Grief & Loss

Between 2009 & 2017, I lost my mom, dad, brother, and dog. This is writing done in direct response to those losses, or related in some way. These are also found as their original dated entries in my journal.

The Clouds Themselves
A Therapy Session, a Time Machine, and a Penseive
Low Resistivity: A Weird Love Letter
America’s Favorite
Reunion
The Difference
On a Windy Day
Anything, Just Anything
Dear Mike Deni
Miles Yet Left
Call From Here
House Grief
What I’d Say
Real Plastic Snow

The Clouds Themselves

The 24-hour Korean spa that I visit a few days after my dog dies—my eyes puffy from lack of sleep, my shoulders sore from body-racking sobs—requires nudity.

I know this going in. I've read the reviews, I understand the etiquette. Still, it takes a few laps around the labyrinthian locker room to work up enough nerve to shed the uniform issued to me upon check-in: mustard yellow t-shirt, baggy khaki shorts, brown rubber flip flops so thin my ankle bones crackle on the hardwood floor. I'm pretty sure the ensemble is purposefully designed to be as ugly as possible, so patrons will want to leave sooner.

A wall of paneled glass, closed off with curtains except for double doors on which are etched the rules, leads into the main spa area. Jacuzzi. Cold-water dipping pool. Sauna and steam room. These facilities are bookended by a series of standard showers on one side, and on the other, three rows of some other kind of bathing stalls that I don't quite understand. Short, tiled booths with detachable shower hoses and plastic stools for sitting. Something ritualistic and exotic about them intimidates me, makes me feel like a prudish outsider. As I walk past these washing stations with averted eyes, I expect to catch glimpses of grey hair, loose skin. Instead they are occupied by lithe young bodies and heads full of sleek black hair.

It's 1:00 am on a Saturday morning, and there are easily three or four dozen other women here. We're all naked. We're not all Korean.

He isn't with me here. There's no reason he ever would be in a place like this, so it's easier to forget him for a few minutes. Heartbreak doesn't exactly leave, but it abates, lessens to a dull throb. I press my shoulders hard against the dry wooden beams of the sauna. Sink my fingers as deeply as I can into warmed-up muscles. Breathe in, then out. Life goes on. You've been here before. There's no holding onto anything, or anyone.

A heavily-accented woman's voice pierces my thoughts and I realize I'm being summoned. The numbers she's calling out match the ones on the plastic, waterproof bracelet around my wrist. The bracelet serves as identification, and also syncs with the locker I've been assigned.

"Seven forty-tooo? Seven forty-tooooo?"

I emerge from the sauna with my hand raised, feeling sheepish and extraordinarily exposed. "Here! I'm here." Glances shoot my way which feel disdainful, though I'm probably imagining that.

The woman who leads me to the separate area where services such as massages, facials, and other treatments are administered is not naked. She is in fact wearing lingerie, or some approximation of it. Tiny black tap pants. A lacy black triangle bra. She's sixty if she's a day.

With a few impatient gestures I am directed to lay facedown on a vinyl massage table sheathed in clear plastic. My skin, hot from the sauna, sticks awkwardly to the plastic as I try to shift into a more comfortable, more dignified position. But I'll understand soon enough the reason for this prophylactic measure: the entire treatment area is tiled, with drains underneath each low-walled cubicle. When things get messy (which they will; I've opted for an oil-based massage), guests can simply be hosed off like elephants at the zoo. After a massage the acrobatics and detached intimacy of which confirm all my presuppositions, bucketfuls of warm water are dumped over me, washing away the oil, and with it the last of my worries. Or such is the idea. Alas.

Alas.

I don't linger long after the massage. One more quick round of the sauna and steam room, then I walk to the wall where I've stashed my t-shirt and shorts in a plastic bin At this point I'm no longer fazed by my own nudity. I don't face the wall as I dress. The place seems to have cleared out anyway. It's time to go home. There is no more putting it off. I remind myself that it will hurt a tiny little bit less every day, until it becomes bearable. But already my throat is thickening and my fingertips tingling. I think of his face and the pain makes me gasp.

Outfitted once more in my own clothes, I trudge up the stairs to turn in my wristband and check out. The cold night air is bracing and black and joyless. I have a twenty minute walk ahead of me. My hair is wet and tangled, but I don't much care.

As I round the side of the building, I hear male voices and laughter issue from somewhere along the curbside, where every inch of precious Koreatown parking has been utilized. It's dark though, so I don't see the source until I'm directly next to it: two men sitting in the front seat of a beat-up mid-90s Nissan, the windows rolled down and passenger-side door swung wide open. The engine is off, as are the car's lights. I'm almost past the vehicle when one of them calls out.

"Hey, how's it going? How was the spa?"

Out of surprise more than friendliness, I stop, bending over to better see the strangers while still maintaining my distance. The faces that peer back at me are grinning and guileless. Both thirty-ish. One fair, one dark. Casually dressed. Well-groomed. Neither particularly bad-looking.

"Great," I reply. "First time. Place is a trip."

"Isn't it, though? Did you check out the rooftop?"

"No. I didn't even realize there was one."

"Oh yeah, and it's awesome. Co-ed floor is crazy, too."

"Co-ed floor? I didn't even know about the co-ed floor." Hearing this news, I feel I've failed somehow.

"Yeah, but you have to wear the uniform."

"Ah, okay," I say, as if consoled. I'm about to dismiss myself and press on when the two introduce themselves. Brian and Zack. We wave polite hellos in the moonlight.

"You seem nice. Do you want to smoke a joint with us, before we go in?"

There is no reason to say yes to this absurd invitation. Two strange men sitting in a beat-up car, in the middle of the night, on the fringes of MacArthur Park—a place I don't want to be even in daylight. But the thought of the alternative—that is, returning home and facing a fresh round of the shattering grief that awaits me there—eclipses my better judgment. And anyway, nothing about these guys reads predatory. My gut says go for it.

And so with a shrug at how fucking weird and wonderful the universe can be, I accept.

The three of us walk around to the front of the building, ambling and talking for another half block until we reach some stone benches underneath a tree. We're on Wilshire Boulevard, a busy thoroughfare. There's still a decent amount of traffic, even at this hour. I'm not concerned, though. I'm too busy trying to wrap my brain around the information I've just received: Brian and Zack are youth pastors.

At first I don't believe them. I accuse them of trolling me. But the pair is sincere. They've got stories. They've been doing it a long time. They've been friends a long time, too. They're aware of how odd a light their current behavior casts them in, and try to explain themselves more. I probe, genuinely fascinated. The more I learn, the more I suspect that neither is a true believer. It seems to be something they fell into by way of a charismatic church leader. The word "cult" floats through my brain, but I stay diplomatically silent. They've got weed, after all.

I'm not a pot smoker. It's just not my drug. It makes me dopey and slow and paranoid, and doesn't work well with my body chemistry. Leaves me feeling blah.

