My house is fat. I still love it as I did when my husband and I bought it with dreams of a future in which the house was to be slender and beautiful.

But I have to say, the physical attraction is waning.

Once upon a time we lived in a tiny 1930s house, the kind where you could grab the toothbrush off the sink and get your shower running while sitting on the toilet. Not that I’ve done that. Back then, Dave and I vowed not to let our house turn into the cluttered mess we knew most American houses become. No exploding closets, no cars in the driveway because the garage is filled with Christmas decorations, no favorite clothes kept around just in case they come back into style.

Use it or lose it was the motto. And for a while, it worked.

Then we moved into a bigger house. Not a McMansion by any stretch of the imagination — we live in the San Francisco Bay Area, where a cardboard box costs $400,000 — but a decent, three-bedroom home with closets, cupboards, and a two-car garage. We needed to buy a few things to fill it out. And then, in replacing some of the old drab stuff, we bought new items and put the old ones — an old couch, chair, and tables — in the garage. Temporarily, of course.

And then we had a baby. Suddenly, there was no time to sift through our belongings and take trips to Goodwill. As baby products consumed every room, we shoved mattresses, cookbooks, and our daughter’s impressive wardrobe into every nook and cranny. And that old couch in the garage? You never know if a sibling or friend might need furniture. At least that’s what we tell ourselves.
 
As the house’s waistline grows, I know we should watch our intake, but I can’t seem to help myself.

I like stuff. I want stuff. Stuff makes me feel good.

I rarely walk into a baby store without buying an outfit for Sarah, even though her grandparents do a marvelous job of keeping her in high style. She has 18,000 toys, all of which she eats. We, the adults, have a mammoth television, Christmas plates, and half a closet dedicated to gift wrap. Recently, while reorganizing, I came upon a forgotten heart-shaped casserole dish. And still, as I perused Crate and Barrel for a media stand to hold our new TV, I wanted more. It got me thinking: Could I ever expect to have one of the thin, beautiful homes we see in the catalogs that rain down on us every week? Or is that dream as unrealistic as waking up to find I look like a supermodel?

Pottery Barn is one of these beauty magazine offenders. About every four hours we get a new catalog from them, and each one shows myriad, perfect rooms with a throw blanket and a pair of slippers at the foot of the couch. There’s no pile of bills, no overflowing laundry basket, and you certainly don’t find last season’s Pottery Barn décor shoved under the stairs. It’s perfectly sparse. It’s the skinny model I always wanted my house to be.

Instead, I open my kitchen cabinets and Tupperware tumbles out like rolls of fat over too-tight jeans.

Rather than purge belongings, a lot of people become manic about organization. Places like The Container Store have been established to satisfy this need. There are nearly 40 across the United States, and like gyms we go to for a week each January, they pretty much exist to make us feel like we’re getting our acts together.

I am guilty of this. I buy color-coded boxes, plastic bins, and shelf dividers, and bring them home to clear out the garage with the aim of driving my car into it. Ultimately, I just have too much stuff in nice bins.

You’d think Americans would catch on. We buy things in an attempt to improve our lives. Next, we believe that if we could just get our stuff organized, everything would be okay. Unfortunately, The Container Store can’t match the army of Pottery Barn locations in the United States, so our consumption is likely to far outweigh our efforts to get in shape.

Our society definitely makes it hard to live a lean lifestyle, but outlets exist to get our homes in fighting condition. On Earth Day, we dumped a TV and yards of extra cords at an e-waste recycling center. There are numerous places to donate clothing, furniture, and appliances to the less fortunate. And if we are really determined, we could just say “no” to buying things.

For our house, that’s not going to happen — at least not for a while. I’m resigned to it being on the chubby side, junk and all.

Summer Batte

Halfway through my senior year in college, I came down with the flu twice along with pneumonia. For several weeks, I swallowed only Thai chicken soup and soy smoothies that were brought to me while I lay on my dorm room bed, coughing my lungs out. When the illness left, it had done what no amount of dieting or exercising had ever accomplished. I had lost every pound I’d gained since high school — not just the fabled “freshman 15” (okay, more like seven), but also the “sophomore four,” the “study abroad six,” and the “new boyfriend three.”

