I made a binder for all my MFA application information — a place to put everything I printed from the internet, a place to track my progress on each application, a place for my excel spreadsheet with the deadlines and requirements for each school. My binder is fat. My binder is my favorite thing right now.

Here are a few of its contents. It represents more work than I’ve ever put into any one single thing. It is full of hope. Wish me luck.

At 8:40 that Tuesday morning, I drove Henry and Sophie to First English Lutheran for preschool. Baby Rose fell asleep in her carseat on the way to school, so after I’d returned home and parked the minivan outside our house, I carried her carseat carefully inside and set it on the living room floor. I began the most ordinary of morning chores on the most ordinary of days: I made the beds. I started a load of diaper laundry. I washed the breakfast dishes and set them to dry next to the sink.

And then, the phone rang. Odd, at 9:30, I mean, nobody calls me in the morning, I thought. I picked it up. Silence on the other end. I got a chill — a feeling. Something’s wrong, I thought. I checked caller ID to see who’d called. It was my sister, but when I called her back, I got one of those funny fast-busy signals.

I put these little bits of information together — Kristin never calls that early, there’s something wrong with the phone lines — and I crossed the house to turn on the TV. When I saw two towers on fire, I had no idea what I was looking at. I didn’t think of the twin towers until somebody on TV said, World Trade Center.

I finally talked to Kristin on the phone — sometime after the Pentagon had been crashed into — and she said this: Come to Cleveland. Just throw some clothes in the car and come. Go get the kids from school. Baltimore’s too close to D.C.

I sat outside with the cordless phone while she said this. I was struck by the silence all around me. No planes in that perfect sky.

I headed back out at 11:45 to get the kids from preschool. They’d been there three short hours, but those three hours had spread out terribly. When I picked Henry and Sophie up, the whole world was different. The teacher who led them to the minivan made that knowing sort of eye contact I was about to become really familiar with. It was a look that said, Nothing will ever be the same again.

I suppose I feel guilty I couldn’t shut the TV off when the kids were around. I was glued like everyone else. Sophie was too little to understand, but Henry — he was 5, a really bright kid. After class one day, Henry’s teacher pulled me aside. “Henry’s taking this really hard,” she said. “He keeps crashing toy planes into everything. He keeps building towers.” She hugged me, and I stiffened against her until I realized, Henry’s teacher was crying. I hugged her back.

A few weeks later, I was walking across our toy room, just like I did about a hundred times a day in that house. I’m sure I was heading to the kitchen to do something in a hurry. Henry had those blocks, those big cardboard blocks that look like bricks, and he’d built a tower as tall as he could reach. This barely registered, I mean, he was always building things, until I crossed the room and saw, out of the corner of my eye, a toy plane. He’d used scotch tape to suspend it there, about a quarter of the way down the tower. He’d gotten the angle just right. The plane was banking just a little as it hit, as it smashed into his red brick tower, as it sent a shudder of shock and sorrow and grief and fear up and down my spine. This tower was right here, inside my house, larger than life. Henry sat silent like a frog at its base.

Henry’s taught me everything I know about frogs.

This thing, this little frog obsession, is one of those surprise gifts of parenting nobody tells you about. Nobody could have predicted Henry and I would stumble upon the amazing Stokes Guide to Amphibians and Reptiles. Who could have known we’d both read it, cover to cover, a bunch of times? Who would have figured we’d be able to identify tadpoles in the local ponds, based on size, coloration, and time of year? Henry and I have seen, or caught, every frog and toad and tadpole native to northern Ohio.

I remember the hot July nights we’d drive home from Gram and Boppa’s house on those quiet back roads that cut across farmland — I’d stop the car, pick up toads and frogs, and move them off the road. I remember once driving past a marshy drainage ditch thick with spring peepers. Their collective calls were deafening. We stopped on the side of the road, and Henry quickly caught his first peeper. I’d never seen one — it was so tiny! Then it got loose in the minivan, and we all crawled under seats, using my cell phone as a flashlight, till we’d found it and let it go.

I remember picking blueberries one afternoon — Henry found a baby wood frog, its little black-and-white mask already perfect and surprising. I remember a hike along the stream beyond the ridge at Gram and Boppa’s, where Henry caught a leopard frog. I took a picture of that frog in Henry’s hand with my cell phone, and then Henry lowered him into the stream. We watched him swim away fast.

I remember one humid summer night — it had just thunderstormed, and the girls were sleeping — Henry and I set out for one of the ponds in the neighborhood, flashlight beams bouncing ahead of us. We sat on the flat rocks next to the drainage sewer and just watched. And listened. We saw gray treefrogs, American toads, spring peepers. It was one of those significant nights. Our eyes would meet — we understood, without saying anything, how lucky we were, how few people have ever sat at a pond on a summer night and soaked it all in. We hardly talked.

On the way back home, I threw my arm around him, and I said, this is it, Bunny. It doesn’t get better than this.

One cold Sunday morning last year, I was driving out of Stow — I’d slept at Katie’s apartment — toward Aurora, on my way to pick up the kids from Dan’s. There wasn’t traffic. It was one of those crisp late winter mornings that makes you think, Will spring never come? I bet I was unshowered and groggy. I bet I’d stopped for coffee at the Speedway on the corner. I bet I had one of Katie’s CDs in, but I know I was too lost in my heavy thoughts to listen.

When I got to the railroad crossing on Stow Road, red lights were flashing, and the striped gate came down. I loved getting stopped for trains. They ran so fast here at this crossing, and consequently, they felt loud and big and close. The train’s whistle distorted in my ears because of the speed at which the engine roared past. I settled in to the rhythm of watching train cars race past my field of vision. Train car. Train car. Train car. Too fast to count. Some had graffiti painted on them. Some were the old-fashioned kind of boxcar. Some were double stacked with shipping containers.

And then: A boxcar appeared in front of me with a message painted on it. Just for a second — and then it was gone, and then it had been pulled fast from the spot of track in front of me. Some enterprising graffiti artist had painted across the entire boxcar. He’d have needed a ladder. Some of the letters were as tall as a person. This train car was pale — it had probably been white once — but the graffiti artist had covered it with thick, black letters.

They spelled: EVERYTHING WILL BE OKAY.

I blinked, and the car was gone. I looked around. Had anyone else seen it? I was alone on this side of the tracks — just me in my rusty minivan. No other witness to what I immediately thought of as a message from the universe. The universe, I thought, had not been subtle this time. I smiled, and then I laughed. “I got it,” I said to nobody. “I got the message.”

Just a couple weeks ago I told you this story about the train car graffiti. I told you how, in the months after I saw that train, things were not at all okay. Things were terrible. Life was awful. I told you I had come to believe the train had been wrong.

You have a little magnet stuck to your napkin box in your kitchen. It says, “Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.” When I saw that, I knew — it was as if that train last year had carried me here, brought me to you, dropped me off in your kitchen. So I could see the rest of the message.

It’s taken me more than a year to believe my train.

When I held you after I told you the train story — in my kitchen, not yours — we laughed because that Jason Mraz song was playing, and its lyrics were, “…and everything will be fine. Everything will be fine…”

“See?” I said. “The universe is sending us a message.”

After a minute, you said, “You’re my train, Lauren. You are my train.”