I spent the weekend with my two older sisters and their husbands in what has become a regular sister-gathering now that our parents are dead. 

 As usual, there were some retellings of family tales, some stories that were revelations, and some that were three variations on a theme. There was no right or wrong to them; they were just each of us sharing our differing perspectives—like who was Mom’s favorite, what we inherited from Dad, and how things might have turned out differently. That kind of thing. 

And for the record, I’ll say it again, I was not Mom’s favorite. That distinction varied, the recipient being, in Mom’s words, “Whomever needs me the most.” 

A role to which no one aspired. 

This powwow was in the hills of Western Maryland, where my firstborn sister’s place overlooks a valley of golden fields bisected by a picturesque railroad track. In the morning, fall mist draped the tree line, giving the illusion of mountains and memories far bigger than the hills.

Because looking back often includes a confession of sorts, I shared this one because it involved a talent for which I have always been a bit vain, and which may demonstrate a learned response to those who need me as well. I am, after all, my mother’s (third) daughter.

Don’t judge too harshly. About the only things I was good at were kickball, running, and making eye contact with my teachers. Kickball and running have not turned out to be particularly valuable life skills, but eye contact is probably why I have three kids and own my own home today. 

We were lingering at the dinner table over my brother-in-law’s peach upside-down cake. “I was at the post office,” I said, “and the line was about 12 patrons deep waiting to get up to one of the three service windows. There was an 8-foot-long, narrow table, about 12 inches wide and chest-high, down the center of the room, where we could queue up to await our turn, simultaneously writing last-minute addresses on envelopes without losing our place in line. I set my purse down and started addressing a package while several other customers did the same.”

 As each person finished their business at the windows, our line slid along the table, I explained. A man ahead of me in line was frumping around pretty anxious about how long the whole process was taking, and I sympathized. It was like being on the beltway in a slowdown—where I always remind myself that every car in front of me has the same goal I do–to get to the next exit as quickly as possible. So, I relax about what I can’t control, knowing my anxiety contributes nothing, and that everyone working towards their goal is inadvertently working towards mine.

The man, fastidious in a button-down-collar, blue shirt, rolled up sleeves, and black jeans, was about three customers ahead of me, so we got to our windows simultaneously—he all the way down the row, me at the one nearest the end of the table. But as I turned in my parcel, I noticed he had not left the building but was frantically searching for something on the floor. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw he was now roaming the entire room, looking a tad panicked. Then he bolted out the door. 

I asked when I could expect my package to be delivered, thanked the clerk helping me, and turned to leave when this man burst back in frantically scanning the room again. 

“Did you lose something?” I asked, looking him right in the eye, because what can I say? It’s a gift. And because my only other gift, besides kickball and running fast, is that I am a really good finder. When the kids lost something, or Mr. Oliver could be witnessed searching his car, I’d always ask, “What are you looking for?” then calmly scan my intuition and within a minute or two produce the missing object.

My finder-sense was coming online, my helper-sensibility was on high alert. He had a need, and I was going to help him meet it. It was the role I was born for.

“My keys!” he groaned, panicked. “I can’t find my car keys, and I’ve got to get home. My wife has to get to an appointment and I’m already late.”

I felt into an image of his keys, imagined them in my mind’s eye—scanned my internal vibe-meter for where they might be lying in a corner of the room behind a table leg, or under a one-day delivery envelope left on the counter. I lifted a pile of label debris by the postal packaging display.

Then I began looking with him in earnest, and now his problem felt like my problem, which meant I was kind of in my element. I could almost feel the sense of happy satisfaction the moment I’d be able to say, ‘Are these yours?” 

He left the building again and I continued to search. Finally, I walked out into the wide shallow parking lot where cars were parked like teeth in a comb, in case he had found them and left, but he was out there peering under a Subaru. 

I needed to get home myself, and having completely failed to use my superpower for good, I called out, “I’m so sorry! Hope you find them!” 

I opened my purse for my sunglasses, and to my horror, there sat a clump of keys I had never seen before. 

He was incredulous. To be fair, so was I. “You mean you’ve had my keys all this time?” he asked, eyebrows raised, face flushed, and voice rising.