My lack of waif-like features had been an anomaly at my perfectionist Ivy school, but I coped. A proud feminist, I made a point of carrying my extra weight confidently. I felt as though my dress size separated me from the girls who played into sexist ideals and mournfully poured vinegar over their dinner carrots. Of course, negative body image drove me to distraction in private, but I could never wholeheartedly tackle the gargantuan — and in my mind, hypocritical — task of getting more than a few pounds skinnier.
 
And now I was sure I’d never have to. Back home for the holidays, I tried on my old clothes. My red dress from “sweet 16” parties fit perfectly. My embroidered cowgirl jeans fit, with room to spare. It didn’t matter that I would never have occasion to wear these ridiculous things again.
   
I was infinitely relieved. A chapter of my life spent feeling fat — and then feeling guilty for caring about my jean size when there was so much else to worry about — had melted away.

But it was naïve to think that all the emotional weight had left with the pounds. In our society, particularly in hypercompetitive niches like my college, size is crucial to our identities, reaching nearly as important a status as race and gender.

You can’t just sneak from fat to thin, or thin to fat.

The first comment I got after my recovery was from a friend whom I bumped into at a late-night campus joint. I was wearing a bulky ski parka, but this girl, who was particularly diet-conscious, saw right through my winter layers. “Oh my god,” she said accusingly from across the restaurant. “You got so ridiculously skinny. You must have lost 10 pounds in a week. Or was it 15?”

I was shocked. When I had been on the chubbier side, people didn’t comment on my body in front of others like that. An unspoken rule says that small bodies of various degrees are okay to moan over (“I’m so fat!”) and compliment (“You’re so not!”). But people who aren’t diminutive face a damning public silence. I was flummoxed. To revel in my friend’s scrutiny would have been impossible: “Thanks, girlfriend. That mucus in my chest really helped create a new me!” But I had been psyched to fit back into that red dress. I felt unusually speechless.

The attention came in a steady parade — some positive, some envious, some suspicious. “You look emaciated,” a close friend told me at a party that spring with a disapproving tone that was sounding like a familiar refrain. Again, my body — not my improving health — was being parsed in a critical way.

While once I was concerned about girth, I was now paranoid about girlfriends. I feared that my new size had thrown some secret pecking order off balance — that my friends had counted on my fuller figure and my feigned comfort with it to make them feel better.  Despite my idealistic aspiration toward a “we are all sisters” kind of feminism, my inner voice warned that I might have to get more stupid now that I was thin, or at least act more self-deprecating. I felt like a walking, talking threat to all the women I knew.

Back when other women had championed the South Beach Diet last year, I had scorned their agonizingly achieved slimness. Now their pissy attitudes about my change in size were forcing me to see that our bodies are always battlegrounds.

So I celebrated the “new me” by joining in a chorus of self-effacing comments. I would never have called attention to myself by stuffing a doughnut in my mouth and saying, “I suck,” when I was 15 pounds heavier. Now I could do exactly that, and I felt like I was joining a heretofore members-only club. And yes, I felt guilty about it.

But whether my self-criticism was silent or tellingly open, it was still there. Unlike the success stories trumped by women’s magazines, we women on all parts of the body-size spectrum still don’t think we’re good enough. And instead of turning against the society that makes us feel this way, we often turn against the woman who eats an extra slice of pizza or refuses dessert, shops one size up, or is a slave to the treadmill.

Engaging in this perverse group exercise of wailing about our waist sizes doesn’t do us any favors. Until we women stop being complicit in our obsession with weight, our relationships will be strained by the relentless need to measure ourselves, literally, against each other.

Sarah Marian Seltzer

First in a two-part series. Click here for the second part.

A truck had dropped me off at a crossroads. But instead of driving away, the well-meaning driver was still trying to tell me something. Probably, “No cars are coming. You’re in the middle of nowhere. Are you crazy? What are you doing, little lady?”

I got the gist, even though I didn’t speak Spanish. I started walking, and as the distance between us grew, I could hear him yelling that maybe this was a bad idea, and he motioned for me to get back into the truck. He honked again.

But I kept on walking. No time for debate.

I passed a man wearing a suit and a felt hat, who was also headed for San Diego de los Baños, a town known for its thermal baths. He was just standing there, waiting in the middle of nowhere, as if it were a bus stop. But there was no bus stop. No car or another person in sight.

Perhaps he is still waiting there.

The man said that San Diego de los Baños was a long way off — fifteen kilometers at least. But rather than join him, standing in the countryside, with the chance that a car may never show up, I decided that if I walked fast enough, perhaps I could still reach the town by nightfall.

