By Sarah Pearce

After our twins were born, my husband and I went to counseling for relationship trouble that was somewhat caused by and somewhat contributing to a mismanaged sex life. Parick’s insurance sent us to Paul, whose office is at a holistic health center – a serene oasis in the woods, where wealthy naturalists go to practice yoga and Tai Chi.

Women during pregnancy and moreso after childbirth go through dramatic physiological changes that affect their health, body shape, body image and mental status. Intercourse in the aftermath of childbirth is painful. Things are in the wrong places, breasts are leaking, and abdominal skin swishes desperately in the opposite direction of force as if trying to escape the horrific scene before it. Although your desperately undersexed husband tells you repeatedly that you are sexy to him, you are deeply aware that sexy to him is not the same thing as sexy in general.

For us, this awkwardness continued, but sex eventually improved slightly. At least it wasn’t painful, but for the first time in my life, I wanted to cover my body. Also, we were exhausted. We had two babies and work to manage. What little time we had was spent doing laundry or, better, sleeping. Although we were step-in-step on child-rearing, we grew apart sexually. I was frustrated with the infrequency of sex, but I had no idea how to fit more of it into our busy schedule.

In November 2007, on a hunch, I checked the Internet browser history on my laptop and found long strings of cybersex. Patrick had a whole sex life that didn’t include me. I approached him, and we talked about the changes to our sex life. After about a week of consideration, I decided to try sex chatting, too, in the hopes we could regain some intimacy. We tried it, and sex became more frequent but hardly better.

A month later, the day the twins turned one, my grandfather died. My grandmother, his wife, had died two weeks earlier. I spent the evening packing our bags to go to my parents’ house for the weekend, so we could attend the services. Patrick spent the evening having cybersex with a brunette from Portsmouth.

It would be months before Patrick and I finally went to counseling. We each met with Paul separately, and then together. With Paul’s help, we sorted through our biggest problems and some smaller ones, too. That is how we resolved the Goddamn Sippy Cup Dilemma.

The Goddamn Sippy Cup Dilemma began when, at some point in the blur of having babies and sleep deprivation, dead grandparents and a flailing midriff, I didn’t always manage to rinse out the cups in a timely manner, an act that was as important to my marital status as not having sex apparently, because one day, Patrick said, “I’m bringing up the sippy cups in therapy.”

In therapy, we learned a technique called reflective listening. One person expresses a feeling or a thought, and the other person repeats it back. At first, it felt awkward, but once we were listening to and thinking about each other’s feelings, our relationship started to improve.

It works like this:

Person 1: When you don’t have sex with me, and instead make up a story with an anonymous person on the internet, it hurts my feelings.

Person 2: When I don’t have sex with you and instead make up a story with an anonymous person on the internet, it hurts your feelings. Is that right?

Person 1: Yes, that’s right. Also, I feel abandoned when I’m grieving and instead of hanging out with me, you jerk off into a trash can.

Person 2: I hear you saying you feel abandoned when I jerk off into a trash can instead of supporting you while you’re grieving. Is that right?

Person 1: Yes, that’s right.

Person 2: I am sorry for abandoning you to jerk off into the trash can. I would like to have sex with you, but I don’t want to bother you. Also, it makes me feel bad about myself that you feel insecure about your body. Also, you never rinse the sippy cups.

Person 1: I hear you saying you don’t want to bother me, and you feel bad about yourself because I am feeling insecure. Is that right?

Person 2: Yes, that’s right. Also, it makes me angry that you never rinse the sippy cups.

Person 1: I am sorry you feel bad about my insecurity and that you don’t want to bother me. You don’t bother me. I want to be near you. I love you.

Person 2: And the sippy cups.

Person 1: I hear you saying you’ll change. Is that it?

Person 2: No.

Paul: Sarah, what I think Patrick is saying is that he is concerned for the health of your children, and he views rinsing the sippy cups as a courtesy to a fellow parent and a sign of respect.

Person 1: What I hear Patrick saying is, “Blah, blah, blah, fuckity blah,” because I don’t have any time to go to the bathroom from 7 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., and I’m not exaggerating, so Patrick is correct that I truly, deeply do not care about his feelings on the goddamn motherfucking sippy cups that he can shove in his stupid, furry ear.

Paul: I feel this dialogue is breaking down.

Person 2: Why can’t you listen to reason on this? Why don’t you respect my feelings? I listen to yours!

Person 1: Because mine are important. And yours are about plastic cups.

The reflective listening goes on like that for a while until someone wins. Winning is a really important part of any couples therapy session, because without it, one person could wind up rinsing out sippy cups for the rest of her children’s young lives. If you succumb to humility and acknowledge that perhaps you’ve become obstinate on the issue, you will have lost. On the other hand, you’ll probably have a healthier relationship.

By Kelsey Osgood

I am ten.  It is my first trip to Europe.  I’ve always asked my parents to take me, but my mom said I “wouldn’t appreciate it.”  That’s just false, because the only thing I really wanted was to travel.   When I was younger and my nanny Carmel’s husband went to foreign countries for business, he would bring me back beautiful dolls–– one wearing a kimono from Japan, one in wooden shoes from Holland, a girl from Mexico with little gold earrings that really dangled –– and I would sit them on the brown carpeted stairs and play International School.

