a moment in the day: mattress

We're lying in bed. We've been watching our show, having our usual late dinner, and the credit music is rolling and soon it's time to go to sleep.

He says, "I'm a little nervous about the new mattress coming tomorrow."

"You mean because it might be too difficult to get set up or it might not turn out to be what you want?"

"You know, I've had this mattress for thirty years," he says. "I think since I was living in my grandmother's house."

I remember it there. When I visited him that one time before we were married. When he made me dinner and we sat on the bed and ate profiteroles.

He picks up his dish and takes it out of the room, to the kitchen, to rinse it. I lie back and close my eyes. I can picture lying in this bed in our old apartment. The little TV in the corner with the bay window behind. How we used to call it the tree house because through all the windows in that corner, at least if you were lying down, you could see nothing but branches and leaves.

I try to feel Nicholas lying on the mattress next to me. Stephen breaks the spell as he comes back into the bedroom. 

I feel so suddenly sad and I don't know why. It's strange to feel sad about losing a mattress. When losing it doesn't erase the stories that happened there, when it's not even the whole bed. Maybe it's not loss I'm feeling but some sort of deep nostalgia. I just know that when I lay back a moment ago and closed my eyes, I felt like I was there in that old place. Could really feel it. Which is something for me because I don't tend to remember things vividly. It was a little dream of a place, wasn't it? Too small, but those bay windows and the stacks of old movie DVDs we used to watch and the Christmas lights strung across the edge of the ceiling.

I wasn't able to fully conjure Nicholas though. I think I only pictured him there from photos we have of him somewhere, lounging reluctantly close to Kitty. No, that wasn't even Nicholas, was it? The little Chihuahua in those photos was José. My memories are all bunched up together and suddenly feel far away.

I think when I tried to picture Nicholas just now, I didn't know where I should put him in the scene. On the pillow beside my head, maybe, or under the covers by my waist, in the crook of my arm, warm and breathing.

a moment in the day: worm

We're cleaning up after the electricians have finished working in the kitchen. I've just put a big piece of, I don't know, drywall?, in the outside garbage, and as I head back from the bin through the soft rain, Stephen is heading over with a full trash bag to chuck. 

On the wet concrete not far from my shoes is a worm. At first it just looks like a thin streak of shadow, but it's moving. Making a mosey toward the house. I don't want it to get stepped on. I stoop, make the fingers of both my hands as delicate as I can to pick it up. 

It shrinks at my touch. As I gather it in my hand, Nicholas's spirit runs from the worm and into my skin.  

I don't believe in magical things, in spiritual things, as a rule. Still. At night in bed when my defenses are down, when my daily projects are quiet and I'm missing people and worrying about people, I close my eyes, squish my head into my pillow, and try to send a ghost thread of me out into the air, into the atoms, through the wood of my house, the drywall and dust, into the night, into the all of the everything, try to send it out far enough to make a connection with someone on the other side. 

And fall asleep.

I guess I can't complain that I'm such a good sleeper.

The worm squiggles in my hand. I go over to the grass, crouch down, and let it go.

a moment in the day: visitation

I've popped downstairs to warm the two sips of coffee at the bottom of my cup. Pulling it from the microwave, closing the little door, I turn and, as my eyes glance across the kitchen, bringing into my periphery the big window to the back yard, my brain blinks to Nicholas. As it sometimes does when I look outside. All the times I would take him out, stand with him as he paced and paced the grass in those final dog years.

Now my eyes turn to look at the window full on, and for just a quarter second: there he is. Right there in the window 

A dark shape against the gray of the rainy yard.

It's the neighbors' cat Tiger. Sitting on the little table just outside the window. 

He pays me no mind. Sniffs around at the edge of the glass. Then hops down and away.

a moment in the day: thread

It's garbage day and I've dumped the recycling from the can to the bin, dumped the compost from the little kitchen container to the other bin, and as I set the empty compost container in the sink to soak, I go over to our calendar, tacked to the wall, to see if this week is a garbage week or a non-garbage week. The city takes the compost, the recycling, the glass every week, but the garbage only every other. I have garbage day notated on the calendar on every other Monday with a little g.

