I take my coffee very seriously- black please, none of that sissy stuff- but with tea I tend to indulge. I drink half a pot of coffee every morning, but I reserve my tea-drinking for rainy afternoons or cool, lonely nights, when the milky sweetness will be especially soothing. I was strictly an herbal tea drinker until I met J-, an visiting Englishman with a very strong opinion about the way he took his tea. He taught me how to make black tea the “proper English way,” a quick but complicated method involving careful attention to detail and the thick-skinned ability to take criticism when you’ve botched the job completely. This is how it’s done:

First, you must boil the water. Yes, it must be boiling. Because it just makes a difference, now do you want me to teach you how to do this, or not? Once the water is boiling, pour it into a mug and drop the tea bag in. Now, this part is important, because Americans always do this wrong. You do not steep your tea, it doesn’t need to stew, do you understand? You drop it in the water, and stir it ’round three or four times, and that’s it. Take it out and squeeze the excess water into the cup. Add a splash of milk (no, you can’t use cream! Cream is for coffee, never for tea, fucking Americans), and a cube of sugar if you’d like. Now, wait for the thing to cool so you don’t scald yourself, and enjoy.

Although I suffered some harsh scolding during these lessons (J- loved me, but had very little patience with me), once I mastered this method it forever changed my relationship with tea. I suddenly found myself in the humbling position of enjoying something I had forever claimed to be disgusting and vile. We humans are a delicate species. Our opinions are linked to our pride, and our pride is what makes us feel strong. It’s difficult, sometimes, to admit when we’ve been wrong.

Food is a gentle way to exercise one’s humility. I’ve learned to love many things that used to repel me, simply by giving them another chance. Asparagus, it seems, is actually delicious, especially when grilled just to the point of tenderness and drizzled with olive oil. Brussels sprouts, when also prepared this way, are equally irresistible. I’m learning to appreciate salmon, which I find absolutely mouthwatering when it’s bathed in lemon juice and served on a bed of hot, steaming rice. I still think about the horrific act of catching and killing the fish, the result of a life spent on beaches where the salmon run in summer. I remember stopping to watch a fisherman once a few years ago, after he had brained a slick, glistening Chinook and sat cleaning it on a log. I stood rooted in the sand, completely repulsed but unable to move away.

“It’s pretty awful, isn’t it?” The man said, noticing my stricken expression. “I hate this part. I don’t like killing something so beautiful, but my wife loves salmon. The worst part is when I catch a female and I open her up and find a bunch of eggs. That’s tough to handle. This one, thank god, is a male.”

If I can manage to heave this memory out of my thoughts, I enjoy my salmon. But I do always wonder if the butcher had to scoop out a mass of gelatinous eggs, babies that will never be born, before preparing the fish to be served on my plate.

Someone told me recently that our tastes change every seven years. Old taste buds are replaced with new ones with new preferences, which explains the variations in our diets as we age. So perhaps it’s not that we were wrong before, that rhubarb pie always tasted wonderful and we were just slow in coming around, it’s that at some point we’re tasting it with an entirely new mouth.

I was married for almost exactly seven years. Is it, then, a question of humility? Should I learn to admit that the girl I was on my wedding day was wrong, that she should never have made that choice, that she was too young or too stupid or just plain misinformed? Or did my cells regenerate, dead ones sloughing off like molting feathers, revealing a woman seven years later who was made up of completely new parts? For most of history, the idea of neurogenesis was thought impossible. Scientists believed that the brain was fixed at birth, only producing new cells during its initial formation in the womb. But now we know that brain cells do regenerate, that new neurons are continually formed even in adulthood, particularly within the hippocampus. The hippocampus is part of the limbic system, those portions of the brain that “seemingly support a variety of functions, including emotion, behavior, [and] long-term memory.” Perhaps I woke up one morning with a new brain, fresh cells that had no idea I was supposed to love the man who slept beside me. Perhaps the newborn cells in my hippocampus registered his presence with a start. He’s very handsome, they might have thought, but WHO IS HE?

