“I’m sure you know why I’m calling you,” Ann said.

I did. She stayed on the phone with me for an hour while she recounted his final hours. I was grateful for the time, knowing she had a list of others to call and another list of arrangements to make. Because while he was my fill-in Dad, he was her husband.

Tom was gone.

After a fight with bone cancer, he’d made it. He was in the clear. And then, in some sort of messed up technicality, an infection took hold of his depleted immune system– an infection that I could have right now, at this minute, and not even know it because my body would just wipe it clean away– and it killed him. The stone that took down Goliath.

I stayed quiet when I hung up. My Someone tried to comfort me, but I wasn’t quite ready. I was already fast forwarding to healing. I made a mental list– more yoga, more writing, long walks, lots of kale. I stood up, grabbed the keys, and drove to the grocery store. I chose a small basket of organic vegetables. I bought dog food. When I returned, my Someone had cleaned the camper. We hitched up and we drove out of Fort Collins, heading toward the wide skies of Wyoming, silent all the way.

While the sun set, I imagined Tom riding the mountains on his Harley– up and over and beyond, just out of my sight line. I’d think of it just long enough to catch the rock in my throat, then I would breathe deep, letting it dissipate, letting the tears well up, and then… nothing. There was no riptide of grief to carry me away.

I self congratulated on my ability to self heal, to prepare myself adequately in order to simultaneously deal with grief before the event itself even happened, and carry on with my work, and be cognizant enough to know that I was, in fact, grieving.

Of course, I’m an idiot. I didn’t account for the Yips.

In May, I’d received a similar call. Tom was on a downswing. I was prepared. We were on our way home from a 2 1/2 month disaster tour– broken transmission, bronchitis, the works. We had three weeks to sleep and release an album and host some company and secure our house before we were gone again for another 2 1/2 months. And in this, Tom wavered on the edge of the wall that separates the living from the dead. I kept myself alert. We left our home on June 2nd heading west, prepared to turn our rig around at any moment and head to Ohio.

The second tour was a bit smoother, and we relished in the beginning of summer newness– the long light, the cool nights. But then, there was an unmistakable strangeness. While the tires held and our bodies felt strong and easy, each time on stage was wiggly. I held my instruments as I carefully and unsteadily hold newborns. The lyrics evaded me until the last second. I dropped chords and words, small at first, then swapping entire verses. I couldn’t remember how to do what I’ve been doing for the last twelve years. It wasn’t stage fright, exactly. I could easily stand in front of audiences, talking between songs, moving about it like an office worker in a boring cubicle. But the playing was strange.

“I don’t understand what’s happening,” I told my Someone.

“Maybe it’s just stress?”

“I don’t think so,” I said, “It’s like I don’t even like this anymore.”

This worried him. For all of my love of music, it has never been my one-and-only. I find within me a current of creativity. Dam the river one way and it’ll come out another. I’ve had to overcome years of intense, debilitating stage fright to do what we do now. It required countless nights of talking me onto the stage again, of shaking uncontrollably, of near tears until I burst into song, the nerves subsiding only near the end of the set list. He didn’t want to go back. I couldn’t move forward.

“I’ll figure it out,” I promised. I didn’t want to quit. I wanted to do what I do again. But without the pointed weirdness of being. It was the only way I could explain it when I called Bryan. It was now the second week of tour, and the feeling persisted.

“Oh, you have the yips!” he said.

I have a lot of interests, but sports are not any of them. Bryan kindly explained the sensation I was feeling back to me, but in terms of a pitcher holding the ball.

“He’s a very good pitcher, too, but this thing he does all of the time, this thing he and everyone knows he’s good at, it’s suddenly strange and foreign to him. Like, he can’t figure out how the ball used to feel in his hands.”

I had the yips. I was so relieved. What an easy thing, to name something, and then for it to go away.

They didn’t go away. But now, at the end of a show, when my Someone would ask, “How was that one?” I could say, “I still had the yips, but it was easier.”

Except it wasn’t easier. It was getting harder.

We were writing more. I made little books mid week to pass the time and fill the merch table. We took walks across the Midwest and into the West and the yips followed me. I was neither homesick nor happy. I relished the summer water any chance my body could fall into it. We evaded the hottest days in a record high temperature summer in the west. We had all the luck. Excepting that the stage each night was a vacuum of reality, and I’d fall into the silence of my previous experience into a chaotic hole of panic until the last notes were sung. I developed a pre-show ritual. I meditated. I did more yoga. I practiced more than we ever had on tour.

And then, in Fort Collins, CO I got a call from my dear friend.

“I’m sure you know why I’m calling you,” Ann said.

The yips were gone, at least for Wyoming, Utah, and then Wisconsin on the homeward trek. We’d watched the funeral from a board room in a public library in Wyoming. Ann insisted we stay on the course of our tour, that she’d wait for the burial service til we were passing through on our way home. It was an unbelievably charitable gift of closure, as she waited wide open in her grief for our arrival.

I wrote her a song, one for the love of she and Tom, for the stories too good to lay to rest. But while the yips had relented, the deep cavern of nothingness took its place.

“I am in grief,” I told my Someone and myself. But still I couldn’t feel it. Instead, I took a week’s worth of hot yoga classes.

“I am in grief,” I practiced again, and had no recollection of the performance I gave, whether it was good or bad. Instead, I took two long walks with my dogs. I tried to find the button inside that lets the mounting pressure of grief at last release, like a sprinkler system to a fire alarm. But the alarm within me kept ringing, and still no release. I couldn’t find it. I concluded instead that I must be beyond it. I must have yoga-ed and walked and written my way above it.

The yips returned.

We played our final show in Wisconsin, and I became furious and exhausted with myself. We stepped on to the stage. We played a couple of songs. Then, I asked the audience if we might play them a new one. I told them about Tom. I stopped performing. I stopped trying to put on a good show. I stepped into myself. I played them the song.

Now I was getting somewhere.

When we got to Ohio the next day, I was dreading it and couldn’t wait to get there– all at once. I stopped telling myself I was in grief. I’d decided that function was broken. I’d done enough. I was in the clear. The alarm kept ringing in my head.

I sat next to Tom’s ashes the next day as we drove to Pennsylvania. There, over the water of the reservoir I’d driven countless times in my college years on my way between my family and my chosen family, the alarm reached its height, and at last the release came.

The graveside service was short, on a sunny, pretty morning. The heavy marble that held my person, my guy, my damn-I’m-proud-of-you-kid voice that stood on top of all of the other voices– including my own– for the last two decades: he was put into the ground.

I did not tell myself I was in grief. I did not calculate the methods in which I would heal. I simply watched as someone who was always there was no longer there. I placed dirt on top of him and turned away. I lingered. I looked back. I let the electricity of impending grief make way for the soft, painful suffocating pillow of it. I cried and fell into a hole within me that had been freshly dug, too. Because grief is not the putting out of a fire. It is a vacancy forever unfilled. One must become adept at working around it for the rest of one’s life. But first, one must lie in it.

In August, it seems, I bury my people.

I am in grief, now, though I don’t much tell myself that. I don’t need to. I am no longer justifying extra yoga practices or the solitary time I spend journaling. I am no longer approaching my grief as a measure of self improvement, a progress report on my emotional evolution.

The yips have more or less subsided. It makes sense, now, that the core of my ability to connect with others would be inextricably tied to my ability to be honest with myself. Of course I had the yips. I didn’t know who I was without Tom. The only thing that ever worked for me as a performer getting over my stage fright was to be myself. Myself lying in a hole of grief within me was not a vulnerability I was willing to share, so I held my breath against the impending change. I was holding my breath for Tom. Now, with his last exhale, I exhaled, too. And while not all at once, I am working around the new vacancy. I am learning myself again, who I am with this new emptiness. And I am coming back, this altered version of myself, and learning to share it again.

How?

I am singing.

I am a woman of prayer now. I guess as I have always been.