This Monday has no g. Not a garbage day. But my eyes tick to Tuesday, where Stephen's handwriting says:

Nicholas Day

The words hit like a warm, soft thud in my chest. A whole year tomorrow since we said goodbye.

I think about this as I drag the garden-clipping-and-compost bin down along the side of the house to the curb. My little boy. I should pay some sort of tribute. Share some pictures. What would I say?

What comes to mind is that I feel Nicholas in all the little beings I see, somehow. The squirrels that run across the fence with their question mark tails, the birds that hop in the trees.

I walk back from the curb and along the side of the house.

What comes to mind is, sometimes I worry that I let go too soon. Sometimes I worry that I held on too long.

As I grab hold of the handle of the big blue plastic recycling bin, I see the asterisked translucent threads of a spiderweb running from the bin to the fence. The spider sitting dead center trembles with the movement as my hand tips the bin up just so slightly and then stops.

I stand there holding the bin at that little angle for a moment.

Then set it back down. I'll take out the recycling next week.

a moment in the day: a shot

I'm just pulling the garbage out of the can to get it ready to take it to the curb when my sister texts: "Hey mom and I are gonna have a shot for dad in a min can you too?"

It's August 11. Five years—five unbelievable years long—since our dad left this world. My mom loves good tequila and doesn't drink it much, but she has a nice bottle that she and Edina once in a while, for a special occasion or remembrance, will take down and pour a shot and toast.

I start going through the cabinet. What can I use? There's an open bottle of red wine on the counter but it's 95 degrees out at seven in the evening, and somehow a shot of something hard seems less of a fireball to your stomach than red wine right now. The phone—the land line, we only talk on the land line—starts ringing and I run through the house to grab it. Mom's on the other end, ready with her little shot glass with Edina close by. I tell her I'm looking for what to use, and I pull down from the high cabinet in the kitchen the bottles my hand can reach. 

A pretty blue bottle that turns out to be gin. A brown bottle that looks to be less than a shot's worth of rum. Mom says that Edina says that I can use "three fingers of milk" if I want. That sounds better than the gin.

"I've got Cointreau!" I say and find a pretty shot glass in the lower cabinet and pour. 

I don't know where to go for this moment. I don't want to stand in the kitchen next to my garbage bag. I go out into the dining room, then through to the edge of the living room. There's nothing of Dad in here, but Mom and Edina are waiting, so I stop, and I realize that what I was doing was moving toward the spot in the corner of the living room with Nicholas's painting and Nicholas's ashes, one loss pinch-hitting for another.  

I say, "OK!"

"I'm clinking with Edina," Mom announces. And then, "I'm clinking the phone!"

I clink the phone. "I'm clinking the phone!"

The phone's plastic so it's more like a clack.

And now a sip. Sweetness that tweaks at my nostrils and burns down into my stomach.

"Edina shot," Mom says. "I'm sipping."

"I'm sipping," I say.

"You know, your dad liked Cointreau," Mom says.

And I am so happy. I didn't know that. Or if I knew that, I forgot it. I just remember that when Dad was drinking he liked Scotch, which we don't have. 

I raise my glass to the fact that Dad liked Cointreau.

After we hang up the phone and Mom and Edina go off to make nachos, a fitting dish for a Dad day, I linger to sip a little longer, not yet ready to get back to taking out the trash.

a moment in the day: fourth

Lying in bed in the mostly dark listening to the occasional boom. This was, of course, a very different Fourth of July. Not devoid of fireworks but nothing like the war-zone bombast of the past. 

Good.

I'm already fading away to sleep, but the relative quiet of the neighborhood tonight takes my brain to two places. First to the fact that we, at least in these more thoughtful parts of the country, just don’t want to celebrate this fraught history and tormented, tormenting place. And second, that I miss the little boy who I used to have to take into the bathroom with the loud ceiling fan and sing to on Fourth of Julys past.

a moment in the day: fan

Ninety-one degrees, and my portable air conditioner is fighting the added heat of my second-floor, poorly insulated attic-turned-office at the very end of the work day. I don't know why I didn't think of this yesterday when it was ninety-six, but now I'm hauling out the box fan in an attempt to drag some of the cooler air over from the quarter of the room that the air conditioner's magic reaches.

Plug the thing in, start to walk away, yank the plug out somehow with my foot, step back over, plug it back in. Angle the thing toward my desk and then go sit down into the rush of relative comfort.