It was now 3:30 p.m. The sky was overcast. About three more hours of sunlight left. Remembering the distance of bygone high school cross-country races, I calculated that 3.1 miles equaled five kilometers. If I can walk three miles per hour, surely I can reach town by dark, I thought. It is doable.

So I began walking. And I walked and walked.

And not a single car came by.

The road through the countryside rose and fell, and soon, the flatness of the land gave way to a forest of pines and cedars. Not far from here, Che Guevara had moved his headquarters into a cave during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was just me and this forest, and if I shouted, I’d spook myself.

Suddenly, two men emerged from nowhere, walking next to their bikes. Perhaps there was a house tucked away in the forest that I couldn’t see. I began to walk a little faster, but the two men were gaining on me.

Why are they walking next to their bikes? I asked myself.

My duffel was heavy, and I tried to pick up the pace, but they were getting closer.

I could totally be raped and robbed right now, I thought, clenching my teeth.

I stopped and let them overtake me. A teenager with his father on a bicycle ride, it appeared. They happened to be walking next to their bikes because the hill was on an incline.

“Hola,” they said, after I gamely raised my hand and said, “Hi.” I knew I was safe after I asked them how far San Diego de los Baños was, and the man replied with a wave of his hand into the distance, “Twelve kilometers. It’s far away.” I reassured him that I was hoping to flag a car that came this way. He nodded, and they soon passed me.

I walked a few more kilometers when I saw two other men approaching from behind — again walking with their bikes.

There is nobody around, so I am really at their mercy here, I began to think. Suppose I get killed in this forest. The Cuban police might take a week to identify my rotting body from my passport photo. My imagination was getting the better of me again; I began to wonder how much media coverage the story would get at home.

And then, the men were next to me. One of them offered to put my bag on his bike. I said no, that I can carry it myself. Now there is a ploy, I thought. Put the tourist’s bag on the bike and ride off.

It was not until the younger of the two men smiled sympathetically and said something about confianza that I softened. I said “Sí,” and put my duffel on his bike. I recognized the word from the French confiance, which means “trust.”

And so began our twelve-kilometer ride to San Diego de los Baños, where the two men lived. The sun emerged, and the skies then revealed the depth of their blue heights, with wispy clouds soaring high above. When we would reach the summit of a hill, I would sit atop the horizontal bar of the bike, “sidesaddle,” in front of the younger man, and hold onto the inner handle bar while he, wearing my backpack, would steer us both downhill, with the older man following close behind.

We’d breeze past palm trees and lush vegetation, the young man applying the brakes generously and carefully avoiding the road’s potholes, until the hill petered out. Then the three of us would hop off the bikes and walk them up to the next summit, get back on, and ride downhill again.

A strange grunting noise seemed to follow us each time we stopped. And then came a long squeal.

Poking out of the slits of two sacks tied onto each bike were two snouts, each sniffing the air as if to figure out what was going on. We were biking with a couple of hogs.

“Música,” joked the younger man as we navigated down yet another hill.

As we approached town, we passed people who looked up and stared. Sometimes, I heard laughs and “Chiiiiina.”

I am American, but I let people think I was from China during this trip to see Cuba on my own. “Chairman Mao!” some would offer generously in a eureka moment of finding common ground. “Lejos,” or “far,” people would say, in remarking how long my plane trip must have been from Asia.

I often got those comments while walking — or waiting for transport.

This is a country where you often have to stick your thumb out to get somewhere, especially when off the beaten track, because of a shortage of buses. No hitch aboard a tractor, truck, or even motorcycle sidecar prepared me, however, for the possibility of catching a ride aboard somebody’s bicycle.

When the younger man had first motioned for me to jump on his bike, I balked. How did he want me to sit, I wondered. Did he want me to straddle it?

“You’re from China,” he said, laughing. “You don’t know how?” He then stuck out his butt to demonstrate that the best way was to sit sideways.

I do know this. I would probably still be walking in the dark in that uninhabited forest, were it not for those two men. Not once did a car pass along the road that entire time.

We made it to town just before nightfall.

November 2, 1999

First in a two-part series. Click here for the second part.

Savage, a Boston Globe correspondent and ITF contributor, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. This story was originally published June 4, 2001.

