24/7

26. My brother had the kind of temper that would make a huge vein pop out on his forehead. 27. I was afraid of that vein. 28. My fourth grade teacher was a recent divorcee. One day she told us about her wedding dress and what a colossal pain in the ass it was to put on. She described hundreds of buttons all along the back that took her bridesmaid an hour to secure. 29. I won grand prize at the town-wide Fine Arts Fair, circa 1989, for my book titled “Witchimina Fafner and the Popularity Elixir.” 30. In junior high, I would wear sneakers on gym day no matter what else I had on. It was not unusual to see me in a sweater, a suede skirt, nylons and white Reeboks. 31. I ran for eighth grade class president on the “Don’t Clown Around, Vote for Binky” ticket. 32. I lost. 33. I hated junior high. 34. My sister was born when I was thirteen years old. 35. As a pre-teen, I became infatuated with the movie Young Guns and the series Young Ri

1. I am a New Englander born and raised; I used to think that stoicism lacks story, but now I know it’s just a different way of telling. 2. There’s addiction in my blood. 3. I was an only child for my formative years. Though I have a brother and a sister, as well as a half-brother and half-sister, mine is more of a sole child psychology. 4. I remember very little from those years, except for: 5. The time we stayed in a cottage on the Sacandaga and bats flew in my bedroom; 6. Dad’s weeks-long stay at that place in New Hampshire, which I visited wearing my corduroy coat with the faux fur trim; 7. The smell of Marlboro hands; 8. And throwing up once at daycare. 9. My parents were cops. 10. They dated only a few months before they married. 11. They were married a year and a half before they had me. 12. I was conceived after the wedding of a good friend of my father. Mom brings up this fact whenever the couple’s anniversary is mentioned, which, thankfully, is not often. 13. Mom is similarly

There’s no rain now, but the fog is thin everywhere. It mutes the foliage just starting to show. The green is more startling at ground level, where a lawnmower could stand to chug if the rusting heap weren ’t still parked next to the shed, enmeshed in a pile of detritus from last year’s fall. On the tree where pears will grow, there are white blooms in leaf jackets. The evergreens nearby haven’t changed. The bee baum looks coarse in all this wetness; when the sun shines again I will clip the stalks low to make room for new growth that will become a base for humming birds and for the fuzzy flying buzz that lends the plant its name. Up high, it could still be winter. If there are buds there, then they are no brighter than the gray. Bony knuckles clench in a wave; if it’s “hi” or “bye,” I don’t know. I can’t hear above the wind, but I can see them clearly, the vapor accentuating their witchy plainness: fat for stalks but thin for trees, bending high but unmoving where bark meets root. It