But these are thoughts better reserved for coffee drinking; the bitterness of coffee is much better suited for the focused consideration of facts and figures and scientific progress. Tea drinking is for softer thoughts, softer memories. Several months ago I kissed a drunk man who looked unsteadily into my eyes and slurred, “You kiss like a poet.” I laugh every time I think of this, and I’m pleased to have discovered the final step in the making of a perfect cup of tea, something J- never mentioned during his lessons: you must laugh when you drink your tea. Laughter has the same affect on tea that it does on life. It reveals the sweetness.

These are a wilted sort of days. The cats lay prone on the hardwood floor and the butter melts in its dish on the counter. I am in love with everything in August. This is the month when I feel closest to the earth, the heat a forceful reminder of the immediacy of everything. Our home has no air conditioning, leaving us as vulnerable to the temperature as the creatures that scrounge about in the yard, experiencing summer with the same patient resignation of the millions that have lived here before us, before the conveniences of modern science. At two o’clock I’m as desperate for the relief of twilight as the rosebushes that droop near the front door; at daybreak I’m as amazed as the red-throated flickers that the day has dawned so hot.

I love to be in the fields in August, especially at midday when the heat is laid out like a blanket over the earth and muffles everything. On Sunday we walked down the country road that connects my grandparents’ house to the hills and paddocks of their friend’s ranch. We brought carrots to coax the horses over to the fence and I taught the girls how to hold their hands out, fingers flat and rigid, while the animals nudged and snuffled and scooped the carrots up with their thick, muscular lips. Some of the horses were painted; the one we fed had stripes of green and pink running down the length of her white back. Remnants of a trip to the county fair, most likely, but I preferred to imagine her the participant of some secret summer ritual, the animals gathering late at night to dance circles under the stars, hooves pounding the dry ground like drums, praying for rain.

Back at the other end of the road, the beach end where my grandparents live, the girls spent hours at the water’s edge, building and collecting and cooling themselves in the wet sand. I don’t let them wade past their knees unless I am in the water with them, because I once watched a little boy get sucked out by the undertow, nearly drowning. He would be dead now if my own mother hadn’t raced into the water after him and pulled him safely to shore.

Not all of the children were kept as close as mine; there was another pair of sisters, lithe, blonde-headed beauties who walked out waist-deep. They squealed and splashed and called to their grandmother who watched them from a plastic chair on the bulkhead. The grandmother shouted at them periodically, telling them they had gone far enough, that it was time to come back, but the girls couldn’t hear her, or chose not to hear her, and continued walking farther into the water. I kept a nervous eye on them in between pages of my book, until the grandmother finally left her chair and shuffled unsteadily across the beach, her cane sinking deep into the sand. I expected the sisters to splash back then, laughing and dripping, but the next time I looked up I saw that the grandmother had waded out to meet them, fully-clothed, cane in hand. They were all three of them up to their chests in the water, the girls pressed close to their grandmother’s side, the oldest of the two supporting her with a bony shoulder tucked into the lady’s armpit and an arm about her waist. It was one of the most spontaneously beautiful moments I have ever seen, and I turned my face away so that I wouldn’t see them turn round and walk back to shore. I wanted to remember them only this way, forever walking into water.

Did you know there are places like this in the world, where you can walk a full mile in the company of a hundred barn swallows, and leave glowing footprints in the phosphorescent sand? It stuns me, bowls me over, leaves me stock-still and paralyzed with wonder. I feel like this every August, absolutely insane with amazement over how beautiful things are. Everything pleases me. I try to remember all of this in March, awful March, when everything is damp cold and nothing makes any sense at all. Oh, how I loathe March. But by then it’s only five more months until August, I can hold on that long. I can wade through the torrents of April, the insipidity of May, the disappointment of June, and unreliable July and then August will be here again, and everything will be in its place.

I have been asked, not so politely, to leave. Leaving is a familiar feeling, I have left before and been left behind. So there’s a peculiar kind of comfort here, even though this is a leaving I will grieve violently. I know how to feel this, I know the proper measurements of stoicism and resignation to tip into the bowl, I know soon it will hurt less and things will feel safe again.