Now I am in Ireland and I am appreciating it very much.  Ireland is the country I’ve always most wanted to see.  Carmel lived in Dublin with her thirteen brothers and sisters until she was sixteen, when she moved to America to be a nanny.  Sometimes I feel Irish even though I have searched my family tree and only have one Irish relative.  I know how to count to five in Gaelic and I know all the words to “Sweet Molly Malone.”  I’ve seen My Left Foot, which is a pretty grown-up movie.  I have a Claddagh (pronounced “clah-dah”) ring that I never take off.  Carmel has told me many stories about Ireland, about how they used hot coals to warm the beds before they went to sleep and how the nuns in school would rap your knuckles with a ruler if you misbehaved.  She had tuberculosis when she was twelve, and even though all her hair fell out, she said it was the best time of her life because the nuns had never been so nice to her.

I have already done many new things since I’ve been here.  I tried venison and watched Sky News.  I went to Irish school for a day with Carmel’s niece, Amy.  I bragged about having a two-acre backyard so they would think I was cool and sort of rich.  I still feel guilty about that.  We went home for lunch break to Amy’s house and when we came back, everyone told me a boy was saying he “fancied” me at recess.  The only boy at home who like likes me once told me I looked like a hamster when I yawn.

Today we are going on a double-decker bus tour of Dublin.  I am wearing a rainbow fleece jacket, leggings, boat shoes and an ugly hat.  The bus drives all over Dublin and the tour guide points out Saint Stephen’s Green, Trinity College, the Zoo, and other important places.  I look out the window as monuments pass us by.  At lunch we stop at an art museum.  We eat on the sculpture floor, but I don’t like anything they have to eat, so I wander around and look at the sculptures all covered in white sheets.  I figure they’re being cleaned or something.  They look creepy, but in a good way, like a movie.  I hear Carmel call my name from a table where she and Al are sitting.

“Kelsey, I have to tell you something,” she says.

My shoulders tense up.  I remember the last time Carmel said that to me.  It was two summers ago, and she was driving me to tennis lessons.  As she was backing out of her driveway, she stopped her silver Nissan short and said, “Kelsey, I have something to tell you.”  I just looked at her.  It was a beautiful day.

She sighed.  “You know how you could never have a kitten because I am allergic to cats?”

I had always wanted a kitten, but Carmel was allergic, and so I was stuck with big, slobbering dogs.  Sometimes when Carmel would come to pick me up at a friend’s house, if the friend had a cat, we’d have to tell the mom to lock it in a separate room so Carmel wouldn’t even see it.

So yes, I knew.

“Well, I’m not actually allergic to cats.  I have a terrible phobia of them.  Something horrible happened to me involving cats when I was younger.  It’s so horrible that I can’t tell you what it is.”
I asked her to please tell me, but she wouldn’t say anything about the cats, only about how everyone who knew what happened told her that yes, it was so, so terrible.

So maybe you can understand why I don’t like stories that begin with, “I have to tell you something.”

I stand in front of Carmel and Al and do my best to look very cool.  I don’t say anything –– I just wait.
“When I was sixteen,” she says, “before I came to America, I had a baby, Peter, and I had to give him up for adoption.  I’ve never met him before, even though I’ve looked for him.  But as it happens, Peter hired a detective to find me, which he did, and tonight I’m going to meet Peter and you’re coming with us.”

She looks at me like she wants me to cry.

“Okay,” I say.
“If you don’t want to come, we can take you back to Amy’s house.”
“No, it’s okay,” and I walk away to look at the ghost sculptures again.
Back on the bus, I feel something caught in my windpipe, and I realize I am afraid –– more than afraid, terrified.  I start to regret pretending I am fine.  I am not.  But why am I so afraid to go?  What is wrong with me?  It’s another one of my weird feelings, definitely my problem, and I have to try really hard to seem like it’s fine, after all.

When the bus tour is over, we walk toward our parked red rental car.  I am holding my breath.  Carmel or Al asks me a question –– I can’t tell who it is –– and a sob bursts out instead of an answer.

“Take me back to Amy’s, please!”

They look at me like I’m crazy, and in a panic ask me what’s wrong?  I am crying and I can’t say anything except that I want to go back to Amy’s.  Once we get in the car, Al says, “It’s the opposite direction.  You shouldn’t make Carmel upset like this.”  So I swallow my tears and my terror and don’t say a thing except, “Okay.”

As we’re driving, Carmel tells me more about when she got pregnant and about her son, Peter.

“Oh, Kelsey,” she says, “It was horrible.  They made me go to a convent in the country.  I wasn’t allowed to see any of my family for six months.  We just knit all day long.  Then when I had the baby, they just took him right from me.  I couldn’t even hold him. It was so awful!  Peter used to have a problem with drugs, you know, needles,” she whispers that word, “but he’s okay now.”

