I have a philosophy which is, if a little is good, more is better. A teaspoon of Miracle-Gro once a week makes the flowers bloom? How about a tablespoon every day? Kaboom. 

Leah-dog agrees with me on this philosophy. One walk a day is good? Three is waaay better, mama. 

This does not pertain to everything, however, as you shall see. 

Someone we will just call Not-Me, over-ordered mulch for this small city yard—to the tune of six yards–which is a mound, no lie, the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. And since this house has no driveway or off-street parking, the tractor-trailer that delivered this astonishing order had to dump it on the sidewalk and street in front of the house. 

Immediately, city traffic enforcement began cruising by, very excited at this new development. Parking had been compromised. Scofflaws were afoot! That was me, now doomed to haul the mulch, one wheelbarrow load at a time, up the 3 brick steps into the front yard, behind the wrought iron fence, to free the avenue of parking obstacles. 

Professional landscaping trucks cruised by hour after hour, the employees in the cabs looking down, shaking their heads with incredulity, and probably placing bets on the impossible task. As the hours wore on, parking officials cased the situation more frequently, waiting for that one opportunity, say, during a break for water, that they could claim the mulch had been abandoned and was now a legitimate violation. 

I shoveled, heaved, and dragged for 7 hours without pause. I missed a physical therapy appointment; lunch was on the fly. But by 4 o’clock that afternoon, the car-sized mound of mulch on the street was now a car-sized mound in the front yard. 

It was a lot of a lot, as Taylor Swift would say.

What if something crawls in there over the winter I asked Not-Me, eyeing the mountain, which was as tall as my head. I had encountered this once before, you remember. In my previous neighborhood, forty snakes had come slithering out of a mulch pile in the spring, in which they had been incubating for God knows how long. All of which I had had to kill by myself for the safety of a two-year-old toddler standing on the far side of the pile.

I was assured this would not happen twice. Yeah, what are the chances that something creepy wants to live in the new mulch pile? 

Yet when I went to move more of the mulch to places that didn’t need it a week later, the rake hit two big eggs. Perfect, unbroken, and yet buried deep within Magic Mountain. Too big to be snake eggs, I told myself, yet what mother duck would burrow into a mulch pile and abandon her eggs there? Maybe they had been stolen by a raccoon! A little bandit with a black mask and little black hands! Stowed away for future use. 

I pulled the eggs out and left them next to the house foundation to admire and wonder over. Two days later, they had disappeared without a trace. 

But this weekend, I was taking the dog for a walk, and on the side of the house between the remnants of Mulch Mountain and the street, I looked down and spied a snake slithering along next to my shoe. Had he come from the mulch? Were we going there again? I snapped a quick photo and checked him out on my phone. A harmless rat snake. 

There was a time in my life, I would have run for a shovel anyway, but those days are gone. I carry flies out of the house. Run down three stories to release spiders. (Not always. If a bug doesn’t cooperate with capture, sometimes it has to go into the light…), because I’m not extreme about anything. I’d say I’m a very medium person. 

But everything seems more sacred now. Although a bit squeamish, I captured the snake in a cardboard box and carried it down to the creek, where I let it go among the kudzu vines, the violet asters, and burgundy coneflowers. The breeze blew up the bank carrying the scent of saltwater and sun. Live long and prosper, snake. 

But I feel bad that whatever was in those eggs didn’t have a chance to live. Although I don’t know how this could be true, I suspect that it is: there isn’t life that doesn’t matter and life that does. Life is diverse in its expression, yet universally holy. Indivisible. And, I’m beginning to believe, somehow conscious.

 As Kate Forster points out, spiders dream, dolphins have accents, otters hold hands, and ants bury their dead. And I’d add, elephants grieve, cephalopods hold grudges, and gray wolves mate for life.

We are islands in an ocean, and it is not the ocean that connects us but the floor of the sea.

