Frosted

 

Front Seat Passenger

My daughter recently transitioned to being a front seat passenger

when it is just her and I

driving,

engaged in parallel conversations,

snacking on Swedish fish, 

listening to podcasts or her poppy “pool party playlist” 

(that I secretly enjoy on my Sunday run).

When she was small and still

in the back seat, 

my mom rigged mirrors 

from all angles off the headrest

so we could see her eyes, mouth, nose 

in the rear view mirror.

When she was small we monitored

breathing, hunger, slumber

Now I angle metaphorical  mirrors toward my front seat passenger, 

attempts to monitor brain chemistry, soul, and faith.

She and I drive through Wisconsin 

moments before the sun sets at 6:00 pm

hours before the leaves finally fall

days before an election.

Years ago when 

she was a back seat bunny

gazing backward out the window 

she pondered the loss of Tempest Shadow’s horn and

requested alternative choruses of  “Wheels on the Bus”

….. Transmission uses his gears 

………Alternator changes the energy

Now she gazes out the windshield with me

and ponders other things 

I try to share all

the things I wish I would have known 

at her age

to make life easier 

to make it more beautiful

but doesn’t every mother make this attempt 

all the while the daughter cringes?

At some point we just need to start singing again. 

As I learned when I was twenty-one years old,

No one is a better DJ

than a front seat passenger.

Life Lately: Summer

We started our summer driving to the Rocky Mountains to be with many of our favorite people. But first, enjoying the drive through Iowa in June with her stunning, lush, green rolling hills. Nebraska hosted the largest, fluffiest, most vibrant white clouds and in them we found the backs of sitting ogres, a boy riding a winged dog, and other spectacular wonders. Lately, we have been cloud watching and looking up more than down. Meeting thirty friends for a hike at Emerald Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park: the friends who visited us in the hospital one day after the birth of our first child and sang in our living room “Cath” by Death Cab for Cutie in a way that still takes my breath away. The much younger friends who were still in college but befriended us early-30-year-olds and our very particular and shy daughter. The friends that became aunties and uncles. The friends who creatively gathered during the pandemic in empty Old Navy parking lots to have dinner together. Friends who brought the silliest, strangest games over to play every Saturday night. (Ahem, I'm looking at you Mysterium as my favorite). So many friends who have been so significant and so many who eventually moved away. It was beautiful to be with all of them again, in one place, cheering on my daughter who hiked in the snow to the top of the Emerald Lake in hot pink Converse. Friends taking the hand of my six-year-old son to cross the icy brook that weaved down the mountain. Lately, I am thankful for all the people who have made life so absolutely stunning and in a way I never could have imagined for myself.

I thought I would spend the summer evenings of 2024 painting and writing. Instead, I took a small detour and started a tiny new job requiring a significant lens shift and learning curve. Lately, I am immersed in podcasts and online continuing education classes studying the neurology of sensory systems, the science of play, and learning about neurodiversity affirming practices in my field from neurodivergent voices. I am trying to carry out what I am learning in a small therapy gym with fantastical play schemes that weave in all the imagination we can muster. I keep thinking back to the fact that play helps release dopamine which is a feel good hormone. When we are engaging in play AND learning new things, we are linking learning with feel good hormones. Why do we ever stop doing this? But then I think of how I am absorbing all this delicious information: over headphones while I am moving through the garden, on long walks in the evenings, during pilates videos in the early morning, on the drive home from a friend’s house, and by creating informational handouts on Canva (and making sure the pictures and font are also “just right”). My learning curve is starting to flatten and with these last few weeks of summer, I hope to find the space for painting and writing. But I can also say I had a lot of fun learning this summer too.

First collection of 2024

Undone Tulip - 2024

Happiness can be the first picked flowers of the season.

 

Life Lately... April 2024

Lately, our living room floor has been the primary surface to sit and intricately fold pieces of paper into swans, lions, and fighter jets. I find paper airplanes nose down in the red oxalis or lost in cavernous spaces between the wall and couch. My six-year-old son spent much of Easter on his own while the rest of us had a nasty stomach bug. (Lately, we have endured so much sickness!) The next day, I found no less than 100 paper airplanes parked in the living room, folded into any model he could find directions for in our origami book. He had spent the entire day folding. 


