Sometimes, my Facebook feed feels like a parade of dead parents. So many people I know are living through the same stage of life I am, and this is where we are: the age of our untethering.

A good friend from college recently lost her father, suddenly, and although–I guess?–none of us should be surprised, it was still surprising. I haven’t yet crossed over to the island so many of my old friends now inhabit, and I always feel at a loss for words when I see them climbing onto that terrible shore. What can I call across to them that that will be helpful and true? What do I know of where they are, or of what life now means to them? When I imagine the journey ahead of me, my own foundation collapsing and throwing me into that same sea…well, I don’t. Imagine it. Not for long, anyway.

My friend, who is also managing some other challenges typical for those our age, has been much on my mind. One dreary day this week, as I pulled into a grocery store parking lot, Katrina and the Waves’s “Walking on Sunshine” came on the radio:

What a frothy confection of a song! It transported me to 1985, the year Kim and I, a pair of coltish young women all lanky and clumsily beautiful, became friends. I remembered a particular afternoon in our sorority’s sun-filled living room, feeling good with her in a place I often felt bad, laughing at that song, at where we were, at how it felt to be everything we were on a rare warm northwest spring day. Everyone around us was blonde and light, with faces turned toward futures I couldn’t imagine as anything other than bright. Nearly 40 years later, sitting in my car in the parking lot of a dismal grocery store on a gray January day, the song made me smile, the way it always did then and always has since. It made me feel good to think of us as we once were, so many of our dramas then as silly-serious as the music, with our biggest mistakes not yet made and our deepest pains not yet felt.

Weren’t we lucky, once?

I want to say that we had no idea how good we had it, but that’s too easy and not quite true. Filling out an intake form recently, I wrote that I am, right now, the best I’ve ever been. And I am. That is true. Sure, I would love to still have my 20-year-old body–and so many of the things and people and places and opportunities I’ve had and lost since then–but not the fears and worries and nearly unbearable weight of impending choices my younger self struggled to carry.

Yes, we had so much. Yes, we had it all ahead of us. Yes, there is something wonderful about a mostly blank slate. And also: It was terrifying and hard and confusing because there was so much we didn’t know and so much pressure to get it All Right. We didn’t know, then, that all right was a fantasy, a myth. That we would never be entirely OK, no matter which choices we did and didn’t make. That simply choosing right would not prevent wounds or heal the ones we didn’t even know, yet, that we had. That even the golden ones among us would suffer. That our lives would always be as they were and had always been, a terrible, gorgeous mix.

Although I will, in the face of another’s grief, always fear saying the wrong thing, or saying the right thing the wrong way, I have learned that it is generally better to say something than nothing. So I sent the song to my friend with a few bumbling words, even as I worried that they might land wrong. That she might wonder what the hell I was thinking, would not understand what I was trying to offer or say. That I would make her feel even more sad than she already does.

But what she wrote back to me was, “I can’t express how much I LOVE this.”

I don’t know how she feels–how any of my friends on that shore I’m heading for truly feel–but I know that the more I lose, the more I love what I’ve had, and the more I realize what a gift it can be to have something good to feel nostalgic and heartbroken with, even if it is only a soft song that lets us forget, for a few moments, all the hard “yes, ands” we all live with, no matter our age.

What’s making me cry this week:

I’ve written here about being a school librarian, but I’ve never said much about the other role I played for the last third of my career as an educator: instructional coach. In short, my job was to support teachers in improving their instructional practice. My speciality was literacy, and I was often leading training sessions to teach teachers how to implement an instructional framework my district had committed to that I came to believe wholeheartedly in.

My faith was based in both research studies showing the framework’s effectiveness and in seeing how it transformed teaching and learning for those teachers I worked with who implemented it fully. For a very few teachers, I watched teaching become more joyful, less arduous, and more effective.

Why only a very few? you might be wondering. Well, because very few were willing/able to implement it fully. Many were frustrated and burned out by the many, many systemic inadequacies they worked within. Many had tried many, many things already that had promised to make things better, only to be disappointed when they did not, in fact, make things better. What I was asking them to do was not easy, and most of us won’t voluntarily do hard things if we don’t have faith or hope that doing them will make things better.

“I already do that,” they’d say to me. (No, they didn’t really. They did parts, or they did things that were “that” superficially, but not in the ways that mattered most. But they weren’t really doing it.)

