The first time my mother brought my father home to the farm, my grandmother said of this charming college classmate in the yellow sportscar, “He’s either the worst thing that ever happened to you or the best.”

“He was both,” my mother confided from the far side of that marriage.

Here’s what I learned from my dad:

The inability to breathe when you fall from the top of the swing set is called “Having the wind knocked out of you.”

To keep from spilling an overfilled cup of coffee you are carrying to someone across the room, do the counterintuitive thing: run with it.

To take the hook out of a sunny’s mouth, stroke its fins toward its tail.

Put sand on a sea nettle sting and baking soda on a bee sting

If you find a spider in the wood pile, look for a red dot on its belly. The bite of a black widow can kill you.

But daddy longlegs don’t bite.

Mud daubers don’t sting.

Walnut leaves under the rugs repel the dog’s fleas, and you can teach a crow to talk.

Pick up a crab where his back flipper hinges to the shell.

Volkswagen Beetles feature the trunk in the front.

I learned very little else, but after he died, Dad taught me that neither life nor love end, arguably one of the best things that ever happened to me.

*****

My mother taught me how to tie off a sewing needle and hem a skirt.

To grease a cookie sheet and crack an egg.

To value education.

That I’m a Pisces, Sagittarius rising.

That vinegar will make my hair shine.

That supper must include meat, a vegetable, a starch, and flowers on the table.

That books are to life what dessert is to dinner.

To brighten the house with lights on rainy days.

To do things that are scary—to build houses for the poor in Appalachia with a group of teenagers you don’t know, audition for a play when your knees are shaking. Speak up when you’re scared, sing when you’re terrified, protect the vulnerable.

To believe in miracles.

To read when you are lonely, write when you’re confused.

Write when you’re in awe.

(Awe is grateful with a mix of beautiful.)

When you are empty, give something away.

To make all birthday cakes from scratch and Halloween costumes by hand.

That there is power in prayer and voting is a privilege.

To recognize the metaphor in virtually everything.

******

My oldest sister taught me that a boy should think you are beautiful but not know why.

That listening is an act of generosity.

My middle sister taught me that the Beatles were a band

That hip huggers were cool

And a secret code to knock on the wall between our bedrooms at night. Pay attention. You will need to know this: One knock meant yes, two meant no, three meant I love you, four meant I hate you, and five meant come into my room.

*****

Somebody taught me that I think too much, talk too much, have no sense of direction but have a high pain tolerance, and promptly respond but seldom initiate.

Almost everything I think about myself, I absorbed from someone else. I’m still learning what has value and what to put in the discard pile.

*****

What’s your story, and who told it to you? You really need to know this because if you repeat the story you were told about you long enough, your story becomes the teller of you.

So, here’s what I’ve learned about you. (Check for accuracy.)

You like to read.

You are quick to laugh. (I love that about you. It’s my favorite thing.)

You want to love; it’s your nature. You’re very smart, and because you are smart, you are trying not to despair.

You fear for those you love and would do anything for your children.

You really want to believe there is no reason to be afraid.

You are a little uncertain of your great-grandparents’ names.

You have stories to tell, and you think it would be awesome if others could hear them.

You know, or suspect, you have been touched by grace.

You want to be remembered, but if you are only immortalized in the way your children show up in this world, or the abiding passion with which they love their own children, that’s enough. 

And you will be sad to leave this life not because you think this is all there is but because that’s how you will say to the world, “This was beautiful, and it mattered.”

You believe in life everlasting more than you don’t, or you wouldn’t be here.

You are hoping I will convince you, and I’m trying.

Listen closely.

(Three knocks.)

******

 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

My friend Brian meditates five hours a day while running a successful multi-state business. We started as editor /writer and are now Zoom friends. We’ve never met.

Brian texts me that there is only one guaranteed path to self-love, the basis of all spiritual growth, and it is not relationship. (My theory.)

Which you do with others.

Which involves food, wine, and eye contact.

It’s meditation. Which you do alone.

“You do you,” I text Brian. I add a happy face emoji, then delete without sending.

