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... 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. 

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

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

 

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. 

Woodstock, NY

We arrive in Woodstock a few hours past sunset. Just in time for a spectacular Windshield Special Feature Show starring cascading snow flurries and dark mountain roads. Our headlights illuminate a vignette of tall bare trees and our car slowly follows a narrow snowy path that leads through them. It is a cinematic shot- horror or romantic comedy, I am uncertain which but I feel I might pass out from beauty. Happiness. Longing for more. The heavenly smell of pine trees, the familiar cadence of my niece's voice, and an excited wiggling pup greet us as we exit the car into a snow-covered forest. Inside the cabin, our family explores strange nooks, purple refrigerators, fourth-story observatories, and hot dog art while Rachel spoons out a chili that has been simmering and waiting for our evening arrival. Hours later, after others have arrived and the kids are in bed, Ben and I enjoy moments in a hot tub that also has been simmering and waiting for our arrival. Snowflakes melt on our bare shoulders, chrystals of coolness that perfectly offset the warmth of our bodies below the waterline. This celestial snowscape can spin my senses when I gaze up, a snow galaxy rushing toward our faces like a view I imagine from the captain’s chair of the Starship Enterprise. 

Fog covers the mountain and hovers over snow-packed earth the next morning. This delightful disorientation is welcome- to be briefly alone and have minimal bearings to location. The dog, my children, and my niece join me in this Catskill wonderland and we explore. A tiny brook still moves through its in-ground groove and my son throws snowballs that crack a fragile sheet of ice covering a connected pond. In the meadow we build a snowman, our voices echoing and then hushed by blankets of snow. We are hidden away in this fog and insulated by snow- the dog bounds in and out of our periphery with my daughter running behind her in rain boots. 

This scene continues for days- my daughter and the dog, my niece nearby, my son bouncing, throwing, and building- even as the November sun burns off the fog and begins to melt the snow in town. The view of the steaming Hudson River at sunset, the waterfall ravines and icy paths, the chess and checker games that my daughter delights in practicing with her cousins on Thanksgiving Day, the hike with the two Swedish expresso-colored labradoodles that bound and splash through the mud puddles ahead of our crew, the in-town bookshop and the street corner of a very old town where my son turns to us and announces his tooth is ready to fall out. And it does. Right there on our stroll. So I run back to my car to grab a tissue to stop the bleeding. We all share a delicious fig tart minutes later to celebrate lost teeth, beautiful places, being alive together, and a larger-than-life Connect Four game. Always the dog and my daughter dashing in and out of the fringe. (Except at the quick tour of the alpaca farm, for obvious reasons). 

But the moon. My father-in-law was the wanna-be-astronomer this year who suggested packing the telescope. I don’t think we fully understood the gift of the cabin’s tower until our final night- all windows, vaulted ceilings, and an elevation of four stories (surely significantly closer to the heavens than the meadow!). There is something extra momentous about having to climb a ladder and lift a heavy wooden hatch door in the ceiling to reach a telescope. We never would have seen the moon had the fog and the snow stayed- as much as I desired to stay insulated and unfindable. Almost too bright to look at, the full moon with all her elevated and depressed surfaces, like the gentle impact from bubbles popping on a thin layer of snow. Tectonic bleeps and bloops. I watch the silhouettes of my son and daughter, niece and nephew as they peek into the eyepiece of the telescope. My son's eyelashes press and bend against the lens- a boy's first mapping of stars and planets.

“It’s so bright!” They squint and momentarily look away from the enlarged pock-marked surface, pupils panicking and adjusting. But the moon is always there. As we fall asleep facing westward windows in New York and Chicago and wherever we find ourselves. Viewable, at some point, by every human being on this planet- the same moon, sometimes in different forms or brilliance. It is present beyond the fog and the snowstorms and dreary days. For me, a reminder of a bigger, even more beautiful, and complex existence. But for now the moon. Out of wonder or the need for counsel and comfort, we will always return our gaze and reposition to look outward again- lashes bending.