“It won’t work because ______ (fill in with any number of things that are beyond a teacher’s control to fix or change),” they’d say. They believed that if someone else could just fix those things (poor attendance, kids’ home lives, lack of resources, etc.), the ways in which they were teaching would be just fine and they wouldn’t need to change what they were doing.

I was often frustrated and bewildered by their responses. There I was, offering a way that was in their control to make their teaching lives better–and improve their students’ learning. True, it would require them to teach in some radically different ways. It would require the shifting of some long-held paradigms. It would mean bucking tradition and giving up some things that they valued. But the current ways weren’t really working! (Everyone admitted that.) And they were unsustainable!

“What do you really have to lose if it doesn’t go well?” I’d ask. “Just try,” I’d implore.

Most did not. I could not understand the resistance I faced when I was offering tools of empowerment. So many people I talked with were so frustrated because they felt powerless. “The great thing is that you have the power to make things better,” I’d say. “And the hard thing is that you have the power to make things better.” It’s hard because if we have the power to make a change, we are the ones who have to make it happen. We are the ones who have to change. We can’t wait for someone else to do things to improve the situation.

This fall, as a student in a 7-week pain management course, and in subsequent experiences that have grown out of that one, I’ve come to a greater understanding of that resistance.

I hated my pain management course. I dreaded Thursday mornings, when I’d have to sit in a 2-hour Zoom meeting and listen to excessively chirpy and annoyingly positive facilitators tell me that I had the power to reduce my pain and make my life better.

I was pretty sure that those facilitators did not know chronic pain the way my fellow participants and I know chronic pain. They were not living it as we were. (I actually don’t know if that’s true. They might have been.)

They shared a poem that basically said it was our responsibility to change the course of our journey with pain, and the implication that it was my choices creating my pain (and therefore my fault) pissed me off so much I said in a session that I thought the poem was ableist and insulting and wondered if perhaps they could find something that gave a similar message about empowerment without the victim-blaming. (Yep, I was that person.)

I, and, it became clear, all of my fellow course participants, had already done and tried so many of the things they were “teaching” us to do. And yet, there we all were, still in pain that was negatively impacting our lives. That pissed me off, too.

In one session, I got extra pissed off because life circumstances for most people make the remedies they were suggesting impossible to implement. Many of the things suggested would not have been possible for me to do in my life when I was working full-time and single-parenting my kids. Since September, I have told others that my new job is getting a handle on my health and pursuing remedies to the various maladies that have plagued me for 3 decades or more, and I haven’t been joking. It has felt like a full-time job, doing All The Things (which I won’t list here).

And, man, if I don’t now get where all those teachers who didn’t want my Kool-Aid were coming from. I was just as burned out from years of struggle with my health and the healthcare system as many of them were from years of struggle with their teaching practice in a dysfunctional educational system. Like the teachers I worked with, my frustrations and anger and hopelessness were real and justified. Things have been all fucked up and it just isn’t right.

But that doesn’t mean my pain class facilitators were wrong.

Seeing the parallels pretty quickly, I forced myself to do the kinds of things I wished more of my colleagues had been able to do with me. I made myself stick with the class. (I did skip one session, though.) I made myself keep trying new things. I made myself keep making and attending appointments and doing the things at home I’ve been advised to do. I read books and clicked links and watched videos. I made myself work to keep an open mind. I gave myself permission to be imperfect in all of this and take breaks when I just couldn’t with it all. And this week, I finally (I think, I hope) got to a doctor who was able to weave the many threads of my story with pain into a cohesive narrative. For the first time, ever.

And damn if those perky facilitators weren’t (for the most part) right. (Yay! And Fuuuuck!)

As is often the case with true stories, there is no black-and-white conflict, no easy cause-and-effect, no simple or neat resolution. There is much more “yes, and” than “either/or.” Yes, there are things I can do to improve my life with pain AND the pain has not been something in my control because it originates from my parasympathetic nervous system, which cannot be consciously controlled. Yes, it is, in a sense, “all in my head”–in that the pain originates in my brain–AND the pain is real, and felt in other parts of my body. Yes, the parts of my body that (now) hurt are structurally sound and disease-free, AND decades of living with a hyper-aroused nervous system have caused physical damage to some of those parts. (Also: In the past, some body systems were damaged, and that damage created pain, and that contributed to forming neural pathways that create pain now, even though I no longer have those organs that created the initial problem. It’s been tangly.) Yes, I lived and worked in broken systems for years that helped create these problems and that I was powerless to change, AND simply leaving those systems hasn’t made everything all better. (And won’t.) Yes, there’s finally a pathway to something better, AND going down it requires a lot of resources that aren’t available to a lot of people–which means that I probably couldn’t have done all that much to improve my situation in the years when I didn’t have them. And that we shouldn’t blame or shame those who don’t have what they need to be able to shift out of surviving a situation to improving it.