But blah is better than broken, so I take all three hits that are offered to me before thanking my benefactors profusely, and saying goodnight.

Okay. Well. 

The walk home is both interminable and fleeting. Once there I cast about for something to put my attention on. Can't read. Can't write. Want to talk to someone, but it's 2 am. There's always a chance my best friend awake; he keeps crazy hours. I re-read our last few exchanges. Zero in on the message I sent a few hours after night it happened. Thursday, February 9th, at 3:02 am, when I found out that the news had been shared. My boyfriend had thoughtfully told my best friend, so I wouldn't have to say the words myself.

I'm sorry. I didn't know he was going to tell you.

Anyway.

It was bloat. The surgery would have been $6-8k. And he was 10. And I hadn't told you but he slipped really bad about a week ago and had been limping way worse than ever. 

I'm sorry you found out this way. 

He loved you so much.

I don't know what else to say right now.

It's never been so quiet. 

The night my dog died, the streets of Los Angeles were thick with fog.

LA is never foggy. The coast, sure. But never the city. In fact I'd never seen anything like it. I noticed it when I got off work: hazy streetlights and a slickness in the air. By the time Timo came over to hang out, you couldn't see twenty yards in front of you. Everything was shrouded, romantic and dramatic and mysterious. Sounds disappeared in the night.

Maybe Chaucer felt the strangeness. Maybe it tickled his senses, delighting him into being especially playful. Trotting more quickly down the dark alley beside my building, his passageway out for a walk. I don't know. Timo doesn't know, either. Both of us took him out that night, in pretty quick succession, because he hadn't gone potty after we fed him. Perhaps he was more keyed up, thanks to the weird weather, or because Timo was there.

He adored Timo.

There is no knowing exactly how or when it happened. If he jumped, or if he drank water too quickly. But it became clear pretty quickly that something was wrong. Retching. Heaving. He wouldn't settle. Wouldn't lay down. My increasing nervousness turning to panic, turning to dread in the backseat of the Uber we called when the 24-hour emergency vet said to bring him immediately.

I knew, of course. Not that it was bloat specifically but that something was very, very wrong. I just knew. And I held my sweet pup in the back of that car and stroked his shaking body, and just let silent tears pour down my face. And Timo reached back and squeezed my knee and I felt nothing, because the most beautiful part of me was dying, and I knew it.

It was foggy the night my best friend left the world.

Fog that wrapped itself around our car as we sped down the freeway, hiding everything from me except his perfect, sweet face. Fog that hugged the animal hospital like soft cotton, muffling cries that tore through me like fire. Fog that gently closed us in, just the two of us, him breathing heavy with sedation, strapped in a tragicomic display of last-moment silliness to a gurney, looking like some kind of spa guest in his white towel, in the room they gave us for our goodbye.

Of course it would be that way. The fog. Because how else would he get into dog heaven?

The clouds themselves had to come down to carry him up.

A Therapy Session, A Time Machine, and a Penseive

How well do you think you know your parents? How much of their past--their deep past, the one before you came along--do you know? Do you understand who they are, and why they are the way the are?

By the time I reached my teens, I had my parents pegged. And my portraits of them weren't all that flattering. My mother was the needy, morose, passive aggressive alcoholic; my dad the stubborn, ill-tempered cynic. Family dysfunction, addiction, and occasional violence prevented any kinder or even just more nuanced characterizations of them from ever emerging. As far as I was concerned, they were a mess--and the reason I was a mess. It's so convenient to have it all figured out at sixteen.

Anyway, my father's cynicism, for as long as I can remember, was absolute and all-encompassing. Politics, culture, romance--you name it, he scoffed at it. Romance in particular was a subject for intense jeering. No matter how excited I was about a boy, from the time that boys were something to be excited about, my dad would find a way to cut down my happiness. That sounds cruel, I know, but I won't pull the punch. He did. I still loved him.

To him I suppose it was a form of teasing, though underneath there was probably some warning being issued. Be careful honey. Love will hurt you. Maybe he was only trying to toughen me up. Whatever his motives, I would never, ever, ever think of my dad as the romantic type. In fact when I told him I was getting married, his critical and dismissive response upset me so much we wound up not speaking for nearly three years. I walked myself down the aisle to greet a husband he hadn't even met.

My father thought marriage was a terrible joke of an idea. His divorce from my mother had nearly killed them both, so acrimonious, expensive, and protracted an event it was. Anyone having gone through such nastiness could be forgiven some Scroogitude where relationships are concerned. It's just really hard to see that when it's your dad.

Of course, despite being the Anti-Romantic, he still pursued women. He'd occasionally share his dating site matches with me, show me the letters in which he wooed would-be lovers. My father was nothing if not clever; these flirty missives were something else. But flirty is where they stopped. I'd even describe them as wary. Chary. Once burned, he was twice shy about climbing back into the fire. And he made it clear to the women he was dating: expect no Romeo, and certainly no ring.

Then my mother died. And a new window into my dad's personality cracked open just the tiniest bit. He did something that caught me completely off guard, it was so uncharacteristic and unexpected. He asked to have her ashes. His ex-wife's ashes. A woman whom he'd been bad-mouthing to me for the better part of twenty years. He promised he had no nefarious intent whatsover, that he would safeguard them for as long as he lived. What the hell.

I didn't question it. I chalked it up to nostalgia, to late-life sentimentality. And I obliged. It's a very odd thing, signing off on having your cremated mother FedExed to her ex-husband. But so it went.

Then the window, through which I had already glimpsed a softer side of my dad than I'd suspected existed, swung open further. And revealed was a man nothing like the one I'd grown up with.

Here's what happened: I found, among my mother's things, a stack of love letters he'd written her. They were dated from May of 1966 through December of that same year. When I came across them I spent a good minute just frowning in confusion. Wait, what? What is this? Someone wrote all these sweet, romantic letters to my mother and signed my dad's name? I don't get it.

It just didn't compute. He wasn't that person. He'd never. Only, here was the proof, right before my eyes. Immaculately kept and bundled neatly with a bulldog clip (which raised all kinds of questions about my mother in turn, like why on earth were these so precious to her when she so hated my dad?). Chronologically ordered. Neatly typed with my father's address in Alaska heading each page. Things started to click into place when I saw that header. Holy shit. This...this was during their courtship. When he was working in Fairbanks and she was still back in NYC. These...this was before they were even married. 

I thumbed through the stack and let my eyes fall on a random paragraph. As luck would have it, though I wouldn't know it for nearly seven years, I just so happened to land on the one semi-explicit sexual reference in the whole set of letters. Nothing too crazy, just a little kinky. But oh my god, that was more than enough for me. Nope nope nope. Not my business, boundary needed here, don't wannna know. I dropped them as if they were a smoking gun.

