Year of the Body

nude — “In the Flesh,” courtesy the artist Amy O. Woodbury. amyowoodbury.com

By Susannah Quern Pratt

She’s not thin, but she is not really Reubenesque either. Curvy—a nice hourglass in the lower half, nothing to brag about on top. Perhaps an exaggerated version of my own physique. She stands at an inviting angle, lingering unassumingly in front of a blue-green background. Her naked body outlined in a bright red line, her bare skin a light yellow. She is not an exhibitionist in our midst, but a companion.

I cannot help but look at her. I drink her in. And yet she is unknowable. Her face is hidden from view. She offers only her body. The peaceful, smooth, flowing, sanguine lines of her body. It is the body whole. The body beautiful. The body at peace.

•••

In 2009 the doctors found a large tumor in my husband’s brain. It’s not a benign tumor; it’s not a malignant tumor. They don’t really say such things to patients in so many words anymore. Which I appreciated. They assign numbers and suggest that those numbers have meanings that may, or may not, correlate to your ultimate life expectancy. Grade 2 this, Possible Grade 3 that…it’s all very coded, but it allows room for hope and healing, if you read the numbers in the right way.

The tumor made itself known though a violent thing called a grand mal seizure. Again, my medical terminology is outdated here—I think they are called by another name now, but there is something vast and ominous about the old French qualifier that I really love…grand mal. Big wrong.

This grand mal signaled the start of the John’s body odyssey—followed by six weeks of radiation and six months of chemotherapy. The entire process was a breaking down of the body—sidelining it while the proton beams and chemicals waged war against the offending tumor. John, the beams, and the chemicals did well; they emerged as victor and, for the time being, have vanquished that which would have taken him down.

Now, three years later, he is trying to rebuild in the body what was there before—musculature, stamina, health. He monitors his calves, searching for the return of the bulk and definition that he is accustomed to. He watches his hair—one of the first things to return—to check how the resettlement process is going. His body is a big country and lots of patience is required during this period of reconstruction.

While the battle was being waged inside John, my own body revolted. And while I didn’t end up in the hospital, I did make the rounds of an embarrassing number of doctors: gynecologists, gastroenterologists, cardiologists. At the end of many tests and well meaning tips from doctors who could find nothing seriously wrong with me, I surrendered to the notion that I simply had to acknowledge the weight of the whole experience. Those in the know, and by this I mean yogis, had predicted this state of affairs. Friends versed in yogic breathing and the importance of stretching watched my hunched shoulders ascend toward my ears. They noticed my arms constantly crossed, my neck tight and stiff. My chest concave and brow furrowed despite the presence of easy laughter and carpe diem resolve. My body was at odds with my spirit and overall orientation. In the head, I was all healing, all the time. In the body, I was slowly crumbling.

This feeling, the body at odds with the spirit or the self, was new to me, and in fact may be the best way that I know of to describe what was heretofore the abstract notion of aging. In this year of the body, my husband’s and mine were not the only ones to show a chink in the armor. Friends developed thyroid disorders, fistulas, glaucoma, breast cancer, and herniated discs. It’s a list that I mistakenly thought I would be making in retirement, but I am talking about those of us hanging out just on either side of forty. No one tells you this. In the age of extended life expectancy, of Botox and aging baby boomers, no one tells you that after a mere forty years, the body will make some of its wear and tear known. No one tells you that living with a chronic condition could mean forty more years of living with a pain or limitation. And no one could ever prepare you for the fact that chronic takes on a relative appeal when compared to the alternative of terminal.

And each of these maladies is discordant with the way my friends and I perceive our lives. In our minds, we are all just getting started. We have small children and newly refinished kitchens. We’re forming opinions about local elementary schools and starting college savings plans. Life looks long from where we sit.

•••

The nude came to us by way of a clandestine meeting between the artist and my husband in the preschool parking lot. We first spotted her in a dark restaurant over a good bottle of wine with friends. John and I sat facing her all night, and as we were getting up after dinner, I told him that I loved the painting. Somewhat surprisingly (there’s no accounting for artistic taste), he completely agreed. There is a simple symmetry to her that is appealing, a certain openness. She’s easy to be with.

After tracking down the artist’s name from the restaurant owner, John had to sneak around to secure the painting without my knowledge. This included a hand-off from the female artist while I was away at work, a meeting that turned the heads of more than a few curious preschool moms but resulted in complete surprise for me. I opened the brown paper wrapping and beheld the painting with great joy—a feeling of reunion.

Finding the right spot for her took some time. She is nude, after all. We flirted with a spot for her in the dining room, considered having her welcome people to the kitchen. For several weeks she ended up propped against our bedroom wall, and I got used to having her there with us. Ultimately she ended up on the bedroom wall outside my closet door, a situation that forces me daily to reckon my own form with hers. So far this has not resulted in despair, but rather further affection.

•••

I have been fortunate in my life never to have been in an extended argument with my body. In college, when girls were alternatively eating whole wheat bagels with mustard (no fat!) and then vomiting to shed excess weight, I happily ballooned up the proverbial fifteen pounds. After college, lacking access to free beer, the fifteen pounds just sort of fell away, and so did an extra five that had been with me since high school. Each of my three pregnancies have been kind—far more miraculous than torturous. And again my normal shape has more or less returned, slightly saggier but basically the same.

Given our long history of peaceful, reliable coexistence, this most recent series of tumors and chest pain and cancers shook up my world order. People speak about disease or illness as being “betrayed by their bodies” but that seems too melodramatic to me, and somewhat inaccurate. It’s not that our bodies have become foreign in their failings, leaving us to question whether we ever really knew them to begin with. Rather, they seem to simply be signaling that things cannot continue as they have. In this way, our bodies are more like unwelcome harbingers of what is to come.

And perhaps this was the biggest question for me arising from The Year of the Body: Is the body the victim or the aggressor? Are these cancers and tumors of us, or alien attackers to be fought off with force? In some cases—like John’s—the tiny clustering of aggressive cells seemed other, like it had no place in him. And yet in other similar cases it’s the body itself that seems to be the enemy. Like the bodies of friends testing positive for the BRCA genes, the genetic predictor of an almost certain eventual occurrence of breast cancer. The women I know who have heard this unwelcome news from their doctors have immediately flown the white flag of surrender and made their way to the nearest surgeon for radical mastectomies and hysterectomies. The tumors don’t yet exist, but their bodies are fundamentally coded for disease. In this case, the preventative mutilations feel strangely appropriate. Like the body is being punished. Pruned back so it might continue to thrive.

•••

Since the painting hangs in an area highly trafficked by our three boys, my husband is waiting for the day when our oldest son, now eight, is first embarrassed by it—and then fascinated by the fully exposed female body. I think this day may be a long way off. Three little boys still come in to talk to me while I am showering, my own body in full view behind a glass shower door, asking what time their grandma is coming over or whether they can watch another show before homework. If they have questions about things corporeal, they are asked in a matter of fact tone. No stammering awkwardness, just straight up curiosity. “Mom, do you pee out of your butt?”

For years I have appreciated that the boys are still in a stage of body innocence—willingly changing out of their wet swimsuits and into dry clothes right in front of any neighbors or friends hanging out in our backyard. They have no shame about their bodies, no desire to judge shapes or figures different than theirs.

But what I have just described is the kind of innocence that is freedom from body image. Lately what I have been appreciating is their freedom from body dependence. Their bodies run, perform, produce on command, without thought or concern. They slam into each other on the bed during marathon wrestling matches without fear of broken bones or other injury. Having pizza for three consecutive meals doesn’t phase them because they have not yet begun to do the exhausting math that haunts the rest of us—the work of eliminating partially hydrogenated oils, or adding Vitamin D and antioxidants to concoct an elixir that will take off a pound or two here or add a year or two there. John and I have given up meat in the wake of his illness; they continue to relish bacon with their breakfasts. They sleep when they are tired, and they sleep deeply and soundly in direct correlation to the amount of activity in a given afternoon. I love watching them sleep—three little bodies at rest—deep breaths, slow shifts, quiet sighs.

•••

A few months ago, John was riding his bike to work for the first time since the end of chemo. He came down dressed in his gear—Lycra bike shorts and shirt, helmet in hand. Calves once again respectable. It is a full ten-mile ride along the lakefront and into some intense city traffic before he arrives at his office. My former strategy for dealing with any anxiety this might cause was to pretty much ignore what he was doing until I got a text signaling his safe arrival.

I am newly cautious, however. “Are you going to ride all the way in?” I asked. That was his plan—just to ride in. He was going to leave his bike at the office and take the train home. This sounded reasonable enough to me so I turned a deaf ear to the whispery voices saying things like “seizure” and “exhaustion.” He departed, a triumphant blur speeding out of the driveway, serenaded by the cheers of three little boys thrilled to see their father in the saddle again.

Later that day, I got a phone call. He was going to ride home. That would bring today’s total to twenty miles, I reminded him. I carried a load of laundry upstairs to our bedroom and began to fold. A chore that, especially in times of stress, feels like a piece of stage business to me. I folded and called out answers to the boys’ questions about dinner. But the whole scene was suspended and surreal; my mind was on a parallel track, watching John navigate the myriad bikers, dog-walkers, and cabs in his path. I was following his body, rooting for it, praying for it. His body that I adore. His body that I fear.

Warm laundry in hand, I looked over at the nude, and in that moment it became clear to me what I like about the painting—what pulls my eyes to it again and again. There, on the canvas, is successful surrender to the body, unabashed adoration of its beautiful, fallible imperfection. No face, no separate self—rather, a reconciling. In the painting, the body is all, and the body is enough.

•••

SUSANNAH QUERN PRATT lives with her healthy husband and three growing boys in Evanston, Illinois.

My Best Friend’s Girlfriend

missing him — By Gina Easley www.ginakelly.com

By Brooke Ferguson

My best friend Dan has a girlfriend. She’s tall, like me. She wears cowboy boots and has a lot of energy and almost a thousand followers on Twitter. She’s a talented artist, and is launching her own business, and is friendly and pretty. Dan says that he likes her very much, and he seems happier than he has in a long time.

This is great. All I want, I’ve been saying to anyone who would listen for the past two years, is for him to be happy. He’s a great guy and he should find a great girl and be really happy. Great!

Except now I’m miserable.

Two years ago, my best friend was my boyfriend and we were living together in an apartment in San Francisco. We were indeed best friends, and roommates … and it kind of felt like that was the extent of our relationship. We were both pretty depressed and in bad situations at work (that is: we hated our jobs). We stayed in and binged on pizza and TV and movies. We didn’t really have any other friends. Everything was almost a flatline. Dan and I were both so easygoing, so low-energy, that if there was a problem we’d just shrug and go bury ourselves in a book (him) or the internet (me). When I told him I wanted to break up, he kept saying, But we get along so well. I don’t understand. I said that was true, that we were great friends, but there was something else that was supposed to be there. A spark that was lacking. An intensity. Just a little passion. For our own lives—to get out of our awful jobs, to go surfing and hiking and take trips like we always said we wanted to—and for each other. I was sorry, but I was firm. It was over.