Because I’m joking. And intrigued. I do get it that to love yourself, you need to be in control of your mind monkeys (those things you regret, those fears you imagine), which means you must be present. But meditating five hours a day? How about five minutes, I ask Brian? I can do five minutes.

Well, now, that’s a lie, he says.

Brian sends me a comprehensive history of Hinduism to encourage me on my limp to enlightenment. He warns that it will only make sense if I’m ready for it. This kind of bothers me. I’m deeply resistant to “us and them” organizations and ideologies. I want to be picked so I’m part of “us,” then I immediately drop out because I’m uncomfortable not including “them.” Ask those in my brief stint in a college sorority.

It also reminds me of being a teenager and my best friend telling me she had discovered the secret of life. To life! The answer was encoded in the lyrics of a John Denver song. We were all over John Denver at the time– Rocky Mountain High Colorado! Who hasn’t belted out the chorus in the car?

Oh.

And neither have I.

She wouldn’t tell me what the secret was. I had to come to it on my own. So, I internally hummed along. He was born in the summer of his 27th year…(we were 17, but okay), coming home to a place he’d never been before… I started to guess—wildly. Love? Is love the key to every door? We were on the phone. Forgiveness? Compassion?

The key, it was revealed since I couldn’t figure it out, is self-love. That club I’m still trying to get into.

In meditation, (sigh, thank you Brian), I see that the greatest obstacle to self-love is self-forgiveness. My immediate thought is that I don’t have that authority, but here’s why this is so important. People I trust assure me that if I don’t love myself, I can’t truly love anyone else. My love is a facsimile. A knockoff. This is a huge worry. As if all the people I think my love warms and protects, have been out there in 30-degree weather without coats. And I certainly feel like I love others, including you. But maybe it’s imposter love. Counterfeit.

So, to that end, and based on Brian’s claim, I decide to make a concentrated effort to find self-love in the now. I order a lotus mat to enhance my meditation experience. It’s made of needles reminiscent of the mats on which yogis meditate. I ordered it because my mother taught me that if a little is good, more is better, that suffering makes you a better person, and that if there are two ways of doing something, you should always choose the hardest way. Check, check, and check. Meditation is enlightening? Let’s do her on a bed of nails!

I take my mat from its packaging and unroll it on the living room rug while Lester Holt explains all the extremely bad news, which usually begins with the weather somewhere else and goes downhill from there. On my back, I arrange myself gingerly on my needle mat in my jeans and a sweater. It’s a weird sensation and not too bad, so I lift the back of my sweater to get the full effect.

 Aie yi yi. I can see why this may work. You’re in enough pain that when you get off the thing you feel good! You could also hit yourself in the head with a hammer to achieve this effect.

I leave my needle mat at home and take my conventional mat to a yoga class. When the teacher says softly, “And if this is available to you, bend your left foot behind your head while balancing on your elbow,” I’m going for it—inevitably attempting the most challenging option (thanks, Mom). I’m also glancing around the room to see if I’m doing this correctly because sometimes I think we are all still bent over with our foreheads on our knees, only to realize everyone else stood up two minutes ago.

I come home thinking about that phrase, “if it’s available to you.”  Is self-love available to me? I’ve been trying for so long. I can remember a time when I was very young, maybe five when I would scrub away the summer day as the call of the whippoorwill drifted in through the window screen. I’d slip on my pale blue shortie pajamas, then run downstairs to tell my mother that I was brand-spanking new, ready to start my life right then and there. I felt like a rocket on the launch pad, powered up and prepared for lift-off without coordinates.

I was so sure, in those moments, looking up at her at the kitchen sink, hands in the dishwater, watching the sun set over the pasture, that I could do and be anything in the world if I just tried hard enough. The coordinates were for whatever I was to become, and she was my witness.

I thought then that everything was a matter of choice and work. Now, I suspect some kind of divine osmosis is necessary—some kind of surrender to a power that can love me more than I love myself. But. I am still my mother’s child.

If being able to truly love others requires a near-impossible posture held on a bed of nails, I’m going for it.

