Rasma Haidri

Into the Answer Into the Answer By Erin Murphy Your high school teacher mother taught you a trick for taking comprehension tests: always skip ahead to read the questions before the passage. (Why are the mother’s hands discolored?) You remember her sitting at the kitchen table, her pen carving into the triplicate mimeograph sheets, the edges of her hands bruised with blue ink.

My kids leave artifacts, fragments of themselves for me to find. Crumpled cheese stick wrappers shoved between couch cushions. Stained unicorn and rainbow t-shirts tossed beside the laundry hamper. Sandy socks thrust into my pockets at the park. I gather these clues and arrange them. Study them. Hints about their days.

Ehukai is a case of magic lost in translation—Hawaiian for ‘sea spray,’ a faint wisp or mist of seawater. The phenomenon, though, is divine: the veil of a wave lifted by the power of the sea. Pulled by the eternal rotation of the earth, a lethargic swath of cold air spirals from the winter darkness of the Arctic Ocean and spills off the coast of Kamchatka. This frigid air mass soon embraces its tropical counterpart: drifting northward is a low-density warm front, vibrant with the energy of the sun.