And it occurs to me. This is the first time I've taken the fan out since Nicholas. This is the first time in I couldn't say how long—years maybe—that I turned on a fan and aimed it at me instead of at a little warm body curled sleeping on his pillows at my feet.

a moment in the day: succulent

Morning, and Stephen's head is in the doorway at the bottom of the stairs, talking up to me about last night's dream as I sit at my computer. Talking about taking down the Christmas tree, finally, this weekend.

He looks away, into the kitchen, then back up to me. "Boy," he says. "That little succulent? When it decided to go, it went."

That little succulent is one of two that came as part of the bouquet of flowers my sister Lizehte sent us when we said goodbye to Nicholas back in September. There was a little card with the flowers that said you could take the succulents and plant them and they would grow. It felt like the perfect thing for that sad time, something that could grow, although the flowers were so hearty, we left them in the vase so long, one of the succulents, when we finally went to plant them, didn't look great. The other did, and there was a long root hanging from the bottom of its cut-off stump. Stephen planted the two side by side in a squat, blue pot and put in on the kitchen counter.

The one always looked healthy and the one always looked a little sickly but I hoped they'd both thrive eventually. Sometimes I'd put the tip of my finger in the little cradle of one of their thick leaves and feel Nicholas the way you can feel the hint of the life in all things if you look for it.

"What will you do with it?" I ask.

"Well," Stephen says, "it's nothing but dead leaves."

"Will you toss it in the garden? Maybe back by the tree? Instead of tossing it in the trash?"

He thinks a moment. "Sure. Okay." 

I'm going to cry. "Thanks," I say.

"Alright," he says. "I'm going to have some coffee."

a moment in the day: carpet

Ten o'clockish on election night. We've listened to the commentaries and obsessed over the map and eaten a pan of French fries, knowing there probably won't be any miracle in the night to bring us back from this dangerous and ludicrous place our country has gotten to. 

I've done squats and pushups and sit-ups and I should just go to bed, my brain doesn't know what to do with all of this, even though I did kind of figure it would go this way. Instead, I sit down on the floor in my office upstairs, the room where Nicholas spent most of his time at the end of his life. I lean close over the carpet. I look for pieces of fur.

That's my hair, that's my hair, that's my hair, there's one. One single strand of Nicholas's fur. It's so small. Less than an inch long. Every tiny piece of fur, I pluck it up and then twitch my fingers over a ramekin and drop it inside.

I haven't vacuumed up here since we said goodbye to Nicholas. I haven't been ready to suck up all those tiny wisps of him. I'm strange, and this little activity is undoubtedly gross. Maybe I won't tell Stephen.

I get my phone and turn on the little flashlight and direct it across the carpet. The light glints on strands. That's my hair, there's one, that's my hair, there's one. 

There's this book Powell's had on display once a long time ago, called something like Felting with Cat Hair. I don't even know if you could do that with Chihuahua hair. It's so short, could it even stick together? I don't know if I would do that if I could, even if I could procure enough fur, and I already have a little snipping of his fur in a locket, but I still hunt and hunt. I feel weird and obsessed. Maybe I won't tell Stephen.

There are lots of them embedded in the black fabric of the futon. I use the tweezers.

After what feels like a long time of this, I look and I have—almost nothing. A thin spiderweb of fur, nearly invisible against the white bottom of the ramekin.

I keep going. One little fur, one little fur. And here at the end of this important and horrifying election day, this activity feels like it's trying its damnedest to be a metaphor—this interminably slow attempt to get each of these single tiny things to add up to something big—but I'm too sad to dig too deep into what to make it mean.

a moment in the day: sky

People are sharing pictures of the northern lights, again, on Facebook. I knew there was a possibility through some news story I popped into earlier in the day. Now, late, Stephen doing dishes, I go upstairs and click over to the NOAA Aurora 30-Minute Forecast tab I've had on my computer ever since May, the first time everyone in Oregon but me, it seemed, saw them. The map shows bright red—high chance—over a huge portion of the top of the country and Canada, cooling to a lime green—still some chance—as it dips into Oregon and over Portland.

I get a funny pang in my chest. This is just one more example of the ways my life has changed now that I don't have Nicholas in it anymore. I have no reason to go outside at the end of the night.

