Quiet Space

I didn’t go to the protest yesterday because I had to work a shift at the library. I did drive by, though. A good two thousand people turned out in our neighborhood. The crowd stretched down to my street. My husband was one of the people. He was waving the American flag. 

The library was quiet when I got there. I know what you’re thinking. Isn’t the library always quiet? I mean, it is. But not in the old shushy way it used to be when I was a kid a million years ago. Now we’re a meeting place. We host community programs and school visits and lectures and English conversation classes. Patrons do work on the computers. Tutors tutor their students. Toddlers screech and laugh and throw tantrums. 

Every once in a while, a parent will warn their kid to be quiet, and I enjoy piping up to say, It’s okay. This isn’t a quiet space. You can talk. 

What’s quiet about the library is there’s never any background music blaring. Never any ads. No one ever tracks you or tries to sell you something. If you want to sit there all day, feel free. We have decent bathrooms and drinking fountains and comfy chairs. Also, if you want book recommendations, come up to the desk and I will give you some.

Everyone, no matter what their income level or ethnic background or immigration status, can check out a book. Or one hundred books. When I was a little girl, the library was my favorite place. I walked there with my mother and younger brothers. This was after my father died, and we didn’t have a car. The trip was about a mile and took us up a big hill and through a lovely, sprawling public park. 

The youth librarian was friendly and kind. She helped me pick out books, and after getting to know my reading taste, she’d have books chosen and waiting for me. Eight or ten, which is about all I could carry home. When I was eight, my mother remarried. We moved into a nice house. We owned a car. We were doing okay on the surface. But not far under the surface things were not good. Still, I had the library. 

I walked up the hill and through the park by myself. I read my way through the youth department. When I was eleven, I won a prize in the summer reading program, and the librarian took a picture of me holding a book and sitting formally in front of the big windows. In the photo I look somehow both shell-shocked and grateful. 

It is not an exaggeration to say that books saved my life, that the library did. 

I worked there all afternoon, missing the second protest in the city, the big one downtown. My husband waved the flag at that one too. I know why so many people were gathering. Fear. Anger. A desperate need to speak out against corruption in this administration, the creeping or already crept over authoritarianism, the cruelty. 

A reminder too that there are so many of us who care about what we are about to lose. Public schools and National Parks. Public Health and scientific research. And libraries, although, I suspect they are far down on many people’s lists of institutions worth fighting for. 

Meanwhile, I checked in books and checked them out. Chatted with a stranger about their favorite movie. Helped someone who was fiddling with a job application. Found the perfect book for a little girl and put it into her hands. 

  

First protest, 2014, to save school libraries, Art, and Music

Me, age eleven, in my quiet space, my happy place

Off the Map

We were going to take a plane from Rome to Paris but a friend suggested we take a train. This way we could really see the countryside. We could split the trip in two parts: up to Turin in Northern Italy, and the next day, through the Alps and on into Paris. So, that’s what we did. 

On the train we sat at a table facing each other, my husband and I, and our daughter and son-in-law. His parents live in Paris, which was why we were heading there, and he was hands down, the best person you could have in your corner on a trip like this. Equal parts tour guide, translator, ticket purchaser, restaurant-picker-outer and food orderer, and interpreter of French cold medicines. 

Also, he brought me coffee every morning and would serve it accompanied by a little biscuit that’s supposedly for digestion. The “biscuit” is a cookie with a chocolate glaze and you dip it into your coffee and the chocolate melts, and now I’m pretty much spoiled for life.  

But back to the train ride. The train travels 180 miles an hour and you hardly feel it. The Alps come looming up and then blur past. I was reading a novel called Rodham on my phone. The book is a fictionalized reimagining of a young Hillary Clinton before she met Bill and their early time in grad school getting to know each other and falling in love, but then suddenly, halfway through the book, she dumps him, and then it’s an alternate reality that turns out so much better for her, and for all of us. 

I felt like I was in an alternate reality myself. The days in Rome, in Turin, in Paris. The train speeding along, the little towns. I didn’t know where I was. I wanted a map, but at the same time, I didn’t want a map. When the train would race into a tunnel and wind around a snow-capped mountain peak, I would try to shut my brain down and just take it all in. I was doing the same thing at all the places we went. The churches, the castles, the little cafés. Everything was beautiful. It was almost too much. 

The bright green paint on an ancient door. The purple flowers climbing up a stone wall. The arrangement of cheese on a pretty plate. The days stretched on and I never knew what time it was. The statues and cathedrals and cobblestone streets blurred together like one of Monet’s Impressionistic paintings. 

We went to his house! Monet’s! And saw his garden with the pond and the lily pads, looking like they were pasted on the surface. The curved bridge. The flowers. I could not stop taking pictures of the flowers. One day I made the mistake of looking at the news. It was horrible as always, but it felt very far away. I had a head cold and the French cold medicine was possibly making me loopy. 

Je monte avec. Je descends avec. was written on every door of the train. "Don't forget your bags," our son-in-law translated for us. But then he added that it literally says something like, "I get on with it. I step off with it."  

Maybe the world back home wasn’t the real world, but this place was, with the bakery on every corner and the high-speed trains and a street musician randomly playing the Norah Jones song Come Away with Me as we strolled along the Seine. Maybe there’s no maybe about it. It was real. It is real. 

I’ve taken it with me. 

Roman Holiday

I am in Rome. Not in Rome exactly. But on a hill outside Rome. The hill overlooks a lake. The lake used to be a volcano. On the other side of the lake/volcano is a castle and a little town.

My family is here for a wedding. Our longtime dear friends’ daughter is getting married today. Friday we all flew in from various places and checked into the hotel, which is actually a monastery that dates back to the 13th century. I hadn’t slept at all on the plane.

Mainly, this was due to how packed in we all were and then there was the guy in my row who had a cat in a carrier under his seat, and at some point during the night flight he said, Sorry! because his cat had just pooped in the carrier. But who needs sleep when you are in Rome for a weekend-long wedding?

We arrived just in time for lunch, which was spread out on tables that overlooked the lake. The scene was like something in a movie, the kind with the stone veranda and the tablecloths and the gardens and the pasta and wine, and then suddenly, Meryl Streep comes whirling out singing. On the plane (before the cat incident) I was reading the book Taste by Stanley Tucci, which is about his love affair with Italian food, so I knew that the pasta was only the first course, and there would be many more courses, and I was right. Grazie, Stanley Tucci.

Can you believe we are in Italy, we kept saying to each other. (No, was what I was thinking.) It was the wine and the zero hours sleep. That view of the lake. I couldn’t get over it. The castle and the cute little town on the other side.

The next day we all hiked through the forest and walked on precariously narrow roads to see the castle up close. Apparently, it’s a big deal because the pope uses the place as his summer home. Twenty thousand steps later we were back at the monastery for more pasta and several other courses. The placemats had words written in Italian, and I tried to parse it out. Something about eating and living was my guess. Which seemed like a nice sentiment.

But then I went on the monastery tour and learned that the place was briefly a kind of health center in the early 1900’s and their motto was EAT SLOWLY AND CHEW WELL. In the cute little castle town, I drank a cappuccino and slowly ate and chewed very well a cannoli and snapped a picture of a sign outside a gift shop that said, Earth without Art is just EH.

I walked with my best friend, the mother of the bride, and had a flashback to a million years ago, when we were young mothers, chasing our little kids around the backyard and filling their plastic sippy cups with chocolate milk, and now here we all are, wandering the cobblestone streets and clinking our wine glasses.

