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I was born in Boston. In a different life, I would have been a regular at The Garden, had the wicked accent of my first-grade native-Bostonian teacher, and grown up to live in Charlestown after Jennifer Coolidge spoke at my Emerson College graduation. Instead, when I was in third grade, I moved from Boston to Ohio. If someone asks where I’m from, I say Ohio, even though I spent 8 years in Boston, 10 years in Ohio, 5 years in Western PA, and 23 years in Colorado.  

I grew up in the same house as my mother, in the bedroom she shared with my aunt. I attended middle school in the school building from which my grandfather graduated from high school. His photo, sepia oval portraits by class, was in the first floor hall by the cafeteria. I graduated from the same high school my mother did, exactly thirty years later. So, while I lived in Ohio just barely “the most” of my pre-adulthood, I was tied to it by blood and by land and by people who knew me through generations of my family. That’s a strong tie, and for me, it was a positive and significant, even if I wasn’t often back after high school. 

The house I grew up in was built in 1898, which we knew based on the handwritten date on the basement wall. My grandfather was a dairy farmer, who I know mostly from photos, but I love the photos. Unfortunately, he died in a farming accident before I truly knew him well, but I grew up with my grandmother. She was a farmer’s wife, and a township clerk, a youth group leader, a gardener, a baker, a bookkeeper, a secret keeper. She was a fierce advocate against injustice, and the caretaker of our home. She hand-polished the hardwood floors with Murphy’s Oil Soap, hung wallpaper in all its rooms, kept its plants flowering, and made us fluffy, perfectly browned “Grandpa’s pancakes” for breakfast, long after he was gone. 

Sometimes, when you are very lucky and very privileged, you don’t realize that what you have might not always be yours to skip back to when you choose. The safety seems like a given. The warmth palpable. And that was the case for me, with my childhood home. It was more than a house; it was a deep connection to who I was.  

When my grandmother died, despite her being integral to my perception of home and self, I didn’t go to her funeral, which you may imagine I have come to regret, but I don’t. My grandmother was one of the very most substantial people I have ever known, and I only wanted memories of her alive. It’s selfish, probably, and I may have disappointed some people, too, but I’m glad I can’t remember anything else. After a few years, the house and farm I grew up in were sold at auction, which everyone knew was coming and it was just the way of things. In a different life, maybe one of us would have been a farmer. Or developed a patent for post-its that would have bought and sold the house within the family a dozen times over. But we are a family of teachers and artists and everyday offices. It was a surprise, however – and maybe it shouldn’t have been – when the new owner decided to tear down the house to make more room for saleable crops. To be fair, I suppose, he hadn’t rolled coffee can ice cream on the front porch in the summer or played baseball between the trees of the backyard. He hadn’t picked strawberries and green beans, or hidden secrets in the wonky broken step going up to the attic. He didn’t know that every drafty window and polished floorboard was a living thing.  

After the house went, my parents bought a new house a mile away, which I visit less than I should. To visit is to acknowledge what was is no longer there. That is a hard thing to realize, when you’ve been gone for so long that you no longer have the instinct of a native, but you also aren’t ready to be a stranger. A month ago, we went back for a visit. It was the first time my husband had been to my hometown, despite various other family trips and vacations and memories. The first time we drove by what was the house, I couldn’t find it. I had no idea where in that field of corn it should have been, which was upsetting. Corn is a tough season for finding memories. We got to “the Habitat Houses” (houses that my grandmother had donated land for decades ago and probably aren’t even owned by the same people anymore), and I said that, by matter of deduction, the house would have been… back there. Later that day, following my mom and dad, my dad put his turn signal on as an indicator. There. We lived there. We loved there. And laughed there. We played Dutch Blitz and euchre and bought Christmas trees that always looked more like fat, happy bushes. We lived there – just here – to the left.  

Since the first time I heard it, the word hiraeth has felt a bit like a glow of recognition in a dark room. Hiraeth is a Welsh word for a deep, nostalgic longing for a place, time, or person that is gone, a bittersweet feeling of missing something irretrievably lost. It is homesickness, nostalgia, and yearning blended into a profound, sometimes painful, sense of connection to something that is not just absent, but out of reach.  

We all get nostalgic from time to time about things we remember fondly, things we may not even miss, per se, but feel a warm sense of memory around. Some college days, when my friends were many, the world was large, and the future was boundless. Those were some good, glowy days, but they were also of an era, a door to open other doors. To go back would be to meet a me of lesser layers, to give up experiences I have damn well earned, but I love the memories. Honestly, I would never go back to the days when my children were very young (love those babies, but every new stage is the stage I love the most). There are times when I see a photo or a video, and all I want is to be able to feel the light but complete and perfect weight of tiny little bodies lying on my chest as we dozed at midnight, with tiny Flintstone feet with no arches and sticky hands and the wonder of sprinklers and teeth-staining blue frosted birthday cakes. I miss the idea of it sometimes, but the memories are enough. I wouldn’t go back.  

It has occurred to me recently that the only other thing besides my childhood home that brings me to the word – to the embodiment of – hiraeth, is today’s United States. I feel like I’m driving by, and I just can’t even point out where it used to be. It’s so changed that I can’t recognize it. The loss is a visceral hurt. 

I don’t think that my core belief system is particularly complicated, and it’s been based largely in the humanitarian brand of Christianity in which I was raised. I was brought up to be sympathetic and compassionate, which didn’t seem to be particularly crazy liberal jargon. When I was in my late 20s, I was working at Dex (which was a phone book company, for those who remember those). One of the salespeople – Chip – was nearing retirement age and had had a colorful life of good luck and affluence in southern Florida, where we had a stable yellow book market (at the time, being a yellow pages salesman was basically like peddling water in the desert. Everyone needed what he was selling). He told me, at one point after some conversation or another (we were amicably close for people 35 years and 2000 miles apart), that I only thought I was a liberal because I hadn’t made any real money yet. I think about Chip sometimes. And while I don’t know if I’ve achieved Chip’s “real money,” I appreciate that money isn’t currently what keeps me up at night. Landing here has been hard work, and luck, and probably capitalizing on luck with hard work. I know at this point that things can fall apart as easily as they can fall together and I’m probably a little more cynical than I was when Chip knew me. But when I think about him, it’s because I want to tell him he was wrong. Being politically liberal wasn’t a passing phase based on my monetary status. It’s my essential belief system.  

Recently, Eva had to write an essay for her senior year English class about her Core Value. As a soon-to-be-teacher, she wrote eloquently about making sure that everyone is given the tools and support to reach their potential. I think it’s a valuable assignment, and one that perhaps we missed assigning to ourselves. When I was Eva’s age, the world was a pretty stable place for a teenager. I didn’t spend an inordinate amount of time concerned about the state of the world, or the United States’ presence in it. I remember some political debate, but I wasn’t losing any sleep over it. I didn’t use a computer to read news. It was mostly for writing, or games. Dial-up kept things simple. I didn’t have a cell phone yet. Columbine hadn’t happened. When Eva talks about my childhood, she does so with a sense of hiraeth. It’s a golden age she can’t quite imagine, but she misses the idea of it.  

