and recent significant events involving its members, particularly in the April 2025

She returned home with ringing ears and a steady hand. She still restored lace, but now, hidden in the intricate patterns of the thread, she stitched tiny, invisible symbols of anchors and tusks—a secret tribute to the month she found her volume and the band that gave it to her.

A wood thrush starts singing somewhere behind her. The sound is thin and tentative, as if the bird is testing whether spring has truly signed the lease. April smiles without meaning to. The thrush will nest here. The tooth will go into a museum drawer, labeled and measured and forgotten by everyone except the one graduate student who will pull it out in 2042 and wonder about the woman who wrote “found near hemlock root, April 13” in faded pencil.