The next three months were some of the worst of my life. We were both trying to find a place to live, sleeping in the same bed at night but not touching, except sometimes when I was crying and he would hold my hand. We’d mope around the apartment until one of us said something funny, and we’d laugh until we remembered we were breaking up. Then we’d grow sullen again.

We never really took a break. I knew that I wanted Dan to be in my life forever, but I said it was up to him if he wanted to remain friends. If he needed some time and space away from me, I totally understood. But he didn’t, and we moved right into a close friendship. Even though we were broken up, we were still each other’s “person.” We picked each other up from the airport. He watched my dog while I was out of town. He was the one I texted when something funny happened or I heard a stupid joke about Willie Nelson. We went to movies, took surfing lessons, went camping and hiking. We did all of the things we’d talked about doing when we were dating. And I kept saying, I just want him to be happy! We both got better jobs. He dated a few girls, but those relationships just seemed to make him stressed out. I dated a few guys, but that went nowhere. None of them made me laugh like Dan did. And we went on, going to museums together, going to concerts, eating hot wings… Until she showed up.

At first I was genuinely glad for him. And then I was not. Then I was a wreck.

I was hurt, too. Hurt that he didn’t have as much time for me, hurt that he might enjoy another woman’s company as much or more than mine. All the time that I’d been encouraging him to move on, to let go, I didn’t really understand what that would mean, what it might feel like. It felt like a cannonball to the stomach.

I began to feel jealous. Dan and I would spend a great day together, riding our bikes to the beach and getting lunch, browsing second-hand records, laughing and joking the entire time. And then we’d ride back and he’d break off to bike to her house, to spend the night with her while I went home alone.

Choose me, I began thinking at him when we were together, when he would text me that he couldn’t hang out because they were going to some party or some pop-up fashion show or something else so cool and exclusive it would have never even appeared on my radar. Choose me. Choose me. The thing was, he had chosen me, and I had ended it. Somehow I managed to turn his moving on into a rejection. He was leaving me; he was breaking my heart. Somehow I had to prove I was the better woman; I was the right choice.

Oh, come on, you selfish asshole, leave him alone and let him be happy. You just want what you can’t have, were some of my first thoughts as, I’m sure, they are your first thoughts.

And to that I will say: fair enough. Except. Except.

I’m not completely sure that’s true. It’s never been easy just being Dan’s friend. I still believe breaking up was absolutely the right thing to do. We’ve become more active, much closer, and a lot more honest. When Dan and I were together, I had a lot of secrets. I was alarmingly preoccupied with my previous relationship. I was a raging, obsessive Grizzly on the inside. I was so stuck on how this other guy had wronged me that I couldn’t be present for the guy who was in front of me, who took care of me when I had a scratched cornea—waking up every three hours to give me pain medicine, feeding me pizza, washing my hair while I soaked in the tub and cried. But I was too afraid to tell him about the beast in my head. How would that conversation go? Sorry I’m acting so weird. I’m just completely obsessed with my ex-boyfriend. Well, yeah, maybe something like that. At least then it would have been out in the open, and we could have talked about it and maybe I would have been surprised by the result. But I didn’t give us that chance. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him. I was so afraid I would lose the relationship that I didn’t speak up to save it. And then, after a while, I just gave up.

So what? I had my chance. What was I doing during the two years before the great girl (G.G.) entered the picture? Well, I was alone for a long time, trying to figure out what kind of life I wanted. I was dating other people and realizing how rare it was to connect with someone so deeply. I was getting the proper help for all the bullshit that I was carrying around from my other relationship. I was discovering that intensity wasn’t love, and that Dan’s way of showing love was maybe not flashy, but it was heartfelt. Over the past year I would sometimes look at him, and feel both a warmth and a sadness, wondering if things would be different now. Would I still feel that lack of spark, or would I find it now that I could be really, truly honest and vulnerable with him, now that I was no longer keeping a piece of myself tucked away like a demented squirrel with a rotten nut? Now that I could accept him for what he was, instead of critiquing all the ways he wasn’t my psychotic ex?

I didn’t get a chance to find out. He moved pretty quickly from a tumultuous, six-month relationship into one with the G.G. He told me about her right away, and said he wanted me to meet her. All right, I thought, he’s finally found that great girl! And she is great, actually. We’ve met a few times, and she doesn’t mind if Dan and I are friends. (I honestly can’t say I would be cool with my boyfriend being such good friends with his ex, but maybe that’s because I have a treacherous mind, and she’s a G.G.).

So why am I suddenly not okay with it? I don’t know if it’s because he’s becoming someone else’s person and I’m mourning the relationship that ended two years ago, doing the grieving I didn’t really get to do because we moved so quickly into a friendship. It might be that things are shifting and changing, and that a lot of times that really hurts, even if it’s a good thing. Maybe eventually it will stop hurting, and I can truly feel glad for him without a sting of pain in my heart. I have to accept that we won’t spend Christmas or Thanksgiving together. We won’t go visit his dad in Texas. But that’s what a break-up means, and maybe we’ve just been putting it off. Maybe I feel a sudden, fierce need for him because he’s moved on, and I haven’t yet, and I don’t know what the future holds. I do know what the past holds—someone who believed in me and treated me kindly. And also someone who didn’t have a lot of ambition, who didn’t touch or hug me often or show affection in public. There’s no face on my future. It’s completely unknown. If Dan isn’t my person, then who is?

One night as I was sitting on my floor, crying and listening to Billy Bragg records, I wondered if I my dilemma had ever been represented somewhere. Had I seen this before? Was there something I could look to for guidance, for comfort? I realized that yes, there was something, and it wasn’t very flattering: I was a less charming Julia Roberts in My Best Friend’s Wedding. All this time I was feeling sorry for myself, but I had not been wronged. If anything, I got what I asked for. And if I took things further, if I started to try and pry them apart, to highlight all the ways I was right for him and she was wrong, I was going to be the villain in the story. It doesn’t feel great to realize you’re the bad guy, even if you aren’t trying to be.

So, what am I going to do? Nothing, really. All this confusion requires no action except that I back off and keep my mouth shut. I will not spill to him about my internal struggle. I will not tell him that when they post Instagram photos of their adventures together I want to punch a wall. I will not say, I think maybe I might want to try again? Because as it stands, he’s unavailable and I am unsure. Even if I were sure, I would have no right to interfere with his new relationship. His happiness is, in fact, very important to me, and so is our friendship. What I am going to do is keep working on myself, and figuring out what I want, and keep moving forward. I will wonder, and be sad, and write about it, and just be his friend. Part of me thinks I’m a terrible person for even having these feelings, but then, they’re just my feelings. If I’ve learned one thing from sitting in a rut, thinking isn’t doing. I can dissect my thoughts to the atomic level and no harm is done. Like I said, there is nothing to be done, unless he becomes single and I am certain I want to risk our friendship for another shot at romance.

Who knows—maybe she really is his person and their relationship will finally close the chapter on whatever it is Dan and I have been doing the past two years. Maybe her arrival will be the best thing that ever happened to our friendship. Maybe I’ll send her flowers.

Maybe not.

•••

BROOKE FERGUSON lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her dog. Her work has appeared in The Hairpin, Index/Fist, and Sparkle & Blink, and she was recently a writer in residence at Starry Night Retreat in New Mexico. She blogs about movies at http://tallbrooke.wordpress.com/

Seafoam Salad

greenleaf187 — By Beth Hannon Fuller www.studiofuller.com

By Gayle Brandeis

Seafoam Salad is on the menu. If I were dining someplace fancier, I might picture this as a feat of molecular gastronomy, an expensive cloud of brine, but I have no idea what it might be here. I ask the server to describe the dish. “It’s like green Jello with stuff inside,” she says. I pass and ask for a regular green salad and buttered noodles, the only vegetarian items offered tonight.

I am sitting with my ninety-three-year-old dad in the dining room of the Olive Grove Retirement Community. This is where I landed after my husband and I decided to separate. I’ve reserved the guest apartment here for ten days as I look for a more permanent place to stay; today I’m three days in. This morning, I had breakfast with my dad and a man named LB. My dad warned me that his friend tells everyone, by rote, “LB stands for Lover Boy, but my wife says it stands for Lazy Boy.” Apparently I make the old guy shy; over our poached eggs and Malt O Meal, he said, “My wife says it means Lazy Boy, but I think it stands for,” and he paused, choosing his words carefully. “I think it stands for something much better.” He blushed and looked away.

•••

“Are you sure that’s where you want to start your life as a fun, single lady?” my nineteen-year-old daughter asked me before I moved in here. She’d just started her own fun, single life in New York a few months ago.

“I can’t imagine a better place,” I told her, and it’s true. This separation is not about being fun or single. It’s about being real, and where better to do that than amongst people confronting the end of their life? Plus it’s safe and clean—a lot safer and cleaner than the fleabag hotel where my three-year-old and I camped out the first two nights after I left our house. And it’s sweet to have my dad as my neighbor, my dining companion.

•••

My dad moved here a few months ago. He broke his hip last year, and after he got out of rehab seventy miles away, I moved him to an assisted living facility near my house. He’s recovered well enough to come to Olive Grove, a more active senior community, although he still requires care, and the loss of independence has been hard for him. He hates to rely on me for rides, to rely on caregivers to help him in and out of the shower.

“I wonder what life would be like if Mom were still here,” he often muses. He imagines he’d still be in Oceanside, that she would have snapped out of her delusions and taken care of him after his fall. I gently remind him that she wasn’t herself three and a half years ago, that she thought he was poisoning her and that he had sent a legion of minions out to attack her; she had come back from delusional episodes before, but this one was different–she was completely gone behind her eyes. A point of no return. She must have known that, too; she killed herself one week after I had given birth. Four months after my wedding.

•••

An apartment complex named Golden Oaks sits a block away from Olive Grove. I hate driving past it. The first time I saw the sign for Golden Oaks, I lost my breath; other times, the name made me cringe so hard, my muscles cramped. After my mom’s death, we learned that the random parking garage in South Pasadena where she had hanged herself was attached to a luxury senior apartment building also named Golden Oaks. There is nothing luxurious about the Golden Oaks in Riverside—the place looks more like a cheap motel than a permanent residence, and somehow that makes its presence even more upsetting. When my dad first considered moving to Olive Grove, I wondered how I would survive seeing “Golden Oaks” on a regular basis. Over time, however, it has gotten easier; the sign has become a homeopathic remedy of sorts, an inoculation—taken in small doses, the name of the building has less power over me.

•••

Not quite four months after my mom’s suicide, my husband’s mom died of an unexpected heart attack. Friends marveled at how well we were coping at the time, and I suppose on the surface we were. We poured our energy into buying and renovating a house and into taking care of our baby, whose joyful presence seemed the perfect antidote for grief. But fissures were opening beneath us—after my husband’s mom died, I didn’t feel supported as I continued to grapple with my loss, and my husband didn’t feel supported as he grappled with his own. Unspoken resentments built up inside us, growing toxic. We both lost respect for each other; we both felt drained by one another’s presence. In a strange bit of psychodrama, we each projected annoying aspects of our dead mom’s personalities onto each other—my husband started to see me as selfish, like my mom; I started to see him as weak, like his.

