Walking behind him on the way to the train. A list of Ians in my head. The one who lost himself out west. The one who The one who had sword fights in Glasgow and heroin here.

Thinking about the way men smell when they work. This one smells like wood. That one smells like stale cigarette sweat. The way men smell when they move things.

I am trying to notice things again.

Laundry to be folded int he new year, laundry and dishes and more of the same. My glasses are broken and they need to be fixed.

I have thirty dollars in the pocket of a pair of dirty jeans and I swear I am going to find it.

Monday night home from the bar and I'm awake and I'm tired. Dance music tonight but the floor was too full too crowded and I didn't want to fight my way up didn't want to dance in back. Girls with plucked eyebrows and tattooed backs and I can't shake the feeling I'm not being the person I mean to be.

Do you remember that time you came out to my bar? I just remembered it, just now.

Tonight a cab ride home never done that before and I'm not even drunk, not even tired. I wasn't dancing for anyone tonight even when the kids came. I could eat something now if there was something to eat, or call someone if I liked the phone. I am home and I don't even know if the Phillies won the Word Series.

Today she has lost her glasses. Athena from down the street is there with a flashlight looking for them. Athena who doesn't get it. Athena who keeps asking her to retrace her steps. We leave without her glasses. Athena stays to make herself a cup of coffee.

Quiet morning naked in bed tired-eyed knitting and listening and still. Cat on the covers lists of things to do lists and lists and things to do. Up into yesterday's jeans. Out into the old truck. Coffee in the sunshine morning. Yardsaling. Finding friends. Old glass buoys and clock cabinets.

I have wasted the day. Wonderful wasted day.

We are starting over.

Every day we wake up to a new light, a new chance, a new hope.

Every day is dashed to the ground like the days before it.

It is spring. There are plants in the garden. I am cooking dinner. The kids are upstairs playing. The air is cool.

I am trying to start a new story. But the story stays the same.

Afternoon and I am waiting for snow. I am full after eating the way you eat to get someone else to eat. As if it were charity.

I am trying to decide what in my life I have control over. What is a choice. Instead of sitting here letting it all wash over me.

What I read as a hangover this morning turns out to be something else. Getting sick. A cough, a headache. A tightness in my lungs. I can feel it like a train coming.

Angry this morning at how sloppy people are. A sign on the door-- "Thanks from all of us." Sloppy sign. Sloppy with words. And I got angry, with my hangover head. Careless. Careless people. Careless and closed-off. Like it doesn't matter.

Words and pictures. We put them everywhere. When I say I love you, you think I am selling you soap.

At the cafe a woman sits with her back to me talking to the photographer. He tells her the story of each picture and as he is talking I can imagine what each one is. The bow cutting across the water. The gravestones. The buildings.

My mother is late. I drink more coffee than I should waiting for her. Sam eats cream cheese off of a bagel. He reads a book.

When she gets there she is all aflutter. Bags of canvases and paints. I get her a cup of coffee. I get her rye toast. We work on her homework: lists of things, categories. Lists of how to do things. We go to her house. As she learns how to find her words Sam crawls under the table, around the chairs. By the time we are done he is covered in dog hair.

We drive downtown doing this week's homework. How a fence is different from a wall. How they are the same.

When I pick Abigail up she is holding an invisible baby bird in her hands. She asks us to be quiet so the baby bird can sleep. By the time we get home the baby bird is awake. She lifts her hands out the car door and lets it fly away.

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Originally uploaded by Mandy K

How we spend our days.

He's gone away for a week. She is upset about it, about being alone without him. So we make sure she is not alone. We write our names on a calendar. We commit to time. Each day we will check on her, see her, make sure she is not alone.

Today I take her to get coffee. In her purse is a large container of organic yogurt. She puts it on the table at the cafe. She pulls out a white shirt with a black stain. She is going to fix it, she says. Then I can have it. It will be as good as new. She trips on her words. They come out sideways.

When Sam makes eyes at a little girl my mother tells a man it is love in place. Nobody cares that her words are wrong. Nobody is listening.

Oatmeal for breakfast. Kids are coughing, just a little, into the tub and out to play. Pull on torn jeans and slip on heels to mail a letter.

Cut tomatoes and fresh mozzarella, basil and olive oil into bread. Stale crackers onto the porch for the birds. Dance around the kitchen. Hang the upstairs rug to dry. Still finding beer bottles and glasses of bourbon and grappa and eggnog and wine. Bags of Waragi and plates of chocolates.

