Days of rain driving down petal, leaf, of turning into slick collecting in the gutters. Days of sun pressing, searching, burning, past fabric, skin, straight into the bones of us.

Zaviera looks up at me, fragile-eyed but fierce in her bones. She thought she was alone, in the clear. She didn’t expect to be caught scampering after her desire.

“Hi Mommy,” she says. 

Her hands are clutched to her heart, guarding something beneath her shirt.

“What are you doing, sweetheart?”

Her shoulders round against the question. She looks up at me through long lashes, through the shadows cast by hair growing in its unique sense of direction.

She knows I know. This knowing falls between us, a space of sun, of light without hunger or burn.
“You won’t tell daddy?”
I squat down.
“No, sweetheart.”

 She reaches down into the neck of her shirt and pulls out her ‘dadu’, her pacifier from the sports bra top she wanted because it looked just like one of mine. I didn’t pause too long on the ‘why’ there were mini sports bra tops in the five-year-old section. If I’d the option at five, its guaranteed I would’ve been dreaming of owning one. She wears it as I do, all the time, and just like me, she quickly began using the bra as a secret stash-away for precious things.

She puts the dadu in my hand.

It is warm from and I imagine the hummingbird flight of her heart trapped in the soft plastic of it. 

The fierce beating of The Heart that Wants, that she can’t HELP wanting even though we tell her, “You are almost five, you’ll need to stop using your dadus.”

She watches me, waiting.
“Did you feel like you needed your dadu?”
She nods.

”Can I please have it? Just for a little bit?”

It is a quiet request, a moment of trust that stretches between us. I tell her yes and then to bring it back to me when she is done.
She is a pounce of love, of gratitude. Her heart against my heart, they speak to one another about wanting and shame and hiding and grace.

I feel the relief in her body, a lightness that moves into me. It illuminates tight and dark corners of my heart, where shame has shoved my ‘dadus’, those vulnerable hungers and comforts.

ZC extracts herself and is on her way, humming through the dadu.

I’m crouching in the scent of earth, leaf, rain damp concrete, in the receding warmth of my daughter, and I’m feeling that maybe my heart can learn to hum through its dadus too.

love

joy

kindness

peace

Blessed be

will be hiding beneath the new paint, protecting our family.

SC has not been interested in prayers on the wall. He has been a prayer of: clean the pond, save the fish.

The day we viewed the house, the real estate agent waved to the pond, “Obviously that will need some cleaning.”

And as I explained that I’d had a thing for ponds since I was a child, digging holes in the back yard, filling fish bowls with friends from the reservoir, SC spotted a flash of gold fin in the congested waters.

“How? How is anything alive?” I questioned everyone and no one.

The agent smiled, solid teeth and pale gums.

He knew it was a done deal.

I have a way of doing the hard part of some people’s jobs for them.

For the last hours of moving boxes, furniture, potted plants, SC has crouched by the pond, watching, waiting for signs of the fish.

SC didn’t care about his new room or all the spaces to explore. He wanted to save the fish. I didn’t want him near the things I imagined in the pond – broken bottles, rusting edges. So I told him again and again – soon, I promise.

And so he paced while I painted.

He paced and paused to ask again and again: when? now?

And then was done with his waiting. Done with his asking. He stood at the ranch slider. Hands on hips. Eyes stern and sad. His faith in me was fading. He was beginning to suspect that it was never, ever going to be time for him, for saving the fish. It was time for him to do what needed to be done.

Okay, I said. It is time. It is when. It is now.

I put away paint and brushes. ZC wandered away singing out to JC, to her dad, distracted from both by the novelty of a home with carpeted stairs.

I gathered the fumes of me.

SC waited with two buckets, a fish net and yogurt container.

We began as the day faded. SC scooped with container into bucket. Plunged and pulled net. Carried full buckets of sludge and stone from pond to Nikau palm, from pond to Ponga fern.  I crouched, trolling fingers through the numbing waters, searching for a slick body, a shiver of fin.

