He curled between us on the sofa, and we all shared Francine’s blanket. It was a terrible, terrible show.

But the nicest night in a house I’d had in so long I couldn’t remember.

In the bed in my room upstairs, I scratched Terry Johnson’s ears with one hand, held my phone in the other.

“Joellen,” I said when she answered. “Are you allowed to check in on a kid who isn’t yours?”

I carry with me a library card for a county I no longer live in.

Not only are libraries the greatest invention ever for a person to get her hands on every single book she ever feels like she might want to read without having to buy and carry the heavy things along with her every six to ten months when she moves to a new house—they are also a peaceful and clean and cheerful place to get some quiet alone time. Living with a bunch of kids is chaotic and exhausting, and so there were many Saturdays in my life when my morning and a good part of the afternoon were spent curled up in the toddler picture-book area of whichever library was near the house I lived in at the time. The adults there, the librarians, were so kind. They spoke in modulated low tones that made the top of my head tingly, and they brought new books to my attention that they thought I might like, and they forgave my late fees. My favorite days were rainy ones, especially in the Seattle Central. That whole building is practically made of glass; the wind blows the rain at the windows, and there are warm drinks for sale in the lobby. Heaven.

My favorite books when I was little were a series of seven that I now understand are actually a romanticized celebration of white people barging into the homelands of indigenous people, participating in their genocide, and stealing the land for themselves, but which, as a little white kid with no parents, I knew only as cozy stories about an adventurous pioneer home life—Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie.