Unforeseen Benefits

"Dear Easter Bunny. I have two homes. Please go to both."

Day, Earth

In the picture book
our earth is split in half like an egg.
Layers of molten rock press
its yolk into solid metal.
My son studies things about science
every child should know
while at this moment,
his great-granddaughter glances back
with an indulgent smile.
How naive we are, bobbing along
inside the deaf shell
of our incomplete knowledge.
What is real will change
a thousand times,
our truths will become obsolete
when we finally disover
the core is not filled with steel and heat
but seven azure feathers
and a vial of tears
the Sumerian farmer's daughter wept
while she prayed in the dark
for rain.

Row Your Boat Gently

When children are free to love both their parents without conflict of loyalty, to have access to both without fear of losing either, they can get on with the totally absorbing work of growing up, on schedule. They can learn to master the tasks that life places before them with confidence and a sense of security. And both parents and children can learn that something as hurtful and as earthshaking as a separation or divorce can eventually be handled constructively. - Mom's House, Dad's House, Isolina Ricci

In the early spring sun, Tee and I met at a nearby playground. Bug scrambled around the trees and jungle gyms with the other kids while we chatted. The meeting was meant to be nothing more than a pick-up exchange, but the lazy sun lulled us into dropping our defenses. We began to talk. I shared a suggestion from my counselor, and we discussed some of what is ahead for our co-parenting relationship.

In a flash, Tee was off the bench, storming away, too angry even to sit next to me anymore. What set him off is still unclear. Was it a word, a phrase? Was it a buildup of grief and frustration finally having its chance to blow? Several brewing weather fronts collided at that mile of sky, and the tempest was immediate and total. The conversation spiraled into a barely contained series of accusations and excuses. Each of us lost our inhibition, and even the proximity of our child and our neighbors didn't rein us in.

Some semblance of control must have remained. We did not find ourselves in a screaming battle or calling each other terrible names, and I would hope we made the other parents merely uncomfortable rather than fearful. I have no doubt, however, that Bug sensed something was not right. It can only have caused him distress. Even the April sunshine has only so much power to alleviate a little boy's fear.

The interaction caught us both off guard. Most of our emotional storm fronts stay off shore, and we have only ventured out under them separately and in the company of counselors or friends. Six months have passed since Tee moved out. A few things have shifted during that time. We are each more settled in our work, our childcare routine, and our separate social lives. I am less interested in what Tee does with his private time, and I am more confident in each of our abilities to stay steady through the changes. Nothing succeeds like success. We can talk a good game about our commitment to our child, but the evidence is in the behaviors we exhibit over time. He has not moved away and neither have I. We are not in court. We each trust the other to care well for our son.

One significant shift has to do with the location of my attention. For the first several months, I was caught up in explaining and understanding the choice to separate. I became one of those insufferable people who suck all the air out of a room blathering on about the drama, the failings, the ex, and what went wrong. Fortunately, my friends and family are patient with me. Only a few have abandoned me altogether during this chaotic time. Because leaving a marriage, especially one with a child involved, is such a significant decision, it cannot be made lightly. It is easy to become consumed by the justifications for doing so. The pull to find fault with the partnership and the partner is almost addictive. It allays the guilt and shame, and it serves as a way to say to the world (and the self), "Look what I had to live with! It's a wonder I stayed as long as I did!"

Separation and divorce land a person in leaky boat, rowing madly for shore. I, for one, am still not sure how I got here. Seeking the reasons may be useful over time so that I don't repeat toxic patterns in future relationships. However, the spiraling diagnosis of the past is a kind of Bermuda Triangle. I have to haul myself out of the pull of "Why" and get myself into "What now?"

Shifting direction is easier said than done. "What now" means making decisions and creating entirely new approaches. "What now" means drawing on one's own resources and letting go of the fantasy of rescue. I have been lost for months. In many ways, I still am. Where is my attention supposed to be? Dangers loom. Sharks circle. Storm clouds gather, maps are out-of-date. For those first weeks and months in this rickety vessel, my mind could not focus on any one thing. Sometimes I found myself paralyzed. Sometime all I could do was curse the sky.