******

*Fun Resource: I loved listening to this New Yorker Poetry Podcast & Bianca Stone's poem "What's Poetry Like?" Listen here. 

** I read the book "Dog Years" by Mark Doty while on our trip and highlighted this beautiful snippet describing Doty walking with his two large dogs and how it anchored him after the death of his partner. I found this especially beautiful after spending an afternoon watching a group of Swedish men hike with their two giant Labradoodles. 

"Walking is an affirmation of physical life. We're in the world, we're breathing, we're together. I move in a straight line, more or less, along the paths, and sometimes the dogs are right in front of me or beside me, but more often, they are threading around the path, padding the woods or thickets or marsh on either side of me. I begin to conceive of us as one extended consciousness, reaching out in different directions, sensing, our bodies making a braided trail but our awareness overlapping. That helps, just now, when a self seems fragile, erasable. With the two of them, I'm joined  to something else, perception expanded, not just stuck there in the world in my own bereft, perishable, limited body." 

On Turning Ten

My daughter spends the last days of her single-digit-years kayaking among dreamy domes of vibrant lime green mountain moss in Vermont. Small citrus shades of tufts cling to rock and weathered wooden bridges, activating happy sensory circuits as our bare feet brush against their softness. Down by the pond, my daughter wades into its bank, mud squishing to form a fleeting footstep. She spends hours scouting for the tiniest toads and crawfish with her dad and brother. 

I find a reading nook between the pond and a delicious babbling brook. I enjoy how the color schemes of my stack of books blend so beautifully with those limelight green and earthy browns. Solitude gives me a moment to notice how the pond reflects pine trees and the enormous, cumulus clouds so vividly that it almost tips my reality upside-down. Sun sparkles dance on the floor of this magical space as an afternoon breeze settles in. 

I wish I could stir all these happy ingredients into a lotion that I can reapply daily for the rest of my life. Or package this particular color wheel into a tube of paint so I can spread it across a canvas when hard days arrive. Instead, I absorb this moment through all my senses and tenderly tuck it deep into my brain matter as the precious tiny gift that it is. Just as I have been doing these past ten years with my daughter, whose hair used to turn translucent in the sunlight.

People love to tell new mothers that childhood goes by in a blink of an eye. I always nod, knowingly. Growing up, my parents called me "Little Busia". Little Grandma. I have always been keenly aware of the bittersweet passing of time. The only remedy I know is to find occasional moments to slow down and soak in life's moments as best as I am able. I appreciated Albert Lee’s words of wisdom that he shared with Ben after the birth of our daughter. “Each stage is so unique and you think you will be devastated when she grows out of it until you realize the next stage is pretty awesome too.” 

We arrive the next day in Boston and, after a rather competitive game of family Uno in the public garden, my daughter turns ten. Standing in Brittany’s apartment in the South End neighborhood, she confesses she feels sad to say goodbye to nine. Brittany, who is just as close in age to my daughter as she is to mine, nods empathetically. “Nine is a great prime number.” My daughter sighs and they share a moment of sadness together. There are sheets of rain pouring onto the streets of Boston when my husband invites our daughter to walk to the nearest coffee and donut shop for a mini birthday date. I remember how vulnerable my heart felt when I first held this baby girl. I thought I had endured big heartbreak before but never had I experienced the sheer amount of power that one little human being could command on whether or not my heart stayed unified or not. For the rest of my life. If there is any comfort in loving someone so deeply, it is knowing that someone else in this world loves her just as much. 

We head to the ocean with Brittany when the date is done- Sandwich, Barnstable, Provincetown. The words “Hey Brittany!” become the anthem of the weekend as our five-year-old son begs for her attention. There are late-night walk-up ice cream counters and carryout dinners sitting beside a tumultuous Atlantic ocean. On a calmer day, Brittany, my daughter, and I spend hours wading through entire seaside ecosystems and tidepools. My son experiences the ocean tides for the first time, jumping, leaping, getting mouthfuls of salt water, sputtering, and spitting. 