Lately, I keep a book of poetry or prose next to the area where I brew my morning tea. In these six minutes, I promise myself that I will not unload the dishes or try to straighten the dining room table but instead savor the words of someone else’s perspective. I have been able to read through the poetry of Mary Oliver, Bianca Stone, and Annie Dillard's short book “The Writing Life” in these tiny, sacred moments.


Spring has been cool and stunning. Lately, I design all my running routes around the areas I know are brimming with magnolia trees, bluebells, redbuds, daffodils, or tulips. Because my endorphins are pumping, I am moved by the fact that each of these plant entities waits all year to perform such specific magical blooms for a brief period. All year they wait and then dazzle for a particular moment. These flowers will never be seen again. If I blink, I miss it and will have to wait a whole year to see the next generation! And because my endorphins are still pumping and I am listening to Tim Keller, I start to relate this phenomenon to our brief time here on earth and see our little lives on par with the bloom time of the crabapple tree in her magnificent magenta. In my notes app: God’s design for our little, beloved lives. Maximize bloom potential.


Lately, we spend the cooler, rainy weekends with friends playing the game Wavelength. I love a game that brings laughter-tears, a little confusion, and a lot of group problem-solving. This game brought much joy on those evenings that were still so dark. This particular weekend I get to enjoy the “mind-reading” game with a friend’s new puppy on my lap. Lately, I am in love with a three-pound ball of curls named Bev. 

Something from almost nothing

She had a story about her seven-year-old daughter that I love to think about in spring. It was a tiny snippet of a story- a side conversation really. Her daughter would pick up fallen scraps of foliage on the concrete slab floor of a Lowes Home Garden Center and tuck them in her pockets. You know... the loose vines and leaf stems that are usually swept up at the end of the day and tossed. The flowers and their damaged stems, rolled over by carts and careless sandal feet. Garbage to most people. No one noticed her collecting the rejected scraps. Most people were looking at the full-bodied plants. Days later her mother found sedums and begonias propagating in her bedroom windows. Her daughter propagated a whole garden from damaged discard. Each spring I wonder where she is now and what incredible things she is creating from almost nothing. 

Prehistoric Love

A well preserved skull 

of a prehistoric sea monster

and its phenomenal extraction 

from the Jurassic coast

is a welcome headline over breakfast

The pliosaur skull like a dragon’s head 

so remarkable
reminds me of the stack of library books
curated by my children

sitting at the edge of the dining room:

How to Train a Dragon and
How to Speak Dragon and
Wings of Fire and even
Dragons like Tacos

Over a bowl of cereal, I obsessively scroll 

through pictures of the monster-dinosaur-sea beast-dragon 

with her fascinating narrow nose

terrifying but elegantly sleek in shape

Fragile in appearance but inevitably enduring

This 150 million year old skull

now rests on a lab table
Thin bones arch across the top of her head

pinched and wing-like

Five thick vertebrae of her spinal column 

Exit from the back center of her magnificent head
Like an incomplete stage direction 
Or a vacuum cord cut short

I remember marveling in similar ways

at my daughter's twenty week ultrasound -

the sight of her slender tibia and fibula

bones articulating 

In-utero knitting, 

fearfully and wonderfully made
Bones have a way of making me emotional

A few years ago I created a Book of Centuries for my daughter
As a way to collage and record a historical timeline of events
As a way to build reverence for the passage of time
As a way to recognize that the world was always both awful and beautiful 

The book begins in 4000 BC 

Hundreds of pages later  I added my birthday 

and then hers
The process was astounding-
expressed so eloquently by James:
“You are just a vapor that appears for a little while
And then vanishes away”
Our point in time microscopic 

Like earth in context of the universe

150 million years ago this sea monster swam and hunted
150 millions years later there was you and there was me
We are weaved together 

for a few sacred moments

gifted with sharing space on this beautiful, old earth

curled up in blankets and evening snuggles

reading through our stacks of books 

in the glow and hope of our Christmas tree

Do the Work

As with any relationship that extends over a period of time, you occasionally need to put in the work and reignite the love. I recognized that our love had faded three years ago and, with a little attention and weekly dates, I have been able to fall in love with Chicago all over again. Our friend Brandon once commented: "Nothing can replicate the layers of texture in Chicago." Now I see that extra historic and rugged beauty everywhere and it makes me smile a little extra. 
 