But six months apart have calmed the stormy waters around separation. My gaze is finally settling where it should. Blaming Tee, or myself, or our naivete and blind spots is no longer useful. The attention needs to be on the far horizon. What will our lives as co-parents look like? How do we want to arrange our two homes to meet Bug's needs? I may not have a map, but I have a point of orientation. Now, I need to attend more to the tone of the exchanges with Tee as a parent than to the feelings about him as a spouse. The arrangement we build from here on out will need to look like a business relationship. Courteous communication, structured meetings, explicit agreements, and respect for privacy should characterize our interactions in the future. 

The language we use has the power to shape our sense of what is real. If I speak of Tee not as my soon-to-be-ex-husband, but instead as Bug's father, I remove the marriage (and its demise) as the central factor in our relationship. If I say, "Our marriage ended," instead of "Our family fell apart," it allows for a more even keel.

Bug's family is intact. He has two of them: one with his father and the one with me. He has two homes. In the eyes of our son, we are each a whole person with the capacity to shelter him, care for him, and help him grow. His families are solid, his homes are complete. Tee is a good and capable father. I am a loving and resourceful mother. I will do my best to draw these thoughts into the front of my mind when I interact with Tee. I will allow the respectful and hopeful picture of Bug's future guide my words.

Those two stable homes exist on that distant shore. I will keep my eyes trained there as I pull this family over the miles of open water to reach it.

Inch by Inch

Last, but not least, there is a need for audacious hope. And it's not optimism. I'm in no way an optimist. I've been black in America for 39 years. No ground for optimism here, given the progress and regress and three steps forward and four steps backward. Optimism is a notion that there's sufficient evidence that would allow us to infer that if we keep doing what we're doing, things will get better. I don't believe that. I'm a prisoner of hope, that's something else. Cutting against the grain, against the evidence. William James said it so well in that grand and masterful essay of his of 1879 called "The Sentiment of Rationality," where he talked about faith being the courage to act when doubt is warranted. And that's what I'm talking about.

- Cornel West, from the 1993 commencement speech at Wesleyan University

Virginia to Wisconsin to California to Colorado to New York back to Virginia. Each place we lived, I hoped and half-believed it would be our home. In each place, we cultivated a circle of friends. Bug had his little buddies, I sought my dance and poetry.

In each place we lived, I planted a garden.

Gardening is audacity. Learning the fickle moods of the soil can take seasons. Years. The climate, the bend of the shade, the ants and voles, the clays and acids, and even just the way the rain pools all work together to create the unique temperament of the land. Tending a garden is not so different from tending a relationship. Over time, gardener and land grow to anticipate one another. The soil, in its way, awaits the tilling, the seeding, the gentle tending and the rough nip of pruners. The gardener comes to love the garden with that tricky combination of pleasure and irritation reserved for the most intimate companions.

Every time our family landed in a new place during the past six or seven years, I began at the beginning. No previous tenant left me an overgrown patch to weed, no departed lover left a guidebook. I started with nothing but a shrug and a shovel. Let the seeds fall where they may.

The amount of money I spent on of fresh dirt and manure and plants makes me cringe now, seeing the creep of red in my bank book. The number of miles I traveled to local land preservation offices to gather information and precious packets of native seeds has me shaking my head in awe. These days, I can barely squeeze in a trip to the supermarket.

In each place, friends and neighbors reluctantly allowed me to drag them into my sweat-drenched folly. Bug and Tee had no choice in the matter. Both donned work gloves and picked up shovels to help prepare the earth and sow the seeds.

I figured the first season would be the learning season. Little did I know each first was also my last. But this is the way of faith, isn't it? Cornel West differentiates between optimism and hope. Optimism ignores the evidence, believing in a happy outcome despite all the challenges in the way. Hope, however, is welll acquainted with the obstacles. Hope plots a path through them.

