My mother appears when I am in the linen closet folding bath towels. Straightening the washcloths or color-stacking the different sizes into neat rows.

I hear, clearly, “you have GOT to be kidding me,” the c-minor tone of her disapproval filling the closet. I am now fifty-six years old and my chest muscles still constrict the same way as when I was ten, fourteen, twenty-two, then my ears ring and a little vertigo shifts my gaze. I frown and peer in between the snowy face cloths, knowing better, but forced to defend myself, talk back into the soundless, empty closet.

“Go away. You know this is what I like to do!” I say, feeling like an idiot.

She has been dead twenty-nine years.

We joked about these encounters before she died. I shook my finger at her with a smile on my face, told her not to float out of the linen closet, that I was born tidy, and attentive to details — wasn’t she always glad one person in the family knew where everyone’s shoes were?  So leave me alone. We got a good laugh but I think she had a twinkle in her eye, or that could have been the elevated morphine to dull the steady march of rogue ovarian cancer cells. Secretly adding ‘linen closet’ to her list of places to visit me ‘after.’ And adding to the many diverse places that grief can sideswipe me on any given day.

Twenty-nine years is a wink of time when you have loved someone so deeply and their death has re-landscaped your heart. Read Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ book, On Death and Dying, written in 1969, the bible of sorts on what to expect from bereavement. I did, from cover to cover, the four years my mother was ill. Trying to anticipate how I would strategize through each stage when the time came. But denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, the Kübler-Ross model of grief, did not, as it happens, present in a straight line. Instead, I rocked and rolled in a scrambled, upside-down mess for a long time —years — after my mother died in 1986. The good news and the bad news is that the roller coaster continues today: I have come to realize over twenty-nine years that grief  — the breath-snatching, heart-tearing, body-numbing strike of familiarity or sadness or even humor — presents itself, for the rest of your life, in utterly surprising and unsurprising ways.

Try reincarnation: My mother appears when my oldest daughter —conceived unknowingly in my mother’s final days and named after her — laughs, throwing her head back and gulping in air, so that I often have to look away, blinded by the sound, the tilt of head, the evenly shaped teeth so familiar it hurts.

And smell: When my youngest daughter sits down, pulls out a pencil, and draws a sketch of the scene in front of her I am swept back into my mother’s studio, looking over her shoulder as the lines magically fall from her fingers onto the page. My awe, and my own artistic talents, have not changed since kindergarten. Now I have another grown woman in my life who makes magic on the paper, who asks my opinion, who humbles me with effortless talent.

She complains, “Mom, what’s the matter with you, are you paying attention, what do you think? my youngest is impatient for praise and dismissive of any criticism, the sure-footed ego of an artist rebuilt from my mother’s DNA into hers so seamlessly. I stammer out admiration, while all the while the smell of old studio oil paint and my mother’s Balmain Vent Vert perfume fills my nostrils and stings my eyelids, making my mouth go dry and words to stick.

Always, memory: A month ago, when going through the death of a friend, my son came home for a family dinner. When our meal was over he stood up, cleared the dishes, and carried them into the kitchen where he proceeded to wash them all by himself, methodically and meticulously, bending his long frame over the sink and dishwasher in a steady, thoughtful rhythm. I let him be. His concentration and silence, his solace from this task, shot me back into the Bainbridge Island farmhouse kitchen in 1986, the summer my mother was dying. My brother, at twenty-three years old, carefully leaning over the sink, unscrewing the washer, tapping the faucet, running the water, silent but occupied, finding solace in his task, in this distraction, in his usefulness, while my mother’s breath grew shallow and infrequent in her bedroom upstairs. My heart broke for my brother then, my son now, and myself that we are veterans of death,  survivors of loss, expert in the ways of sadness.

It is conceivable to say that we always grieve, because we will always remember. But I have come to understand we will be reminded in surprising and beautiful ways not so much heart breaking but consoling. I see my mother in my children. I hear her annoyed voice in the closet and laugh as I slam the door shut on her. I know how to stand aside and let grief work.

My mother would approve of her grandchildren. She will always give me a little shove and remind me to loosen up. She will always be with me in so many ways.

And I am glad.

Keeping things in perspective has been on my mind the last twenty-four hours. Not just because the quince are in full bloom here, while back in Boston they have had 77.3 inches of snow in the last two weeks. I continue to be grateful for even limited use of my arm as I recover slowly from a ‘frozen’ shoulder which didn’t work at all a month ago. I chug along on my writing project, that a few years ago seemed incomprehensible.  But today I am back to a basic reality because of what I witnessed as I breezed in and out of Whole Foods yesterday.

As I stepped in front of the Roosevelt Whole Foods from the crosswalk, a man bundled in grey clothing, sitting on a crate, whispered to me as the doors opened. So hardened by the sheer numbers of panhandlers in Seattle, I have adopted an invisibility cloak when I pass — turn my head, keep walking, hear nothing. As the doors closed behind me I heard the trailing voice say, ‘just some coconut water,’ or so I thought, and I puzzled over this through the sparking aisles, picking out my ingredients for peanut chicken soup.

After paying at the register, the doors wheezed open and I saw a mother, with a young child, standing in front of this man with her phone out. I heard her say, “what else? Don’t worry about it.” And the man on the crate said, ‘I’d be grateful for some coconut water.” And my cloak fell off and I stared. She was collecting his grocery list. She was headed in to purchase not only her items, but what this man needed.

Not handing him money. But handing him kindness, and compassion, and a hand up. Like the woman in the story I reposted on Facebook, “A Blizzard of Perspective,” who rolled down her window and unlocked her car door and made the world easier, for an evening, for a commuting mother and child.

Keeping it all in perspective. Being grateful. Paying it forward. Tag, you are it.

Kendra burst out of the dorm door at St. Georges one afternoon in 2010 with my daughter, spied we were wearing the same old-school Ray Ban sunglasses, and with one gigantic shriek, grabbed me in a bear hug and declared we were sisters.

Kendra had a lot of friends and sisters.  One only has to read the remembrance Facebook page, visit her home, sit on her memorial bench to quickly realize how many people she embraced. Over the past twelve months, I have come to see where this came from — wrapped into the beautiful that was Kendra is all the wonderful of her family,:  Her funny, daring and sweet from her sisters, her deep kindness and compassion that is her Mom, her wiseness that is her calm and loving Dad. Kendra transcended age full of these amazing qualities, and so many of us, old and young, were proud to call her friend — and sister.

This year I have squeezed her family as many times as possible. A few weeks ago, at his son’s funeral, a father said, “if you touched him, you touched us.” When I hugged Kendra all those times I had embraced a family of fine, brave, wise and loving people for life. Thank you, Kendra.

I am now so conscious that we are all connected, in tight or loose webs, with anyone we hug, admire or work with. We have to take care of each other, no time more important than when there is loss. And for a long time after that loss. That is our human truth—we get through loss with the help of others. The day after, the month after and in the years after.

This weekend I will remember Kendra in a little church on Bainbridge Island, Washington, where my mother is buried. I will go sing a hymn and pray on my knees. I will be thankful for the spirit above that is now Kendra, and the family she gave me to love, cherish and hug in Newport.

I’ll be styling those glasses, too.

Rest easy, beautiful girl.

We love you.

Yesterday I fell down the stairs. Now, this is not an auspicious beginning to the New Year of 2015. But to be honest, that is not what I was crying about, crumpled on the slick floor.

2015 began with another loss for our family, a New Year’s Eve death of a wonderful young man that has rocked my son, his former teammates, and a wide ripple of families that have shared St. Lawrence and lacrosse together. I want to put this in perspective but that is impossible. Instead, I want to put 2015 in perspective.

January 1st, 2015 turned out to not be a fresh start but a fresh hit on the head to remember what is important. A well-worn phrase but the only way we made it through January 1st, 2015. Family. Friends. Dogs. The sunrise over the evergreens. The sunset in the backyard. A warm, foamy espresso. A big bowl of spaghetti and meatballs. A green- enough tender leaf of lettuce. A cardinal in the heated birdbath. A few flakes of snow to transform the evening dog walk.

When we lose a young person the world shape-shifts, the pyramid of what is important gets restacked. I have forgotten the laundry pile. I am on the couch with my kids all the time, anytime.  I am petting my dog in the middle of the night. I will go and grieve with friends and strangers for two days this week and give strength to the family with my presence and love.

I have no words of new wisdom. I just want to say I am thinking hard about the value of our broken, beating hearts. The bruises from my fall are the least of my worry. But I may throw away those slippery socks. And a few other things that really have no meaning in 2015.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this journey to the other side of the country, the tasks I’ve set out to try to accomplish, the extreme disappointments and awesome highs that make me look in the mirror and say to my reflection, “what made you this way?”

And a few things came to mind.

I failed at being a little girl. Both the little and the girl part.

I was plump. My grandmother tried to soften this by calling me ‘pleasingly plump,’ squeezing me and complimenting my hair. But I was that fat girl. A little girl that identified with how she looked different before the age of ten.

I wore jumpers when everyone else was buttoned into their fair aisle cardigans and elastic-waisted corduroy skirts. I required an A-line silhouette, large blouses that sagged at the shoulders, paneled pants.  I never looked like anyone else in the school photos, filling the space of two, my hands tucked between my knees, hunched over on the bottom bench.

