“You’re a Graham?” he said.  We were in Vermont again, playing a favorite spot with a slew of our new friends drinking and next-morning-job-be-damned in favor of hearing us.

“I am,” I said.

“They’re a loathsome bunch,” he said, squinting one eye and pulling at his red beard. “I’m one myself, and when I went to Scotland, they told me to watch it.  They are the marauders, the thieves, the brawlers.  They don’t necessarily like us over there, but they sure are to stay out of the way.  Real rough ones.”

“Sounds about right,” I said.  I have been learning to stay out of their way for most of my life.  But then again, I’m a Graham.  A bit of a brawler.  I seem to end up tangled horns first just after treaty.

I’m not sure what my thoughts on Karma are, but my thoughts on shame are pretty clear.  It is abundantly mine.  So when I burn the toast, or trip on the sidewalk, or lose my favorite hat, I have to first fight the belief that I deserved it.  I have to stuff down the sensation that the Universe or God or my own dumb luck forged a reckoning with my Resting State of Badness.

My Someone is consistently fighting it with me.  More often early in our love.  Like when a mug– a gift from my favorite person– fell from the cupboard after a particularly rough passage.  As I cleaned up the pieces, the grief moved rapidly– hope that it could be fixed, anger at our moving house on wheels, despair… but then fear.  Fear that my favorite person who had gifted this to me would believe what I believed about myself– that I am unworthy of gifts.  And then, it is me, crumpled on the floor–

“I am bad, I am bad, I am bad!”

And there, my Someone sitting beside me–

“You are good, good, good.”

It would be pretty easy to trace my Resting State of Badness back to religion.  I’d be hard pressed to find many of my friends who don’t carry a bit of Christian trauma.  As much as I heard that Jesus loved me, I heard that I am a sinner.  Maybe more.  For the Bible tells me so.

But Genetic Badness.  This was something that could help.  This was a hero’s story, against all odds.  I could be the Good Graham in spite of my freebooter’s lot.  As it turns out, nature and nurture are not the same thing.

The first time I was stung this summer was just a week after the confrontation with my parents.  The yellowjacket jabbed me, unprovoked, at the doorway of our friends’ house in North Carolina.  As I usually do when I’ve been hurt, I didn’t say anything.  I walked into the house, made conversation with our friend, all the while my foot beginning to form a bright red blaze around the stinger.

I finished packing our things, climbed into our truck, then told my Someone.

Then, I began retching, my lower back aching, and my chest heaving.

“I might be allergic, I think.”

My Someone drove faster.  We arrived just a few minutes later at our second driveway in town, our friends waiting happily on their porch.

“Go inside and get help,” my Someone said.

“I can’t,” I said.

We finished parking.  My face began to swell.  I finally asked for help as my body panicked.  Someone ran for Benadryl.  My throat began to swell.  I took the medicine.  I don’t remember much about the rest of the day.  Only the recurring thought–

This has happened because I was bad.  This has happened because I have disobeyed my parents.  This has happened and I deserve this.

Kelsey told me when my parents broke up with me that this particular divorce would be more difficult than the rest.  Harder than my actual divorce.  Harder than the time I confronted the sexual predator from my teens.  Parental trauma, she said, is more closely tied to what you believe is your identity.  Tearing out the toxicity will mean tearing apart who you think you really are.

It turns out, I am in shreds.

I had been waiting for the other shoe since the blow out– waiting for the repercussions for standing up for myself.  The truth of the world had to come out and remind me that there is no such thing as a good kid.  So even as we deliberated whether or not I needed to go to the ER for my sting, I resisted the kindness.  Somehow, this life-or-death attack from nature didn’t feel like enough.  There was more coming.

I told my Someone this before falling asleep that night.  We’d made a plan for him to check that I was still breathing through the night.

“You are good,” he said.  “You are good, good, good.”

When I was stung a second time last week, it was with my Someone’s parents.  Out for a hike in Ohio, we stumbled on a nest.  One got me to the back of the calf and I ran, hearing the shouts of everyone behind me.  When we arrived back at the campsite, my leg had swollen.  But my Someone’s mom had it the worst, multiple times and had to hunker down for the rest of the day.

“This is my fault,” I told my Someone.  “I made this happen.  I took everyone on this hike, and then I stung them.”

My Someone laughed, but then got serious.

“You did not sting my parents,” he said.

It sounded rational when he said it, but I felt the following of my Badness, and it was infecting everyone around me.

I am a loathsome bunch, I thought.

Kelsey says I am confusing Disobedience with a Toxic Cycle.

She’s not wrong.

My favorite sting I ever had was when I was 7 or 8 years old.  My Someone thinks that it’s sad to have a favorite sting.  I was sitting up near the garage– the big one that smelled like diesel and oil and dust.  My mother had run for an errand, or was working in the office across the driveway.  That part I don’t remember.  Just that I was alone and thinking again.  And so I went in front of the garage where the large, long spools of erosion control fabrics laid flat across on shelved stilts.  It was early summer, so the black fabric wasn’t too hot to burn my legs, yet.  My feet dangled from the side of the spools I sat on, which made it perfect thinking conditions, running my fingernails through the rough hatch of the fabric while watching the sky.