Over the years of uprooting, my desire for a home for our family grew to an aching, chronic hunger. With every move, I walked the tightrope between hope and defeat. Perhaps ironically, perhaps in the fierce determination to make it so, I invested far more cash and sweat in the garden of the last place we inhabited as a family. In New York, I ringed the perimeter fence with narcissus bulbs and native plants. Bug and I grew peas in the one patch of sun in the yard, and surrounded this with a mix of flowers whose names now swept from my memory. We edged the house in pansies, planted carrots on a support wall, and turned the dreary front yard into a splash of color. All of this we labored to create as our known life was fragmenting under our feet.

Sure, the effort was desperate. But desperation can lead to far worse than tulips and snow peas. I like to hope that the lilies I dredged up by hand from the creek bottom and hauled to our cabin will multiply for the people who live there long after our names are forgotten. Those two small spruce trees we planted in the burnt soil of our Colorado home might grow to house songbirds returning after the ravages of the Hayman Fire. Maybe the effort was not all in vain.

I learned a hard lesson with these futile attempts at marking a place. One cannot force roots into soil not ready to make way. The earth has to get to know its inhabitants. I have left every home far too quickly to have anything but the most fleeting knowledge of place.

Here we are in yet another temporary home. Here, Bug and I are guests in my parents' house. Their back yard is filled almost to the edges with a swimming pool. The rest, my mother tends. She buys her flowers and trims her hedges. Her aesthetic is unique to her, and she has lived in this place 15 years. She has had ample time  to learn where the sun will fall and whether the snapdragons will make it through until summer.

But this is our home, too. Even if it is another way station for Bug and me, it is still the only home we have. For Bug, whose life has been punctuated by a move every 18 months, a home of his own is important in a way most of us cannot fathom.

My son began talking a few weeks ago about moving into our new house. I let the comments slip on past until  a recent dinnertime conversation. Out of the blue: "What will our next house be like, Mommy?" I asked him what he meant. He explained, "We have to move to our next house soon."

Right there at the dinner table, I leaned in and looked him square in the eye. "This is our home. This, right here, is your house." I put my hand down on the table. "We are not moving anywhere. We are going to live here for a long, long time."

"How long?"

"Until you are big. Much bigger. Maybe first or second grade. Big like your cousin."

He considered this quietly. So did his grandparents, who were understandably surprised by this declaration.

Truth is, a place of our own is far beyond reach at the moment. Necessity dictates we stick around. Staying, however, is more than the natural outcome of financial constraint and proximity to Tee. Bug has never experienced continuity. Even now, the kid doesn't know where he is sleeping from one night to the next. The least I can do is give him one fixed variable on my side of the equation. When he needs to have a sense that he belongs somewhere, he can come to this sloppy, old place and find his mom, his grandparents, his dog, his bed, and a little corner of familiarity to which he can return no matter how much confusion the world throws at him.

High time, I would say, to plant a garden. Our garden, Bug's and mine.

We asked Grandma for a plot of our own in the midst of her ornamentals. She found one for us, and even handed over a few slivers of her precious sunlight. We turned the soil, righted bricks for a raised bed, and gathered sticks from a giant pine tree blown down in last month's storm. Together, my boy and I fashioned a bean-pole tent. Bug helped me dig, rake, relocate worms (a key task, I have learned) and trim the hemp line. Once everything was ready, we squatted together. Bug lifted each pea from my palm and placed it in its new nest of earth.

This is our first season growing in this soil. I aim to stick around long enough for my boy to reap the harvest. Change is, of course, inevitable. Fate could laugh at my folly. She might decide to make short work of my big plans. But we have to live with audacity. We have to plant ourselves where we are. Faith, the man says, is the courage to act when doubt is warranted. Perhaps this small corner of the land will share a secret or two, and we will be here next spring to feel the deepening of our roots.

Flourish

High-hope people believe that the future will be better than the present and that they have the power to make it so. 

- Shane Lopez

The canopy of flowering plums and crabapples bobs under cool April rain. On this Friday when much of the Washington area is battening down the hatches for a government shutdown, a collection of bouyant humans from various corners of the globe parted the morning's curtain of mist and shed both warmth and light on a little corner of Fairfax, Virginia. George Mason University's slick new hotel digs, the Mason Inn, hosted this flagship Leading to Well-Being conference.

