ellen and her husband loved children, but they only had one of their own-- his name was adam, and he had a strange blocky head that sort of resembled that of the boy in the hands resist him. ellen is, as i recall, dottie's daughter, which makes her related somehow to julie, my closest childhood friend. dottie lived in our neighbourhood and let us use her pool in the summers when i was growing up, and it was during this time we often ended up playing with adam or being supervised by ellen.

i remember one particular afternoon, although there was probably a whole series of them, of wavy green grass and blue skies, but on the one i remember julie, adam, ellen and i were lying in sort of a spoke pattern in the back yard of my parents' house. we were talking about ellen's new baby: if it would be a boy or a girl, how big she was going to get (she was just starting to show), what she would call it, and when it would be old enough to come and play in the pool with us. she explained the whole thing in calm, teacherly language (she may actually be a teacher, i'm not sure), but i remember being able to hear the excitement in her voice as she talked about the coming addition to her family.

then i remember seeing ellen and adam a lot less over the next few months, and it must have been sometime during the next summer that i was lying down around the same spot and it suddenly occurred to me that the baby and ellen should have been separate entities by now, and that i should have met her. in my mind, the baby was a girl. i didn't think to ask my parents about it, but i knew that something had gone wrong. in after years i realised that she must have miscarried, and i was informed by my parents recently that exactly that had happened, and a few more times since. ellen couldn't carry another child, and even lost twins at one point, a devastation for her that i cannot begin to imagine.

'that poor girl,' my mother said.

the image of that afternoon, of that hopeful young woman looking forward to the birth of her second child, stays with me today.