On a walk earlier this week I came across two groups of dragonflies. The first was near a shaded pond, on the grounds of an elementary school.

Dragonflies always remind me of my father. While he lay dying, the hospital parking lot was filled with what seemed like hundreds of dragonflies. Now when I see a dragonfly, I always feel that is it a messenger, a sign that my father is near.

When I think about dragonflies, I remember that my great-grandmother’s broach was a dragonfly. I do not know its story but I know she wore that pin every day. When we were small, she would pretend that the dragonfly could “bite.” We would advance a nervous finger, she would hide a smile as she covertly aimed the sharp end of the stickpin. At her unexpected jump forward, we would all dissolve into complicit giggles, a rare moment of connection with this woman from a different time.

What I have loved about dragonflies is their iridescence, the veins of black in the transparent, barely-there double wings. Just recently I read that some Native Americans consider the dragonfly a sign of renewal after a period of great hardship. A rainbow that flies.

The second group of dragonflies hovered high above a sun-dappled street. I stop to count. Five, no, six. I stand for a long time, watching.

They dart into the sun and out.

Last Friday we had guests for dinner. Husband was out of town so it was just me and five boys. We had our traditional roast chicken dinner, mashed potatoes, and what according to son the older is the best part of the meal, my gravy.

Afterward, we replaced our standard Shabbas Table Talk, our weekly study of ethics, with a reading of a prayer which hangs on our dining room wall. Each boy took his turn reading aloud.

May this home blossom with love and learning. May those who dwell within treasure goodness and generosity. … May happiness, hope, and good health nourish all who enter and all who depart.

I had left out the drums from our Monday night lesson. Son the younger demonstrated the rhythm he had learned. One of the guests sat at the second drum and took up the beat. Another guest went to the piano and added to the music. Each boy took his turn demonstrating and encouraging, learning and teaching.

I stood in the kitchen, washing dishes and listening. A warm happiness in my heart.

May creativity and kindness be valued within this loving environment.

When my sister and I were young, one afternoon around Memorial Day we would help our grandmother load mason jars of peonies and black-eyed susans, roses and sweet peas into my mother’s car and go to the cemetery.

There, along with my brother, we would lay on our bellies and watch the fish in the pond while my mother and grandmother brushed grass clippings off the tombstones of my great-grandfather and my mother’s sister, who died before my mother was born. My grandmother would send us to a nearby faucet to fetch the water with which she would fill vases set deep in the earth before dividing her flowers between the graves.

Today my sister and I made our annual trip to the cemetery together. Now there are many more graves to decorate: my great-grandmother, my grandfather, and my grandmother herself, as well as my mother and my step-father. As we work, my sister and I, to brush clipping off the tombstones and fill vases with water and flowers, my sister tells me family stories. I listen, marveling that she has collected the lives of people I only vaguely remember.

Before we leave, my sister offers to show me the grave of my grandfather’s stepfather. I don’t remember ever visiting it before. We find it finally, on the far side of the large tree rather than the downhill side. It is a simple white stone with his name and dates of birth, 1860, a year before the outbreak of the civil war, and death, 1913 (of an accidental overdose of morphine).

A few feet away we find a stone marked simply BABY, a family name, and the dates June 25, 1925, and August 25, 1925.

After the heat of the afternoon pushes us toward the car, my sister tells me that there was an epoch in which she and her husband spent the summer traveling from cemetery to cemetery, to visit the graves of the hundred or so relatives in the area.

One of the cemeteries is so old, she says, that almost no one remembers that it exists. At this cemetery, she continues, she and her husband had learned of the grave of a small child and had adopted it, visiting it and decorating it with flowers. “No one but us even knows it’s there,” she said, getting into the car.

In the newer part of this cemetery, behind us now as we drive out, there is a section reserved for babies. Wind chimes hang from trees, pinwheels stuck into soft ground turn furiously in the breeze. Balloons tug at their strings, straining for the freedom of the sky.

I think this way of people, the living and the dead. Both anchored to the earth and heaven-bound. And that we all, the living and the dead, like to have the clippings brushed from our gravestones, and to have our lives, however brief, remembered.

Mondays I have a half hour between dropping off son the elder and teaching my first class. Not far from my Monday teaching assignment is a church with a labyrinth. Tucked into the L of the church, the labyrinth is open to trees and street on the other two sides.

It is gravel with small pavers set into the earth to mark the spiral path leading to the center. Shaded by the building’s shadow, the air is cool. The street is quiet. I see rather than hear the wind moving tree limbs.

The crunch of small stones under my feet is something I feel as well as hear. It is satisfying somehow. Like some kind of inner resistance breaking down, giving way.

As I walk, I imagine a small blossom springing up behind me, one in the trace of each footstep.

Once in the center, I face the four directions. My hands empty at my sides, I ask myself to truly see what there is to be seen.

Walking out, I am carrying a small bubble of space inside me.

No matter when I finish, I am always right on time.