I found out I was pregnant at three in the morning after the Spring Equinox Witches’ Market. Spring still felt very far away, I was still in my big Canadian coat, still wearing rubber gloves under my winter cycling gloves to break the wind, which the man in the Leith Walk bike shop taught me to do. Before I accepted the new job in Edinburgh, my husband and I talked endlessly about the weather. Was it really as bad as we imagined? Could we really live up there?

Four days after the passing of my father-in-law, my wife and I welcomed our foster son. He came to us at five months old, barely sitting up on his own, and deliciously full of baby rolls. Twenty months later, he left our home and went to live with his biological mother for the first time in his life. We were parents for almost two years, but that title was taken from us.

 The first time I saw a circus, I was fascinated by the clowns. They roared into the ring in a tiny car then jumped out one after another after another, falling over each other and leaping up to perform juggling and feats of magic. One white-faced clown in a top hat came up to me and pulled a coin from my ear. That did it. I told my mom I was going to run off with them and become a clown. But, the next day, when we drove past the lot where the circus had been, I saw my dream had been betrayed. They were gone.

On my study’s display shelf devoted to cherished objects stands a miniature porcelain Dutch clog from Delft. HOLLAND it proclaims above a hand-painted image of a windmill and house by a river, small waves brought to life by slashes of cobalt glaze applied by a skilled hand.

At first, I wonder if this is a memento from a trip to the Netherlands, homeland of my maternal grandfather. My cousin sends me photographs of other Delft blue and white porcelain brought from Zeeland by our great-grandmother and given to her mother, my aunt: a set of two canisters, a platter, a dairymaid statuette. I fantasize that this clog creates a connection between me and relatives I’ve never met. I want this heirloom to show me how I belong to this family, and it does, but not in the way I expect.

On an early evening during our first pandemic winter, I closed my laptop and commuted from my home office upstairs to our kitchen below. Another day of quarantine, another at-home meal to prepare for my family. That afternoon I had kneaded pizza dough and left it to rise inside the corner cabinet, warmed by the heating duct that runs beneath it. Now, the plaid kitchen towel draped over the bowl puffed above the rim, like the fabric below the empire waist of a maternity dress.

It’s December 1999, and the world hasn’t ended yet. The dreary weather reflects the pit of dread in my stomach, and nothing tastes right. My mother pulls down her largest pot from the top shelf of glory, and she shines it for show because today is the day.

According to the United States Postal Service website, it’s illegal to send body parts through the mail.

“Heavily restricted,” is a better way to put it. You need the necessary permits, containers, a transport license from the American Association of Mortuary Shippers. There are rules involved, special restrictions; same goes for dry ice and lithium batteries. You can mail live bees, but not medical marijuana. Those thin, translucent lines that keep us from stuffing a toe into a manila envelope on the way to work.

Desmond turns to us as we watch television and says, “I want another cat.” His lengthy eleven-year-old body reclines on our worn leather couch, hands clasped behind his head, his elbows spread like wings. After three days, his crying has subsided, and his confident expression suggests he has solved a problem.

I was on my hands and knees trying to hide a twelve-piece dinner set under my single bed when I heard Mum calling from the bedroom next door. She’d been in bed for two days, suffering from either a bad back or codeine withdrawals. I pushed the crockery behind a box of stainless steel cutlery and some gingham tea towels I’d bought from Woolworth’s the day before.

Grandma Helen was my fancy grandmother. Born in 1909, she was the firstborn child of Julius and Mary Nelson’s five children. Her tall, blue-eyed father liked to tell her that her birth brought him luck. After Grandma arrived, Julius went from selling newspapers on the Lower East Side to learning the trade in his wife’s family’s coat business.