We didn’t acknowledge any of this was happening until six months ago when I entered a charged long distance communication with another man, and my husband discovered it, and everything blew up in our faces. We went to counseling, we promised to live our lives in a more “brave, open, and honest” way, but it wasn’t working; our house became more and more tense and claustrophobic, and I became more and more despondent and restless. When we broached the possibility of a separation, such a deep sense of relief washed through me that I knew it was the right thing to do. We realized we each need our own space to reconnect with ourselves, to do the inner work we neglected when we were picking out our recycled glass countertops and reclaimed wood floors.

•••

I can breathe more fully in the guest apartment at Olive Grove, with its musty fake flower arrangements and its big wooden console TV, than I’ve been able to in ages. The space isn’t buzzing with conflict. The walls are empty of history—at least of my own. I can crawl under the cabbage rose bedspread and know no one will be seething next to me. And on the days my son is here with me, he loves it, too—the couch has become a great mountain for his action figures to climb, and there’s a pool, and many long hallways to explore.

I feel like we’re in a sitcom sometimes as we walk down the halls—someone should pitch that to a network: single mother and child move into retirement home and wreak havoc. Not that we’re wreaking havoc here, at least not much; the residents generally smile as Asher runs past them in their walkers and wheelchairs and motorized scooters, seemingly grateful for the burst of youth he brings to the place. And at forty-five, I feel suddenly young and vibrant, myself, thankful for my strong and sturdy limbs, my freedom of movement. Being here reminds me that this won’t always be the case. I usually wear board shorts over my bathing suit when I swim, self-conscious of my thighs, but when I go to the pool in the building’s courtyard, I keep my shorts off. Here, I have nothing to hide.

•••

Last week, I led a seminar called “A Year to Live” at the MFA program where I teach. The class was all about using awareness of our mortality to write our most urgent and meaningful work. We crafted our own obituaries and made lists of the things that get our hearts pounding so we’d remember to infuse those passions and fears into our work. We talked about how to live our writing lives so we won’t have any regrets when we come to the end of the road. I warned the class that such explorations can be dangerous—they force us to look honestly at how we’re living our lives, and if we’re not happy with what we see, that can force us to make some uncomfortable changes. Preparing for the class helped prepare me for this separation. And living here at Olive Grove is like a continuation of the class, extra credit, reminders of mortality everywhere I turn.

•••

The servers deliver trays of Seafoam Salad around the dining room and it’s actually quite beautiful, bricks of opaque pastel green gel. I almost regret not ordering it as I watch my fellow residents dig in, but I enjoy my leafy greens and my noodles, and the Fruits of the Forest pie I order later for dessert. The residents here tend to eat with gusto—and complain with equal passion when they’re disappointed in their meal. Food is one pleasure still within their grasp. I look around the room at all the folks with their white hair and stooped shoulders and varying degrees of vitality, and I think about how much life every single one of them has experienced and endured. How many stories live inside their skin. And I am filled with a sudden surge of resolve; they’ve survived a lot, and I can, too.

“Are you full enough, honey?” my dad asks me, and even though I find myself hungrier for life, for experience, than I have in a good long while, part of me does feel satisfied, even at peace. I turn to him and say “Yes, Papa. Yes I am.”

•••

GAYLE BRANDEIS is the author of Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write (HarperOne), the novels The Book of Dead Birds (HarperCollins), which won Barbara Kingsolver’s Bellwether Prize for Fiction of Social Engagement, Self Storage (Ballantine), and Delta Girls (Ballantine), and her first novel for young people, My Life with the Lincolns (Henry Holt), which won a Silver Nautilus Book Award. She released The Book of Live Wires, the sequel to The Book of Dead Birds, as an ebook in 2011. Gayle teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Antioch University and is mom to two adult kids and a toddler. She was named a Writer Who Makes a Difference by The Writer magazine and served as Inlandia Literary Laureate from 2012-2014. She and her husband reconciled after a several month separation, and are looking forward to moving to the Lake Tahoe area this summer.

Desperate Settlers

By Tracy Sutton Schorn

Love will make you do crazy things. Like move to Texas.

If you find yourself moving to Texas, a state the color of dead grass, because you fell in love with a trial lawyer who sweet-talked you seventeen hundred miles from a peaceful existence on the East Coast—don’t blame Texas. Blame New Orleans. Jazzfest in particular and too many rum hurricanes, and the seductive powers of Solomon Burke singing “Cry to Me.” Because in New Orleans, you will meet your fate. You’ll forget that you’re forty-two and single and more likely to be hit by lightening than remarry. In New Orleans everything is possible. Resurrection from hurricanes. Second lines. Dancing on coffins. Love in middle age.

Do not be seduced. Do not think impossible things like, “I could learn to love Texas,” because God will test you. He will send you that man, the one you didn’t think existed. Who is quirky, kind and brave. Who sued a sexual harasser once and demanded his shoes. Because they were flashy, snakeskin shoes, and if that creep could be humiliated by leaving mediation in socks, his victim would feel like she really won something.

He asked, but he didn’t get the shoes. You love him for the asking.

So because of this story, and the sweet talk, and the sex, you move to Texas. God calls your bluff. You remarry.

It happens. I live in Texas.

I’m not alone. One thousand sixty people move to Texas every day, more than any other state. They say it’s for the jobs, but I’m convinced that they are lured here by sweet-talking Texans. One day you could be driving south on 1-35 with a U-Haul. Don’t be cocky.

You think you’ve got more sense than to live in a state with one hundred days of 100-degree weather? Think again. The streets of Austin are clogged with hopeful new settlers.

I love my husband and I cannot imagine my life without him. And yet every day I wonder how I wound up in Texas. I’ve concluded it’s a test from God. He wants to know how bad do I want it—this life, this good man.

Bad enough to give up lilacs, tulips, rhubarb, peonies, quick train rides to New York, art museums, Longwood Gardens, temperate weather, twenty-five years of collected woolens, overcoats, socks, snowballs, wood-burning fireplaces, the color green, autumn leaves, maple syrup… Would I give up water, God wants to know?

Because there is no water in Texas. They think they have water—they have no idea what water is. I grew up in Michigan, the Great Lakes state. We know from water. I moved to Texas from Pennsylvania. I had a house on the Susquehanna River and the five feet of water in my basement once to prove it. I know what rivers are. I know what lakes look like. This trickle of ankle-deep, piss-warm murk they call a “river” is what we non-Texans refer to as a “dry creek.”

I get panicky without water. I feel like I’m going to die, like one of those cartoon characters crawling across a desert. I wonder why more people aren’t stockpiling provisions. Frankly, I wonder why more people aren’t driving north on 1-35 out of this place. Perhaps I’m jaded—I moved here during a historic drought. My husband said, “Texas has droughts. This is normal.”

And then the forest fires started.

But that was three years ago. It’s rained a couple times since then. But when it rains in Texas, it rains all at once. Ten-inches-in-an-hour kind of rain. Deluges. Floods. The hard-baked soil can’t absorb it, so it washes down the streets and gullies. People get swept away. Drought, floods, oppressive heat: the weather wants to kill you in Texas—and it often succeeds.

It makes me wonder why on earth anyone settled this place, including Native Americans. You had to have been desperate. All the good land everywhere else must’ve been taken. Texas was what was left over—a scrubby wasteland the Anglos had to fight Mexico for, although I can’t imagine why. Shedding blood at the Alamo for the privilege of owning millions of acres of useless mesquite? WTF?

Like I said, desperate people. Free-thinking Germans, poor second cousins of landowners out East, eternal optimists. I guess they looked at whatever was chasing them, and figured they’d take their chances with the weather.

Who needs peonies, they probably said to themselves, when I can farm on hundreds of acres of withered grass? I’ll never have to knit another sweater as long as I live! Pretty soon their kid was saying to them, “Eat the jalapenos, Mom,” like that was a normal thing. Like pain was a flavor.

Somehow those settlers learned to love Texas. They didn’t just survive. They overcompensated with a colossal regard for the place. Texans adore Texas. Perhaps they’ve never been to other states, I thought. They have nothing to compare it to? It is, after all, a very large state. You couldn’t blame a person for driving eight hours in any direction and giving up. Damn, we’re still in Texas.

I don’t get it. Delaware doesn’t suffer this kind of conceitedness. Minnesota (certainly a state that matches Texas with weather that wants to kill you) doesn’t brag about how great it is. Minnesotans are far too self-effacing for that. Texas thinks it’s badass? I’m from Detroit. People from Detroit—we don’t talk about it. We just live with the contradictions. It’s like still loving a junkie who’s flunked his sixth round of rehab.

My husband loves Texas. He named his son after Willie Nelson. He drives a quad-cab Ford diesel pick-up truck. He wears pearl-snap Western shirts with no sense of hipster irony whatsoever. It just kills him that I don’t love Texas the way he loves Texas.

But I love him. I especially love the way he killed the five-foot long rat snake that slithered under our front door and curled up on the living room rug one day. He escorted the snake to the porch and then hacked it with a garden hoe. The snake did not improve my opinion of Texas. Nor did my mother-in-law’s nonchalance one-upping us when she related how a rat snake once fell on her from on top of the pantry. “They’re harmless,” she said, as if falling Texas rat snakes were as benign as cherry blossoms.

“People love Texas,” my husband admonishes. And judging by the Austin traffic, I know he’s right. I know I’m a freak for missing freezing rain and snow days. And I know in the grand scheme of things, the majority of people would rather have endless summer than lilac bushes. People move to Texas for the opportunity. The places I love—the woods of northern Michigan, tiny villages on the Susquehanna River, verdant green patches of New England—there’s not much opportunity there. It’s pretty, but as they say, you can’t eat the view.

My husband was once married to a woman who cheated on him for two decades before he found out and divorced her. I was briefly married to a man who was also a serial cheater with a double life. It was my second marriage. I thought I was done with love and commitment. There was a time in both of our lives where we thought these experiences would kill us. They didn’t kill us. They made us appreciate opportunity, the kind of opportunity that shows up in front of a four-hundred-pound soul singer in a purple suit crooning “Cry to Me.” That gets drunk in New Orleans and sweet-talked to Texas.

If I’m honest about Texas, I know I belong here. Because I’m a desperate sort of settler, too.

God asked, “How bad do you want it?”

I answered, “I guess I’ll take my chances with the weather.”

•••

TRACY SCHORN is a journalist and runs the blog www.chumplady.com.

Out in the Woods, Away Out There

nature exhibit — By Gina Easley www.ginakelly.com

By Kate Haas

Until the bear came along, I was doing fine with nature. Shafts of sunlight were falling on the red huckleberries lining the trail, setting them aglow like tiny rubies. All around me, huge, craggy Douglas firs reached toward the sky, their limbs draped with moss, and giant ferns carpeted the forest floor in every direction. My family and I were deep into Olympic National Park, ten miles from the nearest paved road. This is the forest primeval, I thought, gazing at those massive trees. The murmuring pines—well, firs—and the hemlocks. I felt an unwonted surge of affection for good old Longfellow.

