ, tremendous.”

Like many cancer patients, Pop died in pieces: couldn’t walk, couldn’t stand, couldn’t turn in bed, then nothing. In those last twenty-four hours, I’d given him a bed bath, and he moaned when I repositioned his gaunt body as gingerly as I knew how.

“Oh, Pop. I’m sorry.”

“It’s not you, it’s me,” he comforted me. “Just do what you need to do.”

Later that day when I ran an errand to the store, Mom locked herself out of the house when she stepped outside to speak to a neighbor. She called me from the neighbor’s house, crying as she explained that Pop was alone. I raced back, entered through the garage door, and rushed to check on Pop, who lay on a hospital bed in the living room.

“You okay, Pop?”

“Yes.”

“Did you know you were alone? Mom locked herself out.”

“Go let her in.”

When I opened the front door, a December chill and my crying mother entered.

Pop strained to yell, “Did you find her?”

“Yes. She’s fine.”

“Thank you.”

Pop died in his sleep that night, never losing the kindness and essence of who he was through the process. I gave a eulogy at Pop’s funeral. I didn’t then—nor later in the presence of that great tree—have anything momentous to say about the meaning of death. I could only tell the truth of how his love for life seemed to grow and mingle with his impending death.

A few hundred yards away from the tree and old bones, in the space I’d run away from, carrion beetles feasted on maggots born in the flesh of the fox. The entire forest is a composition of bits of organic matter that come from life feeding on death. Remnants of foxes, tadpoles, wild geraniums, and trout lilies had perhaps cycled through the people who lived near this place. Liberace, Spencer Tracy, and Golda Meir had lived near our home. Perhaps some elements, molecules, and bits from their bodies had been reused in DJ’s stiff brown hair. The body recycles its elements at different rates, but about every decade, each atom of a body that is a part of living tissue is new. Calcium from native Potawatomi Indians might have been reused in the bones that DJ poked at with his tattered basketball shoe.

Every element that passed out of my body in the form of my son is now in use elsewhere. He follows the patterns of his own DNA blended from his parents, but the organs, cells, and atoms have all formed anew from reclaimed oddments of life and death.

As soon as that fox died, E. coli and other organisms already present in its gut proliferated in the hypoxic and acidic environment. The gut burst and spread the feeding organisms to the rest of the corpse. Bacterial and fungal parents engendered hundreds of generations of offspring in a few days. Yellow jackets, flies, and earthworms shared the bounty of the life-giving putrefaction and began new families. Soil mites, nematodes, and nitrogen-fixing bacteria moved into the fox’s rich neighborhood. As many as a trillion live cells reside in one cubic centimeter of soil near decomposing remains. “Everything dies,” he’d said, but I hadn’t responded and couldn’t even determine if it was the life or death at the site of the dead fox that had repelled me.

All I’d discovered was that the tree wasn’t an American elm. The living tree was an easier subject to discern. Its location near water and the reddish tint in the furrows of the rough bark revealed it as a slippery elm. By its size, I guessed it had been drinking from this river for over 100 years. Native Americans gave leaves of the slippery elm to the sick and dying to soothe their dry mouths. They treated boils and sores with poultices and ingested parts of the inner reddish bark to treat colitis and infection. An impressive tree. DJ had only asked its name but listened to my expanded explanation.

He started toward a deer trail, touching the trunks of trees with alternate hands, identifying the ones he knew: “Sugar maple, black willow, green ash, oak …” Our trail led to the edge of the river, then to the point where we’d had to climb out of the low river bed to cross a bridge back in a neighborhood of houses, cars, and health walkers. A man in 1970-style running shorts walked in front of us smoking a cigarette. DJ quietly laughed at his shorts and his exposed long boiled-egg-white thighs bizarrely antithetical to the long, baggy shorts that were currently the style. The cigarette smoke reached up through my nose to my brain to pull open a file drawer and summon the face of a patient I cared for when I was a new nurse. I’d seen her face hundreds of times. Her hungry eyes searched for a comfort that came only when her breathing stopped. I told DJ about this first patient I ever cared for during a death—how she squeezed my hand, pinching my fingers into a tight bundle as she labored to breathe. Her family smoked in the waiting room, waiting for their matriarch to die of lung cancer. Despite high doses of intravenous analgesic and anti-anxiety medication, my patient struggled through her last breaths. Sitting erect, she reached for air as the cancer nicked off blood vessels and filled each of her alveoli with blood until there were no little air sacs left with a surface that could exchange carbon dioxide for oxygen. She drowned in her own blood as she clutched my hand. Seconds before I closed her wide-open eyes, an image of her face filed itself in my head. The smoky smell of the waiting room where I announced her death, labeled the file.