Last night her daughter made a toast and for a brief jet-laggy moment, I could see the chocolate milk sippy cup instead of the champagne glass. Outside the window was the suburban backyard and the other little kids shrieking on the swings. And then it was back to where we were, where we are, in the ancient monastery.

Cheers, we said.

Lunch on the terrace

View of the lake and the castle at night

Paper Journey

I have a friend who is walking the Appalachian Trail. She started in Georgia, back in April, and now, she’s in Maine, only a few days away from completing the whole thing. I wish I could write about her journey, but it’s not my journey. My journey has been following her journey, looking up her location on my phone (she shares it via a GPS app) and finding the corresponding place on the four-foot long paper map of the trail that I have hanging on my refrigerator.

In the mornings when I am making my coffee, I mark off where she has camped for the night and squint at the mountain elevation and the nearby ponds and rivers. When I started my journey marking her journey, I had to squat in front of the fridge to see where she was on the map. Now, I am fully standing, the last bit of her trek level with my freezer.

At this point she has walked approximately 2100 miles out of the 2198.4 total miles of the trail. Many days she walks 20 to 25 miles. I have only walked that much in one day a few times in my life (these were touristy trips around big cities—New York, Boston, San Francisco, DC) but I have never done it two days in a row, never mind for weeks or months. I have rarely walked long stretches alone.

I have never camped alone. But I have stayed in hotels alone. I’ve gone on writing retreats solo and driven long distances by myself (long distances being ten or eleven hours, which is roughly the amount of time my friend has been walking each day.) I used to be afraid to be alone, especially at night, but over the past few years this fear has gone away. I don’t know why.

I’ve gone on hikes before. I’ve strolled small segments of the Appalachian Trail, jumping on and off in the Smokey Mountains, and probably a few other times without realizing it. Before my friend left for her journey, she invited me to walk with her on a hilly trail by her house. She wanted to see how it would feel to carry her twenty-five pound backpack. I carried nothing but a water bottle. We walked to the top of the hill that was really more like a mini mountain, and I chattered away the whole time because I do that when I’m nervous. Unsurprisingly, I was out of breath when we reached the top.

My friend was not out of breath. We looked at the view for one minute, the valley down below, the little house where she lives, a lake beyond that, and more mountains, and then we turned around and marched down. I didn’t talk much this time. I gulped my water and wiped the sweat off my face. I marveled at my friend who was striding along in front of me as if she wasn’t hauling a twenty-five pound backpack.

When we reached the bottom, I asked her if I could put the backpack on. I wanted to see what twenty-five pounds felt like. Let me tell you, it felt like a lot. I tried to imagine carrying it for more than two minutes. I tried to imagine hiking back up the mini mountain. Hiking three mountains, twenty, fifty.

Hiking for five months. Plotting out where I would camp for the night and where I would pee. Calculating how much food I would need and how to fit it in my backpack. Settling myself into a tent at night and looking up at the stars. Taking the kind of journey where you step out of your ordinary life and set yourself on an unfamiliar path. Knowing, even as I imagined it, that I would never take a journey like this, and I could be okay with that. I have had other journeys. With luck, I still have more to come.

I hoisted the backpack off my back and went home. I bought a paper map and taped it to my refrigerator.

Paper Heart

All morning at the library’s drop-in toddler playtime, I was bleary-eyed and slightly loopy, my arm throbbing from a recent vaccine shot, a tender red knot at the site, and hardly any sleep the night before—the vaccine doing its work, but also, on alert for my husband, who’d just come home from the hospital, one of those same day surgeries. 

Modern medicine is a miracle. A dose of vaccine to keep a potentially scary virus at bay. A threading up through a vein and into the heart muscle (or something along those lines. I don’t quite understand the surgery they did on my husband.) What happened was this: 

He had a procedure last year to take care of a heart issue. The heart issue was fixed. But then he got sick with Covid, and the problem came back, and the doctor recommended the procedure again. He was scheduled for October, but suddenly, a sooner appointment slot opened up, and we jumped on it. 

While my husband scrambled around doing the pre-surgery prep work, unrelated-but-sorta-related, I scrambled around trying to find a place that would give me a Covid vaccine, the guidelines not at all clear anymore in Ohio. Could I walk into a pharmacy or did I need a prescription? Did I qualify to get a shot or would I have to make an impassioned case for myself? (Listen, this virus fff-ed up my husband’s heart!) 

I marched into a nearby CVS, ready for battle, prepared to beg if I had to, but it was all very anti-climactic, with Fred the Pharmacy Manager kindly jabbing me, no questions asked.

The surgery went off without a hitch too. A half a day at the hospital and we were home, my husband groggy, but already feeling better, his heart back in normal rhythm, and I went off to work, jittery from little sleep, a whoosh of worry catching up with me, my panging arm, but happy to be distracted by a beach ball being flung at my head by a three-year-old. 

She was surprised when I caught it. Honestly, I was surprised too. I tossed it back at her and she caught it easily, surprising both of us again. We threw the ball at each other approximately five thousand times and would probably still be doing it now, but I had to take a timeout to turn on the bubble machine, and then there were towers to build out of squishy blocks and touch-and-feel books to touch and feel. I forgot 

about my throbby arm. I forgot about the hours waiting in the waiting room at the hospital, trying to read my book, but mostly distracted by the time ticking by, one hour into the surgery, two, nearing three—and shouldn’t my husband be out by now??—the nurses calling out names to give updates to other loved ones waiting, fidgeting for my turn and when would it be my turn? 

But then it was my turn. A few minutes alone in a smaller private room, the cardiologist impossibly young and confident. 

Everything went well, he said, and something something about heart valves and arteries, electrical charges, closing a loop. I didn’t know what loop he was talking about. He had taken a red pen out of his pocket and he was drawing a heart on a piece of paper. 

I watched, mesmerized, as he squiggled and scrawled, for a moment everything making perfect sense before it slipped away from me, but no matter. The point was the heart was healed, 

and time skipped forward. The waking up out of surgery, the ride home, a careful walk upstairs to bed, an anxious sleep, until morning at the library, beach balls bouncing around the room, my own heart catching, slowing, beating regularly again.  

Notes for the Other Side

I went downtown to the main library for an author event, Maggie Smith and Saeed Jones “in conversation with each other.” That is a thing writers do now when they’re on a book tour. Maggie Smith is a Columbus author known for the poem “Good Bones” and her memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful. Saeed Jones is a poet and memoirist who used to live here and often wrote on social media about how great Columbus is. Last year he moved to Boston, and a few weeks later a group of Nazis marched in his old neighborhood. He didn’t say this, but maybe he is relieved that he moved away.  

The two have a book out called The People’s Project, a collection of essays they solicited from other writers and artists after the last election. I started reading the book in my seat before the writers took the stage, feeling a little anxious in the growing crowd. Going to a thing like this, alone, and downtown on a week night is way out of my comfort zone. I think it’s a leftover fear from the pandemic. 

But when the conversation started, I immediately settled into it. The writers talked about how the book grew out of their initial post-election confusion and despair. How do we navigate through this very divided world—which people are worth teaching and who do we run away from in order to protect ourselves? 

Maggie Smith said she doesn’t like when people say, This isn’t who we are. Or, This isn’t America, whenever something appalling happens. She said, It actually IS who we are. Saeed Jones said there is no polite response to people who are actively trying to harm others, and you will never be able to diminish yourself in a way that will satisfy bullies. He said, the most vulnerable people—trans and gay people, immigrants, Black people have rarely been protected by the system. They know what some of us are just now waking up to. So, please listen to what they have to say. 