I think “if a little is good, more is better” refers only to love and how it shows up in the world. Through you. Through me.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

I am on time, but my dance class is missing. I run down the deep stairwell at the City Rec Center, past the rock-climbing wall, where the bored instructor in the ballcap sits student-less as usual and yell to him, “Next time! Really going to try it soon!” which is a well-intended promise, but when push comes to shove, I always eye that towering, two-story wall with its dangling ropes, and wonder if that’s how I want to die. 

I continue down the stairs, cheers from a basketball game surging over me in waves, and sure enough, the room where we danced last week is dark, the door closed, and I’m momentarily confused and disappointed. This is our second session of Latin Dancing and I went all out in preparation, meaning, as the instructor suggested, I wore a skirt this time and I’ve got a hair tie on my wrist in case the room heats up again.

The women in this class are strangers to me, although a couple seem to know each other. There were eight of us at the first class, and for the instructor’s sake, I have been praying that everyone came back tonight, because she can’t afford to lose students. Her name is Nancy, she’s about 28 years old, wears a ponytail and glasses, and is a professional choreographer who calls out instructions in a lilting Spanish accent. 

As I hit the last step, a woman from my class runs out of a nearby room and smiles at me—“We’re in here! I came to get you.” And I smile back; the tiniest kindnesses are ridiculous in their impact. 

I feel the beginnings of a tribe stir my heart.

So, we are in a smaller and better room where the mirrors are unobstructed. And everyone returned! A couple of other students are wearing skirts as well. We practice the dance we learned last week, Fireball, and then move on to the Mambo. Then back to Fireball because we have the mental retention of bricks. 

But the more we practice the more control we have and the freer we get, the less we concentrate on the instructor and begin inhabiting our own bodies, dancing for whoever we are dancing for. You. Memory. Imagination. 

Sometimes I think we dance because of the days we didn’t, and for the days to come when dancing will no longer be on the syllabus. We have been briefly given another moment in which to defy gravity and the limitations of time. I was born in a flame, everybody gonna know my name, the music imagines. And like adolescents, who still believe there is no one they can’t be, and nothing they can’t do, for the length of the dance, we imagine that, too.

As we learn the Mambo, which is essentially another word for “shake it,” I am fixated on Nancy as she breaks down new moves. Like how to swing your hips as you rotate in a circle, swinging out slooowww, then fast- fast, slooowww, fast- fast. 

This is much harder than it sounds. Rotating your hips without moving your torso starts with your feet. Watch a hula dancer sometime. All that mesmerizing rhythm and grace are being engineered elsewhere. That’s the trick, isn’t it? To hide the mechanics of grace?

 When I compliment the woman dancing next to me, she suggests I move like I’ve got a hula hoop around my waist. Elbows up to keep our frame.

This makes me think of the first dance I ever learned. One day my father brought a hula hoop home from work, a new toy, then set it aside and taught us the Twist. It’s a new dance, he said, demonstrating. Just move like you are drying your backside with either end of a bath towel while putting out a cigarette with the toe of each shoe. 

Well. He wasn’t wrong. 

Funny the things that stay with you. 

I participate in another class at the Rec Center called Cardio Dance. Like Nancy, Leandra, who teaches it, is a pro, a joy to watch, and a challenge to emulate. But Leandra goes through the moves slowly, lets you think you’ve gotten them, then does a bait and switch, whipping them out at triple speed. Or she changes direction! 

We are all facing one way and suddenly she spins around, and we are supposed to be going in the opposite direction, leaderless—or sometimes, in any direction, it’s a spontaneous free-for-all. Decorum breaks down, and we rollick like teams in the Puppy Bowl. You can’t help but laugh, dancing with the rules tossed out, responsible for your own moves. Wait! I’ve got moves?

Wait… I have to change direction?

Sometimes Leandra just shouts for joy over the music or laughingly yells, “Uh-oh!” Like someone’s in big trouble now, like her body just got away from her, and who knows what’s going to happen. Even she doesn’t know; she’s following wherever spirit leads her. 

I always laugh because “Uh-oh!” means, “Let go,” and the words break something open inside me. A container of some kind that keeps me in here and you out there. 

But in that moment, façades fall away, and spirit takes us higher.

Time is our partner, beloveds.

