`You’re not going to believe this because I couldn’t, but then there are so many facts coming to light nowadays that are, at best, counterintuitive—my two favorites? That light is both a wave and a particle (whaaat?) and entanglement–the concept that two subatomic particles, once in contact, remain inexplicably connected across spacetime so that what you do to one affects the other instantaneously. How do they know?

I am a student of discoveries, often controversial—about consciousness and connection, illusions and limitations. Maybe by the end of this story, you will agree with astronomer Fred Hoyle, who observed that the world moves through three stages in the acceptance of any new idea.

First? It’s nonsense.

Second? It’s not actually new.

Third? We knew it all along. (Smiling here.)

My story begins after my parents’ divorce, when my mother sold Barnstead, the white house with the green shutters on the blue-gray river, and we moved to an established neighborhood. I was 12, and the prevailing theory was that this would be good for me. I had been isolated at the Barn, and now there would be swimming from a community beach, ice skating on the creek, and friends with boats for waterskiing. Mom bought a lot on a hill, built another house, and we moved in.

I was grieving but didn’t know it. I was lonely but didn’t show it–so when a construction company began prepping the lot across the cul-de-sac to build a new house, I developed a ritual.

After the carpenters had left for the day, I slipped down the hill to the construction site and sat on the cinderblocks, then the plywood, then on stacks of wallboard, and eventually on the front steps, and wished on the first bit of starlight that pierced the indigo of early evening. “Let a best friend move into this house,” I would ask.” Please let a best friend move in,” I would pray. The green, three-bedroom rancher neared completion but remained empty. I kept praying.

One day, I was home alone, attempting to fry chicken in my bathing suit—not a stellar idea– and there was a knock on the door. A man with blond hair and a friendly smile stood on our porch. “Hi,” he said, “My family is moving in across the cul-de-sac. Do you, by any chance, have a hose I could borrow?”

I was excited that we did indeed have a hose, and I knew where it was. As I handed it over, I asked, “Do you have any kids?”

He smiled down at me, “Yes, I do. I have a boy who is 9 ….” I held my breath, please, please, please, “and a girl about your age.”

A girl! My age!

When he returned the hose, he brought his daughter with him, and we were indeed in the same grade. My new neighbor had very round blue eyes like her father’s and thick, straight blond hair I admired cut in a Dutchboy bob.

She became my best friend for many years. We made scrapbooks, put lemon juice in our hair, picked violets in April, and skipped school, but responsibly: usually on a Thursday so we could pick up any work we missed on Friday.

Eventually, we went away to different colleges, but on our first summer back home, she introduced me to the man I would marry, who would become the father of my three children. In fact, we married men who were college classmates and best friends as well.

We would never again live in the same state, but we stayed in touch, oddly connected—entangled, you might say. The military officers we had married both left the Navy, and we both had two daughters and a son. Often, when I received a photo, I’d note that we had bought the same dress from 1500 miles apart or had the same placemats—and then there was this.

I published a book about ten years ago with Penguin Random House. The publisher reprinted it 8 times, keeping it on the shelf of every Barnes and Noble in the country for nearly a decade and in 20 countries around the world. I’ve found the book in the University of Otago bookstore in Auckland, New Zealand, and in England. When it went out of print, I bought the few remaining new copies from the publisher and the rest continue to sell on Amazon.

But one day, walking past one of those “Little Libraries” that have popped up in neighborhoods around the country, I thought, “I should stick a copy of my book in there. Maybe someone could use it, and I’ll get to know my neighbors better.”

I didn’t want to use the few remaining new copies I owned, so I ordered two copies online from the first used book dealers that popped up. The first arrived in good condition, so I stuck it in the little library down the street. The second book arrived two days later. I was sitting on the hearth in front of a crackling fire when I opened the package and leafed through the book to assess its condition.

Inside the front cover, the book’s original owner had placed a sticker with her name and address. I shook my head, smiling in the warmth and glow of the fire. Of the thousands of books out there, how in the world had I ended up with the only copy owned by the girl who had changed my life more than once.

Entangled.

We have seen each other once in the last 20 years. We have been in intermittent email contact. We have never lived closer than half a country apart. Until recently, we have never even lived in the same time zone.