Valentine B

I had wanted to do something lively this past Valentine's Day
but the family was either down with or recovering from Influenza B.

People laughed when I spelled out it’s full name in text
“It sounds like you are speaking from the Victorian era. Just say “the flu,”” a friend suggested.

After enduring a 103 temperature for three days, you just want to make sure people know.
It takes you out- mentally and physically.
This isn’t just a cold.
It’s Influenza B. It feels like something Victorian. 

So Valentine’s Day with a husband and daughter deep in their fevers.
I am just coming out of my own fever dream.

My six year old son is sitting at the kitchen counter 

We watch the sun go down on a romantic evening for other people.
I turn on the local college radio station and am surprised to hear a popular mainstream tune from the eighties.

They are taking love song requests from the public tonight and 

I can tell the nineteen year old hipster disc jockeys don’t quite know what to do 

with a request for Leather and Lace by Fleetwood Mac 

for Molly.

“We’ll take a look in the disc library,” they say, uncertain.

I love every moment of this interaction. 

This radio moment brings me back to life.

Happiness.

The song eventually floods my kitchen and my son asks to add it to his playlist 

(which mostly consists of thumping warehouse club music from the nineties and 

every version of Carol of the Bells).

He asks if he can make everyone toast for dinner and

we pull a stool up to the toaster.

This year my Valentine is learning how to wait 

thirty seconds 

until the heat of fresh toast warms the butter enough to spread easily. 

He is thrilled every time the bread “pops” 

My Valentine carefully serves his family with a proud disclaimer that

he, indeed, made their Valentine dinner.

Abandoned Shopping Carts & Skeleton Keys

Ben and I bought a house in our favorite neighborhood in the fall of 2019. It was a tiny red cottage that could pass as a camp cabin in the north woods. Instead, it happened to be settled in a tiny urban art district of our city. Inside, the plaster walls were cracking and coming down in chunks. Several gas leaks were discovered upon inspection. Floor tiles chipped as our shoes passed over them and there was an eery feeling one might fall through the stairway if not careful. But there were also treasures: a framed black and white photograph of Ronald Regan in the dining room, a beautiful crystal doorknob, a front door with a skeleton key positioned in the keyhole, and a 1950s painting of a lone cowboy.

Ben and I are typically drawn to houses in serious need of love. We tour a curious house simply because it piques our interest and we wonder how bad the interior can be. Over the past six years we have placed bids on a handful of older homes in our city. Homes with giant oak and elm trees and floors that gloriously rock and groan. Homes hosting quirky, dreamy little rooms with floor to ceiling windows that could make the best art studio or cozy attic libraries with their slanted ceilings. I adored a home once owned by a painter who had no less than 200 big, beautiful oil paintings overlapping his expansive bookshelves. This artist had died several years before and the house, his books and busts, paintings and plants just sat. Entering his home was a museum- it was beautiful and also existential. We considered homes that were gutted and then abandoned with no record of what taxes would be because it had once been property of the adjoining synagogue. We tried so hard to buy the home that had a bathroom without walls but a guest house that my sister-in-law was ready to rent for her gyrotonic studio. We know the homes next to Kate’s parents with their deep, urban forest backyard. We wander the neglected overgrown gardens that you can tell were once abundant in roses and wildflowers. These homes carry stories that I love to try to see. All of these homes were just a touch too expensive for the work that needed to be done. All of them needed to be gutted and restored to their intended glory. We put in bids we could afford, we dreamed for two days while we were considered, and then let the dream go when someone had more cash. We try not to drive by these houses too often to see what could have been.