He told a story about the protests he saw on his college campus last year and how young and hopeful his students were. He thought they were adorable and he wanted to make sure they had proper winter clothing and were eating nutritious meals. Later, he watched the news and saw how the students were framed as dangerous agitators. He said, But listen, one kid made a garden! They were reading poetry to each other and saying prayers!

While the authors were talking and reading pieces from the book, there was some kind of disturbance going on in the back of the room. A man’s voice talking loudly, and then rising to yelling. I looked back and it was a man having a mental health crisis, the librarians hosting the event, speaking softly, trying to diffuse the situation. 

The crowd got quiet. Saeed Jones and Maggie Smith stopped talking. Some people watched, but I looked away, ashamed. Here we were, these comfortably middle class mostly white people, just minutes before nodding along and feeling hopeful, listening to two authors speak about the broken world and how we could still find joy in it, and now the broken world was in the room with us. 

The man kept yelling. He shouted, You think I’m stupid. He yelled, Don’t mace me. 

Nobody was going to mace him. These are librarians at the Columbus Metropolitan Public Library. I used to work there and I had their de-escalation training. Keep your voice low. Say, What can I do to help? And, I hear you, And, I know, I understand. The man screamed, Fuck you. 

Saeed Jones said, Please don’t call 911. His voice was quiet and sad. It made me want to cry. I was afraid and sweating and feeling myself shut down because I know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of people who are broken. Someone is going to be hurt, one way or another. 

But then it was over and the man moved along. The room let out a breath. I assumed the talk would go on and we’d all have to pretend nothing happened. But both writers addressed it. Saeed Jones thanked the staff for treating the man with dignity. He said, That person is drowning and many of us don’t know how to save the drowning without getting pulled under ourselves. He was glad there are people who know what needs to be done to help. 

One of the librarians spoke too. Her voice was shaky when she said thank you to the crowd for holding a calm quiet space while the staff did their jobs. 

The conversation was over and the writers readied themselves for the book signing. But I left. I was still sweaty and feeling sick to my stomach, and now, worried about walking out to my car alone. Which says something about me, I know. 

I made it home and flopped out on the front porch swing, jittery and wrung out. One of the passages Maggie Smith read from the book was from the writer Alexander Chee who talks about how we will celebrate when we make it to the other side. It's a thing people about to go into battle say to each other. Maybe we won’t all make it there, “but what matters is that it is said, and the group decides to do this. To attempt to survive is an act of love.” 

On the porch swing I was drifting off. There’s a fire station at the end of the block and I could hear a firetruck pulling out, sirens blaring. A car horn. The squawk of a crow. Little girls riding their bikes back and forth in front of the house.

One of the girls called out, I love you. The other girl called back, I love you too. Their voices were so bright and happy. 

Small Things

A velvety bright pink flower that looks like something out of a Dr. Suess book. A praying mantis on the stair rail. The way my daughter’s dog snuggles up to me and stuffs his head under my armpit. I am training myself to take notice of small things. To pushpin myself in place and time

because here is what I usually do: the flower. What IS it? I have to take a picture on my phone. Try the plant ID. 

(It might be Celosia argentea, known as cockscomb because the ruffly appearance looks like the crest on a rooster.) (I also learn it may have come from India and had to be nurtured back from extinction, and isn’t it interesting how it found its way here, to this community garden in Washington DC, where my husband and I are visiting our daughter and son-in-law over the weekend?) 

And the praying mantis, which I do not stop to photograph because my daughter is yelping, running up the stairs with the dog, afraid, apparently. A bug! It’s a giant bug, Mom! 

It’s a praying mantis, they’re supposed to be good luck. (Are they good luck? I want to look this up too but we’re running up the stairs together, the dog sprint-loping ahead of us. He’s such a sweet dog—and then I am vaulting back into the past, the Pandemic year, when the dog lived with us in Ohio, along with our daughter and soon-to-be son-in-law, the times we all smushed together on the couch, binge-watching Master Chef, the gourmet meals we ate, courtesy of the soon-to-be son-in-law who took over the cooking. 

Which reminds me, we are going out to dinner tonight at the restaurant where he is a chef! The last time we dined at this lovely place, he sent samples out from the kitchen, a tangy feta dip and sesame bread with the perfect combination of crusty crust and soft center that I have been dreaming about ever since—but wait, a nagging worry: 

all of the things I’ve been reading about in the news about the soldiers occupying DC and scaring off people who just want to eat at restaurants, this further spurred on by the conversation I had with a library patron the other day, when she asked me if I had plans for the weekend and I said, going to DC to visit my daughter. And she said, Are you afraid? 

And then she told me a story about the country where she came from and how her family had to leave because there was a war, but they’ve been back since then, and even there, in a war-torn country, they don’t have soldiers stationed in the street. And I said, Yeah, it’s crazy.) It is crazy.

But back to the flower, the praying mantis, the comfy couch where I am sitting, the sleeping house, the light filtering in through the windows, the trees, the leaves yellowing (yellowing? When did this happen? How am I just now noticing?) the dog loping out to curl up next to me, his grunty, satisfied snores, and I am here again, this place, this time. A reach for my phone to look up praying mantises. 

A pausing and letting go, content, just for the moment, to wonder. 

What's Real

Chaos erupted the other day on my Spelling Bee app. One of the people in the “Hive Community” confessed that she was using AI to solve the puzzle. The people who solve the puzzle using their own brains and find joy in figuring things out attacked her. It was a brutal takedown. Someone compared himself to John Henry.

I looked up John Henry. When you do a search online lately, the first answer that comes up is generated by AI. But here’s a trick I learned: You can type in what you want to search and add minus AI and the answer will come up the way it used to in the olden days, 2023 ish. It looks like this:

John Henry -AI 

(Make sure you put the minus directly in front of the AI or else you’ll get a whole slew of AI junk.) For the record, back in the late 1800s, John Henry supposedly went to battle with a steam powered drill on the railroad and won. Someone wrote a song about him. The moral is: Fight back against the machines that are taking your jobs. I forgot to mention that John Henry died shortly after. The moral is: The machines win in the end. 

Don’t get me started on how I feel about AI. Besides the fact that it steals human research and writing and art, and pollutes the environment, and destroys jobs, it’s not AI. Meaning, it’s not intelligent. (At least not yet.) You think you’re talking to some sentient being, but you may as well be having a conversation with a magic eight ball. 

Meanwhile a lot of people seem to really enjoy chatting with their magic eight balls. I don’t know how to make sense of this, so I do what I do whenever things don’t make sense to me. I read books. I write. I take walks with the dog. I dig around in the garden. I stand in line at the farmers market and wait to buy an almond croissant. Let me tell you about these almond croissants. 

They are buttery and fluffily layered and studded with the perfect ratio of almonds to sugar. When you bite into one of these croissants, it is still warm from the oven. The woman who bakes these luscious treats looks how you would imagine. She has strong arms from rolling out the dough, pink cheeks, and wears a kerchief on her head like she’s just climbed out of an old painting. Every Saturday hers is the booth you must go to first. 

She sells out within an hour. The problem: she’s late every week, so it’s difficult to know when you should join the line. Go too early, and you’re standing around in the sun watching the baker and her partner unload their truck and carefully set up their booth. Go too late, and you risk getting nothing. 

What is this line for? People who are new to the farmers’ market say. 