Stand by, beloveds, stand by.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

 

 

 

 

`You’re not going to believe this because I couldn’t, but then there are so many facts coming to light nowadays that are, at best, counterintuitive—my two favorites? That light is both a wave and a particle (whaaat?) and entanglement–the concept that two subatomic particles, once in contact, remain inexplicably connected across spacetime so that what you do to one affects the other instantaneously. How do they know?

I am a student of discoveries, often controversial—about consciousness and connection, illusions and limitations. Maybe by the end of this story, you will agree with astronomer Fred Hoyle, who observed that the world moves through three stages in the acceptance of any new idea.

First? It’s nonsense.

Second? It’s not actually new.

Third? We knew it all along. (Smiling here.)

My story begins after my parents’ divorce, when my mother sold Barnstead, the white house with the green shutters on the blue-gray river, and we moved to an established neighborhood. I was 12, and the prevailing theory was that this would be good for me. I had been isolated at the Barn, and now there would be swimming from a community beach, ice skating on the creek, and friends with boats for waterskiing. Mom bought a lot on a hill, built another house, and we moved in.

I was grieving but didn’t know it. I was lonely but didn’t show it–so when a construction company began prepping the lot across the cul-de-sac to build a new house, I developed a ritual.

After the carpenters had left for the day, I slipped down the hill to the construction site and sat on the cinderblocks, then the plywood, then on stacks of wallboard, and eventually on the front steps, and wished on the first bit of starlight that pierced the indigo of early evening. “Let a best friend move into this house,” I would ask.” Please let a best friend move in,” I would pray. The green, three-bedroom rancher neared completion but remained empty. I kept praying.

One day, I was home alone, attempting to fry chicken in my bathing suit—not a stellar idea– and there was a knock on the door. A man with blond hair and a friendly smile stood on our porch. “Hi,” he said, “My family is moving in across the cul-de-sac. Do you, by any chance, have a hose I could borrow?”

I was excited that we did indeed have a hose, and I knew where it was. As I handed it over, I asked, “Do you have any kids?”

He smiled down at me, “Yes, I do. I have a boy who is 9 ….” I held my breath, please, please, please, “and a girl about your age.”

A girl! My age!

When he returned the hose, he brought his daughter with him, and we were indeed in the same grade. My new neighbor had very round blue eyes like her father’s and thick, straight blond hair I admired cut in a Dutchboy bob.

She became my best friend for many years. We made scrapbooks, put lemon juice in our hair, picked violets in April, and skipped school, but responsibly: usually on a Thursday so we could pick up any work we missed on Friday.

Eventually, we went away to different colleges, but on our first summer back home, she introduced me to the man I would marry, who would become the father of my three children. In fact, we married men who were college classmates and best friends as well.

We would never again live in the same state, but we stayed in touch, oddly connected—entangled, you might say. The military officers we had married both left the Navy, and we both had two daughters and a son. Often, when I received a photo, I’d note that we had bought the same dress from 1500 miles apart or had the same placemats—and then there was this.

I published a book about ten years ago with Penguin Random House. The publisher reprinted it 8 times, keeping it on the shelf of every Barnes and Noble in the country for nearly a decade and in 20 countries around the world. I’ve found the book in the University of Otago bookstore in Auckland, New Zealand, and in England. When it went out of print, I bought the few remaining new copies from the publisher and the rest continue to sell on Amazon.

But one day, walking past one of those “Little Libraries” that have popped up in neighborhoods around the country, I thought, “I should stick a copy of my book in there. Maybe someone could use it, and I’ll get to know my neighbors better.”

I didn’t want to use the few remaining new copies I owned, so I ordered two copies online from the first used book dealers that popped up. The first arrived in good condition, so I stuck it in the little library down the street. The second book arrived two days later. I was sitting on the hearth in front of a crackling fire when I opened the package and leafed through the book to assess its condition.

Inside the front cover, the book’s original owner had placed a sticker with her name and address. I shook my head, smiling in the warmth and glow of the fire. Of the thousands of books out there, how in the world had I ended up with the only copy owned by the girl who had changed my life more than once.

Entangled.

We have seen each other once in the last 20 years. We have been in intermittent email contact. We have never lived closer than half a country apart. Until recently, we have never even lived in the same time zone.

