I should have heard the warning growl before pulling open the dresser drawer in the garage. It had been twenty years since my husband and I had done any cleaning out here beyond superficial tidying. We’d plunked down his scratched childhood dresser in the garage when we first bought the house. Since there wasn’t enough room for the old dresser inside our new home, it never traveled any farther. The top of the dresser became a landing station for stray gardening tools, rafts of paper towels, and a box of Hannukah decorations.

I lost my mother on Christmas Eve. Colored lights twinkled up and down the block as I arrived but her window was dark. A pile of mail in the hall. Television on, cold coffee in her mug. The radiator banging away. The tree was half trimmed and the cats were prowling around the apartment crying, unfed. Overflowing ashtray. Cat
toys and dust balls, empty bottles of bourbon.

My preferred route, Back Cove Trail, curves its way around the water of Portland, Maine’s Casco Bay, following Baxter Boulevard to Tukey’s Bridge, bending back toward the parking lot, a Mobius strip circuit for contemplation and exercise. Its gravel is familiar to me, smelling of ocean, sun, fauna, and dog. The tide is coming in.