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

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. 

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.

Midnight Highway (thoughts on running)

 

Midnight Highway

(Thoughts on running)

Saturday mornings 

With Melissa and her Wire Fox Terrier Miko 

Trotting, talking, scuttling along the perimeter  

Of her-tree lined Chicago neighborhood

Just off the Francisco brown line train stop

Or along the lakefront from Lee Street to Noyes

Thirteen-fourteen minute mile times

With occasional indulgent stops for community gardens or pie 

Two thirty-something-year-old girls
eventually sharing a first pregnancy together

Attempt to run and then trot then stroll 

Two old friends discussing pelvic pain, gestational diabetic diets, and baby registries

getting comments from strangers on our adorable pregnant pairing

An unexpected and early birth of my first child occurs hours after

Strolling with Melissa along the lake followed by

a bench view of the water for an hour, 

Two round-bellied friends and an August morning breeze

No better way would I have spent the hours before delivering

A six-pound baby girl

Running-trotting-jogging-shuffling 

A self-regulation tool I have used in almost all life transitions

Angst, sadness, heartbreak, or the need to ponder life circumstances and change

all seem to launch me from zero to multiple miles 

Six miles around the fields of West Lafayette 

for the blurred seasons of winter and spring 2000

Trying to stimulate my capillary system in an effort 

to rebuild and repair the biggest broken heart or

Lunchtime jaunts along the Mississippi with Lisa 

As we name origins and insertions of muscle groups in preparation for 

Our anatomical exams or 

The day I transferred to Northwestern University and ran 

To Lake Michigan before even one box was unpacked

(tangible happiness I had not encountered since 

previously mentioned broken heart almost two years prior) or 

Training for a half marathon with Elizabeth

after the move from St Paul back to Chicago and

transition from being single to being married and

becoming an occupational therapist facilitating neural healing or

Senior year of high school 

Friday nights around and around an indoor track with Megan 

Dreaming beautiful faulty vision boards for our future

not realizing we had been running all that time and

eventually coining the term “midnight highway” for that transformation where your 

breath 

Just

floats 

steadily, easily, expanding and contracting above two legs

Lightly treading, carrying, propelling a body forward

Twenty-four years later the midnight highway finds me on an elevated track

Overlooking a half court where my five-year-old son kicks a soccer ball

Melissa once likened him to a bouncy ball 

I cannot unsee this comparison

his movements more vertical than lateral

and, like me, his big feelings more vertical than lateral

This track located above my son's Sunday morning soccer class

helps meet my sudden compulsion to run 3-4-5 miles as often as possible

My son smiles and waves up at me as

Something about when a baby turns five

The freedoms and the growing up-ness

The letting go of being a mama to a baby-toddler-preschooler

The ability to return and inspect one's own life

I ponder the root of this blindside angst and

hyperawareness of transition

That my body increasingly intuits by

The need to feel air moving past my body

The desire to feel both the limits and rhythm of my slow stride 

The search for the beauty of steady breath

Which I envision hovering above my body like the dot of a lowercase i 

Or the image of the holy spirit floating above the apostles' in my daughter’s illustrated storybook bible

Or the wheels of an airplane as they just lift off the tarmac 

Until I enter the space of the night highway

Effortless propulsion forward wrapped within a tunnel of unknown 

Thoughts and sensory flooding, everything external disappears

Alone with a secure and steady breath 

It will carry me through

Stretching toward the clarity of dawn

* Picture: Francisco El platform is so beautiful (photo: July 2023)

** Fun resource: How to Write One Song by Jeff Tweedy.

*** Running playlist: My Autumn 2023 Running Playlist

Morning Archimedes

 

Morning Archimedes

Physical science at the dining room table occurs

Among leftover breakfast bowls and

Frazzled fuzz-balls of wool.

Textile projects will grow throughout the week

(as they always do).

In an attempt to clear a space

We trace a single woolen thread that attaches

to the beginnings of a scarf created 

for Bella (the stuffed dog) who somehow always seems to get swept up 

behind my bedroom door.

Fulcrums, effort, and levers,

Examples of a simple machine created with Legos, 

Lay beside thoughtfully chosen gourds that resemble

arched-necked swans and creeping dragons.

The simplest October decor.

My own attempt at self-care-  oil painting-

in that short time between a Sunday morning 

run & late afternoon church service 

Are now beautiful clutter that contribute

To a Monday morning mess.

Seeking redemption of previous academic failures

(At least I’m not facilitating instruction on chemistry.)

(Yet.) 

We open books promising exploration 

Of How Machines Work  and

The Way Things Work 

My five-year-old son is particularly struck

by a quote from Archimedes

“Give me a lever long enough 

And a fulcrum which to place it, and I shall move the world” 

On a whiteboard he draws out the scenario 

Using the moon as a fulcrum

And a lever 10 million light-years in length.

We imagine a small boy as he walks out to the end of this plank

Out into the universe, just to the very edge

He jumps just once.

Imagine.

* Picture: October's craft pile

** Fun Resource 1: We are loving our science curriculum this fall: Blossom & Root Level Four

*** Fun Resource 2: Why Does God Keep Making Poets by Tish Harrison Warren NYTimes 

"One reason I think we keep making poetry is because we are ourselves poems. There’s a verse in the Bible (Ephesians 2:10) in which we are described as the “handiwork of God.” But it’s the same Greek root that goes into the word “poetry.” It means “a made thing.” A more literal translation is that we are, as human beings, the poems of God. So we keep making poetry because we are ourselves poems.

Allagash White

I remember her barefoot with the squishiest legs 

Dangling over the pier

Toes barely touching the water

My smallest love, sitting there in the quiet of a sleepy town in September 

Middle of Maine

Middle of the week 

Lakeside, mountainside

In a video I capture her production of language- all cheeks & cadence-

She is noticing the pier that moves

Up and Down on the gentle laps of water

“It's like the people,” she says

And begins to sing

The people on the bus go up and down

She turns to look at me

Light pink glasses framing a devoted gaze

Two square chiclet front teeth 

Freshly three years old

I revisit this video over and over

The way her voice sounds when she says “people” 

I tell every new mother to take all the videos

Catch that tiny voice

The way each word is so intentionally strung together

Syllables pronounced with definition

Sentence structure concrete and singular 

like every word is sliding a counter on a abacus

I sometimes live in these Maine moments

Morning Kayaks 

Mist on the water, feet splashing

Collecting fallen birch bark on the steep trail 

leading us from the house to the pier

Miss Rumphius by the fireplace

Allagash White in the evenings 

The darkness of night when we tried to convince her to gaze upward

Searching out for stars 

Grasping for glory

She refused

Because she was three

Years later there is June

Two-year-old daughter of a friend

Her voice is all cheeks & cadence 

Every word so articulate and intentionally expressed 

I hold her on my hip and I watch her 

cheeks inflate as she narrates

The actions of her older sister, my daughter, 

And a miniature horse named Miss Mouse

There is no lake but just a stream of sudsy hose water

That trickles past my feet as I snuggle 

Happy that I can live 

in my memory of the middle of Maine right here

------------

* Picture Hancock, Maine September 2016 

** Actual pier sat in Rangely, Maine

*** Fun resource: Allagash is a Maine brewery and Allagash White continues to be one of my favorite drinks because of this very week