When I first started thinking about my core values, I had a list a mile long. I didn’t want to “miss” anything. I wanted to make sure my stated values were an advocate for all the things and people and places and ideas that do keep me up at night. But brevity is king. I think, for the sake of the former journalism major in me, the summary is this:  I believe in equity, empathy, and science.  

For me, when something is hugely upsetting, it is because it is at odds with one of those three values. Cancelling of billions in medical research funding and destroying millions in food and medicines already promised to, and packed for, underdeveloped countries sparks empathy outrage. DOGE upending people’s lives randomly and needlessly. Equity. Empathy. Science. Major cuts to FEMA and NOAA start with a science outrage but will be equity and empathy anger by the end of hurricane and fire season (both of which are much longer and more brutal than they used to be.) 

The farcical manipulation of immigration data and outright lies depicting migrants and asylum seekers as somehow monstrous, when data shows that immigrant communities commit fewer crimes and are safer, due to strong bonds within them, shared experience, and careful steps not to be deported. A traffic ticket for me is not the same as a traffic ticket for someone who is trying desperately to raise a family here while sending money to family in another country, as well. Rounding up violin players and soccer dad fathers get headlines, but the everyday cruelty of detaining people at the immigration hearings they are mandated to be at – what kind of choice is that? What scared but hopeful conversations must be happening at kitchen tables the night before, and heartache the day of. The gathering up of farm laborers and day workers and thousands of others who are working as hard and probably harder than anyone else in this country is against everything we stand for. Equity, empathy, and science.  

Have we, a nation built on stolen ground, lost our way? Or was this always our latent, inherent psychology? It’s worth remembering that Chicanos in the southwest did not move into the United States, crossing our border. The border moved over them, and treaties with the United States government fell and broke. Native Americans roamed the entirety of this country, before we showed up uninvited. How can we say, without hypocrisy, that our borders are somehow now sacred to us in this moment? Equity, empathy, science.  

I could go on for days, of course. I don’t have the depth and range to react to all of the travesties happening every day. Actions that would have made me irate for weeks are now just eight and ten on a daily list that I can only even digest the top three to five.  

This may shock no one, but I wasn’t a big fan of George W Bush. Both of his presidencies were marked with foreign wars and he ended with a financial crisis that took years to fix (although, it did let me buy my first house with crazy loose terms, to my benefit). But he was also a big advocate for education reform, was handed an impossible situation with 9/11, and at the end of the day, any friend of Michelle Obama’s has layers I would appreciate, I’m sure.  

I think Governor Mitt Romney was probably a politician who I would have appreciated more than presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who pivoted from centrist to conservative to lock the nomination. But he’s proven himself a principled and decent person who has put the country above currying political favor. McCain was a bit more war hawk than I would have preferred, but for reasons that I suppose are understandable. I disagreed with him on where he ended up on most of his platform, but again, I didn’t doubt his basic love for the United States, or that his run was an act of service as well as – as I’m sure in the case for every single politician – a pinnacle of personal achievement. I understand that my opinions are not everyone’s opinions. I believe that, while policies can shift, a strong nation can flex to accommodate people who, at the end of the day, want equity, empathy and science, but see it from different perspectives.  

At no point in the presidencies or the presidential races above did I ever think, “For the love of all that is true and just, our nation may never recover from this.” Until now.  

Militarized streets, universities held for ransom, shake-downs of private industry, attempts at nationalization of the press, concentration camps and meetings with war criminal dictators on US soil, FOX News as a US Cabinet. I still have hope that we will recover. Bruised and battered and having to fight our way back to respectability and decency, within ourselves and on the world stage. But coming back from this would be rebuilding the house, not saving what it was. The foundation is broken and now, instead of steady maintenance, we will have to start again with what we have – hopefully – learned.  

Hiraeth is the deep longing for something irretrievably lost. It’s why so many of us are openly grieving right now. Just like the plaster, slate, stained glass and polished wood of my childhood home, the country that I grew up in has fallen. The hope is that it is not so far gone that we are unable to even recognize it when we drive by.  

A republic, if you can keep it.  

As a 17 year old I live in two worlds, one is the one that everyone expects me to have, the universal teenage experience. The other is one that is harder to explain, but it’s one of unprecedented events, one with thoughts and feelings that aren’t expected as a teenager.
A couple of the many things I do as a 17 year old that are expected: I have a driver’s license and I drive myself around. I drive my friends. We blast music with the windows down like no else exists. We stay out late, go to parks at midnight. We go to places meant for little kids, hanging on to that last thread of childhood. We gossip and laugh just as hard as when we were 6. I dip my toe into the workforce seeing a glimpse of what adulthood is like. I dream of what I could be, I explore possible careers and colleges. I study for exams and tests to keep my GPA up. I find my own interest and join clubs and activities. I find who I am as a person through trials and tribulations. I doom scroll the internet as I am a teen in an ever changing and expanding technological world. I do the things that are expected of me as a teenager.
As a 17 year old I am also fighting for my rights which is a fight that has been fought before, we just can’t seem to get the messages. If you don’t believe me here are some years that citizens of the U.S has fought for our rights:
▪︎1865 abolishing slavery or the 13 amendment
▪︎1868 the right for equal protection under the law also known as the 14th amendment,
▪︎1870 and 1920 the right for all citizens to vote or the 15th and 19th amendment
▪︎1972 the equal rights amendment
▪︎1973 women’s right to abortion, which has been denied once again.
Shall I keep going?
▪︎1954 to stop segregation in schools,
▪︎1955 through 1965 movement for equal rights for people of color, like Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott, walk on Washington, and the civil right act.
To continue the list, 2020 the black lives matter movement, and there’s been so many more. I haven’t even touched LGBTIA movements or smaller protests. I encourage people to research these dates.
The point is I am having to argue to people what being American means. I went to a protest yesterday to try and scream and get people to notice the injustice happening in my world. I am proud of how many people showed up. It was amazing to see us unite under a cause. But I was disappointed when I and so many others posted about this protest and other posts pointing to the problems, and have been hit with negative outbursts. I feel like as a teenager I have to educate fully grown adults the difference between right and wrong.
I cry at night because of the fear and anger I have towards the things happening around me. When my friends talk about the world around us, as the next generation going into the workforce and becoming adults the phrase most said is “we are screwed”. As a 17 year old I shouldn’t have to fear the world around me. I shouldn’t have to worry about my neighbors or fear voicing an opinion. I lived through a global pandemic which is no one’s fault but it adds to the point I am trying to make. It adds to the list of things a teenager shouldn’t go through. To add even more I shouldn’t have grown up with school shooting drills or how to be safe being a woman in this world. If my point hasn’t been clear already, I am a teenager going through so much more than what I should and is expected. I am angry at the world around me.
As a teenager I also have hope, hope for a world that is better. One that I am proud of. As a teenager I am ready and willing to fight for that world, even with the sense of hopelessness and despair but deep down I truly believe in what Kamala said during her Campaign of “we fight, we win”. I will fight alongside her and anyone else who is willing to join. We will come together for a better future, for a better world. So I will continue to scream at the top of my lungs for change. I will continue to support protests even if it makes others uncomfortable (that is the whole point of protests) because that is what makes change happen. I will fight for change that will stay so future generations won’t have to fight the same fight.