I have been dreaming of getting in our car and driving to the ocean since April 2020. It is only fitting that Brittany is here. Brittany, who spent so many years in our living room watching my daughter learn to speak, read, and wonder aloud. Brittany, who bought my daughter women in science t-shirts featuring Madame Curie and Mae Jemison. Who gifted kids books on Quantum Physics, folktales from around the world, and (my favorite) roadkill science. Brittany who ate her dinners of noodles while we met weekly if not multiple times weekly on Zoom throughout March-April-May 2020. When summer 2020 came it was Brittany laying down her blanket in our backyard, on the beach, Garden Park, Wicker Park and joining us for socially distanced dinners where I shared my strong desire to drive to the ocean. Brittany who supplied the families in our bible study with no less than 150 free Covid test kits. Brittany who loves our family so faithfully.

Our east coast travels conclude in the Hudson Valley. On a Sunday evening, we wave goodbye to Brittany as her ferry departs from Provincetown for Boston. On a Monday we are in the Catskills, meeting our niece Mayerli in front of her dorm room. Resourceful, spirited, beautiful, twenty years young- she immediately wraps her arms around her cousins. She arrived early to school for cross-country practice and in this mostly empty building we share our opinions on her dorm furniture and choosing the best dorm room according to capacity for sunlight. She is vibrant in this new home and we laugh as she explains the multiple colorful band-aids patched over her knees. Apparently, her dorm keycard isn’t working and she has to crawl through her dorm window every time she wishes to enter the building. I take a video of her setting up a chair she has hidden in the bushes and then of her hoisting herself up through the lead glass windows. I send it to her mother who will also laugh and groan.

In this moment I gain brief clarity about what I can dream for my daughter over the next ten years. These are the years to build stamina, grit, creative problem-solving, and faithfulness. To continue encouraging wonder and exploration. To provide more invitations to walk to a coffee shop in the rain in new cities, spend more time wading through mud and tidepools in the name of curiousity, read more fairytales, advocate for what you need (maybe it is sunlight!), board ferries that pull us away from the familiar, and teach how to climb in through windows when the door isn’t an option (metaphorically and literally). We wave goodbye to Mayerli the same way we waved to Brittany: knowing that she is thriving in the process of growing.

** Fun Resource: Storybook House on Wright Mountain, Vermont

Better than Sesame Street

Sense of place is often my favorite part of a story. I love it when the setting of a story becomes its own character. For example, I don’t remember much about the movie Mulholland Drive but I do remember loving the city lights of Los Angeles and how the city became a strange, breathing, living thing that kept me unsettled but also transfixed.  Or the book Heaven’s Coast by poet Mark Doty which highlights Boston and Provincetown as major characters both in heartbreak and healing. Or anytime Jhumpa Lahiri places a short story in Boston or the bible refers to "the wilderness". And what would Gilmore Girls be without the main star, Stars Hollow?

In my own life, I think of my middle school connection with a forest preserve where our cross-country team would practice in autumn. I can still feel the clickiness of my Walkman as I started my mixtape and the way the machine popped in my hand when the tape ended abruptly. I still find comfort when I recall sitting in my dear friend’s papasan chair in her first apartment located in Lincoln Park and the way she loved to cook something from the recipe book of Dr Andrew Weil while I read the trilogy of Griffin and Sabine from her library. I can visualize the layout of so many people’s homes, the direction of light that came from different lamps and windows, the smells, the way I feel the barometric pressure either drop or rise when I enter, the texture of their rugs or furniture. The kitchen chairs that were covered in fabric at my childhood friend’s home- the ones that spun around so fast and we would sit with Hostess cupcakes and spin and spin. 

My husband’s parents own a three-flat that I call Sesame Street. At a very special time, two sets of our friends rented out two of their flats. There was an evening that Ben and I dropped by with our three-year-old daughter to visit. We found his parents hanging out on the front porch steps and we began chatting there. Suddenly, a window from the second story was tossed open and Brady joined in the conversation, his upper body hanging out the window for a better view. The couple in the garden apartment opened their front door letting their three-year-old daughter dash out to join mine on a tiny patch of grass. Bailey & Kevin leaned against the brick exterior and we all chatted in these casual spaces until the cicadas started to sing. It was a moment that I knew made my soul so joyful but was not going to last forever. My job was simply to savor. The theatrical positioning of our bodies reminded me of a 1980s Sesame Street scene. Hence, the name Sesame Street continued. 

