here's a passage i wrote today that i don't know where i'll put.

There was only one time she could think of when she consciously did
something for Laney. Something that helped her. She and Warren were 22,
staying with his parents in Michigan for a long two-week vacation. He had just
three months left in the Army, unless he decided to re-up.
They had been there 10 days, and it had been difficult for Judy.
Warren's mother had taken over Laney's feeding, saying that she'd have
the baby sleeping through the night by feeding her plenty of cereal
last thing in the evening. And she needed prunes, Dolores told Judy,
because a baby should be pooping more than once a day. Warren's father
was kind enough but he talked marathons with such intensity that his
own family would just drift away and leave him talking and talking to
Judy, who didn't know how to escape.
But Laney was having the time of her life. She was walking already, and
she staggered naked through the grass in pursuit of any bird or
grasshopper that happened by. The Cooks put Warren's old hobby horse
out on the lawn, and she loved to be sat up on it and held while they
rocked it back and forth.
One afternoon they were all sitting on the
patio, in lounge chairs, when a thunderstorm arrived as suddenly as an
earthquake. There was only a moment of holding up hands, negotiating
with the rain, before they were all driven inside, Judy towing her
child under one arm.
Inside, she held Laney up to the screen door and they watched the rain
together. It was sheeting off the eaves and flowing from each point of
the picnic table umbrella. On the table the fat zucchinis that Warren's
father had picked gathered beads of water that merged and separated
again. Warren's old hobby horse stood stoicly on the grass, its main
and tail limp with water.
"Will they get ruined?" Judy asked.
"What?" Dick asked back, stepping close and putting his hand on his
granddaughter's head.
"The zucchinis."
Dick laughed, keeping his cigarette in one corner of his mouth and
laughing out the other side. "You wash them before you eat them, don't
you?" A moment ago, he had been telling them all the plot of the book
he was reading, blow by blow, but the rain had washed the talk right
out of him.
Judy felt dumb. Before the fruit were baking in the sun, now they
looked wet and slimy, and she imagined them rotting like flesh in a
jungle.
But really nothing seemed rotten here. Just as things got hot and
blooming and you could smell everyone else's shampoo on the humid air,
fall would begin and before you knew it the grass was crunching under
the children's feet on their way to school. There were no cockroaches
or ants in the house or gigantic spiders like in San Diego, only
mosquitoes and fireflies. She saw a mosquito bite on Laney's arm and
rubbed it with her pinky finger.
Laney put her palms on the screen, reaching for the rain.
"Rain," Judy told her, and Laney sang it back to her.
"Rain, rain, rain."
Just before thunder cracked, and Dick shooed them away from the screen
door, Judy made up her mind. This was a place for a child to grow up,
this place with wide, soft fields of grass between each house, with the
checks and balances of the four seasons keeping everything from getting
out of hand. They wouldn't be able to afford anything in San Diego
anything once they had to give up the military house.
She told Warren that night on the pull-out sofa his mother had bought
second-hand for his old bedroom. Let's move in here at first, we can
get our own place as soon as you find a job, she whispered to him. The
baby was asleep in the crib two feet from her head.
Warren was surprised and grateful, and they never discussed it again.
They were both afraid she would change her mind. Just before Christmas,
she put the last of her fragile things into the back of their Rambler.
With Laney sitting eager and alert between them, they set off on a
2,000-mile drive from her home. It was never her home again.