Her name was “Roxy” and she was the coolest person I’d ever met. 

“Do you like Zach or Cody better?” She asked me while digging a piece of driftwood into compacted sand. The twig split apart in her small hands, and she proceeded as if it hadn’t, just to spite it.

“If this doesn’t get better, I may have to cater Christmas.” 

The words hung in the air like the smell that affixes to your hair when you’ve been frying chicken cutlets over the stove in anticipation of the holiday. My Italian American ears burned. Christmas was Christmas. The women planned menus, stood in long lines at Waldbaum’s, the Italian salumeria, the bakery. The men drifted between courses in various states of uprightness and sleep while the women - elbow deep in sudsy water - tried to figure out who forgot to stir the sauce, causing it to stick to the bottom of the pot. 

To the boy I never loved, 

You walked over, reached in my car, and shook my hand. Then it was over. The last time I saw you.

My grandmother, Nana, taught me how to braid. She pulled me up to the circular dining table as I held on to my stuffed animal, placing him into a chair next to me. I watched Nana focus as she cut three pieces of green yarn, fern green yarn. The strings were a modest length, but to a six-year-old, they looked like my height.  As she taped the three strings to the table, she explained the art of braiding. 

When I was small, the line where the grain fields met the sky through my bedroom window was the edge of the world. I stood on my tiptoes at that window, little fingers pressed hard into the scarred wood of the sill, nose pressed to the window screen that smelled of thunderstorm and dirt.

The slumbering house cradles the echo of your footsteps as you wander its sleepy halls.  Sleep should have come for you hours ago, but your anticipation has successfully warded off any chances.  The contractions come so lightly and irregular that you wonder if it’s even labor.  Perhaps it is the Braxton-Hicks you read about.

The NICU carried a low, steady hum that seemed to live inside the walls. Machines breathed in rhythm. Monitors blinked in soft pulses. My daughter, Charlie, lay beneath a warmer that cast a pale glow across her skin. She was six weeks early and small enough for my hands to meet around her torso.

I am a mother and a daughter. But I was not mothered—at least not in any traditional sense. Five months after they met, my parents were married: She’d just turned twenty-one; he was six months younger. They bought a house with red stairs, a half-block from the beach in Santa Monica. Five years later, in 1970, they had me. But in March 1973 my mother divorced my father, and a few months later, she called to tell him that she was leaving me at her parents’ house in Berkeley. The next day, my maternal grandmother met my father at the Oakland airport with me in her arms. My mother cut off all communication with her family and friends.

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.

Not all transitions come with clarity.
Some arrive as quiet unraveling.

The day he left for graduate school, the air in the house felt different.
Not heavy. Not sad. Just…suspended. Like everything was still waiting for something to happen, even though it already had.

I wonder about the metamorphosis of a butterfly as it is stored away in cocoon-darkness until its evolution is complete, and it begins to fly brilliantly.

The cicadas are here again, hanging from branches, clinging to the crimson tips of sunlight that tendril forth from deep green canopies. Like ghosts, they leave their bodies behind.

 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.

My nose crinkled as I opened the door to the dance studio. A mixture of stale sweat, stinky feet, and vanilla body spray mingled to create this unique scent. Blindfold me, tell me to take a whiff, and I would know exactly where I was. It was the first time in months since I had stepped inside.

There is a cabin in the woods of Nisswa, Minnesota that smells like lake water and wet dog. The odor seeps into everything it touches: the well-worn carpet, littered with stray crumbs; the padded porch swing, streaked with dog hair; the tiny hand towels, damp and limp in the narrow kitchen and miniature bathroom. Held together by faded yellow siding and cobweb-covered windows, the stooped building hovers above Lake Hubert, where every August six families gather for three days of outdoors, heavy carbs, and shared identity.

“Okay, I’m going to lift up your breast and place it here,” the technician announces, firmly lifting up what remains of my poor right breast – having endured two lumpectomies and radiation - and stretching it over the arm of the mammography machine. She cranks the machine – bzzz, bzzz, bzzz - and it compresses my breast, flattening it. I close my eyes, refusing to look at my poor stretched and smashed breast. It hurts. I wince. She doesn’t seem to notice.

“Have you thought about going on a diet,” he asks me. “You’re not fat, but you’re not exactly thin.”

I am fourteen, standing in my father’s kitchen. I will grow another two inches over the next three years. 

I am not fat, but I’m not thin. 

I was so earnest and naïve, maybe about thirteen, when I became the champion of my body. Indoctrinated into a cookie cutter world of women’s ideals, my parents remained stubbornly silent in the face of my changing body and sudden need for industrial grade pads. They trusted in the ‘wisdom’ that was Catholic chastity education. 

In fifth grade, our lunch periods were at different times. My best friend Samantha—Sam—ate while I had Social Studies. One day, I slipped out of class on a bathroom pass and into the cafeteria, where sound and color collided. I scanned the crowded room until the blur resolved into Sam—her thick black braid ending in a baby-pink scrunchie at the small of her back, a whole head shorter than everyone else at the long table. She squealed when she saw me, as if it had been years, not hours, since we’d last been together. Sam nudged the girl beside her, who slid over without question. I squeezed in, the other kids at the table shielding me from the lunchroom monitor as Sam and I whispered, knees pressed together. Having different lunch periods once felt like the worst thing that had ever happened to me.