Ever since I could remember I have wanted to become a teacher. I wanted to make a difference like teachers have done for me. I have teachers that I think about a lot because of the impact they had on me. A lot of my friends don’t have these core memories of teachers like I do. I am so lucky that I do and am still able to keep in contact with a lot of my old teachers, though some of that contact has been lost and I wish I had retained those connections. A few of these teachers that have made a big impact are my 2nd, 5th and 6th grade teachers, my 7th grade English teacher and my 8th grade social studies teacher. They have all pushed my passion for teaching. I still actively email my 2nd grade teacher as we have the same birthday and just the pure immense impact she made on my young mind; some of these teachers I wish I still had connections to, like my 6th grade teacher, and some I wish I could break laws of physics to keep that connection like my 8th grade social studies teacher. All of these teachers still push me to become a teacher and I am actively taking steps to become a teacher like them. I have started to work with kids, especially young kids, the age where joy, hope and endless happiness is all that comes across their little minds.

I have loved every minute of it, Every Minute, but as I grew older, I learned about how our world works. I fear for those carefree joyful minds. I worry about the world they will come to know. I am scared if their endless hopefulness finds the bottom. If I already have less rights than the women that came before me, then what rights will the little 5 year old girl who ran to give me a hug or the 7 year old girl who refused to leave my side have? I am scared of the world I will teach in. What will my future students’ world look like? What about their future? I don’t know and it scares me to think about.

Part of me thinks we will figure it out by then and they won’t have the same worries I do now but there’s always that small thought that turns the other way.

In the past couple months I have cried a lot, usually silently where no one knows. The main reason for these tears is fear caused mainly by politics. I cried through the 2024 campaign with fear of, what if Trump wins, that turned to the fear of what Trump will do in the next 4 years. I cried when I watched Kamala’s concession speech as she tried to remind us of the power each of us holds and to keep the hope for a better future and the idea of “we fight we win,’ and then recently when I listened to Joe Biden’s last speech in the oval office where he warned us about the possible outcomes of too much power and the dangerous tipping point we are headed toward if we are not careful. Both of these speeches have a very different look on power and where our country is headed but they both left an immense impact on my view of my world.

I hope the future is what Kamala has it out to be; the one most of us dream of. I truly hope that Biden’s worries and the fear that lives within a lot of us will become just a faint memory and not reality.

Today my mom wrote a blog about similar fears and thoughts about our political state and what it may mean. After reading her blog it got me thinking and after talking to her about what she wrote and my own thoughts, I teared up again.

I have been wanting to write about my thoughts and feelings with all the news that’s been circulating but never knowing where and how to start, but reading her blog and talking to her about it created a starting point to finally get my feelings into words.

There are certain discussions that today’s parents expect to have with their children that I did not have when I was their age. What to do if there is a shooter in your vicinity. That any drug can be laced with fentanyl. What you post online can always be found, even years later, and not just if you’re running for public office, but also if you’re applying for your dream job and someone runs a background check. And then there are discussions that were the same as when I was their age. Keep your drink covered, don’t drink from punch bowls, and only from cans you open yourself. And, more than anything, be true to yourself. Don’t be taken in by the con men, the snake oil salesmen, the impostors. Trust your gut even if your head and heart are leading you astray. Your head doubts and rationalizes, your heart leaps, but your gut will know, if you pay attention. (So will your parents, more than likely, but you may not be ready for that yet. And that’s okay.)

I grew up in what some people have referred to as a Norman Rockwell childhood. I’m sure it had its issues but I largely remember it that way, too. A lot of acres to roll around in, a dinner bell (an oversized musical triangle, actually) to call us home. Two happily married parents, and a grandmother who made homemade bread and pies and let you flop on her bed to talk about the day, on her flowered quilt bedspread, next to the Some See Him Rorschach Jesus print that hung on her wall for as long as I can remember. We had a clubhouse with a rope and a ladder and a tire swing underneath, and a trampoline that hosted some highly choregraphed routines that were nothing short of impressive. Newborn kittens in the hay loft, and extended family baseball and kickball games with first base as the foremost oak tree in the line of them, and third the closest corner of the garden.

To be clear, a Norman Rockwell childhood doesn’t save you. I went on to make plenty of blunders. But it grounds you. It gives you your basic touchpoint about who you are when you are true to yourself. I had a religious, church-centric childhood, but not one that was in any way evangelical. My parents, then and now, believe in a religion you can see by how you treat people, by how you care, not by where you are on Sunday morning, though the two can certainly intertwine. They taught me that how we treat the neediest among us is how we create our personal yardstick of service, grace, and love. I grew up accountable to a lot of people within our Methodist church community, and I think I was –am– better for it. It kept me on a pretty straight-arrow path as a teen, not because of a fear-based religion, or a community of judgement, but because there were a lot of good people who wanted to see me do good. We volunteered in Appalachia, and with Habitat for Humanity, we put together comfort bags for homeless shelters, raked leaves for the elderly, and visited nursing homes with cookies on Valentine’s Day.

I also grew up with Kids Praise and Psalty, the Singing Song Book. Psalty and Free to Be You and Me were really transformational early childhood soundtracks for me. I can still sing 1 John 4: 7-8, and Seek Ye First in a round (only Seek Ye First, in a round. 1 John 4: 7-8 sung in a round would be chaos). It is a memory that makes me smile, but also feel a little sad. I know some people would point to the fact that about 68% of Americans identify as Christian as “the problem with America today.” When I was born, it was more like 90%. By the time I graduated from high school, it was more like 80%. My kids didn’t grow up with Psalty, and some would say that is why the solution, perhaps, is to bully religion back into classrooms. Put the 10 Commandments on the walls of first grade and Trump Bibles on the shelves. But I contend that the issue is more that, as Gandi said, “I like your Christ.  I do not like your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ.” Instead of insisting on pushing a condemnatory rhetoric and demanding adherence, we need to live as Christ intended, so that “they will know we are Christians by our love.”

Some people will stop reading here because either, 1) they are insulted that their Christ-like nature is being questioned; or 2) religion is boring and sanctimonious, and reading someone’s sermon is a really lame way to spend a Saturday afternoon.

I’d ask you to keep reading, partly because I think I have some things to say that are worth thinking about, and partly because I am honestly so surpassingly angry these days that I need to get it out somehow. I understand that there are a lot of people, people who I grew up with, and looked up to, who I know are salt-of-the-earth good people who believe in community and giving back, who show up at women’s shelters with clothes for job interviews, and serve at soup kitchens on Thanksgiving – and who will, or have, voted for the Trump Vance ticket. And I can’t wrap my head around it. It brings me back to the print on my grandmother’s wall, and makes me wonder as I balance the world’s rhetoric, Do you see him?