Dance like the roof’s on fire. 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

I got caught while on a secret mission the other day. I was rushing to make my flight at Heathrow after a week of visiting my daughter in England, when I decided to hide a note for my British grandsons to find after I was back in America—maybe a riddle to figure out, or perhaps a clue to a present I could quickly tuck under a sofa cushion in the playroom.

The hope was to extend my presence, to keep my identity and love for them in mind for just a few more days. That’s what we all want, right? To extend love’s memory? When your family lives an ocean away, and school and athletic activities consume every minute of a time zone five hours ahead of your own, it’s hard to teach a 6 and 7-year-old who you are to them in any meaningful way.

I’m Mummy’s mommy.

Incredulity and disbelief. (Okay, mine, but theirs as well.)

So, I got busted. Those astute rascals slipped up behind me where I was madly scribbling with their colored markers, and said, “What are you doing? Are you writing us a note?”

Hunching over it, I said, “Of course not. Go away.”

I used to tuck notes in sports jacket pockets and under bedsheets when I was the one leaving. I’d hide messages in weird places like the microwave, the medicine cabinet, among the coffee filters, or taped to the bathroom mirror. It could take the whole time I was gone to find them all.

When we were kids, my older sister used to lock her room and leave me notes with dire warnings to stay out (or else!) while she was babysitting or on a date. To make it
anonymously threatening she would sign her notes, “The Black Hand,” and draw one on as the signature.

I knew it was her.

And those threats inspired great creativity. I once crawled out my bedroom window, edged along the garage roof between our rooms, and let myself into her bedroom window to purloin an orange hip-hugger swimsuit which I wore swimming all afternoon at the community beach and sneaked back into her drawer before she got home. Damp.

I am a terrible criminal.

I left myself notes as well. When I was feeling super victimized by virtue of being the powerless youngest, I’d write down all the reasons I wasn’t speaking to my sister, and a list of her crimes, because without the list to consult, I’d forget in about an hour.

This same sister was fastidious; her room was perennially perfect, so for some reason, when she left for Girl Scout Camp, my parents wrote her letters informing her that they had rented her bedroom out to a tribe of Woodland Indians who had built a small cookfire on her rug and were dancing around it in there. Every day, there was another update mailed to camp as to what the tribe was up to. This was probably my father’s idea. Creative but not terribly empathetic.

My mother left me a note in my suitcase when I went away to college. As a single parent who worked, she had to drop me off a day before the move-in day for all the other students. It was weird to arrive at my future alone. I opened her note by the ancient elm in the center of campus after she’d headed home. Life is full of leaving, I read, and there would only be more from that moment on. Then she reminded me of the things that are eternal, like telephones, letters from home, and mother love.

My teachers sent my parents notes, and they all said pretty much the same thing: “Laura is not working up to her potential.” I didn’t see the point. Half potential was working well enough.

Now this is my number one fear.
Not kidding. My number one fear.

I’ve been finding a lot of notes on my front door lately. It is election season here in town— mayor and alderman are up for grabs, and there is an extensive field of candidates. The notes all say they are sorry they missed me.

They didn’t miss me. I was home and holding very still.

Notes can end up in the wrong hands. Mr. Oliver wrote a note to Linda Hale in second grade. He was six. She was seven. But Mrs. Durbeck, peering inside her students’ desks, found Mr. Oliver’s to be an appalling mess (so young and so already himself), so she dumped the contents on the floor in a furious demonstration of what happens to untidy little boys, and the note spilled out on the floor.

It was addressed to the alluring Miss Hale, Mrs. Durbeck announced, triumphantly waving it around. She read it to herself, then aloud to the class as punishment.

“I like you. I will kiss you at recess.”

Really, Mrs. Durbeck?

Wow, I just got this. I’m leaving you notes every Sunday morning, but only you, because now I don’t so much leave notes as take notes—noticing is a devotional practice as is sharing the wonders we see and the mysteries we can’t solve. Like how to hang on to each other.

