Playing mancala and drinking cheap red wine on her screened Florida porch, I bled through an overnight pad onto her orange mid-century chair cushion. “God, I’m so sorry! I’m very sorry!”

“Flip the cushion over,” she said, then, “you need to get your vag checked.”

Within the week I got it checked.  Now we’re both uterus-less. As it turns out, my pelvic organs were adhered to each other and the pelvic walls; my ute was full of fibroids and endometriosis. She knew I was in trouble after what she’d been through before I met her. Before I met her, she had a worse situation, one she doesn't bring up.

Still, it’s the reason she watches every sunset, why she moved to a block, fixer-upper to be near a lake teeming with cranes and gators and awash at sunset with the raspberries and oranges, why she reminds me that such things are fleeting, and why I agree to canoe with her every full moon even though the air is always thick with mosquitos. Because this is how she shows me to stand in awe of life.

This full moon, we were in the center of the acres wide lake when the sun went down. The wind picked up fast and blew strong tides against the boat. In the backlit cloudy darkness, I hollered, “Did you check the weather?” When she said no, my throat caught. I had to remind myself I hadn’t looked it up either.

She pulled hard on her oar. I rowed, matching her, but we made no headway. The water tugged the boat away further from the shore. After paddling for fifteen minutes with all our strength, we neared a neighbor’s dock. I yelled into the wind that snatched away my words, “Do we have a rope?” The gusts banged the canoe against the pylons as I held my grip on the platform. Again, “Do we have a rope?!” When she answered in the negative, I remind myself once more that I didn't think to bring one either.

She was the one who came up with the idea of abandoning the canoe in a distant neighbor’s yard. We rowed hard for a good five minutes and finally thrust the bow up on the grass. She waded through swirling black water, telling me to stay seated as she hauled the canoe up into the grassy shoreline (I was still on lifting restriction from the surgery).     

Ashore, we trekked uphill through the neighbor's usually perfectly tidy lawn now strewn with chigger filled Spanish moss and downed tree limbs. Back at her house, I opened the screen door and we both flopped into our respective chairs and let out a sigh at the same time. She reached for Natalie, her pot box, and thumbed through Spotify. We talked about starting an Etsy business together so we’d have more time to live instead of work, we gossiped about her ex.

After our heart rates and breathing slowed, and we were good and stoned, she took my hand and walked me back down to the lake. Borrowing her confidence, I tip-toed along the path lit by a shard of moonlight. We stepped in the shallow before her dock. “Will you check it for gators?” She swept the landing with the light of her owl lantern.

We sit cross-legged on the wooden plank and I share my wide brimmed straw hat to shield against the gusty wind. I wrap my arms around her to keep her warm, and she glows. “What an adventure! You saved me!” She turns to hug me then points to the clear sky. “See, the wind has died down.” I nod. “Aren’t you glad we came back?” I nod again, ashamed in front of her lion-hearted self, because I know all the while she’s talking— that I’m a chicken liver, and tonight was my last full-moon paddle.