We pull into a little street in an ugly suburb of Dublin.  Paul’s house is a dirty, one-story beige house in a line of other dirty, one-story beige houses.  Inside, Carmel and Paul face each other.  Paul is tall and very thin and reeks of cigarettes.  He has big bags under his eyes and little popped blood vessels in his cheeks.  He seems angry.  They hug and I walk away so I don’t have to witness.  I wander into the kitchen, which has a sliding glass door that opens to the backyard.  When I look outside, I see a cat slink by a full dumpster, but I don’t say a word.

by Holly Sneeringer

It is there in the shop window for the holiday season, up close to the glass, reminding me of so much that I had forgotten about.  From the sidewalk, I admire the small gabled roof and delicate gingerbread cutwork, the wide front porch and double French doors, so much that time had nearly erased from my mind—this miniature interior space, tiny rooms with furniture arranged as they are in real houses, the houses where we live out our ordinary days.

And all of a sudden I want it all back.

An old shoebox in my attic is all that is left of my own doll’s house.  Part of the central staircase and the baby grand piano with its broken leg.  A ladder-back chair from the kitchen set, just one now.  The rolltop desk that really rolled.  My little living room had been formal and done in a lovely robin’s egg blue.  The sofa and chair in that blue chintz are there in the box.  I had forgotten about the study until I saw the tiny plaid wool blanket that I’d drape over the winged-back chair with such care, as if someone was really there to use it on a chilly night.  And I had forgotten that I had always imagined a garden and I’d leave the watering can by the front door.  At Christmastime, I’d put tiny trees in every room and hang a wreath on the front door.

Some say that for children the allure of the doll’s house is having control over the adult world of domesticity.  Off in our own inner world we have power, for the tiny pieces fit perfectly in our small hands and we are free to do as we please with the rhythms and routines of family life.  We are free to arrange the rooms as we like (a twin bed in the kitchen doesn’t alarm us in the least), free to have a blaring fire in the fireplace day into night, to serve dinner at any old hour, to open the front door to strangers, to leave dirty dishes for tomorrow.  Yet, the dolls themselves are not the thing at all.  They tend to be a bit too large and a bit too stiff for the house and its furniture, an awkward plastic family, an afterthought.  Rather it is the exquisite smallness of it all, corners, hallways, and stairwells.  Doors and windows.   Nothing is out of our reach.

Of course, I know now that a toy house is nothing like a real house:  the toy house is completely dependent on the imagination, a child’s imagination.  This is what gives the doll’s house life, because, essentially, nothing happens in a doll’s house at all.  There are no changing seasons or holidays to prepare for, no ebb and flow of joy and sorrow, no messes to clean up, no madness. Instead—it is still life.  And I wonder:  Is this what I am after now:  a diminutive version of the good life?  Uninterrupted.  Unhurried.  A quietly ordered home without drama, one that includes only beauty, charm, and repose?   Is this why I want the doll’s house in the shop window…but what in heaven’s name would I do with a doll’s house?  Where would I even put it?

Now as I get closer, I see that somehow this doll’s house is not for me after all. It is much too Victorian, and I favor a more colonial exterior style.  The color pink that it has been painted is much too garish; it would have to be changed to a pale coral.  And the size is all wrong, much too wide when narrow is what I prefer.  Then, as I begin to turn my back on it, I realize that it is lit from within, a dim sparkling light that brightens the rooms just enough to see that the dining room table is set, as if a holiday party is about to begin, as if the guests will be arriving any minute with silver wrapped packages, as if the meanness of the real world is not invited in.

By Russell Winn

I was eleven or twelve when I decided to break icicles off the overhang of the house and build cities in the garden. In the deep cold of an Idaho winter I shoved my creations into the snow among dead flowers and crystallized rhubarb leaves. The big pieces went in base first to make towers. The little ones would be lined up to make roads or stacked like cabin logs to form walls. I piled the shattered hunks that didn’t fit anywhere else into rough pyramids.

I ran out of materials quickly and began searching the neighborhood for more. I talked Mr. Noyes into getting out his ladder and bringing them down from his porch for me so they wouldn’t shatter. The ones from his old shed were my favorite: you could break them off at the base so that whole sections of them stayed together. If you broke the bottoms off they looked like Greek columns and prison bars.

I took the large brown tiles of ice from the tops of the puddles in Mr. Kelly’s driveway for buildings and walls. I took a full wheelbarrow load of ice that had formed into columns away from the Gamble house, sweating and wheezing in the inversion, for what I thought would be the Coliseum, but what turned out to be Stonehenge. I even scraped the dirty black hunks off the underside of the work truck, until my mom yelled at me for ruining my gloves.

A few days later it snowed. I remembered my work and went out to the garden. Much of it was covered in white, and the tops of the small ice structures had melted. They sunk into each other and looked a little bit sadder, a little bit smushed. But I knew that the complexities underneath, the lattice houses, the dirty rocks lining a crude trestle bridge, were still there. As their architect I also held their secrets, even after they melted. So I rebuilt.

In time I had a new city, simpler, built out of smaller bits of ice. I had used up most of the big stuff. It nestled between bits of encrusted flowers, snow, and old ice buildings. I crushed snow into caps for parapets and went to look for more icicles.

