These late August days, if spent as we want to spend them—never a given, but heavenly when we do—can lend themselves especially well to napping. Generally, if given twenty minutes, I can nap all year round, regardless of weather and season and location and time of day. But when we are living on this remote island, I feel a firm downward pull toward a nap at about 1:30 pm each day. It’s unmistakably a nap I need, not chocolate or caffeine or some kind of exercise; none of those things I reach on to override my fatigue when I am in the real world during the year will work here. And so, on as many days as I possibly can, I give in. For me—and I recognize my immense privilege in writing these words—the nap is a sacrament of these summer days.

At least historically, I think there’s been some shame around napping. It helps that, here, napping is baked into the days. One neighbor hangs out a painted driftwood sign that says, “Napping 1-3,” more as a warning than a joke. Some parents take to calling these hours “quiet time,” recognizing that the word “nap” can be triggering to some who consider themselves too old, or too busy, to nap. Nap time is sanctioned—something to be respected—because here, even when it’s not imposed, the napping hour comes on with its own heavy-lidded insistence. Falling asleep feels less like a premeditated power nap, and more like narcolepsy.

I think this might be because the contours of the day are clearer: there is no electricity, for one thing. We see when it’s light and when it’s dark. It would be too romantic to say that we set our circadian rhythms to the sun, but the sun does exert a stronger influence on our days: we wake up earlier, get a faceful of sun with breakfast, and do more in the mornings—expeditions, deep cleans, mowing work, ferrying people around, big conversations. One can feel here, keenly, that not-quite-manic-but-definitely-purposeful life force of the morning. We get properly hungry for lunch. And then there is a dip in the energy that has kept us upright and moving forward all morning; the dip has its own strength, the strength of an undercurrent—it’ll bend you at the knees. If I let myself flag for a beat or two, I notice how nice it would be to close my eyes, maybe on that window seat under the soft breeze, or on that recently made bed.

There are other atmospherics that can be overpoweringly soporific. Birdsong changes in these hours; it quiets. One can hear, behind the birds, the steadier beat of a cricket. There might be the far-off hum of an airplane, but the world of airplanes seems too distant to have any bearing here; it is the most recessed background noise, just a mild hum that fades before it is consciously noticed. There is, most day, a wind that feels like someone softly whistling through the open window. The sun is strong still, there’s a soft haze to the afternoon’s heat, and there is no air-conditioning. This is the land of the lie-down, the most ancient method of cooling down.

At home in Brooklyn, I might set a timer for a 25-minute nap. Here, time is less relevant than the day’s patterns. I curl up with one of my children and sleep until they wake up. Or I sleep until someone has the temerity to holler a late-afternoon “hello?” through the screen door. Or just maybe, I sleep until my eyes open all on their own, which has to be the single greatest luxury known to mothers.

This kind of nap has a neat way of chaptering the day. Afterwards, I begin again, but this time I am moving more slowly, more thoughtfully. A smoky black tea, and a little chocolate or toasted banana bread, can help orient me to the world again. But the world isn’t the same, quite, as how I left it. Now I feel less like I might be drowning in dishes, and more like dishes are an abstraction, far-away like the airplane. The things that call my attention now are the crisper colors of the horizon line, and the second cup of tea. The rest can wait.

Think of a dozen eggs. They had their travels from chicken coop to the grocery store shelf of this island, just shy of thirty miles out in the Atlantic. So far so good. No cracks yet. But once they are in our hands, their fate—the individual fates of those twelve fragile shells—begins to feel precarious. They are destined for an island even more remote than this one. That other, smaller island has no grocery stores.

