Minding the Store

2012-02-13T05:49:00.001-08:00

This morning, I went to the website for Dreamscapes, a Canadian travel and lifestyles magazine for which I wrote a food article in September, and there it was in the winter/spring 2012 issue! My piece is on sustainability in farming and fishing. Here's the link to my piece directly: http://magazine.dreamscapes.ca/RIDE/viewer.aspx?id=13&pageId=1&lang=&lid=0 and here's the link to the current issue of the magazine: http://magazine.dreamscapes.ca/default.aspx?bhcp=1

2012-02-13T05:47:00.001-08:00

Narberth Writing Workshop

Hello, Everyone~

It's February 13th, 2012 and a Winter Workshop is currently in progress until March 15th. Stay tuned for a spring workshop beginning in early May, again for writers of fiction and creative non-fiction. If you've got short stories, written or incubating, or if you're working on a longer piece - a novel, memoir, even an inspirational work based on your particular experiences - and need a peer group, this setting is ideal for adults (21 and over).

My workshop will expose you to your peers' feedback on your writing, with an emphasis on constructive, rather than prescriptive, responses. We'll also spend time writing together, using prompts I offer, and, along the way, discuss craft and the writing marketplace. Each workshop participant has two opportunities over the six weeks to submit their work for group feedback.

I do hope you'll join me for an enlightening and enjoyable workshop experience. As a writer who thrives on making connections with writers of all levels of experience, I'm always gratified by the positive chemistry in a gathering people motivated to share and learn from their writing. My email is: ckhirsch22@yahoo.com.

Bio:
A freelance writer of features and essays since 1991, I've been leading writing groups, formally and informally, since 1998. I have published short fiction in Philadelphia Stories, and memoir in Parlor Journal, the latter piece nominated for a Pushcart Prize. With an MFA in Creative Writing from Rosemont College, I teach freshman composition at Drexel University, do private one-on-one consultation with adult writers, and my historical novel is soon to be published by Encompass Editions.

2011-06-16T06:35:00.000-07:00

In 2002, Joe and I took our first hike along the White Mountains (New Hampshire) portion of the Appalachian Trail. I was terrified, even though I'd done some gym work to get myself in some sort of shape to climb. It proved helpful that I had an article to write for a lifestyle magazine, the simple act of which helped to motivate me. What followed that hike was a series of annual treks with our kids who love the gratification of stunning vistas and delicious meals served by the AMC huts' gregarious"Cru." If you click on this link, you'll read about the first climb. I hope you'll try it too!

http://www.healinglifestyles.com/index.php/sep2003-retreatandrenew-findingstrength

2009-11-17T17:12:00.000-08:00

Lovesick
by Casey (Cassandra) Krivy Hirsch

The summer she and I were twelve, Alexandra Metcalf became my best friend only hours after she moved onto our block. I was sitting on my front stoop, hugging my knees, listening to the bees’ late summer panic as my parents carted sod back and forth. They were planting the evergreen that would eventually tower over the house, and surrounding it with chrysanthemums. Alexandra’s blond head bobbed past our honeysuckle hedge and she stopped to wave at me as if she weren’t thinking twice about it.

We swam like minnows in the pool in Alexandra’s back yard every day that first week. On the first day, I learned to dive, crouching low, peering at my reflection peering back at me, then meeting the surface with a bruising splash. There was nothing dainty about my dives. Alexandra’s were practically swan-perfect, her rounder thighs catching the sunlight, shaming me in my own bony frame.

"Let’s play shark," she said one day, a hiss of authority behind her voice that upended my will, a will only practiced on my parents until then. Her china-blue eyes were round with eagerness, her teeth bared. "You be the lady swimming at the beach and I’ll slowly swim near you, kind of tap you like this.” She nudged my leg and I flinched as if a real shark had nosed me. "Then you scream, as loud as you can, and I’ll pop out of the water and catch you and drag you under. Okay?"

"What if you hold me there too long?" I glanced at Mr. and Mrs. Metcalf, poolside, both of them reading magazines. Alexandra’s sister, Michele, who was about to start her sophomore year of high school, was stretched out on a chaise, tanning. Her skin was already brown. I could see the faintest shocking white line gleaming at her hip.

"I wouldn’t dare!" Alexandra screeched, as if offended that I suspected her of this. "C’mon, Carrie, grab the side and just kick your feet a little." She paddled backwards to the middle, her eyes fixed on me, then took a deep, silent breath and went down.

I clung to the side, waiting. It was taking her longer than I expected. Michele turned onto her back. From just below the blue tile lip of the pool, I watched, mesmerized, as she slathered a dollop of sun block onto each of her long legs and began massaging it into one of them in long, deliberate strokes.

"Gotcha!" Alexandra yelled, surfacing next to me. "Didn’t you feel me touching your leg?"

My gut lurched.

“I guess not,” I said. “You really took your time."

“The element of surprise. Daddy says there’s an art to it. Isn’t that right, Daddy?”

"That’s right," Mr. Metcalf said, eyes closed, one arm slung across his forehead.

I played the game again, doing it the way Alexandra wanted to, waiting with my back turned and my attention riveted on her stealthy approach from behind. I was truly terrified, the delight of it squirreling up my chest and into my throat as I sensed her coming nearer. I turned in time to see her head charging forward, leaving a cleft in her wake that, for a split second, made me think she was a real shark. Before she could grab hold of my legs, I scrambled out of the pool. When she burst from the water, bewildered, and saw where I was, she let her arms splash back in and she arched into an effortless backward somersault.

"You’re hopeless," she laughed, coming up for air, spitting water in a neat fountain far ahead of her.

Michele didn’t like to swim. She lay still, glistening as Mrs. Metcalf read her magazine, nodding and clucking under a white straw hat.

“Watch this,” Alexandra whispered.

Like a rotor, she spun herself into a frenzied whirl, arms in the air until she lowered one into the pool and splashed a cascade of water directly on her sister.

Her sister screamed, livid, and grabbed the towel from her chaise.

“You little brat!” Michele shrieked, grabbing a towel and curling into a ball as if traumatized.

Ignoring her daughters, Mrs. Metcalf absently patted the few drops that had landed on her, but Mr. Metcalf strode over to the pool. Clad in a tight piece of spandex, he was a full, slender head taller than my stocky father and seemed to tower over us.

“You know better than that, Alexandra.” His voice was deep and full of quiet condemnation.

“It’s no big deal,” Alexandra said. “You’re in your swimsuits.”

“We don’t play those games in our family,” Mr. Metcalf said. “Do that again, and you’ll go straight to your room.”

When he turned his back on us, Alexandra looked at me. Her mouth was cockeyed, and her eyes rolled toward her father. I jumped back in, and we ducked our heads and blew bubbles to keep from laughing out loud.

When we came up for air, Michele and Mr. Metcalf were walking back into the house, and Mrs. Metcalf had risen from her chaise. She was a tall, broad-shouldered woman who, under her livid rouge and brown eye shadow, was paler than milk, even in the sun.

“Would you minnows like some dinner?” she asked.

Alexandra nodded and looked to me to see if I’d stay.

“I guess I should call home first,” I said.

“Then call,” Alexandra said.

“And just so you know, Carrie, you’re always welcome in our home.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Metcalf,” I said.

Shivering, I got out of the pool and picked up the cordless phone, my movements jerky from the cold stiffening my bones. As I called home, I watched Alexandra doing dolphin dives in the water and knew then, not just from watching her move but from a growing intimate knowledge of my own uncooperative body, that I was Alexandra’s complete physical opposite: my straight brown hair hung just above my shoulders, my teeth jutted from my face. Thankfully, we were both flat-chested.

**

When swimming got old, we did gymnastics on my back lawn. I admired Alexandra’s perfect cartwheels and long-held handstands even as I thudded onto my back, sending the wind gusting up and out of my chest. My mother flitted near the kitchen window, applauding us both, but Alexandra was too busy spinning and springing along the grass to notice.

She’d never taken lessons.

She was a self-taught acrobat, fearless and airborne.

And when she watched me walk, Alexandra couldn’t help but offer instruction.

“You always look like you’re about to bend, Carrie,” she said one afternoon as I sauntered over to a silver maple to investigate a fallen bird’s nest. “My mother says you should straighten up or you’ll get a hunchback by the time you’re thirty.”

“She said that about me?”

“Not you. People.”

Alexandra stood by my side and told me to look straight ahead. I did as she said, and my eyes started aching.

“Good,” she said. “Now tuck in your butt, bring your shoulders back, and push your chest out a little.”

I obeyed, and it felt good for about ten seconds.

“Don’t worry,” Alexandra said as my shoulders started to fall. “You’ll get used to it.”

When she wasn’t looking, I preferred the comfort of slouching.

**

At home, Alexandra was all I could talk about. My new friend had a collection of China dolls, I told my mother as she chopped vegetables in the kitchen. And each doll had a different dress, and each dress was a different color. The dresses were made of real silk, I added when my mother remained unimpressed, and in addition to the China dolls, Alexandra also had a collection of crystal animals from Prague .

“You have your own collection,” my mother said.

“Spoons,” I said. “Stupid spoons.”

“They’re not stupid,” my mother said. “And you’ll appreciate them when you’re older.”

The collection had been mine for as long as I could remember, and for as long as I could remember, my mother had been telling me that I’d appreciate my blossoming set of sterling silver flatware when I was older. At the time, however, I couldn’t imagine sharing my plain yet elegant spoons with Alexandra. Her love for showy things kept me from pulling the heavy wooden case from my mother’s closet and explaining the history behind each piece of sterling it contained. Born out of thin air with a history that had surely started and ended with her parents, Alexandra could only be bored to tears by stories of my grandmother and my Polish great-aunt and great-uncle—now long dead, all contributors to this collection in honor of my birth.

“I want something I can show off now,” I muttered, scorning a legacy I knew was precious. “I’m going to Alexandra’s.”