I went to two tennis lessons and never returned because I just knew how bad the outfit looked on me. It had to —  I couldn’t breathe.

And then there was the girl part. Play dates were a terrible idea, though I begged for them. For one, the friend arrived and I tired of her instantly — her request to see my dolls (I had none) or go pet my pony (forget it, mine), or the worst, to play a game (seriously) and within the hour my mother was deployed to play and I had left the room to read my book. They were boring. They were girlie. I was not.

Eventually, my mother refused all requests to invite anyone over.

“They aren’t my friends,” she said finally.

But the lowest point of my little girl years was the sleepovers. Anxiety began to build the moment the invitation arrived — Do I need a nightie or pajamas? What will they all wear? Do I get to read or do I have to stay awake? What if they tell ghost stories (they always did the scarier and improbable the better) and I was frightened?

But mostly I couldn’t hide a hideous fact: Sleeping bags were too hot. And when I got hot in my sleeping bag, I peed. In the bag. After a few soggy sleepover parties, unfamiliar mothers finding me extra pajamas, a spare bed in a different room, nowhere near the giggling party, rolling up my wet bag and dropping it into a trash bag or worse, calling my father to come collect me in the middle of the night, I stopped going.

It wasn’t that I couldn’t be social. I was chatty and engaging and happy. It was just that I wasn’t like them all in so many ways. I knew this. You just had to look at the class photos to know this.

I was my own playdate, a fact about myself that it took me years to appreciate. Back then, in little girl land, failing at playdates and outfits and sleepovers was fatal. I was simply weird. But weird taught me to be myself. And laid the foundation for how I have made decisions for the last forty years.

So now instead of leaving the room to read my book, I’ve left to go write one. When you think of it, this is really no surprise.

My beautiful friend Diane began our yoga class the other day with a reminder from Baron Baptist:

‘We are either Nowhere or Now Here.”

A page from Emma’s Roma sketchbook, fall 2014

This week I will keep my inner ear listening to Diane’s steady voice as I depart Seattle for Boston with Olive. Then 20 hours later head to the airport again and converge with my family in Copenhagen, introducing my children to their Danish cousins and I hope spark a lifetime friendship that will connect the next generation, continuing our family Danish-American tradition of threading the two countries and cultures together since the 1800’s.

EDG

Then 24-hours in London for work and friends, continuing to Rome to see the youngest who is studying, and inhaling, Europe this fall.

EDG, Pisa Fall 2014

I will be keeping mindfulness and all life happening in the present as the priority. Not the jet lag (9-hours time change for me), the head cold, the multiple airport hassles.

Instead, I will be now, here. And so grateful for my family, my friends, my pup who braved her first flight, my nest.

The olive oil will glug on Thanksgiving, where I have promised myself not one dish to wash, and a bowl of fresh pasta. New traditions.

Happy Thanksgiving to All, and as my Dad always signed off for the entire month of November,

‘Gobble, Gobble.”

It all began with a cheesecake recipe (thank you, Susan!), now immortalized in the KCTS9 2010 Family Favorites cookbook. Then a few weeks ago I submitted another recipe on a whim, my rift on Mac & Cheese, Pacific Northwest style — gluten free, roasted cauliflower, unseasoned breadcrumbs, you get the drift. With  a couple of ‘helpful tips,’ and a blurry iPhone photo because it looked so good in my red casserole dish.

I have been to so many Marketing workshops, Internet 101’s, How-to-build-your-platform-as-a-writer lectures that I simply adopted the motto ‘never say no,’  always figuring I would learn a little more, and my name would be a little more familiar, if I just took the leap. “Do anything” might be a better phrase, if a little desperate, in the quest for the “platform.”

I have been published in an online journal before I even knew what line editing was, have written a book review on a tense climbing story, thought I have never reached any summit worth recording, jumped into several writer’s groups with total strangers, perfected my elevator pitch. But this is by far the craziest “yes.”

This Saturday I will be on the TV program, KCTS9 Cooks!, as a featured local chef, along with ten other professional and local cooks. They asked me. And I said “yes.” Trust me, I squeaked.

Here’s an excerpt from one of the many “check in” phone calls from the peppy, intrepid and persistent organizer, where I try to establish just how much I am handling dangerous objects while sweating profusely under TV make-up and on the air:

“Do I need to actually core the cauliflower with a large knife on the air?

“I LOVE when our chefs show a technique!”

“Do you actually want me to zest in my 8-10 minute segment?”

“I LOVE when our chefs zest on air!”

“Well,” I said after a pause, “You had better have bandaids on hand.”

There you have it. I will do anything, it seems, to promote Alexandra Dane. And get free snacks.

Wish me luck.