Along with the other groceries, they are nestled into the back of the car; at this point, the car is many-tote-bags deep in provisions. Clean sheets, bottles of wine, diapers, ground coffee (there is no electricity over there to grind it fresh), probably too many towels, toilet paper in case it’s running low. We drive the car to the western shore of the larger island, and then carry each bag down wooden steps to the beach, trying to stay mindful of those eggs—“they’re in that one, see on top there”—and line them up along the high tide line, where they won’t get wet. All around us are people half-reclined in beach chairs, wondering at the arrival of so many brown grocery bags. They are here to relax, and brought only a cooler of beer and maybe some sandwiches. We are blocking their view. But we are moving quickly, now placing groups of bags into thick plastic contractor bags—“careful with that one with the eggs. And that one has the peaches, I might just hold those.” Then the packed bags rest, scrunched-up passengers awaiting their ferry, in the sand.

I look up, remembering my posture and inhaling deep for the first time all afternoon, and see beyond this shore toward the far island. My husband wades into the water, picking up our anchor to bring our small boat as close to the shore as he can, its hull scraping the sand until it comes to a stop. He tosses the anchor ashore, and we start loading the bags, lifting them over the gunwale and placing them into the bow. The bags are packed close to one another, in the hopes that they’ll stay upright on the crossing. It’s anyone’s guess if the eggs are still okay. There are so many bags—fifteen maybe—and not a lot of time to get them all across, then out of the boat and up the hill, and settled in the fridge, and bathroom, and beds before it’s dark.

Once the motor starts and it’s no longer easy to shift the bags and too loud to talk, I let myself think about breakfast tomorrow. And, in a way that would never occur to me on the mainland, I think about safe passages.

It’s my mom’s 70th birthday today. In her honor, I want to talk about her devotion to health food. It’s a devotion that, historically, I haven’t discussed with the maximum respect.

My mom, who goes by Nini, has achieved celebrity status on my private Instagram, because I occasionally feature her health food obsessions. Her camel’s milk journey—which continues to impact my family and our freezer capacity—has been a particular hit with my small following. The bottles of milk boast that camel’s milk has been the choice of Bedouins for millennia. I wrote something snarky on my Insta, like I can imagine the nomadic Bedouin chose from an array of milks as they traversed the desert by…camel. I did not admit that, whatever the legitimacy of its purported health benefits, the milk was delicious. Instead, I reported that, apparently, camels only release their milk when their own baby is present, which seems like it should make the sale of that milk a nonstarter. Recently, sensing my distance on this topic, my mom forwarded me an email that was titled, “8 Reasons Why You Should STILL Drink Camel Milk.” Unsolicited bulk deliveries of camel milk continued to arrive at our Brooklyn apartment, imbued with my mom’s eternal hope that we will drink it.

Nini herself was raised by a mother who (wisely, for a mother in the 1950s) never learned to cook. Most of her childhood culinary memories feature the local candy shop1 in her Connecticut hometown. She ate Swedish fish by the fistful. But my parents raised us on Nantucket Island, far from both of their Connecticut upbringings, and I have only known my mother as the convert—the health food evangelizer—that she is today.

Growing up, my brothers and I ate fistfuls of alfalfa sprouts straight from the package. It was the 80s, when Skippy was King, but she managed to sidestep the big grocery store; we belonged to the food co-op, where we got five-gallon buckets containing strangely purple peanut butter (for those who haven’t encountered non-homogenized peanut butter at large scale, it comes topped with about five inches of oil and must be mixed by hand). She mail-ordered bulk granola from an organic Canadian company called Walnut Acres. There was a Nantucket health food store then2, the kind that popped up in the 70s, with the bins of nuts and oats and that universal “weak curry scent of the health food store,” as a friend put it. We’d often go there for an after-school treat: a carob-topped rice cake, or a Tiger’s Milk bar. I’m mentioning these brands in case there are fellow travelers out there.