Sometimes you just can’t do anything but say you’re sorry and know that, for the moment at least, you have legitimately earned the title: Mom’s Favorite Child. 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

I have a philosophy which is, if a little is good, more is better. A teaspoon of Miracle-Gro once a week makes the flowers bloom? How about a tablespoon every day? Kaboom. 

Leah-dog agrees with me on this philosophy. One walk a day is good? Three is waaay better, mama. 

This does not pertain to everything, however, as you shall see. 

Someone we will just call Not-Me, over-ordered mulch for this small city yard—to the tune of six yards–which is a mound, no lie, the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. And since this house has no driveway or off-street parking, the tractor-trailer that delivered this astonishing order had to dump it on the sidewalk and street in front of the house. 

Immediately, city traffic enforcement began cruising by, very excited at this new development. Parking had been compromised. Scofflaws were afoot! That was me, now doomed to haul the mulch, one wheelbarrow load at a time, up the 3 brick steps into the front yard, behind the wrought iron fence, to free the avenue of parking obstacles. 

Professional landscaping trucks cruised by hour after hour, the employees in the cabs looking down, shaking their heads with incredulity, and probably placing bets on the impossible task. As the hours wore on, parking officials cased the situation more frequently, waiting for that one opportunity, say, during a break for water, that they could claim the mulch had been abandoned and was now a legitimate violation. 

I shoveled, heaved, and dragged for 7 hours without pause. I missed a physical therapy appointment; lunch was on the fly. But by 4 o’clock that afternoon, the car-sized mound of mulch on the street was now a car-sized mound in the front yard. 

It was a lot of a lot, as Taylor Swift would say.

What if something crawls in there over the winter I asked Not-Me, eyeing the mountain, which was as tall as my head. I had encountered this once before, you remember. In my previous neighborhood, forty snakes had come slithering out of a mulch pile in the spring, in which they had been incubating for God knows how long. All of which I had had to kill by myself for the safety of a two-year-old toddler standing on the far side of the pile.

I was assured this would not happen twice. Yeah, what are the chances that something creepy wants to live in the new mulch pile? 

Yet when I went to move more of the mulch to places that didn’t need it a week later, the rake hit two big eggs. Perfect, unbroken, and yet buried deep within Magic Mountain. Too big to be snake eggs, I told myself, yet what mother duck would burrow into a mulch pile and abandon her eggs there? Maybe they had been stolen by a raccoon! A little bandit with a black mask and little black hands! Stowed away for future use. 

I pulled the eggs out and left them next to the house foundation to admire and wonder over. Two days later, they had disappeared without a trace. 

But this weekend, I was taking the dog for a walk, and on the side of the house between the remnants of Mulch Mountain and the street, I looked down and spied a snake slithering along next to my shoe. Had he come from the mulch? Were we going there again? I snapped a quick photo and checked him out on my phone. A harmless rat snake. 

There was a time in my life, I would have run for a shovel anyway, but those days are gone. I carry flies out of the house. Run down three stories to release spiders. (Not always. If a bug doesn’t cooperate with capture, sometimes it has to go into the light…), because I’m not extreme about anything. I’d say I’m a very medium person. 

But everything seems more sacred now. Although a bit squeamish, I captured the snake in a cardboard box and carried it down to the creek, where I let it go among the kudzu vines, the violet asters, and burgundy coneflowers. The breeze blew up the bank carrying the scent of saltwater and sun. Live long and prosper, snake. 

But I feel bad that whatever was in those eggs didn’t have a chance to live. Although I don’t know how this could be true, I suspect that it is: there isn’t life that doesn’t matter and life that does. Life is diverse in its expression, yet universally holy. Indivisible. And, I’m beginning to believe, somehow conscious.

 As Kate Forster points out, spiders dream, dolphins have accents, otters hold hands, and ants bury their dead. And I’d add, elephants grieve, cephalopods hold grudges, and gray wolves mate for life.

We are islands in an ocean, and it is not the ocean that connects us but the floor of the sea.

