Tag Archives: travel

Farewell, Kia

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Last week my 2008 Kia had an accident—its third—and this one marked the end of its life. It was the first car I ever owned and it’s been a lot of places and done a lot of things. Off the top of my head, I can think of nearly twenty people who have driven it, and at my best count, it’s been to twenty-six states, both coasts, and two Canadian provinces. 

I bought it the summer of 2016 and immediately drove it down to Fort Myers, FL with a former student to see a friend—a week during which I remember both crying a lot and laughing a lot. 2016 and 2017 were difficult, unmooring years and there were many long phone conversations in that car. I played Look Homeward’s “High Tide” on repeat. In 2018, I moved to Vancouver and the car stayed home for a year. My parents appreciated having an extra car to drive and I learned to ride the city bus in a new place. 

Then, in the summer of 2019 my dad and I drove it cross country—stopping along the way to see friends and bison and prairie dogs—and arrived in British Columbia in sparkling mid-summer. Thus began what I consider the glory days of the Kia. It allowed me to take a job at a nursing home that was a bumper-to-bumper but beautiful commute away in West Vancouver—that job would change my life in small but significant ways. Friends and housemates borrowed that car to drive to work, to drive to church, to drive to therapy, to drive to the grocery store. Together we took it to the Okanagan, to the Sunshine Coast, and back across the border to Montana for breaks and get-aways. When the Covid shutdown happened, some of us spent a night joking that we would drive it up to the Yukon and start a new life there. The car was a promise—it held out hope. And it gave a lot of rides, enabled simple generosity.

I drove back into the States for good in June of 2021. When I pulled away from my home of three years in Vancouver, I turned on the radio and Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust” blared out of it. The next day, as I drove through the stunning desolation of Northeastern California, I listened to Anne of Green Gables on audiobook and wept. My brother met up with me in Lake Tahoe and we drove back east—stopping along the way to see family and cities and memories. I got the windshield replaced in Colorado. That fall I took the car with me to Wisconsin, where I learned to shovel a driveway, but got in an accident on an icy road anyway.

I’ve had the Kia back home in North Carolina since 2022, and have tried to tend it gently in its old age. It had an ant problem for a while, the check engine light came on anytime I try to drive through mountains, and the CD player has been jammed since 2020. And now, it has given up a bit earlier than I wanted it to, but still, it has been my friend. 

Someone asked me the other day if I’m a person who names my cars. I think I did pick a name for the Kia when I originally bought it, but then promptly forgot it. So no, clearly I am not. But just because I haven’t been able to properly personify the thing, does not mean it has not been home to me. There is a sticker on its bumper which says that: Home. I can barely recognize my 2016 self, but the Kia can. It has accepted nearly a decade’s worth of my tears and songs with patience. It has carried me through move after move, year after year, and I am grateful.

Travels with Friends

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Late on Sunday I got back from a trip to the West Coast, my first significant one since I moved back to the States four years ago. Stephanie and I flew to Seattle and met Regula, then over two and half days the three of us drove down the splendidly grey and green Oregon coast, through the severe desert hills of northern California and Reno, over Spooner Pass, and into the Lake Tahoe Basin. We stayed there, two blocks from the blue of the water, for a little over a week.

We laughed when things went wrong, made lists like our lives depended on it, hiked up and down, cooked and cleaned, lay on golden beaches, read aloud, took so many photos, and dressed up and took a sunset cruise on a boat called the Tahoe Gal. It was all very good.

In the last few years as I’ve settled into my contented adult life, I’ve not been able to shake the nagging feeling that I’m not as good at joy as I used to be. I’ve become placid. There are worse things, but I miss the child self who I suspect knew without being told how to carry herself into excitement, how to look forward to a thing, how to fall speechless from delight, how to feel beauty for what it is. Now it seems I require teaching.

I took this trip with friends, though, and I think they helped me remember.

Really, I’ve taken three big trips in the last few months, all of them very much with others, so the lesson has been knitting up its little threads inside me the whole time. These last two weeks were just a sunny culmination. The thing which I am coming to understand is this: there are nearly as many good ways of responding to beauty as there are people. It is possible to arrive at the Pacific Ocean or St Paul’s Cathedral or New River Gorge, to climb a stile in the Cotswolds, watch a 92-year-old blow out his birthday candles, see an Amish farmer plow his fields, and respond with a gasp, with a question, with quiet, with laughter, with the urge to create, or the urge to weep. I know this because I’ve experienced all of these things on my recent travels and I’ve had people beside me. I’ve seen their faces.

Sure, I had eighteen expressive and impressionable teenagers with me in London, but as dear as they are, I’m not talking about them. I mean the adults. If it were only the kids who knew how to immerse themselves, that would just support my earlier dreary hypothesis that only children know joy. It was the people who are thirty and up from whom I was seeing these reactions. Sometimes they were picking up a camera, sometimes they were spinning in circles, sometimes they were examining, discussing, and sometimes they were just saying, “Look at that—Oh, look at that!” But all of them were waist-deep in delight.

