I was expressing a desire for more meaningful friendships years ago when a therapist I was seeing suggested I meet another client of hers with a similar longing. She thought we might become friends. 

The no-pressure way we would meet in this arranged marriage was in a small group working on mother issues. I actually didn’t think I had any of those but attended anyway to meet the potential friend. 

We had all been told to bring a stuffed toy that somehow represented our personality. I’d made an aspirational choice, a guileless puppy for whom unconditional love is a dog specialty-of-the-house. As we gathered that first night, sitting in a circle on folding chairs in the therapist’s office, other participants were holding their avatars as well. Representatives included a stuffed kitten, one giraffe with big soulful eyes, a little raccoon… Everyone seemed to have selected a mammal of some kind, including the woman I’d identified as my potential new friend. Mary was lovely, but lovely isn’t necessarily friend material. 

That’s when I glanced directly across the circle and locked eyes with a tall, stunningly beautiful woman who was staring specifically at me. Her expression was one of invitation—a look of intense hope and bossy possibility. It was the kind of stare that makes you glance over your shoulder to see who is standing behind you, for surely that’s the person for whom it is meant. If hope could be brash, if somehow an invitation could be a demand, that was the look.

Conservatively dressed in black slacks and a pale blue turtleneck, she sat clasping a green and brown frog with huge bulgy eyes. It was the only amphibian in the room. I thought, “That frog is the weirdest choice. That frog is hilarious!” And for me, both in friendship and romance, laughter is the love that binds. Two hours later, although I’d come to meet Mary, I left with plans to call Margaret.  

Margaret was seriously yet invisibly ill, which trumped mother issues all to hell and back. And we became good friends though Margaret already had a small infantry of friends wanting to help her kick an insidious invader at least long enough to see her children grown. Which she did until she didn’t. No one can outrun a bullet forever. The point being I’m beginning to think it is true. There are people in your life whom you are destined to meet, even when you come to the party to meet someone else. Or you’re late. Or at the wrong party. 

Whether you love them or leave them, stand by, or stand by them, may be the only choices you get to make. You only get to determine how that person is going to be in your life. Meeting, with a thousand potential outcomes, was a given from the day you were born. 

It’s comforting to think I can’t miss the people bus. I can’t be on the wrong side of the street or late when the bus pulls away from the curb. I simply can’t miss running into the person who will alter the course of my life in a significant way because if I do, fate is going to make us board the same Delta flight a day later or wander down the same aisle at Wegman’s—even if it’s decades in the future in a distant town. 

In my early twenties, I dreamed seven people were sitting around a large rectangular table discussing who was going to take what role in my life. “I’ll be the father,” “I’ll be boss,” “I’ll be the blind date she marries,” “I’ll be the elderly neighbor who leaves fresh camellias on her back steps every morning when she’s a lonely young bride whose husband has deployed to the Med. 

I was watching this strategizing session without sound so I’m inventing the dialogue. But I knew they were divvying up relationships—passing around scripts as if in a play. Later I wondered, is it possible this is how it works? 

The last time I saw Margaret, she was still gorgeous, sitting up in her family room while those who cared about her slipped in one at a time to say goodbye. Margaret was unable to speak by then but seemed to understand everything going on around her, and in typical Margaret fashion (universally and lovingly acknowledged to be opinionated and often critical), she had plenty to say; she just couldn’t say it. 

I sat down next to her when it was my turn, leaning over the upholstered arm of her chair, and tried to speak for both of us, but I was in a foreign country without the language. As I recall, I opened with a comment about what I was wearing (gray sweater dress, suede boots) and what I guessed she’d have said about it! Margaret kept gesturing emphatically. Kept slinging her hands outward as if to say, “What? Wait! Do you believe what’s going on here? Say what I need you to say!” Be who you promised you would be to me before we were born. 

And I could only think, But I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know. 

I think I said I will miss you. I will love you always. But I was so utterly lost I might have said, “See you Thursday.”

If I could talk to her now, I’d say, “Thank you for giving me the opportunity to be your friend. Thank you for aiming frog at puppy. I was adequate in my role, but if you give me another chance, I’ll be so much better. In the years since you left, I’ve learned a little more about what I might have given. Let’s go back to the table—let me pick a different script.” In reality, I feel that way about everyone, not just Margaret. About everyone. 

I wonder if before you were born, there was a table and everyone you would come to know in this life was seated at it volunteering to play a role: “I’ll be the brother who teaches him to play acoustic guitar,” I’ll be the sister who becomes a dentist,” “I’ll be the daughter who demonstrates parents control nothing,” “I’ll be the therapist who finds her a new friend,” “I’ll be the young mother who dies too soon.” 

It took us a long time to get here, didn’t it? But there was never any doubt we’d arrive. 

Since you are reading this, I must have been at your table, yes? And you, beloved, must have been at mine. 

