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278 25 Bertha in the Attic Already it is October, the current semester well under way, the college providing one continuity in this life I am telling. Alone during the day for the brief respite of fall break, I claim this time as my own. With my crystal, I chase the light, the rainbows. I chase memories, too, in frantic need to finish this story. But I know that narrative beginnings and endings are illusory, that in life there is no certainty. Nineteen years later I wish I could tell you that magic happened upon our return from London, that fall when Kara and Adriane and I gathered once again in the house on Spink Street. Perhaps it was a kind of magic, the human kind that takes time and effort and conviction. It is true that we brought with us on our return the knowledge that we were a family, with resources of our own, both individually and collectively. And this knowledge was our magic. But it is also true that we returned to the buffeting of daily life, trying to hold steady the tripod family structure we had stabilized in Cricklewood. W E AT H E R PE R M I T T I NG , Ron and I have continued through the early autumn to sit on our porch in the evenings. The oaks and maples glow red and gold even in the twilight, but the walnut tree is already nearly bare. Each day the sun angles lower in the sky, fading ever earlier; in the evenings, the crickets issue a subdued murmur. The squirrels make serious preparations for winter. On the porch we talk, as always, of the details of our days, but also of larger changes in our lives. We note with pleasure Adriane’s excitement about a recent decision in her own life: to resign her job in children’s book editing and prepare for a different future, a return to the kind of work she did when she first moved to New York. Her plan now is to stay in the city BE R T H A I N T H E AT T IC | 279 she has grown to love, enrolling in a master’s program in education, seeking dual certification in early childhood and special education. She will continue her commitment to her own writing and build upon her commitment to children, turning her attentions in a new direction. We celebrate the joy we hear in her voice as she tells us these plans. AT T H E T I M E OF OU R R ET U R N from England, Adriane was still a child, but during our time away she had successfully bumped up the ladder of self upon which she had previously floundered in precocious questioning of love and morality. She returned to her house, her school, her friends, her cat with a new comfort in herself, a renewed trust in me and in our family. When she now reflects on that time, she recalls her home in Wooster as “warm, supportive, challenging”—a place where she learned to speak her mind with confidence, even as she often felt the need to quiet herself in public in the face of outward expectations. Though she continued to call on me as, in her phrase, a “moral compass” to whom she regularly confessed her anxieties and possible transgressions, she was increasingly growing into her peer world and seeking her own way beyond our household. In those years, a crucial strategy for testing her understanding of the world lay in imaginative construction. She made up dramatic scenes with friends and acted them out in our living room, where Kara and I might serve as commandeered audience. Or she flopped out on her stomach on the kitchen floor while I was cooking and poured stories through her pencil onto the pad in front of her. She would remain still, lost in her fantasy, only once in a while looking up to confirm that I was still there. These stories seemed to come effortlessly, the words rushing from her: imagined scenes of an Indian boy tracking and befriending a deer in the woods or of parentless children constructing their own survival in the wild. Later—but she was still very young, not yet in high school—she would imagine her way into the experience of a great white whale, isolated and hunted, Moby Dick from the whale’s perspective. She regularly tried to...

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