Come closer, dear child. You have the most intoxicating aroma about you. It smells like new school supplies. That pack on your back has the pungent, stiff fragrance of new plastic -- the kind you find on character book bags, in pencil boxes, and wafting around action figures patiently waiting for you to come home and play. Those pencils smell like soft wood shavings, faintly cedar, and cool stony graphite. Your rectangular pink eraser, bright as bubble gum, has the essence of rubber and vinyl and the hope of getting it right on the third try. And this package of construction paper has a bouquet like cardboard, but far sweeter and softer. It brings to mind the creamy, faintly chemical smell of Elmer's glue. I bet you have some of that in there, too, just waiting to be globbed onto thirsty paper. You're going to take those redolent school supplies with you into a classroom, child, where you'll be greeted by more odors whose memory will stay with you well past your...

I hadn't been feeling like myself, or whatever fragments of my self are left at the end of each day. Where my sense of humor used to be there was a flatness; where formerly was a desire to get lost in a 30-minute TV program now was me mentally cataloging the things I would pack when I finally said screw it, I'm out ; where I used to have a creative drive was now me driving in the car aimlessly just to be alone for a few more blessed minutes. For more than three years, my life had revolved around the needs of one or two tiny, helpless, unpredictable humans. For the previous few weeks, I'd been suffering the slings and arrows of parenting a petulant 3-year-old and a teething infant at the same time. In any 60 minutes, I hated 59 of them (with the other minute being me sneaking off to pee alone). At any given time I was THISCLOSE to losing my shit, walking out the door, and strongly considering never coming back. This was more than just needing a break. It was me starti...

In the summer of my seventh year, my family landed in Southeast Texas. We had driven there in a distressingly orange Volvo station wagon with sticky vinyl seats and a "way-back." Inexplicably, my mom called her Betsy For a few years thereafter, each month during summer vacation my brother, my mom, and I would climb into the family car and head to town to go grocery shopping. (At the time, "town" consisted of three stop lights, three fast-food joints (the McDonald's didn't come until 8th grade), and one set of railroad tracks that separated us from the grocery store). It was 98 degrees in the shade and the car's air conditioning hadn't worked since the turn of the decade. Three miles with the windows down can seem like three lifetimes when you're not even 10 years old.