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 had a crush on my last ophthalmologist. He seemed very tall, striding into the small confines of the exam room, dark hair contrasting with his crisp, white lab coat. He was exceedingly charismatic, popular with patients and staff, and had a French surname which didn’t hurt a bit. I began to think of him as America’s Boyfriend, which I know is supposed to be Anderson Cooper but is really Dr. Barreau. 

I was sorry when Dr. Barreau left the practice and neutral, if not a bit wary, about his replacement. My new doctor appears humorless, pretty tightly wound, and alarmingly young. 

He’s been advising me to get some surgery ever since he joined this group of physicians, but he seems like a baby. He mentions it yet again as I gaze at his youthful left ear inches away on the other side of the autorefractor, and I think… baby wants practice. 

He leaves the room, encouraging me to watch a video extolling the virtues of his new laser, and I think… baby has a new toy. Then his tech comes in with a questionnaire that asks, “On a scale of one to ten, how easygoing are you?” To paraphrase, on the left, the choice is: “I’m an unreasonable perfectionist,” and on the right, the choice is, “It’s five o’clock somewhere.” I consider this a minute and think…baby wants wiggle room because the context of this question makes no sense. I mean, I’m laid back about traffic backups, but I wouldn’t be cool with, for instance, surgery on the wrong eye.

I’m thinking this over, stuck in traffic when I notice the SUV in front of me has a bumper sticker that says, “Angry Mob.” Intrigued, I ease cautiously closer and see it actually says, “Angry Mom.” A little closer and I realize it says, “Army Mom,” and I think, Oh, geez, baby knows what he’s talking about. I schedule surgery. 

My physician does a fabulous job; I’m sorry I doubted him. He was right, he was skilled, and I no longer need glasses to read the menu in dimly lit restaurants. In fact, I no longer need glasses at all. But even with eye surgery, I can’t see the forest for the trees. The energy I spend living out each day’s obligations doesn’t allow me to plan ahead, to consider what these days look like if I gather them all in my arms and call them a life? Doctor, can you fix that? 

I’m so immersed in getting chores done, editing others’ work, walking the dog, doing the laundry, transplanting the perennials, studying astronomy, scrubbing the kitchen, doing what feels good in the moment with no regard for the long run (oops), that the big stuff, the reason-you’re-here-stuff just stumps me. Doctor, can you fix that?

I think about the people who drew the Nazca lines 2500 years ago–the geoglyphs on the desert plateau in southern Peru. The hummingbird, the spider, and the monkey are so massive their shapes are unrecognizable from the ground, where you can only see about 3 miles, hindered by the curvature of the planet and the atmosphere. Drawn on the earth, they are only discernible from the sky. 

I’m standing on my life’s Nazca lines. How can I see the big picture when I can see only the past as a shadow and the present in parts? (Why didn’t we take more vacations? Have I watered the hanging basket on the porch?) 

From where I stand, I can only see to the end of the street. But from the perspective of the stars, I’d see all the roads in my neighborhood, all the intersections. All the signs instructing me to yield or to merge, perhaps to change lanes or to get off the road altogether. I’d know which streets are one-way, where to make a U-turn. Maybe I’d see my destination and the most efficient way to get there, or the most scenic route. But the Nazca had no access to the sky. How did they create art for the ages that they couldn’t see? 

We have a theory now that sounds plausible. The Nazca carefully and incrementally scaled up a smaller drawing. Maybe that’s all we need to do: Scale up love itself.

One day without criticizing others becomes two, and then ten. One spontaneous act of kindness becomes a hundred, then a habit. One day lived with authenticity becomes all our remaining years, the pattern of our lives a rendering observable only from the height of heaven.

Where there is a plan so big, we can’t see it. 

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 don’t remember the last time I saw my mother cry, but I remember the first occasion. 

My mother and father were downstairs, the door of their room closed. I was upstairs in my blue bedroom with the circus animal-print curtains edged in ball fringe, trying to stay off the radar. Hot and bored, I gave up and headed downstairs, taking the last three steps in one giant jump wishing someone had seen me.                        

Every Fourth of July, our family picnicked down by the river at dusk. We’d gather driftwood for a bonfire, roast hotdogs until they blistered and dripped onto the sputtering flames, and watch the fireworks shot from the yacht club across the channel. My father would strum his guitar singing “Kingston Town,” and my mother would harmonize on “Moon River,” but alert to nuance, as all children are, I knew there was no harmony here. I decided my role was to protect us from danger. My contribution to the evening would be a first aid kit. 

I chose my Madras purse as the container and began to look for items to fill it. In the downstairs bathroom, I balanced on the edge of the green porcelain tub to reach the medicine cabinet and selected a crimped, almost-empty tube of Bacitracin. Behind the toothpaste, I discovered a red-brown bottle of mercurochrome, and after opening it to admire the tiny glass wand attached to the cap, I twisted it closed and dropped the bottle in as well. I added tweezers in case someone barefoot got a splinter on the pier and syrup of ipecac in case someone was poisoned.