I think “if a little is good, more is better” refers only to love and how it shows up in the world. Through you. Through me.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

I am on time, but my dance class is missing. I run down the deep stairwell at the City Rec Center, past the rock-climbing wall, where the bored instructor in the ballcap sits student-less as usual and yell to him, “Next time! Really going to try it soon!” which is a well-intended promise, but when push comes to shove, I always eye that towering, two-story wall with its dangling ropes, and wonder if that’s how I want to die. 

I continue down the stairs, cheers from a basketball game surging over me in waves, and sure enough, the room where we danced last week is dark, the door closed, and I’m momentarily confused and disappointed. This is our second session of Latin Dancing and I went all out in preparation, meaning, as the instructor suggested, I wore a skirt this time and I’ve got a hair tie on my wrist in case the room heats up again.

The women in this class are strangers to me, although a couple seem to know each other. There were eight of us at the first class, and for the instructor’s sake, I have been praying that everyone came back tonight, because she can’t afford to lose students. Her name is Nancy, she’s about 28 years old, wears a ponytail and glasses, and is a professional choreographer who calls out instructions in a lilting Spanish accent. 

As I hit the last step, a woman from my class runs out of a nearby room and smiles at me—“We’re in here! I came to get you.” And I smile back; the tiniest kindnesses are ridiculous in their impact. 

I feel the beginnings of a tribe stir my heart.

So, we are in a smaller and better room where the mirrors are unobstructed. And everyone returned! A couple of other students are wearing skirts as well. We practice the dance we learned last week, Fireball, and then move on to the Mambo. Then back to Fireball because we have the mental retention of bricks. 

But the more we practice the more control we have and the freer we get, the less we concentrate on the instructor and begin inhabiting our own bodies, dancing for whoever we are dancing for. You. Memory. Imagination. 

Sometimes I think we dance because of the days we didn’t, and for the days to come when dancing will no longer be on the syllabus. We have been briefly given another moment in which to defy gravity and the limitations of time. I was born in a flame, everybody gonna know my name, the music imagines. And like adolescents, who still believe there is no one they can’t be, and nothing they can’t do, for the length of the dance, we imagine that, too.

As we learn the Mambo, which is essentially another word for “shake it,” I am fixated on Nancy as she breaks down new moves. Like how to swing your hips as you rotate in a circle, swinging out slooowww, then fast- fast, slooowww, fast- fast. 

This is much harder than it sounds. Rotating your hips without moving your torso starts with your feet. Watch a hula dancer sometime. All that mesmerizing rhythm and grace are being engineered elsewhere. That’s the trick, isn’t it? To hide the mechanics of grace?

 When I compliment the woman dancing next to me, she suggests I move like I’ve got a hula hoop around my waist. Elbows up to keep our frame.

This makes me think of the first dance I ever learned. One day my father brought a hula hoop home from work, a new toy, then set it aside and taught us the Twist. It’s a new dance, he said, demonstrating. Just move like you are drying your backside with either end of a bath towel while putting out a cigarette with the toe of each shoe. 

Well. He wasn’t wrong. 

Funny the things that stay with you. 

I participate in another class at the Rec Center called Cardio Dance. Like Nancy, Leandra, who teaches it, is a pro, a joy to watch, and a challenge to emulate. But Leandra goes through the moves slowly, lets you think you’ve gotten them, then does a bait and switch, whipping them out at triple speed. Or she changes direction! 

We are all facing one way and suddenly she spins around, and we are supposed to be going in the opposite direction, leaderless—or sometimes, in any direction, it’s a spontaneous free-for-all. Decorum breaks down, and we rollick like teams in the Puppy Bowl. You can’t help but laugh, dancing with the rules tossed out, responsible for your own moves. Wait! I’ve got moves?

Wait… I have to change direction?

Sometimes Leandra just shouts for joy over the music or laughingly yells, “Uh-oh!” Like someone’s in big trouble now, like her body just got away from her, and who knows what’s going to happen. Even she doesn’t know; she’s following wherever spirit leads her. 

I always laugh because “Uh-oh!” means, “Let go,” and the words break something open inside me. A container of some kind that keeps me in here and you out there. 

But in that moment, façades fall away, and spirit takes us higher.

Time is our partner, beloveds.

Dance like the roof’s on fire. 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.