Category Archives: Love in All Its Forms

the kayak and the bunny suit

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I own a bunny suit. I can’t remember why I have one. I think that seven or eight years ago, Old Navy came out with one-piece pajamas, and the bunny onesie just sounded like a good idea after that. The first one I had was pink, but I left it in Ireland for someone taller than me (not hard to find), and P.J. got me this one. It’s gray with a white belly and has a hood with big floppy ears, a full zipper, and unlike most bunny suits, it’s footed with fleece that’s warmer than wool socks and elastic at the ankles that makes it perfect for a short human pretending to be a bunny.

This is in my possession because, while I’d be mortified to the edges of the Universe if someone besides P.J. saw me in it, the bunny suit is the warmest garment in the history of ever. It’s doomsday material. The fleece is miles thick and except for your face and hands, the suit has you covered. It’s the thing you put on when you have a fever and are having chills. It’s the thing you put on if you were stuck outside and just came back in and you’re shivering and need to get warm quickly. If you wear it when your heat goes out, you sleep soundly anyway. This is a bunny suit to be reckoned with.

It even has a carrot zipper pull and a fluffy white tail.

That’s not what I came here to tell you about. I came here to talk about the kayak incident.

There is little that P.J. and I have found in nature that is more beautiful than autumn in Vermont as seen from a lake. Call it a cliché, but it’s only that because it’s true. The lakes in Vermont are dotted with sailboats and kayaks long after the summer swimmers and paddleboards disappear. People picnic on the shores, bundled up in flannel shirts and windbreaker jackets and scarves. Red-cheeked artists set up easels. Photographers carefully step out onto rocks.

The kayakers are braving those waters knowing that they’re downright dangerous. By mid-October, the water in many lakes has fallen to 55 degrees. That water is cold enough to cause muscle rigidity, a pounding heart, rapid breathing, and confusion. It shocks the body. Even without shock, the colder the water, the shorter the amount of time the body can stay in before blood pressure begins to do interesting things and words like “embolism” can enter the chat.

That’s why when P.J. took her Hobie out onto the lake, she was appropriately dressed in wetsuit gear and aware of the risk.

And it’s a good thing, because after a wonderful time kayaking around the lake, within ten yards of approaching the boat ramp, something in the water behind her went KERPLUNK SPLASH. P.J. turned quickly to see what it was and the Hobie rolled and dumped her right into the waiting frigid waters. That’s when she learned that her wet gear was completely inadequate, and she hurriedly walked the kayak the rest of the way to the ramp and hoisted it onto the trailer and went home, blasting the heat in the van the whole way and thinking only of getting warm.

When she got home, she realized that a piece of the kayak was still in the water. The important piece. The Hobie has a drop-in component called a Mirage drive that acts as flippers under water and lets you paddle by pedaling. It’s basically a kayak pretending to be a duck.

It was non-negotiable. We had to get it back.

“We’ll have to agree on sections to search to minimize the time we’re in the water,” P.J. said. We planned it out. She would wear her wet gear and other things on top of that. We’d have poles to feel around and swim shoes so we could feel with our feet. She gave us four minutes, tops, and then we had to get out of the water, no matter what.

“I don’t have any wet gear, though,” I pointed out. We thought hard. Then it occurred to me. “I do have the bunny suit! I could just wear whatever in the water and then change into the bunny suit as soon as I got into the van. That would totally work! Were there, like, other people around at the boat ramp, or was it pretty deserted?”

“There was one truck, nobody else. You could change in the back.”

The next day, we returned to the lake in late afternoon, when the sun was aimed at that patch of water and we’d be able to see the bottom. We told the crew working on some renovations to the front of the house that we were going to grab some dinner, knowing they’d be gone by the time we got home. They didn’t need to know why we threw large bags of towels and clothing and two paint roller extension poles into the back of the van.

We stood at the edge of the water and reiterated the four-minute rule to each other, then thought long and hard about the beauty of the lake and the joy of kayaking and how important it was to get the Mirage drive back. But love of P.J. was the only thing that was going to get me to enter that water, so I thought about that, too, and steeled myself, and counted to three, and then counted to three again, and resolutely waded in with my pole to catch up with P.J. We braved it.

Four minutes later, there was no sign of the Mirage drive. We’d only struck mud and grass.

There were two trucks in the parking area for the boat ramp, but as we peeled off wet clothing in the van and dried off, we decided they were hunters and off in the woods somewhere. P.J. dressed warmly and I put on my bunny suit. Within a minute, I was cozy and warm. We got into our seats in the van and stared at the water, perplexed. Where was the damned thing?

Discussion on the drive home concerned submersible metal detectors and next steps, which found us rational right up to the point where we crested at the top of our driveway and saw that the work crew was still there. P.J. made a casual remark about how it was sunset and she didn’t understand how they could even see what they were doing, but I said, “OH JESUS FUCKING CHRIST I CAN’T GET OUT OF THE VAN THEY’RE GOING TO SEE MY BUNNY SUIT!”