I wandered into the living room where the picture window framed the river, but today it was flat and featureless, held in custody by the summer sun. 

As my parents’ voices rose from their bedroom, I added a sewing needle and thread in case someone were to tear her shorts. As their voices grew more urgent, I slipped into the kitchen, where I added two Popsicle sticks for a finger splint, and baking soda for bee stings. The more items I added, the better I felt. 

My parents’ bedroom door opened abruptly, and my mother walked past me barefoot, a hint of Chanel No. 5 in the air as she passed. In the kitchen, she returned to making brownies, thrusting a wooden spoon through the dough like she was furious with it. She stopped yanking the spoon in half-circles to tap two brown eggs against the rim of the bowl. Dropping the yolks in the batter, she tossed the whites into the sink. I stood on my toes to peer over the edge. The egg whites looked like two jellyfish.

“What are you up to?” my mother asked, but she did not even look at me, so I placed my Madras purse on the counter so close to the brownie bowl that they were touching and told her about the first aid kit.

“Is someone planning to get hurt?” she asked, and I said what I knew to be true.

“You never know.” 

After spooning the thick chocolate batter into a greased pan, she thrust the brownies into the oven and turned, cupping my small cheeks in her cool palms.

“Stop scowling. Your face could freeze that way.” I thought I was wearing my regular face, so I held the look and walked over to the hall mirror. I moved as if balancing a book on my head—as though my expression might fall off if suddenly jarred. I saw serious blue-green eyes beneath straight brows. More freckles on my nose in July than there had been in June. I wouldn’t have called my expression a scowl, but I did look worried, so I forced a big smile, which, with my frowning eyes, now looked a bit deranged. Without moving my head, I slowly turned my entire body to show my mother.

There was a crash behind me and a shout. A glass milk jug had been knocked to the floor, and my mother had instinctively tried to break its fall with her bare foot. The thick glass jar lay unbroken on the linoleum, milk chugging out its mouth and running beneath the cabinets, but my mother had crumpled to the floor, where she rocked back and forth, grasping her ankle. I ran to her, righted the milk jug, then tried to tug her hands away.

“Mommy?” I said, crouching down, “Let me see.” But she continued to rock, forehead pressed to her raised kneecap. 

“Move your hands,” I commanded, but she continued to sway, so I softened my voice and laid my hand on her back. “You’re okay, you’re okay, you’re okay now.” I sang the words softly as if she were the child. My first aid kit, I noted, had fallen from the counter as well, its useless contents in the path of the seeping milk.

I patted her now as she gave voice to her pain, sobbing softly. When she finally raised her face to me, I was more afraid than sympathetic. I had never seen my mother cry, and my heart had never broken for someone else. It pounded against the small wall of my chest like a felt mallet on the surface of a drum, and we both looked down at her slim ankle as she finally lifted her hands. 

There was no cut or bruise other than that caused by her own grip. I stood up, abruptly backing away. “You’re not that hurt,” I said as if she had tricked or betrayed me. “That’s too many tears,” I claimed in a loud, authoritative voice as if there were rules for such things. Finally, I shouted, “Get up!” I sounded angry, but I couldn’t breathe. 

This was a moment in my childhood after which nothing was ever the same. And that is where all stories start. And some end. But not this one.

I don’t think I ever saw her cry again. Not in all the subsequent years of being a single mother, poet, therapist, grandmother, or friend. 

But in the year before she died, when she could no longer speak and there were no more memories over which to cry, I knew just what to say when I visited her.

I’d find her in the recreation room of her assisted living facility, seated in her wheelchair, listening to someone explain an art project for which she had no comprehension. I’d slip into the room, hug her close and whisper in her ear, “All is well, all is well, all is well.” Her shoulders would drop, and her countenance soften as if she’d just put a lifetime of worry down. And then I’d add, “You were the best mother in the whole wide world.” 

Whether or not she knew it was me, I don’t know, but she’d smile and lean into my arms, embraced for all time.

You had a mother. Your mother had a mother. As did hers, and hers, and hers. You, in fact, have had not one but a thousand mothers.

An infinity of love lands in you. 

Happy Mother’s Day.

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.

 

Next week it will have been exactly one year since you and I started writing this Sunday column. That’s roughly 50 stories–which is nothing when you consider that the late and revered George Merrill published 353 essays in this space. When I began, a friend wondered aloud whether I would run out of stories, and at first, I wondered as well. Then I figured out these tales are not about me; they’re about us.

 Start in me, end in you. And isn’t every new day an unborn story?

