THANKFUL FRIDAY

The omelet is my go-to left-to my-own-devices dinner choice when I feel like I should do more than just eat a can of tuna. I usually always have at least two eggs in the fridge and you can fill an omelet with whatever. There’s always some kind of greens in the crisper and a variety of cheeses in the cheese bin. If I’m feeling a bit extra, I might rehydrate some dried fancy mushrooms to add in. Do not be fooled. The omelet is only an option if I’m left to my own devices on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays. Not Wednesday because that’s kitchari night every week and takes only the effort of putting ingredients into the Instapot. If it’s a Friday night, I’m eating a can of tuna with a sleeve of crackers while drinking wine. This is a long and drawn out way to tell you about the last time I was on my own for dinner and made myself an omelet.

Omelets always make me think about my dad.

When my sister moved out of the family house right after graduating high school, I was just ending eighth grade. So I was like thirteen or fourteen and the last kid left in the house with two adults who bickered every single day of their lives together. They left me out of their squabbles for the most part, though that was also the summer I lived with my brother and sister-in-law because of the severity of said squabbles. Eventually the two of them agreed to minimize the amount of bickering and I came home. I don’t know how breakfasts in bed got started, but I suspect that summer was the catalyst. Every Sunday morning, before Mom and I got out of bed to get ready for church, Dad would bring us both breakfast in bed. Like for real. I would get a tray with a plate of breakfast and glass of orange juice sat down on my lap with my back propped up against the headboard of my bed.

Like a complete princess.

Dad was very good at cooking a handful of things. Eggs were his specialty and often he would make me a cheese omelet. Dad’s cheese omelets were off the hook. He would put so much cheese in it that sometimes it was more cheese than egg. I often wonder if he was having a competition with himself over how cheesy he could make an omelet. It should be no surprise to anyone that I was an irregular pooper when I lived with my parents, but mostly because of that omelet. That amount of cheese on a Sunday set the tone for the week, but I never said a single discouraging word about the omelet. I greeted every breakfast tray with enthusiasm and gratitude.

I never once asked for breakfast in bed. This was something Dad just decided to do. It was one of his ways of showing love. The three of us, my brother, sister and me, all grew up with different versions of our dad. Some versions of Dad were not great. He could get angry at the tiniest of things, but as he aged, he mellowed. Sometimes I feel a little guilty because I got more of the mellowed out Dad version. By the time my sister moved out, Dad had less things to worry about. I didn’t require much parenting and less time was needed for keeping me alive, leaving more time for the fun stuff. And Dad reveled in the fun stuff. He loved being involved with all of my extracurricular activities. Dad practically lived at the Christmas tree lot for the band boosters every season. He loved selling those trees and making popcorn for the concession stand at a Friday night football game. Dad was into all of it and he met every task with joy and enthusiasm. There were times when I just wasn’t into something, but then Dad would get so hyped up about it that it would change my mind. His enthusiasm was infectious.

I miss that.

I was fortunate to have had that.

Celebrating Fathers’ Day is complicated when your Father is no longer here. I am grateful to have had a dad who taught me to meet tasks with joy and enthusiasm.

And how to make really cheesy omelets.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

Last year, I had a goal to put together a car camping kit for solo camp trips. I completed that goal and then never went on any camp trips, solo or other wise. But I have gear for two all organized into bins, ready for adventuring. Michael and I have not been tent camping together since 2016. That’s when we slept on a leaky air mattress in the almost freezing summer conditions of northern Wisconsin. That air mattress didn’t even make it home. It went right on into the campground dumpster when we packed up to leave. This was the camping trip that led to the purchase of the camper. The two of us figured that maybe our bodies were no longer the kind of bodies that could sleep on the ground.

So we upgraded to a tent on wheels and that served us pretty well for a number of years. Then the act of packing and unpacking the pop-up, along with the constant stress and worry over possibly damaging the camper, finally took its toll on us. We sold the camper a couple of years ago and have not been camping since. We’ve stayed in cabins in remote places, but actual camping with campfires and camp stove cooking has been a no go. Frankly, I miss it. I miss hanging out in my hammock chair with a book and the wilderness. I miss the big hike that always takes places while camping. I miss the rustic camp dinners that get made that always seem to taste like the best meal you’ve ever eaten even though it is only a hotdog. This is the longest stretch of time in my entire life where I have not spent at least one night in a campground.

We’re taking the Cabbage to their summer camp tomorrow. This year’s camp is basically college. They will be staying for three weeks at Truman State, taking a college class and living the dorm life. I think they are equally excited and nervous. Camp is usually a week long thing for them, so this will be the longest time spent away from parents. Since I was that kid who spent 80% of their summers at some sort of sleep-away camp, I’m excited for the Cabbage. Those independent “study” summers helped shape me into the grownup I am today. I think the Cabbage is going to love this time of freedom and independence. And since we’re driving them all the way over to Kirksville, Michael and I decided to find a nearby campground for a couple of nights of camping.

