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tell what was what. Then something happened, sort of like when you can’t find your car and you suddenly realize you’re in the whole wrong parking lot, and I made the picture small again and she turned back into a beautiful flower.
    The Yahoo! group was wonderful because I got to look at pictures of other babies adopted from Huazhou that people had posted and also I got to hear how everyone loved Miss Peng, the orphanage director, whom many had met and thought to be an angel.
    We got the picture in March, right after Anna turned three, and then we had to wait until June to travel to China to go get Sasha. It was hard to know how to fill that big black hole of time. If you didn’t fill it with something in particular, it would so easily get plugged with fear and all the tricks of the imagination.
    Right away I tried to figure out what her Chinese name meant. Ji Hong Bin. At first I got: Lucky Red Kneecap. Then I got: Lucky Roasted Hair on Temples. Hmm. Translating Chinese into English is something of a fine art. Ji Hong Bin was the “pinyin” version of her name. Pinyin is a system devised to represent Chinese characters phonetically using our alphabet. You have to first get the pinyin translation and then match that to the actual Chinese character. These are not subtle differences. In pinyin “Ji” can mean anything from “lucky” to “horseback” to “accumulate” to “bamboo box used to carry books.” And “Hong” will lead you to “red” just as easily as it will to “cistern,” “blast,” and “species of wild swan.”
    I was able to get a good match on Ji and Hong. Lucky andRed. Bin was giving me a lot of trouble. Lucky Red Riverbank? Lucky Red High-Quality Iron? Eventually, I found it. A character with every last squiggle accounted for.
    So here was my daughter: Lucky Red Equally-Fine-in-External-Accomplishments-and-Internal-Qualities.
    It seemed a big name for such a little girl. But I liked the meaning. The notion of balance. The notion of luck. What a wonderful wish to place upon a six-pound baby lying in a paper box.
    One of the things we did while filling up time before going to China was we got goats. I wanted goats because I had heard that they would eat our multiflora rose, the thorny bush that is almost impossible to control, and also because goats are funny. Gretta recommended Nubians, the kind with the long, floppy ears, because they’re big and eat a lot and we had so much we needed eaten. I rode with her in her truck to the farm in Ohio and met the girl who raised them and her proud parents and then a month later I learned that the girl’s father died suddenly of a heart attack. I sent a card and identified myself as “the lady who bought your goats.” It’s hard to know the right thing to do in a situation like that.
    We named the goats Nellie, Tut, and Cleopatra. Nellie was the oldest and her big ears flew up like Sister Bertrille’s hat on
The Flying Nun
whenever she heard any sounds that concerned her. Tut was Nellie’s son, and Cleopatra was her pregnant daughter.
    Gretta gave us instructions on goat prenatal care. She saidthe most important thing was exercise and she suggested we walk Cleopatra twice daily. I never knew you could walk a goat. It was like walking a very obedient dog. Cleopatra never pulled at the leash, or whimpered, or complained about the snow. She and I wandered around the farm, and I talked to her about motherhood because she was just getting started and I was by now getting sure of myself.
    We bought an intercom system from Radio Shack so that we could eavesdrop on the actions of our goats in the barn. One night I was giving Anna a bath and we heard horrible goat hollering coming out of the monitor. Alex ran down to the barn. “It’s time!” he yelled. Cleopatra, he reported, was in labor. I asked him how he could be so certain. He said there was a foot sticking out.
    I pulled Anna out of the tub and quickly dried her hair and bundled her and by