Once I owned a house. It was a small house in Iowa City, near Plum Grove, the home of Iowa’s first governor. It began as a corner grocery store in the early 1900s, but its overlarge back door was the only part that still looked like what it had been. Its interior walls were flimsy and its four rooms tiny. In the deep back yard was an old plum tree, an enormous pussywillow tree, a thicket of raspberry canes, lilac bushes, and a large walnut tree back near the alley.

Although I owned it for only eight years and those eight years are long ago, even now if I am quiet, I can hear its sounds—a dog barking behind the alley, a child’s voice, a father calling, the padded hush of thick gardens, the boards on the back deck and the brush of snow on the windows. These are the sounds embedded in my blood and my bones. When I close my eyes I can hear them no matter where I am. I do not have to tap my heels three times. I know the smell of earth under the raspberries, the shade of the buds on the lilac bush in the far back corner where I buried the divorce papers, can remember in my bones the rhythmic thuds when someone walks up the five steps to the front door. For years afterwards, my muscles and nerve pathways and internal clocks were all still finely attuned to that house, its sounds, its angles.

Although I owned it for only eight years, they may as well have been twenty-eight. In that house I lived alone with my first cat, Penelope. I learned to till a garden, to turn in compost, learned that blood meal will repel rabbits, that tomatoes can’t grow too close to black walnut trees. I learned to transplant things—it began with chrysanthemums and iris—to find and kill squash bugs by hand, to save seeds and start them early. That garter snakes hang in raspberry canes and that fledgling cardinals leave their nests before they can fly. I learned to can vegetables and to make jam from the fruit of the mulberry tree by the front curb.

Let’s start at the point of departure, the jump-off—whose roots are perhaps tied to indigent travelers hopping from boxcars, or paratroopers launching from a plane, or perhaps someone choosing to dive from a cliff into an unknown depth for the thrill—activities impossible for the anxiety they produce, but perhaps desirable for their efficiency. One would be sure to arrive on time by those routes, though bruised. My father insisted on arriving to the airport three hours before departure. He would alter our plans without notice, sitting in the van with the engine running thirty minutes earlier than agreed upon, ready. I’d haul ass, lest I be left behind. My mother making sure lights were off, shoes tied, doors locked, incanted—

He can wait he can wait

—and he did, though he stressed about arrivals, about traffic, about the unforeseen causing delays, white-knuckling the steering wheel, ruining the novelty of shifting loci for everyone in the backseat. He would never acknowledge that he had changed the plan, bumped our departure forward, insisting he’d always meant to leave at the earlier time.

When you tell your hairstylist that your mother is readying her house for your twenty-one-year-old younger sister to return home after living a year abroad in France by organizing buckets of Legos from the back shelves of closets, hoisting herself into the attic to find puzzles with missing pieces and clean off dusty Christmas books, washing dozens of American Girl doll outfits, and intricately styling each doll’s hair, your hairstylist says, “Oh my gosh, she’s totally nesting,” and you realize she’s right. And you think of how pregnant women are often drawn to painting, organizing, deep cleaning, rearranging, remodeling, and repairing their homes before giving birth. And you realize it has been fourteen years since your mother was last pregnant, but this instinct has never left her.

And this makes you consider the ways that you might be nesting too, because although you have no children, aren’t pregnant, don’t want to be pregnant, and may never want to be pregnant, you are a woman, and you’ve been married for almost five years, and people have been asking for at least the past three years, “When are you going to have a baby?” because most women in your Christian community get pregnant so quickly into their marriages that for some reason people seem to think they have the right to know when you will start popping out babies because you are a woman and this is what women do. They have babies.

I sneezed and dust flew out of the towering oak console that housed my dad’s massive record collection, where I was sifting through the heavy cardboard and plastic discs. In between homework and my middle school classes I spent lots of time poring through sixties and seventies rock music with my dad. He had a way of choosing the perfect song for whatever I was feeling that day. Today he picked David Bowie’s self-titled album, that begins with the song “Space Oddity.” As he helped me maneuver the large disc safely onto the turntable, which he always did because they were unwieldy in my unusual hands, he smiled and said, “You’re in for a treat.”

The round pieces of plastic were always so flat until I dropped the needle and they bloomed into sound that took up physical space, crawling around the room. A whole world lived in that flat space. When I dropped the needle this time, ground control counted down and I was lifted out of my living room, rocketed through each layer of the atmosphere and into space. “Space Oddity” turned the spinning world on its axis, lit the stars brighter against the night sky, made me feel that songs I’d heard before might have been fun and entertaining but that they didn’t really matter that much.

Last night, a ghost called my name and because I intend for this not to be fiction, I will tell you what he said. He said, “Katie.”

I don’t want to debate whether it was night or morning, so I will give you the exact time. 2:12 a.m. PST. In my work, I rarely get an exact time. It’s either—

INT. HALLWAY – LATE NIGHT

OR

INT. HALLWAY – EARLY MORNING

It’s comforting to be able to say something as definite as 2:12 a.m. and know I will not discuss or debate what that means in terms of darkness or light, my levels of exhaustion, or what that means for the character (me) that I am awake at this time. I can tell you simply, for we are dealing in truths, that I know the time for a reason. I was awake. An earthquake had struck off the coast of Malibu and slowly crawled its way to Pasadena.

The next morning over coffee, I told my husband (your dad) that I woke with a start—whole moments before the rolling and shaking, but he believes my mind gave me a moment of kindness. A moment of stillness before the old walls of our one-hundred year old Spanish bungalow (which proudly survived Northridge) shifted in their dirt. But regardless, whether he or I am right, whether I have a kind mind, or an anticipating one— my eyes opened. I watched the light fixture above my head sway. I cradled my belly and counted down from five. You kicked.

Thank you for kicking.

One September morning I woke up and realized I’d treated the dry east side of my state unfairly.

Since moving to Oregon twenty-three years ago, I’ve hiked, camped, and driven around what Northwesterners call “the high desert” and the arid Columbia Plateau many times. I grew up in Phoenix, Arizona. I love desert plants, desert critters, and the views deserts’ openness affords. When I left Arizona at twenty-five, I told myself that if there was a desert in my adopted home, I wanted to see it. But the Sonoran Desert where I grew up is the lushest desert in the world. It was hot and dry but very green. Diverse cacti and shrubs supported impressive reptile, mammal, and insect diversity. It had plants that grew tall enough to qualify as trees, like the native ironwood tree and the green-skinned Palo Verde. The iconic saguaro cactuses seem arboreal, having branch-like candelabra shapes and shadows that help other plants sprout in their shade. You can step outside on any night and find coyotes, bats, and insects. Ecologically and aesthetically, my desert set a high bar for other deserts to live up to. So when I explored eastern Oregon and eastern Washington, all I perceived was a brown monoscape.

The massive Cascade Mountains divide Oregon and Washington in half. Those towering mountains capture moisture blowing in from the Pacific, creating a rain shadow effect that alters the weather so severely that they create a wet, green, forested west side and a dry, hot, scrubby east side. The more time I spent on the east side, the more it disappointed me.