That’s when I saw my Pap Pap’s old blue truck pull up the driveway.  This was a lucky event, as I was just thinking I needed a friend.  When he opened the door, he smiled across the gravel and waved.  I began lifting my hand when I felt it.  I looked down to see a wasp on my fingers, then looked back at my Pap Pap.

I screamed.

He ran.  Toward me.

And this is why it is my favorite–

When he got to me, he did not say, “What did you do?”

He did not say, “Why were you sitting here where you could get stung?”

He did not say, “Stop crying.”

Instead, he picked me up and carried me.  He said, “It’s okay, I’m here now.  We are going to get help.  You are good.  You are so, so good.”

I was told later that I shouldn’t be sitting there on the fabric, anyway.

I would get stung a hundred more times if I could be carried like that each time.

We were leaving South Bend, Indiana, heading toward Kelsey’s house.  We split ways with my Someone’s parents, his poor mother and I still itching from our stings.  Otherwise, it’d been a good week.  We played great shows, ate good food, were healthy, happy, and had the day off.

And I felt terrible.

“I never should have taken us on that hike,” I said to my Someone.

“It was a great hike!”

“Except that I stung everyone at the end,” I said.  “This is what I get for not talking to my parents.”

My Someone exploded.

“You are GOOD!” he yelled.  “We probably would’ve been stung, anyway!  Mallory, you are allowed to sit on the fabric by the garage!  You didn’t do anything wrong!  Your parents keep moving the finish line!  You don’t have to run, anymore!”

I thought about it.

“I think my sting is getting better,” I said.

“I think so, too.”

“Oh, praise baby lord god jesus of heaven and hell!” I said as we threw in the last of our laundry.  It was 8:34PM, four minutes past last load, and we’d made it by the grace of the attendant alone, even as her boyfriend who waited outside in his car tried to block us.

“It’s gotta be in at 8:30, you can’t come in here!” he’d yelled across the lot as my Someone ran the load inside yelling back “I got 8:30 RIGHT NOW!”

We were feeling haggard from long drives and quick errands, trying to maintain a sense of balance in a more chaotic week.  That morning in Indiana, we’d bought ourselves a new mattress with real springs to replace our lumpy pad we’d slept on for the last four years.  We picked up new sheets with llamas on them after our show in Ohio to replace the holey ones my mother had bought us at the start of our camper living.  We needed all things new.  We needed all things put together.  We needed all things clean.  And dammit if some dude who wanted his girlfriend out of work early tonight was going to stop us.

I watched the washer fill with water as my eyes filled with tears.  The woman beside me did the same.  Then she turned to me and said, “Lord, there ain’t no feeling like getting to the laundromat in the nick of time.”  Then she wiped her own tears and sat down to wait.

In the aftermath, I listen to Kesha.  And I am in the aftermath.  This time, of my parents.  After years of trying, after pleas of asking them to love me– or at least to call me– they pulled the plug.  There was a scene, there was crying, and there was my father telling me he’d never call me again and slamming to door to get to church on time to worship the Lover of the World.  There’s more to it, but in this stage on this day, the details don’t seem to matter.  My parents have broken up with me, and the searing in my heart needs Kesha.

We listen as she sings for kids with no religion, backed promptly by her prayers.  She sees no conflict, so I don’t either.  As far as I can tell as we charged across I-80 from Indiana to Ohio, Saint Kesha of the Broken Hearted Party Bus can be heard by God better than any of us.  All aboard.

I’m working it out.  I journal.  I talk to friends.  I write songs.  I try to treat others better.  But also, I get a new mattress.  I quit punishing myself for being unlovable, and instead love myself, hoping to set off a chain reaction.  And I watch my llama sheets gratefully as they swirl around in the last load of the night in a crappy laundromat outside of Cleveland, and count my stupid blessings.

“Are you looking for your basket?” the woman asked me.  I wasn’t, but I nodded anyway.

“When you stepped out,” she said, “there was a spider.  Like a big one– you didn’t want to take it home, okay?”

She gestured across the floor.  I looked to where she pointed.  There was a massive spider, legs up and a little squished.

“It was heading right toward your basket when you stepped out, so I moved it, and then we killed it.  I’m telling you, you were bound to take it with you, and I wouldn’t let it happen.  So I moved your basket.”

“Thank you!” I said, genuinely.

“Yeah!  Of course, but you owe me something in return,” she said.

“Okay?”

“Your prayers.”

“Ummmm…” I started.

“Listen,” she pushed, “I got a whole list.  God’ll know what you’re saying, but let Her know that She can throw in anything extra, too, outside the list– okay?”

