Midafternoon as a storm threatens in, I’m at a stretch of lakeshore where I’ve never swum, and I push in. I’m on the prowl for an eagle, which I never find, and the day has grown muggier than I imagined.

What a month of May this has been. My mother’s death ripples through the amazing forsythia and lilac season, through writing and the steady complexity of work I do for the local Selectboard. At a nearby farm, I buy hothouse basil and tomato starts. A woman I know slightly strikes up a conversation. In the past, our lives ran on weirdly similar tracks, involving divorce, sudden visits from the FBI, the miasma of disorientation. Now, we swap mother stories beneath an enormous lilac. I breathe in the blossoms’ scent.

A few years back, I volunteered in my youngest’s elementary school classroom to assist with a nature program that the kids loved. Naturalist and artist, the teacher kept using the phrase “in the edge.” She pointed out that life thrives at the crossing borders of field and forest, of riverbank, the edges of a homogenous world.

I’m in the edge these days. May’s heat notwithstanding, the water is bitterly cold. I swim out with my lousy swimming skills, my garden’s dirt washing away, the storm clouds hammering together over the glassine water, some of the day yet to come. On the shoreline again, sharp stones gouge my soles.