coats ovenbird Through the small windows set into the red front doors of the school, I watch my daughter struggle to put her rain coat on. Her broken arm makes this task nearly impossible and I see anxiety furrow her brow and cause her eyes to water. A friend takes the twisted polyester from her one good hand, turns it right side out, and lovingly pulls it over my daughter’s head. They both smile and burst out into the rainy afternoon in a flurry of conversation. Later, at dinner with friends, A asks if he can swing by occasionally if there is no one home to help him with his coat. The ongoing degeneration of his occipital and parietal lobes mean that putting a coat on has become as confounding as disarming a bomb, so he can be trapped in his house all day simply because he doesn’t possess the ability to put on clothing appropriate for the weather. I say that he can swing by any time and it will never be an intrusion. Sometimes in the night, I still go into my children’s rooms and pull the blankets up over their sleeping bodies, while they twitch and dream. When I was a baby my mother and father pulled my tiny, clenched hands through the sleeves of my terrycloth sleepers, and laid my fragile body in my crib, wound the mobile, and crept out into the light of the living room, keeping watch until I slept. When my father’s arm was a tangle of tubes and needles and bandages I helped him ease his body into the embrace of his jacket and felt how fleeting our lives are, how dependent we remain. It seems like such a simple thing, to slip our vulnerable skin into the soft, woven armour that keeps us safe from the cold, but our bodies sometimes fail even in this simplest of tasks. There comes a day when we need someone to stand behind us and lift the heft of our threadbare coats to the points of our sagging shoulders. We need someone to help our fingers find the overgrown path through our sleeves so the thin skin holding back collapsing veins in the backs of our hands can feel the warmth of a winter sun. We need someone to wait patiently while we navigate buttons and zippers and pockets full of crumpled receipts and forgotten coins. We need someone to walk with us into the gathering storm, scarves pulled tight to our throats, hands reaching for each other from the ends of our love-worn cuffs. 251010 what's it to you? who go blather from