Or, 

Whoa, those pastries must be good!

Those of us in line nod smugly at our secret knowledge. It drives my husband crazy. Are the croissants that great? He says to me every week when I make him join me in the line. (He isn’t a big croissant fan. He’s more into the carrot cake at the booth down the street.) While we wait together, he calculates how much it costs, in time, to stand here. 

Seven bucks for the croissant plus a good twenty minutes. What is our twenty minutes worth? he asks me. I don’t know how to answer him. 

What is anything worth? A freshly baked croissant, a painting, a novel. The water supply. The electric grid. Dignity. The creative process. Our brains. What makes us human. What rolls out dough. What pulls the tray out of the oven. What feeds us. What fills us. 

What's real. 

 

Beans

Two springs ago a friend gave me a handful of black beans and for the past two years, I planted a few and marveled at the vines taking over half the garden, wrapping around the stakes I hastily set up, nearly too late because the beans were already threatening to twine around the tomato plants and topple the peppers. 

Stand out there for two minutes—I’m not lying—and a tendril will sway and dip and reach for your arm. You can watch it in real time, capturing, looping your wrist. 

But would that be such a bad way to go, bound to the garden, your body muffled by a bean plant? These are the weird things I think about in the middle of the night, a new medication interrupting my sleep, so I am wide awake at one, at two, at three, blinking in the dark, the dog curled against my feet, every now and then, shuddering through a nightmare until I nudge her out of it. 

Why do I assume it’s a nightmare? Maybe she’s battling the mailman and winning. What is that poem that says the world is fifty percent terrible, but let’s not forget the other fifty percent? (I’m paraphrasing.) I want to believe it, but here I am, cataloguing the terrible. 

For example, a friend’s son who was adopted as a baby from another country, and now he’s grown up and afraid of being snatched by ICE and won’t leave home without his identification papers. And how did I get so lucky, never once thinking about what papers to bring with me when I step out of my house. 

Stop reading the news, my husband says. This isn’t the news, I tell him. This is me, talking to a friend. What if the poem is wrong and the world is way more than fifty percent terrible? 

I forgot to tell you something about the bean plants, how all of the tendrils have lovely purple flowers and each pod starts green, turns purple, turns brown, until it is paper-thin, the crackle when you run your thumbnail along the edge, the splitting apart, the reveal: 

Five shiny black beans, 

each specked with a white dot, as if some kind person carefully lifted them, one by one, and dabbed them with paint. Why have I never noticed this before and what does it mean? Nothing. Everything. If fifty-fifty is all we get, please help me remember this. 

Tipping Point

Yesterday at the farmers’ market my husband and I had a dumb argument about blueberries. He said he didn’t want to buy them anymore. They’re too expensive. 

I said, Everything is more expensive at the farmers’ market. At that moment we were in line to buy a block of seven-dollar cheese, and we’d just paid twelve dollars for a bag of coffee. But don’t we want to support local businesses? I said. Don’t we want to eat organic? 

Well, yeah, he said. But this is crazy. He was hurt because he thought I was judging him. I was hurt because I thought he was judging me. 

We went to the grocery store, and he bought cheaper blueberries (which were probably picked months ago and trucked over from Canada. I’m kinda judging. I admit this. I’m kinda judging!), but I kept my mouth shut. I was suddenly remembering the time I had a nervous breakdown about pepperoni pizza. 

It was a million years ago on a school night and one of the kids had just sprung that they needed some expensive must-have thing for school the next day, and my husband was driving around trying to find it, and it ended up being even more expensive than we’d imagined, and on the way home he called and said he was picking up pepperoni pizza, and I lost my mind and started screaming at him. 

Every once in a while, we still joke about this, how I could handle the pricey school thing, but the two for twenty-buck pepperoni pizza special put me over the edge. We all have our tipping points. 

The day went on and it was too hot outside to walk for very long and some animal is taking bites out of the tomatoes and a small bag of chocolate chips at the grocery store costs six dollars and Ohio is sending the National Guard to DC to help the president scare people, and at the restaurant where a friend is a chef, one of the workers was crying because she was afraid of being arrested by ICE, and he told her, Don’t worry, we know how to protect you if it comes to that. 

What does that mean? we asked him. Hide the lady in the walk-in freezer?

Well, yeah, he said. Because ICE can’t go into private spaces.

But what’s to stop them? I said. I was imagining all of our families at the library, the people from Somalia and Pakistan and Albania and India and China and Mexico and how I don’t have a clue what their immigration status is, 

but I do know that the little girl loves Dog Man books and the little boy likes to make pretend toast in the pretend toaster and carry it over to me to pretend-taste, and what are the private spaces in the library where we can hide these children if it comes to that? And now I understand why it’s so much easier and more comfortable—and Jesus, the privilege, the over-the-top, absurd amount of privilege I have—

to get snippy about blueberries and pepperoni pizza and animal teeth marks on my tomatoes. But what am I going to do about it. 

What are any of us going to do. 

 

Afternoon Protest

The protest is at the end of our street, so my husband and I walk down and join the group. The group is eight miles of people stretching from the northern suburbs and down to the Statehouse downtown. Our neighbors brought an extra sign they made. Mine says, No Kings Since 1776. On the back it says Columbus Arborfest, which is a big festival coming up in two weeks at our neighborhood park.

Cars go by honking in solidarity at our signs. The signs are the usual. All are Welcome and No Human is Illegal and the word Fascism with an X over it and something about the president and tacos, which I don’t understand until my husband explains it to me. A helicopter flies overhead and circles back around and flies by again, and we all raise our signs, and I have the funny thought: 

What if I turn mine the other way, so it promotes the tree festival, and what if everyone standing in our eight-mile line has some kind of fun community event on the back of their signs too, and what if we are in an alternate reality, and instead of being despondent about the state of the country and having to protest against injustice and corruption and the dismantling of social services, we all wave signs about art festivals and upcoming concerts and the Columbus Zoo? 

More cars honk. People wave at us out their windows. We’re standing in front of the firehouse and a firefighter sets up a lawn chair and sits behind us, smiling like he’s watching a parade. The protest is scheduled from 2 pm to 3:30. Halfway through we’re all supposed to drop our signs, hold hands, and link our eight-mile chain together (except for going across intersections and the driveway in front of the firehouse.) 

We all do that for a few minutes. I’m thinking about the first time I went to a protest to call attention to cuts to school programming and I got thrown out of a government building and later, gave a speech through a bullhorn about how a librarian saved my life.  

And the last protest I went to, a few weeks ago, which was a rally for public library funding and protecting the freedom to read, where I met up with some of my co-workers in our library union, and one of my librarian friends held her little girl who held a little sign which said Let the Kids Read. 

And the Black Lives Matter protests during the pandemic where we all wore masks and stood six feet apart and some nice guy went across the street to the Kroger and bought a bunch of bottled water and piled it in a wagon and rolled it up and down the sidewalk offering it to everyone. 

And the Women’s March in DC in 2017 when the massive crowd lifted me off my feet and I waved my stop sign, which had one word on it, NO, and I shouted along with everyone else, "This is what democracy looks like!" and felt chills for a moment, my heart banging in my chest, my eyes burning with tears, because this IS what democracy looks like. 

Okay. It didn’t totally work. 

The state cut many of the school librarians, and the library funding and freedom to read in Ohio are still up in the air, and we all know how the other things turned out. So, I don’t know why, really, I’m parked out here in ninety billion degree weather, burning the backs of my legs off because I forgot to apply sunscreen. 

