I opened the heavy oak front door and she returned my gaze with eyes as surprised as mine: the girl who’d made a fool of me in high school, who I’d managed to avoid for ten years even though we both lived in the same small town.

“I’m sorry,” I forced a smile, nearly twisting an ankle in my platform heels as I stepped back. “I was expecting someone else.”

When Ernest came home cradling the egg in his big hands, Mary knew he was up to something. She estimated the egg to be about three inches in length; the density, she found when her smiling husband placed it into her hold, was no more than a light pressure on her palms. The color of it was coffee oversaturated with milk—dirty beige with darker speckles here and there that coalesced into an opaque brownness on the fat bottom.

“Pretty egg, huh? Just like your favorite,” Ernest said with a smile, tapping her arm with his index finger the way he did when he was nervous. “The birds you like, I mean.”

On the new moon in Leo, go to the park. Meet a friend who practices shamanic healing and sit awhile talking on the soft grass dotted with clover as storm clouds slowly cover up the blue summer sky. Watch swallows dart low over the grass and feel the expectant energy in the air. Walk up to the little hill by the quarry, through a narrow path overgrown with grasses and thistles and brambles and rosebay willow herb abuzz with bees.

His knuckles knocked out an irritated rhythm on the table, miming the tap-tap of her Mac keys. There is blood, Vinny thought she had heard him saying.

Her eyes flicked up from the paragraph she was furiously typing and confronted the narrowed eyes of her son—dark fuzz over lips, framed by lank parted hair growing down to his nape—now questioning her. The sneer dominated, because the rest of his face was obscured by long fringes he had to keep swinging out of the way. Having got her attention, he jerked his curtained face towards the washroom door, the door he had banged shut seconds before, that she, in her creative flow, had completely ignored.

Our house was filled with the scent of their lives: fading lilacs from a bush which overhung their drive; chickens, clucking in the gravel for bits of corn. The carnal smell of earth overturned, heaved up brown and cool to receive the seeds thrust inside.

Niha yanks a comb through her long, jet-colored locks, roughly undoing the twists and snarls that fan from her head like snakes. Appa rummages around in the kitchen somewhere, the clang of pots and pans reverberating through the whole apartment.

He’ll burn the whole place down if I don’t check what he’s doing, Niha thinks to herself, though she doesn’t move.

Her father starts to call out her name but bites the word off at one syllable. She dimly overhears a muttered curse before the din starts again, a war of cast iron and stainless steel waged in her tiny, sparsely-equipped kitchen.

Limestone, shale, and granite. At a pond in Eastern Oklahoma. I sit at the foot of a pond with a long, narrow fly fishing dock. Brown clumps of wasps’ homes stick to its steel roof. I grasp at rocks on the shoreline. Some of them are round, others jagged. A few have mossy patches, others indentations that I will myself to believe are fossils of a bygone era. I envision tiny fish and bugs and trilobites, trying to imagine what the world looked like then, all colorful and explosive. My nails are caked with mud. When I reach into the stagnant water, my mother shrieks and pulls out my hand.

Glass jars line the porch from 7 a.m. Later, when the sun dips from view, Lila darts outside and tightens each lid. “Still warm,” she says between grunts.

“Eh?” As Granny turns away from the dirt-dusted street, the ice in her cup cracks against the plastic.

“We’re gonna be rich, Granny. Richer than … race car drivers.”

Granny sucks a sound from the space between her tongue and cheek. “Stop stealing my jars. I need them for jam.”

All Hallows Eve and our first year of middle school. Moms picked out our costumes and coats the same as always, shocked when we fought them for costume freedoms. Two of us won our tantrums, and one of us lost. Regardless, the night’s prospects excited us: cold breeze, black cats, early dinner, boys, trick-or-treaters, witches, princesses, splattered eggs, pumpkin guts, dead leaves.

Presence is the number one thing I need.

I imagine my grief to be a little kid. We go for a walk together, me careful to slow my pace so that the child’s short legs don’t get tired. Or I pick her up, carry her, rock her, if the walk goes long. Sitting on the coast alone, imagining that I am holding this child, my grief, cradling her with both arms.

William sat next to Penelope while the newborn baby slept in his arms. The hibiscus blossoms danced as Penelope worked to transfer the plants from the ground to large pots. William thought about asking her why she was moving them from their home in the ground, but the baby shifted in his arms and he remembered.

Penelope was dead.

There was a time when the mother stayed at home with the kids and the dog and got wrapped up in the yard. Pruning and tending, raking and mowing. It didn’t take long before she was reckoning with weeds. Crabgrass was the worst offender. It grew in patches and wasn’t uniform. Then there was goosegrass which was almost as bad as the crabgrass and stood out in the sod, a twisted pinwheel of green tendrils. She battled hairy bittercress because it was everywhere and grew higher in the sod, waving its spindly arms. Dandelions reminded her of unwieldy lawns with chain-linked fences, but she gave up on them after her son accused her of robbing his happiness.

“I need my wishes mom. Have a heart,” he said, blowing tiny domes of seed all over. She also left the bluegrass, the nimblewill, dead nettle, oxalis, and spurge. Certain herbage mowed down nicely, or fanned out discreetly with dark, delicate arms. The clover she left for her golden retriever, since he liked the taste.