Let me be clear: the forest primeval is not my natural habitat. I grew up in the suburbs, the child of New Yorkers. Our family adventures involved the wily nabbing of city parking spaces en route to the ballet. On the few occasions that my parents took me hiking, I trudged along reluctantly, nursing a strong sense of grievance. What was the point? I complained. Why walk through the woods for no reason, only to turn around and walk right back out? Couldn’t I stay in the car with my book?

Sure, I loved my Quaker summer camp, where I learned to build a fire and use a compass, earning a “woodswoman” badge for acquiring these skills. I appreciated nature, all right. But for the most part, mine was the bookworm’s comfortable, vicarious appreciation. I savored descriptions of Heidi’s beloved Alpine meadows; the vast, mysterious swamp in Girl of the Limberlost; the cave-riddled coast in Island of the Blue Dolphins. From my vantage point on the couch, this was great stuff. But deep down, despite that badge, I wasn’t truly woodsy. And I never would be.

But then, as one does, I met a guy. I’ll call him Nature Man.

Nature Man was a biologist. He liked to lift up rocks and examine the grubs underneath. (He did this on our second date). He talked in near-religious terms about the glories of the ocean and could identify edible and poisonous plants in the woods. He took me bird watching, hauling along a giant spotting scope he’d borrowed from work, through which I watched, in horrified fascination, as a Peregrine falcon devoured a pigeon. (“Way cool, huh?” he said.) Nature Man also played old-time banjo and wrote me love letters illustrated with funny line drawings and watercolors. He planned romantic, themed birthday celebrations in my honor, and he liked to spend rainy Saturdays roaming the big downtown library with me, each of us collecting a stack of books to take home and read companionably on the couch.

There was no doubt about it. I would be learning to love nature.

In the seventeen years that I’ve been married to Nature Man, I’ve logged my time in the woods. I’ve nursed a toddler in a tent and gotten the hang of lighting a camp stove. I’ve grown fond of the scent of citronella candles. Planning a camping trip no longer fazes me, although it does tend to inspire irritation. Why go to all this trouble to haul pots and pans and ingredients into the woods, when we could cook at home in a nice, comfortable kitchen? But Nature Man and our two boys love camping, and I love them, so I keep this thought to myself. Most of the time, anyway. Because once we’re out there, amid those giant trees, out where the mist hangs like a dream over the mountains, and the jade green river churns between ancient rocks, I’m awed, each time, by the sheer splendor of the natural world. And at some point on each of these expeditions, I’m always struck by same thought: without Nature Man in my life, I wouldn’t be marveling at all this.

But in all these years, I’ve never articulated to my husband just how uneasy I sometimes feel in the wilderness. I can’t forget how far away we are, how isolated. And thanks to a ranger program we attended on yet another camping trip, I can’t forget about the cougars, either. Puma concolor, I learned that evening at the park’s rustic amphitheater, roam the Pacific Northwest. They are silent and stealthy, capable of leaping twenty feet from a standing position to land on the neck of their prey, killing it instantly.

I looked around the amphitheater. People in the audience were snuggling with their kids, spritzing on bug repellent, or nodding along with the ranger. No one seemed alarmed. Did you hear that? I wanted to yell. Twenty feet from a standing position! Onto your neck!

The next day, walking along the trail, I tensed at the creak of a tree branch, the back of my neck prickling in dread. Then I looked ahead to Nature Man, pointing out licorice ferns on a nurse log to one of our boys. My husband, I reflected, knew the woods far better than I, and he didn’t seem concerned about being attacked by the New World’s second heaviest cat (after the jaguar). You need to relax, I told myself.

I was successfully following that very advice the next year, the day we met the bear. I hadn’t entirely forgotten the threat of cougars, but I’d pushed it into a small corner of my mind, a little closet where I stash other irrational notions, like my conviction that a headache heralds a brain tumor or that only my will to live keeps the plane in the air. So as we walked deeper and deeper into Olympic National Park that day, I was happily gathering huckleberries for pancakes and musing about nineteenth century poetry.

Not everyone in our party shared my sunny outlook. Unlike twelve-year-old Simon, loping ahead of me in his broad-brimmed hat like a young Indiana Jones, Nate, my nine-year-old, was decidedly grumpy. “Why do we always have to do this?” he muttered. “You should have left me in the car with my Tintin book.”

I repressed the urge to confess that I often feel the same way about hiking. Instead, I told him what I tell myself on those occasions. “We’re a family, Nate. And families do things together.” But there was no denying this particular apple’s proximity to the tree. When it comes to hiking, Nate’s my boy. Nature Man and I had lured him along with trail mix for the first hour. Sparring with his brother on a rustic bridge, re-enacting the encounter between Robin Hood and Little John, had improved his mood after that. But now, just half a mile from our destination, we were out of bribes. “I’m walking for five more minutes,” he said darkly. “That’s it.”

It was at this point that Simon came running back toward us, an expression of alarmed excitement on his face. “There’s a bear on the trail!” he announced breathlessly.

My mental closet burst open. Here it was, the confirmation of all my fears. Nature was a dangerous place, after all. Fearsome things did lurk here. If not cougars, bears, dammit all. Instinctively, I turned to Nature Man. He didn’t say what I expected: “Okay, everyone, turn around—fast!” To my astonishment, what he said was, “Let’s see this bear.” Then he kept walking.

For reasons that remain obscure to me, I followed him.

Sure enough, twenty yards down the trail stood a bear. It was black, with a patch of white on its head, and it was looking right at us. What struck me immediately about this bear—beyond the hair-raising fact of its presence—was its size. This was not a large bear. It was on the smaller side. No, I realized, as my heart began to pound quite unpleasantly, it wasn’t actually small. It was a young bear. Quite young.

All of us, even those not particularly cognizant of the natural world, know exactly what goes along with a young bear. Any second, I imagined, the enraged mother bear would burst from the woods. She would maul us and leave us for dead on the trail. Later, there would be a memorial service, and everyone would cry over the family killed by bears, and we would be forever held up as a warning whenever the park rangers give those talks about wildlife.

Simon had followed his father, and now he turned back to me. “See? There really is a bear!”

“Back away!” I said frantically, still fixated on our memorial service. “There’s a mother bear around here, and she’s going to eat us up.”

Nature Man, who was just a few yards ahead, did not appear to hear me. “Nate, can you see the bear?” he asked. “Let me lift you up.” He raised our son in his arms, as if making an offering to the ursine gods.

“Get my baby away from that bear!” I hissed.

Nature Man made a small sound, which could have been a chuckle. Nate said, “It’s been five minutes. I’m not taking another step.”

The bear gave us a last look, then ambled back into the underbrush.

“See, it’s gone,” said Nature Man. “I’m willing to keep walking.”

Simon said eagerly, “You mean, we’ll follow the bear?”

Nate looked even more mulish. “You’ll have to carry me,” he said.

I stared at my family. “You people are insane.”

Nature Man gave me a quick careful look, then hustled everyone back in the direction we had come. A few minutes later, as we walked quickly along the trail, Nate riding piggyback on his dad, my husband explained that he had only advanced toward the bear because he wasn’t sure Simon had actually seen one. And he had lifted Nate up partly for a better look, but also because, when confronted with a bear, you’re supposed to make yourself look bigger, to intimidate it. “And I wasn’t laughing at you. Well. Not exactly.”

Unwilling to be mollified quite yet, I informed Nature Man that he could forget about taking me hiking, ever again. Today it was a bear, but tomorrow? Cougars, for sure, and what next? Vermicious Knids? Wisely, my husband did not argue with any of this, not even my suggestion that Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator’s amorphous space aliens might materialize in the Pacific Northwest. We both knew I didn’t mean it. Love had gotten me out of a book and into the wilderness in the first place, and I would be back in the woods next summer or even sooner. Besides, we were a family, and families do things together. Like get nearly eaten by bears.

•••

KATE HAAS is an editor at Literary Mama. Her essays have appeared in the Boston Globe Magazine, Salon, Brain, Child, and other publications. She’s a regular contributor to Full Grown People and lives in Portland, Oregon, with her family. Read more of her writing at www.katehaas.com.

I’m with the Band

[This is kind of art you get when your editor is a former band geek. —ed.]

By Rebecca Stetson Werner

In the enormous domed metal building—a cavernous space dominated by three regulation size basketball courts where adults coach the kids’ teams, shouting to be heard above the din—I find the court for Nicholas’s game and quickly sit down on the bleachers. Every once in a while, a dissonant buzzer shrieks, so awful a sound, so jarring it makes my scalp tingle, and I curl in on myself in anticipation of the next blast.

Nicholas’s good friend passes him the ball. He catches it, sort of, but his grip is not quite firm enough, and it barrels on through his hands and down onto his shoe, bouncing out of bounds. I hear a groan and a snicker from somewhere to my left. I fight the desire to turn and glare at the person. Nicholas smiles, forcedly, and I see him apologize to his friend.

Then he throws me a pained look. Hoping to communicate with him as the one person in the crowd who knows and holds his vulnerability, I try to return my best version of what proves to be an impossible expression: a blend of a smirk moving into a softening around the eyes and then a goofy grin, with a bit of a shoulder shrug.

But I am not sure I get the expression right, and I may have missed my chance to connect and communicate with him. Because today, from the moment I entered the arena, I have retreated to the sidelines, taken a stance as an outsider. I am tense, self-conscious, distracted, and frustrated with those around me.

While all the other parents on the bleachers chat and yell and gesture and growl, I am caught up in my own head, spinning through a series of questions. When did this happen? How did we get here? When did we stop wanting our children to play nicely together, stop insisting on apologies when they hurt one another, stop valuing kindness and social skills above competitiveness and drive? And when did it become a good play to foul someone on purpose? When did we stop calling careful with that stick across the playground and start shouting check him?

“Out of the paint!” one parent bellows. Another shouts, “Boards!” every time a player shoots. I have no idea what they mean and wonder if I may be eavesdropping on a bizarre carpentry-focused reality show. I amuse myself for a bit by trying to overlay this crowd’s behavior onto a playground scene from when our children were younger. I imagine what it would have been like to sit on the benches next to the swings with coffee cups in our hands, interrupting one friend’s narration of her clogged mammary gland to shout to one of our kids: Swing harder! Pump those legs! Come on, work those monkey bars! Share those Cheerios!

I’m tempted to turn to the parents beside me on these bleachers and offer an explanation for myself: I was in the band.

•••

In high school, I was a band geek, although there were lots of other, less kind names for members of this motley gang of musicians. On Friday nights, when the popular kids would sit in the bleachers with their French fries and sodas and cheer for their friends on the football team, I was there, too. But off to the side, clad in a royal-blue polyester men’s uniform, helmet perched atop my head, its plumes long ago snapped in half, yellowed, or simply lost.