Then I started laughing. It appeared my best friend had dumped my book. And I didn’t mind at all, whatever the circumstances. Everything has a lifespan, right? Interests run their courses. Relationships as well?

Maybe not. Maybe some relationships started before you were born and will last long after you die. Maybe some are conjured on the first star of early evening, and some are agreements to meet again in another place and time as different people whose souls recognize each other. Maybe we are all chapters in the same book awaiting a new edition.

You look into the eyes of the person you love. “That’s nonsense,” you say.

“And I have known it all along.”

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

 

 

The film After Life asks, “If you could choose only one memory to hold onto for eternity, what would it be?”

The question is like choosing a favorite among your children—so after some consideration, I flip it around. “If I could choose only one memory to forget for eternity, what would it be?”

My first thought is…”Only one?” The second thought, because it’s snowing is, “This one.”

I was the assistant editor of a regional boating magazine, and we worked out of a small house in a commercially zoned district on a residential peninsula. My boss, Dick, had been an advertising sales representative for a Washington newspaper—then bought a yachting magazine and became a full-time publisher. He was an affable guy, good at generating advertising revenue to fund us, and perhaps 7 years older than my very young self. This was my first salaried job in the writing world, and I wanted to do my best, even though the publisher occasionally pointed out that 23-year-old English majors were as replaceable as oxygen. The cottage was old, with offices that had been bedrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a small tree-lined parking lot in the back from which you could see Spa Creek. I loved my sunny spot in the front window, where I edited stories about living and boating on the Chesapeake.

One January afternoon, while we worked on the bluelines, it started to snow. It had already snowed earlier in the week, and the drifts were high. The little parking lot had been plowed with all the snow heaped along the perimeter, and now more snow was falling steadily throughout the afternoon.

I was busy making sure there were two “m’s” in accommodate, that we had capitalized “Eastern Shore,” and that no feature writer had referred to the lines on a sailboat as “rope” when Dick walked over to my desk and stared out the window next to me.

“It’s really piling up out there,” he said. “I’m thinking that if you’re going to make it home tonight, you might want to get going now.”

I looked out and saw he was right—the pavement on the street was already deep in snow, and there were no plows in sight. I had driven our Opel GT to work that day—a small, two-seater, low slung sportscar we had named “Adam Opel” for no other reason but that people sometimes name their cars stupid things.

I gathered my ski jacket, boots, and purse, said goodbye to Dick and Joe, our art director, and headed out into the storm. The Opel was already just a shapeless, snow-covered mound, and it took me a while to get the windows clear. Dick was watching from the office kitchen as I worked, and I very much wanted to demonstrate how competent I was. It was kind of a big deal to me—being competent– for instance, I disdained offers to escort me to my car alone at night after dinner with friends, and I stacked my own firewood. I don’t know why but I felt a fierce need to be unneedy. (Oh dear God. Hello Mom.)

I opened the car door, tapped the snow off my boots as best I could, and clambered in. I started the engine and let it warm up for a minute. But to get out of the lot, I had to turn the car around—pulling up and reversing—and with each maneuver, I was backing right to the edge of the drifts.

I am a born romantic—I have imagined fainting in a stranger’s arms, and I’ll admit that there have been times driving a stick shift (see aforementioned reference to competence), out on the open road, music blasting, sunroof open, that I have imagined a movie camera rolling as I downshifted around curves radiating a Julia Roberts’ smile—I know, I know, you’ve never done this….

But in reality, having people watch me behind the wheel made me excruciatingly self-conscious. I was working hard to get out of that lot undeterred by a blizzard—when suddenly I couldn’t see well. Something was wrong with my eyes. I blinked several times and realized it wasn’t my eyes; the car was filling up with blue smoke. It was getting bluer by the minute. Confused, my last conscious thought was that I had to get out of the car immediately. I felt for the door handle, leaned into it, passed out and fell just as the door swung open. The last thing I heard was Dick yelling to Joe, “Get Laura! I know what’s happening!”

When I came to, I was being carried by two men I wanted to impress, and not like this. I was the ragdoll between them as they staggered through the snow under the extra weight of my winter clothes. And here’s where this went so wrong.

I came to almost instantly.