We left our home in New Hampshire on my Someone’s birthday at the beginning of June, holding our breaths as our home of 8 years rattled down I-91 through Vermont, hoping this tour would prove better than the last. I say hoping and not praying because I didn’t know yet that I am a woman of prayer. Last tour we survived a busted transmission, two strains of bronchitis, food poisoning, our dog almost dying, among a myriad of small paper cuts from the universe. For all of that, we felt pretty good, even if a little nervous.

Our first stop landed us in a church in Upstate New York, a small town outside of the City that brims with quirk and quiet in the way that a celebrity pretends to be a nobody in public but secretly wishes someone else will notice anyway. We arrived at the rain location of our show that evening, decked out with a stained glass Jesus who looked to be about to inject a woman with a hypodermic needle and another Jesus who seemed to be sending the Apostle Peter adrift into the sea, head turned in a Bitch, Please fashion. I like these give-no-shits Jesus’, the kinds that just can’t with these chronic requests, anymore. I am far more comfortable with the relatable disgust of the world’s savior than with the eternal patience feigned by his followers, the passive aggressive “I’m praying for you” of which I’m frequently the recipient. Until later that night, when I met Don’t-Call-Me-Father Charles.

We followed our host to his home, instructed to bypass his driveway for the following parking lot, a large blacktop of an Episcopalian church. When we pulled in, a big pick-up truck was idling in front of the parsonage, a man inside shooting the breeze with another squat man hanging outside of the truck, smoking a cigarette. The smoking man waved our direction, but we ignored him as we turned ourselves around and parked, trying to look intentional enough to scare the intruders away. I told my Someone to cross the lawn to our host’s house while I got the animals settled. I’d just placed the hamster inside when the idling truck drove away and the smoking man called across the lot, walking toward me. I steeled myself until he got closer and said,

“Hi, I’m Charles. I’m the pastor here. I’m sick to death of it, but most people call me Father Charles,” at which point he broke into a thick Long Island accent, “‘Fathah Chahles! Fathah Chahles! Pray for me!’ Damn I’m sick of that shit. Don’t call me Father, just Charles.”

Much like with my Jesus of the hypodermic needle, I was immediately at ease. We talked music and travel in the dark parking lot, until my Someone approached, calling out, “Hello” in the gritted way he does when he feels unsure whether or not I’m okay. I assured him immediately, “Hey! Meet Don’t-Call-Me-Father Charles, he lives here.” Don’t-Call-Me-Father Charles said hello and lit another cigarette. He told us about his ex wife, his kid, his want to hit the road like we did. We told him about our house in New Hampshire, close to Dartmouth.

“Dartmouth!” he said, “That’s some luck if you ever get sick.”

“We know it,” I said, “we have a pal with cancer right now, and we’re awfully grateful for him to be so close.”

Don’t-Call-Me-Father Charles looked at me closely without pause, “What is his first name?”

“John,” I said.

“I will remember John this evening when I pray,” he said, then he took a puff while I took a breath, shot the shit a little more, then said goodnight. But I couldn’t get it out of my head– out of my heart, really. This was a prayer I believed in. He didn’t ask details, he didn’t even ask for a last name. His measure of reciprocation was in balance with the measure of which we knew one another, of which I shared, of which the situation warranted. His response wasn’t performative or grandiose. He didn’t ask that we stop the conversation– that we stop seeing each other in the moment– to offer supplication to an Unknown. He didn’t reach over and look at me meaningfully while he held my hand and said, “I will pray for you.” But he didn’t brush me off, either. This was an act of reactive compassion– not from years of being a pastor, but from years of listening. As if he can’t help but care. Whether or not there is a god above to receive Don’t-Call-Me-Father Charles’ prayer, the prayer was complete and heard because Don’t-Call-Me-Father Charles heard me, told me he heard me, and held lightly and carefully in his hand the deep pain and fear I was accidentally expressing by telling a relative stranger about my friend who he will never meet.

Prayer, I learned, is not about telling god that we need something. Prayer is telling each other that we see and hear them. Then later, in the silence of our bedrooms with hands folded and eyes closed, we are holding a little space and time amid the clatter of catastrophes so that we, in the act of being selfishly wrapped up in someone else’s problems, can see and hear ourselves, too.

The skies muddied with smoke as we drove west, crossing nervously over the Canadian border as a shortcut to Michigan. The wildfires in Alberta were seizing the air right out from under our lungs, and by the time we arrived in Hamilton, Ontario in the early afternoon, a permanent haze sat over our friends’ home. After the first hugs since pre-pandemic and a tour from their sprout of their new dinosaur bedsheets, we settled in the garden for black bean tacos and then coffee. We rolled through the afternoon without noting the time, then stretched our legs on a walk with the dogs before we had to head again for the border.

Piper, stunning and round, days from a labor that would bring her a second little sprout, held out a small paper bag. I could smell it before she gave it to me– homemade soap pressed with rose petals, a beeswax hand salve, and a tall bunch of white sage wrapped in string. They’d grown it themselves last year.

“To burn for a better tour this time,” she said. I was grateful. We needed it. At the last moment, she thought of one more thing. I took a handful of small oranges gifted to me and piled them into my backpack. Then I ran down the stairs to my waiting family in the truck. We were full in belly and in spirit, and we drove away quickly to try and shed the sting of missing our friends which was already radiating. We were almost to Michigan when I got Piper’s text.

We just found your dropped sage.

I sunk. It had fallen on their front steps. It must have been knocked out by the bunch of oranges. Maybe this tour was going to be another doozy, after all. I felt ungrateful, disproportionately upset to have not cared for it better. Then,

But it will be here when we see you next and we will burn some for your journey.

Of course. The smoke of the sage on my behalf may be better than the smoke I make myself. Without asking, Piper had heard my prayer, and offered it up. I imagined the small lilty stream of sage smoke twirling upward in her house, out her screens, and mixing with the haze of the Alberta wildfires that hung around us. A smoky chorus on my behalf. Maybe a small prayer like that couldn’t be detected by the less devout eye. But me, I knew it was there, or going to be there. I was heard and I was seen and I was loved.

Piper, hear my prayer. Just like that, I was less alone.

We landed in Michigan before nightfall, and I felt the weight of the absence I’d been avoiding. It is in this state that my friend lives– my friend who has been my friend as long as my Someone and I have known each other; my friend who carefully told me she prays for me in earnest; my friend who does not speak to me anymore on the basis of needing to choose Christ over me. I’ve resented her prayers in the past, wrapped in sympathy and in a hope that I might one day find true joy in the lifeless judgmental faith that drives her. In recent years, I’ve come to accept her prayers, and even cherish them. If for a moment I might raise to the top of her mind, it doesn’t matter where those thoughts escape to from there– whether to a loving god or a spiteful one, the part that counts is the tethers that bound her heart to mine in those prayers.

I sent out my own prayer, in a text, to my friend Annie. I cast my cares upon her then told her I would throw those cares into Lake Michigan when I get there. Annie is my circle of trees, my shade and my root system and my barrier. I pray to her often, even when we aren’t able to speak. It happened this night that she heard me immediately.

It may be one less tree, but this one is rooted so deep it’s not going anywhere.

Annie, hear my prayer.

I slept better that night.

In the morning, we found a trail next to our camper, leading miles from the parking lot. Six miles later, we returned, dogs panting and our skin a little darker, the first bloom of summer on our bodies. A piece of paper fluttered across the sidewalk. I picked it up. It was a grocery list, sensibly, in the grocery store lot.

Mac n cheese Marleigh
Almond milk
English Muffin
Fruit cups
Breakfast (Renee)
Marleigh nuggets
Breakfast Sausage
Ramen noodles
Leaf lettuce

It took me a couple of reads to understand that Marleigh was a person, not a brand. I imagined from the cursive that it was a Grandmother, preparing a visit from her granddaughter. I imagined her the night before, calling and asking her daughter-in-law what it was that Marleigh would eat– would she like something special? Does she eat vegetables? She jots down the ideas as they come, hangs up, and presses the list into her purse. Not until she is leaving the supermarket the next morning, bags rustling as she juggles the cart out from under the hatchback does that list slip from her hand and wave off to the far end of the parking lot, where a woman and her dogs and her Someone are walking.