They grew wild that summer, the children, their limbs lengthening and minds expanding. They wanted her for hugs, entertainment and snacks. Her son couldn’t resist pouncing on her lap, like an oversized cat, elbows pressing into her as if her body were a springboard, and her daughter liked to roar like a dragon, turn on her belly and log-roll over her. The retriever dug into the grass, forming craters of dirt, then went to her, stretching a muddy paw on her knee, desperate for belly rubs. The kids were debasing and commanding. They said things like, “God, Mom, everybody knows badgers are nocturnal,” or “We should be composting and you knew it all along.”

The dog was a competitive barker.

It would surprise people who know me now that I once wanted—desperately—to be a cheerleader. They’d have pegged me for the girl mocking such unflagging and misdirected enthusiasm from the stands (assuming you’d find me in any kind of stands); or more likely, just reading a book someplace. But most school-age girls, or the honest ones, anyway, would admit to the same desire. And why not? cheerleaders are chosen. Popular. Pretty. Watched and admired by crowds of people. Desired by boys. If you are none of those things, cheerleading’s promise is that you will be all those things. Of course I wanted to be a cheerleader. Specifically, I craved admission to the rarified peppy enclave of the Wilshire Junior High School Cheer Squad.

Iron Mountain, MI ― 1886

You have kissed lots of different women in your life.

You’ve kissed preachers’ daughters with golden curls, kissed schoolteachers in dimly lit living rooms. You’ve kissed people with all your clothes on and without a stitch on either of you. You’ve kissed chastely outside of doors and heated beside windows with curtains drawn.

You figure you’ve got enough experience kissing you can say with certainty: people make too big a deal out of it.

It’s nice enough, you guess. Smooth, warm lips are pleasant but hands on hips or in hair are even better.

After a while, you decide you like what comes with kissing better than the kissing itself. The closeness and another person’s heat. Touching the place ribs give way to waist. The sound of breathing against your ear. Those are the good parts.

But the kissing itself? You don’t see what all the fuss is about.

In the fall of 1952, when I was eight years old, my mother lay down on the couch in the living room. For the next six months, she rarely got up again.

I was able to keep this secret for a long time because no one was around to notice. Although my parents had never formally divorced, my father rented a two-room apartment in a nearby town. He owned a furniture store there, and he told me that he liked to keep tabs on it. When I asked him what he did every night, he said that he ate at the diner nearby or swam laps in the community pool.

In order to become closer to my older brother, who understands much of this world but not much of me, I have signed up for a ride along with him. It is the end of spring term at the University of Washington. I haven’t seen Jacob in three years, and the distance shows up as painfully long silences in forced telephone conversations. I get a B- on my Human Systems and Social Policy final, pack a duffel, kiss my girlfriend goodbye, and fly down to Orange County, a place I have never seen oranges.

Ben and I waited until after dark, which in mid-December arrived by late afternoon. It’s not like we were habitual thieves, but we knew what we were doing was wrong. Stealing. Still, it was fun, in a way—the two of us having this thing to do, just my brother and me. There was a grimness to our task, too, because of why we were driving around the countryside looking for a Christmas tree to chop down and bring home.

Ben drove the pickup, Dad’s turquoise GMC, which I guessed was Ben’s truck now, by default. He was the only person who drove it, anyway. At fifteen, Ben just had a learner’s permit, but since I was seventeen and a licensed driver riding with him, that part of it was legal, at least. Ben and I had never gotten along; the middle two kids of four siblings, always bickering, pushing off each other, sometimes out-and-out fighting. After the accident, everything else had changed. Maybe things could change between my brother and me too.

The road is a seductive path carved through mountains, prairies, towns and cities. It beckons to places unknown, encouraging exploration with whispered promises of adventure. Whatever the stated purpose, a road trip often becomes more about the journey than the destination – offering new perspectives that broaden our sense of place and of who we are. On the road, the vastness and diversity of this land we call home spools out slowly through the rhythmic spin of tires on concrete. And infinite configurations of sky, colors, and contours unveil a raw, wondrous beauty.

In twelve years, I will be 37; the same age my mother was when she had me. Very nearly the same age my grandmother was when she had my mother. I was my mother’s first, she was her mother’s last.

Last night, I dreamed of my own child. A little one, born with stubble teeth in red gums. I dream I am deeply in love with this child, and I dream I have not the slightest idea of what’s happening. I dream myself in vagueness. There’s another parent of this child in my dream, an old boyfriend. He is unquestionably father to our child. He is aware–of the baby, of me. In my dream, I know only that this beautiful child is ours, and that it is odd our child has teeth the day it is born.

My mother handed me the dusty, sticky box. It was especially sticky at the edges where its covering was peeling off, 1970s-era contact paper, brown-and-white gingham. The box was an old file-card container, made to hold 4" x 6" cards, proudly proclaiming on its bottom: Made in the USA. The box held my childhood postcard collection, which had been out of my possession for almost 20 years. It hadn't come to college with me, nor to the five Boston-area apartments I'd lived in since college. But there I was–a married, home-owning, Ph.D.-holding, mother of a four-year-old–pleased that the box still made the same noise upon opening. The sound wasn't the eerie squeaking of un-oiled hinges, but the harsh popping of stuck metal being forced to unstick. It was a small explosion in the hands.