I was aware before I opened my eyes that I was the unwieldy burden being hoisted akimbo between two men I’d only shaken hands with and I was so embarrassed I just kept my eyes shut! Like a kid pretending to be asleep. And the longer I kept my eyes closed, the worse it got. “I’ve seen this happen,” I heard Dick say, “She packed the tailpipe backing into the drifts—good thing she was still in the lot.”

Oh! I thought, always intrigued to learn something new. So, that’s what happened to me! 

Should I open my eyes now? Would it be more awkward to regain consciousness lumbering up the steps or when they lay me on the couch? Maybe I can just die and be done with it.

I’m a member of a special interest group that studies the research on near-death experiences, which nearly always include encountering an unconditional love of indescribable depth.

This was not that. Or was it?

How fortunate I was not to be the last to leave the office that day, that someone was looking out for me.

That someone always is.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

 

 

 

Leah is on the rug in the foyer, licking her paws nonstop. The terrier mix is hard at work giving herself a…  mani? pedi? Your guess is as good as mine, but she draws my attention to something on the floor next to the door, near the crack that lets the cold air in. I bend down and discover that Baby Jesus has fallen out of the trash bag I took out earlier. Good heavens. It feels like a sign.

He’s made of pottery and painted brown to look like wood. I bought him in Barcelona, Spain, the first Christmas I was married. He is part of a creche set, and if you look closely, you notice he has the vacant gaze of a Roman statue, and now, with a major chip out of his manger, Baby J has to go.

I feel a little squeamish dispensing with Jesus (or trying to). It’s similar to deciding what to do with the eight Bibles you’ve accumulated.

Leave them in hotel rooms, Gideon!

But I never had a good surface area on which to display the creche, and over the decades, the cows lost their horns; Mary seems to have had a MOHS procedure on her nose, and her halo is chipped. Joseph, inordinately tall, can’t stand up unassisted now. The arm he extends down toward the manger looks like he’s saying, “Woah Nelly…”  not, “Behold the King of kings.”

I’ve been hanging on to the whole broken holy family because that’s what I do– hang on to family– only in some sense of late that has become the family of man.

Hello you.

Thanks to the internet, I’ve been reconnecting with people I knew only briefly, say in eighth grade, or tangentially, as in my best friend’s friend, and those rediscovered relationships feel very much like Christmas, like the most unanticipated of gifts. Maybe it’s because who we grew up with shaped who we became, and there are days, or moments anyway, where reconnecting with our points of origin feels disarming, even charming.

Eventually, we grow up, and our life companions become our kids. I bought each of my children a Christmas ornament the year they were born and one every year thereafter until they left home. So, each child took a collection of memories from childhood into their future. Audra’s ornaments were always a bell of some kind—silver, gold. Andrew’s were made of china—a polar bear, a reindeer, and Emily’s ornaments were made of crystal—stars, icicles, and angels. That’s nearly 60 ornaments that have come and gone from my tree, which I guess means 60 years of parenting in a way. It’s a 60-year big hole, anyway. Chicxulub comes to mind—the asteroid that had been on a collision course with the Earth for centuries and then left a hole nearly 100 miles wide and at least 12 miles deep.

That sounds about right.

The tree is out on the porch waiting for recycling. When I was little, we cut our tree down from the pasture, but the selection was limited to scraggly white pines. We carried our choice back to the house, with its white shingles and green shutters, and watched my father drill holes in the trunk he then filled with extra branches he’d trimmed in the woods. Eventually, the tree was lush and beautiful. The first artificial Christmas tree!

I decide to keep Mary and one of the cows from the original creche as I finish packing away Christmas. Who hasn’t had MOHS, and who doesn’t have a broken halo? I also keep the angel because who doesn’t need an extra angel?

I vow I will throw out everything that hasn’t been used this year—the rejected decorations left in the 12 storage boxes in the linen closet— again… The garish ornaments from friends I dearly love, the balls from the year I thought I’d do Christmas in blue and white….

I cram all the bows in a box, knowing I have friends who put their bows away stuffed with tissue to retain their shape. Friends who don’t find candles in the box labeled garlands. And who don’t find the box marked “precious kids’ ornaments” empty. But holidays evolve, as do planets, solar systems, feelings, and family.