As was true for the teachers I worked with, there is no outside fix that will make everything all better and what I want it to be. There is no quick and easy solution, and certainly no perfect one. I cannot pick and choose the parts of a coping framework I can easily adopt and ignore other whole parts of it. If I do, I will get only partial benefits, if any. (Which is why so many of the things chronic pain sufferers been told to do over the years haven’t really worked for many of us.) Improving things will require me to adopt new paradigms and do things differently and it will take some time for me to see results. To stay on this path, I will need to abandon others, and there is some loss in that.

But I will tell you this: for the first time in years, I have hope that things can be significantly better. If you’ve ever lost hope and then regained it, you know what a gift it is.

Some years, I can hardly wait until December 26 to take the Christmas tree down. Not this one. My daughter’s husband flew in from Sweden with the ice storm on December 22, and for two weeks our little house was full of sugar and clutter and candlelight and puzzle pieces and music and comfort food and ease. It felt like a warm, slow-moving dream, and I didn’t want it to end, but finally, on Epiphany Eve, I began to put Christmas away.

I’d thought about waiting until Fredrik left to begin dismantling our holiday, but as the world moved on from New Year’s Day things started to feel differently. When Cane returned to school, it started to feel right to begin gathering up our beloved objects and putting them back in their boxes, a physical manifestation of our transition to a different way of being. I didn’t meet the traditional expectation and get everything taken down and put away on Epiphany Eve. In some cultures, that would mean that our decorations needed to then stay up until February 2–but I just can’t with that. I didn’t even finish the next day, Friday, though I made some progress. We were having such a nice one, our last full day with Fredrik. I didn’t want to lose the time we still had to preparing for the time to come.

I was deep in de-lighting the tree that afternoon when Cane’s daughter called to tell him that her cat needed to be put down. We knew it was coming–he was old and ill when she adopted him nearly three years ago–but it was still a blow. Cane would need to be with her the next day while Grace and I took Fredrik to the airport. It was to be a day of hard endings for our girls, and for us, too.

I finished putting Christmas away on Saturday, after our trip to the airport. Driving away from Fredrik and from Grace who was going to privately say goodbye to him there before getting herself to work, I counted three couples clinging to each other on the sidewalk in front of the departures doors, some wiping tears from their faces. I couldn’t stop my own from coming.

That night, Cane and I sat in front of a fire in our living room. Normally, I love the first evening after putting all the Christmas things away. The clean, open spaces feel good. Not this time. “It feels empty in here,” I said, even though we’d spent some of the afternoon talking about how we have too much furniture in the room. “I think this is the first year since I’ve known you that I didn’t say ‘fucking Christmas’ at least one time during the season,” I added. He laughed and agreed that it was.

I suppose that might be because it’s the first year in my adult life I found myself accepting the holidays as they came, able to be more grateful for what we have than sad for what we don’t. As Cane and I sipped wine and put wood on the fire, we talked about our family–the people we’ve lost (our grandparents, younger versions of our children and parents and selves) and the ones who remain. We talked about our fears for losses we know are coming.

“What I didn’t understand when I was younger,” I said, “is that everything and everyone is always dying. Every good-bye is a little death. The Fredrik who gets on the plane will not be the same one we see the next time we are all together in June. We won’t be the same.”

I know that sounds morbid, but I found it comforting, somehow. Time feels like an endless sea at the beginning of all our holidays, all our love stories; we float and play in it with nothing but delight because all we can see is water. We know there is a shore and that the waves are taking us relentlessly toward it, but it’s so far away. Until it isn’t. Eventually, always, the calendar turns. Something ends. Someone leaves or dies. The tree comes down. But that there are always endings means that there are always beginnings, new versions of us to fall in love with, new waters to dive into with joy.

As the fire burned down and we talked about all that we love and have loved, the room began to feel a little more full, and I began to make peace with the changes in it. Or maybe my eyes just began to get used to how it is now, as they always do. We’d planned to cook dinner at home, to make a good new memory in our favorite place, but we were both tired from the day and couldn’t bear the idea of cleaning up afterward. Instead, we went out for Chinese. “It’s still the holidays, right?” he said, and we laughed.