I was, of course, already writing when I got the Spy call. Why? Because I have no greater talents and, as Arlene Croce says, “Writing is how you explain to yourself what has happened to you.” My theory is that what’s happened to me is probably something you’ve experienced, too, but one particular conundrum has haunted me since I was a child. Do you ever think about this?

Everything has an expiration date. No matter what we do to preserve our planet’s diverse species, convert to renewable resources, and end reality television… in 4.5 billion years, our star will run out of hydrogen. At that moment, she will balloon towards the planet, dry our oceans, blow off our magnetic field, shred our atmosphere, and in a last violent expenditure of energy, carry us back into the embrace of her collapse.  

And even if we were to find a way to renew her fuel source, the entire Milky Way galaxy is going to pass through Andromeda. The heavens are dancing, and she is our next partner. This fragile planet that so graciously carries us around the entire galaxy every 230 million years, will be uninhabitable a billion years from now. Four more trips, brave-hearts. Four more. Then Eden will cease to exist.  

And I can’t quite take this in. All our love, all our longing, the stormy gray-green oceans, the ancient mountain ranges thrust skyward as continents crashed, our diamond-solitaire moon– won’t exist forever. No matter what we do. 

These are facts I recognize intellectually—like I recognize my children will most likely live their lives on other continents, that my goofball dog must one day die–but these are facts I can’t make sense of emotionally. Writers are always trying to make sense of the incomprehensible. You should be careful around us. We’re always taking notes. 

(Ask my sisters. The boys I grew up with. My handsome brothers-in-law.)

 Ask my dog.

Besides writing, I help other writers write publishable stories, so you’ll have something new to read, and because it is a way to turn a calling into a profession that is not dependent on the whim of an overworked acquisitions editor who is possibly having a bad day. Mentors nurture, guide and encourage. Motherhood without term limits. (Yay.) 

Serving other writers is a privilege. The lives they recount so often make me want to be a better writer, editor, and always, always, a better human being. 

One of my writers is a surgeon who has been a first responder at every global disaster in the last 30 years—tidal waves, earthquakes, the Ebola outbreak, war zones, bridge collapses–Tom was there, pulling survivors from the rubble, breathing life into the broken. Trying to accept the unacceptable—that there is no answer for why one two-year-old dies and another lives side by side in the same apartment collapse. How do I know of Tom’s pain? Because he hiked a thousand miles on the Pacific Coast Trail to heal the trauma to his own broken heart. And then, to explain to himself what had happened to him… he wrote about it.

I wrote The Story Within to connect with people like Tom, who, like you, I’m unlikely to meet in person. I’d published stories and essays, but they were transients. I wanted my work to settle down, to own some real estate between two covers in a bookstore while the opportunity still exists. The world of publishing is changing at the rate temperatures are rising. I don’t know how long bookstores are even going to be around.

For nearly ten years, I’d visit my book at Barnes and Noble. I’d take its picture like it was one of my children—as if it had also left home to make a life for itself out in the world. I found it in England, New Zealand, and a library in Chicago. Do good work, I’d whisper. Godspeed, story of my heart. 

As this anniversary nears, I hope my stories find those they are meant to serve. I hope they inspire other stories to be written, particularly yours. Our stories connect us. Your stories are the gravity that holds everything with mass together.

If the sun were extinguished tomorrow, you wouldn’t know for 8 minutes and 19 seconds. At 93 million miles from Earth, that’s how long it takes for our star’s light to reach us. So, if the candle were blown out, you’d be living in that borrowed light for 8 minutes. How would you spend it if you knew?

I’d find you. And tell you not to worry–the only true story has no end.

Because story-light, like starlight, will travel the universe till the end of time. It doesn’t need a star to shine.

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.

The end of the story is this. Driving west across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, I’m mesmerized not by the water but by the sky. The storm that was predicted has blown through, drenching the crowd at the Washington College fundraiser I just attended. The downpour forced us under a massive tent into a cacophony of voices, music, the smell of frying fish, damp grass, and wet rain gear.

 But it has left the sky a moving masterpiece of violet, aqua, deep gray, and pure white cloud puffs. The artist is still at work on the canvas, applying understory whisps of spent storm blowing east like smoke. From the bridge, I can’t see the bay beneath me or either shore. I am driving through sky.

This afternoon, I discovered that a prayer I have always carried, let everyone I have ever cared for have been happy, has been at least in part, answered. So why, as I descend towards Sandy Point from the apex of the bridge, am I both grateful and wistful? Full and empty? Why is the longing I live to assuage so present? 

In literature, we are in what is called the ‘falling action.” The part of the story that comes after the climax, when the conflict that has driven the narrative has been resolved. For the most part. 

But every story starts with an inciting incident, and this is mine: My freshman-year boyfriend gets in touch decades after graduation to say he’s sending some old photos. The communication is brief, but Ray mentions a popular college fundraiser he’s been attending for years. “Come,” he says, and I say yes, so I won’t regret saying no. Saying no and wondering what you missed for the rest of your life is worse than saying yes and being sorry you did. 