Well something’s lost but something’s gained

in living every day

-Joni Mitchell

By Nancy Sharp

I needed him to live. I wanted him to die.

At 37, the world as I knew it was tumbling apart. Brett, my husband of eleven years, lay in Calvary Hospice in Bronx, New York, cloaked in white bedding and captive now to the brain tumor that might have felled him seven years earlier, had he not fought so bravely and been so lucky. It was February 2004, the same month Facebook was launched, a sweet, unwitting tribute, I thought, since Brett had been involved in the Internet boom from the ground up. In better days.

Though only a short drive from Manhattan and set amidst its own cityscape of buildings and screeching cars, Calvary felt a place unto itself, far removed from life outside its red brick exterior. A private oasis of sad, crystalline grief.

Today was day ten and while it pains me to admit it, we were settling into this new routine. I left our twins, then two-and-a-half-years old, with our babysitter, a mother herself of two children, for whom nothing seemed beyond her ability to handle. No sooner did she arrive at our apartment each morning than she crouched down on the colorful rug to play beside the twins and hush their tears so that I could make my way to the hospice, warm coffee in hand and stomach full, but wanting, always, more food to sustain me. I’d arrive at Brett’s bedside, room 443, and find him dozing; his torso elevated, his head propped against a flattened pillow, and pale arms resting limp at his sides. It comforted me to see him upright, for he was a sunken man. Normally his eyes fluttered when I entered the room but sometimes, when he slept heavily, I’d lean over and whisper, “Brett, I’m here,” so that he wouldn’t startle.

I trusted such moments, when he felt my presence, even if he could not convey how he felt in words. By now, the demon tumor had rendered his speech unintelligible. Everything was mangled together for him, the doctor said, his brain a patchwork of crossed wires, and eventually he stopped trying. We communicated through gesture – the light stroking of hands and eyes held to one another’s. During those precious few hours of aloneness, before his parents and sister arrived, I’d creep onto the bed, still and gentle, with my head resting on his shoulder. It was only the night before that he’d smiled at me. It was only yesterday, it seemed, that his wavy chestnut hair dipped over his eyebrows, his green eyes brightened when he told a joke, and his midriff offered a generous inch to hold. He wasn’t that man today: he was bald and scarred and gaunt, his eyes muddy and lined with dark circles beneath.

Still…he was my world.

Which is why I was so unnerved when I came to him that morning, like all the days before, and couldn’t rouse him.

“Brett, I’m here,” I said. His eyes were closed, unflinching even as my breath brushed his lips. “Wake up, please.” Alarmed after a few minutes (that in their silence grew longer), I went to the nurse’s station for help. I wish I remembered the nurse’s name. Was it Mary? She followed me back to the room, took his pulse, and calmly told me he was slipping now into a coma.

“Are you sure?”

Yes, the coma was a certainty, the last certainty before death. We’d been forewarned, of course, but seeing him unresponsive like this was crushing. I wanted him back. I needed more time. The twins needed their father. We had a home and a life and a future, none of which could exist without him, today or four or eight or twenty years from now. “Please, not yet,” I said aloud, urgently, to myself and any higher being who might have heard. My eyes fixed on the circular clock above the door; it was 9:30 a.m., time slipping and frozen at once.

Control is little more than an illusion, yet in the midst of crisis, that thin line of reality blurs. Watching Brett sleep with a rhythmic snore, I imagined using my own life force to resurrect him in between semi-conscious breaths. But how?

I didn’t have to ponder this question long because the eerie stillness of the moment shifted. He began to moan—grotesque, loud, indistinguishable, snorting sounds. His eyes shuddered and he winced with what appeared to be pain (although the doctors assured us he felt none). As he struggled with whatever fury was taking hold of him, his body rose and fell with each jarring sound his mouth made, like an agitated infant or an elderly person. Except he was neither. He was thirty-nine.

Because of my love for him, I could not bear to watch him suffer. It tortured me to watch his battle of breath and life, and it tortured me to want him to stop.

Was it selfish, then, to wish he’d die?

***

Even now, seven years after this awful day and the two days thereafter that built to Brett’s death, I remember the conflict I felt watching him slip behind the veil of life. I am almost embarrassed to admit that I tried to feed him chocolate pudding before his eyes closed for the last time. He had stopped eating and his mother and I felt an urgent, almost primal need to nourish him. So that he wouldn’t die. Hungry. It must have seemed like some sort of absurd comedy, the title of which could have been: Distraught Wife Tries to Resuscitate Husband with Pudding.

Healing takes years. I know this—not only because it is my story—but because of what I’m finally accepting all this time after Brett’s death. Today, when I listen to Both Sides Now I hear so much more. Through the words of the song, I’ve found a way to collapse time. Strangely enough, it’s helped me to remember the better days. Like watching the twins splash in a beautiful mess of red, white and blue popsicle juice.

“Come, poor babe. / I have heard, but not believed, the spirits o’th’dead / May walk again. If such a thing be, thy mother / Appeared to me last night. / For ne’er was a dream / So like a waking.”

