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I work with my hands to heal: A pencil roll for my sweet artist. New cotton coasters to protect wood. A Minecraft t-shirt repurposed into a journal for a birthday gift to a friend. Pages of pen and ink mandalas, to quiet my mind.

My interrupted photographs illustrate the Winter 2015 issue of online literary nonfiction journal Brevity Magazine. I clucked over this project like a mother hen, and gave it the majority of my spare time in November and December, to the dismay of those I love. Now this project is out in the world, and I bend to the task of redemption.

She has been folding her thoughts and the meditations of her heart into paper shapes, and I find them all over the house. A menagerie from her imagination. I didn’t know the hole was there before she came into my life to fill it.

When I am an old woman, I will be a milkweed seed pod drying in the sun, wrinkled and spotted. You will pull me open on the seam until my silver-white floss pushes through, and you’ll blow my sweet, tender seed to the wind until I am an empty shell.

Thirty minutes before closing. The grounds are dotted with little houses, each one filled with whispering old objects. Electric fans move the air inside the main building and I wander through three levels. A man browses through silverware on the ground floor. I see him again on the second floor, looking at a small wooden puzzle box. And then we’re on the third floor where the air is thin. We...

I sat on that very same flat hometown rock when I was her age, on the side of a rushing cold water creek filled with crayfish and bubbles.

A coffeecake for new homeowners. I’ll never be able to wrap presents in plastic bows and bright paper again.

My girl and I walked between buildings in our townhouse development and found a patch of fragrant honeysuckle at the edge of the woods. I washed the blossoms, then steeped them overnight in simple syrup. The syrup is lovely mixed with soda water, poured over ice with a squeeze of lemon or sprig of mint.

Not a fancy hack at all, just functional and needed. I love the look of IKEA’s faux sheepskin rug TEJN draped over my FRANKLIN stool, but it never wanted to stay in place. I had to reposition the thing fifteen zillion times a day. The fifteen zillion and oneth time I pulled the fake fur up and over the seat back, I noticed that the edges matched up pretty well...