Before she got married, Nini learned to cook while working for Sarah Lee Chase on Nantucket, so there were sun-bleached copies of Chase’s Nantucket Open-House Cookbook and Cold-Weather Cooking around (wonderfully atmospheric for the year-round Nantucket resident), but she made a lot of recipes from The Vegetarian Epicure. I remember those dinners being very bean-forward. Snacks always had some ulterior motive, which was to deliver nutrients, minerals, and good fats. Nini is not the OG “Almond Mom”—she is in favor of eating more or less constantly—but one of our childhood snacks was exactly seven almonds. I remember counting them out. Cottage cheese topped with avocado featured heavily. She also fed us avocado toast, decades before that was a thing on every menu, and topped it with olive oil, paprika, and Celtic sea salt. We swallowed spoonfuls of organic blackstrap molasses. Wheat germ was treated like a condiment. Apple cider vinegar was ever-present. Smoothies hid all manner of unpalatable ingredients—was that an aftertaste of cod liver oil? When we got sick, our cough syrup was a concoction of raw honey and chopped onions. We also got a steaming cup of ume, a Japanese plum extract that left a black residue on anything it touched.

It wasn’t militant, though, partly because my mom still harbored her own sweet tooth. I would watch her get into the driver’s seat, tear open a bag of M&Ms, tilt her head back, and pour them directly into her mouth3. I realized that if I baked them myself, I could eat brownies and chocolate chip cookies. I learned my mom’s childhood recipe for crepes, and on Sundays, my brothers and I ate unlimited numbers of crepes, all swimming in maple syrup. My dad played his own countercultural role, buying us ice cream cones and Hostess Cupcakes on the side; we knew to eat those before we got out of his truck. And, once a year, on our birthdays, we were allowed one “sugar cereal,” which meant anything sold in the grocery store. I always chose Honey Nut Cheerios and went through the whole box in a day.

There have been some weird turns in her cutting-edge health journey but, increasingly, my teasing feels flat. When it comes to food, Nini is turning out to be more right than wrong; she may just operate about twenty to forty years ahead of the zeitgeist. My first indicator of this arrived in the early 2000s, when UGG boots first became hugely popular: there was Britney Spears, in her own heyday, wearing them with shorts to the Brentwood County Mart. My mom and her friends, from that tiny island in the 1980s—an age before the internet—had discovered UGG boots and mail-ordered them from Australia. They always looked incredibly embarrassing to me, their ugliness unforgivable. “Please don’t wear them to pick me up from school,” I’d beg. And then, all of a sudden, I wanted a pair for Christmas. Since then, the examples have multiplied. She got onto making her own sea moss (long known as a wonder substance in the Caribbean) years before you could buy variations of it on every NYC block. She’s been growing trays of micro-greens on every surface for a while now, and I’ve noticed lately that micro-greens have become suddenly present in grocery stores. She doesn’t seem to care about public validation, but I think she does take a small measure of pride in having been early to bee pollen.

I’ve lived in New York City for more than twenty years, and I will admit now that in this vast, sometimes lonely city, health food stores have been my comforts. You can’t find Tiger’s Milk bars anymore, but there are so many childhood touchstones inside the stores that have been around for decades: raw milk kefir and bee pollen in the fridge, mystery seed bars that seem built for birds, fragrant bean soups. I took my own children to one of these for after-school smoothies and strangely dense muffins, until it closed after almost fifty years in the business4. Now when I spot a health food store of that vintage—from back when health food was new and marginalized, before its Erewhon-ification—I buy everything I can in support.

Like a survivor of the whaleship Essex5, I still marvel at the plethora of what I still think of as “sugar cereals” at the grocery store. I buy Honey Nut Cheerios for my kids sort of prophylactically, before they’ve even asked for it. I hope that if they have it now, they won’t develop my fiendishness for sugar.

But I also keep at eye on Nini’s latest obsessions, because I now know they just might be the next hottest thing somewhere between 2046 and 2066. And, meanwhile, because her Instagram fans ask for Nini’s stance on banana milk and colostrum sources, I won’t gate-keep. Her current obsessions: making yogurt with L. Reuteri, which is a some sort of super probiotic. Also pine needles in all forms (in honey, as extract, actually maybe not quite allll forms). And exactly three Brazil nuts a day, no more. “It is possible to overdo it,” she says. Just referring to Brazil nuts, not the whole health project in general.