I scraped against cement, bruised against river stone. I collected cigarette butts, bottle caps, leaves, twigs, chip packets, a beer bottle, a sock, a bottle opener, a fork. The shadows grew, the light shrunk. The winds rattled the gutters. The clouds twisted and tumbled past the moon.

The pond waters shrunk to puddles.  More handfuls of dead leaves, gravel, twigs, stones.

No flash of gold.

I begin to consider it’d been a trick of trash and light, this fish of ours. Or, I wearily suggested, we’d accidentally thrown the fish out with the water.

SC checked beneath the Nikau, the Ponga. Paced through shadows. Circled back to the pond, sat at the edge and sighed. Faith was fading again.

And then it revealed itself – a flash of gold, a flop of fin beneath the bridge crossing the pond. SC lunged, slipped, lunged again. Yelped triumphantly. Stood with the gold fish bigger than his hands, too big to have hid so long.

And then it was my turn. A lifting of shadow from shadow in the periphery. An impulse, a raising of heartrate and I was slipping and lunging, scooping and laughing. A black and silver body arching against my hands, against the moonlight, slipping into the bucket of clear water. The fish circled and flipped and stilled, staring at one another. Mouths opening and closing, gills lifting and flattening.

We continued until the pond was a smooth basin, until there was no where for life to hide.

We found three fish in the impossible waters.

One of gold. One of black and silver. One a muddy-in-between.

A pond, a boy, and a mama, redeemed.

This love is a gamble of amnesia; what moments will they remember? What moments are carried away like ashes? As light that has flared and gone? What burns?

Some of my memories are a favorite garment worn threadbare. I have a collection of them from between the ages of 3 and 8.

The smell of lilacs on a sprawling summer day in the graveyard that I roamed as a child in Ithaca. The cool slick of a green snake slipping through my hands. Gravestones warm in the sun. Grass dew-damp beneath my bare feet.

Learning to swim, after a summer at ballet camp, making up stories about HOW I could swim (but absolutely could not), my legs dangling, the dark lake yawning beneath me, clinging to an inner tube.

And then on a hot day smelling of sheep shit and fried foods, my grandma led me through a festival to a redwood hot tub and I climbed in. Somewhere between the bubbles and the warmth, I learned to float.

It just happened.

Every day, I wonder what fabrics of memory my children are weaving. When they are away from me, I feel the pull of it in my body, and that is when I grab for my threadbare and favorite memories. The ones that flared and did not fade away. They remain bright without burning. They are moments of solitude. Moments when it is clear that the divine was the dealer of threads and experience. In those vulnerable moments, the divine wove its presence bright, wild, and unmistakable.

At night, with small fingers curling against my palm or foot shoved into my armpit, a head on my belly, the sweet scent of exhaustion and a stilling of minds. The rising and falling of their surrender into sleep.

At night, I stop worrying over the fabric of the day, of it’s flares or burns, and I fall into our beginning.

A language of ancestors, blood, DNA, growing heartbeats, flutters of limb, bubbles of swimming and flips, growing into an intimate bone against bone, a bladder-pressing knowing of one another.

And now, here they are.

Tangled, exhausted, my mind restless, I imagine the love that sometimes feels it will not be contained, moves through me into them. I imagine that love falling down over them, soft threads of indestructible love. Threads for the tears of experience we all must sustain.

I feel the brightness inside me, the truth that even ashes carried away are not forgotten or misplaced.

There is no amnesia in love.

No gamble.

No garment woven carelessly.

No light lost.

No eternal burn.

No tear that can’t be rewoven in love.

DC squints, “Yeah, I’ve had those before. Usually from a piece of skin getting inflamed. It sucks but it’ll pass.”

He goes back to painting. I remain with finger raised to the heavens.

“This no piece-0f-skin-thingy. This is a different thingy altogether!”

DC keeps eyes on the wall, refusing to confirm or deny with response.

My finger feels pregnant with a small galaxy. Stars and black holes and planets ready to explode. I wrap my arms around myself for emotional support. DC doesn’t seem to understand the situation, so I speak the dark and sinister thing.