Then I started laughing. It appeared my best friend had dumped my book. And I didn’t mind at all, whatever the circumstances. Everything has a lifespan, right? Interests run their courses. Relationships as well?

Maybe not. Maybe some relationships started before you were born and will last long after you die. Maybe some are conjured on the first star of early evening, and some are agreements to meet again in another place and time as different people whose souls recognize each other. Maybe we are all chapters in the same book awaiting a new edition.

You look into the eyes of the person you love. “That’s nonsense,” you say.

“And I have known it all along.”

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.

Leah is on the rug in the foyer, licking her paws nonstop. The terrier mix is hard at work giving herself a…  mani? pedi? Your guess is as good as mine, but she draws my attention to something on the floor next to the door, near the crack that lets the cold air in. I bend down and discover that Baby Jesus has fallen out of the trash bag I took out earlier. Good heavens. It feels like a sign.

He’s made of pottery and painted brown to look like wood. I bought him in Barcelona, Spain, the first Christmas I was married. He is part of a creche set, and if you look closely, you notice he has the vacant gaze of a Roman statue, and now, with a major chip out of his manger, Baby J has to go.

I feel a little squeamish dispensing with Jesus (or trying to). It’s similar to deciding what to do with the eight Bibles you’ve accumulated.

Leave them in hotel rooms, Gideon!

But I never had a good surface area on which to display the creche, and over the decades, the cows lost their horns; Mary seems to have had a MOHS procedure on her nose, and her halo is chipped. Joseph, inordinately tall, can’t stand up unassisted now. The arm he extends down toward the manger looks like he’s saying, “Woah Nelly…”  not, “Behold the King of kings.”

I’ve been hanging on to the whole broken holy family because that’s what I do– hang on to family– only in some sense of late that has become the family of man.

Hello you.

Thanks to the internet, I’ve been reconnecting with people I knew only briefly, say in eighth grade, or tangentially, as in my best friend’s friend, and those rediscovered relationships feel very much like Christmas, like the most unanticipated of gifts. Maybe it’s because who we grew up with shaped who we became, and there are days, or moments anyway, where reconnecting with our points of origin feels disarming, even charming.

Eventually, we grow up, and our life companions become our kids. I bought each of my children a Christmas ornament the year they were born and one every year thereafter until they left home. So, each child took a collection of memories from childhood into their future. Audra’s ornaments were always a bell of some kind—silver, gold. Andrew’s were made of china—a polar bear, a reindeer, and Emily’s ornaments were made of crystal—stars, icicles, and angels. That’s nearly 60 ornaments that have come and gone from my tree, which I guess means 60 years of parenting in a way. It’s a 60-year big hole, anyway. Chicxulub comes to mind—the asteroid that had been on a collision course with the Earth for centuries and then left a hole nearly 100 miles wide and at least 12 miles deep.

That sounds about right.

The tree is out on the porch waiting for recycling. When I was little, we cut our tree down from the pasture, but the selection was limited to scraggly white pines. We carried our choice back to the house, with its white shingles and green shutters, and watched my father drill holes in the trunk he then filled with extra branches he’d trimmed in the woods. Eventually, the tree was lush and beautiful. The first artificial Christmas tree!

I decide to keep Mary and one of the cows from the original creche as I finish packing away Christmas. Who hasn’t had MOHS, and who doesn’t have a broken halo? I also keep the angel because who doesn’t need an extra angel?

I vow I will throw out everything that hasn’t been used this year—the rejected decorations left in the 12 storage boxes in the linen closet— again… The garish ornaments from friends I dearly love, the balls from the year I thought I’d do Christmas in blue and white….

I cram all the bows in a box, knowing I have friends who put their bows away stuffed with tissue to retain their shape. Friends who don’t find candles in the box labeled garlands. And who don’t find the box marked “precious kids’ ornaments” empty. But holidays evolve, as do planets, solar systems, feelings, and family.

Christmas has changed for me in many ways and in other ways, not at all. This year, the tree had new ornaments filling out the bare spots where the bells, polar bears, and crystal angels once hung. Six hand-sewn wives of Henry the Eighth, which I bought in London, take their place, plus King Henry himself, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson. But the truth is that most of those boxes I planned to eliminate are back in the closet. I just smush the stuff in tighter so it appears consolidated.