On school days, I stood when the intercom called for the pep rally participants to go to the gym, and I left the room with all the Blue Knights in team jerseys and school colors. In the gymnasium, however, I was absent from the groupings of chairs in the center of the polished wood floors. Instead, I sat First Chair, adjusting my piccolo to a well-tuned B flat and offering it to each member of the pep band. Then I’d sit down again and await our turn to accompany the cheerleaders and play our school’s fight song.

And it wasn’t just pep band. I could also be counted on to maintain the spacing and pace of the most complex marching band formations, my whole row guiding left toward me, peering across the music holders affixed to their bent elbows. In the two-person pit orchestra, I routinely covered three woodwind instruments during school musicals, and would lean across the flute, piccolo, and oboe that lay in my lap so that I could reach the keys of the synthesizer. I must admit: I am a bit embarrassed for myself right now as I write this. Total nerd. But these musical talents did help me pass a bit socially, counterbalancing my polyester uniform and allowing me to relate to the jocks and popular kids. Sadly, these impressive skills were not sufficient to produce a flurry of prom invitations.

At some point during high school, I began singing, a sensible extension of my musical activities. Although some of my most important relationships were formed through singing groups, I never felt completely at ease in the choirs I joined. So I wasn’t surprised when, after her school choir concert, our daughter Julia unintentionally voiced what I also struggled with when singing. I asked her what it had felt like to be on stage, to stand before an audience.

“Well, I liked it when I played the xylophone,” she said. “I knew what to do with my hands. I didn’t know what to do with them when I was singing.”

Like me, it seems, Julia may be an instrumentalist at heart. I was accustomed to holding and playing instruments on stage, to having something protective between me and the audience. I often carried my black cases with me to keep my instruments warm enough, or because they didn’t fit in my locker, also conveniently giving my hands purpose as I moved through my school’s crowded hallways. I used to practice fingerings for scales on my desktop. It gave me something to do while I chatted with the more gregarious kids before classes began. Even now, when I am feeling nervous, my adult fingers long for the feeling of my oboe’s cold wood and silver. I can still call forth the smell of cedar and beeswax and saliva wafting up into my face as I open the case. I can even hear the creaking of the hinge as it opened and the snapping shut of the lid to my reed box. I mentally run my finger down the turkey feather I used to swab my oboe dry after I played.

But singing? As Julia said, it’s just you and your voice on the stage. But I pushed through this unease, this vulnerability, for whatever reason, and it led to something, someone, for me.

•••

My husband, Jonathan, and I met in our college’s choir. He was a dancer and a singer in high school. He tells me of an awkward stage involving leg warmers and acne medication and asking a friend when football rehearsal was over. When we met on his first day of college, I was his assigned greeter, or what we called a hand holder, sitting with him while he waited to audition for the choir that I had already joined. What I noticed about Jonathan—after overcoming my fascination with his strange fashion choices, including a do rag, white t-shirt, tightly cinched pants and shirt cuffs—was that, though I was there to make him feel less nervous as he waited, he was not nervous at all.

The next time we met was in the basement storage room of the performing arts center. I, in my role as choir manager, was responsible for fitting the newly selected men for their tuxedos. This was my first time measuring inseams for men’s attire, and Jonathan, third in line, intervened. Clearly I looked as confused and mortified as I felt, awkwardly holding a measuring tape, trying to figure out how I was going to determine pant lengths for all these young men I did not yet know. “Have him hold the top, and you hold the bottom down by his ankle,” he suggested.

Ah. Ankle. That’s good. I can handle ankles.

But I think the night that our relationship moved from friendship to more than that was at the famed a cappella karaoke night. That evening, we sang each other’s songs. Which is not a euphemism. We actually sang each other’s solos from our respective a cappella groups. There were a lot of red plastic Solo cups in people’s hands that night, though not in his or mine.

He actually volunteered to sing my song, confidently and in full voice, which was a folky Tuck and Patty love song. Jonathan knows how to work a room. But I was then involuntarily pushed up to the front of the crowd as his group began the accompaniment to his signature song, “The Reflex” by Duran Duran. He typically performed with full choreography, and there was clearly some expectation that I would shimmy along with his group as they boogied down. I was completely terrified and uncomfortable and breathless and uncool and not at all uninhibited by the contents of a Solo cup. Yet he stood in the middle of the crowd and mouthed the words for me, smiling warmly the whole time.

In that moment of my vulnerability and his strength, my discomfort and his ease, and during many other moments in the next few years in which we flipped and flopped roles of lending support and revealing weaknesses, our friendship grew into understanding of and love for each other. We were able to give each other what we needed when working through our most difficult, most vulnerable moments.

There was the night, sitting in the middle of our college’s clay tennis courts, in which he—overwhelmed by his work and the high expectations and his exhaustion—confessed, “I’m not going to be able to do this.” And I told him he could, and we did. Together. We created our us and, eventually, our family. We sang Tuck and Patty while rocking our babies years later. And our kids still think we are so weird when we lapse into the fle-fle-fle-fle-flex refrain on road trips.

Back then, we didn’t think about selecting someone who had skills that complemented the other’s. We didn’t anticipate the need to tackle our own home improvements or the requirement that we support all of the different homework subjects. Or that one person’s musicality should be rounded out by the other’s athleticism. And therefore, given our poorly planned love, our house is repaired with duct tape and the kitchen faucet drips. Yet we have inadvertently managed to rock the homework subject coverage at the kitchen counter. And, although our three children each fall in their own unique place on the continuum between gregarious and introverted, luckily, between Jonathan and I, we truly understand them.

Yet without question, our weakest collective skill set is athleticism. Jonathan is a self-described great blue heron with sore knees when asked to assume an athletic stance. And I am awkward and clumsy and often find it difficult to walk across a room without tripping. Of course, as with home improvement and homework coverage, engineering well-rounded genetic loading for one’s potential offspring is not typically how one goes about choosing a mate. One is much more likely to be drawn to another who likes the same things, someone who also shows up to the same a cappella karaoke event.

•••

This us, Jonathan and I. What we know from experience, despite our lack of sports expertise, is the importance of allowing oneself to feel and express one’s vulnerability. And we know the importance of where you place yourself in a crowd. As a couple, we are the result of the push and pull of social dynamics playing out while two people connected amidst a crowd’s pulse and noise. And we know how coming together—finding each other through an extended moment across the room—can evolve into a life together. A dance in which two people stop synchronizing themselves with those around them and fall into their own rhythm. Jonathan and I? We wish for nothing more than these moments, these connections, for our children.

Lately, I have been returning to that nervous, uncertain glance Nicholas shot me across the basketball court. About who I was, or perhaps wasn’t, for him in that moment. And about how Nicholas saw me, sitting among the spectators as well, caught up in my wonder at how our children are getting older and at how parenting requirements change with time. I lost sight of how this is all still about the connections, about forming the closest and strongest relationships we can with each other, relationships during our childhood serving as a springboard for embracing and moving out into the rest of the world. I want to change how I receive his searching look when it next comes my way. Though I know this will not always be the case, our children are still young enough that their raw and vulnerable glances are still directed at me.

Nicholas’s glance has also sent me back into my memory of that moment, albeit a more grown-up moment, between Jonathan and me so many years ago. Of the feeling of finding Jonathan across the crowd. And how that look moved us forward, shored us up, and helped us live. And the desire for connection with Jonathan is still there. I still hope for our eyes not to pass over each other, searching through the mess of parenting and work and distraction and stress. For our eyes to meet and linger, for this look to make the noise around us quiet. Once these intense and precious few days of parenting these beings has shifted and they move outward, that Jonathan and I will still be us, still finding each other, as the crowd thins and moves on. And for our growing children to see this, to know we are in the crowd for them now and for each other, available and strong. And for them to someday find this for themselves with another.

•••

REBECCA STETSON WERNER lives in Portland, Maine, with her husband and three children. She has contributed to Taproot and Grounded Magazine; this is her second essay for Full Grown People. She writes about parenting, children’s books, and life in their very old home at treetoriver.com.

Fertilizer

pregnant — By Gina Kelly www.ginakelly.com

By Susan Rebecca White
(not pictured above)

Back when I was still shell-shocked from having separated from my husband of nearly seven years, when we still had a massive amount of financial untangling to do before we could truly own our own lives, when I was still kept awake at night by waves of panic about not having enough money to support myself, a friend told me, rather matter-of-factly, that I had a pile of shit in front of me that I had to eat. Not only that, but all I could use to do so was a tiny spoon. The good news, she said, was that one day I would reach the end of the pile, and then much lovelier things would be placed before me.

Her prediction turned out to be correct. I met Sam just as my divorce finalized. I like to say that he was my prize at the end of all of that shit, like the toy buried at the bottom of a box of Cracker Jacks—except of course, that’s not fair to the Cracker Jacks or to Sam.

When Sam and I first started dating, I was subletting a small carriage house in my native Atlanta. The carriage house was built in the 1920s, had hardwood floors and French doors, and the walls were painted a cheerful yellow. Sam lived about a mile away, and since we both worked from home, sometimes I would fix pimento cheese sandwiches and invite him over for lunch. He would bring sweet tea. After we ate, we would take a walk around the neighborhood before we both returned to the more practical details of our day. One sunny spring afternoon, after our walk, Sam and I tumbled into bed—work be damned.

We were thirty-six and forty-one years old, and we were in bed together on a Wednesday afternoon, sunlight streaming through the blinds and making stripes on the quilt. It was hard not to feel as if we were getting away with something. This was not what most of my friends—in the middle of marriages, careers, and parenthood—were doing. Yet Sam and I were not cheating on anyone, were not making up excuses to our bosses, were not neglecting our children. Both divorced without kids—his divorce more graceful than mine—we had each eaten our fair share of shit to get to where we were, in the giddy stages of early love. It was heaven.

After dating for nearly a year, Sam and I took a trip to Panama, snorkeled over undulating jellyfish, kayaked in the middle of the blue, blue ocean, gripped each other’s hand as our cab driver weaved recklessly in and out of Panama City traffic. Back in Atlanta we celebrated our one-year anniversary by having spaetzle at the same Alsatian restaurant where we had our first date, and it was there that Sam proposed.

By the time we married in a tiny ceremony in our home with a homemade cake and a bouquet picked from my friend’s garden, I was thirty-seven, Sam forty-two, and we wanted to have a child. Given our ages and our level of commitment to each other, it was tempting to start trying on our honeymoon, but I had a novel coming out the next month, and a tour to go on, and I didn’t want to be distracted by the “am I/ am I not” game one inevitably plays while trying to conceive. And so Sam and I waited until my book tour was over in July. At the end of that same month, seven days before my period was due, I took a pregnancy test and was rewarded with a faint blue plus sign.

I felt incredulous that this—pregnancy—was happening to me. I had always felt on the outside of things, a consummate observer. For a long time, this was my preferred mode of being—it gave me an illusion of control that I desperately needed. Agonizing over choices was infinitely preferable to actually making them. Which is why I spent much of my first marriage trying to figure out whether or not to have a child. It was far easier to wrestle with that question than to face the truth of my situation: that I was in a marriage that no amount of therapy would fix, and that I had willingly put myself into this untenable position in order to avoid fully committing to life, with all of its vulnerabilities and uncertainties.