This list, I thought, is a prayer. A prayer that, when acted upon, may just come true– that Marleigh would have a really nice time with her grandmother. That she would get enough to eat. That she would be happy here. That she would feel loved. I tucked the list into my journal and prayed the same. I hope Marleigh has a most wonderful time.

“You’re putting a curse on her, you know,” my Someone said to me. We were in Minneapolis. The smoke had dissipated, but the heat remained. It was a thick 90 degrees in the afternoons, and we were walking the neighborhood hoping for sprinklers with our dogs.

“What do you mean?” I asked, but already knowing.

“I feel like when you write a song for songwriters, it curses them, it makes them unable to write again.”

“But she already quit writing,” I said.

“True, but it’s like you’re sealing the deal or something.”

I thought about it. We’d just written a song for my friend, the one who might still pray for me but doesn’t speak to me anymore.

“But your ex girlfriend wrote songs about you and you still write,” I said.

“Yes,” he said, “but I sang through it. I kept writing, which breaks the spell.”

I like witch stuff. Very much. It’s why I like Christianity sometimes– the weird spells and rituals and vengeances; the miracles and the incantations; the pretending of drinking the blood of the dead. But this felt distinctly different.

I thought of my friend Tom. Years ago, as his wife and my friend Ann tells it, they were on an RV trip around the country. Everything had gone wrong, as things on RV trips are wont to. While I couldn’t recall the details of the mishaps, the story culminates at a campground late one evening when they finally found a place to stay, and one more hiccup occurs. Tom, a very tall and imposing figure, is furious. He drops the tools he was holding, stands straight, looks up with his hands open and shaking and yells at the sky–

“BRING IT OOOOON!”

As Ann tells it, the sky ripped open and it began pouring rain on his head.

An answer to prayer.

“No,” I said to my Someone, “I am not cursing her. I am daring her.”

Because, as I understood in that moment, a dare is also a prayer. A dare is a call for whatever may come to come as it may, and to bring with it the fury and the force, however unpleasant. Because sometimes, when everything is wrong, a sudden burst of thunderstorm on one’s head would at least clear up the confusion of the pregnant silence that bullies between a man and a god; or presses between two friends.

I can’t curse anyone– especially not someone who is already creating their own hell. They’re already cursed by their own hand. Instead, I pray by writing a song. I make a dare, for something to happen. The importance of a prayer is not that it is answered, but that the sound or the smoke or the water or the tree limbs of it rise up and are heard by someone– anyone. Even if that person is yourself.

Maybe my friend is still praying for me. Maybe it is frustrating for her, because she prays and prays to a god in the sky and she has seen no rain and has smelled no smoke and has had no one put her favorite kind of chicken nuggets on their grocery list in return. But I’m hopeful one day to do her the favor that I’ve been given again and again. I want to give her the gift of someone else looking at her and saying, “I heard that.”

Because that is simply the power of prayer.

I’m Taoist by practice, Christian by nurture, and Agnostic by nature.

Thanks to Pride last weekend, I’ve been born again. The good news bubbles forth, and I’ve got a river of life flowing out of me.

In Tallahassee, we garnered ourselves in rainbow sunglasses and tie dyed shirts and headed downtown with our niece to the event. There were people of all sorts smiling and laughing, and strangers greeting each other like old friends when they accidentally bumped into one another on their way to the virgin pina colada stand that served up each drink in an entire pineapple. We saw community members let loose, and allies offer help with anything from health care to banking, a church or two alongside American Atheists for whatever spiritual or social gaps that need be filled.

And there were free Mom Hugs and Dad Hugs and Parent Hugs, wandering around in descriptive t-shirts, just in case you needed to hear it from someone who knows best– that you are loved just as you are, just as you came into this world.

This was the moment for me. I stepped off the path and took several deep breaths and cried as my Someone put his arm around me and my niece placed her hand on my arm, “It’s okay, Aunt Mallory.”

Here, the scales fell from my eyes. I was placed squarely inside of the church. Or, at least, what the church was supposed to be.

How very Tao, the reckoning, the balance.

It should be known, and is well documented, that upon a conversion experience, one is often met with resistance. A person cannot grow heavier or lighter with good news and not change the balance of the boat they are in. And so, at first, was the antagonizing words of strangers. Some call them trolls, and while I like the image of wide glassy eyed sexless creatures with wild florescent triangular hair on the other side of the computer screen, thinking their most unwelcome thoughts and putting them into the public sphere, I’ve also come to understand that this category isn’t always fairly attributed. Sometimes, people just can’t read the room on the internet, and it takes a little finagling to help them see where they are. As a newborn myself in the previous hours, I understood the excitement of sharing. This stranger from Nebraska finally refrained, and onward I walked in my new faith.

“I have to tell you something,” I told my Someone the next day. “I am actually the best at Christianing that I have ever been. Remember that guy on the internet? Young Christian Mallory would’ve flown off the handle. But look at me! I didn’t yell or say names or anything. I Taoed the shit out of that and my Christianing is off the charts.”

“You’re really killing it,” he said. “You’ve been born again.”

I don’t need to reclaim or reframe Christianity or Jesus, anymore. I’ve realize now, it’s always been there for me.

It all made sense now. You’re just supposed to love people.

Who knew it was that simple?

And then it isn’t simple.

My excitement grew. I told my friends. I spent long video messages bursting with the understanding, the good news. Then, I told them about the not-troll from Nebraska.

How strange, I told them, for one’s impulse to call sin what is love.

The conversation turned. My friend of many years was uncomfortable, felt pressed.

“It is sin,” she said. The conversation turned again.

“If I had to choose between my friends and Christ,” she said, “I would choose Christ. Always.”

“Yes,” I said to her, “if you had to choose, choose Christ. Because this isn’t Abraham beneath an erratic jealous God, holding a dagger above his son’s neck to prove his loyalty. This is Jesus we’re talking about. So, yes, choose Christ. Because Christ would choose me. He always chooses me.”

My friend is not talking to me, anymore. She needs space.

We ask a lot of Jesus, I think. Make us comfortable. Die for sins. Act as scapegoat to our need to take responsibility for our actions. Take the wheel. But from what I gather, mostly all he wanted was to party sometimes, spend some time in nature alone, and maybe occasionally have some conversations. To be a friend. And that message of Jesus isn’t always easy to swallow amid the laundry list of things we need from him. It doesn’t have that Fox’s Book of Martyrs material we’d always imagined as young zealots. It’s too damn ordinary.

The Word, Letter of Mallory to her Friend, Chapter 16, Verse 21-37.

Greetings to you with the warmth of Christ, the laugh of Buddha, and the brief smell of jasmine from an early morning walk!

I have seen and heard the good work of you and your sisters and brothers, and I am delighted by the news. You have cared for the sick, prayed for the hurting, and welcomed in those who need a shower. Keep it up! You’re doing great.

But there is an element that needs reckoning, and I’m afraid it will be difficult to hear, as when I heard it a long time ago– with my Christian Nationalist conditioning– I really didn’t like it. But be assured, on the other side, there is freedom in Christ, and you’ll get to party with him and everyone else at Pride. There are pineapple drinks, you def don’t want to miss it.

If someone chooses someone else to love, regardless of what gender the person is, it is not a sin. To believe it IS a sin is to harbor bigotry, and as seen by your good work already, we know that you are far too compassionate to harbor hate. It would be easy here to cry out, to say that this is an attack on your faith, but it is not. Christ did not come to comfort the oppressor, but to challenge the chains. Your belief, while isolated in a small church with like-minded people, does not remain isolated. This belief is one that seeps like a toxic gas from beneath your church doors, into the streets and the voting booths, and declares other people second class citizens. Because of this belief, they must fight for their dignity, their basic rights, and in too many cases, their lives.

