A cloud of whirligigs spin down on a sudden breeze, from the maple trees newly leafed out in the garden. I’m sitting in the sunroom, looking through the big picture windows I opened to let in the warm air. There’s so much confetti floating in front of me that it feels like I’m inside a snow globe someone shook. It’s enchanting.

The old, mossy azaleas have managed to bloom bright pink again, like aging dowagers who still insist on dressing for dinner. I love the way the dusky fuchsia looks against the grey stone walls, how this fleeting color is the only contrast to the overwhelming green of spring at the moment.

I’ve been away all winter. I’ve missed this quiet communion. To sit and watch the butterflies dance by, to hear the frogs singing in the pond. To smell the rich promise of summer. The birds haven’t quite ventured out yet, but by the sound of loud chirping, they’re busy mustering in the trees. I can understand that. It takes time to adjust to changing seasons.

I spent the last few months in Florida, working hard to get back into competitive riding shape. I focused all my energies on this one goal, not letting myself consider that my need to be so busy and tired at the end of every day would distract me from mourning. But sometimes we need to be still, in order to let our feelings catch up with us.

Sitting here now, with the garden weaving its magic around me, I finally melt. Tears fall on my cheeks like a spring rain, watering my emotions. Through the open windows, the big old trees edging the bowl of lawn seem to bend toward me, their branches rippling as if in sympathy.

I miss my mother. She would have loved it here. After all, she taught me to love gardens, and all the creatures and growing things within them.

George gets up from my feet, where he’s been lying within easy reach of my hand, and whines. There is concern in his young eyes. “It’s okay boy,” I reassure him, wiping my face with my sleeve. I get up and open the sunroom door. Together we walk out into the afternoon light of the garden.

My big, old rhododendron trees are blooming profusely, fat lilac flowers with darker purple starbursts in the center. But it rained hard over the past few days and now the petals are soggy and bruised from the storm. Some have fallen, and litter the ground like pale confetti. I keep reaching for my phone to call my mother, to tell her how achingly beautiful my garden looks this summer. To tell her the azaleas survived being moved last fall, and the apple tree weathered my ignorant pruning. To describe the birds who have returned en masse, cardinals, red house sparrows, and robins. To tell her about the snapping turtle we saw in the pond, and the family of rabbits who appear on the lawn at dusk. To complain to her about the frogs nightly concerts robbing me of sleep. But I can’t call her anymore, and it feels like I’ve lost some integral frame of reference.

When I was 12 my summer job was to work in the garden. I mostly weeded, and deadheaded masses of rhododendrons. I didn’t wear gloves back then, and my small fingers became perpetually sticky from sap. When I complained of the monotonous work, the endless hedges in front of me, my mother explained. “We must deadhead them if we want them to bloom properly.” We had a full time gardener for the long sweeps of manicured lawn dotted with old trees, and the wide ribbon of flowerbeds lining the property. But for three years every summer, I was assigned to the smaller, more tedious tasks. My mother would tend to the half dozen flowerpots, artfully placed around the front of the house, and the rose garden in the back. If she wasn’t deadheading petunias or geraniums, she was clipping back the roses in the beds lining the patio. She enjoyed being outside in the sun, and I didn’t mind the work when she was near.

I didn’t understand until later how perfectly my mother could arrange things, both outside and inside the house. I used to watch her direct my father hanging the many paintings they collected over the years. My father always wanted to measure, to avoid putting more than one nail in the wall if he could help it. But perspective is not an exact science, and I never saw my mother use a tape. I grew up in a house with walls covered in art set at exactly the right viewing height for my mother’s 5’8” frame.

Recently, I have hung some of those paintings in my own house. They look perfectly at home, like they have always belonged on my walls. I inherited some of my mother’s perspective, and learned the rest of it at her feet. As a child I watched her move furniture and art and sculpture around the house until she was satisfied with whatever tableau she was decorating. She had a kind of creative asymmetry that I couldn’t help absorbing. When my mother chose material for furniture, beds, or drapes, I began to understand her balance of color and texture. I would run my fingers through the different fabrics much like I stroked the different coats of my dogs and cat, or the feathers of my parakeet. When I set the table for dinner, I could feel the heft and bumpy smoothness of the hand glazed Majolica pottery my parents bought in Mexico. At holidays we used the fine china, hand painted with birds, light as air and nearly translucent in my hands. My mother loved birds.