“What if it’s a flesh-eating bacteria?”

DC pauses, slides his eyes to my face, to my finger. He thinks I’m hyperbole stuffed into a cute skinsuit.

I know it’s from cleaning the pond, from killing the fish with my good intentions.  

“This is fish revenge,” I say, still hugging myself for emotional support.

Dan, “Well, you did murder them.”

“It’s not funny.”

“Nope, it isn’t.”

He continues to paint. An edge of a smile at the corner of his mouth. He is using a new parenting technique on me from a book he didn’t read. He is using my summary of strategies against me.

“You’re Happy Toddlering me!”

I give up swaddling myself to point my definitely-near-necrotic finger. He smiles. Shrugs. Keeps painting.

“You’ll miss me when I’m a pile of bones. You’ll think, wow, I should have listened to her.”

“Probably so.”

“This is serious! The tip of my finger is developing a brain and it’s not a good brain.”

“I know, ZC. It’s terrrrrrrrrible.” He singsongs it. My hands to hips now, my chin lifted. He is right, I am my daughter’s mother.

The infamous ‘they’ talk a lot about how being a parent is the most difficult and rewarding job on the planet. Some of the ‘they’ roll their eyes and speak ominously about the times to come.  But no authoritative ‘they’ explained that DC and I would be parenting our children AND each other.

As DC and I learn from our children, we learn about ourselves.

The painting continues, the throbbing finger throbs, the conversation turns to subjects far away from flesh eating bacteria. I serenade DC with off-tune improv. The windows darken. The children become restless with a need for sleep.

The walls drying, my hair and skin flecked in paint, JC nuzzles up to me and demands that the day be done. I put down the industry of removing tape from windowsills, along skirting. The index finger and its pulsing, straining galaxy goes quiet.

JC climbs up me like a tree, wrapping his legs around my waist, his arms tight around my neck. We collapse on the bed, a tangle of weariness, warmth, and wild limbs. I feel JC lighten, his breathing sinks deeper, his small fingers tangled in my hair. I feel the moment when he slips into that otherworld of dreams, a lightness in his body, a shifting of presence.

A moment of overlap between all that is human into something else – in that space where DC and I intersect and our children emerge, there is a tear in the veil and I glimpse the divine.

My children are the antidote to peace-eating thoughts. They are the dose of medicine with their fingers tangled in my hair. They are a moment of immunity from self-concern. They are proof of God’s creative love.

I follow JC’s breathing. My lungs are raw from fumes. My arms ache from hours of making a home our own. Now that I have spoken the dark and sinister into the light, I am given new understanding as DC comes into the bedroom carrying ZC.

I whisper, “I’m sorry you had to be SO dramatic about my finger, its going to be fine. Poor guy, such a wild imagination.”

DC nods, “Thanks.”

“You are very welcome.”

He turns off the lights on my Cheshire cat grin, sinks into the bed. ZC rolls instinctively toward me, her breath soft and sweet.

Dead fish smile in their graves. The clean waters of the pond reflect the stars. The flesh-eating bacteria search for a new host. Paint dries on the walls. All is as it should be.

DC leans against the shovel. His flannel shirt, inherited from my dad, is cleaner than it should be but his basketball shorts are filthy.  He points to a spot in the garden between two freshly planted blueberry bushes

“This good? I need to dig it deep enough for several.”

He is tired. An afternoon of digging holes between plants and trees.

I look to the spot, to my dirty UGG boots, my scratched legs, the embroidered red rose that rests above my heart on my Mickey Mouse hoodie.  

I nod to DC. Yes, that space is good.

Behind him, the moon isn’t as present as it should be. It is full but muted. Looking away from the grief in the garden, from the pile of bodies at my feet; the reaching roots of scaled feet, soft stumps of breast and feathers. Boughs of hushed wings.

I gather surface weeds and grass clippings while DC digs. I rake dirt over graves. We are running out of places in the garden.

The children made me promise that I would let them know when it was time to bury Rocky, the ‘boof-head’ chicken with the Rockstar fringe. A chicken version of Animal from the Muppets.