The drive to the event, a fish fry at a farm just feet from the Chester River, is as much like driving through a painting as the trip home will be. It is tender spring. I pass weathered gray barns with red doors, fields with new wheat a foot high. 

I hope I look okay. I glance in the rearview mirror at a stoplight. It’s hard not to feel pressure when you’ve only got one shot and you were 22 at the point of last contact. Tomorrow I’ll probably look better because I won’t have tried so hard. 

I park in a grassy field along with a hundred other alumni and approach the farmhouse. I don’t know a soul, but I recognize my hostess from Facebook. I introduce myself, and it turns out she knows Ray. “Let’s go find him,” she says. 

He was tall, I say. Is he still tall? He had hair. I’m laughing now. Does he still have hair? I want to know what I’m looking for. 

Still tall. Still has hair, she says. We search the tent, the beer line. I try his cell. Finally, he texts, “I’ve got a blue and white umbrella, and I’m near the wine station.”

I text back, “Look up. I think I’m looking right at you.” And the man, who is the boy I knew, looks up. We each leave the protection of cover to meet in the rainy middle.

We find seats in the tent eventually. He has piloted his own jet down from his home in New England. It’s a sleek, shiny machine. He shows me a photo of the gleaming plane with his wife smiling from the cockpit. “So that’s who you married,” I think, curious and charmed. He shows me a beautiful family photo. Two of his boys look like him.

We both love the work we do. I show him photos of my family, share my life in the broadest of strokes. I have 70% of the happiness I’d like, I say. I totally get that should be enough. He concurs, at least in part. Gives good advice I won’t take. 

He leads me around introducing me to classmates with whom he’s stayed in touch. He uses my maiden name. It feels weird; the name has been gone a long time. I was in a hurry to jettison it. 

Entangled. We are all, in terms of quantum physics, entangled. Because we were part of each other’s lives, we will always maintain a point of connection. But there is evidence that black holes disrupt that entanglement, the atoms of which we are made. As objects fall in, they are torn apart. The ejection of those cleaved atoms creates a ring of radiation, that encircling light that allows us to see the void. 

Our history has slipped over the event horizon in an ineffable rush to oblivion, but who we are today is the light by which we see in this rain-dark tent. We ask the only questions that matter now, “Did the choices you made serve you? Would you do it all over again?” 

“How do you remember me?”  

Ray seems to be convinced he is remembered unkindly. “Tell me one happy memory you have of me,” he says, demanding proof this is not so. 

 “During freshman orientation, we were invited to the home of the head of the French department,” I say. “We were 18; he was French. He served us red wine, raw pepperoni, and sour cream. His children kept refilling our solo cups. I had never had alcohol before. I was suddenly violently ill. You put me in your car and drove me, semiconscious, back to my dorm. You carried me back to my room.” 

He searches for the memory.

“Any time I wasn’t throwing up, I was telling you I loved you. ‘I love you,’ fueled by post-throw-up endorphins, means, ‘thank you for being kind.’ Does that count?”   

He says, “I don’t remember the throwing up part.” 

What more proof do you need that you were a good guy? I wonder. Then I realize he probably does remember. What more proof do you need that you’re a good guy now?

My sense is that Ray tows unidentified regrets or chronic uncertainties, but maybe that’s my own story. I don’t see why he thinks he needs forgiveness, yet I feel in need of it, too. Black holes are bottomless. 

Joyce Carol Oates said, “The first sentence can’t be written until the final sentence is written.”  I could not disagree more here in the falling action. The first sentence can’t be written if you even think you know the last line. The future is in superposition, pure potential teased from the past on that event horizon. Surprise is the one true constant. We will all meet again and again in other stories, where love will outshine the entire galaxy of both spent and unborn stars.

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.

Maisy, my son’s irrepressible 7-year-old daughter, is learning to ride. Every Saturday morning, she takes a lesson at a stable out in Davidsonville.

Maisy’s brother took lessons as well for a time, and it was from him that I learned correct riding posture is “back pocket to the earth, chest to the sky.” I liked that and immediately exchanged “chest” for “heart.” Writers. We look for meaning in everything; how can you live with us? And I, for one, want that meaning to express something beautiful because I’m convinced that what is true, real, and everlasting is just that. Beautiful. And why would you write about anything else?

So. Heart to sky.

We boarded a horse named Cinda the summer I turned 12. A chestnut mare with a white blaze from ears to muzzle, she’d been underfed and needed pasture time to recover. Hoping we would buy her, the local stable loaned her to us for 3 months. She arrived with a complete set of English tack, but we were told not to ride her until she’d put on more weight.