I had to explain to my loving husband this morning, upon listening to Good Morning America and hearing Trump talking to Tuck about training guns on Liz Cheney, that I was yelling near him, not at him. “You’re passionate about it, not angry at him,” my daughter soothed (because she knows girl code). But in fact, I am angry. I am very, very angry, because I don’t recognize my neighbors anymore, and I don’t recognize the people I grew up with. I don’t use this blog much these days, mostly because there are so many things that shouldn’t need to be said, and also too many people already saying it. And how do you even begin to articulate things like, “Publicly fantasizing about jailing Americans with opposing viewpoints, supporting “one real rough, nasty day” of policing, and dismantling the FCC… is bad.” If it needs to be said, it feels kind of too late to save us. When I think back to the #thisisnotnormal hashtag of 2016, it seems so stinking cute. Quaint. We had no idea. If only we could go back to the not normal of 2016, I’d be forever thankful.

A few things have been on my mind lately, and they go back to those conversations that you don’t expect to have with your children.

One thing is that in my suburban Denver house, in one of Colorado’s safest cities, in one of the state’s wealthiest counties, per the statistics, my daughter has fears about school next week after the election. She is afraid of potential violence. She is afraid of voicing an opinion because she fears reprisals. She is afraid for her sister, at college out of state. She is afraid for the fact that we picked up a couple extra jars of spaghetti sauce and pasta, cans of tuna, and put a few extra pounds of hamburger in the freezer – because you just never know. Before every snowstorm, bread and milk fly off the shelves. It feels kind of like tracking a storm right now. It could blow over. Or be just some flurries. Or it could be snowpocolypse. Because That. Is. Where. We. Are.  We just don’t know. We are in the middle of deciding who we are as a nation; it scares me, so of course it would scare a 16-year-old. “I never thought I would cry about politics,” she said.

I’ve cried about politics before. I cried when Trump won the first time. I ugly cried when RBG died. Both of those proved warranted, from my perspective. But this is the first time I’ve been afraid, not of the outcome of the election itself, but whether the country makes it through with a peaceful transfer of power. I realize that some people will disagree, but I don’t feel like it is the person saying she wants to be the President of all Americans, listen to the experts, and seat people who disagree at her table who driving this fear. It does seem like it might be the guy talking about the “enemy within,” an era of retribution, mass deportation, and guns “trained at” his political foes. The guy whose own generals and national security leaders (780 – seven hundred and eighty! – of them) have called him “dangerous” and “unfit,” and a “wannabe dictator.” If January 6, 2021 is debatable, about whether it was an insurrection or a “day of love,” it is at least a foreshadowing of possibilities we didn’t even consider when we voted in November 2020. I would even take the not normal of 2020, it turns out.

When I think about about the things that worried me as a child – and I do remember a couple of heated middle school arguments about Clinton and Bush Sr and definitely some more heated college ones about W vs Gore – politics did not feel like they were about personal safety. Rural Ohio in the 90s was different than suburban Denver today. It’s fair to say it was – for me – more homogenous, which perhaps lends itself to a skewed sense of fraternity. Today, my world is more diverse, and I’m grateful for it. I’ve traveled more, I’ve met more people, my circles have both grown and contracted. For example, I know quite a few friends of my children who are witty, smart, talented, empathetic people who either aren’t as concerned about fitting into a snug box of sexual or gender identity, or who are outside the box. Their parents, the same as mine were, we all are, are looking for a world where their children are safe. I want more than anything for the community that I grew up in to embrace the children who are growing up afraid, today. To let them know they have their backs.

It’s different than we grew up with, than what our parents grew up with. The difference is because society is ever-evolving to be more complex because we are evolving, our brains, our reach, our humanity. An ice age ago, finding a cave and lighting a fire was pretty much the apex of things. Today my electric car connects to my phone that connects to radio waves that can connect me to a podcast of a Finnish Nobel laureate (or The Tortured Poets Department anthology, whichever).

There is a reason why they say, “Don’t look back. You’re not going that way.” The United States had slavery until 1865. Women couldn’t vote until 1920. The Equal Credit Opportunity Act (the reason I can open a bank account, a credit card, and hold a mortgage), didn’t come about until 1974. Gay marriage wasn’t legalized in all states until 2015. 2015! Less than one single decade ago. Blows my mind. All of this to say, society changes, but the biggest constant is our unique ability to care for each other. Even in the fire caves, excavations have found skeletons with bones that were set and healed. Our very first ancestors cared for each other, even when it was hard, even when doing the right thing probably felt scary, with perhaps a saber cat pacing outside. Christians don’t live by the Old Testament, because the New Testament superseded it. Modern Christians pray in public, accumulate wealth, and have women in pulpits, even though all of those things are verboten in the New Testament. The greatest part of humanity is our ability to evolve. In our evolution, let’s think about how many times Jesus mentions love. Love as the greatest of these. We aren’t a community only when it’s convenient, only when people look like us, or speak like us, or love like us. We are a community because we have each other’s backs and want to see ourselves do good, and pass it on.

If you think you can love someone while voting against their equal rights, I’m pretty sure one of us is misreading Jesus. Jesus served the poor, the sick, the distressed. He sought out those whom society kept at its edges. When Ghandi noted the discrepancy between Christ and Christians, this is what he was looking for: For I was hungry, and you gave me food. For I was thirsty, and you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you took me in.

Would you find Jesus, a brown emigrant of Nazareth to Egypt, at a Trump rally with Stephen Miller talking about America for Americans and Americans only? Would you find him making up stories about (legal) immigrants eating pets, stories that put people in danger because of the vitriolic and irrational reaction of people who lived no where near them? Or would you find him sitting with a frightened teenager, or holding the hand of a woman with an ectopic pregnancy, or maybe even giving food and water to someone crossing under the razor wire of the Rio Grande, maybe a mother with a newborn son, looking for somewhere safe to watch her child grow up without a metaphorical saber cat, or Herod, in sight.

As Psalty the Singing Songbook said, “Beloved, let us love one another. For love is of God, and everyone who loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. He who loveth not, knows not God, because God is love.” Come to think of it, I think someone said it before Psalty.

On November 5, let them know us by our love.

My neighbor has these gorgeous dinnerplate dahlias that mark mid-summer with pure joyful fortitude, drinking in the summer sun and bursting into pink spiky glory just when you think, I can’t handle yet another 90-degree day. But if you want the dahlias, deep summer is where you find them.

It’s curious how life moves in cycles, which we learn and see and live from childhood, and yet when we find ourselves at the end or beginning of one – or most likely an end and then a beginning – we find ourselves a bit surprised. Either with the speed in which it came, whether fast or slow, or with the fact that it’s suddenly upon us, no matter how ponderously it crept up. My social media has been full of college freshmen moving into their dorms, photos posted by parents who I met – as it turns out – a generation ago, on elementary school playgrounds and Girl Scout meetings. In many cases we’ve lost touch, except for our common thread of aligning milestones, keeping our experience synced. Our kids skinned knees together, played soccer, changed schools, changed schools again, learned to drive, and now – are leaving home for new chapters where we are secondary characters to their plot, rather than half their world. And so, when I see the photos of kids I may not have seen in person since grade school – or sometimes ever, outside of posts from people I myself went to grade school with – it still feels personal. We are in it together.

