January 2021

Alien dreams of leaving his regular life on planet Watercolors to become an explorer There was once an alien who lived on a planet called Watercolors and wanted to be an explorer. But there was a little problem. The problem was that to be an explorer, you had to explore. But everyone on his planet already knew so much about the planet, it would be almost impossible to find something that hadn’t been explored on Watercolors. He knew he had to do something about it, so he started exploring day and night but couldn’t find anything that someone on his planet hadn’t explored yet. That’s about the time the poor little alien decided to give up. After all of that thinking, he felt a bit of hunger in his tummy. It was that type of hunger that made it feel as if your tummy is saying, “I want FOOD!” He felt like he’d caught the flu—his tummy was killing him—so he went to eat lunch. When he arrived, he saw the menu of his dreams! There was pizza, spaghetti, tomato soup, hamburgers, steak, fries, chicken, asparagus, artichokes, meatloaf, and even his very favorite meal—omelets! So, he got himself a spot in line. He waited for his turn, because that’s what a polite alien does. He waited in line for about ten minutes, but it felt like a hundred million years to him. When it was finally his turn, the alien who was writing down the orders asked, “What would you like to order?” Alien knew this was an honest man because of the polite way he’d asked Alien. So Alien said, “The omelet, please.” The alien who was placing the orders answered, “That will be thirteen dollars, please.” So Alien handed over thirteen dollars and said, “Thank you for the food.” Alien said thank you because, again, he was a polite alien and also because he really needed the food, so to him that omelet was really important. When he got his omelet, he found himself a table. He ate his omelet as slowly as possible because it tasted so good, and he wanted to enjoy it as much as he could. When he was finished, a waiter handed him the dessert menu. There was ice cream, chocolate fondue, cinnamon rolls, Italian smoothies, cotton candy, lollipops, and ice cones. He ordered cotton candy. After that he was pretty much full, so he headed home. When he got home, he didn’t really know what to do, so he started reading a book called Life Full of Baloney. It was about someone who had so many questions about life, like why don’t aliens get pimples and humans do, or why do living things snore, or why do living things get addicted to things so quickly, or why do living things have to eat to live, or why do you have to cut down a tree to make paper. It was Alien’s favorite book because, in case you didn’t know, Alien loved mysteries. He read the book for about twenty minutes, and then he decided to have a TV break. He was watching something called Serious Black’s Mission. It was about someone named Serious Black who had a mission of wizardry he had to accomplish. Alien liked it because it had wizardry, and wizardry is like magic. And Alien was very interested in every little detail of what life would be like if everyone were just walking around with magic wands in their hands, casting spells on each other like “Abracadabra!” or “Expeliarmus!” like in Harry Potter. He watched about twenty minutes of the show while eating a bagel and a tangerine, and drinking a cup of juice. After a while, he heard a noise coming from outside. It sounded like a crash from out his window, but when he looked outside, it was just boring old raccoons. Alien treated it like no big whoop, but soon the raccoons were throwing all sorts of trash at Alien’s apartment window—banana peels, dead apple cores, and even chicken bones, which caused the glass of Alien’s apartment window to break with one big glass shatter. It frightened Alien a bit, but he knew they were just some silly raccoons. Still, Alien asked himself the question, “Why are these raccoons so strong?” That’s when Alien realized that these weren’t raccoons, but specifically and biologically possums! Alien decided to call the exterminator because he knew he couldn’t get rid of all those possums all alone. When Alien got on the phone, an alien on the other side of the telephone answered right away. The alien from the exterminator company answered in a deep and questioning voice: “Hello? Is there an animal emergency at your house?” Alien answered, “Well, there appears to be a group of possums throwing trash at my window, which is now shattered. And no, it is not at my house but at my apartment.” The exterminator answered in a cheerier voice, “Okay. Be there as soon as possible.” Alien thought that as soon as the exterminator came to his apartment, the possums would go away, but right at the moment Alien was thinking about that, he heard DING-DONG. Alien got up and opened the door. It was the exterminator! The exterminator was wearing navy-blue overalls with a patch at the top that read “The best exterminators in town!” Alien thought this was the logo. When the exterminator came in, Alien said, “Hello.” “Now, now. Where is this group of possums you told me about?” “They’re over there,” said Alien, pointing proudly to the trash can. The exterminator went to his truck and came back with a bunch of cages in his hands. The exterminator said, “We’re gonna have to trap them in these cages. Then, when we can get them far enough from the neighborhood, we’ll let them free in the wild.” “Sounds like a good plan to me,” Alien said like he was taking it more seriously. As they finished their discussion, the