They made me promise. So I call out. It is time.

SC walks with purpose. He wants to see the body of Rocky.

ZC stands at the edge of the garden. She had been determined to say goodbye to the big grey chicken she’d chased and wrangled and loved in her fierce way. But now, she says, “I just feel like dead chickens give me excusement.”

She waves her hands in the air. Takes a step away from her grey feathered goodbye.

“What do you mean by excusement, sweets?”

“They give me the feeling of excusement.”  She points to the bodies at my feet but her eyes are with my eyes. “It feels yucky, that’s what I mean.”

“Makes me feel yuck too.”

This morning, the children raced out to say hello to the chickens. They’d been imagining names for this temporary inheritance from a dear friend in a life transition. We planned to love them while we found homes for all but a few.  

The morning’s plan was to buy building material for nesting boxes. I was a focus of coffee, calculations and getting dressed. And then the focus shifted, I became a point of listening, of a hairbrush paused.

There was a silence, and then a sound, and then the hairbrush was in the sink, and I was half-dressed at the aviary door.  And there was our dog, Pepita, a paused action, a change in plans.

A chicken in her mouth, bodies at her feet. Bodies thrown to each of the four corners of the aviary. We looked at one another. Assessed. And then action.

SC convicted himself with tears and harsh justice. He had forgotten to lock the aviary. He banned himself from the chickens and told me that both him and Pepita needed to be taken away. ZC cried at the loss of the chickens, the loss of trust in Pepita. JC ran around making loud clucking noises and telling his imaginary friend, Bomb Shooter, about the troubles.

 I moved between garden and child, choosing spots to bury bodies, looking for words for my family’s broken heart. Words gathered like wildflower offerings.

Tonight I stand in the garden and feel death stretching with new definition.

The silhouette of a small finger pointing to feathers and scaled skin. An excusement of eyes looking away, hands waving at the air.

Excusement as the state of standing in dirty boots, a pen in tangled hair, an embroider red rose against my heart. Excusement for a mind full of wildflower petal words, bruised and torn.

The excusement of grief in a garden for the things we can not control.

A shadow of excusement against the light of a muted, turning-away-moon.

“Why is there a storm coming?” my daughter asks.

I lean against the wall, arms wrapped around knees and of all the answers gathering in my roof, my chimney, against the walls of my mind, I reply,

“I don’t know, maybe ask me tomorrow.”

This is not enough. She watches me intently. I should know everything.

“Storms come to clean.””

She nods. It has been one of those days. The atmospheric pressure driving an internal storm, a maximum capacity cloud burst. I’ve moved through the house, wild like the winds, blustering and gathering and hurling toys, dishes, blankets, papers, laundry.

“Like God cleaning?” she says, pulling her pacifier out of her mouth and tilting her head.

I push away from the wall to pick up a teething biscuit crumb, a stray hair.

“Sometimes,” I say. “Maybe.”

I’ve given my daughter nothing conclusive. I feel her eyes on me a moment longer, my fingers gathering to the crumb, the hair, a piece of gravel. She wanders down the hall, into the bedroom, shutting the door with great conclusion.

The storm gathers as I gather grains of sand to the crumb, the hair, the gravel. I gather until the voices in the bedroom settle. I gather as the gentle inhales and exhales expand into snores and snuffles

The storm is done gathering itself, it has arrived.

Rain slams against the roof, the walls, the trees, the street.

I roll sand, hair, crumb, stone, pink ribbon into a small ball of conclusion. I walk down the hall, muscles weary from clearing paths through bottles, books, dinosaurs, blankets.

I enter the bedroom, the night light catching the profile of nose, ear, arm escaped from beneath blanket. Shadows stretch from eyelashes. They pool between tangled limbs.

My small ball of conclusion, of gathered debris, has become precious between my fingers. It is the bits and pieces of our day, our living, our being.

Outside, the wind has its way with the trees, shaking and roaring, and cleaning, I suppose.