When I go back downstairs and mention the northern lights to Stephen, he says, sure, let's go look, and he takes his stocking cap and puts it over the backyard security light to keep us in darkness. I go and stand in the center of the yard. Look north over the neighbors' roof. The sky is nothing but clouds. 

a moment in the day: walk

Late afternoon on a mild October day, Stephen and I are taking a walk. The trees we pass are green, then orange, then red, then green again. 

"Want to go see the fairy garden?" he asks.

"Sure." We turn at the corner and keep going.

Taking a walk, or like last night, actually going out to a reading event, are things I didn't do much in these, the last months of Nicholas' life, as his eyes became cloudier, his body shakier, his separation anxiety all-consuming. Feels weird whenever I'm out of the house now.

There was something sacred about giving all my time to him at the end. And now, on the other side, a walk isn't just a walk; it's also not being needed anymore.

Everything is two things right now. Everything is the thing it is and also the thing it used to be. Turning the latch on the top lock of the back door—the rigidness under my fingers, then the give and the creak-clunk as it turns—is also me taking Nicholas out in the mornings. Getting up from my desk to cross the room to turn on, or off, the air conditioner is also looking for where he is on his little pile of pillows: is he asleep, is he awake, shall I get down there on the floor and give him a cuddle? Doing exercises late at night is also holding Nicholas to my chest instead of gripping hand weights as I do fifty squats, wondering what he thinks of bobbing up and down, up and down.

My history with Nicholas lives deep in my body, in all the tiny ways my body moves every day—turning over in bed, pouring a glass of water, stepping down the back steps.

Here's the fairy garden, suddenly, and Stephen and I stop to look. It's really just a house in the neighborhood where they've planted so many different types and colors of flowers that it looks kind of magical. Stephen points to a corner of the lawn and talks about how he saw the owners do some sort of special technique to get the formerly patchy grass to grow in quick and full. I think about Nicholas walking around our backyard in the tiny shoes I got him back in July when we had so many bees buzzing in the clover.

Everything is going to be two things for a while. And that's as it should be. I ask Stephen if he ever met the people who live here and if he ever told them he calls their yard a fairy garden. We look at the pretty flowers for a little longer and then we continue on our way.

a moment in the day: animal hospital

Two in the morning at the emergency animal hospital is quiet. Not many people in the waiting area. There's the man with the Yorkie called Max and the woman with the cat named Halloween. And Stephen and me sitting side by side, Nicholas on my lap. The big TV screen on the wall is showing Bob Ross painting a mountain with the sound mostly off.

When we first got here during the eleven o'clock hour, it was noisier, Nicholas on my lap emitting a slow rhythm: a cry, then quiet, a cry, then quiet. He was agitated and his face was swollen and we were worried he was having an allergic reaction to something. But in the time we've been waiting here, he seems to have passed whatever reaction he was having to whatever it was. The swelling has gone down and he's not crying or agitated anymore. He curls on my lap mostly snoozing. We're at that point in the long emergency room night where you ask yourself whether you should have stayed home but you've been here long enough that it feels wrong to leave.

Max and his owner have been here since seven o'clock.

Bob Ross has been painting landscapes on the TV screen for three hours. There's a Bob Ross network, apparently? This late into the night, that fact feels kind of surreal. What is the purpose of the Bob Ross network? Is it expressly made for calming people in waiting rooms? Can individuals subscribe to the Bob Ross Network?

Time moves weirdly during the emergency room night. It feels like it moves both too fast and too slow. I look at the clock. I watch Bob Ross paint another mountain. I pet Nicholas. I look at the clock. I watch Bob Ross paint tree branches. I pet Nicholas. I stare into space. I look at the clock. I watch Bob Ross paint wave breaks in a seascape.

Now a sudden hot seep spreads across my lap under Nicholas. He's peeing. It's not a little tinkle but a wide Bob Ross seascape, and I'm too tired to really care. 

"Yeah," I say to Stephen, deadpan. "He's peeing."

As Stephen gets up to go after paper towels and call the front desk person for a clean up, I turn my eyes back to Bob Ross. It's going to be a long night.

a moment in the day: drop-off

Early morning, outside with Nicholas, the air chilled and full of the sound of crows. I'm sitting in a chair while Nicholas wanders and sniffs. Pull out my phone and am looking at the weather app.