Cars keep driving by, honking, some of the honks continuing past us down the street and new honks joining those, until all you can hear is one long, blaring whir of honk-sound, and I remember

back in DC when the crowd lifted me off my feet and I looked up at the sky and saw that my NO signed had flipped upside down and said ON, and who knows how long I’d been waving it around like that, and I fixed it, but I couldn’t stop grinning like a fool, all of these beautiful people and their funny and clever and defiant signs, and I was one of them. 

I am one of them. 

Making Peace in the Garden

Because what else can you do but make peace with it? Otherwise, you’ll find yourself cursing out the beans that twined themselves around the tomato plants and tried to strangle them, and the two cucumber plants that took over the other half of the garden, shooting out so many cucumbers you ran out of pickle jars to cram them in. 

Meanwhile, all the flower seeds you planted and so carefully nurtured for weeks, the bright pink zinnias, the marigolds and the sweet purple basil, came to nothing but a handful of raggedy sprouts. Which makes no sense, when over there, in the sidewalk crack, some bird’s dropped a seed, and wah lah, up came a five-foot high Dr. Suess flower. 

Two decades of gardening, and I still don’t understand how it works. But then, I don’t understand much these days. Everyone I know is walking around shellshocked, each hour’s news a fresh horror. Why is this happening? we say to each other. 

But we may as well be yelling at the dirt, the sun, the weirdo bug that lays its eggs on the base of the strawberry plant and sucks the whole thing dry. 

Do something, a friend urges me when I confess my despair to her. But that’s the problem, I say. Everything I do feels pointless. 

She tells me to ask myself three questions: What brings me joy? What am I good at? How can I help? 

The place where all three overlap is supposedly the “sweet spot for action.” 

I like this, but I don’t think it works in my case. What brings me joy, what I’m good at, is writing. But what good does writing do? Especially now, when any two-bit AI can spit out words on gardening and hopelessness in less than thirty seconds, (another cause of despair!) while here I am, squinting at my computer screen, two hours into it, and still not sure how to tie it all together.

Okay. It has something to do with letting go. 

Forget what the plan was (I wanted more than three tomatoes! I didn’t want ten thousand cucumbers!) and accept what I have been given. Beans. Multiple jars of pickles. 

Or, it’s about making peace with what I can’t control, in general. But that's the easy response. 

Yesterday, I spent the day in the garden, picking cucumbers, untwining bean tendrils from the tomatoes, flicking bugs off the strawberries. And then I watered the raggedy flower sprouts and set them more fully in the sun. 

I am not ready to give up on them yet. 

Alarmed

Friday, we had a bubble party at the library, but first the police came because I accidentally tripped the alarm. I was the first one in that morning and frozen for a moment in the dark, the motion detector lights flicking on one by one, the alarm panel counting down, waiting for me to dismantle it, but I didn’t know how to dismantle it. I don’t have the code. 

Which was funny/not funny because just the other day, a coworker asked me if I wanted the code and I said no. Why would I need the code? I am never the first person there. Cut To: me in the empty vestibule, the alarm blaring. It all turned out fine. My manager disabled the alarm remotely, and when the police guy showed up, he was nice about it, taking my name and writing up his report, 

and all the while I was thinking: he has a gun, which is a thing I always think about when I am interacting with a police officer, not that I have interacted with them that much. Once, a million years ago, one of my husband’s old high school friends, who was a cop, visited our apartment and set his gun down on our coffee table and I couldn’t stop looking at it. 

There’s a gun on our coffee table is what thought over and over in my head and how was I supposed to think about anything else? The next day it was still bugging me, how I had tripped the alarm and got written up in a police guy’s report. I could imagine what the report said. Ding dong old white lady didn’t know the code. My husband and I were driving to the petfood store and had stopped at a light only a few blocks from where we live. 

An unhoused man was asleep on the sidewalk, his back against the bank building. The traffic light stayed red forever, and it was so hot outside. One hundred it said on our dashboard when we first turned on the car, the kind of heat where you can see it shimmering up from the sidewalk. The guy was wearing heavy clothes, pants and a long-sleeved shirt, a jacket. He had a white beard. He was probably the same age as me and my husband. 

The light turned green, and we drove past, and I saw that someone had set a water bottle next to the sleeping man, and I almost started crying. I almost start crying a lot lately, but I can usually reel it back in. I wish there was a code for this, a way to disarm all of the alarms going off. But there isn’t. It’s just us, and oh my God, the least we can do is offer a water bottle. I’m sorry. 

I start off these posts with the best of intentions. Keep it joyful. Look on the bright side. And yet I keep going bleak. A good two hundred people came to the bubble party. They crowded into the youth department because it was way too hot outside to blow bubbles. 

The librarian poured bubble liquid onto trays and handed out wands. For a few hours the room was loud with shrieks and laughing, bubbles floating, popping.  

Floating

I am floating in a swimming pool on a pink flamingo. When I lean back, the sky is a bright blue splotch, the sun peeking out behind the trees. I haven’t been in a swimming pool in years. It feels good. The cool water, the sun on my face. I could do this all day.

I could do this all day, I say to my friends. It’s their pool. Their pink flamingo plastic floaty-thingy. Tonight they're hosting a party for their daughter who is getting married. My husband and I are in town to celebrate. Our son has flown in too. It’s a quick out and back trip. We’ll be here for less than 48 hours. I look up at the sky again, trying not to skip myself forward, the pool time over, the cleaning up and readying for the party, the party ending, the goodbyes, the trip back to the airport.  

How do I do that, float myself in place? The pink flamingo bobbing, friends and my husband and son throwing a ball overhead, someone handing me a coke to fit into a drink holder. There’s a drink holder in the pink flamingo floaty thingy’s arm! Who thought of this? I want to hug this person.  

Let’s swim across the pool, my husband says. See if we can hold our breath. 

Another thing I haven’t done in years. Dunk my head underwater. Swim. I do it. It’s funny how what you’ve learned comes back to you. I can hold my breath. I can swim. What else do I know that I have forgotten? I dip under again. The world is far away and it’s such a relief. 

But I have to stop doing this. Being bothered by the world. Except bother isn’t the right word. Rage is what I mean. Despair. Whatever the word is that means sink underwater and stay there until everything above the surface rights itself. Here though, now, the world is all right. I come up for air.  Pool time is over and now we are at the party. 

It’s English garden-themed because the engaged couple live in England. The invitation said to wear a hat. My friend lends me a silly green hat with a poofy bow. I sip a minty drink and my son tries to teach me how to do a swingy dance. I can’t get the hang out of it, my feet tripping me up and my hat bow boinking my face, but I am laughing. And look at the engaged couple, how radiant they are. I want to stop time. The party has ended. We say our goodbyes. 

Back at the airport and I am writing this. I am writing this and I am on a plane. I am home, writing this. I am floating on a pink flamingo in a swimming pool. I am dancing, feet tripping, laughing. Over and over I tip my head back, blinking at the bright blue sky. 

Acceptance (or not)

All week I was fighting a grouchy mood. First, it was the heat and how every time you went outside it was like slogging through a steam bath. And then, out of the blue, my back started hurting, and all the plans I had went out the window, and I ended up lazing on the couch and watching TV and reading a book about Buddhist philosophy, which said stuff like

“Struggling with anything to make it be other than what it is creates suffering.” 

which hit me hard because lately I’ve realized that a key part of my personality is Wanting to Make Things Be Other Than What They Are. 