But the seed of a thought had been planted: maybe my father hadn't always been a cynical hardheart after all. Maybe a long time ago, before life had its way with it, his heart was full and open.

I mentioned the letters to him casually during our next phone call, keen to hear his reaction. Curiously, he didn't seem all that surprised. Maybe he'd known she'd kept them. Maybe he understood their post-divorce relationship better than I did. At this point I didn't know what to think. But when he asked in a quiet, hopeful voice whether I'd mind sending them to him unread, at least I knew what to do: send them to him, unread.

Fast forward three years to, this time, my father's death. Spring of 2012. Along with the rest of his estate, the letters come back into my possession. There is no one else to pass them to. (My brother would tear them to shreds without hesitating.) But grieving as I am, reading them seems impossible. It's not that I don't want to know what's in them, it's just that I can't yet. I can't. So I put them away, among my other personal memorabilia. I leave them untouched and unread for three years. I don't forget about them, I never once forget about them--but the time doesn't feel right. Until that is, yesterday.

Why yesterday? Well, that...that's difficult to explain. Suffice to say it was a really, really, really bad day, and I spent most of it casting about for a lifeline. Something to make me feel less alone, and more connected to the parts of me that I'm okay with. Something to center me. The letters, I remembered. It's time.

It was past midnight. I stood on a chair to reach the shelf above the kitchen cabinets, and pulled down all three of my stuffed-full memorabilia boxes. The letters were in the first box I opened, in as near-mint condition as when I'd found them seven years ago. I grabbed my glasses, took the letters over to the rug, and sat underneath an angled task lamp.

I read the date on the top one: 31 May 1966. Almost fifty years ago. I did some quick math: my father would have been 27; my mother, 25. I curled my feet under my legs, took a deep breath, and discovered a man completely unrecognizable from the one who raised me. A passionate, dreamy, tender romantic. An optimist, through and through.

It took me less than an hour to get through them. There are only sixteen. But they are lovely. They are so lovely. They are sweet and funny and playful and hopeful. They break my heart and then fill it and then break it again. They are exceedingly well-written. They describe in direct terms my father's life in the remote Alaskan tundra, and in indirect ones the life my mother was living concurrently "down south" in New York. They paint a picture of a couple desperate to reunite and reignite a flame they'd only just lit--my parents spent a mere month dating before my dad landed a work contract that took him across the continent. These letters are their courtship. They are full of references to things that would later be a part of my own life. They allude to planned vacations the pictures of which I saw time and again, in photo albums that lined our living room shelves. They shed light on aspects of my mother's character that I would come to share. They are a therapy session, a time machine, and a Penseive.

I am, perhaps understandably, more enamored of them than would be a stranger. But I believe anyone with a heart would find them at least a little charming. So I'm going to share them. I'll either transcribe them or just scan the letters themselves. I might post them here or, if I can find time, give them their own simple website. I'm thinking about adding to them somehow. Annotating them, using them as a starting point for my own essays, creating short fiction to complete them--I don't know. I just want to do something with them. Both characters are gone now; it's been almost four years since my dad died. I believe it's okay to do this. There's nothing overly personal and beyond a few playful moments nothing explicitly sexual. After all, they barely knew one another at the time.

You have to spend a lifetime with someone, to really know them. Sometimes longer.

Low Resistivity: A Weird Love Letter

In the cold, concrete-floored basement, there's a shop table covered with the guts of dissected medical devices. Clipped wires and dials. Metal rods and needle-sized levers. These are the trappings of an electrical engineer. This is my father's office. 

I don't mess with any of it, not that I'd get in trouble if I did. My dad encourages curiosity. The only things I'm forbidden to touch are the bench vise and scalpel blades. "You'll lose a finger," he warns, though about which I'm not sure. He encourages curiosity and questions, which occasionally I produce. I rarely understand his answers, however. I am my father's daughter in many ways, but not in this way. He will explain concepts to me a hundred times and I will never get them. That's okay. I'll get a lot of things one day that he never will. 

Still, I like to be in it—this space. There is a sense of relaxed gravity, and intelligence. I'm only eight years old, I don't yet appreciate the sort of mind required for engineering. But there's something magical in my dad's tinkering, that I know. He brings things to life, often with visible sparks of energy. It's dangerous and delicate work, and requires all his concentration. I have to play quietly, if I'm going to be down here.

Right now I'm playing with a stack of ferrite magnets. Cool and smooth to touch, they are the color of coal and the width of dimes. I pry two from the stack and set them down on the table a few inches apart. Slowly, very slowly, I move one toward the other. The second magnet scoots away, powerless to resist the opposing polarity. Then I flip one magnet and reverse the game, seeing how close I can get the disks before they snap together in attraction. The click they make when they combine is eternally satisfying, and a sound that will stay with me forever.

___

I heard it tonight, in my memory, as the heat ran from your body to mine, and things I never understood made sense for the length of a lightning bolt.

Magnetism is a fact of the world we can neither force nor resist. And conductivity is how easily things pass between you and I, because of how we choose to minimize the space and the obstacles. That's all I need to know, anyway.

America's Favorite

My mother snuck up on me tonight. She likes to do that, when I make a cup of tea.

Tea was her clock and her comfort. She fixed a cup first thing in the morning, rawboned and pensive in faded flannel pajamas. Thinness kept her girlishly limber into her fifties, and she would sit with her knees drawn tight to her chest like a child at story hour, a faraway look masking her thoughts as she sipped. In those moments it was as if her whole body were wrapped around the mug, pulling heat and strength and reassurance from its steam.

All day. She drank it all day. With meals and afterward. Between chores and before bed. My mother drank tea the way some people smoke tobacco: agreeably and pleasurably chained to it.

She drank cheap American tea, which she prepared the tragically American way: by nuking a single-serve baggie in cold tap water on high for two and a half minutes. As I child I thought microwave ovens worked by conventionally heating their contents, only with greater power. When I learned they actually operate through radiation, I was terrified to think what my mother was ingesting from those little bloated brown bags of leaves. Now I know whatever poisons irradiated Lipton left in her blood were nothing compared to what the alcohol did. But kids aren't always good at recognizing the enemy.

Tonight I wanted to wrench more from the dwindling evening than my brain seemed prepared to give, and past a certain hour coffee just feels obscene—so I made a cup of tea. The cabinet is stocked with Earl Grey, peppermint, and chamomile, not to mention a half-dozen tins of Terence's oolongs and greens and other more exotic blends. But I chose from the bright yellow box with the red and white logo—the one containing several dozen miniature envelopes packed in cheerful uniformity. The cheap stuff. America's Favorite Tea. Well, perhaps. One American's that I can attest to anyway.