So all is not lost. In fact, not only is Lake Tahoe still very blue and the water at Emerald Bay still full of something that shimmers, but in southern Oregon on highway 97 there is a remote old gas station where they’ll tell you the pumps only work on one side. On that one side, the front cover is off as you pump your gas in the July heat, and you can see the gears and belts and clanking things whir furiously at their task, inches from your kneecap, while your tank fills at a glacial pace. On Saturday afternoon, I pointed and laughed to see this absurdity. My friends were, understandably, too tired and hot to care much, but in a good and precious rush, I felt joy.

Travel-Around-London Vignettes

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I ride the Northern Line with my sister from Hampstead to Tottenham Court Road. Across from us sits a young man. He is probably in his mid-twenties with curly hair, fashionable slacks, a button down and dress shoes, and he is drinking a can of Foster’s lager. He is alone. There are delicate pink bruises beneath each eye, maybe self inflicted by lack of sleep. He carries a crumpled canvas duffle and as the car fills he moves it to make way for an older woman to sit next to him. The train jolts and an empty can rolls out of his bag, and, pinker than before, he hurries to retrieve it from the floor by someone else’s feet and tucks it, crumbled neatly, into an outer pocket. By the time he exits at Euston, two other empties have joined it. I suspect there is nothing else in the bag. Some small part of me travels with him as he—I know—boards an escalator which carries him up into hot, fresh summer.

The River Frome

Our walking guidebook is old.
Its clear posts and gates and stiles 
have stuttered into decades, disappeared,
But streams and woods abide
Forward on and on.

The River Frome on and on,
Undisturbed by its own minitude
Sings along through the Golden Valley
Softening all that could be hard
As it has for on and on in time.

This two-steps-width of river formed
This rumpled nape of the earth’s neck,
Carved it out of years with a gentleness 
unworried and absolute, on and on.

I stayed for nine nights in a house in northeast London with three of my coworkers and eighteen of my teenage students. We had three bathrooms between us and one singular front door key. We threw open windows and cried and cooked and laughed. Sometimes we slept. This past Tuesday, we went to the Victoria and Albert Museum and I went up as many stairs as I could until I arrived somewhere I’d never been before, where the whole fourth floor was rooms and rooms of ceramics. They were organized by year and by country and they went on and on through time and place: flowering plates and teapots shaped like camels and ornate bowls the size of bathtubs and figurines of eighteenth century politicians. Room after room after room of bone china labored over with stamp and glaze and heel of hand by people who believed that beauty mattered but had no idea that what they made could last.

His mercies never come to an end. Each morning they are made new—dear and fresh.

An Ode to Airport Living

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This will be a summer of travel for me—spring already has been. Throughout June and July I’ll be more out of town than in it. This has me thinking about airports—those odd liminal spaces consisting of high ceilings, endless grey-green carpets, exorbitantly-priced food, ambient intercom announcements, beeping carts, chirring suitcase wheels.

I never think I like an airport. There are restrictions and lines and unspecified waiting times. Sometimes they yell at you to take your shoes off and sometimes they yell at you to keep them on. When you are late for a flight there are always unintentional herds of people directly in your path who are gazing up at departure screens with tired eyes. Also, luggage gets lost.

And yet, in an airport I am nearly always content. Most of the flights I’ve taken in my adult life have been alone. And while this has the downside of not having someone to watch your bags for you, it comes with its own special flavor of autonomy. You are caught in an uncomfortable limbo—Concourse A, perhaps—but there you are utterly free. Free to walk, free to talk on the phone to every friend you can think of, free to treat yourself to a sit-down dinner no matter the hour, free to go in search of the interfaith chapel, free to curl up on the carpet at an empty gate for a nap, free to listen to three hours of an audiobook, free to be either under or overwhelmed by the in-terminal art exhibits, free to have a cleansing cry. 

Those are the things the people around you are doing too. Wherever you settle yourself, you can look across the way and you will see other another human being wearing a neck pillow like an accessorie, waiting to fly away from home or back to it, expectations, hopes, and fears for the destination piled round their feet like so much luggage as they drink a smoothie and watch distant figures on the tarmack wave neon batons this way and that. There is nothing so universally relatable as one solitary person’s very particular experience.

The plane is a different beast altogether. It’s an uncomfortable cocoon in which the only people-watching you can do is out of your literal peripheral vision. But an airport, oh an airport is all cinnamon-pretzel-smelling and full of unguarded faces which bare gut-deep anxiety, boredom, potential. In a few hours we’ll be scattered round the country, round the whole globe, but in this moment we are all in this place, waiting together. Oh, an airport is living.

For Love of America

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Over spring break a friend and I went on a road trip through the American midwest and my mom gave me a portable sundial to take along. This country has a huge number of paths and byways—roads and porches and on-ramps and off-ramps and faces peering through windows. It was nine days and eight nights of good weather and three different rental cars and many different friendly faces and nine different states. The first evening we ate a Hawaiian pizza off the hood of a flashy white Genesis in a parking lot in Atchison, Kansas, the origin point for the Santa Fe railroad line and stayed the night in Leavenworth, down the road from a clean, symmetrical Neoclassical federal prison. 

