There is a statue of Our Lady of Grace in front of a house on Central Avenue that your brother and I pass on our walk to work. She rests on a tree stump between two cypress trees that sprout unruly and cover two of the first floor windows. It is my guess that she has been there for generations; the almost Aquafresh blue of her mantle spilling onto her simple white robe after years and years of weather. She watches us from the spotty shade of her dark green niche as we jostle by on the uneven sidewalk and I cannot help but purse my lips. How could she have been allowed to drift into this state of disrepair?

And then I look at her. Really look at her. Her hands like two perfect seashells (slightly cupped and worn by the water rolling off the roof) stretching out beyond her mottled veil toward the boughs of the trees. Open. Ready. Her face stained and streaked and washed of any painted detail. Steady. Kind. Her blue stippled feet peaking out from under her robe rest firmly on the blanched serpent coiled across the statue's curved base. I look at her almost lost in the tangle of branches and I love her better than I have ever loved her in the cavernous belly of the Basilica where I mostly go to visit with her. I love her best here because there is something true and penetratingly urgent about her. She stands in the relative chaos of this forgotten little garden in front of the house with graying wood siding on the street with the haphazard sidewalk and looks at me patiently, but with resolve. She is saying "Stand still. Stand in the midst of your meetings, your laundry, your emails, your bills, your clutter, your appointments. Stand with your hands open. Do not be ashamed to be messied. Let grace pour over you and in you and through you. Let it dishevel you. Take it from anyone who will offer it to you. Be greedy for it. Give it to everyone. Give more than you think is prudent. Know that you are God's own. Crush under your feet anything that says otherwise."

I think about this the whole way home as we pass her for the second time today. Your brother pulls on the string of a rainbow swirled helium balloon that he charmed out of the hands of the priest whose fiftieth birthday we had gathered at the Parish Center to celebrate. My eyes scan the lawns, sidewalk, and gutter for the shoe he lost on our earlier journey. He falls asleep about half way home to the quiet rumble of traffic. The string still mixed up in his fingers is almost too perfect and I narrowly resist the urge to sweep my lips across his limp hand as I listen to the quick snatches of sound that escape each car as it whizzes past. I am standing still. I am standing still at the corner of Crain and B & A Boulevard and picturing the image of Our Lady of Grace on Central Avenue tucked into a pocket inside my heart and I watch it dissolve in the deep red of me into swirls of white, blue, and green and course through my veins to that place where our blood meets. I want you to have her.

Today the rain has lulled everything into a heavy green haze. It rained all morning and part of the afternoon and now the trees look fat and sated. Baka, the kitty (lovable schmendrick, destroyer of carpets), is sleeping with her paws folded neatly under her chin on a patchwork tapestry I bought in Philadelphia about five years ago. I ducked out of a sudden downpour into a narrow, cluttered shop on Chesnut Street (I think, or was it Walnut?) and haggled with the shop owner over the price. This is something I'll teach you. Haggling.

Wet tires whisper "shhhhh" on the street outside. I wonder why this sound is so comforting. I wonder if this is the sound you hear all day, the "shhhhh" of my body and distant, waterlogged voices.

o, god (for lucy)

Oh, God.

My friend Diana says that this is the best prayer she knows and, despite all of the resplendent, time-honored, formulaic prayers that I collect and tuck away in secret places like a child squirrels away feathers and seashells, this is the one I pray the most. It is adoration, petition, thanksgiving, and praise. Mainly petition.

Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God.

This is my prayer as I brush my lips over your brother’s feverish forehead, little beads of perspiration smeared into long, wet streaks. This is the prayer I mutter (under my breath and almost as a threat) as I travel along Route 29 hoping to find a gas station. This is the prayer I make whenever the doctor is taking my blood pressure and every time my fingers are lost and groping at the wilderness in the bottom of my bag for my keys. It is also the prayer that escapes my lips (pushes through before I have even begun to trace the syllables in my mind) as I listen to the squinchsquinch sound of my feet on the linoleum and peer at two lines—one dark and one impossibly faint—that bring good tidings of great joy… a small, plastic, pharmaceutical Gabriel in a bathroom strewn with bits of laundry and humming with the sound of fluorescent light. A little Annunciation.

The first time I saw your brother he looked like a seahorse with a spine of smooth, perfect pearls. The first time I see you you look like a lima bean or a greasy thumb print. You are perfect. Each time more angular and fleshy and strange and real. I want to write some things down for you because it’s hard to find the time to love you properly (to delight in you, to savor the idea of you, to listen to the ripples you make in that thick, salty water of my belly). Everything moves so quickly. I need to write to mark the time… for both of us. I need to write to tell you things that are too precious and slippery to be entrusted to memory. How am I going to teach you to be a woman (in the noblest sense of the word) in this world?

Oh, God.