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years after she died: it had taken me that long to stop being mad at her, for having been such a mess my whole life. On the hillside is a mysterious concrete piling where I like to sit when there is dew on the ground, or a mist, so my pants won’t get wet. I have a 360-degree view of my town and the mountain and the foothills. In the early morning, I can see the sun rise above the nearest suburb, and when I come at dusk, the sun sets out toward the farmlands of rural Marin and the Pacific Ocean. Your senses are bathed in smells and sounds and visions, whether you want to receive or not, because the only walls are the tall eucalyptus to the east. You feel unprotected and small and buffeted by the wind, and this defenselessness is a crack through which fresh air and water can enter.
    I sat on the piling. The drizzle had stopped, but the air was still moist—a warm, windy spring evening. The willows, hectic in the wind, were sticklike and gray, their leaves not quite out, yet you could feel them pushing through.
    I fiddled with my red cord, separating the rings of laundry lint: I can’t figure out how these rings could have formed on the cord, as I have never removed it; still, there are three knots, and seven rings of lint.
    When he finished tying it, Jack said that the cord was my new transcript. “You have gotten an A-plus, Annie, for your work during this life.” But Jack feels this way about everyone, and it almost ruins it for me that he thinks we are all doing so well with such difficult material as being alive, having parents, kids, bodies, minds, certain presidents.
    All wise people say the same thing: that you are deserving of love, and that it’s all here now, everything you need. There’s the memoir by a Hindu writer, It’s Here Now (Are You?), and one of my priest friends says the exact same thing, so I think it must be true—that when you pray, you are not starting the conversation from scratch, just remembering to plug back into a conversation that’s always in progress.
    There I sat on the hill, hands folded in my lap, eyes closed, and I started to relax. But then I made a cardinal mistake: I started to think about how holy I was acting, in the face of teenage contempt and shirking; how grown-up, spiritually, emotionally. And this pleased me.
    And it was bad.
    It was like, “Batter up!”
    First the dogs arrived, three of them, from out of nowhere, barking at Lily and me until their owner stepped into the clearing and commanded them to be quiet. I smiled and waved, but closed my eyes so that she could see that I was in holiness mode. “It’s windy!” she cried. I opened my eyes. She had a walking stick, and looked like a shepherd, of bad dogs.
    â€œWhat’s your dog’s name?” she shouted. I told her. “What kind of dog is she? Where’d she get those ears? Here, Lily! Here, girl .” The woman sounded like someone from the shouting Loud family, on the old Saturday Night Live .
    I hung my head and smiled to myself.
    â€œI forgot your name,” she shouted. I told her, and she waved and headed down the hillside. I closed my eyes, breathed in calm, and grass; and then, the pièce derésistance: the smell of dog shit filled my nose, sharp as ammonia, and foul.
    God, I thought, self-righteously: This woman brings her barking dogs into this open space, and they shit all over everything, and she doesn’t clean up after them. I stood to move away, but when I looked down at the grass, there was nothing there. Then I looked at the sole of my shoe.
    My entire childhood passed before my eyes—kids holding their noses in schoolyards, parents commanding us all out of the car, demanding that we check our feet. Nothing isolated you so instantly as having stinky heat-lines wafting visibly off your foot, like in the cartoons.
    It’s a miracle that more of us didn’t shoot up our neighborhoods.
    When I was young, I wore