What with one thing and another, my thoughts are a little frail and shambly lately. Like leaves falling at summer’s end, confused, whirled, in a tangle. I’m having a little trouble putting one word next to another in a way that makes sense or seems worth doing. So I’ve decided to think of this letter as an essay, in the sense that an essay is a try, and as a try in the sense of trying the strength of something: Trying the strength of the thin yet oddly strong threads that connect my thoughts like spider webs. A-here we go …

I took my dog to the eye doctor, and sitting and worrying about my worrying girl as they looked deep into her pretty eyes and tapped on them with strange machines, it reminded me of times I took one son for an X-ray of his ribs, and the other for an ultrasound of his heart. So frail and graceful and beautiful strong and bewildering and moving. Poems. (Everyone was so kind, the nurses and doctors and greeters and calmers and explainers. Everyone was so cheerful. It’s hard to be kind. It’s hard to be cheerful, it can take great effort, when you’re at your job of work. The kindness of nurses. This is what will save the world.)

[The results from the eye doctor came back and they were written thus: “negative menace, questionable dazzle.” Aw, man, nobody’s eyes dazzle like my dog’s eyes dazzle. Have you not sat working and working and looked over to see her gazing up at you and felt a tender ache in your heart at the beauty of those eyes? Do you not remember the time in Montreal when you stayed behind on the way home to get groceries, so they brought her out to greet you and the light in her eyes was so beautiful it almost hurt, when she saw you? This girl’s eyes dazzle.]

When the light changes in autumn, it makes the whole world feel differently important. The change happens so quickly, you can almost watch the darkness drawing up upon the day, pulling its veil father and farther over the mornings and evenings. These days, when we first go out there’s just enough shadow lingering in the air to make the coming light beautiful.

The other morning, for some foolish reason, the people moving through this shifting light seemed significant, poignant. They were just going about the business of setting up the neighborhood, heading off to work, walking their kids to school, delivering packages or bread or newspapers, buying a paper cup of coffee to take to their job, prepping their restaurants. But for some foolish reason I thought about people all over the world starting their day, whatever that day looks like where they live. I had the beautiful feeling of waking up in a strange new city and watching it come alive in all the same ways cities come alive all over the world. People shaking off their dreams, thinking of the hopes and worries for the day ahead. In the morning as we rise out of sleep, there’s a vivid feeling that we’re all alone in our thoughts, but somehow as we start our day it becomes clear we’re all in it together.

This foolishness of mine extended beyond people, and as I walked through welcome waves of warmth and light taking over from dawn’s cool darkness, I thought about how autumn is revelatory; how the change in season peels back layer upon layer so that we can read it on another level. We get a new glimpse of the ways that everything is connected. The leaves are sparer, and storm-shifted branches reveal birds’ nests that were busy all the summer long but empty now, and in the chilly mornings the dew traces jewels on the spider webs that stretch from branch to branch collecting late summer insects.

I saw a bare patch of earth on the path, just a line like a bike tire or a boot heel might have made. Why did I notice it? I don’t know. I don’t know why I stopped long enough to realize that the mark was made by a wildflower with a bending stalk and a heavy head of many tiny flowers, shifting back and forth with the breeze to make a small smooth arc in the gravel. Writing the poem the wind was telling. When my son was little and we had a fire in the backyard on a blue-melting-into-pink-melting-into-darkness summer evening, he used to say, “It’s like the fire’s telling us a story of what it looks like in the clouds.” Telling someone else’s story.

[We’re mourning the anniversary of the Kavanaugh trials. I was at the dentist and the hearings were on the TV in the waiting room. Christine Blasey Ford was answering questions, and I was fighting back tears when I was taken back to the place they drill your teeth. They play some 80s station on the radio at the dentist, and I was thinking about hearing those songs at parties in high school. I was thinking any of this could have gone on in parties in high school, in back rooms and bedrooms and cars, and I would have had no idea. Rumors and whispers and stories never told. My mouth was full of hardware and cotton. The nurse stopped the dentist from drilling, she said, “She’s clenching her fists.” The dentist said, “Are you ok?” Yeah, I guess, for now.]

I like when people tell someone else’s story (and I like even more the idea that flowers and smoke and clouds and wind do it, too, though it might not be a story for us). It feels more important than ever, and more dangerous than ever, at this moment in history, to tell the stories of others. Whether it’s reporters struggling to cover a corrupt and secretive administration. Or student reporters brave enough to stand up to their cowardly administration and give evil its names. Or filmmakers revealing a terrible violence so universally known and universally suppressed that the revelation of it turns that violence on the filmmakers themselves. These stories lay things bare in a way that makes us read them differently, that exposes some strong, pervasive, deeply-rooted framework of lies, deception, and denial that crisscross our vision till we’re stumbling through the news, through the day.

Telling these stories of others reveals the strong, vulnerable beating hearts beneath them, the fragile, beautiful ribs protecting the lungs that take breath in and breathe it out, take breath in and breathe it out, (and everyone must breathe until their dying breath). Hearing these stories, the world and the people in it feel differently important, poignant. Every small act, every small decision — it’s not just that it could be us, but it could be our spouse, or parent, or sibling, or friend, or child. And we are all someone’s child. We might feel alone in our worries and problems, but when our stories are shared, the connections we might have missed or forgotten about, though we see them day by day, stretch from person to person, from kindness to kindness, so fragile, so strong. We’re all in it together.