The next morning I sat on that Kansas balcony just past dawn and thought about spring—the cruel aching of its becoming. The day before we had seen fields and fields of purple where later in the year, wheat will grow. At first I thought it was clover, but a little research let me know that it was a lowly little weed called henbit. The midwest has been lodged somewhere beneath my breastbone since birth, but I’ve rarely—if ever—seen it in the springtime, so the unexpectedness of that constant purple in my periphery gave me fresh eyes for everything.

My main quiet goal of the Missouri day was to see the house that used to be my grandparents’ and to go by their graves. In my eagerness to get there, I kept trying to turn off of US-35 too early and having to embarrassingly reverse course. Everything looked like Highway F to me, like the road that would take me home, but eventually, as always happens, the right road was the right road. We saw the lake, which had risen all the way to the top of the spillway, and then we walked up to the cemetery on a hill.

Car trouble sent us out of our way to St Louis and we eventually crossed the Mississippi at eleven pm near Alton, Illinois, north of the city. The river was only a yawning black expanse at that hour, but we wound along beside it for a while anyway. And there was good morning light the next day at our AirBnB in the heartland of Illinois for writing and for filming (though I found myself baffled by the sundial, for the time being.)

And then Chicago was a quick succession of glassy, shining Navy Pier, families of Hasidic Jews lining up to ride the ferris wheel, turning in a lost iphone found mysteriously on the ground, and then Lou Malnati’s for dinner. The next morning I bathed in a family friend’s apartment in her deep, square bathtub with water the psychedelic color of ancient minerals. Chicago runs its roots deep.

At midday we left and drove up to Madison where my insides turned all to mush. That year I lived there was hard and I was unhappy, but the place itself—the people and Dunn’s Marsh and even the strange traffic patterns to merge onto the beltline—were all kind to me, soft when I was not always able to be. This was my first time back since I moved away, and I missed my client Bonnie who died in spring of 2023. She was Madison to me—she was its parks, its newspapers, its hospitals, its markets, its lakes—and now she is gone. The city itself misses her, even in spring.

The next morning we left before eight and drove north, slowly, through country, to a two-day-a-week mechanic and lawnmower shop and along two lane roads where Amish buggies occasionally rattled past us, then up further north of that, where most of the signs advertised upcoming shops with the simple statement, “CHEESE.”

The Upper Peninsula reaching out over Lake Michigan was grey and open and quiet, as if it knew it was April, but wasn’t ready to talk about it just yet. Shunted backward in time and season, we wandered on a beach in the chill. I flew for a moment on a metal swingset that sang shrilly in the wind and followed two geese out across the sandbar. Spring had arrived on other shores, full of blooms and thawing laughter, but not here, not yet. The only thing that place could do was trust the earth in its turning. That night we stayed in a warm cabin with a Mennonite family down the way. The garbage man waved to me in the morning.

Good Friday brought us to Detroit where my uncle’s tenant let us into his house and we loaded up my grandma’s big table from which I ate so many summer Sunday dinners growing up, and then I sat on the dining room floor and crumpled old Parade magazines to pack bubble glass into boxes. I wrote about Detroit here almost a decade ago and the city has sat up and stuck its chin out since I was there last. It’s dusted off its shoulders and smiled and you can feel it. I stayed in that evening, but Tze went into the city and made friends every which way—on parking decks and sidewalks and in restaurant kitchens. The next morning, Saturday, his friend and her husband walked us through the open air Eastern Market with its thick carpets of flowers laid out in plastic flats, waiting to be planted in earth.

At midday we drove down through the plains to Defiance, Ohio and Abby met us there to putter around a Goodwill. She and I looked for sparkling things, like shoes and dresses, and also for tops because I was running out of clothes. From there we headed straight on to my friend Laura’s family outside Cleveland, and when her six-year-old shrewdly asked me if this was our “first stop with kids” I realized that it sure enough was. So there were books to read aloud and treasure discovered in the backyard dirt pile to admire, because children bring spring in with them from the outdoors. 

And then came Easter Sunday morning, so we drove though idyllic green valleys, where the homes nodded politely to each other all interspersed with churches, to hear a sermon about John chapter twenty, when Mary doesn’t recognize her risen Lord until he speaks her name. He knows her, and through his knowing she knows him: “Rabboni!” she says. After cinnamon rolls and omelets and watching blonde children chase down plastic eggs we drove south through wavering, warming hills on roads nestled into their sides, and found the World’s Largest Cuckoo Clock in a very quiet Sunday town.

Our last night we stayed on Main Street in Charleston, West Virginia. At fifty thousand people, it’s the biggest city in an achingly mountainous and forested and impoverished state. The porches on those neighborhood blocks were full of people who glanced at us with quiet suspicion—girls still in their Easter dresses and boys lingering barefoot along the curbs and folks crouched on stoops and a big sign on a bedsheet that said, “Welcome Home, Old Man!”