“No man is an island,” the poet John Donne assures us. But on October 5, 1998, I had a hard time sharing his optimism. That was the day I found out I had LMS — leiomyosarcoma, a rare cancer of soft muscle tissue that strikes fewer than four people out of a million.

But despite those numbers, I never really felt alone. Today, people with extremely rare medical conditions around the world are banding together via email groups. It is, in every sense, a revolution in terms of patient empowerment, one that has quickly spread in the past couple of years.

Cancers like LMS are among the loneliest of illnesses. While those with more common cancers can usually find a network of others in the same city who have the same condition and who are going through the same thing, my chances of ever meeting another LMS patient seemed slim.

Only a few years ago, that isolation would have been my new reality. It certainly was for Orland Hetherington, a native of Ontario, Canada, who had LMS diagnosed in 1994. “I spent two years trying desperately to find another living soul with LMS,” Hetherington said. “I was alone with this and scared. I became somewhat obsessed with finding someone else on the planet with LMS and searching harder for more and more information.”

In March 1997, LaDonna Backmeyer, an LMS patient in Rock Island, Illinois, found Hetherington on a cancer online support list. She asked him to help her start an online discussion group specifically for LMS patients and their families and friends. From just four members then, that email group has grown to more than 560 subscribers.

For a while, I was one of them. The group instantly welcomed me to its ranks with both personal notes of understanding and a barrage of advice on treatment options and research information that helped me know more about what lay ahead during my recovery.

The group “has given information to several hundred patients since its founding,” Backmeyer said. “Some of the patients check in for a small amount of time in order to get the information they need; others find a group of welcoming friends, and they stay.”

All this from a machine

In my case, the group helped me learn about a then-experimental surgical technique developed by Dr. Steven Curley at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. I flew to Houston and underwent Curley's surgery, which removed all traces of tumor from my liver in December 1998. As of my last trimonthly check up, I remain cancer-free without having had to undergo chemotherapy.

In October 2000, Curley was quoted in a U.S. News & World Report article about a successful new generation of cancer-fighting techniques; because of the help of the LMS group, I found him two years before the general public learned of his existence.

There are similar email lists for about sixty other cancers. All are the offspring of a single group list started three years ago by the not-for-profit Association of Cancer Online Resources, founded by Gilles Frydman, a New York City computer entrepreneur. Frydman's wife was stricken with breast cancer and found information through an email list that helped her avoid a mastectomy.

"I started to look at how cancer patients use the Internet," Frydman said. He found that people with a variety of cancers all seemed to end up on a single, general-cancer email list. "I thought it was outrageous that only people suffering from very common forms, like breast and prostate cancer, got their own specific mailing list. So it seemed to me that what we should do was create a mailing list for every known type of cancer." Today, there are more than 125 email groups, with a total enrollment in the tens of thousands.

"Everyone comes to this support group with no idea of the vast information that is going to be shared with them," said one LMS group member, Cynthia Whitson of LaGrange, Georgia. "We all just come to selfishly help ourselves find the way through the maze of doctors, facilities, treatments, and side effects. We find that we become a part of an emotional movement to collectively find the answer to each one's question."

For many, helping others on the list find answers becomes a way to cope themselves. "I had every intention of getting off the group during this three-month break between treatments while I waited for the next scan date," Whitson said. "But you can't leave it. It becomes a part of your life, just as cancer will forever be a part of your everyday life."

Many members of these rare-cancer communities attest to this sense of involvement–becoming, in the words of Donne’s poem, not an island but a “part of the main … involved in Mankind.”

“The list, for me, has meant longer time here on Earth and incredible satisfaction in trying to help others with LMS,” In The Fray Contributor

I had come to Cambodia to turn 30. My twenties were not nearly as fabulous as I had planned, and I needed a dose of perspective to shake the decade off. Nowhere is perspective so easily gained as in Cambodia, and nowhere is the Cambodian trifecta of poverty, corruption, and genocide more apparent than in the capital city of Phnom Penh.

After days of trekking around the exquisite temples of Angkor Wat in the northern countryside, Phnom Penh is a shock to my system. My husband and I see kids sniffing glue on the street, white men parading around with prostitutes, and legions of homeless people sleeping and bathing on the banks of the Ton Le Sap. Phnom Penh is a city of non-governmental organization workers, not tourists, and after two days, we are quickly running out of attractions to visit. Only two essential stops are left on our trip: S-21, the prison camp where many suspected spies were tortured by the Khmer Rouge, and the killing fields, where those same prisoners were executed and buried.

