Spring has unfolded in waves of purple and white. The scent of it nearly overwhelmed me when I went out to gather some violets for a floral tart I planned to bake. Clouds churned past the sun, casting shadows as I picked, but my glass jar was pretty well full by the time the first plump, round raindrops began to fall.

As I ran back to the shelter of the porch, a thought sprang unbidden to my mind: This isn’t quite right. There should be a child here. A tiny human should be scampering for cover alongside me, mossy stones and clover soft under bare feet.

It was a strange thought, because I don’t have any children. My nieces and nephews live far away, as do any close friends who would let me borrow their littl’uns for a spring afternoon.

And all that is fine, normally. Just that the rainy garden, all green and fragrant, seemed to cry out for a small creature with wide eyes to really appreciate it all: the ferns unfurling in the gully; the violets bashful along the path; the lilacs that the bumblebees so love all in heady bloom. There should have been an audience gathered ‘round the shaded patch of lilies-of-the-valley, where rain had set the delicate bells to tinkling.

“This is how May smells,” I would have said if there were someone there to hear it. “Perfume and petrichor.” But there was no one, and it felt like a crime.

Now, I am quite small and can be childlike in my own way, but my creaky joints and cynicism make a poor substitute for the innocent absorption of an actual child. The blossoms, I could hear, wondered what they’d gotten all dressed up for if not to inspire a youthful imagination.

“What shall I do?” I asked the plants. As if in answer, another thought popped into my head:

Why, go out a-snatchin’, of course.

And at that moment I saw clearly who I was, who I’d always been. I was the old woman in the forest, the fairytale witch with the lopsided smile and long scraggly hair who welcomes stray children into her garden. This reclusive crone is always assumed to have sinister intentions—why would she want to fatten up strange children if not to gobble them up?—but that isn’t it at all. She’s simply tapped into nature’s wild plumpening instincts so particularly potent in spring.

Glut yourself on honey and blossoms! Spring says. It’s been a long winter—roll in the grass with the worms and soothe your bee stings with chewed plantain leaves! Scratch strange glyphs into bits of sycamore bark with a pointy stick! And peel off those socks this instant!

How could every child know that dandelions turn into wishes if not for the wild old woman? Who taught the first child to coax a whistle from a blade of grass or chain a daisy? Who discovered that snapdragons could talk? Why, the solitary crone made giddy with spring, of course. (Though who first taught her remains an eternal mystery.) And every year she lurks behind gnarled mossy tree trunks, eager to share what she knows with the curious little bairns.

So watch out, all you careful parents. Auntie Carrie is coming to snatch up your wee ones. I’ll spirit them away to eat dill-pickle sandwiches in green-bean teepees and crouch on rocks at the edge of the river, investigating the tadpoles. Small hands and toes were made for mud puddles, and Auntie Carrie is happy to facilitate while pouring pink lemonade into cracked teacups for a blanket picnic, grinningly piling violet tartlets onto her best china platter.

Not forever, though, of course. I’ll send them home eventually, with crumbs in their pockets and snails in their hair and fingers sticky with jam, waving a beribboned animal skull fastened on the end of a stick.

If you didn’t know any better, you might not even know I’d been up to any baby-snatching at all. You might think this gorgeous pink-cheeked soaking-in of youthful glories had been merely the influence of the spring, the flowers, the rain.