I’ll let go of more next year, and one day, I will let go of everything. We all will.

But today, I hang on to the love story we just celebrated, to the lives that I made, to every sacred reminder of the life that made 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.

Clustered around two tables at a Chinese restaurant, I am one of 12 women ostensibly here to have lunch and to learn more about feng shui, the Chinese art of rearranging your possessions to change your life. In reality, it is the promise of a personalized forecast for the Chinese New Year that inspired most of us to ante up the $40 fee.

The predictions are nested in little boxes of tokens left at our place settings like gift bags at a birthday party. I bypass the red silk ribbon, jasmine candies, and the fake coins to reach for my reading.

I was born in the Year of the Snake, I discover. It is unappealing by western standards but then the woman to my immediate left was born in the Year of the Rat. Is that any better? We Snakes are the most beautiful women in the world my reading claims. How can that be true? I glance around the table wondering who the Snakes are.

The workshop leader is wearing red, which suits her warm smile, while I am wearing black, which I’m pretty sure is not the best feng shui color to have on but I think I look better in it.

Look, I’m a Black Snake, I joke to the Rat.

My companion doesn’t respond, her focus is riveted upon our hostess who explains that everything in the material world rests spatially next to something else. Therefore, where I place each object in my home impacts the energy flowing to me. The result?  Proper arrangement of my belongings can facilitate the realization of my dreams.

Many of my dreams have already come true: my dog, who was once prescribed Prozac, has never actually bitten anyone. My children’s father has 1) become a gourmet cook who 2) thinks cooking for others is fun!  But if feng shui is both art and science, I have one nagging question. Where can I place the past so that it does not interfere with the present?

What if now I want to say yes to being “Room Mother?” No to working all weekend?  Yes, to taking Advanced Conversational French with Mrs. Procaccini?

What if I wish I’d gone on more vacations when the kids were young, danced at my own wedding? Been braver, less self-absorbed? What if I want to do it all over again—career, being a parent, being a sister, being a friend, being human– knowing what I know now?

Our instructor can’t hear what I’m unable to ask, so she offers more specific instructions. I should put something gold in my prosperity corner and add a plant with friendly round leaves. I’m advised to keep water near my fireplace and to aim all sharp-cornered furniture away from my bed.

Servers arrive laden with bowls of steaming, brothy soup. Silverware and china clatter as the restaurant fills with the bubbling conversation of other diners. A water feature in the lobby creates the sound of perpetual rain and I lean forward in order to hear as our instructions continue.

I should bury a red string in the front yard and write down everything I want to bring into my life and everything I need to release. My gift box includes two small pieces of paper on which to do this. They are thin and delicate, emblazoned with gold leaf symbols and red Chinese lettering I cannot decipher. When this task is accomplished, I’m to burn them.

I start to write. I want my children to remain happy. Healthy. I want to do good work in this world. I want to live with transparent authenticity. I want to be instinctively generous. Compassionate. Thoughts come faster now as I suddenly feel as if it’s all true: I can change the past and forge a bright future, so it is imperative that I leave nothing out.

I want to live up to my potential, to know that love honors our intentions, forgives our mistakes; that a benevolent force is at the heart of the universe.

The woman next to me glances over as I cover my second paper’s surface. “Is that all?” she asks dryly, but I’m not finished. Rotating the page, I write in the tiny margins. I want to know that I am not alone, even when I feel alone; that in some way we have yet to rightly imagine, all is well.

At home, I step outside. Pulling the two small pieces of paper from my pocket I kneel against the winter wind.  A match flames against each fragile corner, and I lift them skyward. As I watch, regret disappears, at least in this moment, and all I still long for rises like hope in the pristine air.

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 ran into Stacey at Whole Foods this week. She is my neighbor who became a massage therapist, and I am the idiot who had to learn to stop referring to her as a masseuse. It means the same thing, but for some reason, masseuse sounds creepy nowadays. Stacey is beautiful and sweet, and we rarely see each other, so we stopped to chat for a minute by frozen foods.

“Ready for company?” I asked, looking at her cart.

