...Sitting on the grassy spot in front of my mother’s grave, I couldn’t help but think I’d be next. Not that turning fifty makes for a death sentence. It’s just that my mother’s recent passing forced me to realize I was no spring chicken anymore. Definitely more like a late-summer chicken, if I were still any kind of chick at all. Fifty, five-o, five tens and no ones, May 24th 2003—just next year, the date when I’d finally become a woman of a certain age. Oh, I’d made a futile pledge to cling to my forties, the final hurrah before a woman slips over the abyss into middle age. But just as with the changing seasons, like the passing of summer into autumn with its frail leaves falling, nothing can stop the cycle.

I looked at the small collection of dried roses on top of my mother’s headstone. In the three months since she’d been gone, I had done my best to leave a single red rose at her grave, if not every day, then at least every other day. That could make for quite a pile of brittle stems laced with brown-tinted petals. Quite a pile, indeed, if I didn’t brush them aside from time to time. Well, I hadn’t bothered to clear the latest heap before setting down the current offering from the Price Chopper in Bennington. The fresh crimson bloom I’d brought lay among the ghosts of roses past. It suited my present mood that late-August day, a reminder of withered beauty and that I should have picked up some hair color along with the rose at the supermarket this morning.

The long, green grass tickled my bare feet as I sat there, head resting on bent knees. I always parked on the south side of the Shaftsbury Center Cemetery instead of the thin ribbon of a dirt road closer to Mother’s grave. I never liked entering that way. Too easy to find my car parked atop of a newly planted occupant. Quite a pleasant walk, all that summer long, getting out of my SUV and taking off my shoes to feel the warm grass between my toes as the neighboring dairy farm’s resident cows would serenade me with a gracious bovine hymn. The old Baptist Church stood at the corner of the cemetery, its squat square tower crowned with a turned spike at each corner. That whitewashed, clapboard building served as our local Historical Museum now, complete with dusty cases where pews had once been.

I sucked in a deep breath of delicious New England air and studied the granite slab before me. “Helen Latham-Cove Randolf, Mother, Grandmother and One Good Looking Dame.” Mother had left instructions in her will to have that epitaph carved on her headstone. Growing up I’d always compared myself to the woman. My two older brothers were definitely her children. Same dark coloring, dusty brown eyes and dimpled smiles accenting slim faces, that if not all that delicate, still seemed to have been carved from living marble. My eyes were bluish-green and set in an oval face framed with auburn hair, with admittedly gray roots at the moment. I was someone else’s child, my dad’s from what I could tell by the photos he’d left behind, the offspring of a man I had never seen in the flesh.

My mother, Helen of Shaftsbury, Vermont, a lady whose beauty had launched a couple of canoes in her youth. Father met her at summer camp and fell in love. A native son of Atlanta, Georgia, his clan never approved of his marriage to that Yankee. They still held a grudge against Sherman. Even so, Helen Latham-Cove married Mr. Jackson Randolf in the spring of 1948 over his family’s objections. Three children later, my father was killed in action during the Korean War. According to my two older brothers he threw himself in front of enemy fire to avoid coming home to Mother. Whatever happened, Father died two months shy of my birth and was buried in the family plot in Georgia, safe forever from the Yankees.

What would Mother think of me now? My editor had been hounding me for months to produce the last book promised in our publishing contract. But I’d been inflicted with a kind of literary constipation. I couldn’t keep writing titillating romances about throbbing manly members anxious for feminine buds budding with luscious lust. If I ever found my muse again, I’d kill her. I tottered on the brink of middle age, feeling like a failure. Okay, maybe an accomplished failure. I’d been published, right? Thankfully my mother never read any of my stuff. Delusional to the end, she always clung to the futile hope I’d pen the great American novel one day. I had to ask myself if the tripe I wrote was worth the struggle it had taken to earn my M.F.A. from UCLA.

I looked across the cemetery where Achilles Roger Latham lay buried, the first of our family to make it to the New Hampshire Grants, the future state of Vermont, home to our clan ever since. Burnt in the hand, some of my relatives had said, Achilles was rumored to have been a convict who’d been indentured to a wealthy New York clan. As a child I’d made a rubbing of the weathered engraving on the man’s headstone. “Achilles Roger Latham, b. 1745 d. 1783 age 38 years 3 months 4 days. He who cheated could not cheat death. He meant no harm.”

I’d always wanted to dig him up, figuratively speaking, and write the story of a man who had most likely been a rebel in probably more ways than anyone in my family may have guessed. Yes, indeed, that book could have well been the best thing I’d ever done. The tale of a Green Mountain Boy. But whenever I’d talked about starting the project, Mother always nixed the idea. Made me believe no one would want to read about an eighteenth century bum.

I stood, eyes focused across the residence of so many departed souls and said aloud as if I were being sworn in before a jury of my peers, “I’m going to write his story.”