On our last day, just south of Charleston, our route crossed New River Gorge again and again. It’s a huge, old seam in the earth’s crust that busted open so many eons ago and has managed, with time, to heal itself over with spit and sweat and gumption and growing things, into a great, green scar. As we wound down through the mountains of Virginia towards Greensboro, I thought of resurrection and again, of Christ stepping out of his tomb, and then, merely by speaking her name, calling Mary out of hers.

All these places we had passed through in this shaken, stubborn country I had been before, and yet seeing them in their states of spring—expecting and tender and face-up-to-the-light and Hopkins’ “dearest freshness deep down things”—I understood how much I did not know about hope.  I see it running in veins through the treetops and the concrete and the backs of people’s hands. There is a mystery that abides. We will not know, not really know, the glory of the resurrected Son until he calls us by name, face to face. Until then, like Mary, we usually only see a gardener and a garden. That will have to do for now.

Christmas in London

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On the Friday before Christmas, I oversaw a bunch of teenagers decorating a gingerbread house while wearing my Christmas tree dress, then went home and changed into corduroys and a big sweater and got a ride to the airport from a friend. My first flight was delayed, then when we did board the pilot had us waiting on the tarmac before take-off for fifteen minutes “because we would make up time in the air,” and then after we landed there was no gate for us for some reason so we waited on that tarmac for about twenty minutes, and I was so convinced that I would miss my second flight and have to wait to travel till the next day that I’d already texted my family and said as much, but when I got off the plane I ran to the other gate anyway in an act of good faith. Another man ran along with me, though perhaps not for the same flight, and more than once we got stuck behind people on the people movers who did not really seem to want to move, but then I made it to the gate, and it was still open and I boarded and sat in my seat and it was a miracle.

This Christmas was a miracle, the kind I often forget to expect.

I landed in London the next morning, and then serendipitously ran into my own brother at Southall Station as if we have spent all our lives living around the block from each other in a small town (which we have not).

The next week-and-change was rich. I wore my sister’s sweaters almost every day. Time passed in a whirl of poems, and foggy Hampstead, and unusual non-perishable food stuffs gifted by my Uncle Jon, and hauling huge pots of paneer and rice to the church, and Christmas carols in the living room, and Asian aunties, and a Christmas group chat with my dad wearing a wig as the icon, and a fourteenth century pub on Christmas Eve, and getting motion-sick on the tube, and walks in Osterley Park (give me a path to tramp across a British field every day for the rest of my life, please), and a brewery in Bermondsey, and dishes done by our friend Zack, and a shop for Christmas dinner at Mary’s big Tesco, and a nativity play with lopsided head-dresses and clear-spoken lines, and the shoulder-to-shoulder crowds at Piccadilly, and egg-white dosas with peanut chutney, and straining cranberry sauce that was much more trouble that I intended, and cream tea at the V&A, and seven adults in a Honda Jazz, and learning that William Buckland once ate the heart of a king, and a clothes dryer piled with all the Christmas goodies like my grandma’s breezeway used to be back in 2003.

I will tell you something: I am unsure if my family has Christmas traditions anymore. Every Christmas of my adult life has been different, this one especially, full of small revelations to bask in. We followed Mary in her hat with its orange bobble through a crowded Covent Garden to track down a Christmas market that had disappeared in the night. My dad sat cheerful and quiet next to an auntie just arrived from India who speaks only Telugu and is hesitant to wear socks. George laughed a lot—often at his own jokes—and rigged up the curtain of saris for the Christmas Mela. My mom bought a floral velvet dress at Harvey Nichols where all of the dresses were very beautiful (except for one which was very ugly). And it was easy to invite in people we haven’t always had with us—my mom’s younger brother and my parents’ student this time. They too can cook and laugh and walk and sing carols and sit on strangers’ couches and hear the good news.

Because every year that news is new, every year we are children again, every year we wait to see what the miracle can possibly be. On Christmas day this year we read Tennyson: “Ring in the valiant man and free, / The larger heart, the kindlier hand; / Ring out the darkness of the land, / Ring in the Christ that is to be.” How much we still have to learn of Him, year after year.

2024 Retrospective

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On January 1st of this year, I wrote with triumph in my journal that all the mice that had been plaguing my kitchen for months were gone: “No more mice!” This did not, unfortunately, turn out to be true—full eradication would take until the spring, but we’ll draw a veil over that. Welcome to the exciting beginning of my 2024. My friend Laura sent me colorful pens for grading, and sometimes I sat in the big chair in my living room and made a mess with watercolors. 

My friend Regula and I joked that this year I entered my “club era”— full of the kinds of clubs that define your thirties. And it’s true that I seem to have become a joiner all of a sudden. Regular commitments include two—and sometimes three—book clubs (only one of which includes my parents), prayer on Thursday evenings, the women’s ministry team at church, and a couple other groups to breathe life into the curious child within me who still sometimes wants to put words on a page that preserve all the good and the odd in the world around her.

