The November sun angles through the window onto my mother’s thin arm resting on the worn oak kitchen table. We are in a house built high in the air; a treehouse perched above a brown ribbon of bayou. Every day she comments on the trees and sky as though they are her companions. The skin of her arm in the sunlight is transparent. The web of blue veins is illuminated like a map of tiny tributaries. I imagine them as different kinds of paths. Maps of hiking trails studied in that moment before you set out. A schematic of electrical circuitry. The patterned design of a turtle shell. Or as paths of energy, what they call Chi, the life force that binds all things in the universe. Her wedding band slips on a delicately bony finger. She is 98 years old, and when she says ‘Daddy’ I know she does not mean the man she was married to, my father, but her own. Their conversations are part of her solid memories that persist among the fleeting ones, like what we ate for lunch or how she fell and bruised her knee this week. I’m afraid the skin will tear in places, and she will leak out. Yet for nearly a century the skin has held this tough, compassionate and loving spirit tethered to the earth, the veins an imprint of one unique human life. One day she will leave both skin and veins behind.