Happy birthday, Mom. Toasting you with a shot of wheatgrass, from a health food store6 that smells of dahl soup, where they’ve stocked a lifetime’s supply of organic blackstrap molasses. May you never run out.

When I had a ten-month-old and a four-year-old, my appendix ruptured. As I was rolled into emergency surgery, the doctor leaned down to tell me that I’d need to stay in the hospital for a week, to recover. “That’s impossible!” I said, attached to a morphine drip, because the pain was greater than I’d had in childbirth. “I have little children!” They listened to me, and discharged me only three days after the surgery.

I’d had the foresight to rupture my appendix while in LA—and the privilege of excellent health insurance—and so for those three days, my hospital room was sunlit and quiet. It was decorated with a pastel-colored David Hockney print of a painting called, “Pool and Steps, Le Nid du Duc,” of a swimming pool in France. I was in the gentle care of expert nurses who asked me very few questions except whether I was in pain, or might be getting hungry. I planned no meals, including my own. I didn’t carry anyone or change any diapers or push any strollers or pack any bags. Since I was in a different time zone than my children, I was not the main artery through which all child-related communication passed. I also I did no emotional labor; for three days, I didn’t listen or soothe or work out the knotted feelings of anyone else. The hardest I worked, emotionally, was when I tried to tell the nurses how much I treasured their care, and when I thanked friends for sending green juices and flowers. Otherwise, as I recall, I slept and watched Wonderwoman.

In the years since that surgery, I’ve become increasingly baffled at my own insistence that I go home early. That was the best medical cover I might ever get, and I had squandered it. As I’ve gone on to hit other levels and flavors of burnout, I’ve thought, longingly, of that time. Apart from the surgery itself, it was a rest-cure. A period of convalescence. No one, from my children to my insurance, questioned that my rest was medically necessary. So many friends have admitted to a private wish that they might accidentally break both legs, or develop a non-life-threatening illness—maybe something Victorian?—that would lead to mandated rest.

It’s important to point out that not one of us is going insane when these thoughts cross our minds. I think we are having a completely sane response to the combination of chronic sleep-deprivation, default parenting, the contortions required to get our own work done, household admin, and the Groundhog Day-ish cycle of meals and dishes and laundry and locating water bottles. We often haven’t rested when we’ve gotten sick, and we’ve been the only one the school nurse seems to call when our children fall ill. We haven’t, sometimes for many years, quite been able to hear ourselves think.

This is when I begin to reimagine the old sanitarium. What if we, once again, decided that bone-deep fatigue is the only justification a woman needs to absent herself from home life and take a real beat of rest? This is layered and tricky territory, I know. It has taken enormous work to undo the dangerously inverted, patriarchal idea that any woman who is not continually blissed-out by domestic life must be insane. Husbands could send their wives away if those wives began to resent daily housework or tire of caring for children. We know that early psychiatric treatments—forced lobotomies and primitive forms of electroshock therapy—drained the agency of many women, sometimes permanently. I’ve read Nellie Bly’s horrific exposé of a women’s sanitarium conditions in Ten Days in a Madhouse. I’ve read Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, in which a woman is made insane by the very conditions of her rest-cure. I’m still sickened by the descriptions of the electroshock therapy administered in Hernan Diaz’s Trust. Heather Clark’s revolutionary biography of Sylvia Plath, Red Comet, covers this topic exhaustively.