DJ recognized the anti-smoking agenda in my tale and diverted me with an invitation to play, asking why the guy would put on old running shorts to go out and smoke.

“Maybe thirty years ago he found love on this parkway. They were both betrothed to others but couldn’t say goodbye. They promised to reunite here today wearing the same clothes so they would recognize each other.”

DJ looked far ahead searching for the short-short wearer’s beloved, but we only saw a wide man with bulldog legs and two white poodles. He shook his head. “Nah, I don’t think so.”

I wrinkled my nose and shook my head no.

DJ countered, “Maybe he’s an alien from a planet that planned his disguise to fit in from watching reruns from the sports channel that show the old classic basketball games.”

I saw a trail that led away from the sidewalk. “Yeah, that’s probably it.”

We let the matter drop, although sometimes we can banter until we have dozens of scenarios. Our path took us back into the undeveloped space along the river. A stand of prairie grass on a hill above the river was dotted with sweet pea vines and greeted us with a baby fresh scent so significant to their identity that their Latin name is Lathyrus odoratus, meaning, “fragrant pea.” A soft breeze in seventy-five-degree air atomized the cologne. Daisy fleabane edged the prairie field. They beaconed pollinators with their bull’s eye yellow centers and finely toothed petals that emerged from the capitulum as white. At exactly the halfway point of the petal, their color sharply changed to lavender, conferring the effect of a small target with a lovely color palette. The showy deep red bull thistles towered over the grasses.

DJ remembered, “Those are the spiny ones.”

“Let’s stand still for a minute and see if there are goldfinches around.” Goldfinches line their nests with thistle down and eat the long, dark seeds—their favorite food. In less than a minute of stillness, we spotted five bright yellow males and four of the duller females scattered in the grasses and shrubs.

“Okay, you saw them. You see them in the yard every day. Now, can we move on?”

“Lead the way,” I told him. I liked the idea that the finches came to visit our yard and feeders every day, and we finally paid an overdue call to their home. July brought our neighborhood a fresh heat that perfused life and death.

An expanse of mowed grasses between a lagoon and river let us walk abreast. DJ hung his elbow around my shoulder and leaned on me while we walked. I tilted in, trying to make it easy for him to maintain the position that crinkled my neck.

We walked silently until DJ blurted, “I believe in heaven and, and I think—I hope—we get to live forever.”

This was my second opportunity to say something deep. “Jesus is our Savior, and because we believe in Him we do have everlasting life.”

He huffed. My response—too scripted for him. My neck hurt where the crook of his elbow tugged. He said nothing.

I grew quiet. Thoughts of death lead to God because we must find a way to make peace with the end of life. The minister and writer F. Forrester Church said, “Religion is the human response to being alive and having to die.” I’d been exploring Unitarianism and was attracted to the faith’s searching for spiritual truths in Christianity, Judaism, nature, and Eastern religions. I hadn’t decided if my worshiping with Unitarians was an insult to my religious roots or a bridge between Christianity and openness to a spirituality not tied to dogma. The search felt right, even without a conclusion.

A large gray-blue S caught my eye in the lagoon. We stopped and turned while DJ kept his arm hooked around my neck. The bed of the lagoon heaved with pollywogs and crayfish. A great blue heron stalked: stab, toss, catch, swallow. A graceful maneuver carried out with such adeptness, we waited only a few minutes to see a replay of this death feeding life, judged beautiful.

On the way home, we stopped at the Burleigh Street Bridge, where five willows along the east side of the river reached for their own apparition. The largest tree tilted its trunk to reach across four white boulders and wept into its own specter and having touched it, had to strain to stay erect as the reflection slowly pulled the willow into the river. A quarter-mile upstream an old willow lay uprooted, stripped, and bleached across the moving water.

We shared the bridge with the automobile traffic behind us. In front of us and above the river, barn swallows with their red bellies, forked tails, and blue bodies flashed iridescent in the sun as they flew. They swooped and caught insects to feed the giant open beaks of the babies who sat in tidy cups under the bridge. We knew they would soon fledge and keep pace with their parents, who fly up to six hundred miles a day in the swift seasonal winds. The offspring will learn to feed themselves and to fly to Argentina and back, and then they will not need their parents anymore.

The river ran beneath our feet, the water constantly wandered through our lives, atmosphere, and our bodies. Even my thoughts about this river were connected to others who watched the water move through their own years. Leonardo da Vinci said, “In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time.” Two hydrogen atoms join one oxygen atom to create a molecule that is slightly positive at one of the poles and slightly negative on the other. The positive end of one pole weakly attracts the negative pole of another water molecule in an act called polar bonding. A small electric charge gives the water surface tension and the ability to dissolve more substances than any other solvent. Water moves up tree trunks and through veins and rivers. It carries life through time. Those hydrogen and oxygen atoms formed molecules that have been flowing through lives since the beginning of the existence of life on this planet, and not just the elements of water, but this water—the water that moved beneath the willows and bridge and this mother and son. DJ stared out into the river and spoke, “Mom, I do believe in God and life after death. I just don’t know what that life will be.”

