Thoughts escape my head like steam from coffee, and between pinched fingers I hope to pluck from the air a tendril of imagination to savor for the day.

Since Tim and Erin and I reconnected I have scrolled backwards, looking again and again at my surroundings, waiting for the college dorm room and its sandy scent like dust with a dash of powder to graze my fingertips as my hands reach out. The colors and faces from 15 to 20 years ago are clear. Conversations are clear, but like waking from a dream with something pressed tightly in my arms, things dematerialize as I wake, and I sit up abruptly to find I am hugging only myself. I am the only thing I have left over from college except a distressed collection of books that I refuse to cast off.

Twenty years ago I could not have known that years later I would open an anthology, thin pages fluttering like days and weeks through my fingers and moving more rapidly as they accumulate, to Stephen Crane. I have always loved his poem In The Desert …I like it because it is bitter, and because it is my heart.

And in another brief poem where his mind nudges the consequences of sin, and doubts man's significance, his character cries out to the universe, sir, I exist, yet the universe did not care.

Again and again I am aware of a world filled with people separated without walls or doors. Our own inward thoughts keep us apart. I like it, because it is bitter, much like Mr Crane's self-absorbed little beast. The creature in his poem cupped his own heart in his feral hands and ate it.

Then again, things can be so rich if you just put yourself aside and watch.

I sat with my 94-year-old grandmother at a time in her life when she was tired. Oh Mama, she sighed, over and over, when her sense of reality had lifted away from mine momentarily. Her mind slipped briefly and at 94, memories from the little girl she had been searched her head for her Mama. I rubbed her hand until she slept. I read a book and sat across from her bed in a chair glancing at a jumble of letters that meant nothing to me. Sir? I exist…but alone in a darkened room with just a reading light splashing the pages, I felt the world expand and rush away.

Other days she would toss out words lucidly and told me -- many times -- that her mother was a saint. Seventeen children of her own and enough patience for the whole neighborhood. The closer she came to seeing her mother again, the calmer she became. Me too. She was drifting toward comfort and one day she woke hugging her mother, and the cradling arms were really there.

Goodbye grandma.

I have been looking backwards. I have been pondering, so I thought I would stare at the past a little while longer. I'll consider the fox tomorrow.

He has been out there again. Lily has just about learned to pronounce Henry, and she barks his name into a sooty, charcoal night.