I loved horses because all romanticizing sixth-grade girls love horses. (We galloped at recess like mustangs, right? Ponytails flying? Wild and free?) But I loved horses mostly because my older sister did. She was turning 17 that summer, and the boarding-Cinda arrangement was probably for her. I was simply the younger sibling appendage who made that a package deal.

It was a season of new experiences, some more pleasant than others. Watching Cinda drink for the first time, I was incredulous that she didn’t lap like a dog but gently placed her muzzle in the water and seemed to silently inhale it. Who knew? If the world doesn’t amaze you, we have work to do.

A hallmark of my childhood was a lack of adult supervision so when Cinda had gained enough weight to ride, I went out alone to the pasture one morning to give it a try. I was able to hoist the blanket and saddle onto her back by standing on cinderblocks, and although the idea of placing a bit into a horse’s mouth today scares me to death, those teeth! Those rubbery lips! I made myself do that as well. From that moment on, I’d ride her through the pasture or to the apple orchards at the end of Eagle Hill Road, where there was enough open space to get her briefly into a gallop, transitioning in one magic moment from the up and down rhythm of posting to being rocked in the cradle. To be clear, this was a pretty gentle horse who kindly let me live. Until she didn’t.

Our place was surrounded by a marsh, woods, and river, and on this steamy August morning, I had ridden her into the cool, dark forest. We were making our way through tender saplings and prickly undergrowth when she bolted. Stung by a bee, spooked by a snake? She tore off at a gallop, zigzagging at breakneck speed through the sassafras, dogwoods, and locust trees. I hung on, branches snapping in my face, tearing at my tee shirt and shorts, entirely out of control, until I looked ahead and saw we were on a direct collision course with a huge pine that had fallen horizontally across our path, snagged by the understory trees like a balance beam. I could see that Cinda was going to race under it and that I was going to be scraped off her back like the 100-pound nuisance I was.

So, I slipped free of the stirrups, let go of the reins, and jumped. I landed on my back in the loamy pine needles with the wind knocked out of me, gazing up at patches of puzzled blue sky, listening to the crows talk to the jays about the morning’s disruption. When I could breathe again, I staggered to my feet, brushed off the seat of my pants, and set off in search of my mount. I found her standing calmly in the sandy lane that edged the woods. The expression on her face was the innocent horse equivalent of, “Wassup?”

I lived out my childhood being my own grown-up and, therefore, anxious most of the time. A low-grade worry caused by unidentifiable adult dramas happening around me attached itself to scary things I could identify — tidal waves, quicksand, leprosy. (The danger of leprosy had been verified both in Sunday School and on an episode of Wagon Train).

So, I created a mantra for those times when something was really scary—like learning to dive off a diving board (counterintuitive to plunge blindly headfirst into anything, yes)? When I needed to do something hard without help, I’d vow, “I’m going to do this if it kills me.”

“I’m going to learn to do a cartwheel, to ride a two-wheeler, to audition for this musical, to put a bit in a horse’s mouth,” if it kills me.

The thing is, in losing the fears of childhood, I’ve lost the courage, too. Now what scares me is encountering a dead mouse in the basement or making that split-second decision at 65 mph whether to take the exit for 895 or 695. Or encountering the emptiness that lurks existentially in most of us if we are not actively filling it up with the companionship of someone we live with, or the comfort sustained by children, travel, books, chores, creative work, and exercise.

Once, I was willing to jump without a net, to saddle and bridle a 1000-pound horse who did not love me. I’m inviting back to myself that determined brave-heart I could once call upon as needed. As I do, I’m wondering if I’m going to do this if it kills me is just another expression for whatever happens, I’m going to be okay. You’re going to be okay, too.

Not that I actually fear that I will die trying whatever the current challenge is. It’s living with the conviction that it’s all right if I do. It’s fine to go. Perfect, even. How can it not be? It’s on the road ahead for all of us. The downed pine across the path that can’t be avoided whether you’re 45 or 95.

I’ve never been a resident of the country of courage, but maybe I can learn to visit again. Come with me. We’ll go together. Jump, let go of the reins, dive headfirst. Believe that whatever is true, real and everlasting is not only beautiful, it is holding us forever safe in a state of grace.

Hearts to sky, beloveds, hearts to sky.

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.

 

Before her son took her to live with him in Macon, Mrs. Ciccarelli often sat on the back porch of the little house next door worrying about the black locust trees that hung treacherously over her fence from a neighbor’s backyard. “Lightning magnets,” her husband Frankie had called them, but I suspected the trees, so common in Maryland, came down in storms because they had shallow root systems, not because they attracted electricity. 

Still, when storms were rumbling in the west, I’d sit with Hilda on her concrete steps and listen to her describe her house and gardens as they had been fifty years ago before Frankie died and her son moved south. Pink tea roses, false dragonhead, and patches of mint had all disappeared because Hilda was no longer able to weed and water in the summer heat. Hilda in a blue gingham housedress, me, in sandals and a yellow sundress, gazed together at all that remained — an ancient lavender butterfly bush and some robust ruby four-o’clocks by the back door. 

