Thanks, I needed that
My sister is younger than me – brighter and more fickle too. She lives in a town 200 miles north of mine. We text regularly but still miss and baffle each other. One evening in June, when they were home together for the first time in six months, while our parents were asleep, she whispered my name, “Come look at the stars.” I got out of bed and joined her under the infinite sky, our necks stretched out in reverence. “I needed a reminder that they existed and thought you could too,” she said. I did. Star-struck, we went to bed. — Amy Guay
New roots
Naked under a sheet the morning after we first made love, I asked when he had a tree with broken roots tattooed on his right back shoulder. “When I was 17,” he said, “after my parents divorced.” I glanced at the Buddhist self-help books he’d picked up a few months earlier after his own divorce. In the severed roots of the tattoo I recognized the desire to connect, to be part of something bigger than yourself. Six years later, when our daughter was two weeks old, he came home from a tattoo parlor with his roots reassembled. — Stevie Trujillo
ready for anything
Every relationship has its hiccups, but nothing prepared my husband and me for that first wave of hiccups over spaghetti. Initially the rapid fire “hic” sound was funny. Hours later, annoying. The next day, when Richard was still hiccuping, alarming. It’s been 10 years now. We searched desperately for diagnoses; Richard has undergone draconian treatments. He’s still hiccuping. On and off, for hours. You could think of these diaphragmatic spasms as a nagging reminder of what can go wrong with our bodies and our lives. We try to accept them as an enduring assurance that our marriage can endure anything. — David Hubbard
Three centimeters of rain
Recently in Michigan, two inches of rain fell one day, and I kept expecting an excited phone call from my mother. She loved to track my weather from hundreds of miles south in Ohio, calling when it was or was going to be extreme. Gardening and her great-grandchildren were also good subjects for us. Politics and cigarette smoking were not. She’s not long gone, but I’ll always think of her when the weather gets bad. — Mary Beth Lewis
