Some local top-forty radio station mumbled indistinctly from behind the cash register Next to the futon rested a pile of fabric and a frilly pincushion. When she wasn’t at work, Lisa liked to make clothes for . She was almost ten years older than me but we were pregnant with our first children at the same time. She spent a lot of time traveling around Europe and the southwest; I married right out of college which explains the timing. Our children would be three months apart and I hoped they would be close, though the distance between Pennsylvania and Colorado is immense. My sister - When I was in kindergarten, my mom sewed most of my clothes. She made one autumn jacket out of fuzzy fake sheep fur that I wore every day once the cool wind that lifted fallen leaves off the ground started to leave my cheeks raw and pink. Every Thursday, school ended before lunch and my best friend Briony and I would walk to her house and sit on the cold, wood floor of her bedroom, listening to her ABBA cd’s on her purple cd player while we doodled on old paper. One day, we did something my I rarely did since I started kindergarten and Reed developed a habit of running and crawling everywhere, sticking his hands in places he shouldn’t. Briony’s mom took us out to lunch. Bruegger’s Bagels, which was a short walk down the street, was hardly exotic, but I got to pick out my own lunch which was an adventure within itself. With my chocolate milk and plain bagel, wrapped in a warm brown bag, the cashier gave me a round sticker with a little chef holding a bagel. I promptly put the sticker on the front of my fuzzy jacket. A week later, when I decided that I had had enough of the sticker, I pulled it off, leaving bits of paper stuck on the fuzz. I would stand at the top of the green plastic slide that made my hair levitate and pick at the paper, telling a classmate about my two favorite movies, Barbie Swan Lake and The Sound of Music.

• The ferry ride there felt like an hour-long ride on a roller coaster. The boat would lurch to one side, and suddenly water was visible through the round window. I hoped that I would see a fish in the water, but instead had to focus on the drama I was creating with Reed’s action figures to fend off the nausea.