Maybe, leaves and branches and seeds; like crumbs, golden hairs, a pink ribbon are swept or rolled or carried away into a ball of God’s tidy and loving conclusion.

I don’t know, I’ll ask my daughter her thoughts in the morning.

This story first published in:     

The Bitter Oleander: Volume 15, Number 2     

Naming Shadows     

It is the time of night when earthworms stop their blind twisting, their digestion of earth, and lie still. The clouds part and starlight presses down through the fronds of fern trees and into dark soil. Crickets, owls, and frogs pause, absorbing, listening.     

Seven-year-old Tama wakes from a dream in which a lion, a tiger, and a giant dog leap from a cliff. Claws and paws extended, bellies bared, mouths open. Above them the sky was so blue it ceased to be a color and became a mood.     

The dream fills Tama with pride. He knows it is proof of something but he doesn’t know what. He sits on the torn second-hand couch that is his bed, trying to find his way back into the dream. The air is thick with the scent of urine, stale beer, and cigarettes.     

“I am here,” the Something from his dreams says. It comes from the corner where shadows drape over the television and broken vacuum cleaner; the corner where Tama is made to sit for hours, imagining what it would be like to be an ant climbing through the forest of the shag carpet. Sometimes his mother forgets him, and Tama falls asleep, his cheek against the wall. He wakes up to an empty house, but still, he does not move until he is told to.     

“Kia ora,” Tama whispers to the shadow, because it is the polite thing to do and Tama, against the prediction of New Zealand national statistics, is a good boy.     

Tama is afraid but fear has always made him reflexive, full of puppy-dog pounce. Faced with the unknown, he scrambles up boulders and grabs his knees to chest, cannon-balling into deep waters to keep himself from drowning. At the top of the jungle gym he leaps, arms pin-wheeling through the air because it is better than falling.     

And his mother’s violent anger does not make him fold into himself. He does not act out in larger and larger ways against his mother’s demands for him to become smaller and smaller.     

Tama means ‘boy’ in Maori, and that is all he has ever been until the dream. Now Tama thinks he might be something more.     

“Kia Ora!” Tama repeats, his black eyes shining. He says it loudly in case the shadow is dumb. It is loud enough to have woken his mother up and earned him a cuff on the side of the head but his mother is gone. As gone as she can be.     

Tama doesn’t know it, but he can do anything now. Yell. Put his mouth over the milk carton and gulp, gulp, gulp. Eat five slices of bread smothered in butter. There will be no punishment. No more accusations performing circus acts in his mind.     

Tama’s mother has become metal crumpling into concrete. She has tumbled over the edge of the bridge’s guardrail, the right hand turn signal of her car a blinking star on the river’s dark surface.     

But Tama is less alone than he has ever been. Something Else sits in the corner, speaking to him with a voice of sunlight and cricket song.     

“I am,” it says.   

“Pardon?”     

Tama wants to get the name right.     

There is laughter; a low roiling noise that causes the dust motes to stir in their dreaming.       

“I am.”     

Tama thinks the name several times in his mind before speaking it out loud.     

“Hello Eyeam, I’m Tama!”     

“I know.”     

“What?”     

“I know.”     

Tama doesn’t know how to respond so he sits, blinking, his mouth opening and closing. The air is suddenly swarming with the scent of wildflower honey. He remembers honey as a grumbling in his belly. He remembers his finger in a jar and a smack on his hand. His mother yelling, “Its shit now boy, shit! Putting your dirty finger in it! You turned it to shit!”     

He remembers how the jar, yanked from his hands and thrown out the open window, caught the sun in its flight before shattering. It had looked as beautiful as it tasted; a glow on the tongue, a warmth in his toes.     

 Tama sits, swallowing the sweet air, grateful that it is free from insects and slivers of glass. He sits and waits for Eyeam to speak. But the shadows are silent.     

Earth worms began to twist again, to digest, to tunnel. The honey-air dissolves on his tongue. A whining in the distance grows wider, filling with red and blue flashing lights. The shadows thicken in the corner, as the highbeams of the patrol car push through the weary curtains and wash over Tama’s goose-fleshed skin. He is a small brown boy with big eyes waiting on a patchwork raft for the rescue he doesn’t know he needs.     