I considered it.  I didn’t think that I prayed.  I don’t even think I looked like I pray.

…I know that I’m perfect, even though I’m fucked up… Kesha sang in my head.

“Yes,” I said.

“Yes?” the lady said.

“Sure, I will.”

“Thank you,” she said.

That night, I slept on a new mattress with clean sheets.  It wasn’t a great night of sleep.  I had a Kesha soundtrack running through my head.  But I suspect an intercession– Saint Kesha of the Orphaned, Abused, and Laundering was heard louder somewhere than a few diligent Our Fathers.

I am having hindsight compulsions.  I guess that just means regret. But its recurring, and I am stuck at inaction each time.  I am frustrated, mostly, by turkeys.

It started in November.  A rafter of turkeys gobbled themselves across the road in front of my littlest– and at the time only– dog on our walk back to our temporary Vermont house.  I talked to her smoothly as she and I both restrained her from running them wild.  It wasn’t until they beat the crest of the hill that I remembered:  I was supposed to count the turkeys.  The remorse was somewhere deeper than I’d wanted to uncover, so I wrote it down when we got back.

Why don’t I count the turkeys, anymore?

Then, I continued to forget in all the months since.  And the forgetting gets wider and deeper.  I am moved to count the whitetail deer beside the highway a good half mile past.  I am harnessing a fabricated memory for the number of ravens that sat on my picnic table that morning while I’m sitting at that same table in the afternoon.  But for the life of me, when I see them, I do not will myself to count them.

I’ve called it growing up.  I’ve called it being responsible.  But it’s really the opposite.  Just like toilet paper and tigers.

I suspect Zoe to be a future vegetarian.  From naming her chickens so they can’t be killed, to defending the cricket that the chickens foraged, all four years of her seems predestined as her bleeding heart leaks from her wide blue eyes.

We were staying in her driveway– she and her older brother Zeke showed us their Legos and their make up kits while we had a rare extended visit with their parents.  We are fortunate to be mobile, dropping in on people’s lives and being able to fully absorb their patterns.  Although Zoe’s compassion is evident within minutes.  She moseyed around the Western North Carolina property in her rain boots and pajamas, digging up bugs and worrying about whether their dog needed another toy to be happy.

Zoe reminds me of me.  Or, at least, how I used to be.  These days I’m all business and learning the hard truths about how the world really works.  But our short stay with Zoe changed me, as it seems to be changing everyone around her.

“Zoe needs me to figure out a new toilet paper situation,” her mom, Amanda, said to me while she poured my coffee.  Living in this family means that you never have a need un-met– and often it’s met before you ask.

“Toilet paper…?”

“Yeah, she just learned that the toilet paper people are using is being made from trees that are the habitat for tigers.  And the tigers are losing their trees, which means they are dying,” Amanda said, as matter-of-factly as Zoe must’ve reported.

I tried to process this as the caffeine hit.

“Poor ZoZo,” I said.

“Yeah.  She asked me to just call the people who are cutting down the trees and tell them to stop it so the tigers can live.”

Of course.

It made so much sense.  Someone is getting hurt.  All you have to do is ask the people who are doing the hurting to stop.  For a minute, I was convinced– can you Google that phone number?  Is it a letter writing situation?

The coffee came in full force.  I excused myself to the bathroom.  In there, I was confronted by the toilet paper that is killing the tigers.  That I was using to kill the tigers.

It’s hopeless.  And then I felt myself trying to forget about the tigers.  All my compassion shriveled up to wipe my own ass with.

Then I remembered how I forget to count the turkeys.

I am frustrated to find out that I am a grown up, and that I am still as helpless to save anyone as when I was a kid.  It’s all a sham.

When I was a kid, I counted the turkeys.  I counted the deer.  I counted the squirrels and the groundhogs and the baby rabbits.  I counted everything that could potentially be struck by a bullet by my family.  Occasionally, particularly with groundhogs or bunnies, I’d beg for their lives.

“When you’re older, you can save all the bunnies you want,” my dad said.  “But under this roof, we shoot them so they stop eating our house.”

I’m 33 now, but I still can’t save any bunnies, let alone call someone about the tigers.  So, I stopped counting them.  But it’s a bigger loss than I’d thought.  It seems in not counting the creatures who are helpless to help themselves, I’ve stopped counting myself.

Maybe it goes like this–

I will let the toilet paper make me sad.  I will count the turkeys, anyway, knowing that they will be someone’s dinner on Thanksgiving.  Because even if I am helpless, maybe it helps to have a voice in all of the callousness.

If I can remember to count three deer– one doe and two fawn– on the side of I-40 heading West through North Carolina, then I am more likely to remember the one mother and two children trying to cross an international border to safety.

Excuse me, we need a grown up!  Something is wrong, something is wrong, something is wrong…

It’s a small step, but an important one.  Any four-year-old knows that.