But my main commitment, in both time and heart, has been my job—spring teaching this year was hectic and sweet and occasionally made me want to tear my hair out. I cared about the kids so much I got honest-to-God angry at them sometimes and in turn they cared so much about what I had to tell them or teach that they cried earnest tears. A student told me I looked tired and when I told him that wasn’t polite, he took it as an invitation to elaborate on my lack of make up. I bought gold confetti from the dollar store to help teach a George Eliot novel, and it still lives on in my classroom to this day. And one day in mid-spring when we were all tired (not just me), I pressed pause on an honors Lit class so we could spend the period talking about the theology of clothing and I could pretend I was in grad school again.

In April, my friend Katie and I went to London to do teaching research, and it was sweet to see her experience it for the first time and also sweet to see the Victoria and Albert Museum and my sister and other people and things that matter. The week felt intense, but good for beauty and good for friendship. When it rained we sheltered under the awning at Royal Albert Hall. This coming June we’re going to go back and take eighteen teenagers with us. The planning process has sometimes been frantic, especially the financial side, because though I’m a reasonably sensible person, I’ve never been in charge of eighty thousand dollars of other people’s money before, but it will be so good to take the kids. Perhaps we too will wait out the rain at Royal Albert Hall.

My birthday was at the end of April after we returned and though some of those days felt very low, Katie and her husband threw me a birthday party with sparkly pink cocktails and at school students brought me flowers and a cookie cake and general frenetic excitement. 

And then came summer and I returned to writing (though it did not always return to me). I painted my kitchen cabinets and my bathroom. I sorted through nearly every item I own (especially the papers) and worked on applying for foster certification—including fingerprints, interviews, a fire inspection, CPR training, and a map of my home. I watched inarguably too much TV, got set up on a couple dates, listened to most of The Chronicles of Narnia on audiobook, went to the mountains for a day, and spent every single night in my own bed.

School started earlier than usual in the thick blue heat of August and for the first time I was teaching opposite one of my own former students. I took on a new role, helping manage our new(ish) house system, and spent most days teaching kids I’ve taught before, whose handwriting I know and whose growth over the years is a quiet source of hope to me, though many of them cannot yet see it. I had the same study hall advisory as last year and sometimes they argued with me about rules and facts the way kids do with their own parents perhaps because my classroom—sometimes too warm and cluttered—has some home to it. They are used to me and I am used to them.

Laura used to send me emails asking both facetiously and sincerely to hear about my adventures, because my life at the time was full of lots of unexpected newnesses, fresh delights and anxieties, but, as I’ve sifted back through, this year hasn’t seemed even to have many separate events in it, much less adventures. It has merely been long continual rhythms in various parts of my life, all layered on top of one another in syncopation. 

These have been the days of small things, the days of inviting people to this and to that, of getting a french bob and watching it grow out, of my car shutting down as if possessed while driving home from work but then continuing to operate as normal, of a long weekend in Minnesota for a cousin wedding reception by a river, of going to Trader Joe’s, of borrowing a dress to wear to a high school friend’s wedding, of leading a Bible study on Ephesians, of bringing my cello to school, of realizing that there are too many small things and I cannot, in reality, foster a child right now, of driving to Greenville in the quiet, and of going to a reading at a bookstore, hearing flash fiction, then becoming entranced by small things all over again.

December has been a gift. When I walked into church on the 1st and realized it was the first Sunday of Advent my heart made a little leap. I always love this season, perhaps because for much of it the corners of my mind become preoccupied (and therefore filled) with light. When there is more darkness than usual, things that glow become precious: light hanging from trees, light nestled in windows, light bursting out of a night sky in a blinding choir singing “gloria in excelsis Deo!” 

Tomorrow I fly to London to spend Christmas with my family, and I’ll land on the winter solstice when there will be less than eight hours of daylight. But oh, there will be candles and oh, there will be stars. In all these small things I keep remembering some lines of T.S. Eliot I discovered as a teenager, stumbled upon as if they were El Dorado:

For all things exist only as seen by Thee, only as known by Thee, all things exist

    Only in Thy light, and Thy glory is declared even in that which denies

      Thee; the darkness declares the glory of light.

Popsicle Castles

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The first time I remember hearing the story was on a long car trip with my dad and some family friends. We were driving to Gettysburg, and he was waxing eloquent about his grad school days in Chicago. I was only half-listening, and then, all in a moment, I was fully listening because the story he was telling was not one I’d heard before. The characters and the setting were all new. In my memory the first telling of that story went on for forty-five minutes and felt like a whole tv miniseries, fantastic and weird and wonderful.

I’ve heard it a few times since and it doesn’t seem to last quite as long anymore or be quite the fully immersive experience. Over time it has become less funny and more moving to me, and with each new time I hear my dad tell it I find myself with more questions about its heroes. But here—to the best of my ability—is the tale, likely embellished over time in small hazy ways by both my father’s memory and my own:

My dad moved from California to Chicago for grad school around the summer of 1981, but California was not the only place his people were from. His grandmother was from Louisiana out in Goldonna, which I’ve always pictured as sepia-toned, railroad-track-laden swampland. He wasn’t really in touch with any family from back that way, but his grandma of course still was, and when he left for Chicago, she reminded him that he had kin there. One of her Louisiana cousins, Aubyn Hoyle, and her common law husband, Joe Sebold, had lived in Chicago for several years. Like a good boy, he would, of course, need to look them up. 