William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale

By Magin LaSov Gregg

The first time I walked the big meadow at Shenandoah National Park, flies circled my head and clapped their onion-skin wings against the air. Bess, my best friend since third grade, walked alongside me. Our husbands stood before us in two vertical lines against the smoke-blue sky, far off in a distance we would not reach that day. “What are they trying to prove?” I asked Bess, her pregnant belly protruding like a cocoon. Inside the waters of her womb, a daughter was beginning to take shape. Bess smiled, then moved her shoulders in a pointed shrug. “We’re just too slow.”

We came to the meadow on the weekend of her thirtieth birthday to welcome womanhood. My birthday had come three months earlier, and to calm Bess, I repeated, “Thirty is a threshold,” until the sentence became our mantra. We stooped alongside stalks of milkweed to scan the plant’s silken leaves for monarch butterfly chrysalises, the appointed symbol of our transformation from girls to women. While the law would place us firmly in womanhood at the age of 21 –– the legal drinking age that operates under the assumption that 21 heralds responsible adulthood in America, no matter when a person can vote or go off to war –– neither of us agreed with that idea. At 29, we still felt like teenagers, riddled with insecurities about zits that intersected with hairline wrinkles at our jaws, plagued by riots of giggles for no apparent reason. We knew that thirty would make us grown-ups, but neither of us could explain why.

That day in the meadow, Bess and I found no chrysalises. I tried not to read too much meaning into this absence as I returned to a memory of my mother’s body, bloated by renal failure, during my twenty-first birthday party that felt more like a wake. Six weeks later, I no longer had a mother. “My mother died when I was twenty-one. My father left when I was two,” became sentences that fell from my lips throughout my twenties each time I met a new person who asked after my parents, believing that such questions were innocent. People presumed that my mother had died from cancer, but type-one diabetes was what killed her.

–––––––––––––

Standing in a meadow, I could not help but notice that the landscape swarming with flies and open to the possibility of chrysalises, held birth and death. These binaries that bookend human life were inscribed on each blade of grass, each tree branch, each flower that swayed against the late May wind. Absorbed by this thought, my mind went straight to Demeter, Greek goddess of the corn, and to her daughter Persephone, whom Hades had plucked from a meadow like the one where I now contemplated my tenuous climb to womanhood.

As she grieves for her daughter, Demeter creates a world that embodies her sorrow. Snow lays thick upon the land and the buds of spring refuse to open their petals. Zeus fears the destruction of the mortal race and sends Hermes, his messenger, into the underworld to free Persephone. According to a Homeric Hymn to Demeter, the god finds Persephone sitting beside Hades, “yearning for her mother, and suffering from the unbearable things inflicted on her by the will of the blessed ones.”

Each time I read this story, I detest the gods of the Greek pantheon for perpetuating pain. Suffering, I had learned in my twenties, never happened for a reason. At 30 I could only concede that a side effect of suffering was that pain had opened my capacity to love. The word compassion suggests as much to me since pati, its Latin root, means suffering. Still, the etymological marriage of suffering and compassion feels wrong, as if this union represents the semantic equivalent of falling in love with an abuser.

–––––––––––––

I return to the Shenandoah meadow two months after Bess’s birthday and resume the search for chrysalises. This time I walk the meadow alone. The milkweed that came up to my ankles in May skims my calves in July. Two months ago, the meadow unfurled in a green carpet embroidered with Queen Anne’s Lace and clover. By July, mid-summer heat has scorched the land. Grass the color of straw skirts my hiking boots when I leave the road to wander the field. While I walk, an image of my mother’s coffin shakes loose from the muck of memory. As is the way with memory, I am transported through time and space to her funeral, where I stand behind a wooden podium and read Walt Whitman: “And I said to my spirit When we become the enfolders of those orbs, and the pleasure and knowledge of everything in them, shall we be fill’d and satisfied then? And my spirit said No, we but level that lift to pass and continue beyond.”

Strange, I think, as these words return to me, that I can always be in two places at once. I am 30 and present to my life of vacuuming and grading and dog walking; I am 21 and terrified of a future that death has detonated with the force of a nuclear explosion. The road that divides the meadow in half mirrors this division of self that has defined my twenties –– a division I cannot scale. I may only traverse the road that runs alongside memories that bind me to my mother, to her body that formed my own out of a microscopic egg, and to her disease that my genes may harbor.

A doe bounds into the trees and splays her legs in a perfect golden arc. With the deer who retreats to the forest, Persephone and Demeter leave me. Alone, I contemplate the clover, the bees that dance along its snow-flake buds, the sun that descends the horizon to turn the sky into a slate screen. Night is coming. My mother’s voice transcends the grave to whisper in my ear, “It is not safe for women to walk alone in the dark.” She leaves as soon as she arrives, flowing toward the horizon and murmuring a song, just one word, repeating: Go.

By Cara Ellen Modisett

The evening is gold, the branches still bare against a glowing western sky. The daffodils and crocuses splash colors against new green grass. The tree is gone from the corner of the yard – it was dying, and so cut down, reduced to a stump, then a pile of sawdust. The compost heap is neglected. The vines are green against the back fence, and starting to bloom. The mint is dry and long. “It comes back every year,” my sister says. The butterfly bush grows wild, not trimmed back this season, a tangle. My sister knows its name. I didn’t know it would grow that tall, that fast.