You might have a picture in your mind of a bunch of feel-good hedonists trotting out their inner hippies while munching on Marriott canteloupe slices. You might be as surprised as I was to find the list of attendees weighed heavily with research scholars from institutions like Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School, UNC Chapel Hill, and the University of Cambridge. Sure, meditation and yoga sessions were on offer even before the first dry pastry was served, but most of the day focused on the outcomes of scientific studies linking mindfulness to the well-being of individuals, organizations, and even nations.

Historically, much of the psychological field has focused on understanding and eliminating negative emotional experiences. Digging around in people's traumas and patterns was thought to be the way to uproot the bad to make way for the good. The trend now seems to be focusing on constructing positive, healing, and future-oriented approaches to generating well-being. Much more than emphasizing what is not working, most of us need to place greater attention on cultivating practices that move us towards good relationships, purpose, and accomplishment in our lives. As Martin Seligman shared in his keynote, he likes to grow roses. Sure, this involves a certain amount of pulling up weeds and clearing out space. However, "You don't get roses by weeding." To generate meaning and health, what do we plant? What do we work to create?

The research that most captured my attention revolved around the physiological changes occurring when positive emotions are introduced through regular practices such as meditation, appreciation, and caring for others. Measurable neurological changes begin to take place through the simple (though repeated) act of attending. "Attending" can take any number of forms. It might be keeing an eye on the present moment through mindfulness meditation. It also might be an increase in attention to what is going well, to feelings of warmth for a loved one, or perhaps to a hopeful picture of the future. Through any number of these practices, not only do people report a greater sense of well-being, but their brain function also increases.

Researchers are beginning to explore the changes occuring even on a cellular level. The vagus nerve, extending from the base of the cranium to the heart, seems to play a role in regulating cardiac function, as one example. Meditation has been shown to improve the health of this nerve and, consequently, the rhythms of the heart. The effect appears to sustain when the practice is continued, meaning the effect is more than simply a response to novelty. Decreases in illness and increases in longevity are not simply nice side-effects of feeling good. Inflammatory responses seem to lessen with regular practice of attention, and over time, the actual organism - the whole body - becomes more capable of fighting off disease and even thriving.

Putting some of this in the context of daily life, the Losada Ratio is an old-ish tool with new implications. I'm going to be sloppy here, but it more or less explains that the ratio of positivity to negativity in an organization or relationship has an impact on whether or not it will flourish. For each type of relationship, there is a "tipping point" below which dysfunction occurs. For a marriage, the ratio is 5:1. This means for every one dumb-ass thing you say to your spouse, you need to do at least five aweome things to make up for it. Because five is the tipping point, you actually need to be doing, oh, twenty or thirty, for the partnership to thrive. On a day-to-day basis, people in relationships, in workplaces, in classrooms, and in communities need to have a much higher quantity of appreciative, healing, hopeful, postivie experiences for every yucky one in order to acheive well-being.

Shane Lopez, Barbara Fredrickson, and Felicia Huppert were a few of the folks who presented both findings and interventions today. Their publications do a much better job than this little blog at explaining the implications. I am most interested, of course, in how I can apply the ideas as well as the tools to the various quarters of my life. When I am advising doctoral students, how might I employ appreciative techniques to help them through the rigors of the work? Is it possible to encourage both expansiveness of vision and singularity of focus? With my son, how might his daily experience improve if I tell him ten things he is doing well for every one thing that drives me bananas? What forms can mindfulness practice take in the life of a four-year-old, and how can we cultivate them in our rather frantic lives?

Most fascinating is the question of positive emotion in the midst of a divorce. For the past eight months or so, Tee and I have been moving through this separation with amazing control. Neither of us has gone nuclear, and we still speak with decency to one another. However, we have a lifetime of co-parenting ahead, as well as the looming challenge of courts (possibly) and custody arrangements (inevitably). If I am to believe the research, creating a balance of 5 or more:1 even in this relationship is key to making it work. Can you imagine? I somehow have to come up with seven or ten things I appreciate and admire for every one thing I criticize about a man I am divorcing? And I actually have to say them? Out loud? To him?