When the Khmer Rouge seized power, Phnom Penh was evacuated within two days. Khmer Rouge soldiers, some as young as 11, had the French colonial city at their disposal. They turned mansions into barracks, hospitals into weapon storehouses, and schools into torture centers. One such torture center was Toul Sleng prison, also known as S-21, a former primary school in what had been a quiet, tree-lined, upper middle-class suburb. Today, the S-21 complex is a museum. The surrounding neighborhood is full of barbed wire, stray dogs, and trash-littered gravel roads. It seems sketchy even for a city as lawless as Phnom Penh.

Our guide at S-21 is a quiet woman in her late thirties who lost most of her family during the reign of the Khmer Rouge. “First they killed my father,” she says, echoing the title of Luang Ung’s haunting memoir of growing up under the regime. The rest of her family was split up and sent to camps in rural areas at opposite ends of the country, she tells us. The guide and her mother were transferred to a camp near the Vietnamese border; they survived by walking to Vietnam in the middle of the night. The guide was nine at the time. She never saw her siblings again.

S-21 is a series of four four-story buildings, which, though worn and weather-stained, give no outward clues to the torture endured by 20,000 prisoners inside. One step into the first building, however, and we are immediately confronted with its grim history. The former classrooms have been divided up into cells, each with a rusty, sagging bed frame. Next to each bed lie cattle prods and other rusty instruments of torture. Fuzzy, blown-up black-and-white photographs reveal how each room looked when the Vietnamese army arrived to overthrow the Khmer Rouge: torched corpses chained to the bed frames, bodies unrecognizable. Wild pigs and rats had already eaten many of the bodies.

Our guide is surrounded by an aura of profound sorrow. She walks into each room, delivers a sentence or two about what happened there, and immediately turns and walks out into the open-air corridor to wait for us. It is as if she cannot handle an extra second inside the walls.

In one cell, the biggest moth I have ever seen flutters about. Its wingspan must be 12 inches, and its brown markings match the dust and rust inside S-21. The moth is eerily beautiful, the product of a warped ecosystem in which pigs scavenge for human flesh and children tote machine guns. I imagine the impossible: that this moth has been around for decades, flitting about this room, quietly watching the transformation from school to torture cell to tourist attraction. The moth reminds me that life goes on, even in the face of insanity.

Our guide leads us to the next building, where hundreds more black-and-white photos of prisoners are displayed. Like the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge kept meticulous records, photographing each prisoner with a numbered plaque upon arrival at S-21. Looking at these photos feels like staring into the eyes of ghosts, each staring back, aware of his or her rapidly approaching death. Out of the 20,000 people housed at S-21, only seven survived.

In the next building, we view an exhibit of present-day photographs of and interviews with former Khmer Rouge soldiers, most of whom are now middle-aged farmers, eking out an existence in the countryside. None of them express regret about their involvement with the Khmer Rouge. Many feel like victims themselves, having been recruited as child soldiers. No one, including these former soldiers, has ever been tried for the atrocities that took place under the regime.

When I ask my guide how she feels about the movement to bring former Khmer Rouge officers to justice, she looks at me with sad, scared eyes and says, “It’s very difficult to talk about politics in my country.” Apparently, more than two decades after the Khmer Rouge, the walls at S-21 still have ears.

Leaving S-21, we negotiate with a tuk-tuk driver to take us to one of the killing fields — former rice paddies where political prisoners were executed and buried in shallow mass graves. The killing fields are now a memorial, but active farms surround them on three sides. Barbed wire demarcates the farmland from the graves. Young boys stand behind the barbed wire, offering to pose as prisoners for the equivalent of $1. In Cambodia, where the average monthly salary is about $17, that is a tremendous sum of money. These kids — some as young as seven — are already master capitalists. Some tourists take them up on the offer, getting the perfect shot of Cambodian boys standing behind barbed wire.

Michelle L Caswell

She was a wise woman.

Heads turned as she pushed her metal shopping cart down supermarket aisles. Strangers at stop lights turned to see if she was wearing a fake attachable halo like the ones children might don with their Halloween angel costumes. Even the kindergarteners she taught noticed — and gave her silent reverent bows as she walked by.

The wise woman’s mane of pure, majestic white hair was unsettling.

People rarely dared to speak openly about it.

Women over 30 were the only ones who blurted out their fears in little bursts of self-conscious comments.