I am now nearly nine months pregnant, my belly big and tight, my energy low, my body taking on a life of its own, and subsequently doing all sorts of embarrassing things. When I sneeze, I pee! When I walk ten feet, I get winded! If I don’t eat a bowl of prunes every morning, I’m constipated! Despite the all too earthy side effects, I love being pregnant, love that I get to experience the bizarre and amazing process of reproduction. I love feeling our son roll and kick inside me. The sheer physicality of the late stages of pregnancy makes what began as something abstract (revealed only by mild nausea and a plus sign on a pee stick) into something much more real. And the realness of the pregnancy has brought me closer to the astounding prospect that we will soon have an infant to care for. That once I deliver the baby he will be in our charge, and I will somehow learn to breastfeed, and get by on little sleep, and grow more patient as small tasks become mighty endeavors. Soon there will be a human manifestation of our love—living, crying, and pooping among us—and we will love him in a way we have never loved before and will consequently be more vulnerable than ever.

Still, I am not yet a mother. I am intellectually aware that a mighty and miraculous wrecking ball is about to smash up the life we know, but I do not understand this on an emotional level. How could I before our son arrives? And so I find myself suspended between the life I knew and the life I am entering, much as I was when I boarded the airplane that took me away from my first husband and our home together and into a future yet known.

This means I am acutely aware of what I am losing: right now Sam and I are still a two-person unit with a host of inside jokes and allusions. We are newlyweds and we are playful. Hopefully we will remain playful as parents, but there is a weight that will come with our new responsibility that we cannot ignore. Post-baby, we probably won’t spend many Sunday afternoons playing Ping-Pong at the local sandwich place. Most likely I won’t cook as elaborately as I do now. Cheese soufflé will no longer be on the rotating menu, nor will I make homemade soda syrups and granola bars. We will have to watch ourselves and not act horribly toward one another when sleep-deprived and overwhelmed with the stresses of new parenthood. Chances are, we will not always succeed at doing so, and our own warts and shortcomings will be more fully revealed.

We are trading one reality for a more intense, harder one—one that for us will be richer, and deeper as well—and we are both ready and excited for the change. And yet the other day, I found myself weeping over what we are losing, our sweet courtship of pimento cheese sandwiches and afternoons in bed. I found this unsettling: it felt like my old, non-committal self coming back into play, the woman terrified of getting herself into something she couldn’t get out of. My tears also felt disloyal toward my unborn son, whom I already love with a startling ferocity. But then I tried to be gentle with myself, the way a mother might be, to allow myself to be sad about the ending of this time when we know each other only as a couple, this time of burgeoning love among people who are not new to life, who weathered some hard things before meeting (and who will surely continue to weather hard things as life goes on). I imagine that twenty years from now, I will think of our early, heady days as a couple with sweet nostalgia. And probably also with a touch of condescension, as in: We thought we were close back then, but look at what we’ve been through now, look at how the roots of our lives have entwined.

It seems that in life there is no gain that comes without loss. Surely one day I will think back on our son’s infanthood with nostalgia, as well as his days as a young child, a boy, and then a young man. To live fully is to commit to things we are terrified to lose, all while knowing loss will come. It occurs to me that life is a series of deaths we must endure, and even somehow embrace, in order to let new life in. Maybe the same is true of our corporeal death, when our bodies will grow cold and lifeless. Maybe instead of fearing that day, I will try to take comfort in the model life has presented so far: New life sprouts in the spaces made by the losses we learn to endure.

•••

SUSAN REBECCA WHITE is the author of three novels: A Place at the Table, A Soft Place to Land, and Bound South. A Place at the Table was recently released in paperback. It is a Target “club pick” and a finalist for the Townsend Prize, Georgia’s oldest literary award. White has also published several essays in places such as Salon, Tin House, The Huffington Post and The Bitter Southerner. She lives in Atlanta with her husband Sam Reid and their (very) soon-to-be-born son.

The Time Machine

By Reyna Eisenstark

A couple of weeks ago, I was at a concert in a bookstore in Hudson, New York, when some hipster put his nearly empty pint glass right on the bookshelf next to him. (This is a bookstore so hip that it has live music and serves beer.) And noticing the glass’s precarious placement next to the James Joyce books (of all things!), I waited a few minutes until I could no longer stand it and then grabbed the glass and put it on my table. A guy closer to my age than the hipster’s sitting near me immediately said, “Thank you! That was bothering me too!” And then, “Are you a Virgo?” What I said was no, but what I thought a few days later (when I accused my own ten-year-old daughter of being a Virgo) is that what I am is … a grown-up.

This realization had been a long time coming.

Just a few years ago, when I was forty years old and my twelve-year marriage had completely unraveled, I dated a guy who was ten years younger than me. It started out as you might expect, but it turned out that we had many things in common: favorite authors, movies, music. Remarkably, we even shared a love of certain television shows, ones that he had watched in reruns growing up and I had watched in real time.

One of the thrills of dating a thirty-year-old was living the life of a thirty-year-old, but as a forty-year-old. On the weekends, while my daughters were with their father, I would step back into another world. My young boyfriend and I would go to parties at his friends’ houses. Sometimes that meant sitting around a fire pit in a backyard, smoking way too much weed, and watching a girl dressed in a cape spinning around in a hula hoop, and sometimes it meant sitting on a zebra-print couch, in a black light-lit room decorated with black light posters, again smoking way too much weed, and wondering briefly why I had ever left my dorm. Going out with friends meant first going to someone’s house and getting sufficiently drunk before heading out into the world. Going out period actually meant staying out until two a.m. and sleeping until noon the next day.

I had done all of these things before. And in actuality it had been many years before. Somehow all these people I met in their late twenties and early thirties were living a kind of delayed life, the one I had gone through in my early- to mid-twenties until I ended up settling down with the man I eventually married, and we went to, for example, readings at the 92^nd Street Y. But here they were in their extended youth, with their comic book hero costume parties, and my young boyfriend firmly in favor of staying that way for as long as possible.

And here I was, astonishingly getting to do the whole thing all over again. “You’ve found a time machine!” exclaimed my friend Susan when I told her about my weekend life. And that’s just what it felt like. A time machine that actually worked the way it was supposed to instead of the way it works in nearly all science fiction shows, with devastating results. Because honestly who wouldn’t want to return to the hedonistic days of their youth but without all that youthful insecurity and doubt? For a while there, I will admit, it really was thrilling.

I was always the oldest person wherever we went. Strangely, it didn’t bother me at all. I sometimes found myself an amused observer, smiling to myself with some inner knowledge that I knew it would take these people years to figure out. Although there were times when I saw girls, say, dressed in shorts with tights, a look I could no longer pull off, and the realization that they were just at the beginning of something made me feel envious. I was getting to experience youth, it was true, and there were times, dancing at some club in the way early hours of the morning, that I felt truly alive as I hadn’t in years, but I would have never done these things at forty were it not for my young boyfriend. And that was when I realized that my actual youth was truly over.

I liked to imagine that my boyfriend’s friends saw me as a cool, possibly striking, older woman, but I honestly have no idea. When I was about twenty-two, a friend of mine was dating (and eventually living with) a thirty-year-old woman. A bunch of us would go over to their apartment and the only thing that struck me were the lines on his girlfriend’s face, something that I hadn’t really ever noticed on anyone before. She looked older, but we all got along just fine. This seemed to be the way things went with my young boyfriend’s friends, too.

Things went on like this for about a year, but my relationship with my young boyfriend evolved into nights at his apartment cooking together and then watching a movie or some TV show like Mad Men, which was perfectly fine with me. It turned out that my young boyfriend, lost, trying to get his career started, was going through a kind of depression, but it also meant that I wasn’t staggering around exhausted at one a.m., dying to leave the bar and just get to sleep.

And then one night when I came over, wearing an old blue hoodie and expecting a night of homemade dinner and TV as usual, my young boyfriend mentioned going to a party and I actually protested. We hadn’t gone out into the real world in a long time, and I found that I had preferred it that way. But I agreed to go along.

It was on the way to the party that I had a revelation, the kind of thing that could only come to a forty-something grown-up: I did not care what anyone thought of me. I was going to go to this party and if no one liked me, it completely didn’t matter. I didn’t even have to talk to anyone if I didn’t want to! Who cared! Thus freed from the usual party anxiety, I had a rather enjoyable time, snacking on the plentiful Trader Joe party snacks, drinking beer, and standing in the corner of the kitchen in my hoodie, observing the young people around me with a permanent smirk on my face. At a certain point, my young boyfriend tried to include me in the conversation he was having with some couple, and I made just the slightest effort at being friendly. But mostly I just didn’t care.

I realized that I no longer envied these young people, with their whole lives ahead of them. I realized that they would be making the same decisions I had: they would marry or not, they would have children or not, and every decision they made would make them regret others they did not make. They were just at the beginning of this stage and I was, I realized thrillingly, relieved to be on the other side. As a seventy-year-old woman once said to me, “We are all young for the same amount of time.”

So let’s leave that party for now and return to the empty pint glass. One way to think about it is this: a twenty-something puts the glass on the bookshelf (next to the James Joyce books, for chrissakes!) and turns away from it without a second glance. The thirty-something sees the glass, feels worried and perhaps a little responsible, but ultimately turns away and hopes for the best. The forty-something sees the glass, and having seen dozens of nearly empty pint glasses spill or crash, grabs it from the bookshelf and sets it down. The glass is no longer precarious. It is exactly where it should be.

•••

REYNA EISENSTARK is a freelance writer living in Chatham, New York. You can read more of her essays at reynaeisenstark.wordpress.com.

The Rest of the Story

By Lee Gulyas

My first date with the man who would become my husband was a disaster.

It was August, and the San Francisco fog rolled across Ghirardelli Square where we both worked selling things to tourists. As we walked, I noticed Ed had a slight limp, and in that optimistic way of seeing one thing connected to everything else, I thought about my friend who had just sprained his ankle and asked my date if he had sprained his.

“No,” Ed said. “I have a fake leg,” as he tilted his head and gave me a smile, leading me to think he was toying with me.

“Yeah, sure. That’s a good one,” I said, not about to let him, or anyone, play me for a fool.

We drove for coffee in the Mission, away from the water and fog, past the War Memorial Opera House, past the fortune cookie factory and into the sun. Light streamed onto our table and illuminated the twisted branches of the sidewalk trees, sad dogs on leashes, motes of dust revolving in the air. Ed talked about folk art, the Virgin of Guadalupe, and Hungarian food. I told him about my love for classical music and punk rock. He didn’t blink, didn’t think the two were incompatible. After a moment of silence, I motioned to his leg and asked how it happened. “My friend shot it off when I was thirteen,” he said, smiling.

“Great, great,” I said, always the cynic. “Do you tell everyone the same story?”

After coffee, we agreed on dinner and more conversation. We talked about landscape and trains and music and literature as the sun disappeared and lights framed the city skyline. I lingered over my calzone and asked him to tell me more. “We were camping in the middle of the desert and my friend got the gun out of the truck and it just went off.” He flashed the same, sly smile, and his eyes gleamed.