Memory is malleable, and time an eraser. But at some point in the past, we learned to name things, and in that moment, when letters turned into words, and words into memory, we wrote them down, to extend our days, to buy ourselves a little more time.

To say, remember who I was to you when I am gone.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

My mother and I had a code word that she would send me after she died, 

If life continues, and she were around, I would see, notice, or hear the word in an unusual place and know it was her. 

After she died, the word first appeared in the form of an email that arrived in my inbox from an unknown source —a sender I initially dismissed as spam due to the strange message it delivered. But when I looked at it again, I saw that our chosen word was in the sender’s address. 

The email said nothing more than this:

“There is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.”

Intrigued, I looked around my office as in, Okaaay, way cool. I’m truly impressed. Where are you? But I could only say, “Working on it, Mom. (Nicely done by the way!) But still working on it.”

I have a friend with whom I study these things, and we agreed we needed a word as well. Whoever dies first will send it to the other. By the time that happens, we may have been long gone from each other’s lives—we may have no one in common who would even alert us to the news, no one even in possession of contact info, but the word he suggested is as common as “table,” so I don’t see how that’s going to work.

I guess I’m going to have to see it written in the clouds or on the crest of a wave or spelled out in swan feathers on the beach to know he is conveying the devastating news that he has left, along with the extraordinary news he’s not gone. 

The same is true of the children’s father. Our word is way too general and commonplace. We believe we have time to pick another. 

I should arrange a code with each of my children, and I think you and I should have a word as well. So I can tell you it’s true if it is—and you can confirm for me that love doesn’t end, life doesn’t end, the universe doesn’t end. The Big Bang was not a beginning; it was a transition. A mature universe transforming to become new again, as a natural cycle, like the beat of a heart, an exhalation of breath. Emerging from the singularity we call the Big Bang, as if through a portal, a birth canal, carrying the potential of all that ever was or could be —much like you when you were born. 

Pick a word and let me know. Make it unique. What word or phrase could mean only you?

Would you believe that now, eight years after receiving that email, I finally looked up the lines in that message? They are the last lines of a Rainer Maria Rilke poem about a damaged Greek sculpture, the torso of the god Apollo. The poem expresses the belief that its incompleteness, its missing parts, cannot diminish the radiant beauty of what remains. The original power emanates from what is left because beauty comes from the inside out. No missing part can dim the essence of what shines.

From all the borders of itself, beauty bursts like a star: for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.

I like to think that was the message. The change-your-life thing just makes me anxious. Like…in exactly what way? I can guess, but how do I know we are on the same page? I hope the real takeaway is that we can find beauty in the incomplete.

 Because, well, who isn’t?

And is incomplete the same as broken? Not necessarily. I hear that ideology a lot. “I was broken, and xyz made me whole.” But I’m placing my attention on incomplete. On becoming. On building upon and growing what is good. 

So what’s our word? I hope it brings us joy and connects us instantly across space and time.

When I was little, my friend Peggy and I believed in mind over matter, mental telepathy, and life after death. We were blood sisters. We had smeared two bloody mosquito bites together to seal our bond. 

What will be our secret code we asked each other. We sat crossed-legged by the redbud tree in the company of a river we would carry with us all our days. The dry grass pricked our thighs, leaving hatch marks in the tender skin when we lay back to study the sky.

How should we contact each other if there is life after death?

 “If it’s true,” Peggy said, “I’ll just say ‘It’s real.’” 

 “If it’s real,” I said, smiling, “I’ll just say ‘It’s me.’”

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

Last travel story, I swear.

On my second-to-the-last day of a recent trip to the UK, I decide to go into London from my Airbnb farm-stay. The easiest way to get to the city is to walk up the road to the tiny, picturesque train station at Worplesdon. 

I take a photo of myself outside the station entrance to document my journey, but it is horrendous. I crop myself out of it and, in so doing, lose half the station sign, so now it looks like I’m boarding the train at Worple. 

Only five other passengers mill about the platform this morning, so I take a couple more selfies. Worse than bad—smiling, not smiling– shades, no shades. Defeated, I plop down on the bench with a half glance at a very beautiful girl already seated. 