We’ve been singing a song about my dead dog lately, and it’s a real doozy.  It took us months to work up to performing it live, with starts and stops of lumpy throats and staring at the ceiling.  Now, we can get through it fine most of the time, and leave the feelings for the audience.

And our audience is feeling it.  They are replacing our dog in the song with ex-husbands and dead wives, their own dogs or their parents, and sometimes their children.  It’s a world of grief out there, and we are grateful to be the ones facilitating a catharsis if it’s needed.  The conversations following the show are similar.

“You never stop missing them,” they will say.

“We never do,” I say, not sure whose loss we are speaking of.

“And they are always still there,” they will say.

“It’s true,” I say, and then add something I think is wise, “the grief never goes away.  It’s just a space you learn to work around, occasionally bumping into.”

“Yes,” they say.  And then, they are gone, bumping into the grief space on their way out the door.

But maybe it isn’t like that at all.

When our friend Josh died, it was sudden and intentional, and we were speeding to Chattanooga late at night to catch a funeral we never imagined we’d attend.  At the funeral, the space of grief widened as we listened to a recording of Tom Petty singing–

You belong among the wildflowers…

I don’t listen to Tom Petty, anymore.  Maybe it’s more than an empty space.  Maybe it’s a black hole, sucking up those songs and next day hangovers and lit candles into a mass of memory you have to work very hard to avoid getting caught in again.

Last month, we watched our friend Thomas direct a choir of children at his school in a medley of songs ranging from Beyonce to Jerry Garcia.  When they sang Wildflowers, I tensed.  I thought about leaving.  I thought about covering my face.  Instead, I cried.

Grief is a space you bump into on occasion– a space you work around.  It is also a black hole, sweeping you down a long tunnel of old church pews and a mother bent over her son’s coffin.  Grief is also a room, lit brightly, that you choose to enter and walk through again and again, changing the flowers in the center table vase before closing the door again on the other side, occasionally with a choir of children or a little folk band guiding you in and safely out again.

In Maine, you’re either from here, or you’re from away.  Those that are from here have no trouble telling you you’re from away.  In fact, they will likely tell you before your first sip of beer, as they are already on their second pint.  They don’t care that it was your grandparents who first settled here.

“It can’t happen in just a generation or two,” John told me down in Cornish, a small town in the Southwest corner.  He’s owned his music store there that we played last Saturday night since 1974.  “You’ve got to have had family here for much longer than me.”  Charlene, his wife, is from here.  She inherited her grandparents’ house, who worked hard for it after their parents settled here.  Marriage is not a transferable ticket for being-from-here.

I don’t belong anywhere, but Maine is one of my favorite states.  I’ve had long dreams of becoming a waitress in a diner someday when I’m hard on my luck and need a place to recover in solitude.  I’ve got a bad attitude and nothing to lose, and potentially a dark secret that the town can only wonder… but, hell, if I ain’t a good worker.  In that alternate life, I don’t contest that I don’t belong there.  It’s part of the a-stranger-comes-to-town narrative.

But I don’t need anyone to tell me so.

In Bangor, we woke up in a movie theater parking lot in hopes of catching an early showing of the latest superhero movie before our show that night in Ellsworth.  I love superheros, but I’m late to the game.  I didn’t grow up in Batman pajamas, or even attempt to care about Saturday morning cartoons that contained anyone with a flimsy mask and a cape.  I didn’t belong there.

Until someone told me I belonged.

By my late twenties, I’d taken to reading graphic novels– but only the kinds about the oppression of women in Pakistan, or the illustrated retelling of the life of Margaret Sanger.  You know, important stuff.  Stuff that didn’t group me into the nerd category.

My comic-curiosity appeared to my friend as a cry for help.  So one night, after babysitting his cute kid, he handed me the start of the New 52 Wonder Woman series.

“Just try it,” he said. “I think it might be what you’re looking for.”

“Oh, I don’t really do comics,” I said.

“You will.”

I came back the next week, strung out from lack of sleep and asking for more.

“This stuff is for everyone,” Justin said, checking his stash to see what else he could entrust with me. “You belong here.”

It goes like this–

I spent half of my childhood laughing at jokes, some I didn’t know the meaning of, because it is good to laugh, and laughing makes me part of something.  Until I was told that the joke isn’t for me.  In fact, the joke is on me.

I then spent my next two decades holding my laughter carefully, just in case it wasn’t meant for me.  I scan the jokes in the ridges of my brain, ensuring its intent, its audience, its landing before letting out what is now a deflated, dissatisfying chortle.

It also goes like this–

As a kid, I am generous with my tears.  I dole them out for other peoples’ parents splitting up, for the evening news, for the broken robin eggs on the sidewalk.  I name and write poems for the dead German Shepherd I found on the railroad tracks.  I am an endless source of empathy.  And then I am told that it’s not mine to carry.  That I am too sensitive.  That I don’t belong with those who are grieving, because the grief isn’t mine.