Fall of 2019, however, we found ourselves agreeing that the little red cabin could be a once in a lifetime opportunity and our offer was accepted. At the time of purchase, several families we loved lived one or two blocks away from this little piece of property. Lake Michigan, sweet friends, shops/ restaurants/ ice cream, an el stop, and a Metra stop were in walking distance. In February 2020, an architect stamped his approval on plans for a stunning restoration that Ben had drawn and designed for the house. We could starting building by summer. We imagined so many things that this new home would provide. Our kids would be able to walk one block to Sesame Street or cross the street to the twinkle lit front porches of their friend’s homes. Just before we turned the stamped plans in to the city, Ben and I spent a weekend in the Fulton River District for my birthday. While strolling through streets way too hip and young for the likes of us, I asked if we could pause for  a minute and really assess whether we had the sincere energy for another home project while also raising young kids. We could submit the plans in March 2020. No big deal.

I don’t think I have to spell out the uncertainty and chaos that mid-March 2020 brought. Our lives, the lives of people we loved dearly, and the places we frequented all turned inside out along with the rest of the world. I think of the science experiment where you add pepper flakes to a shallow bowl of water and then drop the tiniest bit of dish soap in the center of the bowl to break the water’s surface tension. The pepper flakes rapidly repel and spread out away from the soap epicenter. What used to be a collection of like-matter explodes, splits, and the collective is no longer. Part of my 2020 experience included a big, unwanted, drop of soap touching down on our sweet spaces and people.

Lately, I have big feelings anytime I hear or read anyone’s account of February, March, April, May of 2020. I believe this is a delayed counter effect of the emotional shut down many of us needed to do in order to move through that season of the pandemic. Thawing from that experience took more time than expected. I noticed the first hint of a thaw in 2023 when my kid’s favorite podcast had a tiny listener ask how they produced the show in April of 2020. This simple question and answer brought me so much unexpected grief. I realize that I am certainly not alone in this painful after-processing and that our losses were mild compared to those that experienced significant illness, death, neglect, abuse, and loss of careers. I imagine there are others out there who find themselves blissfully driving along an interstate when suddenly something on the radio just brings the flood of emotions.

Like everything else, our home-building dream turned inside out and warped. It took a few years to completely accept. We sold the little red house exactly a year ago. (Another time you can ask me about the overgrown yet communally protected memorial pine tree, the ice shed that traveled throughout Wisconsin in the beginning of the 20th century but was now rotting in the backyard (also communally protected), the price of lumber in 2021, the brief hope we had in Ron, the petrified body of a flying squirrel in the bathtub, and the abandoned Valli Grocery shopping cart (that Bailey and her mother saw first!) in the driveway that finally signaled this dream was dead.) I also have a really, really good realtor recommendation! 

This past fall I expand our search to upstate New York and Vermont just for fun. Ben zeroes in on Rhinebeck, New York after enjoying a delicious falafel sandwich in their downtown followed by a breathtaking mountain view of the Catskills this past August. But our families are here in Chicago-land and we know that this is the exact time to be with them. And once in a while friends decide to stay and buy buildings themselves and they become family. Things will be different when we are twelve years older but right now, this is where we love and are loved.

So here we are: unmoved from the small house we gutted/ continue to restore with Ben’s talent and our hands. We groan at the amount of work that is still ahead if we choose to stay here for another ten years. We should win a Nobel Peace Prize for the wildlife that we allow to live in our roof. I realize that it is such a gift to have a home but I question if it is dull to stay in one space for so many years when my social media is filled with world-schooling, sleepy oceanside towns, and so many friends who have relocated to the mountains or other fascinating cities. 

But as I cool down from a Saturday morning run, I find our playwright neighbor out in the front yard with her aging white cat. “He’s too blind to be out here alone anymore. We now come out here together so I can supervise. He mostly sits and talks to the fern,” she explains, pulling her sweater around her tiny frame because it is cooler than we expected. Indeed the cat is meowing at the lone fern. It is in moments like these that the mundane becomes magical. I have hundreds of these stories from this street that we didn’t plan to stay on for more than a few years. I share in these tiny moments of ordinary beauty, knowing that one day I will look back with nostalgia at this very chapter of my life and want to spend a few moments here again. Participating. 