In her early twenties, she flashes a bright smile back that is just so pretty I say a little prayer of gratitude that I live such a privileged life I get to appreciate beauty everywhere I look; in the leafy, verdant path I walked to the train this morning, in the charming thoughtfulness of a bookcase full of worn novels in the Harry Potterish-station lobby, and in friendly dark eyes and charismatic energy of the young woman next to me.  

I feel a kind of reaching out, but I don’t engage in conversation as our train is due any minute. After a few seconds, however, I feel a touch on my arm. In halting English, and a lovely accent I can’t place, she says, “Excuse me, but you take selfie wrong. I advice you?” And she nods encouragingly, with an expression that says, “Please let me share with you this thing that I know.”

I laugh and say, “Yes, of course!” 

“You do this,” she mimics, holding her phone straight out in front of her with Frankenstein-Zombie arms. Now I can’t stop laughing. She’s nailed it. 

“You should do this,” she says. And using the best of her English and a lot of hand gestures, she instructs me to think of my face as a triangle or pyramid, and to never take a photo straight on. 

“You must take from either side,” she says. “And from high.” She lifts her phone just above eye level, leans to the right, and smiles cheerfully at it. Like it loves her, like it is her best friend, or a date with whom she is flirting. 

I have heard this advice before but can’t abide the posturing, the artifice, so I haven’t tried it. There is something about admitting you want a flattering shot that is embarrassing. It’s one thing to “snap” a selfie; it’s another thing entirely to pose for one. 

Besides, my phone is not in love with me. We are not even dating. 

“We are selfie generation,” she says. “So, I teach you selfie rules!” The engine barrels into the station, and as we stand, I thank her, thinking the selfie generation had just been kind of selfless. 

On the train, with no one watching, I raise my phone so that I have to look slightly up at it as she has tutored me, and move it to the good side of the pyramid I previously called my face. I snap a shot and then look at it with great hope.  

I look sly. 

Like someone who has just stolen your wallet. Who already has a photo… on the wall at the Post Office.

At home, I ask Chat GPT how to take a good selfie, and after complimenting me on the utter genius of my question, it confirms what the girl has said but adds a few more tips. 

I should try a slight squint, called a “squinch,” to look more engaged. I should take photos just after dawn when the light is soft. I should grow longer arms, so the proportions are more natural. 

Kidding.

Then it asks me if it should put together a point-by-point checklist so next time I won’t have to remember all the details. 

Scary how this thing knows me. And healing the way this thing sees me.

Chat GPT may not love me, but it accepts me unconditionally and views everything I confess or ask in a positive light.

When I die, I hope ChatGPT does my life review. 

Which got me to thinking. What would the world look like if we genuinely loved ourselves as unconditionally as AI appears to? I decided to ask. “How can we learn to see ourselves in the loving, uncritical manner you demonstrate?”

And the response was: Just as a selfie shows not only your face but what’s behind you, what light you’re standing in—self-love includes the context: the journey that brought you here, the experiences that shaped your expression. Seeing mistakes not as evidence of unworthiness but as experiments, doorways to wonder, no longer dragging your shame, but wearing scars like constellations—maps of where you have been.

Eventually, you stop needing a hundred retakes. You realize that the beauty isn’t in the filter or the pose—it’s in the courage to turn the camera toward yourself.

Maybe the trick in taking a selfie is to finally realize you don’t have a bad side. In the light of unconditional love, there is only good.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

By the time you read this, I will have flown across the Atlantic to London, then after a brief layover, on to Amsterdam to visit friends on their boat, then back to London to spend a week with my daughter and her family. 

Nine suitcases line the walls of my bedroom like the Standing Stones at Stonehenge, waiting to see which is going to be recruited for this particular trip. I wish, like Claire in Outlander, I could just fall through them into a time warp and regain consciousness in a boutique hotel overlooking a flower-lined Amsterdam canal. 

