I woke up on the “day of concern” at 6:03 a.m., as I have done since I was seven years old. I sat on the edge of my bed and counted my teeth with my tongue. I have a total of thirty teeth. When I was eight, I had thirty-two, at that time I read an article that said when aliens take humans for testing they will often remove a tooth or two.

Mila said she never trusted the clouds out in that country. In the summer they looked harmless enough, soft pillows or feathery streaks, but it was their way of moving she distrusted, with no set path and no mountains to guide their course. Even after living there all her adult life, she said, she still felt a little nausea, like motion sickness, just thinking about it.

I stand in the evening wind
Just outside my barn,
On four boards facing west
By rose bushes piled high, almost in bloom,

I can no longer
tread, tremor, tease
float
naked in this moat

our prayer flags…
are trampled, torn
and wire wrapped

our cairns…
lean left and tumble

there is a strange sort of humor
about growing old
as if it were funny to forget
where you parked your car

My favorite book when I was eight was the Bobbsey Twins at the Seashore. Into my teen years, the memory of that tale conjured up long stretches of sand whiter than I’d ever seen and enormous, deep blue waves that curled up and over and heaved themselves down onto the shore and out again. I lived in a small town in central Minnesota. There were lakes

Now and again thousands of memories converge, harmonize, arrange themselves around a central idea in a coherent form, and I write a story.”
-Katherine Anne Porter