“No you’re not,” my mother said. She’d finished with the vegetables and had begun splitting chicken legs from thighs. “I need you to help with dinner.”

“Mom.”

The sickening sound of moist bones breaking was enough to make me wish I were a vegetarian just like Alexandra and her big sister, Michele.

“Good God, Carrie, you practically live there,” my mother said. “Why don’t you spend some time with your own family for a change?”

“I wish I had a sister,” I mumbled, though I wanted much more than that.

I wanted to be someone else.

“You can see Alexandra after dinner,” my mother said, turning to face me, one hand on her hip. “Besides, if she really wanted to see you, she’d call or come knocking once in a while, don’t you think?”

I hadn’t thought of that. I took for granted, as I should have, that Alexandra would be around forever.

**

The first time I ate dinner at the Metcalfs’ house I was dazzled and sickened all at once. They drank buttermilk out of wineglasses. I hated milk and one look at the thick yellowish liquid clinging to the inside of the glass closed my gullet. But I always said yes when it was offered because it seemed so elegant and strange. At my house, I avoided milk and drank juice from jelly glasses my mother picked up at yard sales.

It was clear to both of us that we preferred her house with the pool and fewer rules. There was also the occasional chance to spy on Michele who looked at her body in the tall oval-shaped swivel mirror, cupping and holding the plum-like roundness of her breasts. Through the keyhole, we took turns peering in as she scowled at her reflection, reaching languidly for her robe, covering herself. I couldn’t think why she looked so angry, and wished my body would open up like hers, my sharp edges soften into curves. I still marvel that she had no idea her keyhole afforded such a perfect view.

Whenever she came across us while we played dress-up with Wally, their fat orange cat, I stared at her polished toes, afraid I might fasten my gaze on her nipples because they always seemed to poke out past her bra like tiny, fat buttons.

“If that cat has any brains, he’ll run far away from here one day,” Michele said one afternoon. She had come downstairs to flip on the T.V. “The way you dress him up like that, it’s a disgrace to cats everywhere.”

“He’s my cat, so I can do what I want,” Alexandra said. “Right, Carrie?”

I looked up at Michele, and she smirked at the two of us as if she knew something we could never understand. Then she turned off the television, wheeled around and delicately climbed the stairs without waiting for me to prove my loyalty to her sister.

“She’s mental,” Alexandra said, glowering, when Michele was gone. “She dresses Wally up, too, when she’s not busy looking at herself.”

I didn’t know whether or not to believe this, the improbability of a girl like Michele playing dress-up with anything at all except herself. Part of my fascination with Alexandra and her family was with their glamorous boredom. They never seemed to need to be busy; their languor was an activity. The effortless way they moved through their house and around each other, their striking looks, distracted me from Alexandra’s bull’s eye accuracy of reducing me to the smallest version of myself simply by being who she was, someone I loved instantly without wanting to admit soon after that I sometimes hated her.

**

One Sunday afternoon, the last before we returned to school, I was alone at Alexandra’s. She had to leave for a piano lesson and, though I wasn’t asked along when the time arrived for her to go, I was invited to stay in the house.

“You can lie on my bed if you want or read something. I have the whole Bobsy Twins, series,” Alexandra said. “But just be really careful about the shelves,” she warned.

At first, I lay down on her bed, and the whisper of her pink cotton coverlet sent up a perfume I couldn’t place, except that all of her clothes smelled like this bedspread. Mine smelled bleachy and over clean. The door to her room was closed and the house was quiet as I looked around, my head perfectly still on the pink and white gingham sham, its plumpness keeping it that way.

Alexandra’s China dolls filled one tall pink wicker bookshelf, and the tiny crystal animal figurines filled another one. Everything on those shelves was sacred. Even Alexandra refused to touch her treasures. She’d already lost one in a pillow fight, and she was so terrified that another one, which had been knocked askew in the same fight, would fall as well, and she wouldn’t even let her mother right it in case it toppled. So there it stood, teetering on the verge of certain doom.

Alexandra and her mother were taking a long time. I had fallen asleep and, jerking awake ten minutes later as the clock radio blinked the lost minutes back at me, I wondered if they’d forgotten I was still there, waiting. Not that I minded too much. It was enough to lie there and pretend it all belonged to me.

I rolled off the bed and padded over on bare feet to peer at the row of crystal animals lined up at eye level, each one different. A giraffe standing next to a lion that was curled up beside an elephant. All the rest behind them were dogs and cats. The sunlight streaming in through Alexandra’s bedroom window bounced off the giraffe and onto the floor in a colorful pool of light. Slowly, my hand steadier than I knew it could be, I took the luminous giraffe and gingerly held it, arcing it through the shaft of light and down, bewitched by the rainbow spilling across the pine planks under my feet.

Just as I finished counting the colors, I started again, sure there were more than my eye could see, but I’d barely begun my second count when I heard crying. Creeping to the door, I opened it slightly until I realized that the crying was coming from the next room.

“You know better than that, Michele,” a man’s voice said, deep and even. “We don’t cry in this house.”

And then Mr. Metcalf was standing in the hallway, in front of me. His frown reversed almost too fast for me to have seen it and he smiled.

“I had no idea you were here, Carrie. Where’s Alexandra? Did she go off and leave you here to fend for yourself?”

I nodded, mute, my palm suddenly empty. We both looked down and saw the giraffe at my feet, snapped cleanly in two.

“Mrs. Metcalf said I could stay if I wanted,” I managed to say.

“Fair enough. Why don’t you join me downstairs for some milk and cookies?”

“What about Michele?” I asked. “Will she be coming, too?”

His smile vanished. He looked at me as if I’d insulted him.

“No,” he muttered. “She’s not feeling well.”

When he turned to go downstairs, I pocketed the two pieces, then followed.

“Have a seat, m’lady,” he said, gesturing with a flourish to a dining room chair. Then he went into the kitchen and came out with a goblet of buttermilk, which he placed before me, and a plate of cookies that wasn’t sweet enough to smother the taste of the milk that Mr. Metcalf seemed intent to have me drink, one agonizing sip at a time.

He said nothing as he watched me choke it down. With Wally purring on his lap, he began to ask me meaningless questions.

“Carrie, are you happy to be returning to school? It’s not long now.”

I shook my head, my lips pasted together.

“I’ve heard the school here is very big. Very good, but very big. Do you think you and Alexandra will have any classes together?”

“I don’t know,” I mumbled, tonguing the cookie into my cheek.

At that moment, Alexandra and her mother breezed in the door, Mrs. Metcalf chirping, “Darlings, we’re home!”

As if wound from behind, I took my empty plate and unfinished milk to the sink and scurried off with Alexandra, the giraffe’s head and body in my shorts pocket.

**

That afternoon, back at my own house helping my mother prepare dinner, I knew I had to tell Alexandra what I’d done. Her father had seen the murdered giraffe.

Gathering my nerve, I went back to their house, the pink and purple creeping into the sky before sunset almost displacing the terror I felt from my scalp down to my feet.

When I knocked on the door, Michele answered.

“How’re you feeling?” I asked, nudging one sandaled foot against the other.

She eyed me for a heartbeat. “Fine,” she said. Her voice fell flat between us. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

I didn’t have an answer.

“I guess you’re looking for Alex,” she said, opening the door wide. “She’s downstairs torturing Wally.”

The one time I’d tried to suggest that Wally might not be having such a great time, Alexandra had said that I was being ridiculous. Cats had no idea whether they were having a good time or not. Besides, Wally was her cat, and I could go home if I didn’t like dressing him up.

Stung by her words but unwilling to be chased away, I stayed on and helped her lace the dresses over his fat, furry stomach and truss the tops of his paws into the tiny booties. This time, however, Alexandra looked up at me, and I thought she understood why I’d come.

I knelt next to her and picked up a piece of doll’s clothing, tracing the eyelet at the hem, embroidered with green petals. Alexandra had a dress just like it in her own size.

“Wally looks nice,” I said. “Like he’s going to a party or something.”

Alexandra was silent.

“Is he?” I said. “Going to a party?”

“Wally doesn’t like parties. We both hate crowds.”

“Then maybe for a walk? Maybe we can take him in the stroller. It’s pretty outside, with the sun about to set.”

I hated how Wally looked, but for the first time, I didn’t want to be in the house any longer than I had to be.

Still not looking at me, Alexandra gathered Wally into her arms and placed him in the stroller, his hind legs poking up, his front paws bound too tightly in ruffled sleeves and slippers for him to fight even if he wanted to.

Once outside, we walked together back toward my house and past it into the park that led toward the school. I started to worry about whether I should bother with any of this—with a confession, with a decision. And I worried, too, that if there was any decision to be made, no matter what I would say, it might not belong to me, that it might be out of my hands altogether.

“So, what’d you do while I was out at piano?” Alexandra asked. “Did you get to read?”

“No,” I said, the fingernails of one hand clamped between my teeth. “I think I fell asleep.”

Alexandra laughed. It was an adult laugh, the kind I’d heard from my mother once or twice, and it made me wonder what kind of emotion could can produce such a mirthless sound.

“I wanted to ask you something,” I said before I really wanted to. I hadn’t planned to ask her anything. But the will I’d abandoned when Alexandra first bobbed into my life was beginning to right itself, stretching, as if roused from sleep.

She stopped the stroller and turned to face me.

I looked at the ground, knowing I had to go forward. “Do your parents—?”

“What? Love us?”

Alexandra spit out the word like a curse, and it dovetailed with all that I knew about her: that she would be a friend I could always count on to put me in a place that would suit our friendship best, even if it hurt her to have me there. It would be a place where I could not hope to be allowed to love my new friend in the way everyone should be loved.

“That’s not what I meant,” I said, ripping off my cuticles and staring back at her.

“Then what did you mean?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

But in a way that terrified me more than what I was sure of, I really did.

I knew exactly what I meant.