Moving forces Jennie to reconsider what makes a house a home Jennie knew every corner of the house she grew up in. Every rut down the center of her bedroom ceiling, every groove worn into the bamboo floorboards, every chip of peeling yellow paint behind the living room sofa. If you asked, she could show you the twining scrape on the laundry room floor from the time her father dragged the plastic hamper from there to the kitchen with Jennie in it; she could tell anyone why there were still streaks of red crayon across the wall in the foyer (no matter how hard they scrubbed, her mom and dad were never able to wash all of her brother Henry’s Crayola masterpiece out of the fading beige wallpaper). Jennie loved that house, the one on Gardener Street with two oak trees in front and a cluster of pink rosebushes that crawled beneath the wide picture windows, only a block away from the park where Jennie and her best friend, Elizabeth, had spent every day of every summer since they were four years old. The rambling lawn expanding from either side of the little brick footpath leading to the maraschino cherry-red front door, the grapevines dripping like warm honey from the wooden ledge on the back porch, the lavender stalks, tall and gloriously purple, waving lethargically in the wind by the white fence at the edge of Jennie’s backyard—every little detail was a treasure to Jennie. Everyone loved the house. Sometimes, on steamy Saturday evenings, Jennie’s parents would kindle the Chinese lanterns that teetered with trepidation on the porch beams and lay the scuffed dining room table with Jennie’s favorite tablecloth—the red-and-white paisley that Aunt Flora had stitched as a little girl all by herself. Then, once Jennie’s mother had prepared a pitcher of sweet hibiscus tea, in would stream the guests. Many partygoers attended—Elizabeth’s family; Hannah and her husband, Jerry, who lived in the duplex on the next street over; the Caulfields and their baby, Ben; Mrs. Hamilton from the pink house next door; Daddy’s colleague Harry Swenson and his three sons; Sophie Russell with her mother Allison . . . Jennie could go on and on. The food was always heavenly: Jennie’s mother would order a peach pie from Franny Belle’s Bakery on Thompson Road—she’d never learned to bake herself—and her father would make brisket in the slow cooker with lots of onions, the way everybody liked it. All of the kids would play hide-and-go-seek in the dark, and Jennie couldn’t remember a time she hadn’t won; because she knew every cranny and crevice, she found a discreet hiding place every time. The grown-ups would laugh and drink hibiscus tea on the porch if it was still scorching hot outside. In the wintertime, they would sit under blankets in the living room and sip coffee, a fire flickering in the hearth. Everyone would stay long past Jennie’s bedtime, and usually the other kids would bring sleeping bags to place on Jennie’s cream-colored braided rug (stained pink in the middle from the time Jennie, age six, had spilled her juice box and left it to soak in), to doze until their parents crept in through the dark, swathed them in blankets, and carried them out the pristine door of Jennie’s house into the luxuriously blustery night. Every night, Jennie lay beneath her lace-trimmed, mint-green comforter, one cheek against the scuffed white wall, breathing in the heavenly scent of baking cookies combined with the pungent smell of lavender that had seeped into every corner of her house, thinking just how wonderful it felt to be there, how the house’s walls almost hummed with memories, how Jennie feared the house would combust: it held that much love and happiness. Sometimes Jennie imagined herself as a mother with two children of her own, raising a family in the house she loved so, her own kids romping in the grass-covered backyard, picking lavender, laughing and shouting with delight. She imagined sitting on the porch drinking iced tea next to a grown-up Elizabeth, and sleeping in her own bed forever and ever and ever. She even imagined Henry living there with her, and her mother and father as grandparents, making pancakes for her each Sunday morning, watching movies in their bedroom every Friday night. Jennie couldn’t wait for these fantasies to come true. She never doubted that they would. Everything changed in a matter of seconds, as if a tornado had suddenly blown in and torn Jennie’s life apart. There came a call from Grandma Helen in Derry, New Hampshire, letting Jennie’s family know that Grandpa Ben was sick with lung cancer. Then Jennie’s dad got a transfer to Derry, and he left to be with his father. Then came the announcement that there was a new house waiting for them in Derry on Blancheford Avenue, a street without a park on the end or an Elizabeth to accompany her there. That the blue house on Gardener Street had been sold to a family with a girl Jennie’s age. That in a month, Jennie and her family would move across the country into a house they’d never even seen before in person. Then came Jennie’s tears that wouldn’t stop, the slam of her bedroom door, the crying and crying into her bedspread for hours on end. The shouting, the screaming. The I’m not going! But New Hampshire happened anyway, and soon Jennie’s whole life, taped shut into dirty cardboard boxes, was bouncing around in the back of a truck headed for Derry. And in a blurry whirlwind of goodbyes and hugs and kisses, Jennie found herself wearing a new, green woolen coat, standing in front of the new house. The new house was a drab olive grey, a color Jennie loathed the way she did Brussels sprouts. The fact that her parents planned to have it painted a lighter shade of green as soon as the weather improved didn’t console Jennie in any way.