Living in her home, the house she and my grandfather built, brought so much peace to my life in the years leading up to the start of our Next Chapter. When the days would batter on and I would find myself crying in our tub because I longed for our little one to join us, I would do so with the curiosity of the past. Did she sit in this same tub, hiding her tears from the world, over the same worries? 

The room was impossibly large and bathed in the brightest sunlight — flooded here and there and dappled in others. I darted my eyes around the room until they landed on an easel, nestled comfortably around primary colors, soft textures, and collections of nameless shapes.

I’d sit and stare out the window and imagine the bottles lining the sill were filled with whispered messages. Indecipherable murmurs that radiated with the caress of the sun. Quietly, I would rotate my glass of ice and Coca-Cola popped can. My nimble fingers would take a napkin, folding it into various intricate shape combinations. Slowly, I would pull the napkin open. Snowflakes. 

Sitting cross-legged with my back against a wooden Pandorian trunk, I’d pull out a neglected, but familiar, box and sift through the contents: a white-tipped and black bodied wand, stack of playing cards, and a dizzying rope of polyester silk scarves.

I knelt down in the corner of the dining room, just behind the table and moved the box of cassette tapes overflowing with Glenn Miller, Linda Ronstadt, and Patsy Cline out of the way to reveal a small basket.

“Oh, yes.” I whisper to the mirror as I turn on the spiraled lamp resting on my vanity. “I’m here for the critique.”

Let’s begin.

He was a carpenter, an engineer. He kept a dark brown leather tool pouch close at hand, housing his most commonly used tools and it traveled back and forth between the house and his shop in the garage.

I hopped into the back of my mom’s old Subaru sedan in the pick-up line shouting my greetings and bobbing around in my seat. She turned around with her beautiful pink-lipped smile and asked in a bubbly tone “how’s my Ann-ET?” As we made our way home I was already lining up what adventure we were going to get into that day. After contemplating the prospects of making mud pies, riding our bikes, or going to feed the ducks, I landed on what made my heart sing that day and eagerly asked if we could ride our bikes around the neighborhood. I was fixated on a house around the loop from us that had two adult Siamese cats who would sit in the window as we rode by, looking incredibly majestic.

In the late afternoon, I’d pull the curtains back and open the window beside my bed. The dappled light would flood the room and after walking around and surveying the trinkets tucked away on dusty shelves and in forgotten drawers, I’d stand barefoot and rotate the random collection of things on the shelves crowning the bed:

There used to be the most magnificent moss patch out by the one of the live oaks in the backyard. As a child, I would sit on one of the tree roots and run my fingers over the bright-to-dark green patches. Sometimes, I would lay down next to it on my stomach and get as close as I could to observe the tiny little “trees” that made up the “moss forest.”

Hello? Yes, hi — I don’t know how to start so I’ll just jump in. And if you don’t mind, I have a lot to say so if you could just listen, I think you’ll hear things you never considered. Things I feel are of the utmost importance you know.

She shuffled the stack in a wild fashion, cards flying out of her hands and landing face up, down, sideways across the table. She began to pluck the individual cards out of the disheveled pile that had formed and neatly arranged them in a row. I looked over at the line of cards, one after another, organized right under a bright faced sunflower.

I pick up the receiver and I hear “‘Come into my parlor’ said the spider to the fly.” With a crinkled nose grin, I reply: “I’d know you anywhere.”

“The waters, they will change your life” echoes in my mind as I remember a pointed, prophetic dream I had when I was 7 about the waters of San Francisco Bay. I had never been to the Bay Area and the dream, for decades, would turn up now and then as an odd token of my childhood.

I heard a gentle buzz in my right ear, it hummed, faded, and returned. “What’s that?” I kept repeating as I turned my head quickly to either side, hoping to catch sight of or shake loose whatever had seemingly nestled close to my ear