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definitely looked cool today in his jeans and black T-shirt, with his hair like that. But whenever he dressed up—like when we encouraged him to bring a date—he’d plaster his hair down with a side part and wear something like plaid pants and a Mister Rogers cardigan and wing-tip shoes.
    But I felt tired. Without ideas. Without urgency. Everything about Opal was far more urgent than my work.
    The last collage I’d finished had come from being on the train while, from the other direction, another train whooshed past. To hold that moment, that fluency—air and movement and coats and rails—I’d shaved bits of lacy driftwood into segments of daylight that flitted by. Whatever I started out with never became the total image. A piece of bleached drift-wood would become not driftwood but windows on a train or, perhaps, a child’s hair. And a bird’s wing would become not part of a bird but something else entirely. Wind perhaps. A skirt. A cloud.
    Now, I doubted that I could ever make another collage. Far too complicated. A definite sign that I’d lost it —whatever it was called. I didn’t like to name it , though some of my teachers had. Talent? Gift? All right, coming from them. Pompous, if it were to come from me.
    I doubted that my work would even recognize me. Instead I came to recognize the smell of Opal’s skin—it changed so quickly—her crying smell and her eating smell and her swampy smell and her sleeping smell. I came to recognize the strength of her fingers when she dug them into my cheek. And I came to adore the ancient look that sometimes flickered deep within her pupils when she observed me with absolute stillness. My little crone. My little wise woman.

    O NE OF US was usually carrying her around. If she cried, Mason would rush over and pick her up right away. He and Opal both thrived, glommed on to each other with the rapt focus of infants. Jake made lists of her music: what calmed her and what didn’t. Opal adored Soul Asylum but not Nirvana. Melissa Etheridge but not Alice in Chains. The Lemonheads but not Bad Religion. Pearl Jam but not the Offspring.
    How many loops did we carry her that first year?
    A thousand loops each? Three thousand loops? Mason in a cradle-hold, her face up in his arms; Jake with his big hands around her middle, her back against his chest, so that Opal could see where he walked with her; and I, trying to keep her from devouring me as her greedy mouth sucked at my neck.
    A Thousand Loops came out of that. Usually I didn’t think of a title until I was almost finished—just let my hands and the material and whatever mysterious thing inside me find the direction—but for this collage I knew the title before I began. It was to be small. That I knew too, but nothing else, when I spread a double layer of butcher paper on my worktable and made a mix of Sobo Glue and water. I thinned acrylics…smeared them randomly on canvas board, my way of getting past my resistance to begin at all, my fear of the blank canvas that would reveal everything I couldn’t do. In doing, roaming, I could trick myself into the illusion that I was working, though I knew it didn’t count as work; and yet, the not-working was taking me deeper into myself, where I knew what I didn’t think I knew. Where I found roundness touching roundness, merging, softening as I swirled loops from willow switches and clock parts…from feathers and the fringe from a sari. And even though, here too, Opal cut into the making of Loops with her needs, I was more at ease with her, held her till her body surrendered, molded itself against mine.
    And I took that into my work.

    O NE MORNING in November, while Opal was still asleep, I propped my raft collages against the walls of the living room and walked from one to the next. Why wasn’t I done yet? What was it about the two boys and the raft that didn’t leave me alone?
    If I could capture