Kevin and I have curiously studied the rule of margins for years, have even developed a lingo for our real-life observations that, where little margin exists, something will always come along to take up even the tiniest bit that remains. Ask me if I feel squeezed, especially this time of year, and if, in the […]

I wait for an hour to speak to someone in customer service, my phone on endless hold, that looping tinny music interspersed with your call is important to us messages playing in the background as I work while also, I am queued online for a chat window. When I clicked the button to chat with […]

Here we are, rolling out of bed at 5am on a Saturday, Kevin and me all stumbles and limping, our voices stolen overnight, and so, we communicate with light touches and knowing nods, passing on our way around the bed to open drawers, dragging ourselves awake.  We groan and creak and sigh without knowing we’ve […]

I love to sit on the cool dark porch just before dawn, listening as birds twitter and sing at such volume I imagine their banditries and bevies and breasts crowding the limbs of the trees with jumpy, sometimes swoopy chaos.  There comes a disembodied tuning, the calls and responses not unlike the huddled collaborations of […]

“I guess it’s about that time,” Kevin says, his morning voice soft as new day, whisper-light as that dawn blush warming up the quiet blue sky over the treetops, those trees, still unlit, wearing green as deep as night. I hear timid pops in the joints of his rocking chair as he stands to go […]

On a getaway vacation, Kevin and I explore new terrain, hiking through El Dorado State Park in Colorado.  El Dorado means the gold or the gilded, a term that became popular in the gold rush days, when at another time people crawled this craggy land looking for the gold veining the Colorado Rockies, living hard, […]

You know the days can slide right by—Monday becomes Wednesday becomes Friday becomes Sunday, routines going by like a blur of houses armored clapboard-neutral outside the dusty car window.  I can flat out miss the extraordinary in my ordinary, moving way too fast, slipping over a stretch of asphalt. This morning, I snagged, caught on […]

“Hey Riley?” Zoe’s voice comes light from my phone, which sits on the kitchen island in the center of the room as Kevin and I turn and twist around finishing dinner; Adam, announcing his echolalia, paces a fast, hungry track around the perimeter; and Riley sits at the bar facing us, wearing a listening grin, […]

Riley spends her first two days doing orientation course work in a tiny room in the unpresentable behind-the-back-curtain part of the hospital, beyond the helpful forward-facing signs and the corridors frequented by patients and visitors. She shows me the place several days later, when I walk her into work for her first day training in […]

Running late, as usual, I feel stressed. I imagine myself purpling and breathless, like some vile thing has me by the neck as I sit out in the car thumping the steering wheel with my thumbs, willing my Riley to finish her checking rituals—and yes, I took my morning pills, and yes, it looks like […]