Old school.

In a tent.

With a better air mattress.

At the beginning of this week, the very thought of lugging my camp gear out of the basement and planing and prepping meals felt exhausting. Wednesday evening, I pulled my camp kitchen box and a bag of random camp needs out of the basement. I opened up the kitchen box to check my inventory and was pleasantly surprised by how well I had organized myself for camping. One tote contained all of my kitchen needs, including my two burner stove. Then I remembered how I used to have to pack the pop-up trailer just for the kitchen. I took a three-tiered wheeling tool chest and converted it into a camp kitchen that I called Fat Max. Fat Max fit perfectly into the storage rack on the front of the camper, but was heavy lifting. We would load Fat Max, the ice chest, our camp chairs and another bin of camp supplies all into that front rack. Then it would all have be unloaded to set up the camper. Very little could be packed inside the camper because folding it up took up any floor space and made the refrigerator inaccessible. Now, I have one bin, two bags (one for bedding, one for camp supplies), one tent, one air mattress and one ice chest, which is how I camped before the camper. I have simplified our camping and in doing so, I have gotten very excited about our camp trip this weekend.

For the life of me, I cannot understand how I let the simplicity of camping become so complicated. I created more work for myself and this soured the experience. But, I think, in general, this is something we all do to ourselves. We overcomplicate all aspects of our lives. Some of this is because many of us were taught that life is a struggle, that it even has to be a struggle. If you’re not struggling, you’re not working hard enough for success. We should be struggling to make ends meet. Our jobs should be a daily struggle. It’s called work because it is supposed to be work. The concept of life being a struggle leaks into every aspect of living and we need permission for ease and simplicity. This idea has fueled businesses selling concepts of health and wellness. Feel the burn, but unplug for self care. Its hard to separate the things that are going to be work from the things that don’t have to be work.

I remember a camping trip once with Chris, Traci and James where Traci had purchased a new tent. The tent was supposed to be really easy to set up. All that was required was to push up from the center of the tent and the poles would lock into place. Easy peasy. Except it wasn’t. Traci was too short to press up far enough for the poles to lock. Even then, it turned out that it required quite a bit of force to lock the poles into place. Finally, after a whole lot of swearing and sweating, they finally got that tent up with the poles locked into place. At the end of that trip, Traci pulled down that tent and threw it into the dumpster. She thought she had bought a tent that would make camping easier. It did not and so she got rid of it and moved onto something else. While it is a memory I will never forget (that whole weekend was filled them), it was also a lesson I should have been paying attention too. Those activities that we like doing should not be something that requires so much work.

Camping shouldn’t be work.

I’m grateful to be able to test out that theory this weekend.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

Today is a travel day as I make my way home from Woods Hole. I’ve been here for most of the whole week and when I scheduled this trip, I thought I would be spending some time orienting new visitors to our lab space. The scientists spending their summer here were delayed with their paperwork. So I’ve had the lab space mostly to myself, which was good. I believe that I got everything in order in the lab so that it will be ready for our visiting scientists this summer.

The last time I was I here, I joked that I had never been to the Cape when it was warm. I thought by pushing this year’s visit to a little bit later date, I would at least be able to leave my coat behind. The weather was lovely on my first full day here but I spent the day organizing the lab space. The rest of the week felt more like walking around inside someone’s cold wet sneeze. At this point, I’ve come to terms with just embracing the weather in what ever form it comes in when I’m in this area. At least I don’t have to be here in the middle of winter.

This trip, I got invited to tour a bit of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI). A former colleague was given her own lab space and she walked me through her very new lab while discussing her plans for the future. I didn’t know her well when she was in Kansas City, but I could not help gushing with pride and joy as I do with all of our graduate students and postdocs who go on to be successful scientists. This is such a scary time to be starting out as scientist and this young scientist admitted that she’s worried about finances, but she’s taking each day as it comes right now. Which is really all any of us can do. We had a depressing conversation about funding cuts where I confessed that we had new graduates and postdocs who had jobs lined up, but then rescinded after this administration put a halt to funding scientific research. One of those postdocs confessed to me that she was applying outside of the US because she couldn’t see a future for her scientific research in this country.