I then spent the next two decades churning each devastation carefully inside, allowing it to filter through the cogs and see if I have any right to elicit a single tear.  I hear myself say, “I’m sorry to hear that,” but feel nothing inside.

There’s a traffic jam of feelings inside, and they are separating me further from anywhere I might belong.

I am calling bullshit on belonging.

Rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep.

I suspect this isn’t just for the benefit of those who are rejoicing and weeping directly.  You are laughing or crying, too?  You belong here.  You’re laughing and crying because you haven’t been given adequate tools or space to express your empathy for decades for fear of making a fool of yourself and being outcast?

Oh, yeah, you definitely belong.

I do, too.

There’s a funny scene with a taco and a spaceship in the new superhero movie.  I laughed so hard I got a popcorn kernel caught in my throat.  I didn’t have to assess if there was more to the joke or not.  Taco spaceship physical comedy is hilarious no matter who you are.

Two nights later, just before our show in Stockholm, Maine, my Someone told me that one of my favorite Christian social defenders died at 37.  I took the news stoically, beginning to assess the appropriate reaction for someone who I don’t know personally.  I tried to measure my grief to the correct ratio compared to, say, her grieving husband and children.  I scrolled Twitter to find out how others, more worthy than me, were responding, so I could respond to a lesser degree, being that I am not a Christian, nor a regular Tweeter.

Then, I stopped and just felt sad.  With everyone else.  If you’re feeling sad, too, you belong here.

We trudged downstairs to the bar for dinner, where a from-here man sat next to me, talking to the guy next to him.  I chewed slowly and read my book, their conversation getting louder and drifting onto my pages.

“You’re not from here, are you,” the Maine man said.  It wasn’t really a question.

“Well,” the other man said, “no, I’m from Connecticut, but…”

The Maine man laughed audibly and shook his head.

“…but!” the Connecticut man said, “I’m 60 years old!  I think I’ve been around long enough to learn just a little bit…”

It was too late.  The Maine man finished his second pint and turned straight ahead.  The conversation was over.

He looked my way.  I stared steadily at my book.  According to him, I wouldn’t belong either.  He hollered to the bartender in a familiar way, lurched from the barstool and left.  An ease replaced his space.

So maybe it goes like this–

Belonging here is to laugh and cry.  But sometimes, it’s just to take up space at the bar with whoever else is there.  It seems that those who are busy deciding who belongs and doesn’t belong squeeze themselves out of belonging themselves.  Even if their great-great-grandparents were here first.

My Someone keeps a mental running tab of the things I say that make him feel sorry for me.  He calls it The Top 5 Saddest Things Mallory Has Ever Said, and takes the opportunity to recite it when I am sick and pitiful and down on my luck.  The recent list, in ascending order from least to most sad, went like this–

5. “I don’t belong anywhere.”

4.  “Since my mom doesn’t call me anymore, I sometimes pretend she is trying to tell me she loves me through the books she lent me.”

3.  “Even though we just ate lunch, my belly rumbles because I am future hungry.”

2. “If I only had four wishes, I would spend a wish on a hotel room tonight that doesn’t smell like cigarettes.”

1. “Sometimes in the bath, since we can’t afford bubbles, I just make the bubbles with my butt.”

I like the recitation for at least five different reasons, because they remind me:

5.  …that I belong somewhere when I am with my Someone, and that my future belonging is mysterious but certain.

4.  …that I am working on my relationships even if they are hard.

3.  …that someone is tending to my hunger, and that my hunger is not a threat to my life.

2.  …that I am able to take care of my body in ways that are bigger than the bare minimum, anymore.

1. …that I am not as poor as I used to be.

Guess how much I love you?  Guess how much I love youuuu?

I was standing over a boiling pan of curry in Kelsey’s kitchen, cooking dinner with my Someone while Kelsey’s almost-three-year-old watched an adorable program in the next room.  It’s a cutesy tune they sing at the end, and one that had been catching our brains in repetition for hours after.

I checked the rice while my Someone stirred the curry, when my Someone started humming, then singing–

Guess how much I love you?  Guess how much I LOOOOVE you?

Something in me rattled, and then burst like water pipe after a long, cold winter–

“I don’t want to guess anymore!” I cried, “I’m tired of guessing!  I don’t want to guess anymore how much, or even if anyone loves me at all!  Why can’t they just tell me?  Why can’t you just tell me how much you love me?!”

My Someone turned to me, surprised.  Then, he hugged me.

“One,” he said, “sometimes I just make the bubbles with my butt.  Two, I don’t want to guess how much you love me…”

“It made the list,” I said, relenting.

“It definitely made the list.”

I guess that’s how much he loves me.