This week was a big one at our house. My youngest got her driver’s license, and my oldest leaves at the end of the week for her first year of college, 1800 miles away. The timing of this was no coincidence, having specifically set a goal for Eva having her driver’s license before Samantha (and her driver’s license) disappeared. And yet even knowing it was coming, it feels like a lot to take in. I’m back to waiting anxiously between departure and arrival texts and trying to gauge the speed and difficulty of my commute with the eyes and reflexes of someone with less than 100 hours of driving under their belt… but trying not to voice too much apprehension, so as not to rattle confidence, but enough to also make sure my super reasonable, extremely warranted concerns are heard, but softly. Samantha will at least have the advantage of distance, while she navigates her new routine and town.

My co-worker asked today how the week was going, knowing that it had been lining up to be a emotionally demanding one. “It’s okay,” I said. “It’s just change, you know?”  and he replied, “You mean, it’s progress.” And I realized that is the better framing of this new season, even though the line between the two feels more like a square knot sometimes.

Every time I go through a new iteration of parenting, I have deeper admiration for my own. I went to school out of state, and then I studied abroad. This was during the very transitional phase of cell phones, and while some students may have had one at that point, they certainly weren’t prevalent in the first couple years I was away. When my parents put me on a plane to London, after which I had to get to the smaller town of Worcester, they did so knowing that I had a calling card in my pocket that could work at any pay phone, but no way to contact me in a hurry. But, they let me figure it out. And I did. I had an amazing, perspective changing year of growth that has continued to shape me even today.

I saw a quote recently that said, “Perhaps this next stage has more to do with who and what you’re choosing to grow with, rather than who and what you’re letting go of.” And it hit me, that positivity of new beginnings. Michelle Obama said this week that hope is making a comeback. For years, I have had a print in my living room with a Emily Dickinson quote, “Hope is the thing with feathers, that perches in the soul, and sings the song without the words, and never stops, at all.” I’ve been focusing on the wrong things for a while. I’ve been afraid of the change and haven’t seen the progress.

Eva told me that last night, when she drove the 13 miles on I-25 between school and home for the first time with no one sitting in the passenger seat, she had a smile on her face the whole time. She was nervous, but she was also confident. I watched obsessively for her to arrive, but it was already a little easier to watch her leave this morning. I’ve found that lately, it’s been a little easier to relax my grip on the reins of all my worries. That soul song seems to be coming back, not as a crescendo, but as a familiar melody humming just at the edge of the brain.

In the last 18 years of parenting, there is no age or stage that I’d rather go back to, though I love looking back. Babies are squishes of miracle development. Toddlers are fierce and precocious. Preschoolers are independent rebels with dubious fashion choices, and grade schoolers are information sponges. Middle schoolers are insightful contradictions, children one day and teens the next. But my teenagers. They are funny, and they are ambitious. They can talk to you about literature or about politics, or about the seventeen subplots of their favorite tv show. They get the joke, and they can make the joke. They want to change the world, and they are walking around with limitless potential. They are choosing who and what to grow with, and we can let them remind us to do the same.

… To your next adventures, ladies. 🤍

There are rosy, hazy memories that have the soft edges of a matte Slumber filter. KOA picnic tables with a Coleman stove as my parents, younger than I am now, fixed breakfast we would eat off blue enamelware plates. The celebration of Put-in-Bay with high school friends when we were just old enough to undertake such an adventure on our own. My grandmother kneading bread on the orange, flour-covered Formica countertops of my childhood kitchen.

And then there are crystalline memories, good and bad, as vivid today as when they happened. Watching a butterfly flit past the third story hospital room window when I was in pre-term labor with my oldest and knowing knowing in the deepest recess of my soul, that everything would be okay. But also coming home from work the day Lucky, the dog who selflessly loved me more than anything, died in his sleep in the summer sunshine of our backyard. It still stings. Memory is tricky. Some things we’d like to last forever slip away at the edges – much loved-voices, vacation details – while things we’d like to just forget, stubbornly hold on.

My parents can easily remember the day that Kennedy was shot, just as 9/11 seared our memories decades later. I remember the day the Challenger exploded, all of us huddled around the bulky television that had been wheeled in just so that we could all watch history happen – though no one thought it would be history like that.

I remember when I heard that Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died. It was a Friday. As is not unusual on a Friday, we were on Highway 24 in Colorado Springs, heading to our cabin in Woodland Park. Stopped – also typical – somewhere between 8^th and 31^st, scrolling news to pass time as we waited in traffic, it was a ubiquitous red headline. When 9/11 happened, it was terrible and tragic and felt unbelievable, but it was terrible in part because we didn’t know what would happen next. When RBG died, the reason that my stomach knotted and dropped, the reason I ugly cried until I was headachy and spent, was that I knew exactly what would happen next. I knew exactly what it meant. For me. For my daughters, for a country already bitterly at odds. While Kennedy’s assignation and the Challenger explosion and 9/11 largely brought people together in common grief and purpose, RBG’s death was a further shattering of shared purpose, of common democratic ideals and I was under no misconception that anything but glee and steely-eyed purpose was being felt by many at her death. Despite being quite firm that Obama did not have the right to nominate Merrick Garland in March 2016, before the November election, it turned out that nominating a Justice in mid-September before the 2020 election was just fine. Amy Coney Barrett was nominated and confirmed within 34 days, sworn in about a week before the presidential election.

I sometimes think about the things I’m glad that my grandmother never had to see when she died in her sleep, buoyed by Obama’s election the week before she passed away, thinking things were changing for the better. She was so glad she was able to vote for him, and I’m glad that she had the chance. Of course, I never met Ruth Bader Ginburg, but sometimes I’m glad that she didn’t see what happened in the weeks and months after her death.

This has been a long week. And actually, last week was a long week. The attrition rate at my workplace is through the roof. The Great Resignation has definitely been felt. From myriad articles I’ve read and anecdotes I’ve heard, recruiter messages on LinkedIn, it’s not just us. But just because it’s common, doesn’t absolve the stress of it. I’ve been at my company for 10 years, but since 2020, my department has seen about 80% turnover. Like a celebrity breakup, there’s the public statement, a goodbye email with contact information or maybe just an acknowledgement of the end of the road. “With absolute love and respect for one another, we have chosen to lovingly separate to begin new chapters, remaining friends as we begin new journeys though we walk separate paths…” Or something. The gradual wear and tear, the slow grind, is exhausting.

We are tired. To-the-bone tired. It’s ironic because I assumed that this stage of my life would be difficult because of having teenagers (no offense, love you girls!). But that’s what they tell you at each prior stage. “Just wait! Just wait!” But my teenagers are good and interesting people. My blended family is pick-ups and drop-offs, and dinner conversation, and inside jokes with just enough eye roll to keep it real. I went back to therapy recently – I go sporadically when it starts to feel like an impartial third-party might help me navigate my 3am what-ifs – and I told her, “I feel heavy. Like I’m carrying around a concrete block I can’t put down. I’m eating too much. I’m drinking too much. I’m just unimaginably tired.” I think the real issue is not so much that I’m exhausted, as that I can’t see when it ends. Apparently there’s no quick fix for this, which is always disappointing, but I’m going again in 4 weeks, just to see if something new materializes.