I interrupted this part of our conversation to move the focus back to her success because being offered your very own lab any where, let alone at some place as prestigious as WHOI is a big freakin’ deal. Getting the opportunity to witness, in person, this success is a gift that I needed right now. Because while it is bleak and pretty awful what this administration has and is doing to our scientific community, there is hope. The take-away here is to take each day as it comes and being grateful for small successes in this moment.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

At the end of today, people will head out of the office and into a long weekend of BBQs and maybe even a little get-away. They will celebrate the beginning of summer which is marked by Memorial Day. Everything summer opens up Memorial Day weekend. School’s out for summer. Except here. We had too many snow days this year. Michael’s last day of school is the 29th. The Cabbage’s last day of middle school is a half day on a Monday, June 2. They are so mad and have spent weeks complaining about having to go in for half a day on a Monday on the first day of summer. They’ve been petitioning an out, but their mom thinks they shouldn’t miss their last day of middle school. I am Switzerland on the subject, but honestly, the Cabbage has been over middle school since December. They’re ready to move on.

We have plans for attending a BBQ on Sunday with Jenn and Wade and some other friends. We’ll do the typical Memorial Day stuff even though Memorial Day has not been typical for me or my family in a really long time. This August will mark twenty years without my nephew, J. For those of you knew to my blog, we lost J to a car bomb in Iraq, August 1st 2005. My family is a small one and J was more little brother then nephew thanks to our four year age gap. Despite having a wife and two little boys (who are now grown adults), he did what a number of young people did after the attacks of Sept 11. He joined the Marine reserves as a way to serve and honor his country. We were all a bit delusional in thinking that because he was part of the reserves and had a young family, the government wouldn’t send him to Afghanistan. And they didn’t. They sent him to Iraq and two weeks before he was supposed to come home, his unit was hit with a car bomb. J came home to us in pieces and this broke my tiny family.

My tiny broken family has changed quite a bit in the last twenty years. J’s young boys are now grown men with wives. His young wife remarried and has two more boys, who I guess are not so much boys anymore as they are young teenage men. My tiny family grew a little bit with the addition of these people but then shrunk a bit with the loss of Chris and Dad. We’ve all moved forward. I no longer visibly cringe when someone thanks me for my sacrifice. It has taken me twenty years to understand that what I really sacrificed was naivety and innocence. I did not willing offer up my nephew to be a sacrificial lamb for this country. Instead, I sacrificed the idea that such tragedy could ever happen to my family. I sacrificed a belief that my country would ever allow such tragedy to happen to any family.

Twenty years later and I still don’t understand how J’s presence in Iraq helped this country.

My so called sacrifice shapes my vote, as I meticulously research candidates and their stance on veteran affairs and support of military families. It is one of the many reasons I did not vote for Josh Hawley (MO. Rep). He voted against supporting expanded health care for our veterans. The DOGE, set up by Trump, cut thousands of jobs for the Department of Veteran Affairs, a department that was already understaffed and implemented a hiring freeze. Veterans will now have longer wait times for health care, disability claims, burial and funeral expenses and the Veteran’s Crisis Line. As a citizen, it’s not like I didn’t care about these issues before this country wrongfully sent J to Iraq. It just made me care more and because of that, Memorial Day is more than BBQs and sales events. It’s about remembering those who died in service for this country, one that doesn’t truly support them.

I am grateful to those who support our military with more than words and accolades. I am grateful for those who still choose to serve in spite of the lack of support they will receive from this administration. I am grateful J turned out to be the kind of person who believed in doing good deeds and a man of integrity. I am grateful to the young ROTC group who decorated J’s grave site this morning by raising the American flag, something the group does every year. I am grateful to spend some time with friends this weekend and I’m grateful for the start of summer.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

My friend Melissa is currently raising money for a charity bicycle ride she’s doing in September for the Kelly Bush Foundation. The KBF provides funding for purchasing adaptive sports equipment for people with spinal cord injuries. This is how Melissa was able to purchase her adaptive bicycle. I don’t think I can explain just how important it is for Melissa to have this bike not just for her physical health, but for her mental health. She told me that she’d really like to raise enough money for the KBF to pay off the grant she received from them for her bike. Every time she tried posting about the fundraiser on Facebook, they took it down for ‘spam’ violations. I shared the link to my Facebook in hopes of spreading the word and so far so good. It’s still up.

Look, she’s not going to like the next part of this post, but I don’t care. Melissa is one of those friends I have that I kind of can’t believe she’s my friend. She’s the too cool for school type, goes to all the cool concerts and has real adventures. Her body handed her a real shit deal, but she hasn’t let that stop her adventuring, concert going spirit. Any way, she’s a cool cat and she’s my friend, which makes me cool by proxy. This whole Facebook thing has me furious. This week has not gone as I intended. I caught the summer cold virus that seems to be floating around the office and spent one whole day on my couch. The thing I started writing sounds so bleak and depressing that there’s no way to spin that into gratitude. I’m not even sure if it will ever see the light of day. So I’m changing tactics. This is what I am grateful for this week.

I am grateful for the friends I have in this life.