“Getting there. My cousin is coming for Christmas Eve. What she doesn’t know is… we’re going Christmas caroling! She’s going to hate it,” Stacey added, her guileless blue eyes shining.

“Totally hate it!”  I agreed, wanting to please but a little perplexed at Stacey’s willingness to annoy her guests.

Stacey’s husband, Cliff, wandered toward us through the ice cream selections. Seeing him, Stacie confided conspiratorially. “Cliff doesn’t know either. He’s going to REALLY hate it.” She looked gleeful, pleased with her plan, but I like Cliff, so I said, “Come sing at my house. I promise to be receptive.” And complicit in the strategy to make nice people uncomfortable, we took our carts down different aisles.

I tried caroling in my old neighborhood. There were no sidewalks, a lot of wet leaves, and most houses sat back from the road. It was dark. No one knew the words past the first verse of anything, so we got quavery and thin on the second, third, fourth, and can you believe it? fifth verses. Jumbling up syllables—coming in strong on the chorus—we didn’t have enough flashlights, and we were not good singers. With every knock on the door, I felt more like a political canvasser for the wrong party or a census taker. I mean, people were in the middle of their favorite television shows or searing the salmon for dinner. It was 32 degrees that night, so they had to either step out and freeze on their front stoops or let all their heat out for the Little Drummer Boy. A lot of people don’t know there are 21 rum pum-pum-pums in that one. Caroling was a well-intended idea but it has to be deployed selectively.

Like when I was in high school. My Girl Scout troop (stop it. We had great uniforms. We looked like WW II WACs in a good way) caroled at the Baltimore nursing home where my father was the administrative director. At least it was warm and light, and all the doors to the rooms were open. People lay in bed smiling at our radiant youthfulness–became alert at our approach. One elderly man saw us, sat up, swung his legs over the side of his mattress, and patted the sheet next to him. I wasn’t sure what to do, I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, but that invitation didn’t feel right. The word masseuse springs to mind. “Hark!” I sang at him, “The herald angels sing!” He kept on nodding and vigorously patting the sheet as I edged out of the room and hurried to catch up with my troop.

I grew up in a Methodist Church, and though I no longer practice any organized religion, reverence for a power greater than myself and the beauty of the rituals are embedded deep in my soul. I loved the hymns as a child, and even as a young mother of three, I sang in the church choir.

Those days are gone and although I didn’t try caroling again, caroling found me.

Five days before Christmas, I awoke to see our 4-year-old son standing next to my side of the bed, his face drained of color, platinum hair plastered to his forehead. “My elbow hurts,” he said. He hadn’t fallen, and it wasn’t swollen, but something told me this was important, so I stopped wrapping gifts and delivering crème de mint brownies that morning to take him to the pediatrician. The doctor asked a few questions, then looked at me and said simply, “You’re in trouble. Take him, right now, to the orthopedic practice across the street and get this aspirated. I’m calling ahead. I suspect you’ll be in surgery this afternoon.”

I literally carried my sick boy in my arms to the surgeon’s office, where they lay him on a table and stuck a needle directly into the now swollen joint where it hurt the most. He struggled with the fierceness of a four-year-old who doesn’t know why his mother is hurting him. I had to use all my strength to hold him down. This still makes me cry. His scream was so loud, and by necessity, my ear was so close, I thought I’d be permanently deaf, and that was fine with me. Take my hearing, take my sight, take anything you want.

As my doctor had predicted, an infection had lodged in my son’s elbow. Should it travel to his brain or heart, the results would be “unacceptable.” The only remedy was surgery. “I’m not ready!” my son yelled from his wheelchair as they took him away.

None of us was ready. None of us ever are.

He came through the surgery fine, but he didn’t get well. Day by day, we sat by his side, slept by his side, as IV antibiotics failed to extinguish the heat of his fever and Christmas approached. I brought decorations for his room. Bought him a squirrel puppet in the hospital gift shop.

On Christmas Eve, we were sitting in a near-silent hospital. Everyone who could go home had gone home. Our seven-year-old daughter was waiting for Santa’s arrival that night at our house with my mother, where the tree was decorated and stockings hung. I was trying to make Christmas happen simultaneously everywhere–for everyone—that’s the promise, right? Gifts for all who believe? All over the world simultaneously?