Today I turn 33.  I cut my own hair in parking lots with kitchen scissors, and then ask my friend or my Someone to help clean up the mess I made of my head.  I am closer to shaving my head completely, and realized last week that if I don’t do it, it would be a lifetime regret on my deathbed.  I think about dying less, but of my deathbed more.  I hope it has soft sheets and good lighting.  In the last year, I’ve unraveled half a lifetime’s worth of shame, and the tremors of it are still frequent, but fading.  I am dissatisfied with most of my wardrobe, but happier in my skin, so I don’t care as much that I am dissatisfied with my wardrobe.  I miss how sensitive I was when I was a kid, back when everyone told me I was too sensitive, and I am scraping callouses to get back to it.  This means that I spend more time doing nothing, wondering if trees transmit messages telepathically, and chewing my food more slowly.  I eat less sugar and drink less alcohol, but not from my enormous restraint and self discipline.  I just kind of forgot.  I’ve given up on having a stringent schedule, and have somehow become more productive, anyway.  I still love spicy foods, but now they make it hurt when I pee.  I think less of the life I want to live and more of the life I am living.  I am keenly aware that my frustration with my new dog is often in direct correlation with my frustration with myself.  My favorite colors are still yellow and brown.  I’m learning how to bind books.   I think about where I belong almost every day, and have no answer.  I am starting to believe that I’ve never belonged anywhere.  I’m not tired all the time, anymore.  I prefer chocolate chunks to chocolate chips because chips are for babies and I am a grown up now.  Also, chunks taste better.  I use the words “generous” and “grateful” more, but not in a Zenny yoga lady kind of way, even though I’m a lady who does yoga all the time.  I think frogs wearing hats are hilarious.  I am less afraid of snakes.  I don’t think snakes wearing hats are hilarious, but maybe they are less scary.  I managed to restrain from making any 33-year-old Jesus martyr jokes for this post.  But all the jokes I thought of were so funny.  I guess maybe 33 isn’t a step in the right direction, but a step in a direction, and that’s good enough for me.

My big dumb dog is lost.

We’d been training her over the past few months to come when called, her response time getting better each day, her loyalty near bursting.  We were parked alone in DNR land in Michigan, literally recharging our battery in freezing temperatures, and helping ourselves to a pretty lake view on an entire campground completely empty.  And then, we helped ourselves to a long trail hike after a morning of hunkering over computer screens.

We practiced off leash calls, our smart little dogs responding quickly with every whistle, leashing them back up and trying again later down the trail.  Perhaps we are idiots, but we were building trust, and our new pup had risen to the occasion for days.  Until she didn’t.  Training dogs always feels like a crapshoot, an incomprehensible act of inter-species communication building, vulnerability abounding– Do you love me enough to come back?  Do you trust me to still be here?  Do I trust you to not be angry when I return too late?  But there are few woods safer than Michigan’s.

Then, Magpie lifted her head, took a sniff, and bolted.  Our other pup, Puddle, followed her.  I didn’t panic– they’d be back.  Sure enough, I whistled, and Puddle popped herself over the crest of the hill.  Magpie did not.

“Magpie!” I yelled, becoming impatient while I leashed our other dog.  “MAAAAAAGPIIIIIIE!” I yelled again.

I walked up the hill, stopping to look and listen.  I called for my Someone.  We split up and crawled through the brambles, combing the woods until we met again back at the trail’s split.

“She’s gone,” I said calmly.

“She’s gone?” my Someone responded.

“She’ll be back,” I said.  It felt true.  But right now, she was also gone, gone, doggone.

“He has brown hair and a beard, like Uncle Scott, but his eyes are brown, not blue, and he wears, like, a white dress with buttons.  You can’t be God and have blue eyes.  They have to be brown,” my niece said.  I asked her to draw me a picture of God, and now she was explaining it.  She’s been dabbling in religion as a 6-year-old, mixed with a few Sunday morning church drop-ins and her endless imagination, I was endlessly fascinated with her perspective.

“Where does he live?”

“In the middle of the woods,” she said promptly.

“Who lives there with him?”

“Well, his wife.  And his children,” she said.

“Who are his children?”

“Well, there’s Jesus, but then also Jesus’s brothers– the three guys who came to see him when he was born?  With the presents?  And also, his other siblings, a goat and a cow.”

It was a surprising number of boys in that family.  Also, a shocking number of beasts.  I then uncovered that God, in fact, was in the woods in the United States.  He worked from home.  If he needed something outside the woods, he sent Jesus or one of his other sons.  Jesus would sometimes leave to go talk to animals, but not the ones with sharp teeth.  Only rams and bunnies, mostly.  Cheetahs and wolves and our new dog, Magpie, were out of his jurisdiction.  Her confidence was persuasive, and I felt like I was really learning.

“So,” I asked, “what exactly does God do in the woods for work?”

“Oh,” she said, “He writes papers all day to send out– the papers just say ‘Help me!  Help me!  Help me!’”

Help me, help me, help me, I started muttering.  We were leaving the woods, heading back to our camper to conjure a game plan to find our missing dog.  Help me, help me, help me…

And then, Who am I talking to?

I’d been here before– in the woods with a missing dog, talking to someone whose name I didn’t know.  When my first dog, Butter, went missing for hours after being hit by a truck, I made promises to this Unknown, swearing to quit smoking and go to church.  When she was found, I was grateful, but celebrated with a cigarette on a friend’s front porch.  I quit just a couple years later, when I had enough and believed in something better for myself.

Now, just like then, I didn’t know who I was talking to.  And somehow, it seemed more likely that the someone I was praying to was just a hermit lost in the woods crying out for help, too.  Someone whose jurisdiction didn’t cover my big toothed, unruly dog.  With every vapid Help me to the sky or the Woods God, my panic began to grow.  I needed something better.  I needed someone who could actually hear me.

We got back to the camper to retrieve our phones and scan the map, marking a definitive plan to scour the woods.  But first, I texted Kristie.  Kristie has become my mental health buddy, checking in on me regularly, and me returning the favor.  She’s heard every confession from me, all the way down to the night I melted a brick of cheddar cheese on a stack of day-old movie popcorn and ate it with a fork on my couch.

So, Mags ran away.  We can’t find her.  I texted.

The response time was immediate.

Omg noooooooooo!  Where????

My heart rate dropped.  It was going to be okay.  Someone out there heard me.  She didn’t tell me I was a bad dog mom.  She didn’t judge me for losing my dog.  She didn’t say she had all the answers.

Oh man!  I’m going to pray you find her or that some nice person does and takes her for her chip to be scanned.  Are you ok?  Freaking out?

I was okay.  If there was a God who wasn’t just a lunatic in the woods, he would definitely listen to Kristie.  Saint Kristie, Intercessor for Those Who Have Lost Their Dog and Don’t Pray, Anymore.

My head was clear when we hopped in the truck, and my intuition was keen.  I dropped pins and plotted between driving, stopping the truck, and listening.  I was impressed with how much better I could hear when my head wasn’t pounding with prayers.  My Someone kept a sharp eye between stops.  We drove to the nearest houses lining the woods and knocked on doors.  They hadn’t seen her.  But someone heard her– out there in the woods.  I checked my map– it checked out.

She’d been gone for only an hour and a half when my Someone caught sight of her from the road.  He hopped out and ran into the woods as I parked.  Her tongue was hanging low and she looked tired, but relieved.  Like she’d just nearly met her maker in those woods, and was glad to be home.

Found her!  I texted Kristie.

Oh thank god!!!!!!!!!

I went over the details of her recovery, how she seemed to have followed the sound of our voices, how we circled with our maps and followed the direction of the people we’d met.  And, I thought to myself, how I didn’t simply fall to my knees in fear.

Smart girl.  Kristie texted back.  I wasn’t sure if she meant me or Magpie, but it rang like a voice of confident Love.  The kind of voice that can’t echo back from a vast sky, but from a real person, eyes wide, heart open.  A real answer to prayer.

My Someone and I were practicing for the studio– we’ve been in a time crunch to work up the new songs before we put our dollar down to record them, and we’d reached the final one.  Something about maple trees and springtime– a song we wrote under snow in Vermont and now, in Florida, felt like the future entering.

I jumped up from the bed, crammed between instruments, clapping my hands and making a spectacle of myself.  The dogs caught the feeling and began howling and jumping with me.  My Someone was laughing by the end.

“I don’t think you should play any instruments on that song,” he said, “just dance with dogs, that would be good enough.”

“It just felt so happy!” I said, “Like praising Jesus, but without all the guilt.  What’s that called?”

“Living.”

“Yeah, let’s do more of that.”

“I swear to baby Jesus, if I hear ‘God Bless America’ one more time I am going to lose my ever loving mind!” I said, lowering my voice to a stern rumble.

“Or ‘Walking After Midnight,’ or ‘Amazing Grace,’ or…” my Someone said crazily.

“I’m off Leann Rimes.  That’s it!  I’m off Leann Rimes and I’m off Patsy Cline and I’m off Perry Como. Forever!  And I love Patsy Cline!  But I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t!”

We’d been parked in my sister’s driveway in Tallahassee for two months, leaving weekends to play shows.  Weekends are usually when Dick plays his music across the street.  We’ve never met Dick, but we know that he built his own alarm system that occasionally sounds off at 11PM, having us duck and cover like a couple of Cold War kids under our desks.  According to our brother-in-law, Dick can fix almost anything.  He fortified his daughter’s Keurig machine to become unbreakable.  And he also found an old stereo system, completely busted, and rebuilt it.  The stereo system is now, according to my brother-in-law, set to play in two main areas of the house– the backyard and the garage– or both at the same time.  It’s complete with a 5 disc CD changer, of which Dick has filled each one and has fixed to go on an endless loop so that he never has to touch the stereo until he turns it off for the day.  And he never changes the CDs.

But we were gone most weekends, so what did it matter?  Except that early on Monday morning two weeks ago, I heard the blare of Leann Rimes wafting into our camper.