I can't drown it without smelling it first. And that smell is everything. Things I've known and things I'll never understand. Things familiar and things forgotten. Things that make sense and things that have no business speaking to me at all, much less from the depths of a delicate paper packet the size of a pocket watch. Orange blossom, pepper, and miscommunication. Timothy hay, chocolate, and blame. That smell is my mother.

A funny thing about tea, though: its scent seems to fade under the kettle's boiling spout. So she comes sometimes, when I reach into the bright yellow box. But she rarely stays longer than two and a half minutes.

Reunion

When my mother died, I found among her things an inch-thick stack of neatly typed letters on high quality stationery, chronologically ordered and carefully bound. They were in excellent condition: freed from their envelopes, unbent, unsmudged, and seemingly untouched by time. They were from my father. They were dated from the years during which he'd worked as an engineer at a remote Alaskan radar station while she had worked for Pan American in New York.

I knew the bulk of my parent's courtship had been conducted via long distance, broken up only by occasional, exotic vacations afforded to them by his excellent salary and her travel benefits. For two, three weeks at a time, they'd meet up somewhere far across the globe: Hong Kong, Israel, the Canary Islands. I knew all the stories. I'd seen all the Super 8 footage.

What I didn't know was that these letters existed. When I found them, you could have knocked me over with a feather. Not only because it was impossible for me to reconcile the idea of my curmudgeonly, cynical, and darkly jaded father with the impassioned, earnest, and lovestruck thirty-something his words revealed. And not only because trying to imagine my parents—two people who spent twelve years fighting tooth and nail through the most bitterly acrimonious and drawn out divorce imaginable—as the young, smitten lovers emerging from these pages was mind-boggling. What caused me to leaf through these love letters in absolute shock was the fact that my mother had even kept them.

Every word my mother had uttered about her ex-husband for the last twenty years of her life had been laced with contempt. Likewise for him. It didn't make sense to me that she'd be sentimental about anything from their long defunct love affair.

I realized immediately that it wouldn't be right of me to read the letters in their entirety. Skimming the first two had been enough to give me an idea of their contents: the soulful outpourings of a man who'd found his life's mate. Partly out of curiosity to see how he'd react, and partly because I wanted to abdicate the responsibility of keeping them, I cautiously broached the subject of the letters to my dad. He was nearly as floored as I was. He asked me not to read them, and to send them to him. I did so, gladly. Something about them bothered me. They were fucking with my world view.

I'd barely recovered from the surprise of the letters when my dad sprung a shock of his own on me. He knew I was having my mother cremated a few days later, and he knew from comments I'd made that the idea of keeping an urn with her ashes made me exceptionally uncomfortable. It was macabre in the worst way to me: macabre and funny. The truth was, I didn't trust myself to treat my mother's remains, should I retain them, with the respect they deserved. I couldn't imagine placing some godawful metal vase, hermetically sealed to prevent spills for Christ's sake, on my mantle and not finding it simultaneously horrifying and hilarious.

My dad knew this, so he asked if he could have them, instead. "And not to do anything nefarious with," he quickly assured me. "I'd just like to keep them, if it's all the same to you."

Go fucking figure.

Rather than try and summon deductive powers I didn't nearly have at the ready (I was, after all, a mite consumed with handling my mother's death) in order to suss out his true motives, I shrugged, thought fuck it, and made arrangements to have my dead mother Fed-Exed to my living father.

And so it was, nearly three years later, when I was faced with the task of going through my second dead parent's things, that I came across my mother once again.

She was in my dad's office, on the top shelf of a mahogany bookcase filled with outdated computer manuals and the sort of tacky bric-a-brac I'd been chiding my father about collecting for years (perhaps in subconscious anticipation of this day?). She was in a predictably ugly brass urn, the fattest part of which was laser cut with thick black grooves.

I couldn't help but laugh. My father himself had been delivered just that day to the mortuary where he'd pre-paid (ever the planner!) for his own cremation. In a matter of a couple days, I was going to be in possession of the ashes of both my dead parents. Just me. All mine. No other family to divide them up with (because, disturbingly, that is apparently a thing people do). No one else to stake a cremains claim.

What a lucky girl I am, I thought wryly.

Well, try as I do to avoid being an utter cliche, there aren't a whole lot of options, when it comes to dealing with the ashes of your dead parents. As far as I can tell, there are three: keep, dispose, or disperse. The first was never an option; the second, a little too callous even for me. So I had no choice but to be a cliche. Christ, I thought. Well, it's Florida. At least there's an ocean a block away. Burial at sea it is!

By the way? Don't judge. You have no idea the sort of dry humor and emotionless pragmatism you're capable of until you're syringe feeding morphine into the mouth of your cancer-crippled dad. You discover versions of yourself you never knew existed. You have to.

I drove to the funeral home to pick up my dad's ashes a few days later. I didn't bother upgrading him to an urn. As far as I was concerned, he was on a short layover. So he came to me bound up in a clear plastic bag that was placed inside a thick, red cardboard box. The mortician supplied me with a certified letter declaring the box's contents, that I would need to show TSA if I wanted to travel with it. And if you think I wasn't tempted to bring the remains home just for the sick fun of messing with people at airport security, well, you don't know me at all. Likewise, if you think I didn't text one or two of my close friends a picture of the box strapped into the seatbelt of the passenger side of my rental car—again, pay closer attention.

I waited until the dead of night before I did one of the strangest and hardest things I've ever had to do.

I placed my mother's urn, my father's box, a small flashlight, and a pair of scissors on the front seat of the car and drove to the water. I stuck the flashlight and scissors in my jeans, carefully cradled both sets of ashes in my arms, and walked down a short pier to the Apollo Beach shoreline.

There were four or five widely-spaced, rickety wooden steps that led down to the water, and it was extremely dark. I don't think I've ever taken steps with as much care as I did those.

It was a clear night, and the moonlight reflected off the water in a way that felt suspiciously scripted. The warm breeze was in on the conspiracy, too. Everything aligned to make this heartbreaking moment as sensually powerful as possible. You will not forget this.

I took almost an hour to say goodbye to my mom and dad. I thought about them not just as parents to me, but as individuals with complex, rich inner lives the depths of which I could only guess at. I thought about what made them special to me, and what made life special to them. I thought about their accomplishments and failures, their quirks and charms. I mourned that as a family, we'd drifted apart, but I treasured the fact that at that moment, they were both there in my arms, together again. I thanked them for what they'd taught me, what they'd given me. I meditated on the ways I would continue to parent myself, in their absence—on what I would take away from each of them.

And finally, I let them go, one at a time, into the warm, shallow water that lapped the lowest stair. And it wasn't a cliche at all.

The Difference

Every once in a while, someone will ask why I write so often about my father and so seldom about my mother. This can be awkward, particularly since the someone asking is me.

My mom and I had a "difficult" and "complicated" relationship. The scare quotes aren't to mock; they're to acknowledge the nebulousness and overuse of two words that, at the end of the day, don't say much about what two people mean to one another. The shorthand works for shallow conversations (and blog posts), but it doesn't get to the heart of why I'm mostly mum about my mom. So I thought I'd explain why it is I rarely blog about her. 