The children watch ants make their busy ways across the deck. “He’s running all over the place!” my nephew exclaims. My niece shrieks, amazed, follows the ants on her own feet and hands, until they disappear into the cracks in the rock wall.

My brother-in-law comes home; Jan, the neighbor next door, comes over with two beers, one for her and one for my sister, Starr Hill, from Charlottesville. The children run back and forth across the grass, back and forth among us, stopping suddenly in front of where we sit cross-legged on the cool grass, waiting to be caught up into hugs. An airplane draws a straight line across the blue sky. Peter looks up and tries to catch it. “Is it my ship?” he asks. I ask where it’s going. If I had a ship that sailed the sky, I’d like it to take me to the top of the Alps, or to Angel Falls, or a iceberg off Newfoundland. “Maybe to the train museum,” he says.

It’s getting late. Bath times, bedtimes. “Thanks for being such a good neighbor,” my brother-in-law says to Jan. She’s been around through pregnancies, childbirths, flu, the end of a medical residency, afternoon walks, neighbors’ marriages, neighbors’ deaths – none of those events mine. Her dogs rouse the dogs cater-cornered, and they bark in a four-dog chorus, making Ruthie wail. “You are tired,” my sister tells her.

Inside, after baths, kids in pajamas, Meg and Paul take apart Ruthie’s crib. “Stand in the doorway,” Meg says, firmly, not wanting the children to be hurt. Ruthie stands and watches her bed disappear, cries. I pick her up and take her into her brother’s room, singing verse after verse of “The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round.” By the time we have gotten to ducks, kitty cats and owls on the bus, the crib is gone, a temporary bed is made, and the world is righted again. She goes to sleep. I go home.

The next day, the house is nearly empty, sun making shadows on the bright hard-wood floors, that joyful brightness of new, empty house, ready for someone’s furniture, snacks, bedtimes, dinner parties, neighbors, pregnancies, flu, afternoon walks.

Two fishing buddies, two flies.

First buddy: call him Bret. He’s a devout adherent of a fly pattern he calls the Blood Nymph. The fly and its name have yet to enter common usage, so I’m not sure where to send you for the recipe or even a photo. I’ll say it’s got a tungsten bead head, collar of red silk, black thread body (tapered), and a red wire rib. The wing is a pair of white biots, the tail a pair of black biots. No dubbing, no hackle. This on a scud hook size 12 down to 16. Picture a severely malnourished Prince Nymph with a bead head, or maybe a Zebra Nymph wearing a tuxedo. Nothing elaborate, but it catches fish. I have seen the Blood Nymph save Bret from blank days and I have seen it outfish other flies three fish to one. Bret catches trout of all varieties on this fly in every season from practically every waterway in Cache Valley and beyond into Wyoming and Montana. When I hold a Blood Nymph in my palm, I half expect it to emit a mystical humming or maybe a faint glow, like Frodo’s sword in The Lord of the Rings.

Second buddy: call him Jeff. While fishing on the Blacksmith Fork the other day Jeff showed me a fly he’s been fishing lately. He wasn’t supposed to show it to me; he swore to one of his other fishing buddies he wouldn’t. The way Jeff tells it, he had to sign some documents in the presence of a Notary before his friend would let him see this fly, and I picture shot glasses and vodka to solemnize the occasion. Only after Jeff ushered me to the middle of the stream, where the noise of current and tittering kingfishers covered our voices, would he show me the fly, which for legal reasons I cannot describe here. Jeff looked around, checked to see that not so much as a beaver was listening, and said, “I’ve caught fish every time I’ve used it.”

This is your basic fly angler—as superstitious as a New England villager at a witch trial. Lucky hat, lucky rod, streamside rituals, talismans. Do we believe in magic? No. Actually, we spend a lot of time trying not think about why things work. Bret’s Blood Nymph catches fish and so does Jeff’s fly. They’re not sure why; they don’t want to know why. If they knew I was writing this they’d say, “Quit, dude. You’ll jinx it.”

It may not be magic, but the real reasons aren’t exactly rational. Is Bret’s Blood Nymph deadly because it’s perfectly conceived? Does it so resemble actual aquatic forage a trout can’t resist striking? No, that can’t be it because Jeff’s top secret fly looks like something one of my kids tied using the debris swirling around under my fly bench.

It’s not magic and it’s not some form of perfection. It’s something a lot harder to come by: confidence. For whatever reason, certain flies engender our confidence. Maybe this fly hooked me a big fish one time. Maybe that pattern was passed down by a mentor. Whatever; that part doesn’t matter. What matters is that when I fish with confidence, I fish better. I fish diligently. I fish in the zone.

In a way, Jeff and Bret are right. You can jinx it. Subvert your confidence and it’s over—go back to the truck, head home, and watch TV. Because you’re always moving toward the zone or away from it. It’s hard to stay in one place, but when you have confidence in your fly, you’re at least moving in the right direction.