Christmas has changed for me in many ways and in other ways, not at all. This year, the tree had new ornaments filling out the bare spots where the bells, polar bears, and crystal angels once hung. Six hand-sewn wives of Henry the Eighth, which I bought in London, take their place, plus King Henry himself, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson. But the truth is that most of those boxes I planned to eliminate are back in the closet. I just smush the stuff in tighter so it appears consolidated.

I’ll let go of more next year, and one day, I will let go of everything. We all will.

But today, I hang on to the love story we just celebrated, to the lives that I made, to every sacred reminder of the life that made me.

 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

 

Clustered around two tables at a Chinese restaurant, I am one of 12 women ostensibly here to have lunch and to learn more about feng shui, the Chinese art of rearranging your possessions to change your life. In reality, it is the promise of a personalized forecast for the Chinese New Year that inspired most of us to ante up the $40 fee.

The predictions are nested in little boxes of tokens left at our place settings like gift bags at a birthday party. I bypass the red silk ribbon, jasmine candies, and the fake coins to reach for my reading.

I was born in the Year of the Snake, I discover. It is unappealing by western standards but then the woman to my immediate left was born in the Year of the Rat. Is that any better? We Snakes are the most beautiful women in the world my reading claims. How can that be true? I glance around the table wondering who the Snakes are.

The workshop leader is wearing red, which suits her warm smile, while I am wearing black, which I’m pretty sure is not the best feng shui color to have on but I think I look better in it.

Look, I’m a Black Snake, I joke to the Rat.

My companion doesn’t respond, her focus is riveted upon our hostess who explains that everything in the material world rests spatially next to something else. Therefore, where I place each object in my home impacts the energy flowing to me. The result?  Proper arrangement of my belongings can facilitate the realization of my dreams.

Many of my dreams have already come true: my dog, who was once prescribed Prozac, has never actually bitten anyone. My children’s father has 1) become a gourmet cook who 2) thinks cooking for others is fun!  But if feng shui is both art and science, I have one nagging question. Where can I place the past so that it does not interfere with the present?

What if now I want to say yes to being “Room Mother?” No to working all weekend?  Yes, to taking Advanced Conversational French with Mrs. Procaccini?

What if I wish I’d gone on more vacations when the kids were young, danced at my own wedding? Been braver, less self-absorbed? What if I want to do it all over again—career, being a parent, being a sister, being a friend, being human– knowing what I know now?

Our instructor can’t hear what I’m unable to ask, so she offers more specific instructions. I should put something gold in my prosperity corner and add a plant with friendly round leaves. I’m advised to keep water near my fireplace and to aim all sharp-cornered furniture away from my bed.

Servers arrive laden with bowls of steaming, brothy soup. Silverware and china clatter as the restaurant fills with the bubbling conversation of other diners. A water feature in the lobby creates the sound of perpetual rain and I lean forward in order to hear as our instructions continue.

I should bury a red string in the front yard and write down everything I want to bring into my life and everything I need to release. My gift box includes two small pieces of paper on which to do this. They are thin and delicate, emblazoned with gold leaf symbols and red Chinese lettering I cannot decipher. When this task is accomplished, I’m to burn them.

I start to write. I want my children to remain happy. Healthy. I want to do good work in this world. I want to live with transparent authenticity. I want to be instinctively generous. Compassionate. Thoughts come faster now as I suddenly feel as if it’s all true: I can change the past and forge a bright future, so it is imperative that I leave nothing out.

I want to live up to my potential, to know that love honors our intentions, forgives our mistakes; that a benevolent force is at the heart of the universe.

The woman next to me glances over as I cover my second paper’s surface. “Is that all?” she asks dryly, but I’m not finished. Rotating the page, I write in the tiny margins. I want to know that I am not alone, even when I feel alone; that in some way we have yet to rightly imagine, all is well.

At home, I step outside. Pulling the two small pieces of paper from my pocket I kneel against the winter wind.  A match flames against each fragile corner, and I lift them skyward. As I watch, regret disappears, at least in this moment, and all I still long for rises like hope in the pristine air.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.