I am sensing I have the power to set a tone of creativity, hope, collaboration, and caring even in a relationship that is becoming something very different than what either of us wanted or imagined. Ugliness, however, is only one narrative of divorce. It might be possible for us to craft our own story. In the one I am just beginning to envision, Tee and I are the heroes who choose virtue and noble purpose over short-cuts, and our son is the ultimate victor.

Duality

Bug's great aunt has a birthday today. Last week, we pulled out scrapbooks to look at photos of this long-forgotten relative in order to entice him to make her a card. As we paged through the album, he was transfixed by the photos. Far-away cousins, long-ago trips to the beach. . . For him, these were ancient relics. He wanted to hear each and every story, at least until he was bored and it was back to legos.

I was never an avid scrapbooker like some of my friends, but I managed to paste a few decent pages together to track our family's quiet adventures. We have wedding books, a pregnancy album, a first-year book, and a Colorado volume. Then, the albums stop cold. I had completed four or five pages for our Adirondack chapter by this time last year. That was when everything changed. Please don't blame me for not wanting to chronicle the giant yard sale we held on Lake George to sell most of our earthly possessions. And I will not apologize for not including a photo of my grandmother's piano - the one I had played as a child in Oklahoma and had to leave behind in our camp house for the next resident. Letting the scrapbooks go dormant for a while was a wise move.

However, the intervening year has not been all neglect and misery. Bug and I have had a number of photo-worthy excursions. Yesterday, I began to compile those pictures onto a memory card for printing. Pulling them from blackberry, camera, and random computer folders was the perfect activity for the lazy end of a sick day. Sorting images was more healing than a bubble bath. It is hard to believe, looking at the visual evidence before me, that this year has really been the toughest on record. Somehow, we keep managing to play. We keep cultivating joy.

A file folder of Tee's photos somehow made it onto my computer. They are as recent as January 2011, so he must have downloaded them to give my folks a slide show after returning from a winter vacation trip with Bug. I scanned through dozen of snow-fun shots filled with people I don't know enjoying a holiday I was not a part of. These photos are only a fraction of the collection Tee is undoubtedly amassing. He has always been fonder of the camera than I.

When a family splits apart, memories become as fractured as home life. I doubt Tee will create an album of his photos. He has never been the crafty type. The scrapbooks I create will tell the story of my son and me, his maternal grandparents, our dog. This one-sided, cobbled-together family will have its chronicle. The history of the other half of his life will have to exist on some other plane. I cannot tell Bug that narrative as he grows. Somehow, he will have to find a place to store his bifurcated memories on his own. He will not have the help of a sibling or parents who share his whole history.

When my boy hops between our houses, he always carries something with him. He packs a little bag of his markers or stuffs a lego plane he has crafted into a purse. His four-year-old need for continuity manifests in his toys. Tee and I let Bug's possessions migrate freely. Yet neither of us can hold the other parent's perspective, and no one has yet invented a bag that can hold memories.

Before today, I had never considered how much it has meant to me to have a set of photo albums in my basement showing our intact (though tumultuous) family life moving along together over the years. My mother stopped assembling these books at some point in my early adolescence. However, I could always - in fact, still do - return to them to see myself in the context of a mostly unchanging circle of kin. This is the way I rooted myself in a history. As a grown child now, I can speak to my parents about an early apartment we lived in or a beach vacation we took, and I can hear the pieces of their accounts echoing off one another, creating a kind of odd harmony. Even in my adulthood, this re-telling of shared experience is a great comfort.

Knowing I cannot give that to my son breaks my heart. For now, his dad and I live close enough to one another to create some overlap. Two nights ago, Tee came over and stayed for dinner while I was upstairs with the flu. Sharing small moments in each other's houses, attending family nights at preschool, and enjoying the occasional lunch together are all fine things to do. They will not, however inoculate Bug against growing pains as our two lives mature separately. In the not-too-distant future, we may be in two new relationships, creating separate families, negotiating moves far from one another. How any child survives such tectonic shifts is beyond me. Yet, children do survive. Some even thrive.