If I could figure out how to fish all my tackle with complete confidence, I guess I could fish in the zone at will. For now I’m satisfied with the occasional magic fly. Right now mine is the Surveyor, size 12 or 14, with pink crystal dubbing, purple hotspot, and a silver tungsten bead head. This fly catches fish, period. It has saved me from blank days and has fished well all over the valley. On the Logan River a few weeks ago the Surveyor pulled three fish from a single bucket-sized hole, almost on consecutive casts. In a few weeks or six months, something will change, and the Surveyor will return to its status as an ordinary fly, a mortal fly, pinned between my Hare’s Ear Nymphs and Pheasant Tails.

Until then, if it isn’t magic, it’s close enough.

I darted from my mother-in-law’s house towards the seclusion of her garage to sneak a cigarette.  The air was cool, slightly damp and fragrant with the “Outdoor Fresh” smell of Bounce dryer sheets.

As I flicked my lighter, I heard a clinking from the dryer.

It was probably some forgotten remnant of my kids’ Christmas loot, a Polly Pocket doll or a Webkin registration card, but I feared the errant crayon that could demolish our clothing with streaks of Brick Red or Midnight Blue.

I opened the dryer and blindly stuck my arm in among the damp clothes. The culprit rested at the bottom of the dryer.  As I pulled it out, the light from my cigarette illuminated it—a white-gold, princess-cut diamond ring.  And it wasn’t mine.  Visions of my six-year-old daughter rummaging through one of her aunt’s jewelry boxes danced in my head.

I dashed towards the house, holding the ring with outstretched arms in fear that its evil acquisition might taint me.  My daughter looked up from her coloring, her eyes wide with fear at the site of the “precious” and the look of horror on my face.

“Mom, I really like diamonds,” she tried to explain.

“Where did you get it?” I boomed.  Tears raced down her pink cheeks towards the unfinished coloring book page.

“Just tell me the truth.  You’re not going to get in trouble,” I said slowly and syrupy to assuage her little girl fears of time-outs and television banishment.

She wiped the tears with her pajama sleeve and thought for a moment. “I found it in the snow.”

There wasn’t a snowflake in sight, just brown lawns and skeletal trees.

“The snow ride at the park,” she clarified.

Now it made sense.  We had spent the previous night at Six Flags rushing to and from every child friendly ride in the park.  Since her Texas cousins rarely experienced snow, they dragged us along to the sledding hill. Unbeknownst to me or anyone else, it was at the bottom of that hill that Lola spotted the sparkling half-carat diamond nestled in a mound of fake flakes.  She slipped it into her back pocket, blissfully unaware of the ring’s monetary or sentimental value.  It was pretty and shiny and free, and well, she really liked diamonds.

When I called the Lost and Found at the park, the female on the phone couldn’t believe that the ring had been found or that I was returning it. She said that I could either drop it off at Six Flags and they would return it or I could call the woman directly.  Since I wanted to be the bearer of good news, I volunteered to call the woman myself.

She was beyond thrilled. “I can’t believe you found it!  This is unbelievable.  Thank you so much.”

Her joy was contagious, and as I hung up the phone, I informed my daughter that we’d given a perfect stranger the best Christmas present of all.

“We did?”

“Yep, we restored her faith.”

“What’s faith?”

“It’s a belief in something you can’t see.”

I felt like a really good parent in the form of a living, breathing Hallmark card.

When we returned home to Colorado, I faithfully looked towards my mailbox with the same sort of expectation of a child on Christmas Eve.  I was waiting on a miracle to appear—a tangible, bankable reward for my supposedly good behavior.  But as the days passed and not even so much as a thank you card arrived, doubt, like the let down of January, crept in.

 Pamela Skjolsvik usually writes about death or prison or both, but that gets old after awhile.

By Meredith A. May

Before a race, I never look at the competition. But Cristina is late, and while standing at the lakeshore with our rowing shell, I can’t help but watch the women in our event gracefully lowering their lithe bodies into delicate boats.

The duos I see pushing off the dock row with the effortless synchronicity of athletes who have been practicing together so long they can move as one without speaking. Their blades dip in and out of Lake Merritt together making barely a splash.

“I forgot my shirt!” shouts Cristina, running toward me.

The loud fuchsia tank I’m wearing has an Indian-inspired henna pattern of swirls and hearts. It looks nothing like the striped racing uniforms expected of rowers, but because we started training only few months ago, we chose our outfits based on irreverence rather than intensity.

But with only one of us wearing it, it doesn’t make sense. A friend offers to go back to Cristina’s duffle bag and retrieve hers. Then Cristina runs to the bathroom.

The four other boats in our thousand-meter race are already on the water. The rowers are practicing their quick starts, their shifts into race pace, and their sprints. It’s fifteen minutes to start. Boats late to the line are disqualified.

We’ll have to skip our warm-up. Racing with cold muscles is risky – the lactic acid can build up and fatigue you at the apex of your race so suddenly it’s like someone just turned the water into syrup. But we don’t expect to win. On land, we look like an unlikely pair. She stands over six feet, a good five inches taller than me. We are already breaking rule number one of sculling – find your twin and row with her. Similar bodies flow better together. Otherwise, one person has to change their stroke for the other and it’s that compromise, and how much each is willing to adapt to the other, that makes the difference between fractions of seconds that push one bow ball across the finish line before another.

