A baby died yesterday. Full term and born still to a family I don't know. But his aunt wrote to say I want to capture this day for them, this day of birth, and mark it. Can you go into your backyard with your camera, right now?

So I did. Even though I've been ignoring my own reckoning, my own lost child. Even though I've felt deaf to the kind of grace and presence that followed me for a time.

Liam's tree was not planted for him but declared itself to be his, a lovely, perfect young maple that catches the light at that time of day and at this time of year, a crown of sun. The day after he was gone I looked out our door and saw it, a gift. I'd never noticed it before but there it was staring back at me. Breathing, smiling, witnessing. I press my hand to its trunk and it hums, still. Everyone who comes to our house, children especially, gravitates toward it. Bodies duck under and climb and run around it and when they do, the tree swells with happiness.

Come this way, the tree whispered to me as I stood on the deck with my camera. You may not feel inspired but I do. All you need to do is translate.

At the moment yesterday's baby was lifted from his mama's belly, there was that familiar crown of light. It got me thinking about regrowth, and defiance, and how we're all meant to find each other, even in ways we don't understand.

I saw souls who set course to grow under our shelter. I saw that while the non-negotiable terms of that growth can break us, the choice of those souls to begin with seeks to inform us.

I thought about the ways that each of us are beautiful, no matter how small and no matter our means or our ends.

I thought of the shadows we cast on each other. And how light's really not much of anything without shadow.

I thought about how shaggy and wild our lawn is. And how I like it that way.

I thought about how living things reach up to light and refreshment, and how we're all stretching, cupping, hungry.

I thought about how we all must become something else.

I thought about small things that land in finite places, within lives or bodies that can only take them so far. But look how they try. Look how they want to be seen.

If I get this teeny-tiny wood stove for the cabin, I will instantly be transformed into a buddhist. A zen buddhist. A cozy zen buddhist. A cozy zen buddhist who basks in the whoosh of air-blown kisses from the hot pucker of the god of good words.

It even comes in red. But mine couldn’t be red. Only harlots and heathens have red wood stoves. Everyone knows that. Only those folk of plain iron are godly and straight-backed.

Then again, well. Maybe red. Because Hello. My name is Kate. I am a Harlot. The Worst Kind of Harlot. The Financially Irresponsible Harlot.

See, I’m sorely tempted by yet another pair of $250 jeans. BWEEP! BWEEP!

Okay FINE. They’re on layaway (slaps hand over mouth). But c’mon. My life is a vice desert. My life is comprised of altogether too many I Nevers and I Wouldn'ts. For instance. I never smoked pot. BWEEP! BWEEP!

Okay. Once. BWEEP!

Fine. Twice. Followed immediately by barf, which cancels out the inherent coolness of causal drug use. I’m so hopelessly square I’ve never tasted coffee. Not a word of a lie. Until only weeks ago I’d never listened to Bob Dylan. I’ve never kissed a chick. BWEEP! Oh stop. That was a total drive-by. I had no part in it. I’ve never tried smoking. My soul intuited that cigarettes would cause me to puke with an audience, a fear that well outweighed peer pressure.

And so during times of financial pustules, these—and these—are the vice that makes a harlot of me.

Don’t make me share photos of the pustules. They are real, and they itch like a mofo. On the rare occasion I buy clothes, it’s from the clearance rack at the grocery store, for chrissakes. Alpha-getti, sweet potato, t-shirt. Check. We lost ten thousand bucks ridding ourselves of the minivan that was no longer necessary after Liam died, the one that taunted Nyaa nyaa, ya lost one! Now cough up eighty bucks to fill my bottomless gut! every time I got behind the wheel. This led to a payment of income taxes on the credit line, a move that will haunt us for years. Personal grooming? Nil. My eyebrows roar spontaneously as did Chewbacca when Han Solo was lowered into a vat of Darth Vader’s carbonite. Wayward cows mistakenly think my hair is a bundle of tasty and nutritious sun-dried alfalfa.

We’re worse off than some and better off than others, as is always the case in matters financial, medical, romantic, parental. We’ve made some dumb decisions that fester like that unidentifiable stink in your fridge. Despite that, will I submit my family to fishsticks and corn niblets for six months for the sake of propping up this rear-end in Japanese ringspun denim?

