This morning I took Daphne out and she ran around like crazy and then vomited up her breakfast and ate it, and David came downstairs and told me he is sick and would like me to take him to the doctor, and both of the boys had upset stomachs after breakfast and we were late to school. After I dropped off John I drove up the parkway to the vet, where I had to get Daphne her heartworm pill and some topical tick and flea treatment, and on the way, of course, I looked up at the trees, which are totally bare now—winter-time trees, pretty in their brown and skeletal way, but necessarily suggestive of a certain way of being, a certain mood, a certain pain, even, in my fingers and toes. I remembered only three weeks ago, when I drove up the highway and looked up at the same trees and saw them covered with red and gold leaves hanging on by little vegetal threads, and thought to myself, myself being, apparently, a mournful, desolate soul, how beautiful the leaves were, but how all this beauty would soon be gone, and winter, which I dread, would be upon us. This morning I was able to occupy both times, the time of beauty and dread, three weeks ago, and then this morning, when the sun shone on the bare curling branches. I thought, I didn’t want it to happen, but it happened anyway. Oh, well.

We saw whales. First we saw them from a distance. Then we saw them from a hundred yards away. Then we cut our engine and two whales surfaced close to us, and swam closer still. One dove so close to our boat that I could see the white spot by its eye grow dim under the water.

We had reached the summit of bliss. We had come very close to a very important thing. It was like a cathedral on the boat—we were awestruck, amazed. And now that this had happened and everyone felt that it had happened, as everyone had, and the sun was sliding down toward the water and the wind was whipping across the stern and bow, I expected we would head in. The Puget Sound, as I discovered the next day, when we went to a very beautiful beach in a lovely protected cove and dipped our toes in the water, is icy, icy cold, so cold that when you step into it you feel that it has grabbed hold of your foot and is squeezing as hard as it can. When the wind whips across it in the late afternoon, in the absence of a strong, vital sun, you freeze your tits off. I was totally inappropriately dressed, too, thanks to Captain Beau, who had told me that his happiness and the happiness of the other people on board, as well as the happiness of my younger son, who had asked very nicely for whales on this vacation and to whom I had promised them, depended on us leaving Vancouver in good time, choosing our lane at the border crossing wisely, catching the next ferry from Anacortes, and getting to the dock by 3.30. At which point he was late, but that didn’t matter, I was already out there in my skirt and sandals and very thin sweater.

But now we had seen the whales, and everyone had had a whale moment, and so we would go home. I went into the cabin, where it was warmer, and awaited the captain at his helm. Instead we stayed out on the water for another hour and saw more whales. Ninety whales were out in Juan de Fuca that day, and we saw them all, although I saw the balance of them from the cabin, through the window, and didn’t care. They were like wallpaper to me, the rest of the whales. They were lite music. People still walked around the boat saying, Whales! But I had seen whales. I had gotten what I wanted from them. I smiled. Whales. Wonderful. Whales. When are we going home?

It was very beautiful around me. I wasn’t going to die. But I must admit that as we followed the whale pods around Juan de Fuca, my thoughts grew dark, and I experienced dread and unhappiness. Then, at some point, as if it were nothing, Beau turned on the heat and everyone came inside and we shut the cabin doors. The engine roared and we turned back towards the shore. Everyone was happy. Everyone talked. When we stopped and pulled up the crab pots we’d dropped on the way out, they were full of crabs. The females and the small males had to be thrown back. Henry threw several overhand. Beau lobbed one but accidentally hit the fishing rods over his head and she fell, hard, on the running board next to David, who kicked her in with his foot. She’s fine! David said. She says she’s fine! and we all laughed, although later David told me that in the water she sank like a stone. We saw whales! They were magnificent.

We were in Brussels, and I was at the pâtisserie. I was in the apartment, with our new babysitter, watching the BBC. I was walking to buy something, something else, and our downstairs neighbor pulled her car across the street in front of me, to see if I was okay. At that point in time David and I shared a cell phone, we knew where the other was, we didn’t worry about each other, or had only just started to worry about each other a few months earlier, when I was pregnant. I remember at the end of the pregnancy I used to root through my purse to check the cell phone to see if I had missed a call, before realizing, again, that no one would be calling me, I would be calling them.

I want to go back further, more, to see how it was then, when everything was wonderful except for loneliness and, in the winter, dodgy heat. When I went to the salle de kinésthérapie and took my turn on the massage bed and watched the snow fall outside. When the man from the next building over stopped us on the street to explain that he and his wife practiced naturisme, and he hoped we wouldn’t mind. When the car was towed, and we found it.

It was as real as anything else. I can see that now. I wonder if the point of thinking and writing about past things is that by doing this you make them real, and by making them real you promise that someday this will all seem real, as well.