For example, we have fancy new book shelves at our newly renovated library and I don’t like them. They’re metal and the books slide and fall over and so we have these hook-like contraption things that attach at the back of the shelves to prop the books up, but the problem is it’s hard to maneuver the hook-like contraptions, which might not seem like a big deal, but a substantial part of working at a library is shelving books, and therefore, having to CONSTANTLY MESS AROUND WITH THE HOOK-LIKE CONTRAPTIONS. 

I don’t like this, I tell my manager, and she nods and smiles and tries to make me feel better by agreeing that yes, it is annoying, but hey, it’s here to stay, so what are we going to do? 

(I don’t know CHANGE IT TO A THING THAT WORKS BETTER?!?!) 

But look, I say, it takes longer to shelve now. 

Nod and shrug. 

But listen, I say, did anyone ask us if we wanted these newfangled, hard-to-use bookends? 

Smile and shrug. 

Okay, now I realize that I am getting on my manager’s nerves, so I shut up, but inside, I’m thinking: Why can't we change this thing that doesn’t work? 

But I don’t say this. I finish up with the $&%^# shelving and head downstairs to my new desk in the youth department, which is smaller than the old desk and three-fourths of the way enclosed so that it is comically cage-like, and now I’m wishing I hadn’t blown all of my goodwill complaining about the shelving. 

What is it like, I wonder, as I turn slowly around inside my cage-desk, to be the kind of person 

who accepts things the way things are? 

the kind of person who steps out into the steam bath and smiles, who nonchalantly notices back pain and finds humor in library renovations, who shakes her head and sighs unquestioningly at the outrageous and horrifying news of the world?    

The Buddhist philosophy book has no answers except Don’t be the kind of person that, apparently, I am. Which suddenly makes me think, Wait, shouldn’t I, therefore, accept that THIS is who I am? And wouldn’t it be a type of suffering, too, to wish that I could be a different person?

These questions make my head spin, and spin some more, as I keep turning inside my cage-desk as the patrons spill into the room, the moms and nannies with the baby strollers and the toddlers toddling toward the train table, the school age kids with their summer reading forms and the teenage volunteers. 

For the next few hours, I am too busy to whine or worry or question or complain because someone wants help finding a book and someone asks for a sticker and someone has bumped his head and needs the Mr. Smiley Face ice pack and someone has piddled in the baby garden. 

There is a lesson here, but I don’t know what it is. Accept the things you cannot change. Or don’t. Be the kind of person you are. Or not. In the meantime, find the book and hand out the stickers, soothe the bonked head and clean up all the piddle.

Disturbance

No one felt like celebrating the 4th of July, so we walked the dogs and watched the Tour de France on and off, and later we went over to the community garden and weeded and mulched, until I inadvertently scooped up an ants nest in the mulch and got stung by a million ants. Oh no, Mom! my daughter said. Are you okay? 

I'm fine, I said. It was her community garden plot in her neighborhood where she lives in DC, and I’d been sharing gardening tips about weeding and mulching, and feeling proud of myself that I have a kid who might like gardening as much as I do, two kids, in fact—my son is working on his first garden this year too—but here I was, stung by ants, and now could add a new gardening tip about scooping up mulch, where you check the pile first for an ants nest. 

The ants were scurrying up my arms and legs, not painfully stinging me exactly, but more like pinches, hundreds of distressed ants in chorus, yelling at me to stop, I am destroying their home, scattering their children. I set the mulch-nest back and we cleaned up and watched more Tour de France until everyone nodded off except for my son-in-law, who was whipping up his famous turkey burgers in the kitchen.

A word about the turkey burgers. They were better than last year’s turkey burgers, and that is saying something. Also, I don’t even think of myself as a person who likes turkey burgers. But this is my son-in-law, *brag alert* who is a chef, and everything he makes instantly becomes my favorite version of that thing. (See pimento cheese dip). We ate the turkey burgers reverently and listened to the not so far away fireworks and remembered that it was the 4th of July and we were in DC, where you’d think you’d feel more patriotic, but mostly, it was distress. 

The day before we’d gone to the African American History Museum and walked through exhibits on slavery and Jim Crow and lynchings, and you could see history folding over itself and repeating, but then, on the highest floor we spilled off the elevator and there was the Lincoln Memorial framed in the window and joyful music playing in the rooms behind us, Ragtime and Jazz and Hip Hop, and something delicious-smelling wafting from the museum café. 

We watched water dance in a fountain and read the lines from the Declaration of Independence on the wall, the part that says whenever any form of government becomes destructive, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and we walked out into the sun and crowds, many of them tourists from other countries with their guidebooks and maps, and what in the world do they think of America these days? 

Later, it was back to the community garden to water and admire our hard work. No sign of the ants, but there was a rabbit hopping along the fence, a blood red sunflower pasted against the sky. 

 

The Bystander

I was standing in line at the farmers' market waiting to buy a chicken, when suddenly, on the sidewalk two dogs started fighting. Or rather, it wasn’t a fight. It was a large brown dog biting the back of a smaller black dog. The brown dog had clamped down on the smaller dog and was tugging. The smaller dog yelped and cried. 

It was only a few seconds, but it felt like forever, and then it was over, and the owner of the bigger dog shuffled away with him, and people gathered around her and comforted her and her dog, who looked completely fine. Meanwhile, the smaller dog was still yelping and crying. 

I was next in line for the chicken, and my head spun. I felt like I had missed something important. It didn’t help that it was 90 million degrees outside and the sun blasted down on me and sweat dribbled into my eyes. I had a weird flashback. I was seventeen and waiting for my ride outside the Ponderosa Steakhouse where I worked as a cashier, my stinky uniform, my grease-streaked arms. 

A screech of tires and a scream, and everything slowed down as a motorcycle skidded in front of me, and a woman flew off and landed in the grass like a doll flung and dropped, the man on the motorcycle crumpled on the pavement, shouting for her and wailing. But there were only soft groans coming from the woman. I moved in slow motion toward her and knelt down, everything fuzzy and murky like I was underwater. 

All I could think to do was touch her hand, say, I’m here. 

But who was I? A silly girl in my polyester uniform. People came running and someone had called an ambulance and I was still on my knees when they arrived. Later, I learned that the accident was the motorcycle guy’s fault. He was going too fast and hit another car head on. 

It was the smaller dog’s fault is where I'm going with this. Apparently, he’d lunged at the bigger dog first, so tough luck for him, I guess. Even so, after I bought the chicken, I walked over to the owners, an elderly couple who set up a booth every week at the farmers’ market to sell houseplants. There was blood on the sidewalk and pieces of fur and the dog was whimpering and the couple was alone in the heat and no one was comforting them. 

I want to say I helped the elderly couple and their dog, brought them water, hustled them out of the heat, or at the very least, bought one of their houseplants. But I did none of those things. I asked if their dog was all right (yes?) and I sweated home with my chicken. Forty years later and what have I learned. 

I am here, standing by, bearing witness, telling you a story. For whatever that is worth.

A Good Walk

The dog is having trouble walking. She’s thirteen and I know what’s coming for her and I don’t want to think about it. The other day she stumbled trotting up the stairs. Later, her back leg slipped when she was trying to lick herself and she toppled over. My husband and I brought her to the vet, and the diagnosis is basically, Old Age. 

Let her rest, the vet said, but when we got home, the dog didn’t want to rest. She wanted to go for a walk. I sat with her on the couch. I was reading a stupid book that I couldn’t put down. The premise of the book was silly and the characters were ridiculous and the writing was bad, but somehow, it was compulsively readable. 