Hilda’s son thought she should no longer live alone, but she didn’t want to leave the two-bedroom, white clapboard cottage she and Frankie had built as 19-year-old newlyweds. They had lived there her entire adult life, although he’d been gone fifteen years by then.

Inspired by Hilda’s nostalgia and moved by her loneliness, I imagined secretly planting new rose bushes and mint patches for her. I suggested trips to the library, book groups, and classes at the Y. I imagined that I could drive her myself, attend events with her, but I had three children, a writing career, a house of my own, and I don’t know that she’d have wanted my help.

I was reminded of the time I offered suggestions to a rather brusque woman complaining about her life at a baby shower. She had finally turned to me with undisguised annoyance and snapped, “Oh, I get it. You like to fix things.” That was exactly what I was trying to do, and what’s worse (don’t judge me), I was confused by her disdain. Is that so wrong, I wondered? passing a onesie as pink as my face to the next guest.

Rest assured that I now know that, yes, it is so wrong. I was supposed to just listen …right?

…Because you actually don’t know anything the complainer doesn’t know …right?

And the baby shower lady did have a point. Hilda appeared happiest when we just sat on the porch theorizing about which way those black locusts would fall, talking about everything from pizzelle recipes to the probability of life after death. She was 84 at the time. Frankie had died of a heart attack on the kitchen floor of that house, and she was convinced he was still with her.

 I had reason to think so, too.

Hilda’s mind seemed sound to me, but when her son took her away a year later, he told her they were going on vacation, and she didn’t seem to find it odd that he was loading her entire life into a U-Haul. When they pulled out of her drive and turned right on Westwood Road for the last time, I could just make out Hilda’s tiny form peeking up above the seatback.

I wondered if she would be bewildered as this vacation became the remaining days of her life. I waved from my living room window, but Hilda’s concentration was on the road ahead. She had bonded with her kidnapper. 

The little house sat empty for the next year, but I knew Hilda would never be back. She was going to die in Macon in the in-law apartment of her son’s big house. At some point, I’d be walking the dog or enjoying a glass of Sauvignon Blanc on the patio, unaware that between one sip and the next, Hilda had slipped away to join Frankie. She would find out before I do if there is life after death or we get second chances. It grieved me that I would never know of her leaving.

When we first moved into the grey shingled house next door to Hilda’s, we were consumed with unpacking, painting, establishing new gardens, an English trellis fence in the back, a stacked stone wall in the front, meeting other young families, and months went by without meeting the tiny elderly lady next door. She was so quiet. She rarely left the house. The curtains were usually closed. I never glimpsed her in the yard.

But one afternoon, entering Trader Joe’s, on impulse, I bought a huge bouquet of locally-grown zinnias. Scarlet, sunshine yellow, creamy white, vibrant orange, they were just the brilliant, happy, workhorse flowers of summer. 

I thought I’d bought them for myself—for the kitchen table– so I could enjoy them from the family room as well. But when I got home, I suddenly felt I was supposed to take the flowers next door. To the quiet, little house with its eyes closed. I wrapped them in tissue, tied a ribbon around the stems, and headed over. Was I trying to fix something? (That’s not a real question.)

I stood on the porch knocking; it was white-hot July, and I couldn’t even tell if anyone was home when the door opened and a tiny woman, even shorter than I, with white curls and a wistful smile, looked up at me expectantly from the other side of the threshold. 

“I’m your next-door neighbor, Laura,” I said, “and I just wanted you to have these.” Her face lit up as she reached for the summer-bright abundance. 

“Oh, my goodness, thank you,” she said. “I was sitting here feeling a little down. You won’t believe this, but it’s my birthday.”

While this could have been a coincidence, I don’t think so. I imagine when Hilda reached for those flowers, the ruby 4 o’clocks opened in joyful acknowledgment of divine timing, and a complicit Frankie grinned in delight. 

“Happy birthday!” I exclaimed, and I gave her a happy hug. As I turned to go, she thanked me again, and I called back, “You are so welcome!” 

Anyone watching would have thought I was addressing only my lovely new neighbor. Anyone watching would have thought I was speaking to Hilda alone.

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.

 

As newly discovered best friends, my daughter Audra and a ponytailed third-grade classmate were enjoying the instant intimacy of those who share the same aspirations—to possess a horse, pierced ears, and the ability to do a split. 

It was the first time Audra had been invited to visit, and as we were leaving, Linda and her mother invited us to admire a pair of mourning doves, which in the confines of a homemade coop in Linda’s backyard, had produced two perfect ivory eggs. The nesting birds seemed to be juveniles, so they were somewhat small, their gray and white feathers as soft as mink, their fragile bodies sleek and without substance. 

