Those occasions when or where I felt at peace, not anxious or feeling like I was doing something wrong: it was often in the flow of writing, on those sunny, early fall mornings in the sitting room, chasing an interesting sentence amidst notebooks.

Yoga, always yoga. Sauna rooms. Stroking my sleepy dog. Dancing. The woods. Venice at night. Sitting outside of a bar in Paris, while the buildings light up during a lightning storm. The unicorn tapestries in the Musée de Cluny. Watching a performance. Watching two young girls goof around while making pancakes on film. Passages in certain books, my world expanding. Early mornings in Alvor on a hotel balcony with a view of the sea, reading Sally Rooney. Drawing a tree or a building facade while having coffee on a warm morning. Observing the countryside from a passenger seat while the husband drove us through the interior of Crete toward the Libyan Sea. Watching the sun set as we drove through Big Sur. The first morning in a friend's apartment, in NYC or Santa Monica or LA. Walking around snowy Berlin. Birdwatching beside an extinct volcano in the midst of a suburb in Northern California. Walking the land of my husband's family farm. Writing in a dim sum shop in NYC or a donut shop in New Orleans, when I had nobody to meet. Lying on a boardwalk in a meadow in Yosemite, marveling at the Milky Way while bats whizzed above. Municipal gardens or parks: the Jardin du Luxembourg, Hampstead Heath, St. Stephen's Green. Pegasus Books in downtown Berkeley.

The jasmine tree in my mother's backyard, letting loose its flowers every September, the month my father died, as if it too remembered and grieved. To have a space for grieving, for remembering, for those feelings that haven't been boxed away, for 'later'.

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