Excerpt from “In My Mind the Sea:”

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I was alone and he was with me, but thinking of the sea made it all right, made everything seem as everything should be.

His fingers. Like a prickling at the nape of my neck that tickled and pinched and joggled the nerve endings as if 5,000 pairs of eyes were trained on me, but I gritted my teeth and believed it nothing more than grains of sand trickling off my sun-drying body, as if the sea simply washed over me and tickled me with its froth.

I was alone when the stars came out. In the bath with GI Joe and Barbie, who had lost her head. The sea had gone now. the only waves to calm me were the ones I made while sloshing. My mother’s presence warmed me, like the first blast of heat from the furnace in the morning. It was her house, now. But the walls were always hers. Petit point: old and new and Home Sweet Home. It smelled of unfinished and unframed petit point daisies, warm kitchens and wood-stoves, fresh bread, and a forest scene as long as the hall between the bathroom and kitchen.

The forest was her favourite. It was an original. She had sewn the old bed sheets together on her sewing machine, and drawn on it trees mountains, and the little cabin—where she said one day we’d live—then she coloured in the sketch with my Reeve’s water colours. It looked almost like the store-bought kits she always got and never finished. She used left-over threads from those kits on her forest.

My forest is nearly finished, she said. And when it’s done it’s going in the PNE Home Show.

It’ll win, I said. But so did he. I had said it first.

She smiled down to me: Go to your room.

So I went to my room and he stayed, and he told her again: It’ll win the blue ribbon, Marl.