I say this, not as a friend against a friend defending a faceless othered entity– the faceless entity you harbor your bigotry for are the very tangible faces of my friends and myself. I say this as a friend who is for their friend, and I would be a poor friend who allows the indignity, because it is also an indignity to you.

Consider this– your children. As you teach them this belief– that some love is a sin– you perpetuate a lie. When, inevitably, your children grow up and are out from under your carefully and best intentioned canopy, they will be confronted with this lie. It is problematic in many ways to equate the bigotry against the LGBTQIA+ community with the racial justice movement, but acknowledging the differences and that we are in fact only in the beginning of eradicating the deathly plague of racism, consider the likeness.

As we grew up, remember the textbooks we read, where we saw the movement of people fighting for their right to sit at lunch counters, vote, be alive. And remember, then, seeing the timeline and realizing that our grandparents, our parents coincided with this time. And remember having to ask the difficult question–

“Mom, Dad– what side were you on?”

I grew up in the depths of racism. I did not know a person of color, and it was kept that way with intention on my behalf. I heard words I knew instinctively were bad, before I ever heard the word racism. I have blamed my parents and their parents for the bigotry they held, and the bigotry they passed on to me. Especially in light of the clear hindsight of history. They misused the same book to justify this hatred as is now misused to call love a sin. They were wrong. I have since forgiven them, letting them suffer on their own island, breathing in their own toxicity, where still they gather like-minded people to pray for their right to hold their strangling beliefs as love and Christ and common sense pounds on the door asking them again and again to reconsider. But the more difficult task has been to forgive myself, for the perpetuation of these beliefs, for the slow unlearning, for the ways which I have acted out– knowingly and unknowingly– the prejudice I was taught.

This forgiveness for you will need to be begged from your children when the history books are inevitably written, and the vapid answer to the hard question, “What side were you on?” is “Not of love.” And then will start the long process of your children forgiving themselves, too.

This is prophecy, one we may or may not choose. But prophecy remains hypothetical, and not always as convincing as the present. So, let us lay out the present. What is there to be afraid of? Remove the statistically unfortunates of car accidents and disease. We live in a world of rising waters and ever-more limited air. We live in a world where we and our children must consider that the act of going to school or a movie or a birthday party or a church may be the last decision we make. In a world where a big yellow school bus may very well cart the ones we love more than we love ourselves to a classroom that is turned into a death trap with the rattle of gunfire echoing off of hallway walls and on to the soft, sweet bodies of our perfect creatures. We live in a world where men are making monsters of themselves. Why then– how does it benefit any of us?– to make unnecessary monsters of people just like us: people who want to marry and send their kids to school and enjoy this perfect, precious life before it is taken from them by force or by time? We live in a world full of things to be afraid of. We need not create them.

Or.

Or, we could choose love now.

I am coming to visit soon. I hope after this letter I will be accepted. I hope you know that this letter is as much to myself as it is to you. May the face of Christ shine upon you, and the dirt we all inevitably turn to when we lose our conscious selves into the Nothing and become dirt again yield you a good harvest.

The glow will fade, I’m sure of it. That’s the last step in a conversion. You go hogwild with the good news, you tell the world, you tell your friends, and then, in the ordinary, you forget. I’ve rededicated my life to Jesus and causes and to the earth enough times to know. But maybe it’s not forgetting. Rather, these are the waves of the Tao, the water that moves and is unnameable. In the ordinariness– in the quiet nothingness– that is where the imprint is found. The mark of a change that comes from seeing the Burning Bush is not the bright light specks that flicker in the eyes for the moments after. Eventually, I need to see again, so that I can take one normal step in front of the other. The next right thing. The pulling of all those logs from my eyes while I sought the specks of dust in others. Sorting righteous anger from just being a dick– something I wish the Apostle Paul’s editors would’ve considered. The cleaning and the cooking and the voting and the listening and the learning until, again, I meet in the middle of a town, dressed in rainbows, finding that mountaintop experience. That I will continue to grow in the meantime, that is faith.

Last week my Someone and I took a walk around a graveyard just before the South Carolina line on I-95 while we waited for our clothes to dry at the laundromat. I spotted a familiar last name on the gravestone closest to us, and called out–

“Look, it’s Dave.”

“Oof,” said my Someone, but then he spotted another last name, and added– “…and Megan!”

And off we went, naming our very living friends while walking among the very dead. We were halfway when I thought better of it.

“Is this morbid?” I asked.

“Maybe a little,” he said.

But then we continued, calling out Laurie and Brian and Amanda and Sandra Bullock. Then I said,

“Mallory,” pointing to the lone stone with GRAHAM etched across the front.

“No,” said my Someone suddenly. I paused. “Why did you pick yourself?”

“Because,” I said without thinking, “I felt left out. I wanted to be with my friends.”

With our recent road hiccups– another major break down on a tour we’ll be lucky to break even on– and the illness that has saturated our friends’ bodies, and the emotional despair that stamped me down to almost breaking last month: the isolation was stifling. As we walked and named, I felt myself become lighter. By the time we reached the gates, it was as though we’d gone to a full party. Le Danse Macabre worked its magic, and I was leveled again with the delight of death’s equalizing force.

Today, I am 37. I am one step closer to someone calling my name above a lone stone etched with GRAHAM, and the reminder brings me an unprecedented amount of life.

I am heavy with gratitude, as texts pile in from friends I made a decade and a half ago. What a miracle it is, that in this short sprint of living– where I can barely manage to keep track of where I last set down my phone or the postcard I wrote to my niece last week that needs a stamp but now I can’t find it– that I have managed to keep anything at all, let alone people who have equally shifted and become new people each seven year stretch when their cells revitalized and their thoughts on god morphed into an abyss of more questions than answers. They lose their keys and their favorite lighters and their bad habits, but have not managed to lose me. And the work it takes to manage the keeping of one’s friends far exceeds that of keeping one’s favorite pen. How do we manage keeping even one person orbiting our atmosphere at all, let alone multiple?

I am heavier with gratitude this year than years before. I’ve formed the opinion this week that friendship doesn’t quite blossom until at least 15 years, and I am in the thick of spring in my friendships, with new seeds germinating as I watch the petals unravel on the others.

I’ve become recently obsessed with the French tune Cou Cou, the Django Reinhardt avec le Quintette du Hot Club de France version, particularly this line–

Eveillez-vous, Eveillez-vous– le monde est transformé.

I’m very early in my learning of the language, but I was confused by this particular line. I knew reveiller to mean wake up; but this, this was spelled incorrectly. A quick google search showed that the meaning is the same– both are to wake up. But taking a look closer, the meaning is subtly changed. Reveiller is to wake up habitually– the habit of every morning when our alarm goes off or the sun shines in our eyes. But Eveiller— this isn’t your average wake up call. This is a deeper, nearly spiritual sense of waking up– this is awakening. The singer isn’t asking us to wake up to see that the world looks different, she’s asking us to awaken ourselves, our deep cellular selves, and see that the world is transformed– which inevitably means we are changed, too.

And this is the ordinary miracle: It takes years of habitual waking up– of putting in the phone calls and the texts and the happy birthdays and the showing up– to arrive at a place of awakening. There I go, reveillez-vous, reveillez-vous for days, and one time I wake up and I’m 37 and voila– I’ve awakened to a plethora of love I can recall in moments with my monthly book club meeting, or in the middle of a cemetery surrounded by my friends’ names. It is an accumulation and luck of the draw, hard work and stupid chance that I have aligned myself with friends and fellow artists and acquaintances that fill my timeline in such a way as to transform it, one waking up at a time, until we wake up no more and keep one another’s bones company as some young 36-year-old walks above us, placing their friends lives upon our own, transforming the world with their heavy, deliberate steps around and around again.