2009-06-17T09:13:00.000-07:00

EXCITING NEWS:

My novel-in-progress, Seagoing Vessels, has been given the
2009 Novel of Promise Award
by
Ocean Cooperative Publishing
www.oceancooperative.com
On this site you'll find an interview between Robert Buckland and myself
as well as an excerpt from my novel.
Please visit the site and tell me what you think!

2009-06-17T09:07:00.000-07:00

A Visit to Macedonia on the Way to Paris

By Cassandra Hirsch

We were far from Paris, sitting at the gate in Philadelphia’s airport waiting for our flight to board for Dulles in D.C. and onward to Charles de Gaulle. Reading, I left the page often to see what was going on around me. People had begun to board and a few feet in front of me was a young woman, heavy-set, with long brown hair, hugging an older woman whom I presumed was her mother. The older one turned away and walked through the gate, leaving her daughter in tears, leaving her to look long after she had disappeared down the concourse to the plane, the young woman’s stare so intent on the walls that swallowed her mother whole, it was as if she could see through it or will her mother to turn around. After a few minutes, still crying, she turned and left.

It was our turn not long after and, once on the plane, I saw that my husband and I were seated across the aisle from each other. I looked at the woman seated by the window with an available seat beside her and recognized her as the mother I’d been watching say goodbye to her daughter. Of the two I could have chosen, I chose this seat, with Joe in the single one across from me.

The woman didn’t respond to the usual prompts by the flight attendants to fasten our seatbelts and look at the emergency procedure card and we were already coasting slowly toward the runway. I pointed to the seatbelt and she looked at me, confused, before she opened her mouth and began speaking in a language I didn’t understand. She didn’t know how to fasten the belt. So, I did it. She said, “Macedonia” and smiled, as did I, which made her smile more, nodding as if that would take care of everything, as if now that I knew where she was from and her native language we could begin conversing.

The plane sat on the runway for a half-hour. The woman was going home and when we took off, she crossed herself several times and murmured a prayer. I turned to her afterward and waved out the window, saying, “Goodbye, Philadelphia!” and we both found that amusing, more so when I pointed out the window at the shrinking skyline and showed her with my hands how tiny everything was becoming. She nodded and laughed, then gripped my knee and didn’t let go for some time. I was afraid to uncross my legs, not because I feared anything improper would happen, but I worried it would upset her if I shifted, upset her trust in me.

Because clearly she did trust me. Perhaps I flattered myself, but having just left her daughter, it occurred to me from the moment I chose the seat that I knew I could help her and, in doing so, help her daughter. I knew it as soon as I saw her, when I recognized her features as those, much younger, in her daughter’s face. Simply sitting next to the old woman would have done nothing and before she opened her mouth to speak what at first I thought was Italian (speakers of Macedonian might laugh at that mistake), I had no clue that there might be this barrier between us. Yet, what was clear early on was that there was only a small one. Language proved to be an insignificant obstacle to what, in the end, we did accomplish.

The woman was a nervous flyer, praying demonstratively on take off and waving her hands a little as if to scatter the words of her prayer around her. I touched her shoulder in thanks then and pointed out the window at the blanket of clouds we were flying over, a sight that clearly terrified and thrilled her and she crossed herself again, three times.

What stays with me is her face, so close to mine on that crowded little aircraft that I could see the cross-hatching of her deeply tanned skin. With her cropped white hair and bright eyes, it was impossible to tell if she was 65 or 85. Her smile was ready, even with a lingering regret behind it from either a life lived or a daughter left.

As the plane descended, she began her prayers again and placed her hand back on my knee until we were on the ground. When we landed in D.C. and stood to de-plane, she handed me her bag to hold while she finessed herself from our snug fit and, taking it back, went before me. Her legs were bowed and thick as trunks, moving only by the force of her will. I couldn’t let her continue alone and looked at my husband, conveying a message. Just wait for me. I need to do this. He had little other choice.

I flagged an airport employee and explained to him, motioning to the woman so she would understand what I was doing, that she needed a wheelchair and he brought one out immediately, telling me he would take her to her gate. Momentarily lost myself, I hugged her and she held on a moment. Then I walked away toward my husband, toward Paris.

(Note: In the fall of 2009, this will be published in the Drexel University 33rd Anthology, a book of writing by faculty and students and used for teaching purposes).

2008-12-07T10:37:00.000-08:00

Gift Horse

My very own gift horse, filled to the brim, has arrived at my doorstep and I’m looking it full in the maw, daring it to swallow me whole. What self-respecting sentimental mother wouldn’t do the same?

My kids were together for this Thanksgiving. Not unusual, since we always are on this occasion. But the dynamic this year is entirely different; our eldest is a freshman in college and, like so many students streaming home for this holiday, her arrival has been the most eagerly anticipated of any visitor. True, our son, 16, didn’t wear his interest in seeing his sister with the same alacrity as he does a new item from American Eagle, though we know from the occasional changing of the guard standing sentry at his cool exterior that he misses her. It’s our youngest daughter, 12, and openly worshipful of her sister, who counted the days along with me till her big sib crossed the threshold. Never mind that we just went up to Boston to visit her barely a month ago. Gratifying to me is that both our younger children, for very different reasons, enjoy having her around and their demeanor changes for the better when she’s here. They simply argue less, laugh more, and the quibbles over who has or gets what are relatively few.

Recently, I had become better at tuning out the melee that could start with something as simple as one child’s plea to the other to be left alone, a plea that only invited more of the same bothersome behaviors. For sanity’s sake, it became easier to dissociate unless I was pulled in when they couldn’t end it themselves. Naturally, it was worse when they were younger, when each was jealous of the other for myriad reasons, each needing to exact his or her form of justice even it meant simply to be alone, willfully cut off from the other two.

As one of two kids, I recall thinking as I grew up, and then married, that I wanted more than two, that two could sometimes be lonely. My brother and I were different as children, fighting more, then talking less; it was as adults that we discovered a burgeoning friendship based on commonalities and a mutually appreciated sense of humor. Then, in 2004, I lost him and the resulting grief forced my eyes open. Though I try very hard, and mostly successfully, not to remind my own children that they need one another, that they must cherish their siblinghood, I do think it every day. During the uglier of their battles, I often want to scream, ‘why are you wasting this time? Grab on! You just never, ever know.’ To utter these words would only earn me the stare of children certain of their mother’s emotional fragility. They would tiptoe and I don’t want that.

After all, what children don’t home in on their siblings’ tender spots? The savage name-calling, the unauthorized borrowing, and so much of the jealousy of what seems to them at particular times to be an imbalance in the way they are raised and given privileges are all part of what kept unarticulated treaties between them short, lacking in conviction; so often, such treaties were based on tentative understanding of the facts, either those issued by us - ‘you’re 6 and your sister was 8 when she got her ears pierced. It won’t be long’ or ‘we didn’t take your brother to his first R-rated movie at 10 years old, so we’re not going to take you either,’ a statement that didn’t reveal just who did take him – or anything revealed in the glee of the moment.

That moment came on Black Friday and nourished the one tiny shoot of resentment to bloom over this past Thanksgiving holiday. We’d been shopping; brimming like a cauldron of good will and optimism, pride in my growing children and my new job, I took them to a prime suburban shopping area and let them go realistically wild. At one point, my youngest daughter heard me let slip, ‘I really like those Uggs; think I might get myself some soon.’ Of course, she heard the permissive lilt in my voice and took her own opening. ‘Maybe I can get them for Hannukah? My feet have stopped growing, I’m sure.’ That’s been the proviso. I gave her hope, describing how grandparents and parents could give them to her as a collective gift. Moments later, in a shop with her older sibs, she told her beloved older sister what she might get. She didn’t say it with a provocative, ‘guess what I’m getting;’ it was more matter-of-fact and, yes, a little gleeful. My eldest daughter, an Uggs wearer for the past year, who thirsted for them for twice that long before they came her way, gave me a chilly stare. ‘I’m 18 and she’s 12. Why is she getting them now?’ I had to give her the feet-have-stopped-growing alibi and the response was a shake of the head that connoted full resignation to what she has come to regard as the injustice revealed in how her younger sibs have benefited from privileges it took her far longer to earn – and only because she’s the eldest. (In my weaker moments, I fall prey to guilt over this truth.)
When we returned home from the shopping trip, I listened to my kids laugh and joke, just as I’ve been doing for the past several days. Driving, I let myself reflect on the way my younger two kids are getting along, hanging out together in their basement rec room watching movies. And I recalled an earlier conversation with my youngest. She had remarked just the other day, holding back her own conviction that it might remain consistent, that she and her brother are starting to be friendlier now that their sister is away. And they are; they kick a soccer ball around in the basement and when we took them to a French film (her first, his second) the other week, after it had ended, he gave her an encouraging nudge and the two shared some pride in being able to handle the challenge of watching a very different kind of film. With the same swell in my chest, I watch my son and older daughter, how he towers over her petite frame, looking himself like a college sophomore, and I feel my throat tighten around a memory: like them, my brother who was younger than I by 22 months, looked like my older sib when we were teenagers. I loved it when people pointed it out as they do to my older kids, how they, too, seem to enjoy the switch in physical dynamics.

Cooking on that Friday afternoon, post-shopping, for a gathering of my husband’s siblings, their kids, and some of our friends, I couldn’t have articulated it, but my joy was palpable. Though I miss my brother every single day, struck blunt force now and then with new grief, it’s the knowledge that my kids are growing not just up, but together, that put a spring in my step as the music played and I chopped vegetables, careful not to slice my finger, willing the gift horse closer.

2008-06-27T07:25:00.001-07:00

The Blurry Realm

It’s official. I’ve become a writer who, in the process of writing and researching, has blurred the line between fact and fiction.

We’ve come back to Rockport, MA where my novel is set. Since our last visit, I’ve completed two drafts and I’m now fully in the revision process which also means I’m headlong into research which, of course, warrants a visit to the place of inspiration.