I was absolutely heartbroken in November 2016, but I was hopeful, too. Hopeful that it would be a wake-up moment for everyone who had shrugged and figured things would work themselves out. Hopeful that a neophyte politician would be mindful and humble enough to surround himself with experienced professionals and be … less than terrible. My family marched in the Women’s March in January 2021 in downtown Denver, and the spirit of positivism and activism felt indefatigable. Surely, we would rise.

Stephen Colbert saw it coming. In 2005, far before the first clouds seemed to be forming on the horizon to the average storm watcher, he coined Truthiness on his cable satire news show. Truthiness is knowing something in your gut, or your heart, as opposed to in your head. It’s taking what you see and putting your full faith in what you’d rather see. Truthiness feels true. And in that moment, Colbert recognized that it was the beginning of facts being the tool of the elitist left.

It’s hard getting up some days. It was a long week, and I was just holding on for the weekend, really. And then on Friday morning news broke that – as expected – Roe v Wade had been overturned by the Supreme Court in a strictly partisan 6-3 decision. (Actually, the 6-3 was a little surprising. I thought Roberts might vote for precedent and a creditable court, but at this point, neither here nor there.) Abortion is now up to the states, and immediately in those states with “trigger” laws, abortion may already be a felony. My family lives in Colorado which has laws already protecting abortion access, but if you live in North Dakota and are a high school senior who, let’s say, is also an honor student with a steady boyfriend who has early admission to a university out of state when you find out you’re pregnant even though you thought you were being careful, well… your options for a self-determined future just got a lot smaller.

I know a lot of pro-choice people. Men and women. Among them, I don’t know a single person who is pro-abortion. No one who thinks it is a decision that would or should be taken lightly. But I do know a lot of people who pragmatically realize that life is a lot harder for some people than others. That teenage birth rates and welfare rates are already higher in states that have draconian abortion laws, and that carrying a baby to adoption is not always healthy for the mother, physically and/or mentally. The foster system is already full. If everyone who professes belief that every baby should be born no matter the circumstances adopts a child from foster care, perhaps this conversation could begin to evolve differently. Currently, our country’s societal framework – no maternal care standards, universal health care, parental leave, nutrition access, etc. – cares far less about unwanted or unplanned children after they leave the womb.

Anyway, memory can be funny. I couldn’t tell you what the weather was like on Monday, but I can remember the white plastic rocking horse with its coil springs that my babysitter had when I was 3. But for the life of me, I can’t remember how we got here. I can remember #thisisnotnormal. The inflated inauguration numbers. The noise of windmills causing cancer. I can remember the Sharpie hurricane path. The staring into the eclipse. They all seem so ridiculously trivial, though also a little embarrassing on the world stage. But I also remember that phone call with some guy we hadn’t even heard of at the time, Zelenskyy. Who knew how that would come back around. And how half the country shrugged and called it political theater. I remember Helsinki. I remember “very fine people on both sides” and “shithole countries.” Each time sunk the bar of normal a little lower. Each one made it a little harder to feel the positivity, the push for change, of that January 22, 2017 march. A little harder to reconcile our country as the one in the international headlines.

I’m tired because I can’t see how it ends. I’m tired because I thought the bottom was 2016. And then I thought the bottom was 2018. And 2020. And because I know parents are feeding their children Tucker Carlson for bedtime stories. I used to think that we were fighting against each other like a bunch of Dr Seuss Sneetches. But the point of the Sneetches story was that they were ultimately all the same on the inside, and I’m not so sure we all are anymore.

At what point did we go from a country that achieved polio and smallpox eradication, to one where an entire segment of the population, and championed by their elected officials and vice versa, openly and derisively mocked masks (which have been in common use for disease control for more than 200 years) and use horse dewormer instead of mRNA vaccines during a global pandemic. Who celebrate the overturning of Roe while fighting to keep AR15s in the hands of 18-year-olds, even before its latest victims are buried. It defies belief, and yet. And yet. Here we are. I cannot figure out how we have allowed ourselves to be here, and I don’t know how we get out.

This is the part where I usually try to tie back to the opening paragraphs and end with something at least low-level insightful if not outright hopeful.

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We reached a record cold temperature early, early Thursday morning in Denver. If you’re going to be really hot or really cold, might as well break a record, I suppose. Ours was -7 degrees, the coldest March 10 you can find.

March is the month when it’s supposed to be summer in the sun and winter in the shade (Dickens). But for sure, we were just winter this week. All winter. Arctic winter. And while on Thursday we quadrupled that early morning temperature by the end of the day (low 20s!), cold is cold. I took a load of warm towels out of the dryer and there was a wave of warmth and fabric softener that spilled out with them. It gave me one of those moments of grateful clarity where you realize just how much you have, and that brief staggering recognition that threatens to overwhelm you as you stand with an armful of laundry in front of the dryer.

What’s wrong?, someone might ask you in that moment if they saw the quick pause, maybe a hitched breath held in surprise. And the answer would be nothing. The moment is so right in its tiny significant inconsequence as to take your breath away, or else consumed and forgotten in the noise of the day. It is a tiny pinpoint of stars on a dark night or a dandelion growing through the pavement. Everything and nothing.

Mary Oliver was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet known for her poems chronicling her awe of the world around her. She saw magic in a blade of grass, in geese as they made their way on their annual migration (check out The Summer Day or Wild Geese). She is a beautiful writer.

And she is absolutely brutal.

“Listen–are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?” she asks.

And then, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

What do I plan to do? Plan to be? I think I knew best who I thought I was when I was probably about 20. A lot has gone down since then. Now? Not so much.

Sometimes when I read Mary Oliver, I feel inspired to take more deep breaths and take more time. To be more present. Sometimes I want to promise to do more. Sometimes to do less, but with intention. Sometimes I feel attacked, guilty for not even being able to remember if I closed the garage door – so focused on the next thing, or not focused at all.

 It’s so hard to be in the moment that we download apps on our glowing blue light phones for mindful meditation, reminders to be grateful, alarms to Slow Down or Breathe. Mary Oliver would laugh wryly at our insistence upon mindful technology. Or maybe she would just turn away, sink down into a meadow, and leave us to ourselves. But even in our haste and inattention, sometimes the world around us insists that we take notice.

On February 24, Russia invaded Ukraine. And on February 26, one of my high school classmates, Eric Grove, died at age 43. The invasion of Ukraine was more expected than my classmate’s death, though both are depressing. Eric was affectionally known as a “big guy with a big heart,” and he was both. A cornerstone of my small Ohio hometown, no one considered that he might not be around for the next football season of the high school he loved so much, or to advise the college students he was a friend and mentor to in his admissions job. He and I were friendly, though never particularly close. But I graduated in a class of only 97 students, and he went to my childhood church (his then and current church where he ran the sound system every Sunday til this day). I knew his history and his family and his friends. Facebook kept us up to date. When he died, there was an outpouring of grief from my hometown. It was a tribute to how much he was loved.

And I realized – this is the point. Using our one wild and precious life to its fullest doesn’t mean that we get up everyone morning and change the world. But it means that the world is changed for the better because we’ve been in it. Eric Grove understood this.