When we returned, the house felt a little more like home than it did when we’d left. And it was all right.

We were all right.

(Nope.)

Each New Year’s Eve, I wonder what the coming year will bring that I cannot anticipate, which prompts me to look back at the previous year and note those things that surprised me. In 2022, for example, these are developments I could not have predicted on December 31, 2021:

I returned to the ice.

I began a new, fundamentally different relationship with my body after an episode of severe back pain.

We bought a project house in Louisiana.

These are all huge things for me, and my life is significantly different from a year ago because of each of them. I will also wonder, too, about what things will happen in the world. On January 5, 2020, I wrote these words, reflecting on the death of someone important to me:

“We are living through a frightening, unstable time. Robert and I viewed many things differently, but we agreed about this. His death–or, more importantly, his life and his beliefs and his many words to me–have me thinking hard about what work needs to be done in the face of all that is coming.”

Ha! “…in the face of all that is coming.” I had no idea what was going to be coming in the months that followed: pandemic, schools closing, protests, wildfires that gave my city–for a week or so–the worst air quality in the world, a presidential election in which the loser (we now know for sure) tried to overthrow the results and was largely responsible for ending our long streak of peaceful transfers of power.

What will the coming year bring? Who knows! After the past few, I have lost any illusions I once had about being in control of what happens. And honestly, I am glad I don’t know. I’d rather deal with the hard things as they come; knowing about last year’s ahead of time would not have allowed me to prevent or mitigate any of them. As for the events I’ve deemed “good,” this last year gave me such lovely, wonderful surprises, and a big part of my delight was the unexpectedness of them.

Perhaps because of the way so many things have felt out of my control in recent years (in ways both good and bad), I’ve abandoned anything that looks like a traditional resolution, and I don’t choose a word for the year, and I don’t really even set intentions. I like to think that new ways of being are something I can invite in at any time (which is why I’m publishing a new year’s post after everyone else has moved on from that topic), and I’m more interested in small shifts than grand undertakings. So, these are two small shifts I’m making this month:

1. PT and yoga: I began physical therapy in the fall, but I haven’t made good progress with it. Despite the fact that it should only take me minutes a day, I’ve had a terrible time making time for it. Yoga is also something I’ve been wanting to start. I’ve signed up for a 30 day yoga series through Yoga with Adriene (recommended by the pain management clinic I started working with in October). I am only a few days in, but I’ve been starting my days with PT and yoga. Maybe I needed more of a time commitment, so that it wouldn’t be so easy to tell myself I’d do it later in the day? I’m not sure how it will work when skating starts up again (classes weren’t in session over the holidays), but my goal is to do PT/yoga on any days I’m not skating. (I’m giving myself permission in advance not to be perfect in my practice. I think that’s got to be a key to sticking with new things.)

2. Reading: Last year my daughter introduced me to an app called StoryGraph. I signed up for it, recorded one book, and promptly forgot about it. I’ve never been a GoodReads person; StoryGraph appeals to me (maybe?) because it’s small. Or it’s small the way I plan to use it. I’ve signed up for the January Pages Challenge, using both the audiobook I’m currently listening to (The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois) and the print book I’m reading (The Winners). I want a way to track my reading, and I want some accountability for myself. I like the visuals of this platform. I don’t know why I’ve been having trouble sustaining my attention with print books, but I’d like to work on changing that. I know the best way is simply to read more. Right now, I’m just raising my awareness of how much I’m reading and why I sometimes don’t pick up a book. If this is something you use or are interested in using, let’s be reading buddies; my username is ritamarie.

That’s it. These are two things I hope I can turn into new routines in my life, regardless of what the year brings. Challenging my body and my mind, cultivating good mental and physical health. I’m still plugging away at food issues (planning, preparation, low-inflammation options, developing workable routines), household organization, figuring out skating goals, and thinking about writing goals, but I’m not starting anything new with any of those things. I can only cultivate so many new habits at once, and these two seem pretty compatible with winter, with its slower pace.

I would love to know what you’re anticipating in the coming year, how you establish new habits, or if you have any book recommendations. Or maybe just chime in on what you want to be in 2023:

Sending wishes that all your surprises in the coming year will be good ones.

It’s been a frosty, sunny stretch of days here. We put up the tree, celebrated my birthday, meandered our way toward the holidays.