And, of course, the moment we turned from the main road, 128 North, onto Route 127 that leads into Rockport, I was pitched into the Blurry Realm. Then, when we walked into the Inn where I’ve set my novel, the innkeepers, Tobey and John Shepherd, held out their arms to me and said, “Welcome Home!” My husband, too, was visibly pleased that we’ve come back. It was a moment incomparable to others I’ve experienced with each return trip to this house and this village, for with each visit here I’ve felt myself enter a kind of dizzy space wherein the characters I’ve created and the days through which they move in this house and this town have taken on very real lives and merged with my present day reality. This re-entry feels very different. For one thing, I’ve toted the hefty draft of my novel, dog-eared in places that need further research, and for another, I’ve finished graduate school, resolved to complete the book’s revisions this summer and send it to agents. It has a beginning, middle, and an end and needs work, absolutely, but it’s a book and it lives and breathes with characters I’ve created out of this house in a time I’ve never lived, in a language that feels frighteningly easy for me to use, with feelings very near the surface.

So, today, sitting in the parlor, a place I use often in my story, I’m writing this piece to honor the pleasing space of that Blurry Realm where my mind resides, to welcome the confusion, and turn my thoughts toward the tasks I’ve set for myself for these two days in Rockport. We’ll begin with a drive around the area that I’ve looked at many times but not truly mapped in my head, for writing came before this kind of refinement of detail. Then I’ll spend a couple of hours – for the second time in as many years – at the Sandy Bay Historical Society’s library, just poking around in Rockport’s granite and fishing industry archives, studying journals kept by erstwhile citizens of the village, people who lived in the mid-19th century. I don’t know if the curator I met back in 2006 is still living, one Cynthia Peckham who was descended from so many who settled Sandy Bay (1690-1840) which then became Rockport. I’ve been getting messages from Gwen Stephenson this past week, a most helpful curator herself, which made me wonder about Mrs. Peckham. I also don’t know if the prolific town historian, Eleanor Parsons, is still living. She would be in her mid-90’s and I met her two years earlier as well, sat in her living room and talked about Hannah Jumper who lives and breathes in my novel, too. Mrs. Parsons, possessed, ironically, of the same surname as my protagonist, was a generous help. I must find out if she’s still living even if I don’t meet with her this visit, or ever again. The three books I purchased from her have been an enormous help.

There’s more on my docket, such as a visit to Dogtown Common, a pass by some granite quarries, a cruise around Manchester-by-the-Sea to get a lay of that land because (rather than Newburyport) it’s the place where my heroine was born and where her parents still reside. I want to sit in the Sawyer Free Library, where my novel’s hero, Theodore Abel, was born out of the archives of the pages of a fisheries chronicle and find out what exactly was going on in Rockport in 1855-56, who was the President, and sundry details in the days lived 150 years ago.

I did get caught up in the research two years ago, last time I was here, and promptly suspended that process, knowing that with only half a novel written at the time, all the riveting details I was finding were going to paralyze me. So, I left it and told myself and my husband that research would be the reward of completion, that this visit would be the cap on getting the book written, however much drivel it contained.

And now, here I am, home again, in this parlor, with the entranceway just outside it and the dining room on the opposite side of the front hallway, the sitting/sun room and porch adjacent to it, the kitchen and pantry off the dining room. The cupola, which I visited just last night when we arrived as evening came on, was so familiar to me. When I climbed its narrow staircase from the third floor and from those ogling windows high above so many of the other rooftops in Rockport, I felt the grey sky pressing lightly down on the village, caught the gulls lofting on the breeze, saw that the telescope pointed toward Mill Pond Meadow, a place that figures prominently in my book, and saw the line of the ocean, that Marianne Parsons looks to so often for a sighting of her husband, just to my left. It is a place I know as well in my head as I do in its reality.

Or do I have that backwards?

2007-12-12T20:18:00.000-08:00

For a visual of some of the things I've posted here about Rockport and its charms:
http://picasaweb.google.com/ckhirsch22/RockportMA

2007-12-12T19:36:00.000-08:00

Paste this link into your browser for a little slide show:
http://picasaweb.google.com/ckhirsch22/VancouverWithMomAndDadAugust2007

2007-11-07T14:53:00.000-08:00

These are poems I've written both in the past few days and since 2004...they're prose, really, with little or no attention to meter, and in some they seem more like fiction. Not a poet to begin with, I am most comfortable in prose. Two of them were published in 2006 in BlazeInk.com (a webzine that no longer exists, unfortunately).

Elegy to Colin Stuart Krivy
February 23, 1967 – July 11, 2004

By Cassandra Krivy Hirsch

Imposters
I.
Night, those first months, even in the crook of Joe’s body,
Brought dreams.
Dressed as hope, they were imposters.
In one, I am with Colin in an apartment I don’t recognize.
He sits quietly, his head back, absorbing my panic,
Tells me to stop trying to change the unchangeable.
I awoke from that one looking at Joe and said,
Well, that’s just plain stupid.

II.
Weeks later Colin walks alongside me
In the street, everything around us grainy,
Like a photograph’s depth of field.
I ask him if he’s okay where he is, if he feels all right.
Yes, he tells me, I’m getting plenty of therapy so it’s going to be fine.

I’m really okay.

And I’m puzzled, even in dreaming.
Alive, Colin often poked fun at the discipline.

III.
The third came on with an aggression that left me breathless with hope
When, wrapped in my sunlit apricot walls, I awoke
Expecting to be at a dinette in a tiny kitchen,
Chin propped.
Because I saw him near the fruit market, walking into a shack,
Not the larger house where he lived.
I followed after where,
Inside I watched him move around, his steps labored,
The mild slur of his words when he spoke to me
Particles that disappeared into the air as soon as released.
He was not well and I knew: it was the brain damage,
From when the car hit him.
So happy to see him alive,
I asked him,

Do Mom and Dad know? Does Dan?

No, no one does.

Can I tell them? Can I tell everyone? People’d want to know!

Colin glanced at me, turned away.

It’s not great. I’m different. I’d prefer to be left alone.

He let me stay awhile.
Let me watch him live his labored life a few hours,
Seemed to enjoy my presence, though we hardly spoke,
Not words beyond those first I could recall in those new moments after.
Dreams may be a betrayal
But waking from them is more often
The ultimate cruelty.

It (First Autumn After)
Feeling the Toronto city streets without him, not
Eyeing the bedraggled, the pierced, the painted
Who exist to be seen,
Who normally draw even reluctant eyes.

My childhood foil, unwittingly older than my two years beyond him
From the time he was born,
Takes the purpose from my step, from his grave.
And I wander ‘round the truth of It.

I’ve come back now, this first entry to where he lived, and the after looms.
Oh, no, I won’t believe It,
Though It claps Its hands around my throat
Thwarting grief, taunting it out, then stuffing it down.

The house where he lives sits occupied by a hired warm body,
Hired by him, before, for his dog, his plants, his things,
His life left temporarily,
Though in a few short months this temporary life will be
Etched in granite.

Forever now, every visit here, the pain sometimes smile-washed
From worn skin and webbed eyes
(to make it less real for younger minds I bring into It)
Is a drive home not to a Toronto house,
But to my belligerent brain.

Rosh Hashanah
It is ten weeks now
And we are gathered all
In my parents’ home
To bring an old year

To its end, to hope
For healing. Though smiles
Divide our faces
In parts, to places

That feel unnatural,
Even singing prayers
We feel it smart, whole
Hearts cut clean by earlier
News, by death, by loss.

For the kids we tell
Ourselves to quiet rage
To turn that page so
Quickly; too, too quick.

Kubler-Ross would wag
Her head, her finger
Saying, let pain be.
Now bring her here. Now!

Make her see that not
A year has passed yet
And when it does, mind,
We – friends, sib, family –

Will come and relive
Together the thoughts
The dreams, the instant
Remembering we bargained.

Life Space
In the city where he lived
The empty space he left is altogether different.
It is everywhere I look,
While in Philadelphia, it is nowhere
But in the lurch of my mind
When I reach, from old habit, to poke at the phone, drawing up short
Before I can make the move to call him.
In Toronto, when I see a cyclist with his slighter frame,
The blunt force adjustment to fact
Makes me swallow harder, look away.
A dog like his Gabby trots past
And my head turns with it,
Following it for a few more steps.
I have talked myself momentarily into hallucination,
Spying men who look so like Colin
That if I weren’t a lucid woman,
I would stop them to peer into their faces
And prove to myself that there is only an unsatisfying likeness.
Something would be missing in the eyes
(and they would no doubt be the wrong color, blue instead of a light brown,
round instead of slightly slanted and long-lashed, further apart than mine)
The smirk would be missing that he sometimes wore,
More a clue to his clever mind than a put-down.
So, I let his feeble doppelgangers walk the earth and fool my eye.
I do not hound them with my haunted version of who they could,
Who they cannot possibly, be.

It (Redux - Second Summer After)
In one particular picture, his green-eyed Gabby, a shepherd/lab mix,
Emulates his easy grin.
She still lives, miles away.
His teaching is still part of her,
Still there in the well-mannered hello Gabby offers when she visits his aging parents.
They take her for weekends and vacations, like a child shuttled.
The dead man’s mother is still not facing It,
Still shoving it off, rebuking her dead son for his hasty leave taking.
And when the grandchildren, his nieces and nephews who can hardly piece together the
Life of their beloved dead uncle, come to visit with their own parents,
Their mother a brother short,
They fuss over their uncle’s sweet, shambling bitch, her hips gone bad,
And ask their grandmother if they can take her home.
“Because it isn’t fair,” they wail. “Gabby’s father is gone!”
And their grandmother wags her head, doleful and steadfast in her resolve
To deny It even now, two years later, and cling to what’s left,
Saying without the blade that bisects her will from unfortunate knowledge,
“Visit her and be content with that.”
And the animal senses nothing as she noses their palms.

Help
He used words no moderately
Literate reader would know on sight.
Reading his work, it behooved me
To mention his unintended slight.

