My dog came into the porchlight, her mouth holding a critter. “Drop it,” I commanded. She’s good this way. Tinkerbell isn’t a vacuum-eating sort of animal. She likes her organic tidbits, bathed in hot water, steeped for five minutes.

A baby squirrel plopped onto the brick, crying out in pain as it hit. Most every household has a designated critter handler. I’m mine. I have ‘shewed’ black snakes, carted baby bunnies into the woods, rescued stunned birds who’d hit the windows and nursed them back to fly. But a baby squirrel? That required round-the-clock feeding. Skills I didn’t possess.

I don’t believe many of us who marry and say the words, “for better or worse,” truly know what we’re getting into. I don’t believe many of us stick around after the better ends, be it thirty days or thirty years. And I can “guaran-darn-tee” you (my daddy’s saying), that most of us don’t know how to approach an adult and say, “It’s time you start wearing diapers.”

The day the world broke, the telephone rang. Being eight, I wasn’t allowed to touch it. My brother had hit his first decade and earned the right to answer. He yelled for Mom. She hated the phone. It tethered her to the dining room wall. She couldn’t wipe down the cooktop or clean the frig with a toothpick, her tool of choice. Dad had installed a longer cord, but it stretched only as far as the formica table.

My girls and I crack open the door to my parents’ house on the hill. It is visited only twice a month by Anna, the cleaning person, and of late, the appraisers. Paintings, tall as my petite teen, line the great room. While high on the walls, the scenes spoke idyllic locales to me–one of a Roman aqueduct, another a rushing Cowboy stream, another a muted Italian bridge. Dad had bought them as originals; up close, the printed versions peek out behind brushstrokes.

All for the love of my eighteen-year old, I attended Murder Con weeks ago. Not a chance in Sherlock did this spark my imagination–until I thought of her. She loves nothing better than watching or reading anything mysterious. Solving problems is rooted in her blood, perhaps because she sat in a Chinese orphanage for 7½ years. The only toy she had was the window she watched the world through. Consequently, her observation skills are keener than the best of them. In a world crowded with images, she can parse out the miniscule case-cracker or lost person at DisneyWorld, during high volume.

The thunder rumbled. My old rescued dog, Hubble, lumbered onto our covered porch, all fifty feet of southern columns and steel railing. The safest place in the world: my spot where I read, gut-talked with friends, cried over my parents’ deaths. It’s like being in a treehouse, surrounded by native dogwoods, redbuds and shagbark hickories. The 140-year old white oak canopied over all. A honey vein ran up its bark, rusty and wide as the Persian carpet down the hallway.