I had a long talk on the phone last night with my cousin Jennifer. Jennifer’s four years younger than I am, and her mother was my mother’s older sister. Every time there was a crisis in our childhoods, and there were plenty, we were shipped off to our Aunt Lynn’s house, so in a lot of ways Jennifer and I were raised almost more like siblings than like cousins.

I have a very clear memory of Patrick and I, having been dropped off one snowy night by someone who had agreed to drive us from where? Our Dad’s house? Our Mom’s? I remember them being people our mother knew, but not well. At any rate, they dropped Patrick and me off, and it was snowing — big fat Wisconsin snowflakes, and we were standing at Lynn’s back door in the light of the headlights while they waited for us to get inside. We were outside, in the illuminated snowflakes, with our little-kid suitcases, standing on Lynn’s back deck. It was always kind of like that.

And then when I was nineteen, and Jennifer was fifteen, Lynn drank herself to death. It was one of the things we talked about last night on the phone. “You guys were always there,” Jennifer said. “And then Mom died and you were all just gone.” I told her how hard it had been — none of us liked her father (who brought his girlfriend to the funeral for the wife he wasn’t separated from) — and they were just kids, and we were all so heartbroken that to even think about going up to that house, that house that had been our safe place, without Lynn in it, and with those three bereft kids and their awful father, well, none of us could face it. We talked, Jennifer and I, about how mad we still are at her mother for killing herself like that, about how she was the one who was supposed to take care of all of us. Lynn died 22 years ago and it was like it happened last week. Jennifer’s oldest daughter is 13 now, and Jennifer knows it’s going to be weird when she, in essence, outlives her own mother. She knows too that she probably hangs onto her girls too close, that in some very real ways she needs them to make her the mother she didn’t have.

And we talked about losing Patrick, and the aftermath of that, and how strange it’s been. It’s one of the incomprehensible things about life. The people we love die, and they’re just gone, and they don’t come back.

But, on the other hand, Jennifer’s in Arizona now, and we’re old enough to call eachother and finally talk about the stuff that we couldn’t talk about when she was fifteen and I was nineteen because we were really just heartbroken kids. We made it, somehow. We grew up. We’re mostly okay.

This morning my friend Nina called and asked, with that sort of tense tone in her voice, what I was doing. Why? I said. Do you need a rescue? Turns out, she was in the car with the twins, who had a pediatrician’s appointment, and her husband (who is writing for TV trying to support them all) had a sudden deadline at eleven. She needed an extra set of arms.

Well count me in. There’s no cure for a case of low-level January depression like a two month old baby that needs a snuggle.

I did have to check my schedule though. While I have no evidence that part of the reason that I lost the Totally Cushy Real Job and got booted over into the Real Job I Don’t Know How To Do is because I spent a lot of time last summer driving Nina to Billings for doctor’s appointments when she was pregnant, it was probably a tiny little factor. So this morning, Nina was all: “if you have to work …” but the glory of the Real Job is that it’s in California, which is an hour behind Montana, so it looked like I could go.

And when I got there, there was Lola, wearing the completely extravagent sweater I bought for her in France (deep rose, hoodie, with these fabulous buttons that look like roses and are made from ribbon). I am superstitious, and won’t ordinarily buy baby presents for babies who aren’t here yet, but when I went to France for the anniversary of Patrick’s death, I decided it was time to believe in these babies. And the shopkeeper in the gorgeous French baby clothes store saw me coming — I spent a fortune, and it was worth every penny. Each baby got a gorgeous outfit, and with any luck they may grow enough this winter to wear them!

The pediatrician was interesting — I’m not a mom, so while the doctor was very nice, and has a young baby of her own, I was somewhat shocked by her tone, which seemed to imply that the doctors had loaned Nina these two babies, and gee, wasn’t she doing a good job with them? Now Nina’s one of the most confident moms I know, and these are babies three and four, so she’s got a bag of tricks under her belt, and I must say, if this is the way doctors talk to moms, then no wonder they wind up feeling insecure.

But, as the auntie, I had a lovely morning with Violet, and Lola, holding whichever baby wasn’t being stripped naked, weighed, and having her head measured. And then there were the terrible injections — each one of the bunnies got an RSV injection — their little legs are so tiny, and the needle was so big, and they were deeply betrayed. It was terrible. But by the time we left, Lola, who hadn’t slept at all last night, had passed out against my collarbone from the excitement, and despite the immediate horror of being stuck with that big needle, they were fine.

As was I, after a quick morning hit of infant, and a reminder that it’s good to be a member of the village.