When I think about my dad, if I let it, the flood of memories will come fast and furious. I can easily picture him in a hundred different settings, saying a hundred different things to me. Random associations pull me from thought to emotion and back again, and if I'm not careful I'll get whiplash from the ride: the horsehair shoe brush on the shelf of his closet, sitting near a stack of thick, scratchy wool sweaters he used to wear in Alaska when he had the handlebar mustache from those epic Polaroids; I can see that same expression twenty years later and ten states over—laughing, holding a beer, that dangerous twinkle in his eye when he'd had too much and he'd sing too loud and he'd smack my shoulder with a comradely slap like I wasn't a child at all but a drinking buddy like I wasn't his sensitive and hesitant and people-pleasing daughter but his brother or his son…

And so it goes, ranging as far and wide as I want it to.

But with my mom, there isn't this facility and clarity of reminiscence. Thinking about her with prolonged, concentrated intention—as I do with my dad now and again, to keep him alive and close and familiar—is like swimming out into the ocean, holding my breath, and letting myself sink down beneath the waves...then trying to take stock of what I see. It's possible, but it isn't easy. It isn't easy to see things underneath the blue, which turns quickly to black the deeper I go. Even on the brightest days, when my heart feels full for her, I look at my mother through a wall of water that distorts and disfigures whatever truth is there.

Have you ever stuck your hands below the surface of a fountain or a pool, and noticed the way they shimmer and twist, light and liquid playing tricks with their shapes? That's what it's like, remembering my mom. She's both the light and the liquid and my shimmering, twisting hands. I can't make out what's reality and what's trompe l'oiel.

Why is this? Simple: We just didn't know each other very well. We began our slow withdrawal from one another when I was about twelve, and family dysfunction took as its first victim our preteen-mother relationship (it eventually took a toll on all relationships in our foursome; no pairing was spared). She retreated in her own way, to her own safe havens, and I retreated in mine, to mine. And over the next ten years, as I fled the nest and began to build a new one of my own, her role in my life evolved into something best described as aunt-like. We saw less and less of one another (and one another's homes), knowing less and less of one another until eventually, I couldn't tell you whether she still used the dish set I'd grown up with or if she'd replaced it—or how she felt about doing so. Or how she felt about anything at all. And then another ten years slipped by before we knew it, as if we'd hit the snooze button on our own lives. And then she was gone.

I have to go back pretty far in my mind, to reassemble the collection of various household objects that speak of my mother. There's no horsehair shoe brush within easy reach, leading me to the next emotional totem, and so forth, such that I can resurrect for myself, for you, for anyone, the narrative that was Ellie and Her Mom. Because we stopped writing it. And when two people cease constructing a narrative with one another, they have two choices: they can either quit altogether, and move on with their lives; or, if it's too painful to just leave a void, they can continue to construct that narrative on their own, filling it with whatever stories and facts they need there to be, for their own sanity and peace.

I think that's probably what we both did, my mom and I, for a while. We told ourselves what we needed to about why it happened, and we told ourselves who the other person was, that we no longer knew, but whom we would always love. And I can't speak for her, and she can't speak for herself anymore either—but I know that I'd rather let my version of our narrative float just out of view and out of reach, underwater, rather than tell a story that isn't true. And everything I know about us is tied to everything I know about her, and both sink a little bit deeper every day, no matter how good a swimmer I am. No matter how long I can hold my breath to take stock.

That's the difference, anyway, between remembering and writing about the two people who made me.

On A Windy Day

On a windy day, on a late afternoon in February, here's what you can do: You can walk the three blocks from your apartment to the store, because you need things. You need a new mop head, because you've been ever so slightly fastidious about your floor lately. You need index cards, because you've started collecting vocabulary words again—because you've started reading again. Words like marmoreal, canebrake, gracile, loblolly. You need toothpaste.

You can walk that three block stretch briskly, without a coat or a purse to weigh you down. You can navigate the rush hour sidewalk with ease, twisting to squeeze past a crush of disembarking bus riders, weaving lightly through exhausted businessmen in suits, briefcases linked with invisible chains to their wrists. You can feel the late winter chill on your face, and thrust your fists deep into the pockets of your sweatshirt, which is zipped tight against your neck. The wind will lift your hair and your spirits, as it always does, and without looking down, you'll reach into your back pocket, feel for a tiny button on the side your phone, and press it once, twice. Yes. Louder. 

You can reach the far side of the main street, where the sidewalk opens widely, and finally get clear of the crowd. You can then be seized by a feeling of such unexpected, unadulterated, and embarrassingly unjustified happiness that it feels as though someone has shoved you from one spot to the next, across several degrees of uncharted latitude, through some unseen continuum of emotion and consciousness, indifferent to where you'll land. You'll marvel at how different this instant feels from the one just before it. You'll swear you could turn around, there on the city street, and see a fast-fading ghost of yourself stepping forward, ready to assume the moment you're in possession of right now.

You'll want to laugh, but instead you'll just take a deep breath, drinking it in with concentration, and with greed.

You can become acutely aware of your senses, your comportment, your gait. Objects will suddenly shed the cloudy scrim behind which you viewed them just a minute ago and come to life, extra-dimensional. Colors will be obscenely vibrant. You'll stare at the people you pass, fascinated, mystified, vaguely aware that what you're feeling is unreal, a trick, a dream, but wishing everyone else would wake up, too. How can they be so calm in the face of it?

It. What is it? What is it?

It's the undeniable certainty that life is devastating—in its beauty, and in its misery. It's the belief that not only will everything be ok—it already is. It's the knowledge that we are so interconnected in our experience of that beauty and that pain, despite the billion-odd individual paths we're on, that we may as well just stop dead in our tracks, look at one another, and laugh. Or sigh. Or cry.

Everything in your sight will charm and delight you. Every last everyday detail: the way a pretty blonde has carefully tied the belt of her trenchcoat into an off-side bow; the self-conscious jerk with which a teenaged skateboarder shakes his hair from his face, poised and ready for the stoplight to release him; the oddly comforting familiarity of the taxi drivers' faces, queued as they are in their regular spot: Eastern European, and African, and African American. I don't know a single one of them. I feel as though I've known each of them for years.

You can have the thought come dancing into your brain, boastful and irrational as it always is, that you feel things more intensely than other people. You can feel your mind schism at the thought, half of it prickling with shame—What makes you think you're so special?, half of it quietly agreeing—yes. Yes, you do. 

You'll wonder for the hundredth time if something inside of you is broken, causing you to feel such exquisite, heart-stopping joy at the most mundane of triggers—or if instead something in you is enhanced. Amplified. And, as always when this happens, the wind will stir the leaves in your mind, exposing their opposite, darker sides: yes, but.