Through the shatter of crow sound, suddenly, just above me is a thud at the edge of the roof, and now something drops, fast, past my head, and lands on the concrete just an inch or two away from Nicholas. 

He sniffs at it. I look up: edge of the roof and sky above.

A crow swoops out from somewhere above the roof, passes above me, and lands on the edge of the roof of the studio a few feet away. 

Did a crow just try to drop a pinecone on my dog?

Now more crows are trading places across the yard: the roof, the arbor, the fence post. I pick up the pinecone and set it on the table. I figure we might as well head inside, and as I gather Nicholas up and turn toward the door, the crows are already dropping one by one onto the grass. I go in, close the door, and head up the steps, then stop and look out the window as the mirthful murder, all cackle and flutter, close in around and dive into our small offering of last night's chunk of leftover birthday cake from my dessert plate, devour it in moments, and are gone.

a moment in the day: just to say

I come up the stairs with a cold glass of water to offer to my dog because he was just lapping at the very bottom of his. He's up on the futon bed, now, curled up comfy, so instead of pouring it into his dish, I take the glass and sit down next to him. Take a drink to show him how much he'll enjoy it. Reach the glass down to his level.

Nicholas looks at the glass and then at me. He's not interested.

I drink again, offer it again. He looks at the glass.

"Drink this," I tell him. "It's so good. So cold. Like a plum from the fridge or whatever. Don't you get poetry?"

Nicholas is unimpressed.

a moment in the day: jazz

It's night on the third of July and Nicholas and I are camped out in the upstairs bathroom with the door closed and the overhead fan on: his safe place in fireworks weather.

As the fan and closed door aren't quite enough to keep the sound completely out, I'm singing to him. It's our fireworks ritual going back I-don't-know-how-many years. Well, probably as long as we've owned this house.

I generally sing him old jazz standards. Mean to Me. Lush Life. Don't Smoke in Bed. When the firecracker sounds kicked up into high gear a while ago, he got agitated. Started panting, looking distressed, so I grabbed my phone and dialed up YouTube to add backup to my singing.

Now, we've sung our way through the entirety of Peggy Lee's Blues Cross Country, Nicholas curled on his pillow, me on the floor next to him, my hand going down his back. I'm getting tired of jazz. I poke some letters into YouTube's search bar and bring up some Beatles tunes. Start one playing.

It won't be long, yeah

(yeah)

Yeah

(yeah)

Yeah

(yeah)

Nicholas's head comes up. He starts panting again. 

I don't think he likes rock 'n roll.

a moment in the day: crown

Stephen and I are just back from getting our second covid shots. We have a few moments before I need to be off upstairs to get on Zoom for my writing group. He's going to head out into the studio to get to work, but I make him wait and I run from the room, coming back with two Christmas crackers, one gold foil paper, one silver. I hand them both out to him and he laughs. I tell him to take his pick.

It will be two weeks before we're fully vaccinated, but I feel like we should celebrate, just a little. With as precious as these shots are, with as difficult as it has been for many to get appointments—and more so in other places in the world—I've tried to think of the vaccination wait as one, long, rolling Christmas or Hanukkah or whatever big holiday people would wait for, all year, when they were kids. Something to try to anticipate with excitement rather than impatience. I used to think about erecting a tree in the house with lights and putting names underneath it, a new name each time someone I loved got vaccinated.

But who puts up a Christmas tree in the spring? So these will have to do.

We each take the ends of our Christmas crackers in our hands. These ones are the kind that don't make a pop sound when you open them, but still, Nicholas runs from the room. We count one, two, three. Yank our crackers open. The loot falls on the floor. The paper crown, the slip of paper with a joke on it, and for each of us, a little prize like from a Crackerjack box. Wait. Is that why they call them Crackerjacks?

My prize is a weird, little keychain with a bottle opener shaped like a dead fish.

We put the paper crowns on our heads. Shiny gold foil. We ask each other Christmas jokes. 

What do you call Santa Claus when he goes down the chimney and the fire is lit?

Krisp Kringle.

"That's kind of violent," I say when Stephen reads me the answer.