To me he spoke of darkening,
Of not hiding when I met with
Themes which, first touched on, I would flee.
And try I did, upon his death

Accomplishing a gloominess,
Knowing how he has met too well
With my advice to tone it down,
Though at a price and at a bell.

It’s too, too permanent a loss.
For now his words, once loftily put
Have no chance but my effort to
Renew their interest and send them out.

Books
Now that we’re here,
I notice more
The way my parents’ home has filled with things.
Still a safe house for the treasures
My mother picks up at yard and estate sales,
Turning a few of them over on e-bay,
It has also become a repository for all of Colin’s work.
Volumes of paper, his plays, his stories,
Sit huddled in my Dad’s music room.
And in the room where Joe and I sleep,
My bedroom for one year before I married,
Colin’s down comforter covers the bed,
Some of his books are stacked on the shelves and night tables,
Books I took from his house after he died,
Books he’d owned with his name,
Slipped a piece of paper in between the pages, folded a corner.
He had, I knew, read all of his books.
It was part of his weave:
A voracious appetite for words, for language, for meter
And, I believe, the juxtaposition of this with life;
His life.
Last night in this bed I dreamt of being held, of riding in a car,
Of people riding their bikes, then being tossed in the air,
Left to die on the ground.

Bicycle
It was to be a new beginning with an open end
A tailwind and occasional grueling climbs,
A house to go to in winter, to write, to listen, to wait
And a life to meet Down Under where he would learn, for one year, to be a teacher.

Of course, he did, he learned, tossed high in the air, his helmet cracking, his skull beneath it.
And since then he teaches not children, but me.
From a now empty pine box, I listen to him coach me into a new life,
Hear him caution me not to forestall, not to excuse myself for another year.

Prophecy
When he was small, all of seven,
He could ball his fists and bruise her,
She would yelp and
Wind up punished.

He was blond and sweet, too clever
For an older sister not too spry, not quick enough
To dodge his wit, his strength, his cunning.
Yet, even small, he protected her when others bullied.

And when they grew closer in age,
Or so it seemed to others after his voice went south
His body muscled, while hers curved and softened,
She fancied he was older and her pride soared.

Until he withdrew to the basement, forsaking family.
Well, she felt the slight so that
The privilege of a visit to hear music
Was not taken lightly.
(Gary Neumann still reminds her of being 13).

Moving downtown, he chose the attic room, again away.
And she went to college, commuting.
They seldom chatted, but he called the ambulance
When she sliced her finger, and went along.

His stories, when he was small,
Were dark, funny, filled with death.
Their mother, even as he grew to write, saw herself in every word.
Saw her marriage in his plays.

He wrote one particular story perhaps as an adult,
Not with keystrokes,
Found undated days afterward,
A tale of a man whose palm spoke of a brief life,
A man who, when he left the psychic,
Found his bicycle had been stolen.

Anniversary
It was the few months before that filled her with dread
Snapped her eyes wide, drum-tucked the quilt around them,
Darkened the night and strummed at her intestines.

The month before burgled her appetite, for food, for sex.
Numbed her to her children at critical moments,
Heightened their pain for her, doused hers with It.

Mothering was easier some days, unthinkable others.

With weeks remaining, her husband lay awake too,
Understanding platitudes were banned; not like before,
In the first days after, when she wanted them to drown the roar of her anger.

2006-11-18T20:35:00.000-08:00

Winter in Rockport – February – 06

It was to be two things for us; a chance to knock those snug winter doldrums askew before February’s onslaught, and a research trip for me. The choreography of our kids’ care and safety while we were away was in place and we’d been looking forward to this long weekend. Perhaps I was looking forward to it too much, since February, the month of my recently deceased brother’s birthday, was the month I’d chosen for our slip from everyday life. I needed a few days that couldn’t possibly align themselves with quotidian tasks and could transport me to the place where I’d set my novel, to the time and the house I’d chosen, and deliver my husband and me to more intimate corners of our marriage that seem more distant when life gets in the way.

Rockport, Massachusetts, a tiny town on Cape Ann that shares its getaway status in a very different way with Gloucester, is just 6 hours away from Philadelphia, without three kids, a dog, and stops for fast food and bathrooms times five. Once you get near it, you’ll know. Aside from the signs that start welcoming you into New England’s venerable towns established in the 16th and 17th centuries, you begin to feel the ocean, even in winter.

There is sand on the shoulders. Even mixed with grey, grainy snow, you can see the sand. The marshes along Route 128 are covered in snow, but by then, the bay is to your left and you’re about to enter the Cape.

I should mention that we’ve been to Rockport in the summer numerous times, to the same inn where we were headed on this particular Super Bowl February weekend when the Eagles were pitted against the Patriots (and lost). Summer in a town like Rockport that is nirvana for artists and shop owners from ice cream to sterling silver is the same to any tourist who doesn’t mind a bit of a crowd. We’ve loved it, coming ourselves two consecutive years as a treat following rigorous White Mountain hikes, then last summer bringing our children and my parents who also drank it in. We would have stayed on if school weren’t about to start.

A summer town in winter is a quirky choice to make for a getaway when your friends are going to the Dominican Republic, Hawaii, and Trinidad. It might even be a brave choice. But I had to see and feel Rockport buried in quiet to be able to understand it in a season other than the one that brings flocks of people, like a winged migration, between April and October.

Since we started coming here, we've favored the Linden Tree Inn. It is just a block up the road from the Atlantic Ocean and down the street from the Sandy Bay Historical Society. From the inn’s cupola, or widow's watch, through leafless branches you can see the Union Cemetery where the town’s Civil War soldiers are buried, and far to the right, a lighthouse, one of the twin Thacher lights. Rockport Presbyterian’s spire rises above the town, clearing the trees. Mill Pond, where in summer painters set their easels along its pathway, is a stone’s throw. Up here in winter, with the morning sun shining so brightly I can hardly see my computer’s monitor, I hear the ducks even with the windows closed, see them skating onto the ice as they land. It’s a small, square room, hardly larger than a bathroom, with a telescope and windows that ogle the town from all sides. You can see the foam of the ocean as it swirls and eddies against the rocks.

John and Tobey Shepherd, the innkeepers, have put two chairs up here and a table so that I can write. I like to imagine that one of my female characters spends time up here, wondering about her fate, why she’s been dealt such a loss. Perhaps it’s trite, having a character in a fishing town in the 1870’s lose her husband at sea. Or maybe it’s prophetic. I didn’t know what it felt like to lose a loved one when I set out to write my novel. Ironically, it was my brother, Colin, a writer working on his own book, who encouraged me to get off my laurels and just do. So, I am here for him, too.

One of the places we revisited was a café-bistro called Alchemy on Gloucester’s Main Street. When we first started going there after a leisurely poke-around across the street at Mystery Train, the used music/book store we can still hardly leave each time we enter, Alchemy was a charming carpet bag of a joint, with old couches on tattered rugs, baskets of books and toys to distract children while their parents fiendishly darted a few feet away to the juice and coffee bar and chose a dessert. Now, a couple of years after our first visit, the place is completely transformed. The couches are leather, elegantly strewn with throw pillows I coveted as soon as I sat back in one, and the menu is gourmet deli. The juice and coffee bar are gone, but the toy and baskets remain, stowed under a large coffee table. We sat there all afternoon, me poking at my laptop, my husband at his while he enjoyed the Greek salad and a latte and I lapped up the pumpkin carrot soup. The gratis wireless was a dividend we didn’t expect.

The Linden Tree Inn was built around 1850 as a residence and in the 1920’s it became an inn when the daughter who was raised in the house began to take in guests, calling it Broadview House. The Shepherds took it on as newlyweds in 2002 and keep it open all year, with lulls in winter that have made this house our home for this particular weekend. For, while they have retreats and conventions ideally scheduled for these quiet spells, we are the only guests. The house doesn’t echo with our footsteps; it absorbs us. The radiators twitter early in the evening, then fade to a whisper that keeps the house hearthside warm.

One thing we love about the Linden Tree is Tobey’s breakfasts, served in the formal dining room that is intimate enough to feel like your own and large enough to be almost grand, with elegant furniture, seamlessly built-in hutches that must date back to when the house was built, and a bay window where there is one of four tables for two around the larger table.

The aroma of Tobey’s scones swelling in the oven and her coffee ripening in the Bodum waft to the cathedral ceilings. Because we’re the only guests this weekend, we can ask for breakfast at whatever time our hearts desire it. Tobey is glad enough that we’re not early birds, but she and her husband, John, an affable Brit and an economics professor at Bentley College, are well-accustomed to those who rise early to take in what they can. If we’d said we eat breakfast at 7:30, they wouldn’t have blinked, though it would mean rising before the sun.

Something about being around the British, and remembering how I drank tea in Canada where I was born and raised, makes me want to drink my P.J. Tipps the way John would, so I do. After all, I’m on holiday.

After breakfast, we sometimes sat on the enclosed side porch, summery in any season, with white wicker furniture cushioned in blue with those Victorian patterns that invite you into another time. In the afternoon, it is drenched in sunlight and a perfect room for reading. Retreat groups and conferences that the Shepherds encourage to book at the inn gather there as they do in the dining and living rooms to conduct their programs.

In the summer, after a deliciously filling seafood meal at the locally popular Fish Shack (now under construction, but normally open in winter, too), we would amble along the Bearskin Neck toward the water and poke our heads in and out of shops and galleries, buy indiscriminate amounts of penny candy from Tuck’s. But it is winter. So, each evening after dinner we retire to the living room at the inn, a room off the main hallway, with plush couches flanking the doorway in an L-shape so that you feel brought toward them. There is a wood-burning stove and a pleasing Victorian sensibility in the way the room is furnished that flows with the rest of the house.

There Joe and I work on our separate projects, absorbed in them, just as free to stretch out and cuddle while we watch a movie as if we were in our own living space. On one evening, we do, and it’s more of a delight than I’d imagined. Somehow, I worried that this - something we can do at home in our own family room - would be a waste of precious time. But perhaps because it is precious, one should allow a little of it to go to waste now and then and to taste that pleasure without worrying about time ebbing the way the tide does.