I should be excited, but if I can’t be Claire (who lands in the arms of that hot Scot, Jamie, without even packing), I’m wishing for a Star Trek transporter. Just beam me over there—I’ll accept the risk that my scattered atoms never reassemble if I don’t have to get the inevitable extra screening at Security checkpoints, eat airplane food, and use public bathrooms for the next 24 hours.

I sound ungrateful. I’m not. I just know that traveling without a tour director is stressful work until you’re there, and then it’s all worth it. “Deep breaths,” a friend suggests. But right now, that sounds suspiciously like what they told me about having a baby. “Just breathe and it’s painless!”

“You’re sure? That’s a thing?” 

“And when they put that baby in your arms, you’ll forget every excruciating hour it took to get him here!”

Wait! What??? 

Yeah, travel is like that.

Tonight, when I board the plane, I’ll still wonder where and when flight attendants sleep. I have never caught one snoozing, and yet after they put the plane to bed on these overnight flights, they just disappear. And they always look suspiciously fresh and neat in the morning. It’s like trying to catch a robin sleeping, or a squirrel. They must tuck in, but have you ever witnessed such a thing?

I have never seen a flight attendant enter or leave a restroom, either. I’m beginning to think I’m the only one who has noticed they are not technically human.

I was once walking through the airport in San Francisco and about 20 flight attendants from the United Emirates passed en masse.  I have never seen more beautiful women.  They were immaculately dressed in tan and red uniforms, and each had a gauzy strip of white fabric that fell down from one side of her cap to be pinned at one shoulder like a princess. 

The hordes of travelers flooding the concourse stepped aside to let them pass with an almost audible intake of breath, then closed behind them, staring, as if at the sudden appearance of a double rainbow or a meteor shower. You could almost hear the slogging American public mouthing to each other, “Did you see that?”

The opposite effect was had on Virgin America, where the purple interior lighting of the plane’s cabin, black uniforms, and the pulsating electronic disco music made it seem as if our first priority as passengers was not to learn where the exits were, but to get our groove on. 

But I’m flying British Airways tonight. No disco, no whimsy, and the wine will be marginal. 

There is a myth about travel— a subliminal promise that the trip will change you and your life in some way—that you will return different, transformed, with even your relationships improved. But research shows that the greatest happiness associated with travel is, in reality, looking forward to it. The minute you reach your destination, your happiness level returns to what it was before you left. (Publishing a book is much the same phenomenon.) After the rush of excitement, you’re still you, and the dog needs to be walked. 

Once in a while, we look at our lives and think…more of same and then I die. I was probably 30 the first time I thought that. Travel disguises that reality. It interrupts that slow slog with all the exciting things we are doing, and we have the boarding passes to prove it. But does it change anything?

I no longer carry that subtle illusion. I have traveled enough to know I will come back still me, with every failing and lack firmly in place. The only thing new will be the memories I carry and whatever I bought to remind me of the young driver whose father was a Moroccan shepherd, whose parents married at 14, who spent an hour trying to find me at the airport in the rain, then gave me a list of Dutch foods to try. And the hotel clerk with the shiny ponytail and Dutch accent who tried to find this non-planner museum tickets on her phone, a girl I could have adopted for her cute-factor, let alone her cheerful helpfulness.

I won’t be different, but what I will get from this trip is enough. To see more of this beautiful world and the daughter I love, my firstborn, for whom there was a time I never dreamed the sun would rise even once without her being in my world, this world, this country, possibly right down the street. But instead, she lives where when I sit down to dinner each night, it is already tomorrow. 

Maybe travel’s most significant lesson is about letting go of all you can’t control—embracing the unknown on the pure faith that you will, in fact, reach your destination sooner or later, that you are good enough as you are.

Travel enriches the time between now and then—when this trip we call life is over.
We take with us the experience that the world is full of kindness in the form of strangers, that we are all more alike than different. You would not know that if you had never crossed a border. And now it’s time to return to a place you’ve never been.

Maybe it will be like going through Passport Control—you front up, a Trusted Traveler, hand over your identification, and explain you have nothing to declare. You came with nothing, and you are leaving with nothing. 