Perhaps he did or perhaps his Grandma Veonia, called up Aubyn herself to pass along my dad’s number, but the fact remains that they invited him to spend Thanksgiving with him that first autumn. Aubyn and Joe were going to show him a day on the town.

They pulled up to his apartment at the University of Chicago in a pick-up which didn’t seem to have enough working parts to power a lawnmower. They were probably in their forties, but because of hard-living and a scant amount of teeth, looked much older. They were, however, thrilled to have a chance to be hospitable, and to a polite young relation on top of that.

The first place they insisted on taking their PhD-bound cousin was to see their doctor. Doctors, they felt warmly, should associate with doctors, and theirs was especially good, they assured my dad. So soon they were climbing up long flights of stairs to see Dr. Aspirin, their veterinarian. Despite the fact that it was Thanksgiving Day, his waiting room was full of folks who did not look entirely well themselves speaking a variety of languages with decrepit animals languishing across their laps and at their feet. Canine skin diseases seemed to be prominent. Aubyn and Joe marched my dad to the front of the line and asked the wildly overworked receptionist if they could see Dr. Aspirin. “This here’s our kin, and he’s studying to be a doctor, so we want him to meet our doctor.” The receptionist said she would see what she could do, so Aubyn and Joe and my dad settled in with the rest of the hoi polloi to wait. They waited and waited, which of course was to be expected at a doctor’s office, particularly when you were just there to make a social call, but eventually, the honest-to-goodness Dr. Aspirin appeared. He was a tiny Filipino man in a white coat marked by all manner of fluids. Aubyn and Joe explained who my dad was and what they had in common, and the doctor shook his hand very cordially. Aubyn and Joe were well-pleased.

The next stop was Navy Pier which, in the early eighties was no great attraction, but a crowded gray hulk reaching an arm out into Lake Michigan. And then onto what my dad’s hosts assured him was their favorite piece of sculpture in the whole city. And it was, in its own way, a marvel. Forty feet tall, on a rotating platform at the edge of a junkyard were washers welded to lawnmowers fused to the bumpers of old trucks all sticking out at various angles, forming a looming silhouette of machine life and art. It looked as if the thing had grown there, though in retrospect, it couldn’t possibly have. As they wended from stop to stop Aubyn and Joe kept up a regular chatter in the front seat, often turning around to my dad to address him about various aspects of their lives or their city. At one point Aubyn, craned back and announced, with a clear belief that my dad needed to be informed, “You know, dog is God spelled backwards.”

Thanksgiving dinner was special, Joe told my dad, and turned out to take place at a cafeteria in which the turkey consisted of a variety of meat substances stuffed into a fowl-shaped mold, like a sausage casing, and then revealed in glory to the beholder. It was simultaneously a feast for both the eyes and the stomach, as well as appropriate for Aubyn and Joe’s great dearth of teeth. After dinner they took my dad back to their apartment, which was up many flights of stairs, just as Dr. Aspirin’s office had been, and, once inside, was piled high with all manner of things. But as one does with kin, they extracted the family album from one of the many piles and laid it across my dad’s lap for him to appreciate. He opened it, and three cockroaches ran out, skittering across the room and away to cover. Aubyn was not concerned by this intrusion, but began the pleasant due diligence of pointing out all the photos of his grandma as a little girl, as well as legions of relations he had never met.

At last, as my dad was hoping to make his exit, Joe announced that they needed to show him “what they made.” So they led him to the second bedroom, and he opened the door and peered in. But instead of disordered hills of junk, he found tables covered in careful architectural miniatures: the White House, the Empire State Building, the Colosseum, the Eiffel Tower, all built entirely of popsicle sticks. They were intricate and ordered and clearly represented many hours of work. Aubyn and Joe glowed with pride behind him. These people had dedicated themselves to building a world. My dad couldn’t think of what to say, and so he asked, “Where do you get all the popsicle sticks?” It turned out to be a foolish question, because they then led him to the kitchen and opened the freezer, which was full, of course, of popsicles. Joe smiled his toothless smile.

My dad never saw them again after that one Thanksgiving with all its revelations, but there is a coda to the story. Years later, he was contacted by a lawyer who told him that Joe Sebold had passed away and left my father a few acres of land down in Natchitoches Parish in Louisiana. There were no buildings to speak of on it, and it was hot and sodden and isolated. My dad was in the midst of finishing his doctorate and getting married, so he did the practical thing—he had the lawyer sell the land sight unseen. But Joe had, at the last, done that thing he and Aubyn knew best—reach out to kin, and hold nothing back, offer the very best of what you’ve got.