As reliable as the tide were those few winter nights we spent at the inn, lulled by the house’s sonorous quiet, behind it the distant thunder of the surf, a rhythmic roar that placed itself just behind a membrane thin wall of my consciousness. It was quiet enough to allow for sleep, the thunder and hiss of the ocean present enough a reminder that we weren’t in Philadelphia.

2006-11-18T20:25:00.000-08:00

Autumn in Rockport – November 18-06

To Mrs. Cynthia Peckham, I owe a debt of gratitude. This morning, I marched up to the Sandy Bay Historical Society at the top of King Street and she let me into the old house (by arrangement), once owned by one of her ancestors, Levi Sewall when he built it in 1832 out of granite from his quarry. She led me up into the reading room, where there were volumes of books, some of them entire genealogies for some of Rockport’s residents who take an interest in their provenance. There were also town records, history books and literature, as well as letters that I never even got to during my two hours.

But I found a plumb resource, a journal written in 1848-49 by a young Susannah Norwood Torrey, when she was in her early 20’s and newly married, living a middle class life in Rockport. It was a revelation to read something so similar to what I’ve created in my own head and committed to over 100 pages so far; the language, the overall mood, were eerily like that of my character, Marianne Parsons. I took away some pages of introduction to the transcribed journal and about two pages of what Susannah Norwood Torrey had written to get a feel for her daily rhythm. I am in complete disbelief. Susannah is, forgive me, almost a dead ringer for my protagonist, Marianne Parsons, with an aspect of her that veers a little away from the conventional just as Marianne’s nature tends to do.

Mrs. Peckham, curator of the Historical Society, is a descendant of the Norwood and Poole families; the Norwoods being great landowners going back to the early 18th century, the Pooles among the earliest settlers of Sandy Bay (founded in 1690 and which became the town of Rockport in 1840), once part of Gloucester. Mrs. P., in her 80’s herself, was generous with facts and remarkably clear-headed. She had much to offer and was happy to oblige as I ferreted through this and that stack she handed me, skimming a book or two before moving hungrily onto the next thing and losing myself in what I felt was the prize; the journal and the file on Hannah Jumper.

Before I knew anything about her other than that she was queen of Temperance, I had slipped Hannah Jumper into my book without knowing when she lived and died. The trail I’d begun to sniff a few days ago (on the internet) brought me to a book written about her by Eleanor C. Parsons, detailing the day Hannah and dozens of homemakers took to the establishments in Rockport, hatchets hidden under their lace shawls (July 8, 1856), to lay waste to any liquor they could find. Never married, an enterprising seamstress and handy with rendering medicine from herbs which is how, it is recorded, that she knew and was admired by Rockport’s women, Hannah Jumper was a spry 75 when she led that revolt against illicit supplies of alcohol. Though I hadn’t known until today about that riotous day in Rockport’s history and its effect on Temperance (which ended here in 2005 when the law of no liquor licenses was repealed in Rockport), I realized that if she’s going to be a guest at a dinner party at the Pringles’ table in my book, I had better figure out if she was still alive.

Of course, she wasn’t, not in 1870; she died in 1865. And, not only was she dead, this morning Mrs. Peckham told me that Hannah Jumper’s line is gone. She has no descendants, although Story Parsons, Eleanor Parsons' late husband, was descended from Hannah Jumper (I learned this later) whose maiden name was Parsons; how to keep it all straight! So, looking at the day the hatchet gang went on their liquor vanquishing rampage and realizing, too, that it was before the Civil War into which Rockport sent some of its men to fight but which was also not as significantly a part of their lives as in other parts of the Northeast, I’ve decided that I might place the diary in 1856-57 (a year in Marianne Parsons’ life) and include this historic event in my book as a bit of backdrop. I now have a document, written in 1933, of the account (as told to, and eye witnessed) of Hannah Jumper’s siege. It’s actually told in a decidedly light tone, and seemed even then to be a source of some amusement. The triumph of her will is celebrated.

The other touchstone I’ve been led to when researching Hannah Jumper is Eleanor C. Parsons, Rockport’s resident historian, perhaps one of several. To her enormous credit, Mrs. Peckham is definitely a fount of history with her familial ties to a rich legacy of town folk through the centuries. And this morning I asked this marvelous curator if Eleanor Parsons is accessible to anyone. So, she gave me her address and tel. number, saying the Mrs. Parsons would enjoy being “bothered,” as she’s often bored. Boredom can be lethal to an elderly person. No wonder Mrs. Parsons uses that still lucid brain to keep writing historical books.

Now I’m set to meet with her tomorrow afternoon. Her late husband is Story Parsons from Rockport, his family dating back to its earliest days. Though Mrs. Peckham – a woman, I soon learned, with an eagle eye for accuracy and truth in non-fiction - more or less waved her hand in dismissal of my worry that using the Parsons name might be a problem in my fictional work, I plan to ask the nonagenarian history maven if I can use her surname; just dumb luck on my part to have chosen it in the first place. She’s written an embarrassment of books on Rockport’s history, one of them about Hannah and her Hatchet Gang, and she’s 91 years old. She’s still writing and publishing!

So, I called the venerable Mrs. Eleanor Parsons and we spoke a few minutes. I figured, I’m only here another day and uncertain as to when I'll be back; I must make hay while the sun shines. She was only too happy to agree to a 2 o’clock meeting tomorrow at her house, down the street from the Sandy Bay Historical Society which is just a few minutes’ walk from the inn. I feel a little like a sleuth even though much of what I’m discovering seems organically to sprout from the thing I discover and turn over before it. But this is what research is and I don’t want to get too deep into it yet, just gather bits here and there to inform my story so that I can proceed and return later to facts and places as they occur and arise.

Right now, Joe is upstairs in our cozy room doing his own work and in an hour or so we’ll stroll back into town for dinner. We took a walk this afternoon after lunching on some crackers, cheese and fruit (and a bit of Port wine for me; my favorite in small, self-indulgent doses) which really hit the spot. I’m setting this elegantly furnished living room on fire with the after effects of too much cheese.

Later today or tomorrow, Tobey Shepherd, the proprietress of the Linden Tree Inn (along with her husband John whose English lineage – he’s from a naval family in Plymouth, England – is rich indeed) where we stay when we come here, is going to show me the interior staircases in this house where I’ve set my novel. In the four years and half-dozen times we’ve been coming to the inn, these staircases were unknown to me. This house is filled with rooms, two deep stories of them, topped off by a widow’s watch that I like to visit just to look through the ogling windows on all sides. Today they were steamy and I could only peer through one tiny space out to one of the twin Thacher lighthouses in the distance.

Being here with Joe, feeling the presence of the ghosts of my book’s characters, absorbing the warmth and comfort of this 155 year old house, is my heaven. Joe is cheering my efforts on when I gush about my discoveries, is happy to enjoy the surroundings as much as I do. He is a good companion.

In February when we were here, I struggled with the continuation of the book, my confidence and convictions wobbling. But it is nine months later, the full cycle of a pregnancy, and I’m ready to nurture it to the end and watch it grow beyond its beginnings; most vitally to help it along since it can’t grow without me to nudge it further.

2006-09-07T10:10:00.000-07:00

Life Space

Toronto is where he should be, so carrying my life through its every day in Philadelphia with my family, I don’t feel Colin’s absence. When he was alive, we only spoke on the phone about once a month and, while it was a reflexive motion that sent my hand for the phone to tell him good news or just share my litany of the kids’ antics with him, I’ve toyed with the idea that I don’t miss that freedom.

But I do. I miss it, that right to just pluck the phone from its cradle and dial him up, the way a tooth that was once in an easy-to-probe spot now leaves a pulpy black cavity in its place. So, I push that feeling away when I get the urge, when I forget for a moment and move toward the phone, and I resume the every day to sidestep the bruise of reminder.

Here in Toronto, the empty space is altogether different. It is everywhere I look even as he did not roam the city or always make it a point to be at Mom and Dad’s house upon our arrival. When I see a cyclist, the blunt force adjustment to fact makes me swallow harder, look away; a dog like his Gabby trots past and my head turns with it, following it for a few more steps. I have talked myself momentarily into hallucination, spying men who look so like Colin that if I weren’t a lucid woman, I would stop them to peer into their faces and prove to myself that there is only an unsatisfying likeness. Something would be missing in the eyes – and they would no doubt be the wrong color, blue instead of a light brown, round instead of slightly slanted and long-lashed, further apart than mine – the smirk would be missing that he sometimes wore, more a clue to his clever mind than a put-down. So, I let his feeble doppelgangers walk the earth. I do not hound them with my haunted version of who they could, who they cannot possibly, be.

Now that we’re here, I notice more the way my parents’ home has filled with things. Still a safe house for the treasures my mother picks up at yard and estate sales, turning a few of them over on e-bay, it has also become a repository for all of Colin’s work. Volumes of paper clutter my Dad’s music room, the space where he does his own e-bay whirligigging and listens to his voluminous record and CD collection.

In the room where Joe and I sleep, my bedroom for one year before I married, Colin’s down comforter covers the bed and some of his books are stacked on the shelves and night tables. They are books I took from his house after he died, though I took many more home; the ones he’d inscribed with his name, or slipped a piece of paper in between the pages. He had, I knew, read all of the books he owned. It was part of his weave; a voracious appetite for words, for language, for meter and, I believe, the juxtaposition of this with life, his life. Life.

When I first enter this city, I feel a veil of something like grief come down on my shoulders, feather light but present. It is a welcome feeling, I don’t mind admitting, because it’s the reminder that eludes me in my everyday life with my family which, in its manipulative way, is merciful. For my parents, living in the city where they were born, where they raised us, where their son no longer lives but may circle overhead in the frantic space in their own minds that harbors that grief now that two years have passed, it can only be a kind of hell.