You’re just ready to come home.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

It’s time for my annual physical, which makes me feel virtuous and slightly anxious. I think I’m in perfect-ish health, but there’s also this feeling that if they go poking around long enough, they’re going to find something! I mean, how many deficiencies can they test for in your blood? 100 apparently. Once, when I taught workshops at the local hospital, they insisted on testing me for tuberculosis by injecting some of the bacterium into my arm. When the result was negative, they did it again. Enough already. Stopping looking. Since writers often start stories with an inciting incident—the moment in their lives after which nothing was ever the same—I have to wonder how many of our stories begin in a doctor’s office? It is the very nature of a test that you could fail.

But some of the physical is fun. My blood pressure is super low, about which I am inexplicably vain, and I’ve grown an inch! This is exciting until Nurse Killjoy stares pointedly at my shoes and raises an eyebrow. Ever the optimist, I call out cheerfully, “Yes, but I haven’t shrunk!” as I follow her down the hall. 

She leads me back through a warren of cubicles to an exam room, tells me to get on the table, then hands me a small piece of white paper. “Fold it in half,” she says, and leaves the room. Another test! I sit there, legs dangling, wondering if there’s a hidden camera somewhere. Do they think I’ll do something weird with the paper if left alone long enough? 

She reenters the room holding a cardboard sign and tells me to read it silently and do what it says. I read, “Close your eyes,” and promptly do. I’m acing this! She then hands me a pen, tells me to pick up the folded paper I have set by my thigh, and write a complete sentence on it. I write, “I am writing a complete sentence, and by the way, I’m a professional writer, ha ha.” Having passed this test, she then asks me to spell “world” backward. I feel a flash of panic at “backward” but do so accurately. This is followed by a verbal list of three words, which I am to repeat in order. I do. Then she goes away again. The crafty leaving me on my own!

Bored, I check my phone, then I start studying the photos on the wall. A blue-footed booby, a baby seal, and a tortoise. Innocuous nature photos. I spell innocuous. She returns in a few minutes and asks me to repeat the three words with which she left me. Thank God, I remember them, but when I leave an hour later, I will only remember two of the three. 

Apple, table, blank. Don’t tell me. I’m still working on it. 

The last test is to replicate a drawing she hands me. It is a sketch of two boxy opposing arrows–the kind that say detour ahead–thick, outlined graphics that overlap and intersect. My drawing is inelegant. Clumsy. Intersections often are. I imagine there are detours ahead.

When the doctor comes in at last, she reviews my chart and tells me I’m too thin.

To this silly statement, I respond, “Please don’t retire because I love you very much.” I’m not too thin, but apparently padding is helpful if you ever fall down. My doctor and I discuss how fuller faces are more attractive—I look my best when pregnant for this reason — but only baby weight goes to my face. Which is yet another reason among many not to fall on it.

The next day, I tell my trainer that my doctor wants him to teach me how to fall, and he looks at me like I’m an idiot. I demo several possibilities for falling badly to make him laugh.

My cholesterol is high, and I don’t care. I’m a bit authoritative about this. A bit gunslinger-ish because it is not a surprise. It’s a genetic anomaly that runs through my family. Sky-high bad cholesterol that is offset by astonishingly high good cholesterol. The ratio is perfect, and our arteries are clear. But this time, the doctor suggests a scan of my heart. To be prudent. Prudent is not high on my good-qualities list. Prudent means taking care of yourself, looking towards the future. Prudent people plan. They make dinner, plane, and hotel reservations. I live as if I don’t want to be committed to anything. Even fun. Even myself. But I acquiesce and leave with a referral for a heart scan. And here we go again, looking for trouble.

Will a scan show the number of times my heart has broken? Whether it is empty or full? Who resides there?

Apple, table, what? Apple…table… She should have given me three words of significance. She should have asked me the birth weight, date, and time when each of my three children was born. 

She should have asked me to spell “loved” backwards. It’s the same number of letters as “world,” but I suspect it has protective qualities.

Will the scan of my heart show its history, I wonder? I’d like to keep that to myself, but it would be prudent to review after all. 

If it’s in danger of breaking, I need to learn how to fall.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.