Color Study: in Progress

 

Preferably with Glitter

She greets me with enthusiasm and mispronounces my name every week. She loves to relay all the information she knows about me and repeats any phrases that sound extra melodic to her. The state of her thrilling topknot of curls communicates what kind of morning has had. I’m sure she could acquire the same information from the state of my bangs. She tells me about my daughter and son, adding extra syllables to their names that I secretly adore. She asks questions about my daughter and son before moving on to a new question. Do I like mushrooms? Do I eat them off the ground? I tell her I eat them, preferably grilled, with my pizza or cheeseburgers. I am sure this information will be repeated back to me next week. “Ms. Coke likes grilled mushrooms on her pizza and cheeseburgers. Not mushrooms from the ground.” And like the brilliant lyrical Susan Boynton Belly Button Book book I will echo in my head: No, never mushrooms from the ground.

It is sweet to have someone who holds fragmented details of your life in their thoughts. To have someone interested in the tiniest, mundane details and listens so thoroughly that she can repeat it back to you as though it were a fascinating fact. I hope she knows that I treasure fragmented conversations between us as well. This is what I love about my job- the daily interactions spanning over years with people I otherwise would never have any chance of meeting. I recently listened to an occupational therapy podcast that called for us to really dig into our client/ student/ patient’s dreams and values in a life worth living and work from this perspective. If I love nothing else, I love a good dream. 

I think of the 55+ year-old bachelor spending twenty minutes of our session finding his best angle for a selfie to post on a dating website and using his hemiplegic fingers to take the shot. Or the woman who wanted to pick back up writing her finance blog but first chose the most vibrant of colors to paint the fingernails of her hemiplegic hand. It was she who taught me about the concept of “the party nail”- a fingernail painted a different color than the others. “Preferably, with glitter.” Or the jeweler who was unable to form words but always came with tools and chemicals to clean the wedding rings of his therapy team. Or the woman who called me “Dr Pink-Purple” so affectionately that I still sometimes long to hear those words again. I have a thousand tiny treasured stories from tens of thousands interactions that I am so thankful to have been a part of. Every day I go to work, I get to encounter more. 

When I left my last job at the hospital, a colleague casually said to me “Now I’m going to be the one with the loudest laugh.” At first, I was taken aback and a little embarrassed. But as I thought about it, most of the time outpatient occupational therapists are one of the last stops in a medical journey. I have learned this journey can be incredibly dehumanizing- not because of the lack of an amazing medical staff but because it is such a system. A colleague used to joke about the Labor and Delivery unit always winning the “most satisfied customer” award every year. “Of course, they win- people get to come home with a baby and happy hormones. What do rehab patients get? A quad cane and a grab bar in their shower. At best.” So when my patients visited me and were open to dreaming, joking, and laughing, I loved meeting them right there. When they wanted a tiny party between functional hand exercises and practicing visual scanning strategies, I filled the Dixie cups with water and we drank to possibilities. And I guess we laughed pretty loud sometimes too. 

"There in the shade and hid from the sun we freed our minds and learned 
Our greatest reason for being here, our bodies moved and burned 
There on our mountain bed of leaves we learned life's reason why 
The people laugh and love and dream, they fight, they hate to die" 

- Mountain Bed, Jeff Tweedy/ Billy Bragg 

Life Lately... January 2024

Lately the air temperature over lake Michigan is tens of degrees colder than the water. It is negative thirteen degrees and a rare sliver of sun is minutes from sinking into night when my mom and I step onto the beach. Frozen craters of ice-sand shift and crumble beneath our boots but our eyes are set on the horizon. In the distance, celestial pillars of lavender-gray steam stretch upward from the water’s surface and connect to the low ceiling of clouds brooding above. This type of chemical architecture demands admiration and we stand in awe, wrapped to our watering eyes in scarves and hats, taking it in far beyond the minutes we stand there. Hours after the sun has set. (We will not see the sun again for days.)

Lately, it’s been too cold or icy to complete my daily running path. Instead, I spend evenings under a blanket with my son who has just cracked the phonics code. I enjoy listening to the intonation of his voice when he is feeling confident about the words he is reading and the way he giggles before the funny part has even occurred. Nearby I hear another set of giggles, belly-jiggling, merciless giggles as my daughter finishes another Garfield comic book. The word Arbuckle alone brings laughter to us all. Meanwhile, I continue to read poetry and Covenant of Water. On an extra cold morning, I read a Mary Oliver poem. First to myself, then to my daughter. I am moved by its lines for the rest of the day because lately, I've been thinking a lot about both the beauty and deterioration that the passing of time brings. I love to find these thoughts summed up by another- we are never alone. 