I try to convince myself that this is a good thing. This house, like other things I’ve had to leave, isn’t perfect. The windows are thin and during cold months there’s a draft that chills us in our beds and makes waking intolerable. Ants fell through the ceiling last summer and spent a month dying on the living room floor, and I’ve lived in constant dread of another infestation. I watch the ceiling apprehensively, trying to see beyond the tongue-and-groove wood to the secret things that only happen in dark places just beyond our vision. I fancy I hear them up there sometimes, hard jaws tunneling through the soft wood. I listen so intently that the sudden blast of my phone ringing scares me witless, and I say a strangled hello with my heart hammering in my chest and my breath caught tight in my throat. I’ve woken up drenched in sweat, fresh from frantic dreams of finding my children swarmed over in their sleep, carried away from me like the baby that was killed by Marquez: The first of the line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by ants.

There are other nights I can’t sleep because of the rosebush. I hate this rosebush and would have cut it down immediately if I could have lived with the guilt of ruining such a beautiful thing. The rosebush and I share a wall, and on breezy nights it scrapes relentlessly against the side of the house, echoing in my small room and forcing me to lie awake in my bed and think terrible thoughts about death and blackness and futility.

Nothing quite works properly here, and I’ve been reduced to tears more than once by a stubbornly clogged drain or the tempermental dishwasher. Friends have patiently talked me out of my panic when the washing machine decides to break in the middle of the spin cycle, and have come over late at night to remove the giant spiders that materialize in the bathtub. This house has been too much for me to care for on my own, and that is the complete truth. But so is everything. We can do nothing on our own, not even care for ourselves. Solitude drives us mad, you know, and we need the refreshment of another person breathing nearby to prevent us from becoming sick from the stagnant air. I always needed help with this place, and I hardly ever asked for it because I am unattractively prideful, so things are always a bit shabby around here. But oh, how I’ve loved it anyway.

My very favorite thing is the way the breeze comes in through the back windows and billows through my curtains in the most charming way; it’s so unaccountably lovely that even the furnace repairman told me it was wonderful. I love the strange stone wall in the living room with shelves that hold my most beautiful books. I love the lion that’s carved into the front door like a talisman and the way the lavender draws the honeybees. In the spring, the magnolia tree gives birth to blossoms that are bigger than my fists and the girls make fairy clothes with the fallen petals. On clear nights the moon shines through the high windows and glows on the smoothness of the hardwood floor. There are enough windowsills for everything I have collected: my antique jars, the moon snail shells, the sea glass. A few weeks ago I watched a bird stealing threads from the prayer flags that are strung across the deck, flitting off to weave them through the twigs and moss where her babies slept. The hopefulness of this idea struck me so fiercely that I stood at the kitchen window and wept.

When the notice arrived yesterday, commanding a renewal of the lease or a termination of our tenancy, I wanted to scream. I’ve known for awhile now that we can’t afford to stay here much longer, the rent and the bills are just too much for us, but I wanted more time. I wanted to give my heart enough space to grieve this loss- the loss of the first home that has been truly mine, the first place I’ve ever felt safe. I wanted to let the idea of leaving simmer for awhile, let it warm up to me gently so I could get used to it by degrees. But endings are never that pretty, and things always disappear before we’re ready for them to be gone. That infuriates me. Loss infuriates me. Grief infuriates me. And sometimes, on especially bitter days, love infuriates me. I hate to love things that can never stay, and I hate even more that I can never prevent myself from loving them anyway. This is the circle of life, loving and leaving and loving again.

Kinnell wrote, “The desolation of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness carved out of such tiny beings as we are asks to be filled; the need for the new love is faithfulness to the old.”

I suppose it is this way.