The dog fell asleep, loopy from the drugs the vet prescribed that we had to trick her into eating by burying them inside cheese cubes. I was jittery. A combination of the dumb book and the disgustingly hot weather and whatever new horror's in the news and the sick feeling that I am losing my dog. 

I talk about this with my therapist, the sense of dread I have and how familiar it is. For several years she has been working with me to break old patterns, and I thought I was making progress, but now it’s back to square one. I’m trapped. 

What’s the opposite of trapped? she says.

I try to play along. I’m free? 

How about, You have options. 

I have options, I repeat. It sounds absurd. Sometimes, in my head, I am still a child and there are no options. Except in reality, I am not a child, and I actually do have some options. 

I finish reading the dumb book, laughing at the nuttiness of it, but also, impressed, that it kept me reading, that it took me away for a few hours from real life. There might be a lesson here. If things get too crazy, take a rest. 

The dog wakes up and she still wants to go for a walk, so I take her. We move slowly in the heat, poking around the flowers in the front yards, sniffing the trees. When she loses her step, my heart breaks, but then, she rights herself, and we keep going, a different walk from our usual, but a good one.  

Surprised by Cookie Butter

The week had all the makings of a bad one, but then I tried a spoonful of cookie butter. 

I had never heard of this product before, but I was game to try it, and oh my lord it was good. Imagine the creaminess of butter all blended up with cookie dough. What are you supposed to do with it, a friend asked when I told her about it. Smear it on toast? 

I don't know, I said. I ate it straight out of the jar. The next day, my husband and I went to the pride parade downtown. I admit I was a little afraid to go this year. The protests erupting in cities all over the country. The general crappiness of a certain kind of person who hates the kind of people who march in a pride parade. What if that someone drove a car into the crowd? 

But the news said there were 700,000 people in town for Pride. I was defiant and happy to be one of them. All of the rainbow flags and colorful balloons. The music and exuberant dancing. It made me tear up. Why would anyone be afraid of people because they're different? I wanted to hug each and every one of them. The drag queens and the waving polar bears. The children snapping their rainbow fans and the churchy moms with their t-shirts reminding us that Love Is Love and All Are Welcome. 

Meanwhile, my daughter was in DC, staying far away from the squeaky-wheeled tank parade that was going down on the Mall. Her dog was sick with some kind of stomach bug, and she had to keep feeding him special food and something called Probiotic Flora. 

Probiotic Flora? I have never heard of this. 

My daughter laughed.  

To prove that I was in the know about something, I asked her if she had ever tried cookie butter.

Of course, she said. 

I felt myself deflate. Am I the only one still learning new things? I read an article that says there are three ways of coping in a dying world. Hope, resilience, and reconciliation. I didn't understand what the article was getting at. Hope, that we find something buried in the ashes? Resilience, that we can keep ourselves going while we look for it? 

But what is the reconciliation? My son tells me the answer to everything is connecting with people in real life. This can be as small as the interaction you have at the checkout counter when you buy your first jar of cookie butter. 

At the pride parade, I had to go to the bathroom. I found a row of rainbow-colored Porta Potties behind a restaurant, but I wasn’t sure if they were letting the parade-goers use them. I struck up a conversation with the woman who was cleaning one, and she said, I've got it all ready for you. 

It was the cleanest restroom I have ever experienced. And I say that as a person with a pea-sized bladder and a long, well-documented history with public restrooms. I relayed this to the woman, and she told me she was the owner of the Porta Potties. Would I mind leaving a review? 

Not at all! 

Home from the parade, and I was a mixture of sad at the state of the world, and yet, weirdly happy. I ate another spoonful of cookie butter. How have I gone a whole lifetime without knowing of its existence?

 

Old Things

Lately, I have been enjoying giving things away.

The kids’ old violas. The absurd amount of lettuce growing in the garden, which I’ve taken to bagging up and leaving on coworkers' desks or dropping on neighbors’ doorsteps. An old watch.

Here is the story of the watch. It goes back to teenager me, the poor kid at the wealthy high school who wears a uniform and has no clue what’s in style. Cut to: the poor kid at the wealthy college, studying the rich girls like I’m an anthropologist. Their blue jean mini-skirts and perfect hair. A watch on the wrist, a string of pearls, an LL Bean backpack casually thrown over one shoulder. 

Forget the expensive backpack and pearls—they’re totally out of my reach—but a wristwatch, maybe that’s something I can manage? Summer after Sophomore year I temp at a law office and splurge a chunk of my paycheck on one. I am so excited about this watch, I can’t properly explain it. 

And get this: at the end of the summer, the attorney I work for gives me a going away present. An LL Bean backpack. How did he know it was exactly what I’d coveted? But then, back at school, the air is punctured out of me. My sociology professor is leading a discussion about social class. What are the markers of it and how do we know who’s upper and who’s… not? 

I hold my breath. It’s my secret fear. That I don’t belong at this school. That people can tell just by looking at me. Someone throws out watches as an example, and the teacher agrees, mentioning a particular watch brand as a sure sign of wealth, and another, (the one I’m wearing) as the opposite. I break out in a sweat and hide my wrist under my desk. Take off the watch. Head back to my dorm room and toss it in the trash.  

A couple of years later, I buy the other watch. It’s stupidly expensive and I can’t afford it, but I do have a credit card. (Take that snooty professor.) (Although, Ha ha, joke’s on me. I’ll be paying that watch off for months.) I wear it proudly, never examining my feelings about class, about money, about wanting to be in style, whatever that means, my underlying worry that it’s all for nothing because the rich people, the popular people will always have some new standard that I can’t reach, never mind have a clue about. 

Flash forward to a few weeks ago, the death of my smartwatch, and I am in need of the old-fashioned kind. Turns out I have two. The status symbol watch, which is cute but a little banged up, and a nice, newish one (if fifteen years ago is newish), an anniversary gift from my husband. My daughter’s in town, and I offer one to her.  

She chooses the old watch, and I admit I am surprised. I thought she’d want the sleeker, modern one. But this is middle-aged me, still clueless about what’s in style. Vintage, apparently, according to my daughter. I tell her the story behind the watch, and for a moment the long forgotten humiliation burbles up, along with a stab of embarrassment that I used to care so much about what other people thought of me.   

The watch is lovely, though, on my daughter’s wrist. And so much better than gathering dust in a dresser drawer. A week later my son and daughter-in-law breeze through. Someone needs a backpack, and my husband rifles through a closet and digs out the old LL Bean. I didn’t even know we still owned it. My daughter-in-law slips it over both shoulders, and she looks great. 

I tell her the story too and realize I have no idea what the moral is. Our things, like us, have complicated pasts. We obsess over them, hate them, treasure them, bury them. The random few, we share a memory and joyfully let them go.   

Note Taking

I take notes when someone is talking. It’s a compulsion, a nervous tic, a thing to keep my worried fingers moving, scribbling on the backs of receipts or on the junk mail I’ve stuffed in my purse. I rarely do anything with this writing. It ends up back in my purse, and then, every few weeks I empty out my purse and chuck the crumpled notes in the recycling bin. 

I used to carry around a little notebook because I’d read somewhere that all writers should carry around a little notebook. In it I would write snippets of potential story scenes and oddball thoughts that popped into my head and conversations I shamelessly eavesdropped on. 

For example, in March 2008, I was sitting at the Panera Bread in Columbus, Ohio, and I overheard a woman at a nearby table say to another: “Dad said some magic words to me. And the magic words were: What are you going to do with your luggage?” 