The day I was scheduled to launch my first website I took a moment to google my name. No brainer, just seeing. And there it was — the top five listings were my 24-year old daughter. I had to laugh. Foiled, for all my good intentions. We shared a name, and now, the history of the name problem. I thought I had had the solution. But who anticipated the internet in 1987?

My mother was named “Alexandra” after her mother’s favorite roommate at Smith. The name, of Greek origin, was carried through history by several early Christian saints, the wife of Czar Nicholas II, and many princesses. And me.

The moment my mother arrived back home from the hospital with her little namesake, the problems began. Guess who got the nickname? Blame falls on the delivery doctor, or so the story goes.

“Ma’am!” he supposedly exclaimed, “What a beautiful pink pumpkin you have!”

My mother went by “Alex” but I bore the mortifying nickname of “Pinky” (should I be grateful this wasn’t “Pumpkin?” I am still not sure) until the day my parents pulled me out of public school, halfway through third grade and delivered me, in January, to a private school forty minutes away. I didn’t know a soul. But even at eight-years old I knew this was my big opportunity. I sensed a new beginning. If I could write it, I could be it. When this new girl was asked her name as the first class began, I proudly said aloud “ALEXANDRA!”

What more did third-graders need? I was new and had a name they had only seen in the history books. Tar-get.

”Think you’re so great, Alexander the Great?” “Think you’re a princess, too?” Usually followed by hilarity and hair tossing. Always striking me in the heart. What a way to start.

Gradually, the insults were shortened to “Alex,” faster for children to sling through braces and peanut butter. And that began stage two of the name problem.

When the telephone would ring at home, I would freeze. And sometimes, my mother would hide. When one of us finally picked up the receiver we would often hear,

“Hello is…ugh…umm…little Alex there?” or “Big Alex, is that you?”

Confusion on both ends humming down the curly red plastic phone cord.

In other homes people would shout, “I got it!” when the phone began to ring. In ours we would shout, “I’m NOT getting it!” Who wanted to be the “little” one? And on the other side of things, who wanted to be the  “big” one? Receivers were handed back and forth in fury multiple times a day, and sometimes we didn’t answer the the ringing phone at all.

So when my first daughter was born I had taken notes. We named her “Alexandra” and on the birth announcement,“ Sasha,” the beautiful Russian nickname, was scripted underneath.  Problem solved!

The name “Alexandra” proceeded to reached #26 on the charts for most popular baby names in 1995 and my daughter was grateful she wasn’t one of a million named ‘Allie’ or ‘Alexis.” I was happy we didn’t have phone conflicts. Landlines morphed into cell phones and all was quiet in the name world. Until I wanted a website.

When she began her career after college I never thought to ask what her professional name would be. She, in turn, used her nickname for friends, but her full name on her professional documents. Why not?

I sat at my computer with two minutes to go until the conference call with the web designer, the sizable credit card payment, and my new career as a writer was launched. I was so proud of her. I did not want to do anything to create confusion on her amazing road to success, or begin a muddle on the internet keyboard. Far more complicated than tossing the red phone receiver at each other.

I took a breath. I deleted my last name, my married name, and enlarged the font on my middle name. Willing to nip this historical problem at the bud.

“Alexandra Dane” is all mine. “Alexandra Garfield” is all hers. In some ways, the internet made that easy. ‘Till the next one.

Olive

I would do it in a boat, 

I would do it on a goat.

I would walk it at a trot,

I would swim it on the spot.

I’ve done it on a plane,

And I know it’s not the same.

I’ve done it twice –

take my advice!

Just like the song,

You won’t miss it ’til it’s gone.

For those of you following my Facebook posts, I just completed crossing the country in my Mini Cooper, with Olive, partly with Stephen, mostly alone. When I see the map and final accounting of miles here, I am humbled.

Unlike others who made the same trip this summer, I had ten days and not too much time to dawdle. But at 5 AM in Sheridan, Wyoming, I had the parks to myself, Olive had the pick of scampering rabbits, and the air was delicious. And standing in the middle of a roadside stop with thousands of acres of wheat pillowing the horizon, I could believe I had Nebraska all to myself. My visit with my brother and his family was long overdue, and the 33 degree evening temperature in Missoula, MT reminded me that one should always pack more than a pair of flip flops, even the first week of September.

I have committed to a nine-month workshop to complete my manuscript with Theo Nestor at the ever-diverse Hugo House in Seattle. I continue with my memoir workshop on Tuesday nights with Tara Hardy. I will sit in the Nest and my study-buddy will sigh with boredom. We will both wish we were waterproof soon.

But today, Seattle blooms glorious, with a tinge of crisp in the air, a waft of espresso from Greenwood, the lake shimmers and I think we see a big, grey cat stalking the birds. All is good.