What I wish I’d said to the woman in the locker room yesterday, after she caught my eye in the way people do when they feel they are bursting within themselves– when circular thinking reroutes itself from the hamster wheel and sporadically careens out the mouth to the first pair of eyes that catch. What I wish I’d said to the woman who was tugging on her purple Umbro shorts, patting the tail of her short hair cropped close on her neck, eyebrows twisted in a knot at her forehead when she began to exit, thought better of it, and found my eyes again in the mirror, asked–

“Do you think these shorts are too short?”

I looked and said, “No, I don’t think so. But do you think so?”

“I do,” she said.

“I think you’re great,” I said lamely, even though I did.

“I think the reason is that I don’t feel good in my body right now,” she said, “So I don’t feel good in anything.”

“Oh no!” I said, trying to assess more fully, “No, you are right, right now.”

She nodded, unconsoled, and began to leave. She thought better of it again and turned back to me.

“It’s just that I’m underweight,” she said. “I have a health issue with my metabolism. It’s all messed up.”

“Well, I think you’re fine,” I said automatically, unable to unpack any further before she sped out one last time.

What I wish I’d said to that woman is that you are exactly where you are. I wish I’d said that our bodies are not permanent things in any sense of the word– they have have no true stasis, no correct way of being. That they move around us even as our thoughts and our feelings swirl within. That your body is communicating as much as your mouth is: it’s a tell. That sometimes it tells that you are ill, and sometimes it tells that you’ve had too much pizza the night before, and sometimes it tells that you’ve been sleeping well and eating your vegetables.

We spend an inordinate amount of time hiding from others or hiding from ourselves the most honest, forthright part of ourselves. We pack around it and within it to inhibit it from blabbing to the world the immediate truth of our circumstances; and in many ways, to slow the immediate truth from penetrating our change resistent brains. We plump and we tuck and we suck in and we floof to create a semblance of stability to present these blobby, angular, gossipy borderlines of self.

But these sweet vessels, these big boats, these hided and haired fat and skin and muscle layers are all the while resisting, telling the truth on us, begging the rest of our pack to notice– notice!– that I am changing, yet again, as I pass from KETO to Paleo to Gluten Free to Who Gives a Damn, because it is not the what these bodies are leading the eye to, but the why. They are the first passage inward, the open door. Someone older than us said that the eyes are the window to the soul; but I’d bet that it’s also the crow’s feet around them and the straggly unwashed hair and the big bouncing flabby butt with the fat dimples that speak out our soul as precisely.

This isn’t a free card to assess one another’s bodies– we don’t know how to read anymore. We’ve spent too much time with our eyes on glossy pages and glowing screens, with others’ bodies and their inadequate unnecessary fixes permeating our minds. Which means we have no sense on how to read a body, only how to judge. But perhaps we could begin with reading our own. “Oh, my, look at you! Skinny as a rail– time to take you to the doctor to see what exactly my body means by this.” Or, “Would you look at this! Dark circles under my eyes– an interesting paragraph on my worry that is keeping me from sleep.” We are novels, where the plot is always thickening and resolving, with the opening line written right there on the back of our arm fat that our mother and our mother’s mother also had– a rich history lesson and short story at once.

And once we have studied– really studied– our own bodies in that way, we may learn to read others’ more appropriately, without judgment, but with true appreciation. Hot damn, what a plethora of story available to us, written all over our friends’ bodies! Look there at the belly of my best pal, the story of her most recent baby, red and barely breathing when he came into this world. Look also there, at the eyelids of my other friend, swollen and red from her days spent with too many dogs so that she can make her living. And here, look at these stretch marks on the side of my thighs, where I sprouted too quickly as a kid and only more from there– aren’t I an eager grower?

What I wish I’d said to the woman was also this– that it is incredible that we are packaged up in such an impermanent package, that each change cries out to be noticed, to be seen, to be loved. What an incredible favor our bodies act out for us, while we try in excess and no avail to shush them. And the impermanence of them is impermanent still, as I think of children with their pudgy fingers and lengthening limbs, maybe some with stretch marks beginning on their thighs from their body’s eagerness to grow, stopped short on the floor of a school in Nashville this week. Isn’t it enough to want to hold each body in your gaze, reading their story, taking your eyes from your own mirrored reflection for just a minute, where your judgment glasses are off and your reading glasses are on and to see, really see, that our bodies are precious, perfect creatures that roll like waves into time until we see them no more, and that one day others will suffer to watch them go. Won’t we wish then that we’d really appreciated every rolling body wave that came into our part of the ocean, however brief, and including our own.

But instead, I waved at this woman politely and smiled as I passed her on my way out of the gym. She had her headphones on, running on the treadmill, one leg after the other, like waves in the sea.

“Good afternoon,” I called to Donna, sloshing on my side of Cemetery Road. She pulled her earbuds from her head and smiled, nodding to my muck boots.

“Mud Season has begun,” she called back, rolling her eyes and smiling.

“So it has,” I said, letting my dogs pull me on and waving goodbye. It was an unwelcome holy moment, like a preacher breaking in with an Amen to silent prayers still spinning in the congregation’s head. My neighbor’s nod to the mud soaked dog paws, the ruts rising up from our dirt road, the thick wet seeping from the earth was nothing I couldn’t see, but I wasn’t ready to say it.

Mud Season be with you.

And also with you.

Amen.

Winter is over. The cool, thick blanket of endless bright and dreary days is melting down, and the close comfort of death is rotating its face over to someone else’s falling leaves.

In the last few days, I’ve felt the brush of Death– nothing harrowing or sudden. More the slow passing of someone on their way to a different meeting. I don’t know how to describe it other than this– a shoulder brush with a mumbled “Excuse me,” as she moves onward. I don’t get a chill up the spine, or a panic in my stomach. I feel quiet. Accepting. Grateful. And, understandably, a little overwhelmed. I tried to explain it to my Someone.

“But you don’t know it’s death,” he said.

“But I do,” I said, plainly.

He waited a beat, then conceded.

“I know you do,” he says.

It scares him only a little, he admits. He’s grown accustomed to my strange emotional sorcery, though he and I are both a bit unsettled by my lack of fear. I have always been afraid of Death. Though maybe it is knowing that she is not coming for me– at least not this minute– that keeps me from the usual unraveling. These last few days, I have wrapped myself in Death, like a snowy blanket, luring her in to sit comfortably between myself and living. Between myself and Mud Season. But Mud Season is upon us. The death of Death itself. I find no comfort in the petulant reemergence of life. Not this season.

In January I had the honor of visiting a friend to assist in their recovery from a brutal procedure. I accompanied them to the hospital, sitting for their appointments as they made the slow trek back from the deep whirlpool of cancer. On one visit, they told the doctor of their pain. Not the pain of the cancer, but the chronic, unruly pains that followed them. The doctor blinked once as if computing, leaned forward, and delivered frankly–

“But you have old bones. You will always have pain. Old bones have pain. It does not get better from here.”

I must have misunderstood her. Then she followed up.

“You must find a way to deal with this fact.”

I will always have pain. Each day I am ever nearer to my end, as near to it as I have ever been. The murky, slothful propulsion is inevitable, and this winter, it has worn me down. Fact: I will die. Fact: I can do nothing for it. Question: How will I deal with it? The answer these days is to settle in and wait for its consummation. To endure its passing me by another day with gratitude, with watchfulness, with a big sigh of relief and a rattle of feelings.

This is new for me. So far, I’ve dealt with Death by denying it, by fighting it, by negotiating with God or the Unconscious, praying myself to be the anomaly, the only one who will never need to confront their Old Bones. This new method of wrapping myself in its snowy blanket, cooling my heart beat to a shiver: it’s refreshing.

But it is also a distraction. Because even Death has a season. I cannot stay there forever, or my acceptance transforms from a healthy seasonal reckoning to a moping over Old Bones. So the ugliness of reemergence into the land of the living. So, Mud Season.