Today, the best I can do for my boy is compile a few photos to create a loving history in which my son can find himself. It's a long way from here to scrapbook page, I know. I am, after all, a working mom now. I don't expect to have anything compiled before 2012. One small step at a time.

Bug's life may not have a single narrative. Whose life does, really? My son will, however, have one account of his childhood lovingly told, and always available to him. I may not be able to control the outcome of this change in our family, but I am a mother. And that means I have considerable power to bring resilience, imagination, and hope to the story we write together.

Scales Fall

Yesterday morning, a mystery bug knocked me flat. The sudden onset and the unpleasantness of the symptoms pointed to food poisoning. However, once my temperature hit 102 degrees and I found myself sleeping 30 out of 36 hours, speculation turned to something viral.

Around 9:00pm, I roused myself from my foul nest and wobbled downstairs. The parents were up watching television in the living room. Needing some human company, I curled up in an easy chair while my kind mother delievered toast and a popsicle.

Ken Burns' documentary of the Civil War was on PBS. I drifted in and out of awareness as various narrators spoke about the first battle of Manassas. This happens to be one of the few conflicts of that war with which I am familiar, having made it a regular habit to hike the Manassas battlefield with historic guide in hand. The pace of the documentary is artfully created. With nothing more than old photographs and a few minutes of Shelby Foote to engage the eye, the drama builds and the viewer is drawn in.

After the show ended, I lolled around whimpering as my parents flipped through channels.  They landed on a crime drama involving a murder-suicide that turned out to be a double-homicide. Formulaic stuff. I've seen hundreds of these before. They hold no appeal for me. However, I could not bring myself to return to my rank cave upstairs, so I stayed put and let the show roll on out over me.

This is the most TV I've watched in a year. My eyes are not accustomed to seeing the world arranged in such a way. The women are all insanely skinny, perfectly coiffed, and wearing impractical clothes. Everyone is young. The workplaces are sterile, the dialogue stilted, the jokes delivered at a jittery pace. The characters all seem to have a lot of money. Okay, so these observations are nothing new. What struck me was how bizarre it appeared. These eyes have watched a lot of visual media over the decades, and they've never before registered the oddness with this impact.

Avoiding the television universe for such a significant chunk of time is like existing on another planet. Where I live, people's bodies come in a wide array of shapes, and conversations tumble along an unpredictable landscape. I had not considered this outcome of my fast. As the real inhabits my attention, the unreal beomes odd, surreal, and even alien. For years, I had heard (usually older) people say that actresses and models looked off to them. Almost insectile. "Give that girl a cheeseburger!"

For the first time last night, I had the same experience. My reaction to the creature in the Victoria's Secret ad was fascinated revulsion, which is a far cry from the desire or covetousness I have spent my life experiencing. Now, my Zumba mornings are spent in the company of real bodies moving with grace (or stiffness, or awkwardness, or joy). Following the dance is the locker room, where those same bodies peel down to flesh and limp around, showering and oiling up. Several times a week, I am surrounded by naked human skin. Even the fittest among us are made of age and dimples, sag and muscle, scar and wobble.

Having Ken Burns provide a juxtaposition to the staccato, commercial-laden and almost cartoonish crime drama is a good thing. It serves as a reminder of the argument people often make in defense of visual media. "It's just a tool. It can be used in so many ways." Yep, it can. And just like any activity - writing or cooking or talking with a friend - it can be done superficially or mindfully. We can take shortcuts or we can go the long way around. Our art is an extension of our lives, after all. Do we grab for the fleeting pleasure? Or do we attend to crafting the real?

This morning, I am coming up from the delirium of my illness. Outside, a hazy, April sun hangs low over my neighborhood. In another lifetime, a sick day would have found me curled up on the sofa with club soda and the remote. Today, however, I will read an essay by Barbara Kingsolver. I will stretch my creaking limbs long in the bed and draw healing breath down into my tissues. I will ease myself down to the back deck and listen for the chickadee who is sure to arrive here soon, if only I keep my ears tuned, if only I invite him in.

