“Queen Anne’s lace?” she asks.
“Pretty, aren’t they?” I say.
The flowers of Queen Anne’s Lace are white or pink with a small purple-black floweret in the center. Legend has it that Queen Anne pricked her finger while tatting lace. A drop of blood fell onto her lace, leaving a single dark spot in the middle.
The four of us gather every July for our birthdays. We’re all 85 this year, all living alone. This year, as promised, I’m bringing cupcakes, along with the flowers I’ve foraged from the swamp behind my house.
I think back to when my wife died, freeing me from catastrophes and caretaking. For a decade I’ve dreamt she’s alive again. But we had a funeral! I tell her. Do we have to go through this again? Lately, though, those dreams have stopped. In their place, I picture scenes from our first 30 years together and feel her with me, watching. Would she condone the deception I’ve planned?
As Jeanine drives, a little too fast, I ponder “85.” I’ve got typical complaints: wobbly balance, creaky knees, a little hearing loss. I don’t drive any more, by fiat of my children. But I’ve still got all my marbles, don’t I? I fiddle with the bouquet in my lap and steady the box when Jeanine careens around a corner.
My destination, a saltbox house festooned with ivy, comes into view at the end of a gravelly path. I heave myself out of the back seat, clutching the offerings, then inch my way along rocky unevenness to the door. Minding my feet as if they’re errant children, I guide them across the transom.
My old friends Emily, Lulu, and James are seated around the kitchen table. Having known them since college, I’ve never gotten used to their old-people’s hair—silver, white, gray, missing. Emily, who owns the house, wears a halo of baldness on the back of her head. They all look up and nod, but don’t rise to greet me. How hard would it be to get up for a hug?
I glance from one to the next, mentally cataloging their lives: their achievements, their loved ones, their health. I start feeling superior, till I imagine what my wife would say. Enough with the competition, Arthur. Why tell yourself useless stories, at this stage of the game?
I hold out the weed cupcakes my daughter made. “These are from Allison,” I tell my friends. “She thinks we’re a hilarious bunch of old potheads.”
“They’ll take the edge off. Thanks for bringing them,” says Emily, taking the box and bouquet to the kitchen. James gazes out the window.
The Queen Anne’s lace plant is entirely edible, with a long history in herbal medicine. However, the forager must learn to distinguish it from the poisonous wild hemlock, which it closely resembles. The umbrella shape of Queen Anne’s lace is flat-topped, while the hemlock umbel is rounded. The stem of Queen Anne’s lace is hairy and thin, while wild hemlock has reddish purple blotches on a thick stem.
Emily motions to me to sit. Paper, pens, and envelopes are spread across the table. My friends resume the letters they had begun, exchanging news about children and grandchildren. I’m quiet awhile, thinking about how loud the katydids are this year, and about my first great-grandchild on the way.
“I don’t think we should do it.”
“It was your idea in the first place, Arthur,” says James.
“Remember the alternatives,” says Lulu. “Out of money, bedridden or demented, forcing our kids to take care of us.”
“People weren’t meant to live this long,” says James.
“I know, we’ve been over it every year,” I say. “But now that we’ve reached the magic number, I have second thoughts. I can’t say if it’s cowardice to want to keep going, or courage. Or both.”
“We’ve psyched ourselves up for a long time,” says Emily. “To choose our own fate, not wait for random events. Not to mention spare our children.”
“We all have to decide for ourselves, Arthur,” says Lulu.
The others murmur in agreement and return to their letters. They retreat to their own thoughts, but each one glances at me from time to time, eyes soft or wary. Finally, I get up and walk out into twilight. No hugs on the way out either.
I get another death-defying driver for the ride home: Miguel in a white Subaru, not a talker. In the back seat, I take out my phone and start messaging my friends’ children. There will be hell to pay, but I’m willing.
All parts of the wild hemlock plant are toxic, especially when ingested. Death through hemlock poisoning was a common punishment for ancient Greek prisoners, Socrates most famously. Ingesting six to eight hemlock leaves can be fatal for adult humans.
I imagine the scene back at Emily’s house. Emily serves the cupcakes, then returns to the kitchen. She separates the flowers from their newspaper shroud. Her fingers brush their thin hairy stems as she peels off leaves, ten for each person’s bowl of salad. Admiring the purple spot in the heart of each flat, lacy flower, she arranges them in a vase to grace the table.
I also imagine my wife surveying the scene: a wry smile, a gentle rebuke. You know what they say, Arthur. To fear death is to think oneself wise when one is not.
Dear Phebe is an out-of-the ordinary autobiography, an encounter with the myth (and truth) of Judy Wells’ own origins and destiny. Sorting through family letters, the Berkeley poet hears voices from her ancestors—three Dickinson sisters who went out west in the 1860s to seek their fortunes as pioneer schoolteachers. I loved every twist and turn of this mind-tripping story and laughed with glee when the author finds herself in the after-life with the Dickinson sisters, and then ends up returning her great-grandmother Phebe's 100-year-overdue book to the San Francisco Public Library.
— Bridget Connelly, Forgetting Ireland
With Dear Phebe, poet Judy Wells has produced a cutting-edge work of art that combines family ancestry research with poetic interrogations. Each Dickinson sister she profiles has a unique trajectory to California; all are waylaid by what Jane Austen called “the marriage plot.” Wells sings to them, dances with them (and away from them), challenges them, excavates them from a box of letters into the light of the 2lst-century and a world they could not have imagined. This book is a wholly new form, fusing history and poetry, inspiring both disciplines.
— Lauren Coodley, author of California: A Multicultural Documentary History and The Same River Twice
“Go West, young man,” is the famous command, but young women also heeded this advice. Among them were Judy Wells’ great-grandmother Phebe Marsh Dickinson and her two sisters, Delia and Abbie, distant cousins of Emily Dickinson, who came to California from Massachusetts in the late 19th century. In Dear Phebe, Wells chronicles their stories in poetry and prose in narratives that are so compelling I didn’t want the book to end.
— Lucille Lang Day, Married at Fourteen: A True Story and Becoming an Ancestor
For more about Dear Phebe and the author, go to her website: http://www.judywellspoet.com
Dear Phebe can be ordered directly from the author for $27.95 (22.95 + 5.00 s/h).
To pay by check, make the check out to Judy Wells and contact her at jwellspoet@att.net for her address.
To pay by PayPal/credit card, send $27.95 to jwalfredsen@yahoo.com.
In "What's this for?" include Dear Phebe, your name and address. 
Jennifer Thomas began writing fiction after a long career as a science writer. Her stories have been published in 365tomorrows, Flash Fiction Magazine (contest honorable mention), Bewildering Stories, Women on Writing (second place contest winner), 101 Words, Windward Review, and Does It Have Pockets? among others. You can find some of her work at 
windflower lives with her wife and two dogs in western Massachusetts on unceded homelands of the Pocumtuc, Nipmuc, and Nonotuck people. She co-founded the Feminist Arts Program at the University of Massachusetts, published and edited Chomo Uri, a women’s multi-arts magazine, and in 1976 produced the first National Women’s Poetry Festival. Her poetry has been published in numerous journals and anthologies. Her chapbook Age Brings Them Home to Me was published earlier this year by Finishing Line Press.