Then, from very far away, so faint at first, you might have imagined a choir of angels, the distant strains of “Silent Night” floated closer and closer, becoming more and more distinct. Round yon virgin, mother and child, holy infant so tender and mild. Muffled footsteps in the hall, and a cluster of carolers appeared. Benevolent strangers who could have been at home with their families, enjoying Christmas Eve supper by the hearth, but instead stood smiling in the hospital doorway of a very sick boy and two scared and exhausted parents.

“Sleep in heavenly peace,” the choir of angels sang softly, “sleep in heavenly peace.”

That night, that very night, when love is passed one to another throughout the world, in a story that defies the laws of physics but inspires the laws of love, the fever broke.

When the sun rose, in dawn’s redeeming grace, we went home.

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.

My Great-Grandfather Anderson was chopping milkweed one day, got the juice on his arms, and broke out in a rash that eventually extended all the way over his head. His fever soared, he lost all his hair and then lost his mind. He had developed Aerophilous Erysipelas, or St. Anthony’s Fire, which causes sores, intense burning pain, and hallucinations. Grandmother Anderson hid all the knives or slept with them under her pillow. That was surely unnecessary, but he was eventually taken to the state mental hospital in Jacksonville, IL, for a time. Over the centuries, St. Anthony’s fire has killed popes, kings, soldiers, and saints.

My great-grandmother was reported to have talents from which my suffering great-grandfather could have benefited. In folklore terminology, she had the ability to “blow out fire.” If she concentrated intensely, blowing gently on an injury while murmuring an inaudible incantation or prayer, she could make pain disappear. People with this ability were also called “fire talkers,” but no one knows what they said. When my mother was burned as a child, it was my great-grandmother who blew out the heat. The talent cannot be passed to a relative, so the legend goes, but a man can tell a woman how to do it, and a woman can tell a man.

My friend Jim and I are having lunch. Sorry, I tell him. I’ve got no special knowledge to impart but I wish I did because I’ve always been aware of the power of touch. When I was very pregnant with my firstborn, sleepless and hormonal, my army-trained obstetrician entered the exam room where I perched like Humpty-Dumpty in a sundress on the end of the table, put down my file, then moved closer to check out my lymph nodes. He walked his fingertips slowly and gently under my jawline, chin, and down my neck. “Here’s the embarrassing part,” I tell Jim. “It felt so good, so restorative; I’m pretty sure I closed my eyes and leaned into him. There might have been a whimper involved.”

“Not as embarrassing as me doing the same thing last week with the dental hygienist,” Jim laughed.

Our waitress approaches. She looks harassed, overwhelmed. I touch her arm as I hand her our menus. Touch blows out fire. “You have such beautiful skin,” I say as she walks away smiling. Maybe fire talkers simply weave a new story where the hurt has been. “Some people just have a healing energy,” I say.

We look at each other across the table as silverware and china clink at the waitstaff station. Do we all? We wonder aloud. What if touch blows out grief? Loss? Sorrow in others we can’t see?

The miracle of touch. It is the impulse to lie next to your child in a hospital bed as monitors beep and voices hush in the hall, the universal phenomenon that sick toddlers want only to be held against the warmth of your chest. But the momentary touch of strangers has an impact as well, an impact on mind and heart. After all, the things that hurt us most are not visible. So, it’s not chance that a laughing touch on the arm lifts your spirits, and the guiding hand on the small of your back lingers as a subtle sense of well-being long after you’ve walked through the door.

When my mother was in assisted living and then eventually on the health services floor, I noticed a volunteer who came every week just to give the female patients manicures. Some of them had no memory, none of them could walk—ladies with gray hair, white hair, in cotton knit pantsuits lined up in wheelchairs for nail polish, cherry red, and satiny pink. They signed up, I believe, so that just one more time in this world, they could experience the tender intimacy of someone holding their hand.

What were the words my great-grandmother used to heal? I look for them every week, I’ve been looking for them all my life– for the boy who limped at school, the widow with the Chesapeake Bay retrievers at the end of the road. For myself. Wanting to try, afraid to try, wrestling fear as a lack of faith.

But it occurs to me as I write this that faith is not required of the healer, but of those who wish to be healed.

I believe, I believe, I believe.

Touch me now.