Long after she sold the sewing machine business, Mumma had continued her subscriptions to McCall’s and Vogue and Vanity Fair and, of course, she had saved every issue, “just in case.” For a whole day, I stacked them and tied them up with string, but I often paused to gaze at the Palmolive advertisements on the back covers. There, the soap’s green tint was lent a foreign glamor by a slender olive-skinned girl who sat beneath palm trees and beckoned the customer toward starlit pyramids.

Another Ohio winter lowered the skies; for days at a time, noon was as dark as dusk. During the holidays, I passed many a long empty evening reading Douglas’s mission diaries about Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, or paging through Lillie’s scrapbooks of their travels. The idea of sun and desert heat began to make a compelling case as Rosie and I took our short, cold walks. Rosie loved the snow and would tunnel through it after chipmunks, digging with relentless determination until the ice balls between her toes made movement impossible and she had to be carried inside. I tried to emulate her energetic pleasure in the season but felt increasingly adrift as silent nights became dismal days.

You may be wondering why I didn’t go back to my job in the Cleveland school district. Well, at the end of the war, women had achieved the suffrage, but the Nineteenth Amendment didn’t carry with it the right to make a living. There were so many demobilized soldiers needing work that we ladies were often summarily dismissed from employment. With plenty of money and no family of my own to support, I could not bring myself to protest when I was replaced by a returning veteran. Even so, I missed my students and my colleagues.

Rosie was not my sole companion in those days, although she was the only one of flesh and blood. In the years after the Great War and the Great Influenza, many of us were visited by apparitions, and I saw—or, rather, heard—my share of spirits.