And with Mud Season comes a healthy fear of Death.

And so with the fear of Death comes the sap of life.

Laurie called on Monday, bubbling with the news.

The sap was running up the maples– I should bring my friends. We crossed the Connecticut River to the fertile side of Vermont and climbed our car up the mountain to Rowe & Laurie’s place. Their house shines as a bright barn red on top of a hillside they’ve cultivated to include the perfect sledding hill in the winter, and an illustrious garden in the summer. Behind the patch of birches, a row of maples stood in a line with galvanized steel buckets attached, popping a silver light against the mud. We visited each tree with a large white five gallon bucket, collecting the watery offering.

But before we’d move on, Laurie would hush us and lean close to the sap bucket. The small plink of the first new drop hitting the now empty vessel was our signal to continue. A small celebration.

Laurie loves her maple syrup in a way that practically makes her radiate. Rowe jokes that her epitaph will read “Did you put maple syrup on that?” As we continued through the process of separating the sap from the water, straining the bugs and leaves, and watching it boil in the small alter they’d build in their barn, I understood the spirit of it. We were gleaning first life, first nutrients of the season, boiling it down and letting its steam waft over us, revitalizing our chapped faces after the long season of Death.

Rowe continued to keep watch over the sap-and-future-syrup Monday night and all day Tuesday, and Laurie promised to call us when it was ready for finishing. Like awaiting a child from labor, we kept our boots lined up and our ears to the ground. We got the call Tuesday evening, and scurried over with snacks and local cider and the thrill of watching the blood of a tree turn into a small taste of sugar. This was a party. We crowded into a steamy kitchen that had notes of marshmallow and graham cracker and vanilla and watched as Laurie dipped the hydrometer in again and again until– so soon and so long at once– it was time. Rowe & Laurie scrambled to turn off the heat and strain the syrup for one last filter. As we watched, spoons in hand, Laurie waved us over to the sink.

“Go ahead!” she said, “Get your spoons under there.”

And that was my first taste of new life. Oh, Death, where is your sting? I can endure anything. Even Mud Season.

The syrup was placed in four jars, two large and two small, screwed tight, and turned upside down. We retired to the living room where the woodstove burned so warm Laurie had to crack a window, and we pattered conversationally while snow glittered on the windows outside. Just as we waited for the plink of the first sap drop, we waited now for the plink of the jars, indicating that they are sealed and ready. The ding of the metal announced itself in a stagger, and Laurie delivered a small jar to me, still warm. This is what the living do, I thought.

But also, this. The previous day, when we’d first carried our large bucket to collect the sap, we passed several large maples in the front of the house. Rowe had noted that, no, they don’t tap those trees anymore. Laurie smiled sheepishly and said,

“I like to let my trees retire,” she patted one on its trunk as we passed. “I just think at a certain point they should get to rest.”

There near where she patted was a small scar from an old tap. They certainly could produce an abundance of maple syrup, but Laurie wouldn’t have it. She listened, and when she sensed a tree was done, she let it go. They had old bones. Let old bones do what old bones do. These trees, the retired lot, were the ones who shaded the front of the house all summer and speckled the lawn with brilliant fall colors. A stunning way of coping with old bones, of reckoning with the closeness of death– simply: living.

I am ready for Mud Season, now. Though, truthfully, we are missing it this year. We’re skipping right into spring, packing our camper this week and launching it to Florida, where spring is already underway without a road rut in sight.

But before we could set sail, I had another brush with Death. A snow storm blew in on Wednesday night, and I awoke to another thick cold coat of white. The trees are weighed down heavy with the stuff, and I can hear it sliding in clumps from my metal roof. So my Someone and I did what we always do on snow days. We ate pancakes.

And we topped them with a rationed pour of our new maple syrup.

I begrudge the snow a little, at the taste of the sweet candied syrup while I squint at the brightness through my window. But the Death outside, I remember, is a great mercy to my life. Sure enough, it has come in to save the day, freezing the ground well enough that we can safely pull out our old rig and begin moving again without sliding or getting stuck on the way.

It’s the only way to really appreciate the two– life and death– as they press toward each other on to our old bones: together. Like the taste of two day old maple syrup on a bleak, snowy winter morning.

For Christmas, my mother sent me the photograph, professionally framed. It took me a second– no more– to realize the effort of it, the sweetness, the singular ray that stretched from my path to hers. There is a light I’ve been awkwardly dismissing between us– I was too skittish. On Christmas morning, I gave in.

It began with my Aunt Tammy’s death. After over two years of silence, my mother called me. But it wasn’t complete. I was grateful, of course– it was my only request since I’d pulled the plug in her kitchen, crying in a huddled mess, begging her and my father to see me– to just call me every once and while. They declined. Until August of 2021, when bad news opened the line. I was suspicious of the circumstances, and asked to work slowly. I thanked her for the call. I agreed to move forward. She agreed, too.

Since then, it’s been a delicate walk– a smattering of phone calls, but mostly we text. Or we email. Or, occasionally, we send a note in the mail. I don’t dread seeing her name pop up on my phone, anymore, and I count it as a win.

The thing about it is, I became my own mother in the last few years. So what I thought I needed from her, I no longer need. What I thought I needed was for her to be someone she isn’t– someone more like me. But she’s not that. Except.

Except sometimes, I think, in her quieter moments.

Like last summer, when she sent me a photo she captured in the woods. She had lately taken up morning hikes in the thick hills of Western Pennsylvania, walking the trails on the family’s 80 acres of blackberry brambles and huckleberry shrubs, messy pines and straightbacked beeches, of fox dens hidden at the edge of the clearing and a bear cave piled high with heavy, mossy rocks on the top of the hill. These are the woods where my childhood imagination conjured evil spirits by the old oil well that still popped in the evenings and ancient secrets whispered from the stream where I built my fort. I clomped and ran and hid most weekends in those mountains, chewing on birch bark and squeezing teaberries between my fingers and teeth for the radiating warmth and mild sweetness.

The photo she sent, taken herself on that morning, flooded me with home.

I imagined her walking alone in those woods, duck boots crashing through the light leafy debris of the path, and looking up to see the sunlight coming through the trees in honest-to-god rays. Rays like in cartoons or those funny, primitive pictures a kid would draw, with triangles long and thin casting out from the light white circle of the sun, the trees achingly still sides of a prism shaping those strange, geometric light swatches to the ground. I imagine her to stop then, taking a breath before grabbing her phone, slowly at first, as though a movement could knock the light right out of the sky, but then more quickly as she remembers the inevitability of the Western PA skies clouding this perfect moment in mere seconds. When she snaps that picture of her solitude, I imagine her feeling close to someone– to god, to her dad– not recognizing the beacon is herself, shining back.

But whoever she was thinking of, she sent it to me. Maybe she shared it with everyone in her church group, and maybe that doesn’t matter. Because she did share it with me, too. I wrote back with enthusiasm. It wasn’t feigned– it’s such a lovely photo. I thought, we are the same, Mom. We are so alone and together and the same.

Since then, our phone calls have dwindled, but our connection has not. Maybe I’m a fool to see it that way. Broken down to its specifics, this relationship looks not so different than before our split. Texts, emails, and empty invites to see one another someday, down the road, when things calm down a bit.

This December, leading up to Christmas, I chose to see the light on the path. My first real home, and I was ready to shed the heartache of the homes I’d been captured in before. But I could not deny the direct line of cookies from my mother’s oven to my heart. I asked her for her recipes– all of them, every Christmas cookie I could remember from my childhood.