There was nothing for it. Not only did we return home without a key bit of kayak, I also had to walk across the driveway to the front door with a fluffy white tail shaking behind my butt and floppy ears. The workmen were intelligent and ignored me, or maybe it was too dark to see, in the dim of twilight. The walk from the van to the door took more fortitude than wading into the water.

Epilogue: The next week, we traded a six-pack for the loan of an old jon boat, and we tried for an hour to find the Mirage drive using rakes. It’s still at the bottom of the lake.

sacred spaces

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“There’s a pretty intense storm coming, almost here. Is Molly down there with you?” P.J. called down.

” — hhhesshhh dwnnnnhrrrr,” I called back.

“What?”

I spit out the wrench in my mouth. “She’s down here with me. Probably not enough time to give her trazodone. Almost done, be right up. I’ll sit with her in the bathroom if she needs it.”

I tightened the last few bolts and smiled. Two new chairs for the deck. Friends are coming over this weekend, the first we’ve hosted since adding a deck, and now there will be enough seating for everyone to be comfortable. We asked them to come because we have a remarkable view of the White Mountains and it’s incredibly selfish to keep it for ourselves.



P.J. and I are both surprised by my willingness to sit outside. I initially disavowed the entire concept of the front deck, given my aversion to heat, sun, spiders, wasps, mosquitoes, and generally the entire outdoor/natural world. But there are two rocking chairs and a tiny table between them, and each evening (earlier and earlier), we “go sit out” and watch the belt of Venus form and then wane. Sometimes it’s chilly and we have blanket wraps, and there are usually two mugs of tea with milk and honey on the table. There are still mosquitoes, but it’s a sacred space now, and I’m drawn to it. The breeze and birds and distant dogs and cows bring on dusk. Staring at the distant mountains opens me.

The other sacred space in our home is the opposite of a distant mountain view. When we renovated the basement, the staircase was drywalled in and a door added to make a storage closet. It was intended for all things holiday, but after shoving in the bins and boxes and Christmas tree, there was still room enough for my idea to take shape.



I painted the whole closet as close to the shade of peaceful hot cocoa as I could. I hung a curtain in front of the clutter, made and hung a shelf on one side. I added a rug, a writing desk less than three feet wide, and a small task chair. I used flexible board and dowels and caulk to proximate a ceiling. Battery-powered fairy lights cover it, the switches by the door. The light is just enough.

This is my writing closet, or my “office” at home. There is no electricity, only enough light to see by and space for my laptop and a cup of coffee. The shelf holds my music scores and some assorted notebooks. I have to sit down before the door can close, and once inside, the space is a pillow fort, a tent in the dark, a blanket draped over chairs, the perfect hiding place. A place to whisper into this keyboard.

One space opens me and one space shelters me. Both spaces are sacred. Both are home.

a hole full of things

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Anne Marie is a thread woven through my life, and I am woven through hers.

The way we relate now has seemingly little to do with our origins, our friendly competitiveness in elementary school, our enmity in much of middle and high school, our reuniting when we realized our two heads were the only ones lifted above the others, noticing the little things because our senses of humor were aligned. Those high school summers, she taught tennis lessons while I worked long days at Wendy’s. She would come buy a Frosty and I would stand behind the counter, a bit sticky and greasy, and we’d talk. I abandoned her to her senior year when I left early for college, and I attended the graduation that year, the one that would have been mine but wasn’t. It hurt us both, but her salutatory speech received a standing ovation, and I stood beside her parents and clapped the loudest.

We choose the term “childhood best friends.”

In adulthood, things got real. Graduate school and weddings and challenging parenthood occupied us. Sometimes we lived in proximity; sometimes we lived apart in distant cities; but always, we managed to completely fail to get together in person. We’ve always preferred correspondence, through e-mail and now through messenger apps. We’re writers and it’s the vehicle through which we best express ourselves.

This doesn’t minimize our friendship. We’re unusual. Anne Marie is a couples therapist, soon to be a doctor. We used to go months without talking, then pick up the threads as if no time had gone by at all. Now, we talk daily. She is in therapy and she provides it to others, but when she needs therapy about the therapy, she comes to me. I know her best. Likewise, whatever I am grappling with mentally and in therapy, she knows and understands, often better than anyone else involved. We share The Ache, a longing that calls out to be filled by the affection of a mother figure. Our own mothers were as different as the sun and moon, but The Ache is there. Thirty years of discussion later, we still cannot pinpoint why.