Eric’s was a gentle existence. The invasion of Ukraine is anything but. But in both cases, it brings into such stark relief how much we take for granted the quiet piling up of seemingly unremarkable days. I imagine an old woman, stacking pearls into a pile, a pearl for each day, amounting to years, carefully constructed into a just-stable collection. And then, an earthquake; then an avalanche. Pearls spilling, tumbling, smooth and slick and spinning into chaos. And as we scramble after each one, we realize that not one of them was unremarkable. Each is priceless and part of the whole.

Watching the news for 45 seconds of “highlights” will break your heart right now. It seems it has been that way for a while. Maybe for as long as there has been headline news. We feel powerless to FIX all the things that are broken. We watch the vulnerable and we feel vulnerable ourselves, but also guilty for having a dryer full of warm, soft towels. We’re angry that life is so unjust, and that so many people are gone too soon. We’re anguished that people, children even, are confused and frightened, afraid or in pain before they go. And we’re awestruck at the bravery of people who had work-a-day jobs just like ours, whose children refused to eat certain colors, whose dishwashers sprung leaks at inconvenient times, who rushed from work to orthodontist appointments to middle school band concerts – and who now form an army of peerless civilians.

Can any of us imagine our skies opening above us and raining down destruction? Can we imagine putting our loved ones into a mass grave, hurriedly, because we might be next, even as we bury our hearts? Even as I see it broadcast right into my living room, I can’t quite imagine living it.

Life is heavy. It feels like mid-winter when we we’ve been hoping for so long for spring. COVID cases going down? Can I introduce you to the possibility of nuclear world war? Or perhaps just rife civil discord in your own country that makes you grit your teeth as you bite your tongue so as not to lose friends, because life is too short?

Sometimes it feels almost disloyal to the horrible madness to laugh. Can we laugh into the anarchy? Does that make us mad ourselves? Or callously blasé? Or just … still alive? Our hearts are bruised and fractured, injured by a thousand small cuts and a few not-quite-mortal wounds, pressed to near-smothered by Putin’s horrific war crimes, by our friends’ and families’ grief, by our own ineffectiveness in shouting into the void for all the losses great and small.

But I have to think that we’re not defeated until we no longer watch the wild geese as they fly overhead, no longer feel the small wonder of a load of warm, fresh towels, until our admiration of others’ lives no longer prompts us to want to live our own… better.  

Perhaps all we can really do, perhaps the very most we can promise to do with our one wild and precious life, is – as Mary Oliver said – just to pay attention. To let our hearts fill and let them break. Again and again.

A couple of weeks ago, I was putting dishes away or maybe loading the dishwasher. I don’t even remember now, but I somehow managed to hit the top side of my left foot on the corner of the dishwasher door as it lay open. It stung. I likely cursed, maybe out loud or maybe under my breath, depending on how the rest of the day had gone, and I moved on to the next thing. Then, a few days later, I looked down and the entire top of my foot was bruised. I felt medical-ick hypochondria wash over me. Well, that can’t be good, I thought. My significantly-less-hypochondriac other half said, “Feet have no fat to pad an injury. They’re just bones and nerves. It’s fine.”

A couple more days went by, and the black and blue became that weird healing chartreuse, with just a line of dark bruising at my toes. And I thought, “Well that can’t be good.” “You probably bruised the bone,” my partner said, “It’ll take a while to heal.” Healing often takes way longer than I anticipate. There are things from 2002 that I’m still processing. Meanwhile, I have been wearing only ballet flats that don’t put pressure on the top of my foot (not ideal footwear for January and February), but any shoe with a tongue put its seam in the worst possible spot, and just forget a shoe with any style and or shape. And so, all flats, all the time.

Then I started to feel slightly off, once every so often. Dizzy. A little too hot and prickly around my core. It’s probably a blood clot, I figured, sanguine. You know, the kind in your foot that mostly affects your core and vision for ten minutes every 5-9 days.

 One of the best things about me is that my ability to worry endlessly is only balanced by my willingness to put my head in the sand when, in fact, I’m truly – reasonably or not – concerned. “You’re stressed out from work, from raising two teenagers, from watching the news,” I said, to me, out loud. However, multiple friends and my partner said, “The foot thing is nothing, but seriously, feeling dizzy and tingly around the edges is not normal.” They pushed for a doctor’s appointment (for which I love and appreciate them). In the week that it took to get into that appointment, I lived my best life. I walked the dog on extra long routes. I spent time just breathing. I took my blood pressure every day. I put a moratorium on the near-daily glass of wine or cocktail that has become routine. (It’s almost like I already know the things that would make me a better, healthier version of myself.)

I went to the doctor. She did the doctor things and pronounced me apparently, seemingly healthy. She used the phrase “benign transient symptoms” and said that she wanted me to continue monitoring how often I was feeling off, call the office once a week with my findings (unless things suddenly got really weird), but that nothing I had described was throwing any panic switches for her. I asked her if it could be related to the foot injury somehow, but she said she didn’t think so… that feet have no fat and are all bones and nerves. “It will just take a while to heal; wear comfortable shoes.” (Hmm. Yes, noted.)

My daughter’s 14^th birthday is this week; we were supposed to have a party with just her uncle and her almost-uncle and our immediate family, which is what she asked for last year, too. She chose a theme (as we do) and a birthday menu that was tailorable for my gluten free and her almost-uncle’s vegetarianism. She’s a good kid. But Saturday morning, we were informed of a second-degree COVID contact. No one’s fault, just one of those things during life in an endemic. We have home tests, but it seemed like the window was just too short for a test to be meaningful. So, like many other times and events in the last couple of years, we switched to Zoom.

It was frustrating – it seemed like we had asked for so little. We hadn’t planned a dozen friends and a pony and a bouncy house. But at this point, any plan at any time can fall victim to life as we know it. It is what it is. Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. But still, watching the little disappointments add up for our children, watching them rally, and rally again, hurts our collective mama hearts.

Mostly I’m just so tired.

I haven’t been in my 40s with two teenage children before, so maybe this is just what tired is. I don’t really know different. I try to think about if I had been born in 1900. If I had been 14 when WWI started. And then 39 when WWII started, probably with a 14-year-old of my own. And then in my 60s and 70s, my grandchildren were sucked into Vietnam. I can’t really imagine that. I can’t imagine the constant state of anxiety, throughout decades. I like to think that we’re on the downslope of all of this, even if we’re not.

But if I had been born in 1900, I think about turning the radio on for the evening news to hear the day’s events. To read the paper, black newsprint on my fingers, and then putting it down to make dinner. Contrast with today, my wrist buzzes with notifications. It’s a prison of my own making, really. The news is accessible 24/7, and headlines push their way in. Sometimes work is so busy that I don’t have time to keep up with current events, and honestly, even though long days arriving and leaving in the dark feel weighty, and even though I feel like I’m failing home life with my around-the-world take-out routine (Thai, Cuban, Indian, Japanese, oh look toasted sandwiches at home), it’s nice to be in a news-less bubble, even if just occasionally.

Recently, our Denver suburb has been in the news (at least locally) because our newly elected school board (who ran on a largely anti-mask platform with a side of archetypal dog-whistling thrown in) gathered its like-minded members (the 4, of the 4-3 divide) to deliver a private threat to our Superintendent. Resign or be fired (he did not resign). The 4 were given a heads up about open meeting laws they had broken, and so they quickly threw together an open meeting, with no public comment allowed, to officially fire the 26-year veteran who had supported masks.