“Wow,” I said. “Your story just keeps getting better. You’re really good at this.”

We decided to go for drinks. I took him to a dive bar close to my apartment. He was impressed with the extensive taxidermy, year-round Christmas decorations, dim lighting, and ample margaritas. I selected music on the jukebox—Frank Sinatra, Johnny Cash, Ranchera. We sat on red vinyl-covered swivel stools and sipped drinks under the glow of Christmas lights draped over deer antlers. After a few drinks, we planned for a weekend hike on Mt. Tamalpais.

Later, while I described the mechanical beauty of vintage Italian motorcycles, Ed sat his drink on the bar, leaned over, raised his pant leg, pulled up his sock, and stuck it to the Velcro square on his hard, plastic leg.

I remember my stomach turning, growing tight. I felt queasy and it wasn’t the margaritas. I don’t remember the rest of the evening, what was said, how we parted. What I do know is that at the age of twenty-five, for the first time in my life, I called my mom to talk about a man. After blurting out the story, panicked that I couldn’t go hiking with him, that I’d made such an ass of myself, she set me straight. “It’s not the first time, and it won’t be the last.”

How could I argue with that?

•••

I’ve never been known for my social grace, yet this blunder had my head spinning. I didn’t want to face Ed after spending the whole afternoon, evening, and night making fun of him, but I couldn’t figure a way out of our next date without making myself look worse. The awful thing was that I was falling for him, and it had seemed so long since this was possible. San Francisco in the eighties was a playground full of sex, drugs, and music, and I had played for years until my circle of friends became smaller (and more responsible). The party was winding down. We no longer danced till four a.m., heading out for breakfast after, tearing through the streets on motorcycles to get home to our beds before the sun came up. Now we worked at our jobs or went to school and met for breakfast on Saturday mornings. I hadn’t been on a date in years, but I was content enough with my job and my friends that being “dateless” didn’t bother me. And I never thought that I was missing anything until the possibility of missing my next encounter with this man outweighed any chance for the salvation of my pride.

The next day was sun and shadow, redwoods and ferns. I wondered if I should say something—apologize for my disbelief, my arrogance—but at first there didn’t seem to be a good time, and as the day went on an apology seemed irrelevant. We sat on a rock in the middle of a rushing stream. We feasted on pistachios and dried figs, listened to woodpeckers and ravens. We scrambled up hills and down ravines, stood above the fog line and peered across to San Francisco.

At the end of the day when his car stopped in front of my apartment, Ed leaned over, stared into my eyes and asked, “Can I do something?” I nodded tentatively and he reached around to the back of my head and took my unruly hair into his hand. He lingered, then let go.

In the coming weeks we walked all over the city to restaurants, movies, and cafés. At Point Reyes, we hiked two miles with full gear in the blue moonlight and made camp on a bluff overlooking the ocean. On a weekend trip to Squaw Valley, he taught me how to downhill ski and never laughed, even after the chair lift knocked me down. We backpacked our way through steep canyons and valleys in the Southwest, swam in cold, spring fed waters in Oak Creek Canyon. I was in new territory—I usually spent my time in restaurants and bars and my idea of outdoors activities took place on a motorcycle. Still, I was hesitant about Ed’s handicap, uncertain of how his disability could change my life.

•••

I couldn’t figure out exactly what I was afraid of. It wasn’t that his prosthesis was limiting—he was way more active and daring than I was. It certainly wasn’t the idea of disability—my aunt had polio, my dad had a permanent tracheostomy, and I have friends with a range of conditions and array of medical apparatuses. So what was my problem?

That’s when I realized that I was my problem. I wasn’t afraid he would need me. I like being needed. I was afraid that I would need him.

•••

It took years for my husband to tell me the rest of the story. How his leg blew open in front of him, how his friend’s father threw him in the back of the truck and drove like hell to the nearest hospital, miles away over rough desert roads. How he waited in the emergency room for hours while the hospital tried to locate his parents so they could authorize emergency treatment, so the doctors could do more than just resuscitate him each time he slipped away. How he spent months in the hospital enduring surgery after surgery, taking away more of his limb because of the spreading gangrene. How a young resident told him to leave the hospital, that he had been allergic to the antibiotic, but the attending doctor wouldn’t even consider allergic reaction a possibility. How leaving the hospital not only saved what was left of his leg, but also saved his life.

Over twenty years later I won’t lie. I won’t say that Ed’s leg has been problem free. Since he is active he often breaks his prosthetic foot. The costly legs have to be replaced every few years, the silicone liners every few months, and insurance doesn’t always cover the expenses. There are times when his skin gets irritated or chafed and then he can’t wear the leg at all. He’s undergone corrective surgery that required him to stay off his leg completely for two months straight—no prosthesis, no walking, no driving. He suffers from back problems; there are days at a time when all he can do is take muscle relaxants and lie flat on his back until the pain subsides. Then there’s the frustration and subsequent depression, a symptom of all the imposed inactivity. He experiences chronic pain, not phantom ones, though he gets those too. But he rarely asks for help; he hates being immobile, reliant on others for his basic needs.

Ed seldom slows down unless he has to. We visit relatives in Hungary. We’ve trekked through rural Mexico, traveled through Romania and Ethiopia, and lived in Yemen—all difficult places to get around. He gardens, bikes, swims, and has a long list of interests and projects, too many for me to keep track of. I’m content in the house, with a book. Ed’s the one that makes me get off the couch and out into the world.

Now he jokes that I married him for the parking space. I laugh, but I have to admit that it is convenient. The state we live in calls the rectangular blue placard that hangs from our rearview mirror “a privilege.” I see it as a courtesy, a small gesture that can only help make this single aspect of his life a little easier.

In the meantime, we’re proof that normal is relative. Sometimes our daughter, now a teenager, has to be reminded why we often can’t go skiing or for a hike, or why we get directed to the front of a crowded parking lot at Disneyland or the fair.

Sometimes I forget too, even though I know my future will include a long parade of orthopedic surgeons, dermatologists, prosthetists, physical therapists, and the accompanying bills. We’ll have to move from our cozy Victorian home to a more practical one-story house, ready for wheelchairs, accessible design, and all the accoutrements of “independent living,” even though there is no such thing, even though in the end it could be me who has to rely upon Ed for care. I suppose this is the rest of the story: nothing is certain—so we go forward the best way we know how.

•••

LEE GULYAS lives in Bellingham, Washington, and teaches at Western Washington University. Her poetry and nonfiction has appeared in such journals as Prime Number, Event, Barn Owl Review, and The Common.

All Sorts of Things and Weather, Taken in Together

By Randy Osborne

My forearms and the backs of my hands are faintly speckled and sketched with blood. Like when, in grade school, you twiddled the ballpoint pen between your fingers and let the tip touch paper for quick, light slashes. Like when you made dots by pressing.

These traces on my flesh—they heal and are remade, but they will heal again—can pull a stranger’s gaze, can make him look away. Neither defined enough to signify cutter, nor dug-out enough to say crank sores, the marks mean something else.

Squirrel.

•••

Upon waking, Sciurus carolinensis, the Eastern gray tree squirrel abundant in my Atlanta neighborhood, yawns and stretches. It sees the world in color. Its hands bear vestigial “thumbs.” Its body temperature ranges from 98 degrees Fahrenheit to 102.

Its brain weighs 0.25 to 0.35 ounces, relatively large for a mammal, in proportion to body weight. This is not because the squirrel is extra-smart, but because it has parallax vision (it looks at you with both eyes at the same time to judge your distance, for the purpose of fleeing) and spatial memory (it doesn’t find buried acorns by odor alone—it remembers), and because a squirrel’s keen sense of hearing needs more gray matter. Its ears face sideways, like ours.

The family name Sciuridae is Greek for “shadow of the tail.” Used mainly for keeping warm and dry, the tail adds 17.8 percent of protective value to baseline when raised. Someone has measured this. Below the tail rests a cluster of blood vessels that the squirrel can dilate or narrow to warm up or cool off—no small matter for endotherms, creatures that make their own heat, like us.

You may detest squirrels. Many urban people do, given the raiding of bird feeders that goes on, given the chewing-up of attic insulation, which compromises our own heat-making, and given the mad, kamikaze severing of electrical wires. “Tree rats,” you may call them, ignoring the many differences. I love one.

•••

In June 2012, I was making more money than I had ever made. My first foray into the corporate world, with its murky, ever shifting demands meant a nicer apartment, with a pool and gym. My girlfriend Joyce and I dined at snazzy restaurants. We talked about having kids. My boss flew me out to work in the home office, a skyscraper that gleamed in the San Francisco sun.

Abruptly one afternoon, by phone, I lost my job. Downsized and restructured, I drifted, uncertain about my future. Ours. Although I didn’t realize this when we met a few years earlier, the matter of children was a potential deal breaker, since Joyce half-wanted kids. “Not your willingness, I mean, but whether you would be open to the idea,” she said, vaguely.

I was. With three grown kids from two previous marriages—three, by the way, is also the average size of an Eastern gray squirrel’s litter—I felt ready to consider fatherhood with Joyce. But now I was jobless. Even before, there was a potential snag. Our ages differ by twenty years. The gap is wide enough to worry over, especially considering the already shorter lifespan for men. Twenty years is how long squirrels are estimated to live in captivity. In the wild, only about half that.

•••

In August, a friend asked me to substitute as host of her literary reading series. A simple chore. Welcome the turnout, introduce each of three writers, and wind up the show, good night. But I felt nervous, an impostor. Although I had composed a few pieces that seemed okay, I was not a member of the scene, not a bona fide person of letters. I admired the others as they sped past, trailing bright streamers of irony.

Since I had planned to attend as a spectator anyway—and with, after all, not much else to do—I said yes.

We strolled in the near-dusk, making our way toward the coffeehouse. I saw a few people I recognized, no doubt bound for the same place. Suddenly, someone cried out, pointing to a spot in the street beneath a massive oak. We hurried over.

A tiny curlicue twisted slowly on the asphalt, its sparse fur (pelage, I would learn) unruffled, eyes open. Blood seeped from the nose and mouth. Delicate whiskers (vibrissae) twitched. About twenty-five feet above us, we spied the leafy mass of nest (drey).

Joyce’s artist friend Hilary retrieved an old tee-shirt from her car. She lifted the squirrel from the pavement as if handling smoke. Her fingertips arranged the fabric around its wee body, which all but disappeared. Most squirrels don’t survive their first year, and this one fell hard. Internal injuries, most likely.

Of the night’s event, I remember only the end, when Hilary approached me with the bundle, a cleaned-up nose peeking out. She had asked around—nobody wanted to take the squirrel home. Made sense to me, hardly a fan of the rodent class. Everyone probably recalled well, as I did, all the baby-bird failures of the past and couldn’t face another. Hilary tucked the corners, a final tidying of the package.

“It’s a boy,” she said and held him out to me.

At home, after a Google search, I witnessed myself driving to Publix, where I asked the pharmacist for a batch, please, of one-cc, needle-free syringes. Then to the infant-care aisle, where I seized a liter of Pedialyte. Next, PetSmart for a can of Esbilac puppy-milk powder.