I miss her more desperately now she’s gone, than I ever did when she was alive. There is so much I long to share with her, but all I can think to do is fill the hole her absence has left in my life with paintings and dishes from my childhood. These large, colorful abstracts and family portraits now adorn my walls, her china now sits in my cupboards. These objects comfort me, cloak me in the veil of her presence, but the wound is still fresh and there is a bittersweet aspect to my inheritance. Like the petals of my rhododendrons, at times I feel bruised and crushed from sudden storms of grief.

I’m knitting a blanket for my nephew’s baby. He’s due on New Year’s Eve. I thought about making him some mittens, or a hat, but I’ve never been that interested in following patterns. They seem too much like directions for assembling Ikea furniture. I knit for instant gratification. And because it has a calming effect on me.

There is something innocuous about knitting that I find comforting. It’s also grounding, the act itself tethering my mind to my hands lest I drop a stitch. Left to its own devices, my mind has a tendency to embrace those irresistible magnets called worry and fear.

This time of year is difficult for many. There is a great deal of financial stress out there, a continuing threat of Covid, and the isolation of family members from each other. Even those who can be with loved ones during the holidays still have to navigate around a bevy of emotional land mines that lie waiting to explode with one false step.

I come from a traditional family, and spent every Christmas with my parents until I had a family of my own. And even then, until we moved away. This year will be the first in 28 years that I haven’t had one of my kids with me at Christmas. And that realization torpedoed me, sent me spinning into the deep. I was caught off guard, not expecting to feel this gutted so late in my mothering career. I thought I was done with the empty nest, thought that was the last big emotional hit. Nobody tells you these things.

It doesn’t help that I’m forced to stay inside at the moment, nursing an eye injury. I need my time outdoors, in nature, moving and breathing away general anxiety. But now, in forced stillness, my mind has caught up with my body and I feel pinned to a board like a butterfly, thoughts beating frantically around my brain like wings, flooding me in yet another loss.

“Sounds like it’s time for a knitting project,” my sister in law advised the other day, when I complained to her about my internment. And so I raced off to the yarn store in relief, as if it were a pharmacy holding a pain medication prescription for me.

I’m now on the couch holding my needles, yarn wrapped around my finger like a lifeline. Yards of it are unspooled at my feet, waiting to be transformed into something that makes sense to me, into a gift at Christmastime. Sugar is curled at my side, purring. As the rows begin to accumulate, I can feel my heart rate slow, and I think about what joy a new baby coming into the world will bring.

I can hear my brother moving around downstairs in the kitchen. The dogs toenails are making clicking sounds on the tiles, and the cats are meowing for their breakfast. My brother’s deep voice murmurs softly to them. It’s early, still dark outside. I’m sitting at my nephew’s desk, writing these words. Through the window I can see the water shining in the blackness. The same water where my brother took me paddle boarding yesterday. I had followed him down to the dock, the dogs whining behind us. The invisible fence stopped them from following. We lifted the boards from their stands and placed them in the water alongside the dock. My brother handed me a paddle. “You’ve paddled before?” He asked me.

“Once, on the lake with Maude,” I said. But this was Puget Sound.

“Strap that thing on your ankle,” he instructed. Then he stepped lightly onto his board and paddled around the other side of the dock, out of sight. I gingerly stepped on my board with knees bent, the transfer of my weight rocking it slightly from side to side. My toes gripped the board and my body felt tense, uncertain. I slowly straightened up, exhaling as if doing a yoga pose, until the board quieted. Then I paddled slowly around the dock. My brother was close to shore, uncharacteristically waiting for me. “Turn your paddle around,” he said. And with that his only correction, he pulled silently away. Watching his tall frame hardly move as he paddled, his head cocked slightly to one side, I was suddenly transported back to childhood. To the listening. When we would move slowly through the forest so as not to startle woodland creatures. My brother was always in front of me then too, as elder, if only by two years. We explored together often, by default as much as anything else. Neither of us had friends that understood our need for solitude. We could be alone, together. The natural world was a blanket around us.