I was – am – irate. I am frustrated. Disappointed. But mostly so, so tired. I admit that in part, I’m frustrated because I voted for the 3, not the 4. My side lost. I have a hard time understanding many of my fellow Americans these days. And I’m sure, they, me. But if an open coup at the United States Capitol is not enough to unite a nation toward a new direction, what chance does a community violation of Sunshine Laws have?  

But. But. More than 1000 teachers called in sick on Thursday to protest the board’s actions. The community showed up en masse to rally on a day where the high did not break 20 degrees. Students are planning a walk-out to show their feelings about not only the Superintendent’s firing but also, and perhaps more pointedly for them, the new board’s dismantling of the District’s equity policy. As my 15-year-old said, “How can you concentrate on academics if you’re afraid of being bullied for who you are?”

Options still feel limited. The board’s decision can’t be undone. In the midst of so much uncertainty and upheaval, our school district will doubtless be losing teachers (1000+ teachers very clearly voiced their displeasure just this week, undoubtedly some of them will leave) as a Superintendent of the new board’s choosing is enstated. At least we know for sure that they only serve at the board’s pleasure, not their own.

I think about being born in 1900, but I wasn’t. I was born now (well, a few years back but of this era, and well before 1900!). I was born in an era of current events buzzing on my wrist and real-time news and a drumbeat of divisiveness. I am so, so tired of being disappointed and angry. I’m tired of watching my children’s disappointment, which is prolonged because the pandemic is prolonged, because so many people would rather take ivermectin than a vaccine.

I have a hard time distinguishing what happened yesterday and what happened in, say, August 2020. Was that two months ago, or two years ago? I know I need to figure out how to parent through the disappointments of the 2020s, just as parents did in 1914 and 1934. But I’m flying blind here. Hopefully I get more right than wrong.

I’ve had a few weird health and wellness episodes, but I can mostly text my brother a little obsessively for a few weeks and get through those. My doctor remains fairly convinced of my health and resiliency. But I think I understand now that my bruised foot is really the better allegory for February 2022. There’s just no padding to absorb the blows. It’s just bone and nerve and a lingering tenderness, even as we get on with it, even as we wear comfortable footwear – or leggings, whatever – and go about another day.

My daughter turns 14 this week regardless of whether she was able to hug her uncle in person over cake. And she’ll be okay. Whatever doesn’t kill you, they say and it’s probably true, even if we’re tired of proving it. We’re a little bruised, bone bruised even perhaps, but still out there in the cold on a 16-degree day, believing that no matter what, it’s still worth showing up. Still rescheduling birthdays with Zoom meetings with the people we love most, still singing happy birthday.

Over Christmas, our family went to Cabo San Lucas. We (I) sweated the return COVID test requirement a little, but it turned out fine. We watched whales sound and rode horses on the beach and watched the sun rise over the ocean and ate fresh seafood and papaya. We family’d. Yes, we’re tired and a little bruised. Our nerves are singing. We’re frustrated, angry and literally (literally!) vibrating with news and opinions and reminders to Move! and Breathe! But we’re still here and even on the hardest days, we’re showing up for the sunrise.

It is 6:12pm on the Sunday night before the week of the first day of school (which is actually not until Tuesday, thankfully.) The lingering heat from the day is still enough to be just a few degrees more than a warm summer night comfortably requires, but the knowledge that summer nights are far too few, in the grand scheme of things, makes me seek it out, anyway. There is a bee poking around, landing uneasily close to my bare feet, to my drink, buzzing within vibration of my ear, because warm summer nights always have both the enveloping warmth and the reminder that nothing is quite as superlative as our own imaginings.

School always starts earlier than you think it would or should, based on all the summer cues around us. Last year, it started two weeks later than slated, a futile offering on the altar of re-acquiring our normal, just on the other side of “maybe” and “what if.” And after two extra weeks, and no real change to any unknowns, school started back with a remote/in-person masked hybrid that we were almost used to, but not quite.

This past week, when we picked up schedules and tested locker combinations and met teachers and mapped classroom routes, we ran into one of Eva’s favorite teachers from last year, who gave her a hug and asked about her summer and her new schedule and how she’s been. As we walked away, Eva said, “That’s the first time I’ve seen what her smile looks like in person.” This teacher who was instrumental in Eva’s best scholastic year to date. Who sang her praises as a good, kind human and made her feel seen and appreciated in the hard-knock world of middle schooling. Who worked hard to make sure that Eva was set up on a solid path for the future. But whom Eva had never seen smile, in person… I have to stop and sigh a little. This. This is Covid, abridged.

On Tuesday, we go back to school on schedule. In person and five days a week (should we not be pacing ourselves after all we’ve been through??). And the first holiday is not for weeks. Weeks! Four of them, in fact.

When asked whether they are ready to go back to school, my oldest shrugs. My youngest says, “I’m ready. I like routine.” I went back to work in person full time at the beginning of March, so in some ways, I’ve been back to it. I wear work clothes again. And make-up and heels and leave in the morning often before the time I was even getting myself out of bed in those weird, dark winter days when my dining room table was my whole world. But it feels like we are still so unsettled. We’re trying on a routine, pantomiming the actions of the people we were, but still standing on the edge of an unknown, wondering, What if, like a drummer’s tattoo. Fall break. Maybe. The holidays? If… then… for sure. Unless. But otherwise, yes, absolutely.

My boyfriend’s daughter and her husband came to visit last month, a visit long delayed, supplemented by calls and texts and opening presents via video. My parents are coming next month and I honestly just want to sit in the same room that they are in and eat at the same table and share old jokes and know that time and distance are only time and distance, after all, and powerless against deep-rooted family bonds.

Everything seems so much more indelibly significant and yet also like a series of Polaroid photos, snapped in a moment we can’t be sure of until we can look back. I met my best friend’s daughter approximately 15 months after the obvious timeline would have suggested. She was born 18 months ago, in January 2020. Planning to give the new family a little space to find their new footing, I figured I’d hop a plane and visit in the spring. In January 2020, it made complete sense. And now she’s walking and talking and doing puzzles and eating her own red peppers and salmon for dinner, and it seems crazy that in the time I was at my dining room table, this tiny baby became a small human who can befriend rollie pollie bugs during a garden exploration.

Time is relative, and yet so formidably fixed. This week, this second week of August, all my accounts and apps offer up memories of first days of school in years past. Google photos and Facebook and Instagram and Shutterfly. On this Day. We hope you enjoy looking back… And the similarities are as pronounced as the differences. The photos with new backpacks in front of the first-day-photo tree. Tan legs and sun-lightened hair. But so much change in the children themselves.

Now I have an 8^th grader and a 10^th grader, and I have no idea what the year ahead will hold for them. I have fewer answers than ever, and I never had a monopoly on them. I hope our maybes and what ifs all become the routine that Eva is looking for. But I think we’ve all seen the other side of the looking glass now, so it’s hard to say if we’ll ever be quite the same again.

But even so, in a couple days, we’ll wake up early, stand in front of the first-day-of-school photo tree, and start the next thing. And we have these summer nights.