It is November, and spring. My body—bewildered by all this waking life in a month I always associated with near endings—vacillates between exhaustion and intense wakefulness. The Gregorian year will soon end, and the sabiá are building a nest in the eaves of the veranda. The bullfrog nighttime chorus has made its debut. Instead of an encore, their boisterous calls disappeared one night into rain: a wall of it so thick that I feared for our lives.

Lightning snaked the ground and rendered us powerless, so my family told stories in the dark while I drifted in and out of sleep beside them on the couch. The next morning, the power seemed to have come back, so I proceeded to work as usual, tutoring ESL to students across the globe. But my fears from the previous rainy weeks materialized in sudden darkness. Smack dab in the middle of a session, the electricity failed again. Faces on the screen blinked out of existence. Somewhere a few seconds before, a tree fell on a power line.

I live in a place of edges. Semi-rurality is a small town swishing its skirt and flirting with the forest. I’m in the folds, near green rolling hills. Here, they call it the “interior” to mean “outside the metropolis.” I find my center in the edges, in a raw tapestry that can sometimes feel threadbare.