I have just moved to a new house 100 miles south of the town on the coast of Maine where I raised my four children. I am starting again in a new city with my youngest, who is just 12. Yesterday we met the neighbors as we scrabbled around the privet hedge looking for our cat. 

It turns out that my neighbor, Maeve, has an infestation of lantern plants around her compost pile—stretching from the pallets she uses to define her vegetable garden, past the barberry that once marked the dividing line between our yards, and around the Old Town canoe that leans on a plastic water barrel. The plants are knee high in the shade under an old box alder and, like most of their cousins in the nightshade family, they have elongated, heart shaped leaves, their bottoms elongated toward teardrop as if pulled by gravity down toward the earth. 

Maeve tells me she finds them annoying: they pop up uninvited and she has long since tired of the fairy quality of the lanterns—which glow orange, uniformly orange, nearly fluorescent, as if marking the entrance to a leprechaun mound. They appear at the end of the summer, their stems appearing out of the leaf mold, rocking back and forth with every breeze, marking the change of seasons. The time when the veil between this world and the next is narrowest, the time of plenty when we have enough abundance from the earth to remember the spirits of those we have lost. 

Lantern plants have invaded the temperate climate zones in a band around the earth: in Japan they light the way of gratitude toward the ancestors who have come before us. In West Virginia, they are invasive. Here in Maine, people say they will beat out competing plants—goutweed and wild plantain—but the winters are still harsh enough, even here near the ocean, to keep them in check. 

In the spring, the lantern plants will appear through the snow, the warmth of their rhizomes melting the ice just a little around their stems, the orange papery skins will have long since faded away—blown away by the winds, or slowly evaporated by rain, leaving only a golden filigree cage marking what the veins, the internal blood vessels of their husks, glow around a single orange berry. Like the sleeve of skin around a tomatillo, the ribs and cross branches of the lantern plants are absurdly strong: they survive the crush of winter. Inside this cobweb of leftover petal, lies a round, shiny fruit. 

Every other piece of the plant, is deadly to humans and animals, but this little ball, the cherry inside this ground cherry, is edible: filled apparently with vitamin C and some compound that eases the pain of childbirth, fevers of adulthood and the lifelong excesses internal heat that leads to crankiness. You can collect it carefully in the spring—checking each for ripeness to be sure that the toxic solanine and other alkaloids that fill the immature berries have been converted out of them, into sour fruits the flavor of rose hips. You can wash your hands and serve them, jammy and sour, in chutney with roast lamb for Easter. 

Maeve apologizes for the plants: they will colonize my grass, they will annoy me too, she says. She has her two-month-old sleeping against her chest, and she walks with her hips still tilted squared off from pregnancy. I realize how young Maeve is when her wife appears, holding their other two-month-old, who rotates their head to look toward me. I have one of those flashes of recognition: I am older than they are and I am filled with baby longing. 

Just the night before, I laid in bed with my lover and had one of those involuntary interruptions, both physical and entirely in your brain—like a seizure in your intestines, a dry heave, an Oh God, in some mix of post-coital satisfaction and panic. The unbidden worry that I would get pregnant. And this feeling was followed by the sleepy thought that perhaps, his hand on my abdomen, that would not be so bad, and I imagined a blue-eyed newborn with fondness. 

But after a moment, I was not too tired to remember, to recognize with embarrassment, that my body, that this body I have now, is middle aged. That I will never be pregnant again. I scanned my body for signs that it was different, for some sign that would remind me that I have changed. I feel like myself. But still, I know I am 52. I didn’t expect this. 

And I suppose by this, I mean both the lust that came to me in middle age and the feeling of being myself in my naked body, the new house and the starting over, and the absurd amount I know with something verging on mellow equanimity. The things I know for sure: that people will worry inevitably about whether you can eat the berries of the lantern plant, because it is an improbable harvest of winter, coming long after the real cherries, the ones from the trees, are past frozen and rotting on the branches. Like the child of St. Anne, the fruit of the lantern is too freighted with symbolism to be real: the child of poisonous leaves and stems, ripening in winter, meant to temper the illnesses of childbearing, the heats of midlife and the choleric temper of adulthood. 

I mean to say that the younger me did not know as much as I do now about ground cherries and lantern plants. I have gardened now long enough that I can feel the way rhizomes criss-cross my neighbor’s yard. Walking in my stockinged feet on the fallen leaves in their yard I can feel them, know they are there under my feet, one plant attached to another, communicating, sending out signals, propagating, growing in a vast underground net the shape of my spider veins, preparing for the golden reliquaries of the lantern plants that will stack up against the fence in the spring.