2023 Retrospective

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My 2023 started with a walk with my friend Heather, visiting from New England. That evening we sat in my warm living room across from each other and wrote poems about the year and other stuff we’d seen. Then those first few days brought some difficult things at work—quiet things, heavy things, which in retrospect I may have mishandled in many ways. An inauspicious start, but I’m not grading this year on my own performance.

In very rough chronological order, this is what followed:

I took a cold little hike out in Rockingham with Karen and CJ and a hundred strangers. I read a lot and chatted with my coworkers even more in the quiet cracks of planning periods. I got more colds than usual and collected and organized all the digital curriculum guides in the two upper schools.

I had a writer’s retreat in the grey winter hills of the Piedmont where I wrote a bit and took more baths than there were days. I covered the walls of my bedroom in curtain rods, so I could hang my clothes from hooks like garlands. I let students read my novel in bits and pieces, and while waiting for planes and trains I made use of long layovers the best way I know how: talking to friends and walking to see the art.

I flew to Jolene’s wedding and let the Vancouver drizzle permeate my skin. I wrote postcards for my students before their AP exam, and spent two months preparing in excess for a half-hour chapel talk for the high school. Now that I have a place of my own I discovered that I am sometimes unsure of what to do with myself when I am in it—I rattle and chafe—but at school a coworker friend bought a TENS unit so the kids could simulate period pain, and I knew the best response to that was laughter.

Over spring break I went to Tennessee with my mom and, with my aunt, we walked around Cheekwood and saw model trains and spring blooms and paneled libraries. My freshmen illustrated Dante’s circles of hell (and added Where’s Waldo to many of them), I went to a Kentucky Derby party for the first time since childhood, and while on my way to a sweet and full family reunion in the brown and green mountains of Colorado I received news that my client Bonnie, who took up most of my working hours when I lived in Wisconsin, had died.

I went blonde, later covered that in henna, then a few months later chopped it all off, because changing my hair has always been a reliable constant. I took a long train journey for all of July, leaving my life behind to take up temporary residence in the lives of half a dozen friends: attending the birthday party of a little girl I’d only barely met, watching Survivor, chatting with the neighbor kids, and peering up at fireworks from beneath an umbrella. Then I came home in August and killed a couple house plants through well-intended negligence.

I watched Love Island with friends, because you can’t be teachers all the time, and waited six months to get my car repaired after running into a tree. I purloined a couch from storage at school for my classroom, was immediately asked to return it, and then, in perhaps the greatest miracle of the decade, was gifted an armchair and ottoman. My sister came home for a few months, taking lots of walks and visiting every thrift store and church she could find. I made new friends here and there, but struggled to maintain the friendships I already had as I sank into fall. Regardless, I watched people’s dogs for them and cleaned out my gutters.

I went to Charleston with my family where we ate at The Obstinate Daughter and played trivia, and I discovered that I do, after all, like the beach. A student cried over a test I wrote for the first time in years, and I planned trips to London and maybe to Tahoe for next year. I went to the zoo with a friend and her kids, and was asked to write two essays for church, one of which led to me teaching a George Herbert poem around a campfire to a bunch of open-faced grown women. And despite my own grown-ness, I found myself more and more often the recipient of generosity from those around me—rides and patience and time.

God has been just as good to me this year as he is every year, and many of the gifts enumerated above echo his long goodness, but I’ve felt myself straining to keep afloat, despite all that. I know this primarily because writing—which used to be so full of joy, like stepping into sunlight—has become stale, difficult, full of grey sand. I’ve posted here every month since I was eighteen—more than thirteen years—but I’m going to take a sabbatical now. I’m working only within the framework of my own rules, but those rules have often been fairly definite things, so I need a fancy word to feel as if this is allowed. Sabbatical it is. I will return to this space—I think—in six months.

The fact is, I’ve felt both older and younger—more squinting, childlike, and lost—recently, and I might as well dwell in that, holding my empty hands out and taking what others have to offer. Last week, my friend Katie gave me a basic lesson in watercolor and told me she was going to start at the beginning, like I knew nothing, and, sitting at her kitchen table with the paint brush I wasn’t sure how to hold, I said that made sense. Wendell Berry wrote that “when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work,” and he may be right. Yesterday was Christmas. I sat with my family for nearly two hours opening the presents that were piled under the tree. It was a very good day, and I thought of Mary two thousand years ago, picturing her as the song does: “not used to the light, but having to squint her eyes in the sunshine,” yet chosen and beloved by God, nonetheless.

The day school let out a week or so ago, my siblings came over in the evening. I was very tired, so they heated up dinner and we ate together. After, as we were cleaning up, my sister asked for a container for the little bit of peas that were left. I reached into the cabinet and pulled out a tiny container the size of two bottle caps stacked on one another, and held it out to her, giggling hysterically. In the space of about five seconds my laughter dissolved into tears. Mary took the container from me, told me to sit down, and began to rummage in the cupboard herself. So there you have it—I don’t always know what to make of things anymore, or what to say about or do about them. But I will treasure them all up, and ponder them in my heart.