[What does this mean? I wondered in March 2008, and I wonder, again, now.]

The other day someone was talking at a meeting, and I was taking notes furiously—furiously in the sense that I was trying to keep up with what the person was saying, but also, because I was furious about what she was saying, which basically boiled down to Things Are Really Bad Right Now. 

After the meeting I scrunched up the paper I’d been taking notes on and drove home in tears. If I don’t write things down, I will forget them. If I write things down, but don’t read what I’ve written, I can also forget. It’s a nifty trick. Too bad I can’t always manage to remember it. 

I have so many questions about what I hear, what I write. The woman at the Panera Bread. I mean, what the hell was she going to do with her luggage? And at the meeting the other day. Instead of telling us how crappy things are, why can’t someone help us figure out what to do about it? 

Maybe I am asking for too much. Maybe there are no magic words. Still, I find myself writing it all down. Friday at the library, a toddler shows me her coloring page. It’s covered in crayon scribbles and I love it. When she offers it to me, I take it. 

One writer to another. No words, but I know exactly what she means. 

 

Peonies

Until a few years ago I didn’t know the names of most flowers. 

Roses, okay, sure. Daisies, tulips, but that’s about it. I would see flowers and like them, but didn’t feel any particular curiosity about what they were called. It worked the other way too. If I came upon a type of flower in a book or poem, Wordsworth’s daffodils, for example, or D. H. Lawrence’s Bavarian Gentians, I could only hold a vague, flowerish picture in my head.  

This all changed six years ago when we moved into our new-old house. The yard was overrun with plants we couldn’t identify. Also, the house was overrun with stuff we couldn’t identify. Wooden sculptures nailed to the walls. Glitter mixed with the orange ceiling paint. The giant Gatsby-like eyeball decals pasted to the dining room wall. But this is another story. That summer we focused on the house and left the yard for later. 

Later, turned out to be the first scary, bewildering months of the pandemic. Project one was to pull out the jungle of bamboo. Bamboo, I could recognize. Next, came the mass of wild grass. One day I crawled through it and had the shock of my life: a crazy woman on hands and knees coming straight at me. 

Ha ha no, that was a mirror and the crazy woman was me. Why was there a large mirror propped up in the center of a thicket of wild grass? Who knows. But then, why had the doorknobs on all the doors been replaced with water faucets and why was there a prison door on the patio and why were we in the middle of a global pandemic, the president advising us to drink bleach? But back to the flowers. 

After the bamboo came out and the wild grass, I was starting to get somewhere with my flower identification. This was summer 2020, and I was aiming the plant app on my phone at everything remaining. Those orange things were day lilies. The yellow stuff was Black-eyed Susan. The purple was coneflower. A delicate blue with spokes shooting out of it was called Love in the Mist.   

When the library opened its curbside delivery service, I ordered a bunch of plant books and painstakingly mapped out the yard on graph paper. The yarrow. The blazing star. The crocosmia with its feathery petals that looked like flames. And the peonies.

Let me tell you about the peonies. It’s a spring flower so I missed it completely in 2020, but the next year I noticed the big blooms behind the garage. This is a part of the yard that I didn’t know was our property so I had never seen the flowers back there. By the time I found them, they were flopped over, smushed on the neighbor’s driveway. I dug up part of the plant and replanted it in a place where we could see it, and now every spring, it’s my favorite flower to watch bloom.

First, a tight pink bud, and then an unfurling, a poof, and it’s a full-blown flower, too heavy to stay upright. There’s the inevitable flop over and a shedding of all of the petals, this entire process only taking a week? two weeks at most, and then it’s back to being an ordinary bush until next spring. Which is such a shame, the quickness of it, the loss. 

This year I decided to do what I could to slow things down. Can you slow things down? Maybe not, but I’ve been clipping several of the stems at the tight pink bud stage and putting them in jars around the house. I wish you could smell how sweet it is as the buds open, see the loveliness of the blooms. I put a vase in the guest room for our daughter, who is visiting for the weekend. 

Oh! she said, when she saw it. What is this? A peony, I told her. And like magic, we keep seeing them. A farmer selling bouquets at the farmers market and on our walks with the dog. Bushes on the edges of front lawns, the flowers brushing the sidewalk. 

We've been talking about other times she’s visited, when we first bought this wacky old house (that she begged us not to buy because it needed so much work) and later, during the pandemic, when she was in our bubble, the days we jumped on shovels together, tugging out bamboo roots. It feels like yesterday, it feels like today. The time with her, 

it goes too fast. But right this moment, she is here and I am taking her in. This morning before she wakes up, I tuck a fresh peony into the vase for one more day of frothiness and delight.  

Unwatched

On Friday my smartwatch broke. The face must’ve snapped off at some point when I was unrolling the baby yoga mats for our weekly tummy time program at the library, and it took me a minute to register that it had broken. To say that I am attached to this watch is an understatement. I've been wearing it pretty much non-stop for five years. 

It’s the first thing I look at in the morning, to check the time and analyze my sleep. Was my heart rate up or down? Did I fall into the recommended minutes of deep sleep? Did I wake too much to toss and turn? Later, I’d check my steps, noting with satisfaction when I crossed 5000, when I crossed ten, and braggy alert: when I crossed 15. 

For the rest of my work shift, I wandered around feeling the ghost weight of the watch on my wrist. I was already calculating how fast I could buy another and have it sent to me, because really, how else would I know when I completed the requisite standing-for-one-minute-per-hour? And what else was going to give me a digital badge for doing twenty minutes of outdoor exercise?

Home, though, and I had a wild thought: What if I DON’T buy another watch? 

This question came up courtesy of the three books I’ve read recently about the emptiness and dangers of over-consumerism and how we might all be happier with less. (For the record the books are: The Year of Less by Cait Flanders, The Art of Frugal Hedonism by Annie Raser-Rowland, and The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer.) 

On fire with my new awareness, I told my husband we should stop buying so much online and try to purge ten items from our house each week. I made a list of things to purge and promptly did not purge them. 

For example, a bike we never ride that has flat tires. Do we fix it? Stick it out on the curb in its flat-tired state? Haul it to the junkyard? Or, my ancient wedding dress which I had never stored properly, and frankly, who would want it now, with the Lady Diana-inspired poofy sleeves and fiddly beaded bodice? 

I did have one moment of purge-y success. A few days before the watch broke, I noticed a sign at my library that they were collecting gently-used musical instruments for the city schools, and I remembered that I have two violas gathering dust in a closet. When I toted them into the building and set them in the collection box, a wave of nostalgia splashed over me. 

This was the end of an era. The kids playing viola in their school orchestras. The music lessons. The concerts. But the funny thing is that it was the end of the era twelve years ago. For whatever reason I kept hanging on to the violas. I took a picture of the dusty cases and walked away, and immediately felt lighter. 

Wait, my husband says when I tell him about my plan to NOT buy another smartwatch. How will you know how you slept? How will you keep track of your steps? 

I don't know, I say. Do I have to keep track of these things? 

We were out to dinner with friends, and this morning I woke up groggy and tired, and I knew it, without the watch, that the one cocktail and delicious deep-fried barbecued chicken sandwich I ate the night before had really affected my sleep. But, oh well!   

Later, I went for a long walk with the dog, keenly aware of my bare wrist. I ambled along the usual route, but it felt like unmapped territory, a new path unfurling before me, my heartbeats unmeasured, my footsteps, for now, uncounted.