But some of these stays, particularly before there were treatments beyond rest and chicken broth, seem like they were onto something. Red Comet also mentions that Plath, who knew firsthand the horrors of certain of those treatments, “once fantasized about getting tuberculosis so she could take a rest-cure away from society.”1 The prescription then for TB was rest, sun, good food, and plenty of fresh air. Some women in my own family, generations back, spent time in sanitariums. Perhaps there were several pregnancies and miscarriages in a short period of years. Perhaps there was a son who contracted polio and, for a short time, the stress of caring for a child with physical disabilities was overwhelming. I don’t know what they made of those stays, or whether they had a say in the matter of their confinement. But I am glad that they were able to take a break.

I think that less grave situations can still merit a break, and I can imagine a rest-cure—even a full sanitarium—that honors a woman’s sanity and her own agency. Such a place would be, first off, covered by insurance. Women would be admitted on an emergency basis, if only so that they wouldn’t first spend a week arranging for their own absence. It would be quiet, tucked away in the hills somewhere that receives plenty of sunlight. The interiors would have simple furnishings, white walls—it’s fine if it has the air of a hospital, because this sort of fatigue is a medical condition. This would not be a hotel or a retreat. In other words, a ‘yoga retreat’ could be seen as an indulgence; a ‘rest-cure’ is clearly a necessity.

The treatment itself would be the relief of caring for others, and an acceptance of being in the care of others, physically and emotionally, for the prescribed period of rest. Patients would have no need to explain themselves, or to apologize, or to justify their need for rest. The food need not be gourmet, just good enough and available at all hours. Sweatpants would be provided, and laundered daily. Patients wouldn’t need to answer a single question, nor listen if they weren’t in the mood. There would be rooms should anyone need to go scream, or cry, or dance. There would be the option of socializing if the mood strikes; same goes for taking a walk on the beautiful grounds, and there would be yoga, a lending library, and maybe watercoloring supplies, but no pressure to do any of those things. The primary activities would be staring into the middle distance, remaining in child’s pose, and hearing oneself think.

If my large sample set is a good indicator, it’s very difficult for mothers—and all women who take care of others—to give themselves a real break. Most of us need another woman to encourage us to take a break, or at least a nap, or a doctor to mandate it. But in this imagined world, taking a rest-cure would indicate wisdom, and a strong, healthy awareness of one’s own needs. The only person who’d need to sign off, medically, would be the woman herself. And the minimum stay would be a week.

As a mother of a child with disabilities, I feel a certain responsibility to language. I know that people listen to how I describe my son Hooper. By virtue of being his mother, I am imbued with authority over a specific category of language; whatever words I use must be the right ones to describe his differences. I don’t think people listen closely just so that they can be politically correct. There is such a long history of isolating children with disabilities—putting them into separate, scary schools and homes, and speaking of them with hushed shame, if at all—that lots of us are still unsteady and fearful about how exactly to talk about people who are in our midst and register as different.

I use ‘disabilities,’ instead of ‘special needs,’ because the former seems more precise and the latter a touch euphemistic. I didn’t think much about the difference between these terms before Hooper, and I experimented for a while with the sound and reaction to different terms, how I felt saying them and how they landed. As we got a diagnosis and began to understand Hooper’s trajectory (for which we are continually adjusting), I wanted to speak frankly and lovingly about him. I didn’t want to seem like I was casting around for a nice way to say he doesn’t have the full suite of abilities we expect children to naturally develop. I wanted a word that says all of that is true, and that implies all of that is OK with us. We don’t need pity or an “I’m sorry,” followed by a closed-mouth smile. ‘Disabilities’ is a little clinical, and it’s five whole syllables, but I like that it doesn’t beat around the bush: there are challenges about his life, he needs accommodation and support to share fully in activities we tend to take for granted. I know that people who can express their language preference, which Hooper cannot, prefer to say they have ‘disabilities,’ too.

