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228 21 Rumors of Crickets Wilbur burst into tears. ‘I don’t want to die,’ he moaned. ‘I want to stay alive, right here in my comfortable manure pile with all my friends. I want to breathe the beautiful air and lie in the beautiful sun.’” I have found this passage in our musty copy of Charlotte’s Web, stored in a third-floor closet with other children’s books, stuffed animals, and games from my daughters’ childhood. I pause in the pressures of this academic year, needing to revisit an earlier winter season during this current winter break. Though I rarely have time for my walks—and the crickets and mourning doves have long since fallen into silence—I will find the time to return to a fragile period in the early 1980s, a time of grief and uncertainty that ruptured our growing confidence as a single-parent family. A DR I A N E A N D I were snuggled together on the couch in the living room for some early evening reading time when the telephone interrupted. She waited impatiently as I answered it, spoke briefly, and then returned to my spot next to her. Seeing tears in my eyes, she reassured me: “Don’t worry, Mom. They won’t kill Wilbur. Remember?” Wilbur would serve as an excuse a six-year-old could understand, but my tears sprang from a different well of grief. The phone call had delivered the news that Michael had made the definitive decision to leave town, to move on into a different life. Though he and I had long since ceased hoping to make a life together, the news of his departure touched an emptiness in my life: a persistent loneliness, a yearning for adult companionship. But there was more to come from this well, now tapped by a random phone call. It had already been a year and a half since my father’s diagnosis RU MOR S OF C R IC K E T S | 229 with prostate cancer. He would be dead in less than a year. I did not yet know the timing of his death, but I had begun to recognize its imminence. At that moment, I felt surrounded by loss and the threat of loss. I snuggled closer to Adriane as we continued reading, waiting for the glorious miracle that would save the life of Wilbur the pig: words spun from the entrails of a self-sacrificing spider. T H E S U M M E R after my father’s diagnosis, when we thought he was in remission , he and I had spent extended time together remodeling the bathroom in the house I had moved into two years previously. The girls and I could no longer be satisfied with a bathtub; we needed a shower, too. Working with my father, I was reminded of the long hours he and I had spent in my waning days on the farm, working in the garage to build the bookshelves I would leave behind as a monument to a failed marriage. On this bathroom project, we again shared manual labor and talk, developing a closeness that came most easily for him with constructive physical effort. In that earlier time, I had learned by inference that my marriage with Lawrence could not be repaired. Now we shared in other ways: probing our differences about religion, about family, about work. In the process, we not only had agreed to accept our differences but had also come to a new understanding of a commonality between our work lives that gave me secret pleasure. His work as an engineer and a remodeler required the effort of wrestling with space, imagining objects in interrelationship . As we worked, I realized that I experienced my work as a literary critic in remarkably similar terms, wrestling ideas into a new spatial arrangement , developing a new intricacy of interrelationship. During our work on the bathroom—tracking down a small radiator that would fit the available space, planning a hidden panel that would give access to the pipes for the shower, sawing boards to precise measurement on sawhorses on the porch, cutting plasterboard to fit the odd spaces in the ceiling—he and I talked of this new recognition of commonality. As we worked together I sensed that he was ready to stop judging me for life decisions he could not understand. A Y E A R L AT E R , 1981, the remission was not so...

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