Cherry reflects on how premonitions—those uncanny moments when someone senses what is about to happen—can change a person profoundly. She tells the story of her grandmother Lizzie, who sensed danger while hanging washing on the clothesline and looked down just in time to see a red-bellied black snake slithering across baby Mae's stomach. Her grandmother reacted instantly, snatching Mae out of the basket and allegedly spinning her above her head. This became a frequently retold family story, with Mae skeptical about the spinning and Grandpa insisting there must have been a rational explanation like a rustle or movement, though he always relented and agreed Grandma "just knew."

Cherry then describes her mother before Arthur's death by lightning. Mae was charismatic, clever, pretty, and the first mother on their street to learn to drive, but she was not "unusual" in any supernatural sense. She spent her days on domestic tasks, read romance novels, and swore at magpies dropping mulberries on her clean laundry. Mae did read palms, but only casually—mimicking her own mother Lizzie—and never charged a fee. Palm readings with her girlfriends dissolved into laughter, and tea-leaf readings for Cherry were more like storytelling than genuine belief.

The family shared common superstitions—knocking on wood, throwing spilled salt over a shoulder, noting double-yolk eggs—but none of it was taken seriously. After Arthur's death by lightning, however, everything changed. All superstitions became serious. Cherry concedes that perhaps her mother really did foresee Arthur's death, but notes with some bitterness that if Mae truly believed he would be struck by lightning, she might have warned him not to go rock fishing on a stormy day.