But here on the water, my brother had waited. He didn’t ever look back at me, he didn’t need to, he was listening to the sound of my paddle displacing water. Maybe he used to listen for me in the forest too, to the sound of twigs snapping under my small feet. I was many paddle lengths behind him now, and still he hadn’t turned. But he knew exactly where I was.

We passed several docks, some with boats up on blocks for the winter. Gulls screeched and dove. “Look there, ten o’clock,” my brother called back to me, finally breaking the silence. A young seal popped its head up, gazing at us curiously. My brother whistled softly, reassuring the creature. I could feel the same magic, that rush of wonder bursting through me, as when we stumbled upon a fawn in the forest as children. We paddled by a man on the end of his dock, stowing gear. “Rick,” my brother nodded at the man.

“Whitney,” Rick replied.

“Any fish today?” My brother asked.

“Not many. But we saw four whales,” Rick said in a more animated voice. “One big one.” That caught my brother’s attention and he turned his board toward Rick’s dock, finally allowing me a chance to catch up. My bare feet stung from the cold water dripping from my paddle as I crossed it from side to side. I didn’t dare move my head to look at Rick, focused on keeping my balance.

“You have fifteen minutes in this water before dying of exposure,” my brother had reminded me before we set out. “Try not to get wet.”

I floated up near him while he spoke with Rick. He didn’t introduce me. He would have felt no need. My brother saved his words for situations that required them. I could feel Rick’s eyes, curious, on my back as we paddled away. We were crossing the lagoon at the shortest point, heading towards the shore of Tanglewood Island. I could tell my brother didn’t want me in open water, despite the easy paddling, and barely a ripple on the surface. I would have scoffed at him as a girl. But we’re both approaching 60 now. We’d lost our father, and our mother was declining. Children of the forest, of the lakes and rivers, feel wild things die in their hands. We knew how fragile life could be. How brief.

As we rounded the island, past the lighthouse, my brother pointed at the channel with his paddle.

“That’s where we see whales,” he said. We were a few hundred yards from his dock, his house. And then I understood why he stayed. There’s no running from grief. Like these trees, this water, and these creatures, it will be part of us forever. No matter how far I run, this landscape will always be home.

I sip my coffee and gaze out of the large picture window of the sunroom into the garden. A rabbit darts across the edge of the lawn, over the rock where we buried Cocoa. I like to think he is among his own kind, even now. I open the door to let the morning in, and Sugar out. She pads carefully down the stone steps, dowager-like. The air is cool and fresh, washed clean of summer humidity. I inhale deeply, savoring it.

Sugar walks along the old stone wall that borders the azalea hedge like a terrace, separating the upper garden from the lower. The pond, teeming with lilies and vines, juts into a wide basin of lawn below. Towering trees of oak, maple, and pine anchor this setting, their high canopies almost touching, like mothers’ heads at a playground.

A bird bath rests in the middle of the stone wall, filled to the brim with last night’s rain. Sugar stops to drink from its shallow bowl. It had belonged to my father, who liked to watch the birds under California's desert sun, some years ago now. The birds that live in this Connecticut garden have made themselves invisible while Sugar drinks, but I can hear them protesting her presence noisily from the trees.

Sugar is too old to hunt now. She still likes to sit outside and watch the birds though, reliving her prime in the slight twitch of her tail or flick of her eyes. On days that I weed, she prowls slowly among the shrubs, or naps near me on sun-heated flagstones, warming her old bones. She will often join me in the evenings when I water the flowerbeds, sitting just outside reach of the hose, and watch the spray in companionable silence.

As my cat makes her way back along the wall toward the house I look beyond her to the grass shimmering emerald green from all the rain we’ve had this summer. The birds still wait impatiently for Sugar to disappear before resuming their regular flight patterns, but white butterflies dance across my view like its a stage set in open air.