I was reading at my favorite coffee shop when a man walked up to my table and asked if he could join me. I looked up and recognized my friend Ahmad, a man I have shared a table with on several occasions. I hadn’t seen him in weeks. He hooked a cane on the corner of the table and slowly sat down. A fresh incision arced from the top of one ear, up over his smooth, balding head, to the top of the ear on the other side. It was held together by dozens of tiny, silver staples, neatly and evenly spaced. It was a horrifying sight to behold, a terrible railroad track perfectly bisecting the front and back of Ahmad’s head.

“Hello, friend,” I said. My face was still and completely impassive. The shock I felt at seeing him was kept private- I had no right to burden him with a dramatic reaction. “I see you’ve been busy.”

Ahmad has been struggling for years with tumors, the removal of one which left him temporarily unable to walk and permanently unable to write. I knew there was concern of another tumor, that surgery had been considered, but I had no idea that the doctors had decided to go through with it. Ahmad had also battled with a leaky memory since the removal of the first tumor, his brain refusing to hold on to information as tightly as it used to, but he always- even now- remembered me.

His countenance was markedly altered. Usually direct, lively, and charming, he now appeared muted. It was as if the artist’s palm had brushed across the bold charcoal lines of Ahmad’s expressions, leaving everything blurred. He made no eye contact. He was frightened-looking and distracted. He told me only that they had gone in after another tumor, offering no other details of the procedure, not even whether or not it had been successful. I didn’t ask. Instead, he began to describe the place he has been staying since his release from the hospital, a nursing home not far from the cafe.

“Today is the first day I have gone out on my own. I had to get out for awhile. That place… it makes you more sick.” Ahmad stared out of the window as he spoke. His face was blank, but his eyes were haunted.

“The people there- they are living a nightmare. A nightmare. They see things, you know, and they hear things, and there is always crying. They cry and call out for help and there is nothing anybody can do because the things that are hurting them aren’t really there.”

I could see it as he spoke, the long, fluorescent-lit hallways punctuated with nurse’s stations and clusters of folded-up wheelchairs.The rows of endless, open doors. In my mind I could hear them, the desperate, heartbroken cries coming from these rooms filled with people who had each been given the solitary task of dying. Bodies broken by age, minds atrophied by dimentia… I’ve been to places like this before. I knew exactly what he meant.

“There is no hope left there,” he said. “There is no believing that someday they will get better. This is how they live, and this is how they are going to die.”

Ahmad began to talk of empathy- he was angry now. “You don’t understand the system until you’re in it, and you don’t start to hate the system until you’re in it. People don’t know what this is like because they just decide not to think about it. They think that unless it is hurting them it doesn’t matter. I could watch you burning right in front of me and say to myself, ‘glad that isn’t me.’”

I wanted to stay there, to stay and let him talk to me, but I had an appointment and it was time to go. I told him I wanted to give him my phone number, that he could call me if he needed anything. He handed me his phone and I punched in my name and number, along with the name of the coffee shop for context.

“Oh, good. Now I will remember which one you are. Not that I know so many Karlis,” Ahmad said.

“Please,” I joked. “I know you- such a ladies man!” Ahmad looked at me and smiled for the first time since sitting down at the table.

“Well,” he chuckled. “Who doesn’t love beautiful women?”

I kissed him on the cheek and told him how good it was to see him. I told him that I was glad he was so stubborn. I hated to leave him there, but I couldn’t stay. I hated the thought of him riding the bus with his cane and his incision, the way the people would stare and whisper. I hated that he had to go back to that place. But I’m glad that he talked to me. Sometimes knowing that one person, just one person has really heard you, it can make the unbearable bearable again. We carry each other’s burdens this way, even if just for a moment. Sometimes the relief of that moment is all it takes to give you enough strength to go on.

“She’s about to fall asleep- look at her eyes. I can always tell when she’s about to pass out because her pupils get smaller.”

I looked into the face of the baby I held in my arms. Sunlight filtered through the leaves of an overhead tree and played patterns across the whiteness of her skin. Her giant blue eyes were focused on the bottle she clutched tightly in her delicate spider hands and I clucked at her, coaxing her to look up at me. Her pupils looked completely average-sized to me, but what did I know. I wasn’t the mother.

