Kristina, a goat, and Amber (right)

I arrive home to an older man splayed on our shared porch. I think that Jake, my neighbor, is working on something, such is the contortion of his posture before the door. I realize as quickly that he had collapsed. I run through my first aid training. He is cogent and, though he says he has no strength, doesn't show signs of a stroke. He asks that I help him into his apartment. I don't know how to lift him or how much weight he can put on his legs. I hold him like a parent, encouraging first steps, my hands on his sides, ready to take all his heaviness if he can no longer handle walking.

The chair is a straight shot. Hoisting Jake, circulars and junk mail surrounding us, I am uneasy. I have considered for some time that I may be the last person who sees Jake alive. I don't want the obligation of this.

I am unsure what to do with him now. Do I wait? No, that isn't right. I ask if he has his phone--having reassembled it a few times and turned it on a few more, I know he has one. He pats his pocket, muttering something I don't catch, and that is where it rests.

The only thing I know about my neighbor lately is that he cares for birds and the bottle. I wish he could have cared less about the bottle. I see pounds of bird seed on our porch, which he spreads under the lone bird feeder.

He used to be a more persistent presence. For the last year or so, most of my interactions with him take place waving from my car as he has returned to using the riding lawn mower. I was surprised, and persistent being surprised, that he has not died, if not from his reported Stage 4 cancer, then simply from falling on stone steps twice until they were coated with blood.

When I go into my apartment, I remain nervous. I call my mother, who wishes I had not told anyone about finding him. She runs me through with sounds like a rehearsal for being interrogated by the police. She thinks that perhaps he was suffering some spinal injury, and my moving him per his request might have been the thing that kills him.

I go out later. His light is on, and he has moved to a different chair, so I'm reasonably sure I did not murder Jake.

On the eve of my forty-third birthday, ushering an older man into a cluttered yet empty apartment is too pat a visual metaphor.

The stress forces me from my body. Everything is dulled, one degree removed. I did not anticipate bearing his burden, but that is always the way. We never carry only ourselves.

In the hours preceding this discovery, I had an intuition I had better come straight home, but I dismissed this. Amber would not be home until late, and I needed gas and a haircut, so why should I?

I spend hours fighting this fugue. Then I hear the tiny peeping frogs who nestle in trees accompanied by a chorus of cricket chirps. I search for what could make this sound, and my mind slips. I feel it is summer, the texture of August that doesn't seem long ago. It is no symbol but an apparent hallucination. It is a few seconds, then the summer passes back where it came from, leaving mid-December again, but I still have the relief of hot nights. I cannot explain it other than that, as though these invisible frogs had taken the load I'd carried and then some.

My mood has been imperfect over the last few months--I keep a file of my sleep so that I might notice patterns, so I know when I have been moody--but I feel the most myself after the frogs. They appeared in my head and, once they had brought the summer, are gone again.

Auditory hallucinations and the possibility I am losing my mind are not how I hoped to begin my forty-third year, but you can't beat the results.

(I do discover that the burbling of the hermit crab humidifier may have triggered it, but the actual hallucination was more layered and vivid.)

When I wake up the following day, Amber hugs me. "You are no longer the Answer."

"Yes," I say, having prepared for this joke with one of my own, "but I am in my prime."

They notice my haircut, which they like as much as they ever like them.

My mood is excellent all day, more of a surprise given that Amber woke me at 4:30--almost fitting given my age.

Work goes well as I spend most of it planning my English 102 course, where I have convinced myself I must teach one of my stories to get the residents to understand literary criticism. At a job that often wastes me, finding a way I can be more than purposeful is encouraging. I so often feel like a cell phone used as a doorstop. Sure, it works, but it is a damaging waste of the resource.

I come home to Amber. We end all our letters affirming that we miss the other, but I am thrilled to see them and spend another year of my life in love. That they got me a mini Holy Cow ice cream cake contributes somewhat.

I spend my evening making them dinner--which involves two culinary fumbles atop one another, but eating experiments is the better part of cooking.

The night is barely different, and I am not sorry for this. If I were the sort to care about birthdays--and I have long since given that up--this would be a good one.

We have my birthday dinner that Friday. My family spends too much, but I am thrilled for the meal out, even if my mother takes an outsized interest in interrogating the waiter. I affectionately refer to our server as a himbo, all muscles and grinning. My mother asks him to guess my age and then tell him before he gets the opportunity. He cannot begin to believe that is right, asking how. One, I have my cap on, hiding the clearest sign of my age. Two, I have been pathologically averse to drugs, alcohol, smoking, and tanning. It does keep one youthful to be a drag at parties.

Saturday, Amber and I go to Olana State Historic Site's solstice festival, partly because they had suggested we go on more day trips. This is less than half an hour from where we have lived for over a decade. I had seen this colorful curiosity on a mountain crossing The Rip Van Winkle Bridge but only forced the excuse to visit now. We told a few friends about our plan, but they had issues with COVID, tires, and burnout from grading. These are all reasonable excuses; I don't expect people to attend events. Amber is there, which is enough for me.

Kristina says she will come, and Ingrid and her child express interest. (We refer to her daughter as The Child because this is how Ingrid dubbed her on social media.)

"What is the reason for this house?" asks Kristina when she arrives to Amber and me awaiting entrance.

"I could make something up if you want." No one objects, so I begin, "It is said Aleister Crowley--"

"No," Amber interrupts, "it is not said."

I conjure something more plausible from having glimpsed a trifold display as Amber mulled over buying hot chocolate. Kristina, who should know me better, asks if I am reading this off my phone. Amber assures her that I speak nonsense and that nothing I've said is true.

When we enter the house, crowded with a mish-mash of aesthetic artifacts from artist Frederic Edwin Church's travels, the docents relate stories that resemble my fiction. I've been in enough places like this to be able to improvise.

When she shows up, Ingrid hands me a wrapped present the size of a knuckle, in which is a capsule containing a tiny man. I marvel at it and her. Though this constitutes the third time I see her in person, I consider her one of my best friends. This gives an apparent reason.

The Child is one of the kids I admire, though we had not to this moment met. I shake her hand and tell her I am impressed with her attempts to educate her eighteen-year-old cat via a chalkboard. This does not amuse her; instead, it makes her more apprehensive of me. I do not become less of a bizarre adult until half an hour later when I keep addressing her as though she is just another person--which is what I like about her. She is an incisive, bright, sweet creature who is wise and weird beyond her years. Ingrid says The Child argued for an earlier bedtime and loves broccoli enough to have made her a convert. I ask what it is like to have raised a changeling, but I am deeply impressed by the parenting that resulted in The Child.

The Child plays with a blind goat. She is a wiz with all things animal. Ingrid reminds her daughter that Amber is similarly affected and tells her to share an animal fact, which is that hippos can stay underwater for six minutes at a time, but they will automatically rise for a breath and sink again in their sleep. When we are later crowded around a bonfire, The Child and I plot how to use the other children as kindling. Devising the demise of the unwary is the mark of a good kid.

last watched: Fargo
reading: Nonviolent Communication