When I’m describing Hooper to someone who hasn’t met him and seems curious, I try to give more dimensionality beyond the words “intellectual disabilities” or “developmental disabilities.” I try for the light conversational equivalent of showing off a cute Polaroid of a giggling nine-year-old boy, so that they absorb ‘disability’ right alongside something like ‘fully human’ or just ‘a cute kid.’ I don’t want his disabilities to make him seem separate and other; he is, first and last, a child, ridiculous and delicious and joy-generating. Early in some of these conversations, I’ve been asked whether he will ever live independently. I save that question for conversations with close friends, but the truth is that he is someone who is still becoming, as all children are, and my husband and I try to make no conclusions about him.

It is best when I don’t have to speak for him. Like a lot of people who have limited spoken language, Hooper can cut through typical lines of communication and charm people, soul to soul. Three different times, with three different Uber drivers, Hooper has reached out for the driver’s hand at the end of the ride and said, “thank you.” These three different drivers have each replied, “You’re welcome. I love you.” I don’t like to think of Hooper as an ‘angel’ or even really a ‘teacher’—again, he is a child. But it is my experience that he reveals some angels among us.

When I was a child and an adolescent, I craved normalcy; ‘normal’ seemed like the end goal. Normal clothes, a normal house, normal-seeming parents. But early on with Hooper, I learned that ‘normal’ is not our friend; it’s a word that restricts everyone in its radius, and locks him, semantically, into some cold lonely corner. If you aren’t normal, you are abnormal; in a world designed for the average ability, you are less than, outside of, separated from. Instead, when describing those kids whose growth lines cluster around the same rising diagonal line on an X-Y graph, developing steadily and without much assistance, I’ve learned to say ‘neurotypical,’ or ‘typically developing.’ Again, more syllables and a little clinical, but more neutral. It takes away the positive value implied by ‘normal.’

Hooper goes to an independent New York City school I describe as ‘radically inclusive.’ It’s ‘radical’ only because it is the only school, public or private, doing what it is doing, which is placing typically developing students in the same classroom as students whose lines of development don’t fall along that same general trendline. Students like Hooper are accompanied in their days with an associate teacher who helps them access the curriculum, use the bathroom, express needs they don’t have all the tools to express unaided. Students without disabilities seem to become leaders and advocates and empaths. They are intimate with—and unafraid of—difference. They see how hard some people have to work to use a straw, or count to ten, and they see that doesn’t make them weird or diminished, just human. The classrooms seem natural, I think, because they are inclusive in the same way that our planet is inclusive: everyone is on here together. These students may come up with new language that feels even better to use.

Maybe because we get tired of being accidental spokespeople, some of us parents of kids with disabilities play with language among ourselves. One friend describes her two children who do not have Down’s syndrome—as her son does—as “neurotips,” with a sort of winking eye roll: the challenges that come up among those young neurotips are real, but almost funny in their prosaicness: they skin a knee on the playground, they forget their homework. How charmingly neurotip. My husband, whom I’d describe as less a student of language than me but an absolute devotee of Hooper, has taken to using “normie” whenever our family does something we see other families casually doing: eating at a restaurant, going to a movie, all showing up at a birthday party. It works here, this word, in this context, because it speaks to our admitted envy at the casualness of other families, and also pokes a little fun at them: a normie doesn’t sound like someone to envy. It’s closer to condescending, a way to flip the script that I find hilarious.

My husband and I recently took our boys to a famed toy store, the sort of store that I dreamed of visiting as a child, just to be inside an indulgent, overabundant vision of fun and treats, like getting inside Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. We arrived, and our 12-year-old could have spent all day there, even though he was old for a bunch of the toys. He walked each floor and watched each toy demonstration, savoring it all. But Hooper spotted the elevator bank when we walked in, and insisted, with whole body, and marshalling all his expressive language, on staying inside the sweaty, overcrowded elevators rather than walking around the store. Elevators are his very favorite; put the most urine-strenched, rickety elevator next to the most coveted toy in the world, and he’d choose the elevator every time. The store visit became an exercise in tense negotiation—let’s get out of this elevator just for a minute, to see just one toy. My husband and our babysitter, both managing Hooper, were sweating and signaling an urgent need to get the hell out of the store. When I reported this episode, in its blood-pressure-raising and depleting and sweaty details, to the same friend who coined ‘neurotips’ and took eagerly to ‘normie,’ she texted back: “I guess toys are quite normie, aren’t they?” God, that felt true. A palace of toys is only exciting if you’re basic enough to be a normie.