Built on a high shelf attached to the back of their house, the nest had been enclosed with three walls and a roof of chicken wire. The girls stood on cinderblocks to see into it. “Is it really all right for the two of them to be inside the enclosure?” I asked Linda’s mother. She was a science teacher, which made me feel devoid of practical skills and undereducated, but I hoped we might become friends. 

“Oh, sure,” Mrs. Hall replied, distracted. Her two-year-old son Jaimie was using a blue-flowered fistful of her skirt as a tether, weaving around her knees. He crashed into her legs periodically to entertain himself, then swung away again on an elliptical orbit. 

“Linda goes in there all the time. She’s so excited about having baby birds,” our hostess explained.

As we continued to watch the girls through the honeycomb of chicken wire, the doves became increasingly active, fluttering, and repositioning themselves. Linda jumped down from the cinderblocks with a soft thud and joined her mother outside the enclosure, doing a little dance in the spring grass, chatting away about what she planned to name the fledglings. Still in the enclosure, Audra continued to gaze into the nest, her forearms anchoring her precariously to the wooden shelf. Though she would never ask, I imagined she wished to adopt one of the birds when they hatched. I’d once had a similar longing. 

When I was five, searching for arrowheads along the pasture fence, I glimpsed a flash of Bermuda blue in the grass. I knelt, parting sticks and leaves to get a better look. A robin’s egg—as blue as a jay’s wing, as blue as the April sky.

With one finger, I touched the smooth turquoise surface. Warm. With mounting excitement, I nudged the delicate treasure to one side. Unbroken—still protecting the tiniest and most fragile of hearts. I picked it up and struck out for home, the rhythmic thrumming of my corduroy overalls resonating like someone blowing through paper pressed to a comb. 

Slipping in the backdoor, I ran upstairs and laid the egg in a bed of Kleenex which I then placed on a Thom McCann shoebox directly under the hall nightlight. The bulb emitted just enough heat to keep the egg warm, and I went in search of my overworked mother to assure her I’d be responsible for my impending offspring. That night I went to bed unable to stop talking (girl-joy, admit it, you still do that), imagining how great it would be when I taught my bird to ride on my shoulder and to speak. 

At daybreak, I hopped out of bed and padded down the hall on bare feet to check on the egg. To my horror, the nightlight had been turned off sometime after I’d gone to sleep. The egg was stone cold. That afternoon I buried my charge at the base of the play yard swing set, the only witness to my inability to protect a life for which I’d taken responsibility. 

I thanked Linda’s mom one last time and told Audra we had to go. Her little brother was waiting at home; I’d left a lasagna in the oven. As she retreated reluctantly from the nest, her worn tennis shoes slipped from the cinderblocks, and she was thrown off balance, grasping instinctively for the shelf as she fell. In slow motion, the entire arrangement broke away from the wall. The air was filled with beating wings; there was a crash, a child cried out. 

As the chaos settled, I scanned the wreckage. A yellow yolk was sliding down the side of the house, and Audra, frozen in remorse and embarrassment, was staring in horror at the toe of her shoe. The remaining egg lay broken in the canvas creases. 

Linda’s eyes met no one else’s as she reeled in closer to her mother. I tried to touch Audra through the wire wall separating us as apologies and absolutions were offered on the breeze. 

“Look, Linda,” said Mrs. Hall after a few excruciating moments.

“These eggs were never fertilized!” She was examining Audra’s shoe with a clinical eye. “They would never have hatched. Maybe next time.”

We’d be friends, all right. I already loved her.

Apologizing again, unable to do anything but carry our remorse with us, Audra and I walked to the sanctuary of our second-hand Volvo. She moved with deliberate dignity as if she could do penance for this disaster by never making another spontaneous movement. She was uncharacteristically polite and arranged herself with formality on the front seat. 

I was afraid to touch the fragile shell of her composure on the ride home. We spoke of practical matters, and finally, I told her about the lost robin’s egg that was as blue as her eyes and over which I had spun dreams. I wanted to take some of her disappointment from her by demonstrating I already had a place for it. 

We pulled into our gravel driveway. Getting carefully out of the car, my daughter informed me that she had some things she’d like to do in her room and climbed the stairs with the self-conscious posture of an 8-year-old penitent. 

Later that night, I checked on her on my way to bed. She was asleep, silky brown hair against her pillow, the white down comforter a rumpled heap that had fallen to the floor. 

I stood there imagining that love is a force field. That the ferocious, abiding love we feel for our children, and sometimes extend to each other, could ward off every hurt. But that’s not how it works, of course. Hurt is the heart’s tenderizer. And it’s necessary. How can you be moved to assuage someone else’s pain if you’ve never experienced your own?

I lifted the comforter from the floor and covered her then, still intent on nurturing something breathtakingly fragile that might one day take flight. 

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.