Kiss the kids as they run through and send them up to play. Reheat coffee. This year I will live the way I mean to. Make better use of my resources. Write more letters.

This year I will act out of love.

Two days after Christmas and the emergency room is full. She didn't know what she was doing, a week's worth of pills. Forty-two pills. A week's worth.

In the next room a man has taken something and fallen off of a fishing boat. He is cold. He screams for two hours while they try to figure out his name. Down the hall a little girl is so sick they send her straight to Children's. An old woman wanders from room to room doing EKGs.

We watch as her heart speeds up and slows down. We wait to be moved. A woman with chest pains sits and waits alone. A man with a blown-out knee waits on a stretcher.

The next day when I go to the hospital to visit I find a slide on the wet pavement. The corner of the Public Garden by Beacon and Arlington. The corner I sat in so many times. The edge of the statue shows and I remember what it says. Neither shall there be any more pain.

Christmas night the day long and gone and a lot of good in it. Plastic toys rattle in the back of the car. Sam cries as we sit in traffic.

I am trying to keep the tender parts of me tender.

Pickup truck rolled over. Car smashed in. A peace in knowing she would not be alone. The rising of a voice brings me to tears. The way we light things up and call them joy.

I ask if I am doing all I can. Am I doing all I can.

Thursday night a mind of its own with snow and cold and no dinner and bourbon. There will be mistakes and I'm sorry for them but it's the way it is there are always mistakes.

So it's Thursday and it's blues night and we end up out, out with Shilo's brother, and eventually I'll call him Ryan but not tonight and the music's okay but loud and the night is ending and in comes Mac and he sits with us of course he sits with us and the music is ending and I let him buy us drinks because the night is nearly over and his wife is dead and I was thinking about her Sunday and we have whiskey and I dance with Mac because he is lonely.

And the music ends and we sit down and we talk and Dave Sag comes up and Dave knows Gregor I'm his right-hand-man and Dave knows Anne Marie and Dave came to Gloucester after her. And it is December 13th heading into December 14th and Dave tells m he held Galen in his arms when he was a baby and it is December 14th and I make Mac get me another drink and it is December and Dave knew Anne Marie when she was baking bread and I baked for Mac and it is December 14th Dave held Galen in his arms and I will remember that this morning when my baby wakes up I will remember Anne Marie whailing in my kitchen as her baby lay dead in Great Barrington.

And it is Thursday night and I haven't eaten and we are talking about Galen and Gloucester and Anne Marie and Mac says out of nowhere that he misses my father and hell I miss my father and we drink to that but I'm the only one drinking and I am a Lacey and Dave talks about my mother and he remembers her and she doesn't even remember herself. I drink to that. And the night ends and I stumble home in the snow and I reheat leftover spaghetti and I've had too much to drink but I love you and I miss you and this morning it is fifteen years and nearly four years and who knows when my mother started to lose it but I love you I love you all.

It's feeling like a hot stove life these days. I don't know who to talk to. I don't know who to trade.

I'm waiting for the Mitchell Report to blow it all up.

Today it is difficult not to drink. I mean not to drink early. This morning with ice over everything and no cream for coffee, like a sign or something that whiskey would do or bourbon or scotch or anything but coffee with no cream.

There is a smell in the house, a bad smell, like lost sippy cup or worse. Keep doing laundry. Close the gate upstairs and mop the floor. Replace the bad smell with the bad smell of bleach. Strip the beds.

Wash Sam's chair. Scrub yogurt from the grooves in the table. Bring the garbage outside. Knock the ice off the lid. Shovel the steps, the walk. Throw salt on it.

Watch the crows fly away. I forgot about winter, this way things have of freezing shut. The way windex freezes on a window.

At one o'clock Jane brings me cream. I give her soup. I set oranges and cloves to boil on the stove.

It is after noon and I haven't had a drink.

My streak stands unbroken.

My house is filled with balloons. The kitchen cabinet is falling off of the wall. My living room is filled with fabric from another of my mother's closets.

Today she watched Sam while I put parts of her life in boxes and into my car. She sat him on the counter and fed him pieces of bagel. She gave him antiques dolls to play. And when her dog snapped at him she pulled Sam up quickly and cried with him.

She cried and was sorry and couldn't talk. She wandered around and couldn't find her things and cried and said she was sorry. I told her not to worry. Everything is fine.

I would lie through my teeth to make her happy.

Funny to watch Joe standing, his chin up just like Celeste's.