To the outside eye, there is a gaping hole where a normal friendship should be, one in which we try to see each other, go for dinner, coffee, anything. I’ve seen her in person more since I moved nine-hundred miles away than I did when I lived in the next city over back home. That “seeing her more” was one visit to Herbie’s Diner last fall, for an hour, with our mouths full of egg and toast and frantic attempts to talk between bites. I had to use GPS to find the place and she had a head cold. But when we said goodbye and left, we were sixteen again, with our cars, and Anne Marie honked her horn as she drove away and flipped me the bird. I yelled obscenities at her, not caring who may have heard me, because sixteen-year-olds don’t heed those things when they’re performing their rituals and laughing. I climbed back into my rental car and remembered that it wasn’t my old Mazda, and her SUV was not her ’92 Corsica. My radio wasn’t stuck on the Oldies station, but I would have bet anything she still listens to her daddy and that SUV always has at least a half tank of gas.

Her writing is spectacular. We talk about writing a book together, but I know we won’t. Instead, our messages about our children’s struggles, absurd and hilarious observations, and the very contents of our hearts will not be set to pages meant for others.

There will remain a hole, full of an unwritten book and bread not broken together, a shared mystery never solved, cars never in each other’s driveways. Don’t be deceived by the hole. We’re out here together, threaded and woven, still weaving.

anchor store

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It’s just a grocery store, right? There is nothing sentimental about visiting, or not visiting, a fluorescent-lighted, linoleum-floored, generic chain store with sale signs and cash registers beeping and the same products that can be found anywhere, everywhere.

This morning, I woke with a smooth, gray, heavy stone in the bottom of my heart. It feels like the pain I experience at the nadir of a depression cycle. It’s almost debilitating. My limbs do not want to move. I’m forcing down food and drink that I’d rather spit out. My blood is sludge and my body grinds and I’m fighting drowsiness.

It would make sense that this is the wall I’ve feared I would hit, with all of this cleaning, packing, hauling, dismantling, pushing my body to its limits each day so that my muscles don’t have time to heal and I wake each morning weaker and achier than the day before. Last night, I couldn’t clench my hands into fists because they had held a screwdriver and a sponge past their point of tolerance. Surely there is a wall and I’ve smashed into it. That must be it.

But that isn’t it.

It would make sense that I’ve been losing too many things, sending them away and saying good-bye, one by one, and seemingly taking it in stride. I’ve cried a little, but on the whole, I’ve been eerily okay with it all. Surely there is a tipping point, a straw that makes it all break and crumble. Surely this small thing, a run to the grocery store, could not be responsible for feeling that the gods turned up the gravity.

But it makes sense.

I’ve shopped there for twelve years. James was six and in full manifestation of ADHD. I would move up and down the aisles, trying to envision myself as the nucleus of an atom, with a whizzing electron in my orbit. I would try to shop when there weren’t many other customers who would be bothered by his enjoyment of running and falling and sliding on the floor, his spin-dancing. A nucleus can exert considerable binding force on an electron, and I wasn’t that parent who doesn’t try to control her kid, but usually, contained chaos was all I could manage.

When James was nine and ten, we played the game where we would pass a misplaced item on the shelf and one of us would point it out to the other, and we would laugh at the randomness of the juxtaposition. He was just old enough for me to permit him to leave my side and go put it back without forming, in three seconds, the certainty that he had been abducted and was already in someone’s car, speeding away from me forever. He loved putting things back. He knew where every single item was. He loved the game.

When he was twelve, he told me the things he would like and stayed home, turning back to his video games.

When he was sixteen, he told me he wasn’t allowed to check me out in his lane, because I’m family, but that he could bag my groceries.

Somehow, I became the “cool mom” and the teenagers all want me in their lines. The adults all want to tell me something funny James said or did or a reason they’re proud of him. At home, I point out when his work pants are fraying between the legs and I order him new ones.

Sometimes the goat cheese crumbles are buy-one-get-two-free and we have it in salad with mandarin oranges and chicken and almond slices.

Once, I thought I’d broken the coffee-grinding machine. I spent twenty minutes helping the manager troubleshoot, and we diagnosed the problem. It was the electrical outlet above the top of the shelf. Someone flipped a breaker and I was able to coarse-grind the beans for homemade cold brew. We high-fived.

The Sunday after I’d been released from the psych unit at the hospital, I did the shopping. The disparity was surreal, coming twenty-four hours after I hadn’t even been allowed to have shoelaces, but the asparagus and ice cream and ready-to-microwave mashed potatoes were so mundane and tangible and … normal. They were an anchor that kept me in the real world.

During COVID lockdown, James kept coming home late from work. There were time discrepancies and they concerned me. I looked into it and learned that he was buying fresh produce after his work shift for his best friend’s parents, who couldn’t go out in public places, and dropping it on their doorstep. They’d leave cash out for him. He never wanted to tell us.

The deli subs are pretty good, especially the ones on cheese bread.

