Wrote this single-finger style on my iPad on a plane heading to Lake Superior yesterday. Now I am sitting at the shore, it 6:30 on Sunday morning, I hope you can hear the waves.

What is Love by Sherry Cassells

My mother tied her hair back like Virginia Woolf and wore the same style of dress, no prosthetic nose was required, the line of her silhouette both as sad and beautiful as her heroin, I know that word’s wrong, but it’s right, too, my mother died of an overdose when I was twelve.

She went from Virgin to Wolf when the needle hit its groove, and I went next door to the Campbell’s.

If I had to wring my childhood into a single drop it would contain the darkening hours at the Campbell’s kitchen table where I learned everything.

Jeopardy was on in the living room, we could hear the answers, we asked the questions quietly, often in unison, each of us held a pencil and we took turns at the crossword in the folded newspaper. Mr. and Mrs. Campbell's block letters were perfectly identical, it took a few weeks before I mastered mine to the same shape, and my anonymous answers went to the page with increased authority, any mistakes were anonymously corrected.

What is 1967, who is Carson McCullers, what is dioxin, who is Richard Nixon, what is Ohio, who is Lou Reed, what is Vietnam.

And then my mother died and suddenly what is foster care, where is home, who are these strangers, how will I cope.

 I wrote to my beautiful neighbours and they wrote back, I got a letter every three days, on nearly see-through paper, one paragraph his the next hers, their penmanship identical but I knew who was who, they asked me about school, what colour my bedroom was, what was I reading, they told me about the garden, Mr. Campbell’s new knee, nothing about the neighbourhood, nothing about missing me terribly, I imagined a ruined space where my house used to be like an extracted tooth.

I tried to find interesting things to write about, I was reading The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, it was okay, there were two other kids in the house, younger, a boy and a girl, they were okay, a dog named True, I lied that school was okay, we ate fish on Fridays, they asked if I liked fish now and I answered NO!

It became something other than wonderful when I got their letters, there was a sadness to them, they finally admitted they missed me and I quickly wrote in a very short burst that I missed them terribly and would they consider maybe not adopting me but fostering me, I mailed it before I thought it through, and three days later when I went home for lunch there was no letter, I’d blown it, I barely made it back to school for the weight of my sentence was enormous.

What is a happy ending.

I recognized their car in the driveway, I guess they were inside waiting for me, True got out when they opened the door, he galloped to me and I galloped too, past him, straight into the Campbells’ arms.