Western Pennsylvania is known for its cookies, and not just at Christmas time. At weddings, in addition to cake, there is an entire cookie table set up for friends and family members to bring their best recipe and drop a platter. At the end of the reception, boxes are handed out to every guest, and they take a haul home of their favorites– lady locks, filled Pizzelles, Peanut Butter Blossoms, Thumbprints, Snickerdoodles, Oatmeal Raisin, Chocolate Chip, Italian Peach Cookies, Cannoli. But at Christmas, it was a full time job. My mother would designate two weeks ahead of Christmas to bake, nearly 9-5, inviting friends over to make batches of their favorites, swapping by the dozen at the end of the day. Pizzelles, Russian Tea Cakes, Caramel Tassies, Gingerbread, Peanut Butter, Ginger Snaps, Sugar Cookies, White Chocolate Macadamia, Buckeyes. The recipes would be doubled, tripled, quadrupled, and then cooled down the center of our small kitchen table, occasionally overflowing to the table in the dining room, too. Then, the frumpy old tupperware would be brought up from the basement and, after they cooled, the cookies would be lidded with their respective kind and placed on the back porch. Winter in Western PA was cold enough then to sustain them– should they not get eaten sooner– til almost February. When we had guests, one of the kids was instructed with a large plate to go on to the porch and make a full sampler platter of cookies, bringing them in an hour before so they had time to thaw by the time the guests arrived.

They tasted just as good cold, before they ever hit the plate.

Since the photo my mother had sent me early in the year had split open my home reservations, I wanted to welcome a piece of it into my own home. She sent the recipes in batches, and I baked as I received them.

“I am bonding with my mom,” I told my Someone. “But she doesn’t know it.”

“Sounds good to me,” he said, sneaking his fourth Caramel Tassie from the plate.

And I was. I was welcoming her into my kitchen, into my home, each time I pulled a new sheet from the oven. I texted her photos, or emailed her with questions like “But how much sugar in the Pizzelles? It doesn’t say,” or “Are you sure it’s regular sugar and not powdered sugar for that icing?” I navigated her vague recipes, crawling inside her head to figure out proper measurements.

I told my Someone that maybe it was unfair to do it this way– to create a connection with someone through cookies, not letting her interject the reality of herself into my attempts at becoming closer. I was, clearly, sugarcoating our relationship.

But I have a hard time believing that’s true. Maybe the elements are the same, I cannot deny the way our efforts cut through– the geometric rays that are nearly tangible in their light. Maybe it’s a trick of the mind– a trick of the light– but the path this way is much easier because of it. It’s hard won. I haven’t thoughtlessly foregone my boundaries or changed my mind or given up. It’s quite the opposite. I’ve opened wide to a new friend who, somehow, while we seem nothing alike, are deeply connected by a sharp shard of light that casts its way on both of our paths. Maybe that’s what forgiveness looks like. Or love. Or acceptance. I only know it, now, as lightness.

On Christmas morning, with the taste of my mother’s Gingersnaps and coffee still on my tongue, I opened the photograph, professionally framed. Yes, I knew for certain. Things have definitely changed. I can see it. I can taste it.

My niece went to school yesterday, in spite of the bad news.

Her guinea pig is dead.

She took it well enough, and vowed to turn her sorrow into art–
Taking the corpse’s paws into her pink fingers,
Squishing ink from paw to page.
One didn’t turn out so well.
He was already in rigor mortis.

My grief is less purely exorcised.

I bought a String of Tears hanging plant
This morning from the Hannaford’s.

“For Brownie,” I say.

I throw my plastic card at the automatic machine.
Money covers bases.

It occurs to me on the drive home that
I have imprisoned myself to the day of the guinea pig’s death
So long as the plant lives.

“For Brownie,” I say again.
One pustule pod is rattled by the truck
On a back road to home in New Hampshire,
And it falls onto the floor.

Later in the afternoon
On my walk,
the thick stench of sweet apples,
The smell is red & fermented.

“For Brownie,” I think.
I know it is a farce.
Brownie is also dead.

So the dead are only for me.

I pick up a piece of birch bark in the cemetery,
But I don’t offer it.

“Redundant,” I think.
Dead trees for dead beings,
And I am the only one living between.

In the woods before home,
I consider a poem.
I consider a 10-year-old girl
Drawing tiny pawprints
On her notebook in school.

I curl in my chair upstairs,
Under the skylight
Where a String of Tears
Dangles above me.

It’s still alive since the morning
(nothing is a guarantee).

Lucky, because the dead are not for themselves, anymore.
The dead are for the living.

I think, “For her.”

And then I think,

“For me.”

My first step in most places is to figure out all of the ways I don’t belong. Not the common ground, but the way in which I stick out, how I’m unsettled, how I’m the other. I can vouch that this is, in fact, the worst way to enter almost any situation. It is an inhibitor to any meaningful contact, and will make one look desperate because one becomes desperate.

Suddenly I’m backpedaling who I am with a plateful of mashed potatoes in a line at Friendsgiving dinner, attempting to explain myself and why I am this way, and the face of the brand new person I’ve encountered goes from average-first-meeting-face to curiosity to alarm as I flail my free arm and hit the fast forward button on my mouth to try and get their face to go back to the average-first-meeting-face before I hit the end of my now-five-page-single-run-on-sentence, which usually ends in “I’m so sorry!”

For the last almost 8 years, I’ve been a traveler, which means that I was entering new places almost daily, and was secure in the knowledge that I don’t belong because, quite decidedly, I didn’t belong. I was leaving, if not this day then the next, and there was no real reason to explain myself or try and fool anyone into thinking otherwise. I belonged everywhere because I belonged nowhere. It’s an excellent bit. But I’ve ruined that self-actualized constant. I’ve ruined it because I belong somewhere, now. And I’m freaking out.

On October 31, my Someone and I closed on a house in Haverhill, NH, a little corner of New England wherein the trees offer a welcome shroud between me and the grey sky, where the Connecticut River narrows and widens between my home and the rolling green of Vermont, where there’s an apple stand just up the street that offers at least eight different varieties at any given visit, and the varieties change by the next week. I’ve yet to encounter it in its fullness, but there will be snow, likely through March and maybe to April, and if I drive East for a few short hours I will hit the rocky Atlantic coast. I’m 79 miles from Canada, the fun French part, and most days I’ve been here are the kind of dreary that makes me light candles and turn on low lights and stack good novels next to my reading chair. That’s to say, I have a reading chair. And a kitchen where I’ve made an apple pie with apples from the apple market up the street. I have a living room where we sit close to the heater at night, and a separate bedroom where I read before sleeping, where my hamster runs on her wheel and my dog snores next to me. I have house plants who I’ve named Jones, Marge, Rippy, and Scuttlebutt.

By all accounts, I have a home. I live here. I belong. From the moment we saw the place to the closing, there have been zero barriers, no hang ups. It was fluid, like it was meant to be. Which means that I have been freaking out because I have nothing to freak out about. Where is the anxiety of decision? When is the part where a major wrench appears and I get to question my choices? In what way don’t I belong?

We’ve even lucked out in community. We were swiftly welcomed by friends of friends, and found ourselves squarely in a room full of warm and open people– poets, painters, priests, potters, play actors– over Friendsgiving in the town hall across the river. Again and again we introduced ourselves, “Hello, we’re new here,” and in return were given a tour of people, what they do, where they live, and how they love this place. A couple nights later we entered another room of strangers and left with new friends. By the end of the night, I was tired.

“I should be happy,” I said to my Someone. “We’re lucky.”

We were. New Englanders are notorious for keeping to themselves– so we’re told.

“It’s hard to meet people,” a few friends warned us.

“Don’t expect a casserole from anyone around here,” one neighbor said.

And in a way, they are right. We still haven’t met our immediate neighbors, though we’ve knocked on the door during a minor fiasco wherein my little dog went missing. We were met with silence, but eventually found our little dog, fat and sick from a turkey carcass she found in the woods. The next day another neighbor, one who looks out for us, let us know that my Someone’s face was all over Facebook as a “suspicious character” caught on a surveillance camera for “lurking around.” She helped us make it right, and we are keeping a look out our window to try and better introduce ourselves.

It’s the small drop in the bucket of not belonging in an otherwise full bucket of getting more invitations to dinner than we have stomachs for.

So the deep ache, the lowness of spirit that compounded after yet another perfect night of being welcomed “home,” I couldn’t figure it. I tried to reason it out.

“Maybe it’s because we know we’re not leaving,” I said.

“Maybe,” said my Someone.

“Maybe it’s because we don’t know our neighbors well enough,” I said.

“Maybe,” said my Someone.

“Maybe we miss being on the road?” I asked.

“Nope,” said my Someone.

He was right. Not once since we moved in have we looked out at our old, beat up home-of-the-road and wished for another night in it. Sure, there are days ahead still where we’ll pack it up and carry it across this country and back. But now we have a place to be back to. No matter where we go, now, we belong somewhere else.

We pulled into our driveway and walked toward our front door. I made sure to touch the spot on the third step up, about a third of the way from the right. Since moving in, it’s the one spot I’ve found that accidentally felt like home. Our second week here, I’d been running back from the camper with an armful of our things when I stepped on that spot and had the sensation of doing it a thousand times already and a million times in the future. That little piece of the step would know my tread, and it warmed my leg up to the top of my head in a feeling of knowing that I couldn’t deny. I’ve since pressed it for its magic each time I walk up to my porch, hoping if I stamp it enough, it’ll pool outward under the house and float upward to the loft until the house in drenched in the stuff of home. I believe it’s working, as last week I felt that wobbling magic under the skylight in my kitchen as I chopped celery on Thanksgiving eve.

We entered our house, dog tails wagging. These two animals have taken to still life easily with no identity crisis at all. I breathed in the faint smell of a local peppermint mocha candle I bought. I dropped my things in their correct places. I wandered into each room while my Someone began to chop lettuce for dinner. He yelled from the kitchen, asking if I’d like to watch a new movie. I said yes, but kept roaming from room to room. When dinner was ready, I sat down in the living room with the low patio lights and a few candles burning and looked blankly at the computer screen we prop up on the desk chair in front of the couch. My Someone hit play and I felt myself relax.

“This isn’t that new movie,” I said.

“It isn’t,” said my Someone.

The screen played a familiar opening sequence, one I’ve seen at least three times before. I don’t re-watch things much, if at all, unless it is in the spirit of sharing it with someone who is watching for the first time. I don’t like watching the same movie every year at Christmas. I don’t like reliving childhood memories around The Land Before Time, I don’t like playing Magnolia again for the director’s cut. But my Someone and I have already watched this before. The whole series. From beginning to end.

“But, you’ve already watched this,” I said.

“Yes,” said my Someone, “but it seemed like maybe you needed an old friend.”

There it was. I was homesick. I was new, new, new, in a new house with new people with new neighbors and a new peppermint mocha candle. And all I really wanted was for someone who knew, knew, knew me, longer than a day, longer than a year, longer than a decade.

And somehow, Lorelai Gilmore knew me then. Or rather, my Someone knew me well enough to know that rewatching The Gilmore Girls would be just the ticket to put my old self in its new order. We finished the episode and started another, making a bowl of popcorn and piling another blanket on, one my mother had made me the first time I got married. I was getting tired, as my ages were coming together again, presenting themselves in my one body in a new place. I picked up my phone and texted Ann, then Annie, then Jessica and Holly, too. Because to know someone a long time is to belong somewhere, no matter where your body with all of its ages is sitting.

Then, a text popped up from a new friend. We’d declined dinner for the sake of coming home to our sick, turkey filled dog. When I opened the screen, it was to a photo of a table full of new people, ones we’ve met since arriving here, ones who have made such an intention to fold us in. They were waving at us from the dinner we declined, and they were telling us that they were happy to have our new selves in their community.

The feeling, at first, was itchy. I tried to find the way that I could protest– the way to tell them I don’t belong. But it was impossible. Because belonging is one part showing up and one part acceptance and a few parts that are a mystery that I will likely be figuring out as I spend my years here. Sometimes, it is you yourself accepting your belonging. But sometimes, when you’re really lucky like I am, it is the persistent invitation to be accepted, in spite of yourself. All this agonizing over a story I’ve already watched before– I know how it goes. It’s no Stars Hollow, but it’s pretty damn close, and soon I will be replaying these early episodes in that familiar way that only someone who belongs can appreciate.

I am confident two weeks ago was my last tomato sandwich, so I savored it appropriately by letting it drip down the front of my overalls and placed it to rest on the plate between bites, soaking up pickle juice and seeds before the next bite. I sighed when it was finished and said, “You never know when a tomato sandwich will be your last of the summer.” Then I rinsed my plate and waited for the leaves to turn colors while it was still 90 degrees and full summer in the thumb of Michigan.

I’m not in a rush for the new season. Of course I love fall, but this year isn’t the slow drag of praying for a breeze. This year, I only want to make sure that I have appropriately noted the change rather than waking up on a cold September morning and sleepily realizing summer is gone. I am hungry not only for tomato sandwiches, but to know that this is my last tomato sandwich. And if it isn’t, then I will treat the next one as my last.

That is to say, my richest grief these days is inextricably woven with my deepest joy, and I am comfortable in the strain.

My Someone and I are in the studio this week for a new record. Nashville in September is a favorite. It’s not a roll of colors and smells, yet, but it is the small gasp that escapes from a city that’s been entrenched in a suffocating heat for months. The relief is visceral, almost audible, in spite of the nearly unchanging landscape. The thermometer will still hit 90, but the sentiment has changed– this isn’t forever.

I am in a city I called home for five years, running the risk of running into who I used to be, which I am afraid will be who I still am. It’s impossible, of course. The less afraid I am, the less likely I am to run into old me. Old me is just an amalgamation of fear– fear of who I was, fear of who everyone thought I was. A ghost of shuttered windows, hiding indoors. I, too, am gasping in the relief from the stifling heat of fear and walking comfortably– that wasn’t forever. This isn’t either. I am appropriately savoring the last bites of who I was, letting the seeds drip down the front of my memory, and rinsing my plate to prepare for the next season.

Yes, but really. I say the last bites, but this season isn’t shook yet. A pleasant surprise and a burden to savor at once, on comes another last perfect tomato of the season.

Metaphorically, at least.

Our new record is one of noting the time without rushing to meet it. These are songs from a glorious and shit year. A little more than a year ago, I lost my Aunt– suddenly, without the option to savor last moments. And so, I have been savoring my grief. My songs for her didn’t come until months after her passing. Now, I paste them to time– to a click track, no less– and I am surprised to find a new wave of grief appearing at the back of the refrigerator. I am honoring it by carefully slicing it into an arrangement of verse and chorus, letting the instruments sop up the possibility of this being the last time to feel the loss in this way. This isn’t forever. It is painfully joyful work. You never know when a wave of grief will be your very last, when you might wake up on a cold September morning and have missed the opportunity to miss someone with the perspective of time moving abundantly beneath you.

As we began to wrap our first week of recording, I found another last tomato in the bottom of the fruit bowl. Not at all metaphorically. It had miraculously made the journey from Michigan to Tennessee, nearly unbruised, and warmly fragrant. I considered making another last sandwich, but the temperature dropped earlier in the evening. It was sunny all day, but the season has changed, and I was unable to capture its precise moment. That’s the way of tomato sandwiches. Even when you are sure it is your last, you won’t know until it has passed. I refrained from reaching for the bread and mayo, and began, instead, to boil a pot of water. I cut basil, minced half a bulb of garlic, pulled the capers from the cupboard. Then, I pulled what is likely the last good tomato of the season, and I chopped it roughly into juicy cubes. When we sat down to dinner, our ears still ringing from the work of listening all day, the pasta pomodoro steamed from our bowls.

“This is the last good tomato of the season,” I told my Someone.

“Do you think so?” he said.

“Maybe,” I said. And we ate as if it really was.