I don’t always feel it the moment I arrive. Perhaps it’s shamelessly maudlin of me to say I do. But I wait for it, welcome it and let it come to me in its time. Grief has become such an elliptical thing that I sometimes wonder, how can we all continue as we do, move unimpeded, plan, hope, and aspire when this life, Colin’s truncated, soon-to-be-brilliant, already so promising life is gone? It’s when I think in these terms that I know the answer and need hardly spell it out for myself, for anyone reading, listening.

Last night I dreamt of being held, of riding in a car, of seeing people riding their bikes and being tossed in the air, left to die on the ground. I awoke anxious and knew what the dream was; a symptom yes, a reminder, of course.

Mom and Dad keep talking about cleaning up the clutter even as they fill rooms with more. The thought of walking into a house without the stacks of books, the boxes of trinkets and knick knackery, Colin’s works-in-progress (of which I know I have copies), and a pervasive sense throughout the house of a life no longer lived but cherished, even if it isn’t only Colin’s, would send me out the door thinking I had come to the wrong place.

They will attempt slowly to clear the house, maybe to archive his works and to have a gala yard sale, even giving much of their decades’ worth of collection away, but I do need to feel the presence I always felt when I’ve come here, before losing Colin and since. I wonder if my parents share my feeling that clearing the decks would, in some way, leave gaping a space that, filled with its heaps of things blocking staircases and linear movement throughout their lovely old house, signifies life.

2006-08-27T18:22:00.000-07:00

Ghosts (written in August, 2005)

When I was ten and my brother, Colin, eight, my parents bought an old schoolhouse in a northern corner of Ontario, just north enough to be away from home; too far away for me. It sat on an acre of grass with trees all around it on the outer perimeter, and it was one hundred years old. At first, we went there on weekends and lived in it just as it was, with its pit toilets right inside the house, its one remaining wood and wrought iron desk nailed to the floor, its one large room filled with our bedraggled furniture.

I hated it there. When I wasn’t playing on one of the two puckered wood swings, their thick, rusty chains gritty in my hands, or trying to keep my brother up in the air on the sea saw, I truly hated it. In between charming the garter snakes out of the nest they’d made under the house or climbing the barbed fence to go groundhog spotting in the neighboring field, I wanted so badly to go home that I refused to betray any fleeting interest I had in the place with a smile.
Right from the first, I began to imagine children who must have gone to school at our weekend home when it was built in 1875. In my mind, it was mostly girls who played in the yard, wading through the thick, uncut grass with their long dresses, coming toward me with smiles and a plan to rescue me from my crippling boredom. I wanted them to exist and I day dreamed them into the lonely days I spent with my brother who annoyed me as much because he seemed to like to the schoolhouse as for his speed and agility.

Tree climbing was effortless for him, though I managed somehow to clutch the limbs that would take me high enough to look from that silver maple out onto the other fields and the houses and farms and think of jumping in one free-flying leap toward the farthest one just to see if I could. But rather than jump from tree to swaying wheat, we climbed over the barbed wire to plod through the adjacent fields.

While our parents read and napped, we got to know the McDermotts up the road, whose farm boasted pigs and cows, dogs and cats. If the pigs were out, we rested against the fence, our arms dangling over it while the pigs lay around, their muddied backs cracking in the sun.
Sometimes we headed for the barn and Colin scrambled up into the loft, his little blond head rising almost indistinguishably from the hay bales stacked high as he grabbed onto the rope and swung into the heap of straw below. It was fun to watch him, but I wasn’t tempted. The sweet smell of the hay, its ends brushing against my clothes and prickling my bare legs, was enough for me.

Our parents knocked the ceiling out after the first year, in 1976, and put in three bedrooms, leaving the first floor open after they took out the makeshift walls and moved beds upstairs. The railing at the top was one person wide between slats, the stairs gapped wide enough for an errant foot to slip through. My room had a map of England covering one wall. In love with England through books, I looked at that map every night, running my finger along it, imagining the patchwork of fields brought into focus past the grid lines on the map.

Attached to the schoolhouse was, and still is, a small barn, with a door leading into the house that was sealed shut. Inside were cobwebbed remnants of the building, covered in dust. It was the smell of things forgotten that I still equate with death, not knowing what death smells like, not making sense even then of my longing for the ghosts of children who’d lived a century before me and what they would have smelled like if I could have met them in my own stultifying reality.

When we were old enough to venture further away from the schoolhouse, Colin and I took to the unpaved road that led to Glen Huron, a tiny town with a water wheel and a general store, two or three miles away where there was salvation in candy. We didn’t talk much on the way, united only by our boredom and the appalling lack of kids our age, a persistent problem through the years we’d spent there so far, removing ourselves from our friends most weekends from June through August. Fingering the few dollars entrenched in my pocket, I imagined the chocolate bars I’d buy that would see me through the rest of the weekend. My brother, more private by the time he was 11 or 12, might have been thinking anything; maybe thinking he’d rather be playing with his friend Martin than poking along a country road with his older sister. I never asked him that question, never thought to.

I don’t remember when I was first allowed to stay home while my parents went up North. I must have been about 17 and possibly Colin stayed with me. A few times in my college years I took a girlfriend up for the weekend without my parents there and we went to the beach, to the shores of Georgian Bay, went out to dinner, or cooked at the house, its one room filling with the steam and smoke of whatever our botched efforts yielded. Colin would go up on his own often in his late teens and twenties, perhaps preferring his own company.

I never talked to him about why he liked the schoolhouse so much; likely, I connected it with his inclination away from the family, his pronounced need to spend time apart from us even as he treated us all with a kind of acquaintance-level respect. He and I got along well enough when we reached our teens, but I don’t think we found a mutual pass-through until our thirties when we revealed the work we were both doing, the writing we’d both chosen that would define our lives, shape them and, for Colin, ultimately rob him blind of the life he’d chosen to pursue as a writer.

The crime was committed indirectly in the summer of 2004, by a man driving a car as if he had the right-of-way all over the road, as if my brother were merely a decoy he could plow over. Yes, he stopped afterward, but by then Colin was broken and gone from me, from everyone.

As soon as I could get away with it, I didn’t go up to the schoolhouse; not for years, forgetting the ghosts I waited for who never came, audibly grateful for my autonomy as soon as I had it. Being allowed to stay home while my parents were up there was a power enough. I was too square to dream up illicit alternatives. At 18, I brought my then-boyfriend up and his very real allergies to old things made him ill, so we never went again.

Not long after, I was engaged to Joe and he, too, was plagued by an allergic reaction to the mold that inhabited unmined corners of the house. We weren’t a fastidious family, my mother content to leave things coated in dust, smeared with grease, dotted with crumbs so she could gather fiddleheads or milkweed to make edible. It drove my father mad, but I didn’t know this until long after I moved away and kept my own house. They would visit Joe and me and out of her earshot he’d remark to me how much neater I was than my mother. I’d smile, aware of the truth, that my husband was a far more exacting housecleaner than I would ever be, or want to be, that I kept a reasonably clean house more to sidestep his scrutiny than as an antidote to my mother’s slovenly domesticity. And anyway, though I didn’t say this to my father, I’d always thought of that aspect of her as part of her unusual lack of accountability to anyone. I still admire this about her even as I poke a little fun which has the effect of making her laugh at herself.

Our children love the schoolhouse. They love the supernatural quiet of it, the remove from everything they think of as natural. Of course, they haven’t been there for two years and their last time didn’t leave them hungering for their creature comforts; their internet, cell phones and X-Box. But they still want to go and when we drive up to Toronto to visit my parents, we ogle the indolent cows lying in the sun, the horses grazing near the roadside, and clutch our guts on the roller coaster of the Hockley Valley road. (Just the name of that highway summons queasiness.)

When we’re there with the kids, I look up at the night sky and remember it differently, wishing I’d looked with less fear as a child. One August, when our youngest daughter was a baby and the older two children were still awake, a brilliant light undulated across the sky and I felt certain something terrible was going to happen. It lingered for hours, soundless and graceful, and we stood under it. Beneath that brilliance, I could see where the ground was scarred where the sea saw and swings used to be. The bats had the good sense to stay in the eaves, away from light. Occasionally, I’d go inside and stand behind the screen willing the terror out of me, finally half-convinced that we were all experiencing a close encounter. I pictured our family clawing at the ground with feeble fingers as we struggled against being beamed onto a mother ship and I still laugh at how that single protracted sighting of Northern Lights could stir such panic in me when my mother stood fearless most nights of my childhood under the night sky, beckoning me out when I couldn’t sleep, her absence and my fear pulling me from my bed. And I would join her and my father for a few minutes only to scurry back inside, favoring a lonely house with a maddeningly sleeping brother over a star-clouded ceiling.

In the months before my brother was killed, he told me that part of his plan to write and teach English and Drama the way our grandfather had involved the schoolhouse. He wanted to live there for several months with his dog Gabby who loved it there as much as he did. He would do so in winter, the loneliest time up there, waiting it out until he could earn his teaching degree in Australia the following year. Most years our parents had rented the place to skiers, the sport popular up there with the swells of Blue Mountain and other runs nearby. So, it was winterized and ready to receive him.

I had looked at him in disbelief and possibly admiration when he filled me in. Yes, I knew he liked it; I even felt a certain jealous prickle that he was free to chase his dream, that he could make a decision to change his life and be truer to himself and that part of his scheme involved a cross-Canada cycling trip that would begin his new life.

But what resonated when he first told me about his plan during an October visit to Philadelphia, and asked me not to tell our parents yet, was the idea that he would hole up at the schoolhouse when the earth was dead and the trees bare, the wind shrill at the windows, the people…well, that last didn’t matter because people were not what he was after.

I didn’t tell my parents, leaving it to him when he was ready. When he finally let them know what he’d be doing, from selling his home, to cycling across the country, to staying at the schoolhouse writing away the months of autumn well into winter and then attending school, I recall that pride stuck in my throat, displacing envy. I hope I told him that what he was doing was hats off incredible.