Places don’t leave me. I can still close my eyes and wander around the offices of former jobs, see the names on the mailboxes and file folders and smell the hand soap in the bathrooms. I can peruse the border art and posters of former classrooms and turn to the right pages of church hymnals, ready to stand and sing. I can walk in these places as settings in dreams. When the raw edges heal over, I know I will walk the hallways of the schools I just left.

But this place? It’s just a grocery store.

how gifts are given

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“May I sit here? I’ve been out. I’ve had a cold, but I think I’m well enough now to sing.”

“Of course,” I say, and scoot my chair to the left a few inches to let her into the aisle. I move my glass of water and my coat.

Her diminutive eighty-year-old frame doesn’t take up the full width of the chair. She sets her bag on the floor and opens her music folder. “What did he go over last night? What did I miss?” she leans over and whispers, so as to keep from disturbing Jamie, who is teaching the basses how to sustain a modified vowel on a note too high for their range.

“Let’s see … ‘Lift Up Your Heads’, ‘And With His Stripes’, and yeah, we went back to the Christmas stuff and did ‘And He Shall Purify’ and ‘For Unto Us’. He tortured us on the melismas.” She scribbles furiously with her pencil on a single sheet of notebook paper in the back of a folder that is shabby from many years of use.

She leans over once more. “I’m Nancy,” she says.

I smile. “Amy. Thank you for sitting with me, Nancy, but you’re going to be sorry because I sound like a frog tonight!” She keeps a straight face. “Well, then, we’ll just be a couple of frogs. This thing still has my throat.”

Why does this remind of me so much of my Grandma? She would have said something like that. She was always a little odd. I think about the name Nancy and decide that she reminds me more of a Ruby.

During our first break, we talk in the fervent, rambling way that people do when they’ve just met but feel like fast friends. We talk about raising kids and fact-checking the media and her thirty-minute drive down for these practices, which she makes without complaint every week because she feels safe in her Buick. She won’t let her husband drive her.

We talk about church choirs and music and why I sing Messiah every year when I’m not a believer. “You are … unusual!” she says after a thoughtful pause. We talk about the piano I’m planning to sell. She says it’s a shame to sell a piano, unless it’s going to someone who’s going to use it. “I played when I was young and I thought I could get it back,” I explain. “I play every Sunday for our little church up there, but if I sit at the piano in my living room, I can just play for hours. Such a joy, and you never lose it,” she says, and she gives me a keen, piercing look, convicting me for giving up, then lets her eyes fall because something has occurred to her.

“I used to play the violin, too. I played for years, honey, and sometimes I even did a solo in church on it. And you won’t believe it, but ten years ago, we had a windy day, as windy as I’ve ever seen it be, and don’t you know, I was carrying the violin back into the house — “

I know what is coming. The violin neck is about to get crunched or the whole case is going to be blown out of her hand and the instrument smashed to pieces.

” — and the wind caught and the door slammed right on my hand and broke my finger!” She holds out her right hand, so frail with its paper skin and liver spots, and shows me the ring finger, knuckle swollen with arthritis, bent and misaligned. “My husband took me to the emergency room, but you know, they let me sit out there for so long that it didn’t get set right, and now look at it.” She looks at the finger and rubs it. “I haven’t played the violin since. It hurts too much to hold the bow. I have to have that finger to hold it, you see. Ten years,” she muses.

The break is over. We sing through ‘Glory to God’ and ‘His Yoke Is Easy’. Jamie makes jokes and Nancy glances over each time with a smirk. “He is just something else, isn’t he? So funny,” she whispers. Something in that half-smile is my Grandma. Nancy stands at four-eleven, the same height, the same tiny form. Her wit is sharp.

I am suddenly overcome with love for this woman, a gem like Grandma was, and I know what to do, because they make damned near everything these days. Things an eighty-year- old woman would not necessarily know about, I realize.

At the next break, I sneak off to an empty room in the church fellowship hall, take out my phone and bring up Amazon. I search for “violin bow arthritis”. There it is, a grip mod piece for the bow frog that is made for players with arthritis, complete with five stars and multiple, grateful testimonials about finally getting to play the violin again after years of prohibitive pain.

I order it. It won’t be here in time for me to give it to her in person, even with Prime, but I have her name and her town and addresses are easy to find in online voter records. I see she is registered as a Democrat in a sea of Republicans. I think about how she just told me she loves NPR.

It’s terribly difficult to keep from grinning for the rest of the rehearsal. I manage to solemnly charge her with being careful on the way home and resting up and taking care of that cold. In this moment, I know that my heart has adopted a grandmother.

I’ll stand beside her during the performance, transported back to twelve years old, standing beside Grandma in the church choir.

You never lose it. I want to give Nancy back this music, because I think she’s really a Ruby. I can close my eyes and envision a violin and bow in her hands again. It gives me the much-touted Christmas warmth I seldom experience. This is how gifts are given.