There was also a fun season in Ben and my life where we hosted a small group for our church every Monday evening. I worked a ten-hour shift on Mondays in that same season and would often arrive home to greet my husband and two-year-old daughter along with twenty to thirty people who were already settling into my living room. This sounds exhausting when I write it out now but we loved providing a space to congregate for Northwestern students, young couples and families, and anyone willing to join the chaos. I enjoyed coming home and hearing the distinct voices of people I cherished. Our six years of hosting ended quite suddenly with the pandemic but one evening, over Zoom, our friend Josh confessed that he missed our kitchen and could vividly imagine the overhead lighting and how it made him feel so cozy in our home. This made my heart sing: someone else carried the sense of place that our home provided.

As with all things in life, nothing stays the same. Half the battle in life is recognizing that a place of comfort or beauty or the people within those spaces can be fleeting. It is only then that you can take a moment to be thankful for and savor it. In an instant, places can be torn away, burned down, left behind, overtaken, lost, vacated, or taken from us. Lake Michigan water levels rose significantly in the spring and summer of 2020. Ben and I were taking a drive as we often did during the early pandemic and we saw our favorite beaches were completely covered in water. It was as if they never existed. We can carry treasured places in our memories and hearts if we allow them the space. What a privilege having a home or welcome space can be, especially when there are so many displaced people and unsafe spaces. When your town, city, or country itself is in turmoil. My brain is wired to constantly be aware that this happens every day and could happen to anyone, anywhere. But this is also when I lean on the belief that what lies here on earth is not my final home. I appreciated a quote from Author Jen Pollock who writes, “In the beginning of time, God made a home for his people and at the end of time God will make a home for us.” She goes on to point out that our first home was in a garden, and our last home will be in a city. Better than Sesame Street.

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* Postcards by Bob Eckstein found from The Wasteshed

** Fun resource: YOU! I would love to hear what your favorite space is :)

I'll Write You a Letter Tomorrow

Little Denise sits on the window ledge above my kitchen sink. She takes form in a wide-mouthed mason jar among tiny green propagation clippings. Her composition consists of 50 grams water, 50 grams flour, and 100 grams sourdough starter that Big Denise dropped off on a Sunday afternoon. I barely make bread with Little Denise.

Instead, I love to watch her breath- bubbles climbing the sides of the mason jar and then settling back down by evening. I love her remnants that stick like lace to the jar’s interior, evidence that she grew until she couldn’t anymore. I love her constancy, like tides rising and falling. I marvel at her breathwork like I marvel at the plastic gallon of milk which pumps like a heart, its sides expanding and contracting rhythmically when I pour its spoiled contents down my sink drain. Apparently, I create and measure body vitals in the form of food containers these days. Breath. Heartbeat. Hunger. I feed Little Denise daily. She is like a new pet and I feel stupidly anxious that I will fail her and she will stop rising to the top of the jar. Stop breathing. I confess my new anxiety to a small group of women on a Monday evening.

“Sourdough in 2022? That was so 2020,” Danielle jokes. And we laugh because it’s true. Because it is still so tender to think about that season. Because I might start sobbing if we don’t laugh. Or that I won't cry at all. The latter has become my norm since double masking while moving around masses of tiny, sweet bodies that I continued to work with in person while much of our community was still isolated. Singing, dancing, playing, practicing handwriting, and trying to smile extra big with my eyes since no one saw the lower half of my face for a year and it's hard to build rapport with smalls when they can't see you are smiling. 

