Mary Dansak

Boy, do folks ever get in a tizzy over aging. I can't go to any of my old-folk medical appointments without seeing ads for Botox! It's almost as if my aging body offends thee.

“Did you ever hear of Steller's sea cows,” Tipi Joe, our feral bonus-son, asked me the other day. I had not. Intrigued, I spent much of last weekend engrossed in learning about Stellar's sea cows, Hydrodamalis gigas.

One day, when I was in my late 40s, I woke up with an overwhelming sense that I was not myself anymore. Something was dreadfully amiss. I could not find pleasure in anything. Furthermore, my emotions went berserk. I was unable to pinpoint what was wrong with me. This state of living like a stranger to myself went on for years, accompanied by a new and most unwelcome brain fog.

When one of my stepmother's tiny dogs disappeared from her rural home, we blamed coyotes. I wanted to kill every coyote in Alabama to avenge her death. I had the same reaction when coyotes broke into an enclosure and killed an injured Canada goose my neighbors were raising. It seems all my animal-loving, live-and-let-live tolerance immediately gives way to violent fury when it comes to coyotes killing off pets.

New York City shines like a beacon, glitters with lights on streets and in windows, and beams with the dreams of eight million souls on any given day. Recently, however, the city experienced an extra fresh and spangly sparkle. Not because the Knicks won the national championship. Not because the violent crime rate is lower than it's been in the past five years. Not because Lei won the James Beard Award for Best New Restaurant on the very day our daughter Anna started working there. No, the fresh little light that brightened the whole city was the presence of Ruby, our brilliant gem of a granddaughter, who visited New York with me to celebrate turning ten years old.

I am the world's worst gardener. I am content to let the wildflowers and those some call weeds take over wherever they find purchase in my woodsy yard. But this was not always the case.

She's old and heavy with a musty smell about her. Her joints are stiff; she's out of tune. Still, I am charmed.

I have so many questions about stinging. What is happening at the cellular level in our bodies when we get stung? How is a sting different from a shock or a pinprick? And, of course, oh death, where is thy sting?

I stared into the tiny animal's glassy brown eyes. Its body was hunched into a ball, terrified. Its delicate nose twitched ever so slightly. “Don't worry, little mouse, I won't hurt you,” I whispered, slowly sliding the pantry door shut to give the little rodent some peace.

My husband Joe and I were innocently flipping around on YouTube the other night when we found a clip of a woman who awoke to find a bat trying to crawl into her mouth. Of course we stopped. Of course we watched the clip.