That big snow cone truck in the sky.

Somehow it never seems completely dark in Madeleine's room. Part of that is the nightlight shaped like a snail that sits at the corner of her bed and casts warm light in a halo around her pillow. But there is more to light than its very existence. There is also the intangible brightness that comes from the life in her room, the leopard gecko hunting crickets in its tank, the pet rat rustling in its bedding, the ball python exploring its confines, looking for escape. Their noise lends credence to the idea that her room is a safe place. Comfort somehow illuminated without the help of light.

And there is also the intangible brightness that comes from my daughter, nestled into my shoulder and burrowed under the covers. She picks nighttime to talk about the Big Things, and tonight's topic is one of the Super Big Things. "Mom," she begins, kicking her feet a little as she arranges the covers just so. "Logan at school said he believes in God. And I told him there isn't a God, and he said, 'You don't believe in God?' And some other people said I was wrong. And they said there is a God! But I'm not wrong, right?"

"Well," I hedge, considering my response. Not for the first time I wish I had something solid to tell her, something steady and sure she can hold on to. "I don't really know if you're wrong or right," I finally tell her, cursing my own lack of a clear belief system. "I have no idea if there is a God or not."

"But you don't believe in God, right?" She is drawing this from a talk we had ages ago, where I thought I had been careful to say whether I did or didn't believe. And No, I don't, is the thought that burbles up now in my mind just as it did then, unbidden, and just as quickly my mind sends it back down. This feels like a deeply treasonous thing to think, much less to say. Almost immediately I am thinking of my mother, who sent my sister and I to church sporadically when we were younger. I am thinking of the Bible camp she sent me to when I was younger. I am thinking of my mom on the phone earlier in the week, imploring me to take my girls to church on Easter, to teach them the real meaning of the holiday. To say I don't believe in God is to reject something intrinsic to how I define my mother. It is to let her down immeasurably.

Before I can answer, Madeleine is speaking again. "What?" She scoffs. "Do I think there is some big man up in the sky who will take me up to the clouds with his big old hand and take me to the snow cone truck up there?"

"Snow cone truck?" I ask, and Madeleine giggles. "Yeah! What? Am I going to eat clouds? I don't believe in that. I don't believe there is a big castle up in the clouds." She is impassioned, gesturing with her hands now. "I don't believe it because I can't see it," she says. "It doesn't make sense to me because you can't even see that!"

"You believe in fairies and you've never seen one," I point out. "What about the tooth fairy?"

"Yeah, but I've seen the stuff that the tooth fairy leaves me," she says. "It's hard to explain, because I haven't seen a fairy, but I know they're there because you see their stuff sometimes. Like the glitter in the backyard and the fairy steps and the money under my pillow and stuff."

I suppress a wince, because these things -- these things are things I have fostered. Sprinkling glitter in the backyard because I know when the girls find it they will be delighted that magic was left there. Calling the fungus jutting out like steps from the trunk of a tree "fairy steps." Writing tiny notes from the tooth fairy thanking the girls for taking such good care of their teeth. I have fostered in them a belief in magic but not a belief in anything spiritual.

"That makes sense," I say carefully. "But some people say that life itself is proof enough of God. Someone could look at a snake winding through the grass and say, 'Look at that amazing creature! Only an amazing God could create something like that.' Or they might look at a beautiful sunset and just feel really glad that there is a God who would make something so lovely."

Mad considers this. "No," she finally says. "That stuff is just nature."

I don't argue this point because I mostly agree with her. And all the while my mind has been grappling for the proper way to frame all this for her. I've got mostly nothing. Except this: "I think the thing about God is that it doesn't really matter," I say. "All that really matters is that you're a good person in the world. So at the end of everything, when you're very, very old and it's time for you to die, you can die knowing that you were good for the world. That you always tried to do good things. And if there is a God, great. He'll be very happy. And if there isn't, then awesome. Because you and the people in your life will be happy -- because you were good to the people you loved."

"Yeah," Mad says immediately, as though this is something she's thought of before."But why do people even believe in God? It doesn't even make sense!"