“Where are my oars?”

Hundreds of oars are clustered like pick-up sticks ringing the lake. A line of boats is backing up behind us, waiting for Cristina to find hers.

Nine minutes until our race.

She plucks them from the maze and mercilessly we settle into a rhythm toward the start line, where aluminum motorboats are staked by underwater tethers to the center of each lane. Inside each boat is a volunteer, who will reach out and hold our stern with one hand, listening through an ear piece to an aligner standing on shore who will direct the volunteers to push or pull the shells to get them into a perfect row.

As we glide together, I hear the familiar sound of bubbles trickling under the hull signaling the boat is hovering and getting good run. But something is not right with Cristina. She’s rushing the slide, rowing ahead of me, creating a slight pressure in my lower back.

“OK, weigh enough,” she says, the rower’s command for stop.

I twist around in my seat, but carefully, as to not flip the carbon fiber boat. It’s so light and narrow that our hips are wider than the gunwales.

“You OK?”

She’s embarrassed. Her previous race was in a single, and she’d steered so poorly that she weaved in and out of her lane.

“I don’t know Meredith, I just couldn’t steer. I’ve raced the single before with no issues, now all of a sudden it’s like I lost it. It was so, so bad.”

Three minutes until our race.

I tell her she doesn’t have to steer alone. I can see the buoy lines and help by pulling harder on port or starboard side, so if we veer off course it will be a shared mistake.

“Let’s just decide that our goal will be to stay in our lane,” I offer. “Really, I don’t expect to win against women who have been rowing partners for decades. We’ll help each other stay straight.”

Her shoulders relax, she laughs and I can see it was the right thing to say.

We pull into lane four and I stare at the official holding the red flag over his head.

“Are you ready ladies? We have an alignment,” he announces over a megaphone.

We sit crouched at the top of the tracks on wheeled seats, our arms stretched out in front of us, and our blades buried in the water behind our backs, ready to spring once we see the flag drop.

“Attention! GO!”

The silence erupts into a cacophony of splashing, as all ten of us dig hard at the water. I see blurs of white and black out of my peripheral vision, as oars thrash within inches of mine. We blast out of the start, catching the water and jamming our legs. The stroke meter registers forty strokes per minute.

Cristina calls out, “Settle in two,” and counts: “One, two!” We bring the pace down to thirty-two strokes per minute by slowing the recovery, to give the boat time to run. The perfect balance of weight lifting and ballet. The delicate laughter of underwater bubbles returns.

“We’re in the pack,” Cristina says.

I check the buoys. There’s an even amount of space on each side. We are centered. I allow myself the liberty to pull a little harder. I swing my body back farther to give myself more room to pull a longer stroke through the water.

Two minutes down. I see the large inflatable orange floaters that signal the five hundred meter mark. Halfway.

“Second place,” Cristina says between exhales.

Those two words make the burn in my lungs and quads recoil, and my reptilian brain takes over. I have become a purely physical animal, blood hungry on only one thing. But I must stay calm. Elation can sap precious energy, make a rower forget to sprint, or take her focus off steering, so the entire effort disintegrates into a performance that could have been.

We are in the third quarter of the race – the nemesis for most rowers. It’s here where the only thing that can keep you going is your mind. Racing is like getting in a handstand and then doing push-ups one hundred and thirty times. By push-up number ninety, every cell is begging for relief. Your mind goes to thoughts of jumping into a cool lake, of eating ice cream, of getting a massage. I imagine it’s similar to what marathon runners describe at mile twenty-two when it’s as if the rubbery body peels away from the mind.

“We have contact,” Cristina says.

I never thought I’d hear those words. We have closed the margin so our bow ball has reached the stern of the lead boat.

“Let’s make a move,” I say.

She counts it out.

“In two. One, two!”

We take a power ten. I’m in that place where I can’t honestly say if I’m going to make it. I’ve pushed beyond my body’s pain signals, and I don’t know what waits on the other side. A burst lung, a pulled ligament, a cracked rib. I don’t care. I just want to win.

“EVEN!” she yells, loud enough for the other boat to hear that we’ve pulled alongside them.

“We got this!” I yell back, amazed I had the breath to answer her.

The white buoys – which are just empty Clorox bottles turned upside down, are now painted red, signaling we are in the last two hundred and fifty meters of the race – the place where you take up the pace and sprint to the end. Thirty-five strokes to go.

I can see the lead boat on my right, which means we have overtaken them. Unless they have a secret sprint in their race plan, we can win this.

Twenty strokes left.

My vision blurs, and I hear the knocking of my heart in my temples. Spectators are screaming, but I can’t make out any words. We are hovering over the water, and everything is right. My hair is blowing forward, we are pin straight in our lane, and each stroke is building stronger on the next.

We pull five more times, and the air horn sounds.

We collapse forward over our oars, sucking air and shaking. When I can rise, I turn to Cristina and splash her with lake water.

“We did this, baby girl. You and me. We did this,” I say.