But even before that. The day before our state asked us to stay in our homes for two weeks, my daughter joined her kindergarten friends at Lia’s home for a birthday party. My two-year-old son sat on the window sill with Lia’s sweet older brothers and we watched these little six-year-old girls giggle and hug with their freshly painted faces. They were small tigers and butterflies moving around the house with so much joy. And if you knew my daughter’s shyness leading up to that year, you would know how beautiful it was to see her moving so confidently and linking arms with her classmates. Our family stayed late, joined Lia’s family for dinner, and then walked home with my son sitting up on Ben’s shoulders under a bright moon. I remember looking up at him and seeing the moon atop his head like a crown. “See you in two weeks,” were probably our parting words with Lia’s family as we exited through the garage. I still feel the breath knocked out of me when I recall this day and all the things we knew and did not know at that moment.

It is now autumn of 2023. Little Denise died of starvation a year ago. As did Little Cathy, her replacement. Perhaps I shouldn’t name my sourdough starters after friends anymore. It only adds guilt to the smell of spoiled starter. I am restless in this season and sense the signs of misalignment when I cannot stop running. The cool, dark Tuesday evening covers me and I am obsessed with a song I don’t remember listening to very often in the 90s but is now my nostalgic poster song for those high school years that are suddenly under review after a dream I had in August. I listen to this song all four miles of this particular run, pondering and working through all the things I could have done differently, better, and kinder at the turn of the century. The tension of life seems to involve making decisions in individual moments where we both know and don’t know things. We try to do the best we can with what we know. Sometimes we make choices that are painful to recall. We just didn't know then what we know now. “Can’t Hardly Wait” seems to be a portal for these ruminations but what I most appreciate as I listen to this song on repeat, is when the horns quit for a beat and there is absolute silence. The only thing I hear in that perfect pause is the exhale of breath. Mine.

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“I remember me and all the little things that make up a memory

Like she said she loved to watch me sleep

Like she said

"It's the breathing, it's the breathing in and out and in and..." 

- Have You Seen Me Lately, The Counting Crows

A band I once loved and never listened to again

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*Photo: Little Denise outgrowing her mason jar

** Fun resource: My end of my Century Playlist

Tiny Flower Farm Dream

 

Many summers ago I enjoyed visiting the homes of people who lived along the northern Atlantic seaside. Their homes included a converted barn on a stretch of green meadow thriving on salty air, a house with simple wooden beams whose hillside location allowed for a grand, uninterrupted view of the Atlantic Ocean, and an artist’s studio docked at the edge of a harbor next to a fishing boat. We spent one day with a woman who collected data on the migration of birds, taking a ferry together to an island where we counted endangered birds. I don’t remember much about her home but I do remember the warmth of her small wooden dining room table and a colorful cloth she laid across it for dinner. She sent us out into her meadow with scissors and told us to cut and arrange the flowers for the evening. Her seaside wildflowers in early August were stunning and we collected a variety in the mason jar she provided. 

I wish I could remember so much more but it was the feeling of the evening, among the warmth of her small home with the bursting jar of flowers that I cherish so deeply in my bones. So when we bought a home of our own, I planted flowers for cutting. And when we had children old enough to use scissors, I sent them out into the garden with a jar. This Monday morning we are trying to establish our homeschool rhythm and I’ve been trying to stay prompt, starting at 9:00. But the cicadas are making their fabulous noises and the sun is out but it is cool and most September-ish. So I send them out to the garden with scissors instead of pulling out the workbooks. My daughter comes in with her jar and an unexpected arrangement of flowers. I thought she’d pick from the abundant dahlias and zinnias but instead has chosen some of the white-flowering weeds, sedum, peach-colored berries (are those even from my yard?), and dusty miller. “It represents all the seasons!” Isn’t that just the best way to appreciate beauty? To see what another beholds, be surprised and curious, and then center it on the dining room table for the rest of the day to wonder at another's perception of the world.  

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* Picture: Flowers from my yard

**Fun resource dive: Blossom and Branch Micro Farming Videos

Do people even read Blogs anymore?