I’ll start with something I wrote about how my office, where I’m sitting now, came to be. This little outcropping of space behind the kitchen of our Brooklyn apartment used to house our mop and cleaning supplies and extra toilet paper. I would put brooms back in here with one arm, not even glancing into the little space itself, and then close the door so fast that I could pretend not to hear the broom timber onto the floor. It used to be that kind of relationship, between me and this space.

Like many of us, I got new, sharp clarity about my most primal needs deep in the pandemic. Along with learning the need for a daily walk and weekly calls with friends, I realized that I needed to externalize my thoughts somehow. My craving to write and get thoughts on a page, or even get them straight in my own mind, had been buried even before the pandemic. It was buried by the needs of two beloved little kids. It was deep underneath other layers of the to-dos that could and must be done within our household chaos. When Covid came and my husband worked ten-hour days behind the closed door of our bedroom, I was managing a Zoom schedule for a kindergartener and a two-year old. My jaw felt Krazy-glued tight with the effort of keeping down those packed layers. I’d see a thought tentatively raise its head up, but I didn’t have time to grab it and at least register it, record it, before it crouched back down.

One afternoon, all the repressed need finally welled up with an animal ferocity that almost scared me. I wanted to be somewhere away from questions and needs, where I could listen to my thoughts and complete my sentences. I was in the kitchen, trying to unload the dishwasher. I did the thing mothers are told to do when we’re on the verge of exploding: I went into a different room. I opened a door onto this tiny space at the very end of our apartment and walked in.

It was a Narnian moment: by going in and closing that door behind me, I opened up a new world. With a door to muffle the household cacophony, I could hear my own breath. And then, as my ears attuned to the new space, I made out a new surround sound: the light, tinkling chatter of birds and a mourning dove cooing its five-note song. I noticed, for the first time, that this space has windows on three sides—two of them tiny, no more than the width of my foot, but windows nevertheless. The third, big window had a full-bleed view of the spring’s neon green trees. If I squinted, I was in a treehouse.

Most of the space’s footprint was a narrow line that led to an old dumbwaiter, long covered over with a wide cabinet door. My eyes stayed on that cabinet door. Still powered by a primal instinct, I hunted through the pile of tools we kept near the brooms. My hand landed on our electrical drill. I’d never used one, but my dad was a carpenter and that thought gave me some steadying confidence. I felt for the screws along the cabinet’s hinges; they’d been painted over many times in the past hundred years, but there they were, flats of old metal all down the side of the door. I turned on the drill—another noise to drown out the household—and matched its whirling vortex to the head of each screw. I felt a hit of satisfaction when, one by one, they relented and fell onto the floor. In two minutes the cabinet door was freed and in my lap. It was a broad, horizontal surface, full of new potential.

I got a few armfuls of big red faux-brick cardboard blocks from our son’s bedroom. Moving away the brooms, I set them up in two stacks, and then laid the cabinet door on top. I had a desk. Stepping back to assess my work, I felt full of accomplishment. I knew how the Swiss Family Robinson felt after jerry-rigging a multi-storied home out of the New Guinea forest.

For the first time since I’d left the workforce, after our second son was born, I had a place to do my work. Later, a handyman built a desk into the end of the narrow space, so that I face one of the tiny windows. It is spring again now, and I hear the mourning doves through the cracked windows. This office has become my favorite spot in the apartment.

It’s six years after that pandemic spring. I’ve done so much work here, though too much of it has been administrative and obligatory. I still need a good lock for my door. I’m still trying to get my thoughts straight on the page.

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