Yes, but, even if it's true, even if the wellspring of joy runs deeper in you, so too does the sorrow.

And you can think, for the hundredth time, about diluting both the joy and the sorrow. About saying, Yes, well, the thing is, doctor, the depression really is unbearable at times. Yes, I know this pill will dull the brighter side of things too. On balance, though, I think it would be best.

And you can say, Fuck balance. You can say, Fuck balance, I'll take them both. Because you can, because you've been doing it your whole adult life.

That's what you can do, on a windy day, on a late afternoon in February.

Anything, Just Anything

Ten years ago today a hospice nurse whose name I don't remember came to the spare bedroom in my father's house to tell me he had died. Or maybe not. Maybe she told my boyfriend first. Maybe she told him in the kitchen, keeping her voice low, so he could come break the news to me himself. Maybe he woke me up to tell me, gently stroking my leg until I opened my eyes and waited for him to find the words. Or maybe I was already awake, and bracing for it. Maybe I looked at him pleadingly, secretly hoping it was over.

I don't remember.

Ten years ago today I sat in that spare bedroom, hugging my knees to my chest, humming to myself to block out the sound of the body bag zipping shut, because my father had died ten feet from where I was still alive. Or maybe I didn't. Maybe I lingered in the doorway, morbidly fascinated by the whole scene, numb enough to watch the collapsible gurney get wheeled out into the Florida sunshine.

Maybe it was both. I don't remember. 

Ten years ago today I texted Mason, whose own father had died a few years before, one single word: fin. His own one word reply came quickly: triste.

That I do remember. That definitely happened, just like that. 

I don't remember much of what happened the day my dad died. I remember other things instead, like the incredible love my boyfriend and friends showed me, from the minute I found out he was sick until he was gone thirteen days later, rolling onward for months after I went back home to LA and dealt with the fallout. I am endlessly grateful to myself for writing it all down. If you go back to my posts from April 2012 to fall of that year, you'll see. You'll see how deeply I was loved, and how many magical moments I experienced in all of that love.

But back to my dad. 

I remember things about my dad that I've never written down or talked to anyone about, because the only people who would nod and laugh, well, they're gone too. So it's just me left to remember the random, weird shit about my dad that pops up out of nowhere, like when I do laundry.

My dad was a laundry guy. Me, I'm not a laundry person. I will wear the same thing five times before I wash it, and even then I do so unwillingly, sure I am degrading the precious, expensive fibers of my favorite pieces. But my dad fucking loved doing laundry. He kept his washing machine and dryer in the garage, and kept them immaculate—just like the garage. And he did laundry all the goddamn time. Washed his clothes seemingly daily. Didn't care about shrinking them. And they were already pretty tight to begin with, because despite his best efforts towards staying fit, my father put on a few pounds every year. That can happen when you slam nom M&Ms during Soprano binge sessions. 

And my dad's wardrobe stop evolving sometime around 1989, so we're talking corduroy short-shorts and polos in colors that haven't been fashionable since the Reagan administration. Lots of banana yellow. Oh, and no fabric softener. My dad was anti-fabric softener. Not an allergy issue. Possibly a cheapskate issue? I'm not sure. But there he was, with his stupid, shrunken polos keeping no secrets for his sixty-something belly, and the ridiculous shorts that crept alarmingly high when he sat down. He was an absolute clown in this regard and I would give anything, just anything to run the stupid fucking rough fabric of one of those stupid fucking canary yellow polo shirts between my fingers, because maybe it would help me remember whether I was even in the room when they took my father's body, because I should have been.

I should have been.

Ten years is a long time. You get a lot of scar tissue built up in ten years. But life is ever armed with a scalpel, and it can cut you back open in an instant, and nothing you can do about it. 

If the only day I could have with him again was the day he died, I would take it. I wouldn't have left the room, selfishly, childishly, to go nurse my own heartbreak. I would have stayed by his side and not averted my gaze once, even though his own eyes were glazed over and elsewhere already. I would have kept telling him things that he wouldn't have heard, about what his love had meant to me, and all the ways his personality had shaped mine. And if I could go back to April 30, 2012 but take April 30, 2022 with me, I would lean close and whisper all my news. Dad, guess what? My company is sending me to a gala. They're sending me to big fancy black tie party because they believe in me, and think I can make good things happen.

And I would tell him that after the gala, I'm going to go spend the weekend with someone special in this new city I've made home. And Dad, get this, I would whisper. He's an engineer, just like you. But much better looking. And here I would pause, for laughter that wouldn't come. Then I'd continue:

And yes, Dad, sometimes I am sad like mom and sometimes I am lost like Matt. But I am doing the best I can out here for all of you, and I'm sorry you're not here to see it.

That's some of what I would say. And then I would be quiet and still and let him fall asleep, and I wouldn't leave for anything. 

Dear Mike Deni

Ten years ago this past August, on the second Saturday of the month, I stood on a hill in Golden Gate Park with a plastic cup of wine in my hand. It was cheap red concession stand wine, and it was my second glass in an hour. I was trying to get drunk. I was trying to get drunk so I didn't feel so self-conscious about being at a music festival by myself. I wanted to join the crowd down below, where dozens of people were about to watch a set I had carefully chosen from a lineup of several possible choices. It was a group I'd never heard of until just a few months prior, but something about their music made me put them on my schedule. I wanted to join the growing group of fans, but I wasn't ready yet.

It was a cloudy-cool summer day, in a painful but also wonderfully memorable year. My dad had died a few months prior, and I'd been in a state of semi-mania ever since. Parties and bars, dancing and drugs, nonstop nights out with friends. All the while a three-inch thick binder of paperwork shoved to the back of my kitchen cabinet, haunting every minute of my fun: my dad's will, estate papers, and everything I needed to do to get his affairs settled and my inheritance safely administered. I was simultaneously terrified of it and thrilled by it. I knew it meant financial security and a fresh start for me. All I had to do was pull myself together and get a job, any job, and I would be okay. The depression and anxiety of being shiftless, of having no direction—none of that mattered now. I would be okay, if I could just face down the panic-inducing task of sorting all the legalities out and taking my first, belated steps towards real independence.  

The binder sat and waited. It waited for me to catch my breath after his death. To fly home to LA from Florida and accept reality: Mom and Dad both gone now. On my own for real this time. The binder sat and waited while my friends swooped in with love and laughter to be a short term surrogate family. The binder waited while my boyfriend took me to Bonnaroo. And the binder was there listening when we broke up soon afterward, the terrible weight of my grief flattening us beyond repair. The binder knew it was a bad idea to go to Outside Lands, but we'd already bought the tickets. We figured we could travel separately, maybe meet up for a few hours as friends, catch a little music together.