I was at somebody else’s family picnic, a group of jovial, engaging strangers who offered me grilled meat and a spot in the outfield for the kickball game. I did my best to chat with the ladies and joke around with the men, but my natural tendencies towards shyness and introversion were made worse by the fact that my blue summer dress plunged dangerously low in the front. This dress, at home, had seemed playful and charmingly risque. Now here, in the midst of this family that wasn’t my own, I was suddenly shameful of the amount of skin I was baring. I felt cheap and obvious, and I took the very first opportunity I could find to slip away from the friendly clamor of the adults… the baby was fussy.

“May I take her?” I asked the grandmother, and she raised her eyebrows in surprise. “I have two girls of my own, but they’re big now. I miss how it feels to hold a baby.”

I saw the grandmother’s eyes flick uncertainly from my sandaled feet, up the front of my blue cotton dress that clung to my hips in the sticky California heat, all the way up to linger for a moment at my half-covered breasts before finally meeting my gaze with a hesitant, tight-lipped smile.

“Of course, honey.” She handed me the baby. “Let me know if you need any help with her. She’s teething.”

And suddenly, blessedly, it was just the two of us, just me and this squat, squishy, squirming thing with a fat diapered bottom and a mild case of the hiccups. I held her tightly against me and smelled her sour-milk neck until she pushed gently against my chest, craning her head back to peer quizzically into my face. I lifted my sunglasses away from my eyes and we just stared at each other for awhile. This is one of my favorite things about babies, the fact that you can get away with looking at their face for a very long time without having to say anything. You can do this with dogs, but they get distracted very easily, and with lovers, although the staring is usually interrupted by kissing. Babies, though, will just look at you and look at you and maybe fart a little bit, but the eye contact remains unbroken.

We sat down on a blanket in the shade of a tree, at a safe distance from all of the grown-ups. She tasted my fingers and I told her she was beautiful, to which she responded by blowing pretty, lady-like raspberries. Her mother checked on us infrequently, dropping off a bottle and a diaper, fussing occasionally that the baby hadn’t napped yet. For the most part we were left completely alone, and I was free to enjoy the warm breeze and the brightness of the afternoon in her open, non-judging presence. I stopped worrying about my slutty blue dress and fretting over making clever conversation and was able to relax and do what I do best: love someone.

This is my other favorite thing about babies. Unlike their jaded, grown-up counterparts, babies don’t find it suspicious that you love them immediately and without reserve. You can kiss them and sniff them all you want, and they never laugh at you or try to change the subject. The reason for this is because babies are born with a protective film of goodness that coats their soft skin and eases the rough transition from the utopia of the womb to the harsh reality of life on Earth. As they grow and we teach them words and discipline and consequences, the film wears away and a normal, healthy, confused person shows up. Ava’s big brother, a sprawling, ruddy-cheeked three-year-old, had all but lost his. While Ava in her babyhood was free to lounge about in the arms of a stranger, he was busy getting spanked and publicly humiliated for wetting his pants. He will have so much to teach her about this world.

After awhile the grandmother came back and took away the baby and I stood up with empty arms. Without Ava there to protect me from myself I was suddenly overcome with awkwardness and uncertainty, embarrassed for having spent so much time away from the others, worried I appeared anti-social. I tugged at the front of my dress and adjusted my sunglasses and hoped that it was almost time to go. It was late in the afternoon and still very hot, and everyone had begun to fray a bit at the edges. Children were weeping and grown-ups were laughing too loudly, and I panicked quietly as I re-joined the group because I knew I had run out of things to say. The only two who were still calm and cheerfully unaffected were Ava, now drooling happily into the crook of her grandmother’s arm, and the 98-year old woman who spoke only Spanish and who had been pleasantly parked in a lawn chair on the outskirts of the group for hours. I smiled at this, and wondered (as I often do) how long it will take me to figure out that the only thing worth learning in life is how to forget all the things you’ve been taught by living.