Current toe temperature suggests we are living in Michigan, mid-winter. You might say, Put some socks on, woman! But I’m already double socked, and the hot water bottle has become my fourth pet. (The hot water bottle seems like the sort of genetically altered pet favored by citizens of an amoral and luxurious future society: mute, lumpen, hairless, heat-giving, obedient friend.)  But let’s get back to the weather for a minute. I mean, the sky outside is white. The ocean is invisible. The dog is wearing her pink blanket, and the pink blanket is definitely wearing the dog. It’s been like this for weeks. Every July I tell myself, This year, I’m prepared, my heart is hard, my hopes are low, why, I’ll even find the beauty in it,  and every year it turns into the Fogocalypse.  The fog makes me suspect we can never adequately prepare for anything, even the seasons. How can this fog not be a harbinger of something else? How can it not be a metaphor? What does it conceal, apart from my car parked across the street? And because we are on the coast, and the rest of the city is so often in sun, I feel the message is meant especially for us, beach people. Is it a message from the sharks? Is it a message from the future? Is it a blessing or a subjugation?

I’ve been reading a lot of good kids’ books lately. You might think this is something I do all the time anyway, but I don’t. Reading any good book fills me with a sense of loss as well as delight. I assume some of the feeling of loss has to do with envy because I didn’t write the awesome thing myself, but that’s not the whole picture. When a book is really good, really wise, or funny, or weird, or full of broad and nuanced understanding of man and beast, or the projection of a great imagination, then I find the world of the book and the world beyond the book painfully discordant. The real world isn’t worse, exactly, but it’s different, and I’m different in it. When I read I am all action, never numb, never lazy, basically a wolf girl tearing across the landscape on all fours.  I guess reading is like dreaming in this way, but a dream you don’t undertake voluntarily. You don’t surrender energetically to a dream. You just live through it.

Good novels for adults make me more alive to the ways of the world, but it’s usually this sweet old world. Kids’ books make me alive to other worlds. Sometimes I go puttering along for months at a time, happy in loving who I love, determinedly doing the things I need to do, and then, bit by bit, I’ll start wondering, What is beyond? What is out there? It’s very sci fi. It’s not about death, exactly, or anyway, not immediately. It’s about a space of greater imagination, different animals, surprising physics, magic powers! I don’t think I’m explaining very well, but sometimes I just think, Is this all there is? Making our way and making sense of the same old mysteries? I want to know what the sharks discuss at their yearly meeting in the valley of the ocean. I want to meet a dog with eyes on his forelegs, who sings and sees the future. I want to have a child with wings and a beak. You know what I mean? You see what the fog brings?