Lately, Mad Libs has taken over all areas of our lives. I love that my son calls it “Mad Lips” just like I used to do. I love to hear my daughter and her friends sit in a stairway for hours and laugh at how their silly verbs, adjectives, and nouns form ridiculous stories. On the car ride home, my daughter shares that she found a poem in one of their creations. Something about a violet cat that ate over the moon. It’s a fantastic image, I agree. Later that weekend, during the Sunday night church soup potluck, more of her friends gather in a circle, laying on their stomachs between the couches, madly scribbling, and bursting out into laughter. And in a light-flooded restaurant booth the next morning, my son carefully spells out a Mad Lib story for his 22-year-old cousin. Words are spelled phonetically and in all capitals which I savor in memory boxes.  He tries not to overuse the action word “fart” but they both do it anyway. 

Offscreen Voices & Backyard Beauties

An advantage of our quirky, partially subterranean dining room is the intimate view of our garden and a

fantastic view of the sky. We can often observe animals and birds much closer than if we were outside among them- sometimes mere inches from their little bodies. I plant wildflowers, poppies, and dwarf hydrangeas in this space adjacent to our wide windows to draw these furry and feathered friends closer. From the dining room table I can watch chipmunks scurry between the blooming coneflowers, praying mantises creep across thick bearded iris stems, goldfinches perch on wintered heads of sedum, and the red cardinal settle on the bare branches of the lilac tree. During breakfast in summer we see a monarch land on the hummingbird feeder and wonder aloud if that is the same monarch we kept safe in our home while she crystallized and transformed. Is she still lingering a few days more in our garden? 

I keep a space for videos of “things I see in my backyard” on my Instagram. They catalog little ghost prints of beauty witnessed right outside our dining room window. I revisit the fires that Ben made in the snow, Olivia and I drinking White Russians in the glow of the flames and giggling at the effort my then three-year-old son exerts to pull his seven-year-old sister on a sled. I can recapture the image of the time it snowed 24+ inches and I shoveled it all into a mountain so we could have our own sled hill. That same evening I recorded Ben, solo, climbing and sledding down that hill in the light of the Christmas lights we strung across everything living in the backyard. What truly pokes at my heart is not the recording of the possum passing under the hosta but the offscreen voices: the one-year-old babbling to himself “bub bub bub”, a tiny two-year-old voice commenting to a butterfly that “he’s so so so cute”, or the one-year-old narrating “big….. bug…. I seeeeee” as an enormous praying mantis on our window sill bends and extends one of her middle legs like a ballerina warming up at the barre.

I often think social media (specifically Instagram) is a literal manifestation of my favorite Jean-Paul Sartre quote: “I live in the past. I take everything that has happened to me and arrange it. From a distance like that, it doesn't do any harm, you'd almost let yourself be caught in it. Our whole story is fairly beautiful. I give it a few prods and it makes a whole string of perfect moments. Then I close my eyes and try to imagine that I'm still living inside it.” Sometimes I am very guilty of still living inside beautiful moments gone by.

But this morning it is a “real feel of -30” and Chicagoland schools have been canceled. It's hard to not be present in dramatic weather. I invite my friend’s children over for the morning and I listen to their voices playing as I type this now. What is more exciting to a child than a snow day/ frigid temp day? Even the homeschooled are excited as they suddenly have hours of their friends in the sunlight again. They are eating lunch in my quirky, sunken dining room and, for as long as I can remember, they have always asked me to read stories to them as they eat. (I imagine I will be devastated the day that they don’t.) So I read a collection of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories when all of a sudden they are aflutter and pointing outside at the lattice where the chandelier blows in the wind. 

