Ashes in Our Hands

There are things we carry without knowing we carry them. They are not in our hands or on our backs. They are in the way we pause at certain kinds of light, or find ourselves moved by music we have never heard before, or feel an inexplicable tenderness for people we have only just met.

This book is about those things. It is about what we inherit from the people we loved and what we pass on to the people who will love us, and the way that love moves through time in forms that do not always announce themselves as love.

It is also about ash. The particular quality of ash — how it is simultaneously the most permanent and the most temporary of substances. How it keeps the shape of what it was, briefly, before the wind takes it. How we scatter it over things we love as both a letting go and a staying close.