I stopped writing regularly ten years ago when a baby girl with a century-old soul entered my life. I had no brain space to recall the plot of the book I had been working on before she arrived. I also had no words for the bursting love I felt toward this squishy smoosh who loved to question the natural world like a tiny philosopher. I had to answer important questions about where our spirits live before we are born. "Are we all in a pile somewhere?" We had to incorporate an imaginary dog named "Ketchup" into our dinner routine if eating it was going to be successful. We got to teach this little brain to read so she could research her own answers since she found Ben and my answers inadequate and sometimes unanswered. "Do they put little pieces of the moon into flashlights so that they glow?" Like most parents, we lived in the juxtaposition of being utterly in love and exhausted. 

There were a few months when my daughter was a toddler that I tried to reclaim the joy of writing stories again. A few friends and I started a writing group where we discussed plot twists, character development, and strategies to fit more writing into our lives. Bailey wrote the most clever and comical observation about the cult-following of Wildbird baby carrier.  Meanwhile, our gang of two-year-old daughters donned babushkas and strands of plastic pearls, pushing pink plastic shopping carts around the dining room table. During this time I did write some prose on co-sleeping, observations on counting with a toddler (and the insistence that four did not exist), and other topics that a tiny niche of people would maybe find interesting at a very specific time. But isn’t that the beauty of personal narrative and writing simply because you love to write? These are the writings I hold most dear to my heart. These were the type of writings that I sought out at night while nursing my second baby in the glow of my phone screen when I felt so tired, so over-touched, and like I was the only person awake in the city. Words of other mothers were a tiny emotional lifeline in the stillness of two a.m.

It was a year before I became pregnant with the second squishy baby when I started acrylic painting thanks to Amanda Evanston. Amanda lived in my Sesame Street neighborhood (a magical place at that time of my life) and every day, twice a day, I parked my car in front of Amanda’s home so I could drop off and pick up my daughter from childcare. One summer Amanda covered her garage in the most vibrant paintings of wildflowers.  I became obsessed with the process of painting flowers and landscapes using "chaos layers". This was the creative outlet that kept me connected to hope when I spent nine months with pre-partum depression. Painting was a gooey and spectacular outlet that required just enough headspace that I could muster. I am eternally grateful for Amanda’s instruction, encouragement, and beauty during this time of my life. I am so thankful we became friends in the process. 

But words. Words are what I fall back on for memories. Encouragement. Understanding. Knowledge. Reflection. Beauty. Stories. Stories are groupings of meaningful words that help us connect. Stories are the reason we can grow in empathy. Share in an otherwise unfamiliar perspective. Find the bittersweet beauty, heartache, injustice, pain, tenderness, redemption, hope, and just general human-ness that either levels us to the ground or grows us. Stories are what I look for in myself, a situation, others, and in healing. Stories reveal how big, glorious, and faithful God is and stories can help us do better/ do best when really hard things happen. 

I do not believe this world needs the noise of more words in 2023. Truth: no one needs to hear my voice or musings. There is nothing special here. But then I think of the morning I found out I was pregnant. It was a little unexpected and I felt stunned. I remember instinctively falling back on what was routine and comforting. I turned on my favorite radio station and then poured through the words of a blog, Hulaseventy, that I had followed since undergraduate college. I found immense comfort and even excitement while reading this amazing artist-mom's stories about herself in the context of her family. Her words were an unknown lifeline that she had thrown out into the world years before but there I was in 2013 eating them up like a comfort food.

So why bother to write when the world could probably use more silence and stillness? A friend from many years ago encouraged me to keep writing so that my daughter could see me prioritizing a passion. I also write to preserve little landscapes of my life and the people I am so fortunate to spend time with. Going back to the previous blog posts I strung together between 2001-2013 can be super cringey but it is also so sweet. It is there that I can live delicious moments twice: recorded conversations that make me giggle or think deeply, observations of my niece and nephew when they were small (and are now in their twenties!), or the rewarding nature of my job detailed in a story form. It can also reveal the reality of a spectrum of emotions, mistakes, or things unseen at the time but obvious now.  So.... Who wants to read the stories of a not-super-exciting and introverted mind? Who reads blogs anymore? If no one else, I do.

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*Photo: Amanda Evanston's garage has been the backdrop of our Halloween pictures since 2017

** Fun resource Dive: The Secret Garden painting class. Worth every penny.