There’s a cat sleeping on the sidewalk underneath my car. I can see it out my window, periodically moving from the shade to bask in a patch of sun, where it rolls its brown fluffy body around in ecstasy. I can relate. I’ve never spent a whole winter in a warm climate before, and there’s something to be said for rolling around in the sun.

You can say what you want about Florida, that it’s the land of Tiger King and the mockery of memes. Like the guy who held up a mini mart with a duct taped alligator, or the guy who kidnapped a psychic to make his dog immortal, or the couple who sold fake gold lottery tickets to heaven for $99.99. And people bought them. But in addition to the warm weather, the exotic wildlife and natural beauty of Florida, this diverse identity is what I find so entertaining about living here.

I rented a studio in Lake Worth Beach, which is like a carnival version of the fancier and more sanitized community of Palm Beach just to the north. You won’t find monster trucks or muscle cars at The Breakers, no tattoo parlors or vape shops along palm lined Flagler Avenue. The citizens of El Dub (as the locals refer to Lake Worth) comprise a melting pot of age, ethnicity, and interests. Aging hippies, retirees, and people living off the grid blend with working families, millennial hipsters, artists, beach bums, and a handful of homeless people who sleep under the shade trees in Bryant Park.

The majority of houses in my neighborhood are small bungalows, some dilapidated and seedy looking, some well kept and painted in shockingly bright colors like tangerine or periwinkle. The gardens of these houses run the gamut between plastic pink flamingos perched on astro turf and surrounded by cyclone fencing, to being landscaped in gorgeous bougainvillea and hedges of mangroves, set around elegant water features.

In town, large murals cover many of the buildings in artistic abandon. People spill out of bars and restaurants on Lake Avenue at all hours, laughing and drinking and smoking. At night, joy riders thunder by on motorcycles, stereos blasting. Further down, the town square is lined on one side with magnificent ancient banyan trees, aa big fountain dominates the other side, and in between there are engraved tiles of famous black historical figures. The library sits across the street facing the square. One of my favorite things about the neighborhood is the dozens of small kiosks filled with books, dotted every few blocks. The glass fronted cabinets are set on wooden posts with signs that read, “Take a book, Leave a book.”

Every morning I walk down to the water, either through Bryant Park along the path that hugs the Intercostal waterway, or over the drawbridge and back, gazing at the skyline of Palm Beach in the distance, the sailboats moored in the channel, and the pelicans diving for fish. In the park, old men play horseshoes and feed bread to a gaggle of ibises. The walkway goes underneath the bridge where there is a mural of a beautiful, dark haired girl painted in the centermost supporting beam, as if she’s guarding the lagoon.

Now out my window a young, dread locked woman is walking her Great Dane along the sidewalk. She’s wearing a crop top and running underwear, and most of her muscular body is covered in tattoos. Her giant dog stops to sniff under my car, but the cat has vanished.

A great egret came to the edge of my pond again yesterday. When I saw him the first time about a week ago I thought he was a blue heron, but since I only caught a glimpse of him before he flew off, his pale coloring could have been a trick of the light reflecting off the water. But yesterday I could see plainly that he was white. I walked outside for a closer look, moving quietly around the house and down the stairs toward the pond. Charlie and Sugar followed me out before I could close the back door, but thankfully they stopped on the grass and waited, both dog and cat sensing my need for reticence. I stepped up onto the stone wall overlooking the back yard, keeping my hands hidden in my pockets. The statuesque bird watched me carefully for several slow breaths, and then he moved delicately along the water’s edge, his feet disappearing into the mud and his long black legs bending elegantly, like a dancer’s.

“Hello,” I whispered softly. His neck grew a few inches taller at the sound of my voice, and I stretched up in similar reaction. This white creature looked like a painter’s muse, beautiful and regal, the plumes on his back fluttering in gossamer fineness. Those exquisite feathers were the reason egrets were hunted almost to extinction in the late 1800s, for the millinery trade, to decorate women’s hats.

After a moment the bird continued his graceful circuit of the water’s edge, still watchful of my presence, but periodically stabbing his beak into the mud in search of food. I was mesmerized by the scene, captured in a spell of tranquility. Herons symbolize stillness, and I was grateful for the reminder, to see possibility in these strange days of confinement. Just then Charlie moved forward slightly, startling the great egret. He rose majestically into the air above our heads, his wingspan fanning out beyond my own capacity, and in long rhythmic strokes, flew away.