When I was a young teen, I made all the gifts I gave to adults. I had so many people on my list–great-grandmothers, grandparents, parents, an aunt and uncle–that I began working on them in September. I remember plotting out when I would make each one on a calendar, amazed at how little time I had. I sewed, made art, wrote books that I illustrated. I remember trying my hand at candle-making and other kinds of crafts.

This week, I have been uneasy because I am not stretched for time. By design and through loss, I have few gifts to give this year, and I can’t shake the sense that I have forgotten something important. I keep thinking there is something I’m supposed to be doing that I haven’t, and I’ve been remembering a recurring dream in which it is Christmas and I have forgotten to get presents for my family. We are having the simple holidays we decided, back in the summer, that we wanted, but I am discovering that the conditioning of 50+ years is not so easy to cast off.

I’m feeling a bit of sadness, too, some longing for holidays of years past. Today some of my cousins are gathering, but I won’t be joining them, much as I’d like to. They are too far away, Cane has to work tomorrow, and we are limiting our contact with others to increase chances that we’ll be healthy for a visit to my parents in the week after Christmas. We haven’t seen them since the summer, as illness keeps canceling our plans. The last time my extended family gathered was the Christmas of 2019. We ate the food we always eat together (Croatian spaghetti, kroštule, scotcheroos), and after dinner we sat at the table and played Apples to Apples. It was normal, familiar, comfortable, unremarkable, wonderful. For much of my life we gathered every year, around my grandmother’s table, but that year was the first time we’d been able to do so in several. We said then that we needed to make sure we didn’t let so much time pass, that we would need to make sure to meet again the following year. We had no idea what was coming at us in 2020, or that it would be years before we could gather in such a way again. Writing these words, I can’t help wondering if we ever will. How many years can we go before a tradition that had already frayed breaks completely?

I’m doing my best to let that sadness sit beside different kinds of comfort and joy–to accept that a long life is a thing of constant inconstancy, a coming-and-going stream of people and places and things that we love, a rich amalgam of grief, abundance, loss, gain, and surprise of various kinds. (We never know what might happen in any given day, do we?) This year we have my daughter with us, and her husband will be joining us from Sweden. We are looking forward to good food, a fusion of Swedish and American holiday traditions, and a day designed for introverts. I am sure there will be a year in the future–if I’m lucky–in which I will look back on this one and miss the parts of it I no longer have.

Wishing all of you peace, comfort, and joy in the coming days. I will catch up with you again in the new year.

…to get outside

…to delete apps

…to make soup

…to read

…to nap

…to puzzle

…to complete a small project

…to eat a dive-bar burger

…see a nostalgic, mostly feel-good movie

Yesterday was cold, but sunny, and so we spent a few hours working in the yard. I shuffled some plants around, cut back stems that finally withered from our first frosts, and planted a few new things for winter. Cane pruned the pear tree and took a load of lumber scraps and other detritus from summer projects to the dump. It felt really good to move our bodies in the cold air and look closely at the sparse kind of beauty that late fall brings.

The first thing I did yesterday morning was make soup (recipe linked above; I recommend mashing the beans a bit to make the broth a little thicker), and it was so nice to go inside and warm up with it after getting cold and dirty and the best kind of tired.

After lunch we took naps, and then we went out for a real, honest-to-God date. We walked around a fancy part of town to look at lights and storefronts, and then we had one of our favorite dinners, a dive-bar burger. Followed that up with Spielberg’s latest schmaltzy offering, but we found it more charming than eye-roll inducing. Sometimes you just want to spend a few hours with simplistic characters, grand speeches about Important Things, swelling music, and gorgeous people, clothing, and interiors. This time of year is a good one for that kind of movie. We made our annual obligatory trip to our city’s main square to see the big Christmas tree that is erected there every year. I’m glad we did.

This morning I read Anne Helen Peterson’s latest newsletter offering (linked above), on reading, and so much hit so close to home. I miss reading the way I once did. I keep trying to find my way back to it, and it eludes me. I then spent a good amount of time deleting apps from my phone. I’d already deactivated the dumpster fire that is Twitter, which I rarely used anyway, but I’ve put both Instagram and Facebook in timeout. I really love some Instagram accounts I follow (e.g., poetryisnotaluxury), but I would rather be the kind of reader I once was. I’m not sure this will do the trick, but I’m willing to try it.

