On Kauai, the loveliest of the Hawaiian Islands, I’ve come to see a beach lined with steely industrial silos, barbed-wire fences and chained gates.

Two 16-pound sledges with green, fiberglass handles, which we had been told would reduce arm fatigue. Getting shreddy by the heads, from missed blows.

In Alba, Italy, rain and a market. In my hands, the white, greased paper that once held an entire rotisserie rabbit. Its bones clack together like hooves, a horse in the distance.

As her memory darkened, I did not see my mother. What hold time held upon my mother loosened and, like a shawl, slipped. My father worried that she would walk out the front door in her nightgown, with an empty black purse slung over her arm, into traffic she would not see, having forgotten her glasses on the nightstand.

I’d spent the afternoon polishing the hull of my sailboat, which sat on a trailer in my front yard in Phoenix. Now it was night. I was standing next to the boat in the moonlight, admiring its pearly sheen.A

The fish jumped a ladder built of electricity and concrete. Swimming up the Columbia is a lesson in progress.

Months since my nephew slid otter-slick into the doctors hands, I anoint his head with baby oil, Brailling his fate: Is baldness in his future? The first time I touched a bald man’s head, I was a grown woman, and I read in the elegant bones of his skull my future, for the next few hours at least.

I drive all morning, fervent and focused, finally stopping for coffee at The Waffle House near Plain City, Ohio. My car sports a “Free Tibet” bumper sticker that I picked up in Atlanta, and as I lean against the left fender, sipping my cup of mindfulness, a young man spills out of a purple school bus and starts running toward me.

My mother was a champion bowler in Thailand. This was not what I knew of her. I knew only her expectations of me to be the perfect Thai boy. I knew her distaste for blond American women she feared would seduce her son.

A box of rocks. That boy—oh, you know the one. Dropped his cat from that second-story sleeping porch just to see if it was true, what they say about cats always landing on their feet.