ButterTree & Biscuits

Mia met Sara twenty-three years ago, when she was eight years old. They met through Sara’s older sister, who would sometimes bring Sara along to sleepovers. Eventually it was just Mia and Sara who would hang out, who would have sleepovers every weekend, alternating between each other’s houses. Mia says they can communicate an entire thought with a glance — one of the benefits of knowing each other so long. 

Anna says her grandma is the most caring person she knows, and that this realization was made nine years ago. Anna was recovering from back surgery and her grandma stepped up to take care of her. She stepped up even though she was in her 70s at the time — no one asked her to do it, but she did. Anna was 100% dependent. 

Can relationships with loved ones continue even after they've passed on? That's a question I’ve been asking myself a lot over the last year, since I lost my mom.

My brother signed my twenty-seventh birthday card, “You old. Love, Jon.” And in all our pictures together since childhood, while my arm is wrapped enthusiastically around him, he looks away with theatrical disdain. Yet people used to ask my mom, “What do you do to make your kids get along so well?”

When I think of my dad, I think of car rides and listening to Queen. I think of side hugs and bear stories, his patient listening and my incessant talking after the caffeine hits during morning coffees.

There it was, about to fly through the air, the bottle of wine we’d lugged in our overweight suitcase, up five flights of stairs to our apartment in the oppressive June heat. The bottle that had prompted our AirBnb host to go on a quest to find us an opener. The bottle we’d been putting off drinking in search of the right occasion.

Some places are sacred, portals to the past: a secret cove, a branch in an oak tree, a private beach or a forest clearing. I’ve had many sacred spaces throughout my life, but one in particular that comes to mind is Maggie and I’s windowsill.