I heard the phrase “shoulder season” the other day, and it stuck with me. Fall is one of the slim ends of the year, a turning point. The days have darkened earlier in dramatic fashion, leaves have changed kaleidoscopically from green to yellow, started falling. The morning air is now cool and damp when yesterday the cat sunned herself on the flagstones. Fall turns easily, like a shoulder joint it’s flexible. But a shoulder joint is also the most unstable joint in the body. So is weather at the edges.

Wind blows the ghost I hung on the tree in front of my house. It hangs over the white fence and onto the road so people going by can see it. So I can see it every time I come home. I bought a huge white pumpkin and put it under my mailbox, decorated the post with dried corn stalks, and tied a prehistoric looking skeleton of a snake to the top of the fence. My new neighbors across the street have young kids that I hope see my house out of their bedroom windows, and wonder. I love Halloween for its celebration of the dark, of souls and the dead, the mystery.

A shoulder season could refer to parenting adult children as well as the weather. Mine are grown and out of the house, and yet we are still attached like more arms swinging from my shoulders. I hold my breath as they rotate around this world, no longer in control of their choices, their lives. It’s a short season, these young adults starting out, not quite independent, but not needing me the same as when they were children or adolescents. Those were long seasons that weathered me, that defined me.

Parenting today conditions us for attachment, not separation. I feel pain almost like dislocation at times, living in a world where technology has eliminated an out of sight out of mind sense of relief. Maybe this shoulder season will remind me to let go, as trees let go of their leaves, so I can learn to parent less and listen more as they make their own way. Like I listen to the rain, while fall hurries towards winter.

It’s been over three weeks since Jennifer Dulos went missing. There are pictures of her on signs in town, a pretty brunette, smiling, with no inkling in her gaze of what would befall her. My stomach clenches every time I drive by the one posted on God’s Acre, named for the land on which the Congregational Church was built and New Canaan founded upon, and where the whole town gathers to carol on Christmas Eve. I pass that sign at least once a day, on my way to the grocery store, the pet store, or cutting through town to get to the Merritt Parkway. There’s another sign posted outside Waveny Park, where the police found Jennifer’s car parked on that fateful Friday.

New Canaan is a small and affluent town, oozing leafy charm. People move here for the schools and proximity to New York City, as well as the elegance of its countryside. Crime can happen anywhere and wealth is certainly no indicator of morality, but it has been very difficult for me to wrap my head around the violence many believe happened here in New Canaan, to a woman not so different from me in age and education, to another mother. It feels too close to the bone.

I didn’t know Jennifer, she had only lived here two years and my kids are older than hers, but the degrees of separation are small in a town this size. I know other moms who know her, and I know kids who know her kids from their school. I probably passed her a dozen times in the grocery store or walking my dog in Waveny. The hardest part for me has been thinking about how she would have been thinking about her kids. I bet she wasn’t even scared so much for herself, when her husband threatened her. She would have been terrified to leave them.

I’ve avoided Waveny since her disappearance, when the police and FBI swarmed the park, and news reporters were asking people questions. I know every trail through those woods, every stream where Charlie stops to drink, and the K9’s probably stopped to sniff, even the contours of the dirty pond they dredged, where a couple of mallards like to float. I’ve avoided the park because although no trace of her was found there, I still wouldn’t be able to help myself from looking for signs of her in the bracken, amongst the deer.

We’ve had a lot of rain here the last few weeks so if Jennifer had been brought here on May 24th, all traces would probably have been washed away by now. Waveny turns into a jungle of new growth in June, with trees unfurling their leaves into great canopies of green overhead. On the paths underneath it feels like you’re moving through swathes of pulsing green curtains, heat and humidity releasing the wild fragrance of honeysuckle and wet earth. If Jennifer is no longer alive, then I would like to think she is resting somewhere in that forest, safe at last in Mother Nature’s arms, and connected to her children through the very air they breathe.

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