YES. (unblinking)

If you’ve never slipped one leg and then another into jeans that cost one-fifth a mortgage payment, you will think I’m a fucking idiot. Until you slip one leg and then another into jeans that cost one-fifth a mortgage payment. At which point you will think of me, and you will sigh, and your face will scream forbidden fruit, and you will curse my name whilst running your hands lasciviously up and down your own thigh. Gap schmap.

And so perhaps I am a harlot. One so far gone that I may as well get myself a fire in fire-engine red, as soon as I find a spare thousand bucks in my rice krispie lunch.

+++

Let’s toss aside the solemnity commanded by the economic shitstorm. Tell me what you lust for. What indulgences, little or big, do you refuse to give up against all good advice? What ridiculous or otherwise wildly irrational object would make your life complete?

Resisting the urge to make that more specific. Nobody puts your answer in a corner. Shoot.

That's five complex sets of emotions at any given time, all of which demand contemplation, NOW, each before all the rest, and none are patient.

Please let there be more than this.
Was he in pain?
Damn body.
Damn me.
Poor me.
Me who balked.

Days until their birthday and despite rush hour for the internal hecklers, I haven't felt accompanied by him lately, not as I was in that first year. He stayed with me until he figured I could walk on my own.

Wait. Was that death-by-hallmark?

Yeah, well. I like cheese. Cheese can be funky and funky makes you grimace and screw up your face like PHEEWPH! but this gig is gorgonzola, incomplete without unexpected grimaces. Just don’t tell me he carried me where there was only one set of footprints. The wee boy was too small for that.

+++

My god, how the hospital is full of ghosts. Not so much of people but of trauma. I walk past the row of pumping rooms, remembering all the fucking tears shed inside, and the pain. I see their pod, darkened. The library where I staggered to write to you.

My skin crawls in there. I can see myself, back then. He is not the ghost. I am.

+++

We came out so lucky, even given Liam. Especially given Liam? Ahh, words.

+++

I fill my mind with streamers, blue ones, and cake, a damn fine cake it will be. And Saturday’s cleaning in advance of Sunday’s toddler infantry. And tiny Elton John star-sunglasses, because for a second birthday and first party it is fitting to add superfluous bedazzlement to a dazzling boy.

I don't think Liam minds a bit.

(pauses. sighs.)

Who am I kidding. He’s not here.

+++

I realize now why I deprived myself of sleep back then. If I went to bed completely zonked I would lessen the amount of time I'd be haunted by death.

It waits for me in bed—the smell of morphine, the way he grew cold from the inside-out—and I imagine him restless at how the horror drowns out his light.

That was not me. That was just my dying.

I know, lili love, most days.

I curl up into a ball and let the imprints come because these things, they finish their business faster if you’re not so horrified of them. Try and turn away and they only get louder and more insistent. So I cluster the hecklers all up in the corner, and I glare at them until they know to shush it. They owe me that much. Then I turn and I stare back until the imprints give it up and let me sleep.

+++

The cardiologist speaks so quietly I can hardly hear him. I think perhaps it’s cultivated, a radical sort of gentleness, because radically distressing news must dominate the day of a pediatric heart clinic.

“He’s totally normal,” he looks at me a little bewildered, unsure of how to fill the additional time afforded by this kid of the three-word answer. We sit there a moment, staring at each other. I resist the urge to run, and fail.

We skip through the halls, the delighted BYE! he throws over his shoulder much like a taunt, cheeks stuffed with two-bite brownies, and I feel all this.

1. Take that, hospital. Take that with your French’s mustard and your wonderbread and stick it. (to son) Let’s bust this pop stand. (son, to mother, in falsetto gibberish) Yeah. Bust this pop stand. TIMBITS!
2. Thank you, hospital. I can be kind of an asshole, and I write my kid to sound like kind of an asshole too. Please do not take it personally that we enjoy busting outta you. It’s not you. It’s us.
3. I was you once, parent. I really was. You are this aching, shivering thing that is my kin, and I am an escapist who leaves without throwing you the keys. I would sell the world to kidnap you and yours and burn the pain to the ground in our wake. I would.
4. Hey, hospital? Can I have my son back? No, not this one. He’s fine. The other one. I want him too. I know you must have him here somewhere.

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Just thought I’d ask.