My grandfather started dying more than ten years ago. That’s when everybody first found out that he had lymphoma, the bad kind that takes you slowly. He’s been held together with scotch tape for the last few years, but somehow he and my grandmother have found dignity and a way to still drive an hour on Indiana state roads from their house on a lake to the nearest town where their doctors and extended family live.

I have a video of my grandfather and I walking across his property to the water I shot a few years back, before the weight left him. “Here’s where I’m going to build the dock,” he says on the video, pointing to a few tires visible through the surface. It’s that little stuff that’s kept him going, the thought of buying another place on Klinger Lake as a family summer home, of piecing together piers and harvesting.

He used to buy a new truck every year, and he had a string of Irish setters I’d see in the back of them over the years. Star, Misty. Then Gillie. When she died a few years ago my cousin Ross started to ask, “where’s Gill–” during the Christmas meal. He stopped himself, but anyone could have made the slip. Because she’d always just been around in one incarnation or another.

I’m really in the water, broth in sips, very much believing I exist
because of what’s around me, copper kettle
more than what I’m made of–an elevation of bones, hair, and teeth bound up and sung

ball
book
wawa (water)
pup
pop pop (grandfather)
mama
daddy
cheese
blue
nana
hi
hey
uh oh
wow
owl
tree
hot
hat
bye
light
bell
eye

The same thing began to happen to my hair shortly after I gave birth. Strands started appearing everywhere, first in my food. It was easy enough to imagine some ruff-and-tumble line cook shaking his dandruffy maine into my Mediterranean salad until I connected the dots and realized that the hair, of course, was mine.

The shedding of my hair, caused by a normal hormonal shift after pregnancy, became a reminder of my ‘isness’ every time I got out of the shower and collected a fresh clump from the drain. It’s made me wonder if my hair loss isn’t just a symptom of post-pregnancy but of a broader curiosity, a weird mental break-up with myself before I became a mother.

Me with lots of hair: in bars, out for dessert, breezing through fitting rooms. Me with less hair: running two miles not three, out to brunch before naptime, whipping avacodos into baby food jars.

The hairshirt, or sackcloth, was used in Biblical times as an exclamation point at the end of a sentence–a visual representation of a pilgrim waiting for atonement.  Truth is, if I gathered up all the hair that’s fallen off my head in the past three months, crocheted it into loops and made a tank top, I wouldn’t know how to wear the thing. I wear my baby in public now, and he’s pretty, messy proof that we can be good, or at least better, again.

In a few minutes I’m sitting down to eat wintry things, getting my body ready for what’s ahead. It’s like this whole new color will get invented as soon as he’s born, and I can’t begin to see it now because nobody but God imagines colors. But soon everything will have this tint and it will filter over my clothes, water, the soles of my shoes.

And the way life feels different between summer and winter will be a really old feeling, because now I’ll have this kid, and this hue, and everything everywhere will be like leaves pressed in books and lost for awhile.

I found this letter to the editor about five years ago in the Muncie, Indiana Star Press. Now I never liked Bush at all, but this guy? He takes the cake.

Please, please read the last paragraph. I can’t believe it actually made it into print.

They comfort you all year long. Comfort them this holiday season.