“A woodpecker!” they exclaim excitedly. And there he is, quite close so we can get a very good look, with his striking red cap and white dotted wings, dribbling his bill into the wood beams that are normally nibbled by carpenter bees. We record, of course. I make sure to include the offscreen voices, munching of chips and happy sounds. I know these details will be just as important or more when I watch it one day in the future and remember that day school was called off and we watched a woodpecker dance back and forth between the lattice and beams.

---------

* An excerpt from a poem that I read today and captured all the things that are all the things I am feeling these past few months: 

Snow Geese by Mary Oliver

"Oh, to love what is lovely, and will not last!

What a task

to ask

of anything, or anyone,

yet it is not by the century or the year but by the hours."

read entire poem here 

Radiation Bliss

He has been my champion of the occupational therapy profession since I met him many years ago. “I love OT!” he used to shout every time I entered his classroom. It didn’t matter how many times I had already been there that day or if I was walking in on a quiet lesson being taught. The enthusiastic greeting was consistent and welcoming. His classmate would follow by broadcasting something like “The Obstacle Course is here” in a more monotone cadence. And that became my name- Obstacle Course- with their teacher finding the most joy in this career rebrand. I loved this class. I loved this group of six and seven year olds. I loved this teacher. I still love being called “obstacle course” every once in a while because we continue to find it amusing.

Years later I am standing in a kitchenette and my now-grown-friend is practicing microwaving pancakes for a small group of friends. He is careful and thoughtful, slowly lowering the plate into the microwave and punching in the numbers to heat them for a minute. As soon as the microwave begins to glow he starts to jump, occasionally twirling, and bombards me with anticipatory questions.


“Are they gonna love it?”

“Is this so nice that we are making them pancakes?”

“Is this the best party we've ever had?”

“Are you going to eat pancakes too?”


The microwave beeps and his jumping instantly halts. He slowly reaches into the microwave, adjusting the stack of pancakes and monitoring the temperature while being cautious not to burn himself. We decide to add 15 more seconds. The jumping and twirls begin again as the microwave lights up and hums.


“Do you think they will love the pancakes?”

“Isn’t this so nice of us?”

“I love my friends so much. Do you think they will love this?”


I ask my friend if he feels happy. Excited. He is losing his mind in these fifteen seconds and after this, I never use the microwave without recalling this all-consuming delight. Radiation bliss. We serve plates of steaming pancakes to his friends minutes later and they, being wonderful humans sticky with syrup lips and fingers, tell him how much they indeed love these pancakes. He is so full of joy he almost forgets to leave a few pancakes on the plate for himself. "These are the best pancakes I've ever had," he finally says between bites. I respond that they absolutely are. 

Gut Punch

A tree swing hangs long and low
She listens to wheels spin
Out, around and around,
Dune buggies creating grooves
In the gravel road that circles the trees
Race car captain hearts
Dusty smile after smile
We haven’t heard them laugh that hard
In weeks?
In months?
In years?



Late-July Saturday with nowhere to be
The fridge has been stocked since Tuesday
Lounging on wide front porches
Taking turns with all types of automobiles
We are between significant departures
The second wave that followed the first
Unseen just right now, just like the last
We didn’t know then what we know now
Maybe we can cook together this fall, he said.
Dreaming of homemade empanadas & dumplings to share



My daughter swings beneath the tree minutes before-
Her legs stretch out toward the pond that absorbs
reflections of cumulus creations from above
Her toes clap
Bursting bubbles
In a picture, I catch our dispatched orbs
The ones we blew mercilessly into
the swing’s pendulum path



I joke with Antonio many months later
My pandemic toddler now believes
All vacations come equipped with
Miniature private islands hosting three-story tree houses
Airborn four wheelers
Fishing buddies and
Birthday cake for thirty



From the porch I record
a trail of children running
Backlit by a setting sun
My son second to youngest
Chasing ten paces behind
Right arm pumping as they cross
The narrow grass bar between dots of ponds
I love to watch them move across the property
Always running, always somewhere exciting to be


A tire swing hangs empty and quiet
He listens to the gravel that shouts
from between my teeth
embedded in my palms
Lateral ligament torn
Wheels- now horizontal- still spinning
As I count children, scanning the ponds
Looking for ripples of disruption
Finding none
We haven’t seen them run so far
In weeks?
In months?
In years.