Cut to day two of the festival. There I was with my wine, my mixed feelings of loss and gain, and all the insecurities that were keeping me from walking down the hill to be less alone than I needed to be. I felt, somehow, both broken and invincible. A difficult past, a family full of trauma and conflict, all the arguments and unresolved anger between my father and I—it was finally gone, gone, gone. No one to frown with silent disappointment at my mistakes anymore. No one to offer criticism but never help. My every choice going forward would be weightless, free from judgment. I could do and be whatever I wanted...if I could only figure out what that was. And in the meantime, music.

The band started up. My heart began pounding, hearing that unmistakable synth-pop sound. Taking the microphone from its stand, you addressed the crowd. And something about what you said or maybe just how you said it—it was like a key turning in a lock. There was a gentleness to it. A humbleness. A recognition of the gravity of the moment. Yours wasn't the biggest band on the lineup, and didn't command the biggest crowd. It was just exactly what I needed, to feel safe enough to lose myself in sound and celebration, to remember what could be beautiful so I could start to forget what had been ugly. 

"Alright, you guys ready?" A tremor of excitement as bodies started to move. "Let's do this."

That's all you said. But it was the invitation I couldn't resist. I tossed back the rest of my wine and took deep, quick steps down the hill to come listen to you, alone but not. 

---

No one ever warns us to keep some music to ourselves. So we share it, to amplify its meaning. To get even higher on it with another than we can get when we are alone. We draw a triangle between ourselves, the one we love, and the song that we've come to believe belongs to us both. With great consideration and ceremony, we place a piece of our heart inside that triangle. We need to. And it's every bit as intoxicating as we knew it would be. 

What they don't tell us is that we'll never get that piece of our heart back. Forever after, the association is galvanized. Good luck separating those songs from the ghosts that cling to them. It's impossible.

But I never shared your music with anyone. It's mine alone. After the festival, I revisited your songs again and again over the years. But I never played Geographer for anyone. It became a signifier of a kind of solo inner life that began that shimmering summer ten years ago. Every time I hear Verona, I can reconstruct the moment exactly. The slight chill on my underdressed arms. Hellman Hollow filling up with day two attendees. Laughter and chatter and music everywhere. My indecision about whether to plant myself on the hill and watch from a distance, or get lost in the mix of welcoming strangers. Then you spoke, and my decision was made. And ever since, the sound of your voice reminds me of my independence and strength. Of my ability to crawl through difficult days, to face down binders and breakups, to break down and bounce back without anyone else's help. Your songs are my selfish, secret strength. 

People worry about me on Thanksgiving, but they do so for the wrong reasons. They worry because I am alone, but really they should worry because I am not. The table is set for one but there are uninvited guests everywhere. My parents are here. My brother, too. They all want me to remember the simple happiness of sitting down to a meal surrounded by the ones that mean you must be home, safe. I don't want to remember that. It's too wonderful and it's too far gone.

On a day when there is always so much to be thankful for, today I am thankful for you. To my left and to my right, memories surge that threaten to pull me down into a deadly well of sadness. But your voice is a through line, a bright, beautiful wire on a cloudy day—again. Ten years I've been listening, without realizing until now just how much it means to me.

So thank you.  

Miles Yet Left

I didn’t find out until fall of 2016 that my brother had died that summer.

I only had one brother. He was four years older than me. He was an addict, a violent criminal, and mentally ill. When he died I hadn't seen him in nearly a decade. The last I spoke with him was when our mother died; when our dad died we had no contact whatsoever. His final parole officer was legally obligated to send me warnings that he still made threats on my life. He didn't recommend reconnecting.

Anyway, regardless of all this, learning he'd died (of liver poisoning) knocked the wind out of me. In fact that's very much what it felt like— a deflation. Like a sigh. Like a third tire going flat on the saddest, most beat-up station wagon ever to limp along the road. In this tragicomic metaphor, my family is of course the station wagon. A car full of alcoholics, anger junkies, depressives, and well-intentioned failures. I'm allowed to say this, being one of them.

When that third tire went kaput, it was like Well fuck. Now what. You motherfuckers all skipped town, and now I'm the only one left, to what? Elevate the family name back up to some baseline of respectability? Prove that our existence was worth something? Well, you guys upvoted the wrong one. Prepare for an afterlife of disappointment.  

I've had a lot of cheese-stands-alone moments in my life, and this was the loneliest cheese I'd ever felt myself to be.

And when I got over myself, I mourned for him, and all the happinesses he might have had. Did have, a very long time ago. I cried for the little boy who pulled his littler sister in a red wagon down a sidewalk in a town so small it didn't matter if they got lost. A smart if difficult boy who loved paper planes, then model planes. A boy who hid from the things that troubled him in boxes of baseball cards, then British Invasion box sets. A teenager whose fucked-up internal wiring was all too easily ignited by some fucked-up parenting. My brother didn't stand much of a chance, to be fair. Our parents were a mess. Our household was a mess. I survived, relatively unscathed, by the skin of my teeth.

So yes, there it is I guess. This post ostensibly about him is really about me, and how I moved on from the death of my last remaining immediate family member: easily enough. Like a patched-up tire with some miles yet left on it. Like you do.

House Grief

When your dog dies, you will find yourself hating your home. There is nothing emptier than a house that has lost a dog. Nothing in the world as quiet, as lacking in joy. You won't want to be anywhere near it. You certainly won't want to be alone with it.

But if you can, spare a thought for that house. You think you miss your dog? How do you think the house feels? At least you get to leave each morning, be out and about in the world. Your poor house just has to sit there by itself, having lost the best friend it has ever known, wondering if it will ever have another.

Spare a thought for the walls, which kept him safe while every day he waited for you.
Spare a thought for the floor, warmed by his body and tickled by his fur.
Spare a thought for the fridge, and all the mischief the two of them caused.
Spare a thought for the bed, cold now, and entirely too clean.
Spare a thought for the bath, and all it endured for the sake of the house.
Spare a thought for the table, who taught your dog to sit as much as you did.
Spare a thought for the yard, the grass and trees and flowers who've lost a playmate.

Spare a thought for the vacuum, who probably feels really fucking shitty right about now.

 What I’d Say

My dad was an engineer. As a kid, I didn't really understand what that entailed. I only knew it meant lots of tools, lots of curious-looking devices, and lots of hours logged at a basement workstation tinkering with them. I learned very early on that my dad could dissect, reassemble, and explain anything with an electronic pulse, though such explanations were lost on me—less because of my young age and more due to the fact that I am not mechanically inclined, at all. That bit didn't land a spot on the DNA he passed along to me. Probably got bumped off by his dry humor and temper. Those I got in spades.

Nevertheless, I liked being down there, in our musty Michigan basement, near him while he worked away on various mysterious apparatuses. I'd color or do crafts (little known fact: clay and pipe cleaners predate Pinterest), blissfully immersed in my childhood creativity while he soldered wires, or calibrated dials.