Removed from his burrito-style wrap, he fit in my palm like a miniature doughnut with a licorice-whip tail, or like an exotic, oversized insect. He kept his eyes closed, as if to say either, “Let me get some rest, it’s been a long day,” or, “I can’t bear to watch what the human is about to do to me.”

I loaded the syringe with Pedialyte. Here goes.

As soon as he felt contact, he gripped the nozzle with bony hands and sucked, eyes half open now, gulping, as my thumb delivered a slow push.

Baby squirrels in the wild gain sixteen-fold their weight in two months. In humans, this would be comparable to an eight-pound baby reaching 130 pounds in the same period. The squirrel mother’s magic milk consists of twenty-five percent fat and nine percent protein. Compare Esbilac powder, stirred into Pedialyte: forty percent fat and thirty-three percent protein. Close enough, it turns out.

During those first weeks, Bug took six syringes of formula at each meal, with feeds about four hours apart. He would drain the first syringe, swat it away, and grope frantically for the next. In about a month, he was downing less formula and rejecting the syringe after emptying two or three. He munched bits of apple. A few weeks later, diced raw green beans, and broccoli stems. Shelled nuts. Before long, he was cracking into them himself.

•••

“Imagine,” the wildlife rehabber tells me, “having a two-year-old child who is emotionally dependent on you—only you, they latch onto a single caregiver—and who will never grow up. I mean never.”

I think of my kids as two-year-olds. Hadn’t I wanted them to grow up? Of course, I did. Yes. And: no.

The rehabber is realistic in describing my options. She is predicting from experience how things will go. Did she say “emotionally”?

Until her, I didn’t know that people exist who specialize in the process of returning squirrels to their natural habitat, after well-meaning humans like me snatch them out.

“But it doesn’t always work,” she says.

I keep her number.

•••

“The majority of mammals live solitary lives; estimates suggest that at least 85 percent of mammals can be classified as asocial animals that aggregate only briefly at a seasonal food source or to mate.”

—Michael Steele and John Kropowski, North American Tree Squirrels (Smithsonian Books, 2001)

Joyce and I watch squirrels jump, dart, and scurry in the park. On a flat surface, squirrels can travel as fast as 16.7 miles per hour. Their crazy trajectories, never in tandem or together, bisect each other across the grass and up the trunks of trees. Lyrics from a Patti Smith song come to me, the one she wrote for Robert Mapplethorpe as he was dying of AIDS. “Paths that cross will cross again.”

In the traffic behind us on North Highland Avenue, we hear a pop—the sound a plastic bag with trapped air makes as tires roll over it.

Together, we turn. The squirrel lies near the center of the road, still alive, hands clawing pavement, unable to drag the rest of its body. After a few seconds, stillness. A light, almost merry wave of the tail, goodbye.

How far away the curb must have seemed, in that squirrel’s fast-fading, parallax, big-brained vision. The Stephen Dobyns poem, “Querencia” (Spanish for “a secure place”), describes a bull tormented in the ring as the audience cheers.

Probably, he has no real knowledge and,

like any of us, it’s pain that teaches him

to be wary, so his only desire in defeat

is to return to that spot of sand, and even

when dying he will stagger toward his querencia

as if he might feel better there, could

recover there, take back his strength, win

the fight, stick that glittering creature to the wall …

The glittering creature in this instance is not a matador but an SUV, now a block away. No bloodthirsty crowd, only a few pedestrians who seem not to notice what happened. Maybe the driver didn’t, either.

One of the many reliefs of no longer owning a car is that I don’t have to worry about killing anything with it, but I remember instances. A thump, the glance in the rear-view mirror. That wad of flopping misery. My sick, jarred sense of a fatal suffering so great and so nearby, yet unfelt by me, impossibly, its cause.

In Dobyns’s poem, the afternoon proceeds messily, the bullfighter proves inept, and “everyone wanted to forget it and go home.” Joyce and I do, too. Cars make sad arcs around the squirrel corpse, which I know I should relocate before it’s transformed into a meat rag.

The squirrel’s up-tilted, almond-shaped eye, with that tight rim of lighter hair, is still moist and shiny. I’ve had my eye inches from Bug’s. Like this eye, his are strong-coffee opaque, yet suggestive of a depth.

The body is warm in my hands. I think of Hilary’s fingers. I feel crushed bone pieces, many bone pieces, jostle amid the limp flesh. Before situating it in the grass, I sneak a glimpse at the lower abdomen, the pink nub there. Male.

•••

Tonight’s sunset must be glorious to somebody. On Elizabeth Street, I stand gaping, unfazed, at the orange-scarlet and indigo riot in the sky.

I’m hungry.

Scientists at Wake Forest University devised a chamber with an oxygen analyzer, put a squirrel inside, and gave it something to eat. The idea was to find out whether squirrels know which nuts are smartest to consume, i.e., which offer a “net value” (calories) that justifies their “handling costs” (effort taken to split the shell, determined by oxygen use). As you may have guessed, they do know. They budget every sliver of energy. Gray squirrels do not hibernate, which means that, even in the harshest winter, they forage. Searching and often not finding.

Squirrels budget, and so must we, the privileged. Dinner done—burritos, cheap New Zealand white wine—it’s playtime for Bug. He’s ready. He charges madly up and down the levels of his tall cage. We do this twice a day, to keep his skeleton supple and because I can’t resist him.

Metabolic bone disease is the main cause of death in captive squirrels. Like humans, when they are not exposed to enough sunlight, they make no vitamin D and can’t absorb calcium. I send away for Bug’s food. The fortified blocks, in sealed plastic bags from Florida, consist of pecans, protein isolates (whey, wheat), and thirty other ingredients, including vitamins D, K, E, as well as B-1, -2, -3, -6, and -12, with all the important minerals. A month’s supply, twenty-five dollars.

He springs out. Perches on my shoulder, rotates to inspect the room. Hops atop my head.

For the next hour, he scrambles over and across my arms, legs, hands, and torso—somehow he knows to avoid my face—pausing only to wrestle. This involves tumbling between my hands, losing then regaining the top position. Over and over.

He nips, and I feel the promise of his incisors, but not their full gift. The damage is done by his inward-curved claws. Evolved for tree bark, they slice and puncture flesh. I endure this abuse in trade for the moments between, when I touch his pelage, soft belly, and cold wet nose. His tail, plumy, snow-fringed, sifts through my fingers.

I offer a hazelnut, which he snatches and “buries”—finds a cranny in the sofa or an empty shoe or even a vacant pocket, jams the nut in as far as possible, and pats around the area. Scatterhoarding. During play, he will not stop longer than a few seconds.

In the mornings, though—yawn and stretch—he positions himself on the cage’s upper tier, where I can reach him, tucks his snout into the crook of my thumb, and submits to a few minutes of drowsy massage. As if he knows breakfast follows. He does know.

•••

One of Emerson’s lesser-known poems, “Fable,” pits squirrel against mountain in an argument—the dialogue of big versus small, hashing out superiority. Says the squirrel,

But all sorts of things and weather

Must be taken in together

To make up a year

And a sphere.

And I think it’s no disgrace

To occupy my place.

It reminds me of Bergson’s Introduction to Metaphysics, where he writes that “many diverse images, borrowed from very different orders of things, may, by the convergence of their action, direct consciousness to the precise point where there is a certain intuition to be seized.” But toward what is Bug directing me? What am I expected to seize?

•••

Squirrels mate twice per year, once between December and February, and again in summer. Estrus lasts eight hours. All day, males chase the female, who copulates with three or four. Each gets about twenty seconds. The older, dominant ones usually prevail, but not always. In “breakaways,” the female escapes to a secluded area for a few minutes of peace. She mates with the first male that finds her.

Bug’s downy testicles are huge, about the size of butterbeans, loaded with baby-making potential. In “active” mode, his balls weigh seven grams. They shrink to one gram when the season of lust passes. Why shouldn’t he get his chance? Even if it’s with a girl who’s just tired of going through the paces with more virile types and willing to take whatever guy comes along.

But I fear for him in the wild. Predators hover and lurk. Hawks and owls. Cats, foxes, and snakes. The hodgepodge of parasitic species that want him includes six protozoans, two flukes, 10 tapeworms, one acanthocephalan (thorny-headed worm), 23 roundworms, 37 mites, seven lice, and 17 fleas. There is also the odious botfly, which lays its eggs under the squirrel’s skin. Larvae become disfiguring lumps the size of olives, called “warbles.” Eventually, the pupa drop out of dermal holes to finish growing in soil.

What’s mating worth?

•••

In the fall of 2013, I see reports of squirrel migrations in north Georgia. A bumper crop of oak acorns in the previous year led to a high birth rate, followed by a mild winter and rainy spring, which caused the supply of nuts from oak, beech, and hickory trees (mast) to dwindle. That’s one theory. Less obvious forces could be responsible. Naturalist P.R. Hoy of Racine, Wisconsin, reported gray squirrel migrations across his territory during three satisfactory mast years—1842 (four weeks, a half-billion squirrels!), 1847, and 1852. No one knows why.

In more recent history, our state has not seen a migration of 2013’s magnitude since 1968, a year when other stories pushed aside news of wandering Sciuridae. The war in Vietnam raged that year, with the Tet offensive in January and the My Lai massacre in March. Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed in April and Robert F. Kennedy in June. President Lyndon Johnson gave up on seeking a second term.

Quieter history was made in Greenwich Village. “In retrospect, the summer of 1968 marked a time of physical awakening for both Robert and me,” writes Patti Smith in her memoir. They had begun to understand what was possible, and what was not.

•••

Winter’s almost here. Joyce and I continue our talks. I bring up parenthood more often than she does, she who has yet to become a mother (nulliparous). At the same time, I wonder about my fitness for doing the dad thing yet again.

For more than a year Bug was, other than Joyce, the last thing I saw before sleep, and the first thing I saw in the morning, his cage and towel “nest” situated opposite our bed. I woke to the squeaks when he dreamed.

At odd moments, almost every day, memories of him rise. Images. Sniffing inside my ear. Smacking on a chunk of avocado, his favorite. Balancing on my hand, his teeth scraping my thumbnail. Nuzzling me as, from the other side of the bars, I trace his flanks and ribs. I feel his heart tapping.

I see him leap from branch to branch in the forest canopy, his body made for this. The “overstory,” botanists call the green ceiling, limbs almost entwined, leaf and twig so close together that the vibrissae of tree squirrels grow longer than those of ground squirrels, the better to detect what’s near. There’s an “understory,” too, down where I am. Paths that cross will cross again. I picture him in mid-air.

•••

RANDY OSBORNE writes in Atlanta, where he teaches fiction and creative nonfiction at Emory University. He’s the director and co-founder in 2010 of Carapace, a monthly event of true personal storytelling, and staff writer at BioWorld Today, a daily newsletter that covers the biotechnology industry. Represented by the Brandt & Hochman Agency in New York, he is finishing a collection of personal essays.