When I turn to go off to writing group, my paper crown falls off my head and floats to the floor. I pick it up. Put it back on. Head upstairs.

a moment in the day: golden

Middle of the work day, me at my desk at home, typing away on my laptop. Checking my Outlook calendar for Zoom meetings. I click the "remote desktop" icon in my tray and my screen blinks to another cyber environment, remoting into my office computer so I can use a program there. This strange world of work-from-home.

Over the top of my laptop screen, across the little room, Nicholas snoozes in a pile of blankets on the futon bed. His eyes blink open and he's looking at me.

Those eyes are a tractor beam, pulling me up from my chair. I cross to him. A brief moment to slip my hand under his covers and scratch his warm fur.

One thing about this pandemic. It's a golden age for dogs.

"Do you even remember," I ask him out loud, "when I used to leave the house for nine hours almost every day?"

Nicholas makes a soft sleepy snorty sound and closes his eyes.

a moment in the day: post

Just off the phone with my mom, lounging on the bed with Nicholas, giving him a pet, I pick up my cell lying there. Scroll a little.

Now there's a dog nose poking into my scrolling.

"Hey," I say.

I turn the phone toward him and touch where it says, create post. A virtual keyboard rises up.

"Here," I tell him. "Want to post something?"

Nicholas looks at the screen. His nose swipes across the surface.

a moment in the day: one

Quiet, I bend down and lift Nicholas out of his self-heating doggy bed and carry him through the dark morning house. Past the Christmas tree whose lights, with their automatic shut-off, turned themselves off somewhere in the night. The whirr up from the heating vent. Through the kitchen to take him out for a first pee.

As I go to step down the back stairs I remind myself that my Christmas doggy socks with Nicholas' face all over them are a little slick on the bottom. I remind myself it's still 2020. 

Be extra careful. You can make it one more day.

Silly to lay so much significance on a number, to pretend a curse can be contained inside a year.

Still, my brain has always been fond of games and if I'm to play a game on this last morning of double twos and double zeroes, let that game be that what's to come, when that last zero turns to a one, will be better.

I step slowly down, push open the back door. Coming in with the cold is the keening rise and fall of an emergency truck siren.

a moment in the day: glass

Early morning black and Stephen is snoring, quietly, but enough that it wakes me. I try to pretend for a while that I can ignore the rhythm of it, but I finally give up and rise. Take my ear plugs out and put them in the drawer in the bedside table. Ease out from the covers.

I reach down and gently lift Nicholas from his pillow on the floor where he's been sleeping ever since the injury. It hurts my heart that he may never be able to sleep in the bed with us again.

Hip dysplasia. Thank you, 2020, for bestowing so many gifts upon us. We give him his medicine. We rest him. We keep him from jumping up or down from things, going up and down the stairs. Hoping treatment will avoid surgery, I don't want him to have to go through yet another surgery.

I carry him quiet through the dark house. Up the stairs. Maybe, maybe I can put him down on his pillow on the floor. Put the baby gate at the top of the stairwell. Go back to sleep on the little daybed.

Through the dark of the room, there's a tick-tick-tick against the skylights. It's raining. Of course it's raining. Nicholas is afraid of the rain. Even with the baby gate up to keep him from going back down, he'll pace. He'll be agitated and afraid. If I put him back downstairs will he stay if I'm not there? Will he try to find me?

For a moment we stand here, suspended, Nicholas in my arms, his little silhouette turned toward the tick-tick-ticking against the glass. 

I try to believe it will be OK, that his hip will get stronger and we can manage things. But this year. I've lost so much. We've all lost so much. This raging pandemic, this president downplaying and lying even as he gets pumped full of special and experimental drugs behind the scenes for his own case of the virus that his administration mismanaged, telling people this thing is not a big deal so they'll go out and keep catching it and keep spreading it, keep dying. Less than a month away from the election, and no, I don't have hope that it'll turn out OK, because this year and these four years have taught us otherwise. Sometimes I think my brain has been permanently changed to be unable to ever have hope again that things could be OK.

Don't think about it. Don't wake yourself up. Take Nicholas back down. Maybe you can go back to sleep. At least that's something, right? A few more hours of sleep?

I turn and take a step, and my foot kicks a water glass on the floor. It cracks into pieces.