Devolution

Night is falling. So is wet snow. We turn onto our street, and my son announces he wants to walk the dog when we get home. For months, I've been wheedling and bribing him to help with this task. And now, on the night my mother is home to help with this, and slush is glopping from the sky, and it's been a wretched day, he wants to walk the dog?

"Yeah! In the far away woods!"

Of course.

This is the season of yes. I have committed to looking up, to paying attention. After a deep breath, I take notice. My very own boy has offered to walk with me. In the rain! At night! I may be tired, but I'm not a fool. I wrangle us both into the house to don rubber boots, grab mittens, leash the dog. It is already dusk, and I have no time to scrounge for either umbrella or flash light, or to remember to pack a snack. It's just us and our restless feet.

"Hop in the stroller, kiddo!" He does, and I entrust him with Fenway's lead. In my flopping wellies, I jog the rattling stroller over a mile of black neighborhood streets, through the intersection, up the cul-de-sac, into the stretch of trees that can carry us into the deeper woods. The capricious weather needles my cheeks and creeps down my neck. My blood rises to meet it, defiant.

We park the stroller upside-down and tramp down the root-veined path. Untethered, all three of us tumble through curtains of bud-tipped shrubs into the forgiving mud. Bug and the mutt take turns surging into the lead. The mist deepens around us. My boy pauses to pick up a clump of wood he claims is coal for keeping us warm.

"It is getting dark," he says to me, stopping to notice scarlet-edged night slipping around the brush. "Can you find your way in the dark, Mommy?"

"Oh, yes, baby. I am right at home in the woods. I can always find my way."

"You're not scared?"

"I love it here." I spread my arms wide. "The forest is wrapping around us, giving us a big hug. The trees keep us safe."

He walks on. "I can hear the raindrops," he tells me. Then he grins. "One just got my lip!"

We twist over the damp bridge and into the creek. Bug is wary at its edge until I remind him he is in galoshes. He stamps right into the water. "Now one-two-three of us are walking in the river!" Fenway is already splashing upstream.

Shoulders squared, the little Shackleton makes his way along the creek, up and over the thickening brush. "Be careful of the prickers, Mommy!" He calls back, not waiting for my response. He scales an eroding wall of loose rock then descends back into the water. Even when the easy bank is within reach, he favors the tangle, the splash, the slip.

Then just like that, it is night. I see it has plopped down in its big easy chair and there is no chance of rousing it. Bug sees only the next eddy, the next swirling bend, his next step. The depth is hard to gauge. He is careful until he is not. Then, down he slips into a smooth, black pool. He sinks quickly, up to the knees. Water snakes with breathtaking suddenness into his boots, down to his bones. Before he has a chance to panic, I swoop in, grab him around the chest, and swing him over to the shore.

The mighty explorer shrinks down to a quiver and a sway. Even in the blackness, I can sense tears pushing back against the rain. A small voice whimpers, "It's really cold."

He leans in. I pour the water from the boots and peel off the socks. I hunch my broad back down, heft the cub on board. Crouched, iced to the marrow, we make our way back downstream. Darkness embraces us. The creek guides my blind feet. Bug burrows in, digging his ice-seared fingers into mama bear's armpits, pressing his cheek against my damp back. The pelt may be thin but it is durable. Thorned bushes bend deep, the knuckles of trees prod me gently along. Low and sure, I make my steady way towards the place where the forest breathes open and spills us over its threshold.

A blanket, mittens, relentless rain. We leave the safe embrace of forest and wind our way back through the strange wildrerness of the neighborhood. Brick and clapboard blink at our passing, uncomprehending. Our faces are clouds of wet fog. Our faces are swallowed by the singular smile of upending routine and shaking out ancient secrets. No one can see what we smuggle from the forest in our naked arms. No one even knows we are here

We have gone native. We are jungle. We are night.