July 27 I'm at the airport, buying a new charger for my headphones. In line for the self checkout machine, I point and say—"Oh my God, look!" The man ahead of me is pressing a cheese & cracker plate to his checkered chest when he hears me, and says—"Wow, I wonder how that got there?" Laying flat atop the blue palettes of gum, above the rows of stacked candy bars, is a half eaten chocolate chip cookie. It is uniform in color and pattern, a Chewy Chip's Ahoy, maybe. I look at t

July 25 A man with a sun-reddened face and gelled hair comes in around 10am. "It's been a long time since I've seen you here." He leans over the display case, rests his forearms on its plastic top. I don't recognize him. But the feeling is familiar: a man seeing me without my seeing them. "Yeah, I've been away. Back part-time." It’s my second week back on the job. I spent a semester teaching, but teaching is just as complicated as writing, and I can't sustain both at o

July 24 A green apple falls hard onto the garden sand, like a tennis ball thrown for no dog. The tiniest dog is tick-tacking, click-clacking across the wooden table at the Gestault Taphouse—in the back, where dogs are allowed (if they’re small. If they’re cute). When Collin puts down my glass, the tiny dog licks the foam off my Pilsner, poured tall in a glass that weighs more than she does, I bet. Her name is Eva. Eva's dad is long limbed; he could probably carry ten Evas in

July 22 I'm eating an open-faced sandwich–chicken salad, radishes, focaccia gone twice through the toaster. The grass I’m sitting on has, today, become the audience for a children's puppet show–The Magical Forest. To my left is a pile of fabrics and string, coiled on the top of the park slope. The deck, below (where I used to peer over into the creek as a child, where the toddler I first nannied bit through skin when I told him he couldn't go in) is the stage. On its wooden

July 20 A baby lizard, so small I can't imagine the organs, dashes from the street through my sandaled feet. I'm standing at our gate, about to roll the recycling bins back in. But I am startled now, at how giant I am. At how my feet could end a life just beginning, just like that. I remember a Mrs. Dalloway quote, something about how miraculous it is that we survive even one day. The stone path the cans must travel is full of California poppies now, their thin green arms hol

July 19 That three sips of coffee after 2 p.m. kept my body awake past midnight, the sliver of a moon out my window enough of a reason to sit up, get up, and listen to the nocturnal mammals of summer. That my dog and the foxes got so close last night, barked and growled—but still, a conversation. And that, on my lunch break I pass two panting, leash-stuck huskies in the sun and say, “Poor babies—who do you belong to?” And how right then, materializing from the shadow of a c