Addicts count days. My 9 year old daughter counts sheep. My 10 year old son counts to two. Then he starts over. One, two he says. One, two. Sometimes he will get all the way up to seven. For a while he could count to ten, but then the seizures happened and I don’t know what fritzed inside his brain. I picture it getting red and orange and now he counts to two again. On good days he knows that one means one and two means one and one more. On most days, he is just counting.

I count too. My son Jesús gets medication in the morning. He gets medication in the evening. Two different types of medication, two times a day. As the mother of a child with disabilities I cannot forget the medication. If I do, he will most certainly have a seizure. I cannot forget the medication. I absolutely cannot forget. As a mother. Also, and equally, as a human, I have forgotten his medication.

When they left Connecticut in a car packed to the brim with the rest of what they owned, it was raining. It was raining in Tennessee when they slept under trees. It was lightning in Arkansas when they slept by the lake. It was finally sunny in Oklahoma, and then poured in New Mexico when at last they turned right and headed north instead of west. And then it was straight north for hundreds of miles and backtrack a little east until they almost hit the cold northern waters of Superior. They went over the bridge, through the town, beyond the fields and took a right on Red Pine and drove up our driveway- then they stopped. And they got out. And they are here.

5:54 in the morning and it is still dark. The way to know that summer is ending is to feel the dark fold up on each side of the day. And soon, we know it the way the birds know it, this season will turn right over to the next. Time has settled into a pattern of waking, feeding, playing, loving. I’ve been saying the not-new-revelation all summer. This summer — the one where we have spent over ten nights in tents and at least thirty hours in canoes — is going fast.