“I wish my hair were striking white. Not this awful, lifeless ash,” they said mournfully, always lifting a portion of their own hair and letting it fall back to their scalps like washed-out pieces of dead seaweed.

“You’re so lucky. Once you dye your hair, you can’t stop. But I guess with hair like yours, you’ve never had to dye it, have you?”

The wise woman would shake her head silently. Never.

“I can’t believe that. I remember when I got my first gray hair, I was devastated.”

She knew that even if she tried to say something to help them acknowledge their inner light, they would not hear it.

So she stayed quiet, as the women, wrapped up in the tragedy of aging, prattled on about their fear of becoming obsolete, of losing their husbands to younger women with thick, vibrant, undyed hair that tumbled down their backs.

“Just like the ones in the Pantene Pro-V commercials — you know which ones I mean?”

They sputtered about feeling threatened by airbrushed TV goddesses, whose sexiness and confidence seemed to flow into their bouncy hair.

The women would eventually finish their monologues and drift away, muttering about models and the latest haircuts on “Grey’s Anatomy.”

Never once really seeing the woman of wisdom’s luminous white hair.

If they had looked a little longer, they might have glimpsed the icy tips of the highest mountains piercing crystal blue skies.

If they had stilled their minds for a moment, they’d catch a soft aura and glimpse Buddha sitting under the Bodhi tree and awakening.

They might feel the gentle warmth of a church candle between their palms. Or a pool of tranquility deep inside their bellies, like an untouched lake in a forgotten grove.

Instead, the women walked on without looking back.

Without even a silent kindergarten bow.

Rhian Kohashi ORourke

For Chanukkah this year I may have received the most meaningful gift I’ve ever been given. My family isn’t all that big on the gift-giving associated with that time of year. Like many people, it’s more about the time we spend together as a family than the price tags or the presents. We get simple things, like Dutch chocolate letters, an old tradition from my dad; or useful things, like teacups or socks or warm sweaters. And to be honest, this year I didn’t even want a gift. Everyone was happy and healthy, and that’s all that mattered.

However, my mom surprised me this year. When I was in high school she taught me how to knit, and I had spent many years slowly knitting colored squares with the intention of one day creating a quilt. She started making squares as well, and when I went away to university we stored the squares and the yarn in our guest room. Unbeknownst to me, my mom had taken on the task of sewing together not only squares that both she and I had made but added those to squares my dad’s mother had made as well: a three-generation quilt.

I was completely stunned. I knew that my mom must have spent countless hours painstakingly arranging all the squares and sewing them together. Her inclusion of pieces from my oma (“grandmother” in Dutch) gives the quilt an added meaning. My oma passed away when I was 14, just as I was beginning to know her. She and her husband, who died when I was 3, were both Holocaust survivors. I feel as if I’ve spent the rest of my life searching for pieces of them, tying stories, pictures, and memories together in an attempt to hold onto her.

I know a few people who have their grandparent’s pocket watch or a piece of jewelry belonging to a great-great relative. Or maybe it’s an old photograph that they carry in their wallet. These objects remain almost invincible to time, preserving the memories of their past owners and keeping them alive.

Aside from objects, stories that are passed from generation to generation also keep memories from dying. Also, sometimes people name their children after those who have passed on as a way to give honor to their memory.

As for my grandmother, I try to weave the stories my family has told me about her with my own memories as well as physical objects. Before she died, a Holocaust museum in Florida interviewed my grandmother. I listened to the tapes, searching for answers into who she was. She described her experiences about being in a line that separated the people who will live from the people who will die, and about where they slept, ate, and cried. Her spirit and determination comes through on those tapes so vividly, it’s almost as if she’s next to me and we’re having this intimate conversation. I want and need to keep her memory alive for my children and their children too.

In the meantime, the quilt lays on my bed, protecting me from the unknown secrets in the night and keeping me warm. My squares, which are sometimes slightly misshapen or hampered by mistakes, intertwine with those of my mom, pieces that are uniform, brightly colored, and cheerful. My eyes follow the stitches to my oma’s squares, neat, tightly bound, and of deep, rich shades of brown and orange that were popular in the ’70s. And maybe it sounds silly, but I know she’s there with me. It’s as if her soul shines through the yarn. Perhaps physical objects are our most powerful relics after all. Either way, they certainly keep our bodies and our hearts warm.

Rachel Van Thyn