I didn’t tell my brother that I’d started to write a play about our earliest years at the schoolhouse and that the characters of Carrie and Mitchell were composites of my two older children, him and me, or that there was a prominent ghost in the story, named Penelope. She comes to Carrie in her dreams, lulls her away from her belligerent need to hate the place, shows her clues to a lush legacy in the town, relics in the barn adjoining the schoolhouse, mends fences between Carrie and her vexing younger brother, helps them hatch a plan to keep the schoolhouse when their parents find it’s much more than they’d first thought they could handle when they plucked their children from city life to show them that quiet wasn’t just when the lights went out at night.

2006-08-25T21:36:00.000-07:00

The Sky's the Limit

Somehow, our tiny white protege's life has ebbed between last night and tonight. This morning when we took her from her bed she was scrambling in our hands and took a bit of her formula, though not enough to satisfy us that she wouldn't need another feeding midday which she did, with Ariel. This, after being in Ilana's and Jonathan's warm, loving clutches all morning. It was worth a few giggles to watch Jordan Tikki run amok in her box and flip and pitch herself forward and sideways, a little out of control but as if healthy and ready for some serious growing up. We really believed we had a future with her. These last three days have passed as languidly as three weeks.

But by this evening, she was drowsier than usual and by 8 or 9 when we were about to sit down to Shabbat dinner with our family and Joe's brother, Danny, his wife Lisa and their bairn, JT was lethargic. We tried another feeding and she could hardly lift her head to drink. It didn't take a close look to see her stomach had become concave.

It's well after midnight now and Ariel is upstairs keeping a vigil. We've been on the phone with a veterinary hotline, told we were doing everything right. As Joe, Ariel and I sat in her room and watched JT reach, shudder, and twitch, her mewing a plaintive, scratchy sound Ariel couldn't bear, thunder started. It was far away at first, scudding quickly closer until, within a few minutes, there was a terrific light show with hail that took a great limb down from Laura and Gabe's oak tree, the other side of our twin, onto their porch. It landed with a house-shaking crash that I thought was Ariel and Joe moving around upstairs in a panic. Some of the tree limb is on our shared third floor roof, a flat surface we all use if one of us is locked out of our house. We've always left our back third floor windows opened so that we could go upstairs in one another's homes, climb out the third floor window and steal into our own.

The lightning has moved off. I watched the flickering of it through our soon-to-be cut down willow in front of the house. This tree stands tall in the front yard, a long-haired lady, rather than the usual, by comparison stout, thick-trunked willows with dense, generously bowing limbs. Long before we arrived in our 90 year old home, our willow had grown straight up to adapt to the crowding of other trees over the decades. And as I watched the light surge and ebb through those branches, I knew the effect of this air borne energy was precisely, poetically matched to JT's struggle to live.

Thankfully, Ilana is asleep with her girl cousins, Malka and Avital, and Elan, 7, is alseep in Jonathan's room. When they went to bed, these four youngest children were aware that JT, her thin coat whiter today but not as downy as yesterday and now hardly covering her tiny jutting bones, was in distress. For the children visiting us, this household is at odds. When they come they always look forward to playing with their big cousins, Ariel and Jonathan, and with Ilana who is ideally matched to the girls' ages, 10 and 11. They love Norman, whom Elan called No-No when he was a baby. But they walked into a funereal mood that has deepened since they said goodnight.

Ilana takes a more philosophical approach to life after death, something I learned when I lost my brother, Colin, two years ago. After days and days, perhaps weeks of Ilana questioning me about what happens when a person dies, to which I could only give her my own truth, that the ones we love live in us afterward, she announced that heaven is inside us, not in the sky.

That night, I left her room feeling certain she was right. And tonight, with the fallen tree amplifying our anxiety and punctuating our grief over a briefly beloved pet, I feel certain, too, that tomorrow if JT isn't with us anymore, that if she chooses to, Ilana will be able to comfort her older sister as she did me.

(Jordan Tikki, born August 19, 2006, died August 26, 2006)

Fur in my Eyes

2006-08-22T19:20:00.000-07:00

Our hearts have surrendered to a 4-inch blind newborn. Darla, mother to five baby bunnies just Saturday, which she seemed to be tending to busily enough when we peered into her hutch, taking bundles of hay into her mouth and laying them over her kits, did not in the end seem to be able to feed them. Now we have the survivor, named Jordan Tikki (Tikvah, the Hebrew word for 'hope' which speaks volumes), and all of us are enslaved by her extreme vulnerability, a captive, whimpering audience to her feeble movements and need for warmth. We cup her tiny body in our hands, have scarecely left her alone except for our first meal as surrogate parents to this newborn rabbit and even then she was only a few feet away on a countertop in her blue felt-lined, hay-padded box. Ilana spends hours a day holding her, belying her own ten years. She is doing all the things a new mother does, fawning, adjusting, worrying, kvelling.

This time last year, Ilana and I were quite literally engaged in a poetic struggle; she pleading for a pet rabbit, I resisting and turning my belligerence into a writing exercise to avoid hers. It worked and we produced a poem to which she added pictures and titled, "Other than a Fish," the title really a refrain at the end of each verse suggesting other insane ideas for pets. Each verse was a testament to her doggedness to have anything but a fish. A bunny was her uncompromised desire.

But let me start at the beginning.

Years ago I met a woman, mother of two sons then, pregnant with her soon-to-be third son and not yet thinking of the daughter she would also eventually have. When G and I met, I admired her busy household, made busier than my two child family because she had two dogs. And not only did she go onto have a 3rd and 4th baby - I was content to stop at the third child, but was held in thrall by her ability to manage 4, to want to in spite of an au pair who could do so much of the daily work of child-raising for her - she got a guinea pig and a cat, then another dog. Chickens, too, and a rooster which woke me up in the dark cold of a January morning when I visited G in her Chicago suburb and I sat up in bed and tried to remember where I was. I could harldly believe how smoothly it all seemed to work in her home; how the animals moved about with the people in the house, dogs and cats getting underfoot, being loved, rejected, fed, counted on, absorbed, ignored.

Eventually, we got a dog. Norman. My childhood was spent with cats, avoiding dogs, fearing them. But we went to the pound 6 years ago and I recall with some shame and gratitude that my unwillingness finally gave way to the bleeding heart I must have inherited from my mother. Norman stole my conviction. There he was, doomed. He'd been in the pound for 5 days and stood, stalwart, perhaps resigned to his fate, unbeseeching in the deafening corridor we wandered. All the other dogs campaigned hard to get out of there and Ilana, I remember, 4 at the time, beelined for the puppies. I would have, too, since we talked about waiting till spring and getting a puppy we could train and spend the summer getting to know on our terms. But Norman's mute gaze seemed to find us, and there I stood in front of his cage and wept for the dog we probably wouldn't take home because I had told everyone as we pulled away from the curb, "we are not taking an animal home today" only to see Joe and Ariel exchange a conspiratorial smirk they thought I'd miss.

We walked Norman in the little pet cemetery and he was trembling and unwilling to move much. We tried coaxing him out of a trauma we didn't understand and then had the keeper put him back, opting for a beautiful Nikita named Austin that ran us around as if pumped on steroids, too strong even for Joe. Smitten even as we knew Austin was probably bionic and out of our league, we put him back and prepared to leave, all of us weepy over poor, bedraggled Norman. But after the kids got into the car, I looked at Joe and told him, "I'm going back inside to see him" and asked the keeper what Norman would be like with a person he knows. So, she brought him out and he was all over her with happiness, the clever cur. We took him home. He had me regretting the decision for a good half-year as he chewed shoes, belts, brushes, and girls' panties from the dirty laundry! Early on I tried wrestling him to the ground and growling at him when he was out of line - a misbegotten piece of advice I got from a neighboring dog owner; I was lucky he didn't take a bite out of me for trying to tell him who his quavering boss was! But we called Willie in, a K-9 expert and he taught us a few tricks. Since then, with a few endearing and annoying quirks that are quintessential Norman (yes, underwear if it's dangling from the hamper), he has become a grateful and loyal pet. I've left the wrestling to Joe and the two go at it like a pair of lions.

Since bringing in the newborn bunny, Joe has come home early twice to aid in the feeding and care of this miniscule heartthrob, this robber rabbit, this tiny white hope. Now he's holding Jordan Tikki in his hand and cleaning her after a feeding that, if it wasn't vigorous, gave us hope that she was interested as she rooted around for more, craned her little head toward a warm space on Ariel's or Joe's shirt. I took a picture of her little mustachioed face, captioning it, "Got Milk?" but her features are practically embryonic even at 4 days, even at zoom-in range with my camera phone.

Norman has been a chap about it, truly, and getting extra treats because he's so good about not mauling the newest member of our family, not even sniffing around her box. He does as he always has done; following us from room to room and laying heavily at our feet or near them, waiting for someone to leap up and show him the way to the next room, his black-outlined brown eyes, doleful forever, finally beseeching, 'can I stay with you always?' He knows the answer, though it seems to be the question lingering there all the time, even before our tiny orphan came in.

A friend asked me if I resented Darla for abandoning her kits. At first I was stunned by the rejection of her flesh and blood. But no, resentment hasn't occurred to me mainly because Darla might not be mother material. She may, as this friend pointed out, need her freedom, love her emancipation now that Fletch, her hutch mate and the father of her kits, is fixed but good and no amount of surprises at her backside will yield more than a hind-leg warning from her or a lady-like skip toward a plump patch of grass. So, I look at it, as I hope the kids do, as a possibility, a cruel condition of Nature, a sly crook of Nature's finger that might have steered Darla astray, and fooled us all, not knowing she couldn't be a mother.

Last night, our first with Jordan Tikki in the house, Joe and I hardly slept. If I wasn't padding into Ilana's breezeless room to touch the tiny sleeping form in the blue box on her desk, to reassure myself of a pulse, then Joe was. I even drank water on one of those trips so I would need to waken myself to pee again before dawn and check one more time.

Tonight, someone sedate us. Stat.