I

It was the money plant that pointed the way.  The brown stems were brittle and ready to snap at the touch and the pods thinned like a layer of flaking, tanned skin.   But I grabbed a branch, broke the stalk, shook it, the brown flat seeds floating into my open palm.  I peeled the sheath of another small parchment oval away and there was a slight glimmer, a hint of muted pearl like a single streak of white light on a gray sea.

II

It was the money plant that pointed the way.  I remember searching for it in bramble and weeds, in blackberry patches, and stands of glossy evergreen bushes.  It pushed its way out into the air, ready to be plucked.  My son at three tugged the brown stalks until they gave way, and then he held the cool silk oval to his cheek, soft as tissue paper.  And I remember that we both carefully pulled away the outer browned layers and there was the silver, untouched, glimmering in the sun.  That was thirty years ago.

III

And later each time when I went to the bay, when my son was five and seven and thirteen, we searched for the money plant, looked for it against gray picket fences, weeds on the side of the road, stands of rose hips.  We looked for it as the ocean turned violet, midnight, or fresco blue, but the plant was not there.  It had disappeared.  The floating seeds and silver white discs gone.

IV

Then I return to a cottage by the sea when I am sixty-five, return to watch the light on the bay. The flecks of silver turned to liquid streaks that sparked in the sun.  A vision that brought delight and awe.  A comfort at a time when the only certainty was flux and change.  I accept so much even the ache in my gut.  The friends lost to cancer, the mother gone, the lost son gone from home, a wanderer never to return.  I see them.   Their shadows passing through my body in nightmares.  The screams of my mother, her leaden shuffle before death; the blank eyes of my father in the midst of dementia; the friend’s crow-like voice on the telephone days before he died. These memories flood my mind as I stare at the sea.

V

I walk back to the cottage, expecting nothing.  Then I see it.  The money plant, darkened by fall, more brittle than in early summer.  I break off a stem, peel the browned film away—peel each side carefully because there are cuts in the oval, and some pods are broken and ragged.  I find one untouched by wind or rain.  Pull away the sheaths.  And there it is.  A small parchment oval.  Yellow white with a hint of silver.  I break off several more that are intact.   And when I blow against the pods, they rustle but don’t crack off the stems.  They flutter in the air like translucent wings.

VI

The money plant points the way.
There is a silver sheen that stops my breath.
A glint that erases time.