The police officer knocking on the door is a sound Tama will remember for the rest of his life. Whenever fist hits wood with that same dutiful force the center of his chest will open to an empty hall of dull light. But in that echoing space will also be something else.     

The first police officer with his family-man eyes, smiles a tired smile and asks, “What’s your name, son?”     

Tama will always remember his own voice answering, “My name is Eyeam.”     

He will remember a lion, a tiger, and a giant dog extending their claws and leaping in the sky. It is the night that the shadows gave him their name.

My memory is a tricky thing. The days and their details shatter and blend until I am left with a collection of mosaics created from people, places, and events. What continues to translate itself fluidly over the years is essence – I can remember the presence of a beach down in Baja California. I remember the feeling of sand giving way beneath my feet, the bright, knobbly shell of a lobster washed up in the shore line, the heat on my skin. I remember moments, so perfectly preserved, of people as I connected with them, before life tumbled us onwards crashing and retreating over and over again.

This evening I have found myself remembering someone who I haven’t thought about in years and the clarity of these memories involving Noel surprise me.

The coastline where I learned to surf in Northern California had a small community of surfers. I think things have changed now, they were already changing back then, but in those years that I lived in Bodega Bay, everyone generally knew everyone else. There were only a handful of female surfers who consistently braved the cold waters and heavy conditions, and those of us who did were surrounded by a group of men who acted like big brothers to us. In my years of travel, I learned that there was a breed of surfer that could be found in most places and when you found them, there was an instant sort of kinship created by the connection with the ocean – a tribe of surfers.

Because Bodega Bay didn’t offer any of the glamorous versions of surfing, it generally only attracted this type of ‘soul surfer.’ Any one who surfed on that coast did so because they had a deep need to connect with the ocean. Everything about the surfing experience in those conditions failed the romantic versions of surfing.

We wore thick wetsuits that often smelled vaguely pissy because we all took full advantage of the warmth of our own pee in those early morning sessions. After getting washed in ice-cold water, you’d see a fellow surfer get this private little smile and know that he was peeing in his wetsuit and enjoying the temporary warmth. Most of us also wore thick neoprene booties and hoods and sometimes gloves to keep our hands from turning into numb claws.  Our tan lines stopped at our wrists and necks. We squinted through the early morning fog, usually right before dawn, clutching our various hot, caffeinated drinks of choice, determining whether to drive an hour one way up north to catch the swell or muscle through the beach break of Salmon Creek.

People who surfed for years on that coast became weathered by the conditions and almost all of us were always planning trips to warmer waters, but others, unlike me, remained fiercely loyal to the wild nature of the coast.  I longed for warmer waters. My relationship with the coastline was a love/hate one. I loved the ocean and waves, hated the fog, the cold, the howling winds. Nearly every surf session spit me out on the shore with numb fingers, weary bones, and a need to hibernate under a pile of blankets until my body recovered. But I had to surf. The cold was  an initiation process for me, testing my desire to learn.

During those years, Noel had a place among a group of men that I admired for their surfing. Like the spirit of the coast itself, there was a wild, fierce, diverse group of surfers that were like demigods out in the waves. All of them traveled to better waves, better conditions, but they came back to the coastline again and again. I believe most of them still live there. Images of those dark figures crouched on waves that moved like mountains are a permanent part of the landscape of my imagination.

I knew Noel in the pre-days, meaning, it wasn’t until tonight that I became aware of what he had gone on to achieve. He was just beginning to test himself against Puerto Escondido. Stories of his adventures circulated with the other stories the men of his rank would bring back from their adventures. I knew a Noel that was always flashing cheeky smiles at me and flirting when he shouldn’t have, because that’s exactly the kind of guy he was – he took life by the teeth and shook it around. I admired him and was always shy in his presence. He made me aware of how silly my own self-seriousness was. That is the essence of him that remains in my mind.