And now I am thinking of Bible camp again, how I was inexplicably moved to tears at the evening service on the last day, when all the kids joined hands and sang in unison, "Jesus, lamb of God, worthy is thy name." I am thinking of the things people say and do to each other in the name of God. I am thinking of my cousins, devout Christians, who do their own thing and radiate goodness. How great it is for them to have that foundation. I am thinking of my own husband, who says he believes in God. "Mad, your dad believes in God," I tell her. "It makes sense to him."

"But not to us, right?" She says. "We don't believe in God. Maybe if we see him, then we can believe in him."

So now we're talking about faith. And we're talking about nature and we're talking about beliefs and values and it is 9 p.m. and she should be asleep already. And besides. Besides. I don't know the answers. Until I have something real, something concrete to give her -- straight from my heart, something I believe with all of my entire soul -- then I will at least have something she can hold on to. Until then, I have nothing but uncertainty to offer.

I believe in you, I think before I tell her we'll have to talk more about this later. I believe in this -- as I give her a hug goodnight. I believe that this life is pretty awesome -- as she snuggles closer and shuts her eyes. We are ensconced in the glow of her nightlight. And in the other light, too -- the way the sounds of her pets warm up the darkness and turn it into something safer, somehow. This isn't too far from the nature of faith, I realize. Recognizing the light of life in the darkness. Resting in a moment. Asking questions, filled with love. Maybe here and now is our greater power. I want to tell her this in a way she'll understand, but the best I can do is kiss her forehead and tell her I love her.

A 7-Year-Old Digs Up Her Dead Pet Mouse

She uncovers death in the backyard
because she misses life, the uncomplicated truth
of a small mouse burrowing into the whorls of her hair.

It looks just the same.
She brushes the dirt from its body and regards it,
considers how life becomes death all at once,
wonders at it, how she can hold both
in the palm of her hand.

This is so small it's almost
nothing. So large it's almost everything.
But she doesn't have the words for it, only
the weight of a body, the lightness of death, the heaviness
of love snapping and popping with nowhere
to make a connection.

She returns it to the earth. She piles the dirt on,
tamps it down, and goes in to wash her hands.
Her thoughts are curiously quiet for now.
There is a sense she's done something huge,
but she doesn't really know what it is.

The ghost of a song whispers in her head:
You're in my heart,
You're in my heart,
and she feels a lurch there. A secret something.
A tender hurt. But she doesn't have the words for this, either,
only everything, all this, this whole world.
It's too big, this, and so. So she will
go and ask her mother
for a piece of chocolate cake.

Slow, slow, you want to call.

You used to sit near an open window, a tattered pink spiral notebook open on the bed. You'd breathe in the scent of wet rain on rusted window screens and imagine that the breeze sliding through was a promise of something. And it was, the breeze soaked in moon and drenched in starlight, a promise you could feel in the knotted hollows of your bones, look how big the world is. It felt like yours, sitting there, pen in hand and your thoughts lifting up and up and up and out, ballooning into something tangible. These real, important thoughts, nothing more and nothing less than your fingers on the screen, your hand around the pen, the spiral spine of your notebook marking your arm with lines when you leaned forward, the pen, always the pen, the bubble-swirl of letters. You contained your breathless teenage stupid awestruck brilliant small looming pinprick specific peaceful wondrous ideas in the lines and loops of letters. Your heart raced. The world, oh, the entire world. You were it and it was you and you had some strange sense of entitlement when you wrote it all down. My world! My whole entire world!

And today you are less and not much more, the knotted hollows of your bones are filled too much with an aching worry, an ever-present concern for the state of things. You are always worrying about the state of things, and when you are not worrying about the state of things you are too silent. Too silent because you've retreated, working over a raw anger and hiding. You feel a sharp absence in the inside corner of your elbow, where you keep the memory of rain on screens and a feeling that the world could be yours if you found the right words to say it. You find wonder sometimes in the giggle gasp of your children laughing or the way light tiptoes its way through trees sometimes in the early morning, touching leaves and crossing distances in a way that comes close to meaningful. You are slower and you distrust too much joy. Joy is a two-faced harridan who offers warmth at one turn and goes cold too quickly. And your heart races, but not for the world, oh, the entire world. It races because you can sense in a curious way that you never did before, how quickly everything is rushing by. Slow, slow! You want to call. You want to grasp time's racing feet and drag it back to you by the ankles. You want to bloody its face and kick it into submission. But you watch it go instead, and you whisper. Every second murmurs. My world. My whole entire world.