Not much in store for today. I’m sitting at our dining table in the living room, on new-to-us old chairs we bought and recovered last weekend, watching snow blow out the window. The weather app tells me it’s supposed to be rain and 37 degrees, but my eyes tell me those are snowflakes and that they are sticking to the ground. I’d rather believe my eyes than my phone. We’ll be celebrating the second Sunday of advent at dinner tonight, a Swedish tradition my daughter has brought home with her. We celebrated first Sunday last week, and we really enjoyed it. There will candle lighting and a fire burning in the fireplace and something warm and comforting to eat.

I don’t know if it’s the most wonderful time of the year. I know for many it isn’t–and I think you probably can’t live as many decades as we have without feeling some sorrow through the holidays–but we’re doing our best to make the best of these weeks. We’re keeping it small, and simple, and listening to what our bodies want. Our souls, too. Hoping you can do the same in the weeks to come.

One day this week, an errand took me past a former workplace. It’s a road I spent years driving down, Monday through Friday, but I rarely have cause to drive it now.

Thanks to my pain management class, a book I learned about there, and a recent conversation with my primary care doc, I am coming to understand some things about my body’s responses to perceived threat, and how that is connected to years of chronic pain from various medical conditions. So, when I had to drive by that place slowly–it’s a school zone, and I hit it at peak drop-off time in the morning–I had plenty of time to get triggered and to feel what the triggering was doing to my body.

When I drove that road nearly every day, I didn’t notice how it felt–how I felt. It was just my normal. Maybe I was desensitized by its constancy. Maybe there was no room to really feel it. I mean, quitting was not an option. I wasn’t in denial about the problems of that place, but I was about their impact on me. Not entirely, but enough to keep myself able to function. Mostly. For a long time, anyway.

My PCP sent me to a behavioral health consultant, so that I can get access to therapy to “heal from unresolved trauma” that is playing a role in my chronic pain conditions. That person asked me to rate, on a 10-point scale, how much I feel impacted from my chronic pain.

The question stumped me.

I mean, how I feel most of the time is better than I ever have in my entire life. I have pain of one kind or another (and fairly often more than one kind at a time) most days, but it is manageable. When my back acts up after a half hour of cleaning, I am able to sit down and rest. When a migraine starts, I am able to stay home and rest. I have effective meds. For the first time in my life (other than a short stretch in my early 20s), I am not either living or working in a situation that causes me to walk on eggshells, constantly alert for trouble and doing whatever I can to avoid it. Do you know how good it feels to always feel safe, accepted, loved, and relaxed at home? I feel so incredibly fortunate to have what I have now. It’s a wonder to me.

But I do have pain of one kind or another most days, and that is manageable only because I am no longer working in my career field. I don’t feel able to commit to any other paid work because managing/improving my health is feeling like its own full-time job now. But working is a primary life function, and I’m not even 60 yet. If I can’t do a primary life function at my age and be well, what should my score be?

I think I settled on 7. Or maybe 6.

I don’t know where I’m going with this.

It’s been a funky week. The weather is cold cold cold, but the days are so brightly sunny I keep saying I need to get my sunglasses back out. I’m savoring every last bit of true fall that I can, before we pass Thanksgiving and it is officially winter holiday season. I love this time of year, when we go inside and get cozy but don’t yet have a bunch of other obligations. When we love light all the more for its scarcity.

For so many reasons, I really can’t with Thanksgiving much any more, but I will always love taking time to notice and name what I am grateful for. In this funky week full with appointments and phone calls and triggers and wind and wool sweaters, there was one morning where everything sparkled because the temperatures had dropped below freezing overnight, but the sun was rising. Branches were newly bare, but there were still leaves clinging to them–leaves blazing with their final colors. It felt like a metaphor for many things right now, so I took a picture.

One day I was home alone, and I noticed a pair of boots that Cane had left out. My daughter leaves her shoes and slippers in the hallway outside her bedroom door. When my son used to come home on military leave, he’d leave his shoes out, too, and I always loved seeing them. When I lived by myself, I had neat, tidy, empty hallways. This kind of clutter fills me.

On a walk this week, I passed an old, old tree:

Isn’t she glorious? I mean, look closer:

That’s a kind of beauty that only comes from years of living, from standing through season after season of sun, rain, wind, ice, and sun again. When I was younger, reminders that the world had existed long before me and would long after me were unsettling. Now, they are comforting. (I might have given that tree a hug. She felt like a grandmother, and I miss mine.)

Hoping all of you have a week with some beauty and comfort in it, wherever you are and whatever you’re doing.