“That’s what faith is—when you don’t understand exactly but believe anyway.”

“Yeah. It’ll drive you nuts if you think you’ve got to figure it all out, but you still have to think about it some. I don’t know if Grandpa Paul went away to heaven. Sometimes I think I feel him with us.”

“Do you feel him now?” I asked.

DJ’s pensive profile showed eyebrows bushier than I remembered. His nose had grown out of the pug stage that mine never left. “The woods felt so busy today, like we were not alone.”

“I felt it too,” I said. It was like all of our ancestors and all those who lived before us came for a July reunion.

When John Muir was ten, a year younger than DJ, he came to live in the wilderness of Wisconsin. Near here, he began his journey to become a wilderness theologian. Years later, he gave parents this advice:

“Let the children walk with Nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blended star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life.”

My faith isn’t that strong. Death can be stingless, but it doesn’t always show up as a natural phenomenon of intellectual and spiritual beauty. Having no choice, I make a conditional peace with death but can’t quite commit to a universal embrace of the face of mortality. I’ve seen death many times; I’ve been in the room. I can’t shake this fallacious belief that everyone is owed a long life. I’m angry about terrorists and politicians who kill to demonstrate their power, and I won’t find a way to think of murder and genocide as beautiful. Why are we unable to prevent that kind of pain and suffering? I hope there is not a divine plan that is meant to create a Danteesque tension between life and death. No one need drop a bomb on a village so that I might appreciate the quality and quantity of my life by comparison.

I can buy Muir’s explanation when the dead and dying are decades older than I am and die a natural death. The idea of life as a cycle, the reuse, the rebirth, and the constant freshness of new life mixed with the seasoned, I see the beauty and sense in this. Maybe DJ will make a more complete peace with the reality of death than I’ve been able to.

DJ stared at the river. He wasn’t looking at me; he wasn’t looking to me. “Everything dies,” DJ had told me. It wasn’t a question; it was an acknowledgement.

The phone rang as I put the key in the door lock. DJ ran around me, making a show of speed-wiping his feet on the rug before his successful dash to the phone. He turned his back to me as a signal that the call was for him. I was washing my hands in the bathroom when I heard him yell to the whole house, “Mom, can Michael sleep over?” His voice cracked upward two scattered octaves in the middle of Michael’s name.

Thank you God, for my son. I turned my head around for a moment to yell toward him, “Sure,” and then smiled at myself in the mirror, pleased in the way that parents delight in the intelligence and innocence of their offspring. I love to watch DJ pursue answers and think about big questions. Pascal, who devoted his life to science and religion, said about God, “You would not seek me had you not found me.”

My face was flushed, and my curly hair puffed out despite the rubber band holding it back. A black spot fluttered in my tangles—a flying ant. I carefully plucked it out and went to the front porch to release the hitchhiker. The neighbor’s kid drove by in her new used car, at least fifteen miles over the speed limit. She waved to me with a teenage look-at-me-I’m-driving smile. The tall Queen Anne’s lace flowers on the side of the road quivered as if they were an excited crowd, celebrating her privilege of passage.

Since before the seventh century, Buddhists have celebrated the July communion of the ancestors’ visitation to the living. The origin of this sacred celebration is a mother and son story. While meditating, Mongallana saw his mother suffering in hell and pleaded to Buddha for her release. Buddha explained that the mother was cast to hell for her worldly ways, her most egregious act the placement of her family (especially her children) before all else—even her own spiritual development. Buddha advised this son that through meditation and the practice of compassionate acts and offerings, he could release his mother. Mongallana freed his mother from torment and in his joy danced the Bon, a dance that still surrounds the celebration of the reunion of spirits.

DJ came out on the porch with me and looked at the nothing-happening-on-the-parkway where I stared. He’s accustomed to my silent focus on birds, trees, water, bugs, and flowers. “Michael will be here at four.” He turned to go back into the house, but first mentioned, “Seems like there’s more of them than last year.”

“More of what?”

“More of those white flowers—the ones that start out looking like ferns and then turn lacy this time of year. I can tell you like them.”

The door shut behind him. A yellow swallowtail butterfly explored the screen.

I’ve read that some modern Buddhists no longer believe that the spirits of the dead come back in July. New Agers changed the essence of the holiday to a time to honor the dead, and, of course, we should honor the departed. Still, I think ancestors are drawn to visit the living when called, if not throughout the year, certainly in July.