When I was first learning to surf and only just starting to master moving against the weight of the cold and the bulk of my wetsuit, I remember him being on the inside of a wave I was dropping into. He hooted and hollered as I got to my feet. My heart had pounded with adrenaline. I didn’t want to get slammed by the wave, or to be humiliated in front of one of the local ‘big bros’.

Later on, Noel said to the man I was involved with, “She was charging into that wave…You really need to buy her a helmet.”

I was so proud – even if he was insinuating I was likely to knock myself out.

I thought of him as one of those guys that was so durable he could throw himself at the ugliest waves and he might get battered, bounced around, but he’d eventually pop back up at the peak, smiling and ready to charge the biggest wave in the set. Tonight, I thought about the fact that he had died doing the thing he loved. There is something beautiful and blessed about that.

Tonight I tried to imagine what might have happened in those warm, Mexican waters that took his life. My mind gave me a series of images blending into one another, the strongest being an impression of his smile.

Noel is one of those gleaming pieces of memory in the mosaic of my memory. I imagine that he is somewhere on the other side, riding endless waves, gliding over the shadows of sharks, and I want to thank him for living his life the way he did.

Vigil of Clouds

 (sorry, temporarily taking this down to submit to an anthology in NZ  – wish me luck! I’ve always had a dream of seeing this story written for Noah Ranui find its way into print)

Vigil of Clouds first appeared in: http://www.smashwords.com/extreader/read/2942/117/flash-fiction-40-anthology-july-2009

About a month ago, Jordan Rosenfeld (author of my favorite writing/craft book: Make a Scene) and I were discussing our experiences of pursuing dreams. We both agreed that while yes, we had to show up on the path and begin walking forward, the journey has never been a solitary one. When I look back at all of the greatest things that have happened to me, they have been a result of others choosing to believe in me. Those gestures of belief were sometimes as simple as sincere words spoken at the right moment. Other times they have come along as something larger, often an opportunity that I had no way of envisioning before it was given to me. The key ingredient in these gestures being that they were unexpected gifts. I never felt as though I had earned them or could take credit for their arrival. For me, these are the true rewards of stepping out in faith or striving towards a goal. It is not so much what I can take responsibility for achieving myself, but the people who have become apart of my life along the way and the things they have taught me about life.

For both Jordan and myself, one of these gift-givers has been Maria Schneider. She has acted as a champion in both of our endeavors as writers. I met Maria for the first time during the Writer’s Digest trip after winning the 76th Annual Competition. It was a turning point in my life and I was buzzing with the terror that I might do something wrong and pop this bubble that had lifted me up like some fairytale. After years of barely being able to look my dream of being a writer in the eye, it was suddenly grasping me by the hand and saying, “Well, you’ve been wishing for me. Here I am!”

Maria put me at ease instantly.  She was down-to-earth, witty, professional, generous and basically, the kind of woman I would love to be. As we scurried from meeting to meeting, Maria’s support meant that I was able to breathe between elevator pitches, intense discussions of the reality of the publishing business and back and forth dialogue challenging everything about the novel I was presenting from title to premise. I think without her easy presence and reassurance I would have been like a squirrel jacked-up on espresso in danger of dying from nervous exhaustion.

I become attached to certain people very quickly and Maria is one of those people. When I found out that she was leaving her position as editor for Writer’s Digest, I went into a state of mourning. For me, she was the Patron Saint of Humanity standing guard for all writers. I was relieved when she launched her website for writers EditorUnleashed.com.  When she offered me the opportunity to blog for the site, I was honored. But it has been more than just the platform she has given me or the words of encouragement, Maria has been teaching me about the spirit of staying true to myself as a writer and a woman. She is a person with vision and courage and spirit. She is not afraid to give the odds the finger. In the face of so much naysaying and striving for security in a competitive industry, Maria is a champion for all those who refuse to have their vision confined. In knowing her, I believe I have grown in my own courage.

It is so easy to go along in life not letting those around you know how they have changed who you are. I am grateful for this opportunity to be able to thank Maria for her presence in this world.