One day I showed him a drawing I'd done. I feel like I was about seven, but of course I can't be sure. I remember having used the new "neon" set from Crayola, and for some reason, I'm pretty sure I'd drawn a family of aliens. In my mind's eye I see oversized, brightly glowing heads and gangly, striped bodies.

Anyway, he made a huge fuss over my picture. It was the greatest thing he'd ever seen, etc. etc. In fact, it was so good, he wanted to share it with others. Would I make copies for his friends and employees? 

He didn't mean on the Xerox machine. 

My dad was asking me to replicate, by hand, some random, throwaway drawing I'd done just to pass the time. And though to an outsider it might sound weird, or like he was making some inordinate demand of his child, it was actually the highest compliment he could have paid me. And, brilliantly, it would keep me busy and quiet for at least another couple of hours.

I got to work immediately, invigorated by the challenge. I don't recall if it was then that he sweetened the deal or later, but at some point he added that rather than just give my art away, he'd sell it. Ten cents apiece (or some similarly trivial price). 

To this day I remember what the stack felt like in my hand, when I turned it in: triumphantly thick, the paper waxy from crayons I'd worn down to nubs. And I remember him doling out a dime or a quarter here and there over the next week—my earnings from the sale of limited edition reprints.

For all I know he shelved the lot of them. For all I know he kept one and threw the rest away. For all I know he didn't even keep one. But it doesn't matter. What matters is how he made me feel that day, about myself and my creative efforts. What matters is what he taught me about valuing both.

I can't call my dad today. I can't wish him a happy Father's Day and catch up on our respective domestic vagaries. I can't confess to him all the secret things I don't tell you guys, or even my best friends. But I know what the conversation would sound like, anyway. I know what I'd say if I could.

Real Plastic Snow

In a single story Scottsdale Spanish Colonial, on a sunny, seventy-five degree day in December 1987, a woman and her daughter are making it snow.

They are in the family room, not the living room—a distinction still not entirely clear to the girl, even after two years. As best she can tell, it has something to do with the furniture. The living room sofa is new and expensive, off white and off limits. Patterned across its smooth linen are watercolor swipes of pastel teal, peach, and mauve. Colors the girl will come to know as a familiar Southwestern palette, echoed in near daily sunsets of staggering polychromy. The family room couch, on the other hand, is old and worn, one of the few pieces moved down from Michigan. A solid cream chenille, scattered with pea-sized cigarette burns and clumps of accumulated pet hair, it is the locus of household leisure. One look and it's obvious which is the real living room.

Regardless, they are the only family in the family room today. They'll be the only family in the family room come Christmas, too. In fact, they have been the only family in the entire house all year. The girl's older brother has been in Durango Juvenile Detention Facility since January, and her father moved out not long after. It's just her, her mother, and their growing collection of dogs (two) and cats (three).

The cats love the snow. They sit watching, tails flicking with anticipatory mischief, as the girl and her mother sprinkle it by the handful over the ceramic holiday-themed village assembled across three end tables covered by a sheet. The snow must be purchased new each year. It's too difficult to repackage. By January, the cats will have batted most of it to the floor, spreading it to every corner of the house where it will mix with their fur and the detritus of seldom vacuumed carpet. Easier to just buy more of the stuff. Fine by the girl, since that means a trip to the craft store, where she can gaze at rainbow row after rainbow row of art supplies. Soft bricks of modeling clay, begging to be molded into a zoo full of animals. Furry pipe cleaners, silky-soft and full of silly promise. She knows if she asks, her mother will buy her anything she wants. It's how her mother shows love, though it will be decades before the girl will make that connection. Before she sees that it was easier—simpler and cleaner—for her mother to open her purse than her heart.

But right now, they must ration the Department 56 Non-flammable Real Plastic Snow in order to adequately cover the village grounds. This year the girl, who arranged the pieces while her mother looked on with a glass of wine, has spread things out. The village center is a cozy cluster of commerce as usual—bakery, diner, gas station, post office, city hall—but the homes have been spaced out in an exurb at the outskirts of the tables. Plenty of room between each piece. Room enough for a yard, to be precise. That houses should have wide, grassy yards is a religious certainty the girl didn't know she held until she moved to the desert. But now she understands how lucky she'd been all her life, just to have a thing as basic as a yard. Baseball games with her brother and his friends. Getting dragged around in a sled by her dad. Raking piles of leaves into mounds just for the joy of stomping them. Laying on her stomach in the summer, combing through patches of clover in search of good luck.

None of that is possible at her new home, where there is only jagged landscaping rock and prickly cactus outside her front door, no matter the season. And so she has invested into the little ceramic village this year all her memories of Michigan winters past. Her mother helps her set the weather, but once the snow has been dropped it will be up to her to outfit the town with accessories. Stop signs and street lights with tiny, blinking bulbs. Mailboxes and cars, comically out of proportion to one another. A paperboy on his bicycle, riding down imaginary streets she has lined with real bottle brush trees. It is a magical scene she can escape into for one month a year, while outside there is nothing to indicate winter except a slightly sharper chill at night.

It will have to do for now.

- - -

On a downtown Chicago sidewalk in January 2022, a woman in a wool coat adjusts her earmuffs and peers up at the blue hour skyline. She has come to recognize the exact shade of luminous, ominous grey the sky turns when snow is coming. Sure enough, the first dry flurries begin to dust her face. She feels it breaking across her again—the sense of wonder and enchantment that hasn't loosened its grip since she got to the city. Snow. I'm in snow.

She has to squint for much of the walk home; the wind is against her and the swirling white flakes fly straight in her eyes. But she has the sights memorized, anyway. The street lamps, already amber in the five o'clock hour. The brass plaques fitted to the stone walls of buildings. The cheerful blue mailboxes and elegant sidewalk benches. The awning-covered stairwells leading up to the train stops. All of it blanketed with snow. Real snow. Crystallized water dropped in gentle clouds or spitting swarms. Snow that builds quiet into the city, dampening sound in a way she didn't expect, because she forgot. She knew once, that she's sure of. But now is a time of remembering some things and forgetting others, and she likes to think that deep inside her is a reawakening of knowledge, of familiarity with deep, real winter.

It is like Narnia to her. Just as magical, just as secret. Because who could understand? Who could ever understand the history of this moment? The snow is a signifier of things she barely realizes herself. It is purifying and redemptive in ways she's almost afraid to consider. Winter has stolen her heart; at some point she will have to break the news to autumn.

But for now, it's time to get home. She walks through the city center—the coffee shops, banks, and restaurants—to her cozy high rise apartment on the edge of the downtown loop. Not for the first time, not for the last, she cries with happiness. She can't help it. It's just too beautiful. It means so much. Gelid droplets run frozen streaks down her face, and she can't tell which are tears and which are melting snowflakes.