“Dick must be taking the day off today?” I said.

“He’s retired,” my Someone said. “Maybe he just needed an extra boost?”

For the rest of the day, we listened to Dick’s 5 discs, looping over and over until after dinner time.  I hummed “She’s Got You” until bedtime.

On Tuesday morning, we walked the dogs, ate our breakfast, and started our day of working in the camper.

Oh, say! Does that Star Spangled Banner yet waaaaaaaaave?

“Why is Leann Rimes singing the National Anthem right now?!  It’s Tuesday!” I said.

“I don’t understand what’s happening…” my Someone murmured.  We worked the rest of the day outside, listening to Dick’s 5 CD’s until just after dinner.  I asked my sister about it.

“He only plays it on weekends– usually for Sunday Funday,” she said.

“But it’s NOT just Sunday, it’s been for three days straight now!” I said.

“Oh dear,” she said. “Maybe it’s the only thing that keeps his wife soothed?  She’s dying, you know.”

Dammit.

Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, just after dinner I hummed “Walking After Midnight.”  It was the least irksome of the lot I listened to all day.

It’s been two weeks.  Yesterday, my Someone cracked.

“I CAN’T LIVE LIKE THIS ANYMORE!”

“What do you mean?” I said, smiling like an insane person.

“We are hostages!  We are living in a permanent Leann Rimes hell!  We’ve got to talk to him!” he yelled, waving his arms like a Muppet.

“You know his wife is dying, right?”

“Dammit.”

“I don’t think it’s right,” Elizabeth said, “I don’t think they should be putting those little white crosses on the side of the road.”

I liked Elizabeth.  She’s a native German, but has sweet drawl of a South Carolinian, having been planted there since she was 10.  But Elizabeth has no problem saying whatever it is that’s on her mind, whenever the thought occurs to her.  I had the distinct pleasure of being the recipient of these thoughts for all of November while my Someone and I house sat our Vermont friends’ Air B&B.  Elizabeth had been there since March.  She spent her day as a nurse, traveling to clients in the area, and she spent her nights tucked in her room.  We hardly saw her except when she made coffee in the morning and pasta at night.  But she lingered more and more as I lured her with fresh baked cookies and vegan pot pie.

I took a real delight in Elizabeth– mostly because I never had any idea where the conversation was going.  Lake Monsters could be in the same breath as Chinese Conspiracy in the same paragraph as universal health care.  And always delivered with a cheery, tinkling voice and a smile.  This particular abrupt opinion didn’t shock me nearly as much as her idea of Trump’s Master Plan.

“What’s wrong with the crosses?” I started, a little eager, “aren’t they for people who have died in accidents at that place in the road?”

“Exactly,” said Elizabeth.

I stopped stirring my oatmeal and turned around.  Elizabeth was rustling in the refrigerator, pulling out the organic non-GMO soymilk for her local coffee.

“What’s wrong with that, though?” I pushed, genuinely curious.

“I just don’t think it’s fair,” she said, “when all I am doing is driving down a street– a street that everyone drives on!  I’m sorry they lost someone and everything, but I don’t think it’s right that I have to reckon with their grief.  I don’t want to be thinking of that stuff.  I just want to enjoy my drive and get to where I am going without having to think of their dead person and how sad they are.  I don’t put a picture of my dead people in parks and stuff.  It’s public space.  It’s just not right.”

I turned back to my oatmeal and stirred.

“You know,” I said hazily, “I guess I’ve never thought of that before.”

“Okay, well, have a good day!” she chirped.

And then Elizabeth was out the door.

It’s Day 16 of Dick’s 5 CD changer.  My Someone and I have moved our work to a local coffee shop in the morning, letting the whir of espresso machines and the chipper soundtrack of the Beach Boys and ‘N’Sync drown the sound of Leann Rimes singing “Bridge Over Troubled Water” still ringing in our heads.  We try to stay busy indoors in the afternoon, or take the dogs for a walk, or our niece and nephew to the movies to avoid it.

For all we know, Dick has always played his music this loud.  But I can’t help thinking that we are darting our eyes away from the crosses on the side of the road.  Confronting someone else’s grief– or even the potential for someone else’s grief– is awkward business.

But then I think of the Joan Shelley record I played again and again after my dog died two Novembers ago– how my Someone endured it three, four times a day, back-to-back– not even a Patsy Cline song to break the monotony.  Then I think of the other hundreds of little white crosses I’ve put up.  The songs I write.  This blog.  Photographs.  Learning to play the accordion.  A few paintings.  To avoid my grief is to take apart significant parts of who I am now.  To leave our grief in a cemetery may give us fewer roadside crosses, but we may also lose out on too many beautiful living relics.

I’m not sure what that means for the highway crosses, or if Elizabeth is right.  But maybe it would help to think, not of the tragically dead, but of the gratefully alive, stirring their comfort foods and listening to their favorite sad songs, and going out walking after midnight…