Friends’ Homes and Peculiar Gifts

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I am almost home from this journey. Almost, but not quite. The trip been the things I expected, but also more. There have been eleven train stations (plus two bus stations for good measure). And when you travel by train, you look out the window a lot and see the trees and the fields and the small-town roads and jails and houses flashing past, then laid gently on top of all that you see your own reflection looking back at you.

Last week I had a long layover in downtown Chicago, so I stored my luggage and bought a pass to the Art Institute. I walked there down full, sunny streets. Wearing a wide brimmed hat and a short flowy dress in the Windy City was an added complication, but I didn’t really mind. This is how you expect solo travel to be: a little complex, but peaceful. I wandered through room after room at the Art Institute, photos and paintings and stained glass and pencil sketches and antique furniture, with the soft feeling that beauty tends to give me creeping along my skin. I took breaks from the art to each lunch in the courtyard and to walk down past Buckingham Fountain to the shore of Lake Michigan.

But most of this trip has not been cosmopolitan like that. Most of this trip has been family homes. Since I last wrote to you, I’ve been in a succession of them. There have been four babies, lots of toddlers and preschoolers, and a few older kids too. The highlights of days have been trips to the park with double strollers, family ice cream runs, and little hikes suitable for small legs through midwest woods. I’ve curled on many different couches to write.

These friendships all have a sweet longevity, sustained by small, unremarkable bits of upkeep when we see each other. We go to the library, and I pick out good grown-up novels for them while they watch their kids play in the children’s section. We color each other’s hair with henna because we’ve talked about it for a couple years now. We sit in the evening and watch something and chat long, holding out memories and future hopes to each other with equal care.

I am more aware than I’ve ever been of my friends’ generosity. Traveling this way requires it, requires people to rouse themselves out of bed at odd hours to take me to the train station, to make space for me in their rhythms and homes and at their tables. Going through this pattern of being cared for in place after place was more humbling than I knew it would be.

But this is what it means to be in each other’s lives.

Last night, bleary and tired I sat on the train looking down at the rings on my hand—the amethyst from my grandma and the pearl I found in that rental car last summer— and thought of all the pudgy little fingers that have reached out to fiddle with them in the past couple weeks. And suddenly, with my head leaned against the window, I was teary.

I am a woman with a natural instinct to mother, but single in my thirties and surrounded by peers who are in what we like to call a “different stage of life” from me. I will tell you, some days I feel as if an important part of me is wasting away, withering imperceptibly month by month while no one watches. The oft-repeated suggestion of pouring that directionless love into someone else’s children almost always clangs like a trite consolation prize, no matter how nice the kid or good the friend.

But as I looked at those rings, and thought of the little people nestled into my side who had touched them, a quiet wonder happened. I was fully, divinely aware of what a peculiarly glistening gift the last two weeks have been. I sat there and cried because, as someone told me once, we serve a no waste God, and he takes our deep desires into his own hands, and uses them in ways we could not imagine.

Because the gift of being with my friends’ young families was not a gift to me only. I’ve spent this time buckling so many car seats, holding so many hands as we cross a street, and swaying with so many fussy babies balanced against my hip. I’ve read more books aloud than I can count, small bodies using my arm or shoulder to somersault themselves into a new spot on the couch. My lap has more real estate for sitting on than a nursing mother’s and I know card games the school age kids haven’t learned yet. I can cook dinner with a thirteen-year-old for a sous chef while his mom runs out to pick up his sister and I can make sure the toddlers don’t touch the breakables in the general store. In return, I’m called “Miss Alice” in a sweet host of piping voices. 

Some kids who a decade ago hugged my legs with head mashed against my hip are now taller than me. The ones who hugged my legs this past week will grow fast like that too, and whether I have my own kids or not, I get to watch, and watching is a joy.

I’ve had much time to think about all this, because my last travel leg home has been a long and ridiculous saga. There were four graveyard-shift hours spent waiting at the Indianapolis Amtrak station, and then twenty-four straight hours on a train, about seven of which were at a total standstill. Arriving in Charlottesville after three this morning, the station attendant sent several of us in a taxi to a hotel outside of town where we would stay for free, but when we were dropped there and walked into the lobby we found that they had no record of us. Eventually I got some real sleep in a clean bed though, and now, after a sticky midday walk, I am sitting at the University of Virginia library writing this to you. I will catch my final train home this evening.

I’d planned to be back in my own space by now, and I’ll be happy when I am. And yet. Despite exhaustion and discomfort, this last day or two has been its own peculiar gift. I’ve been surrounded at every juncture by people who seem straight out of a Flannery O’Connor story, their outrageous humanity busting through all the cracks in their veneer. I’ve watched and laughed and thought about what wonderfully messy, oozing poetry they would make. 

But that’s for another day.

Today I am simply grateful for all of the last few weeks: all the homes I’ve entered, all the beds I’ve slept in, all the plates set in front of me, all the arms wrapped around me, and all the beauty I’ve seen. And most, I’m grateful for the grace of God in allowing me to occasionally understand just how good I have it.