This is part of the reason I keep my social media accounts. It is a place for sharing joys and triumphs and words of encouragement. When everything happened with the election, so many people jumped off the social media boats in protest. My protest has been to stay put and refuse to allow others to turn those spaces into nothing but untruths and hatefulness. I adamantly maintain that Facebook is a place for community. I had a friend post a request to send her grandmother cards for her 100th birthday and without blinking, I requested an address (it’s in the mail today!). Amy posted about her kid selling Girls Scout cookies and even though I won’t see them until probably August, I bought some dang cookies. I support my friends and every time I’ve made an ask or request, my social peeps have been there to support me right back.

Today, I have a request.

If you still have a Facebook account, please click this fundraiser link and share it to your Facebook accounts. I’m not asking for donations, but if you feel like you can give some money to this great charity, that’s awesome. I want to flood Facebook with the opportunity to give to a good cause and also to spread some awareness for adaptive programs. I also want to give a giant middle finger to the hypocritical algorithms of social media. Let this be your protest today, your act of rebellion.

Gratitude is an act of rebellion.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

I just received an ad for Mothers Day gifts for dog moms and it kind of makes my brain feel itchy. I am one hundred percent a dog mom. I love Josephine so much that Michael often tells her that she’s a terrible tragedy. He says she can’t understand a word that we say and I know for a fact that she understands everything. Because Josephine and I know that he understands nothing. She’s the best most smooshy face cuddle puppy in the whole dang world and we just got in trouble with the veterinarian because I have been giving Josephine all the treats that she asks for. We’ve been put on a treat diet. The point is, I agree that I treat Josephine better than I would an actual child of mine, but giving me a Mothers Day gift feels like a bit too much.

I recognize that someone doesn’t have to actually drop a baby out of their body in order to be a mother. Motherhood comes in a beautiful kaleidoscope array of colors. Raising a human being, a good human being, is really difficult. Raising a human to be empathetic towards others, community minded, kind, generous and thoughtful is the defining reason for my choice to not have children. I just never believed that it was something I had a skill set to do. There was also a whole thing about money. Kids are expensive. Chris and I were always struggling financially. I don’t think we ever had a savings account or if we did, it held only the bare minimum to be active. Chris and I were not responsible people and sure, I know that there are plenty of irresponsible people out there raising children. I just didn’t want to be one of those people.

To be clear, I still don’t want to be one of those people.

I came across a photo of my sister-in-law and nephew in a box labeled ‘Cindy’. My mother had sorted photos into various boxes. for us. There was one for my sister, but I didn’t see one for my brother. As I sorted through my box, I came across a number of pictures that clearly should go to either of my siblings. Like my sister’s wedding photos and my nephews Eagle Scout Ceremony. This one particular photo though, made me tear up when I looked at it. It was an old Polaroid photo of my sister-in-law and nephew curled up asleep on my parents couch. They were both still dressed in their Easter clothes. My Strawberry Shortcake blanket had been draped over them. That photo said everything that there is to say about being a mother. Love, comfort, safety. All of that and more. The thing you can’t see in this photo is just how hard it is to love someone so much and then just have to let them go out into the world, living their own lives. Motherhood is hard. And it’s made harder when something unimaginable happens to the person you birthed. I’ve seen those mothers who have had to navigate the unimaginable while remaining steadfast and true and there are so many of them who do it so well. They had to have been designed for it.

Motherhood is hard and we live in a country that doesn’t support it. The current administration has slashed funding for schools and school safety, along with free meals. They’ve put a stop to funding for investigating child sexual abuse and other crimes against children. Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programs are now working with a greatly reduced budget. We are the only high-income country in the world that does not mandate paid maternity leave. The administration has cut funding for research regarding women’s health, particularly reproductive health. Meanwhile, this president thinks that a $5,000 incentive will encourage women to have more babies while the average cost of infant care is around $14,000 a year.

As Kristin Lawless points out, recent estimates find that mothers are working 97 hours per week in the home. If they were paid accordingly, it would amount to $115,000 per year — which includes 13.2 hours as a day care teacher, 3.9 hours as household CEO, 7.6 hours as a psychologist, 14.1 hours as a chef, 15.4 hours as a housekeeper, 6.6 hours doing laundry, 9.5 hours as a PC or Mac operator, 10.7 hours as facilities manager, 7.8 hours as a janitor, and 7.8 hours driving the family car. - Robert Reich (substack article on mothers day)

Being a mother is a full time job on top of the full time jobs most women have. Mothers are over worked and underpaid. To truly support mothers in this country is to support legislation that cares for mothers. Instead, our answer for all of this is to have a day devoted to moms where we let mom hang out in bed eating the burnt pancakes we lovingly make them. While, it may have been a well meaning holiday, Mothers Day has gone the way of many of our well intentioned holidays. We’ve commercialized the fuck out of it so now we send out ads to include as many people who will be willing to pull out their credit cards. The reminders that we need to ‘give Mom the very best’ and to ‘show her that you love her’ would be nice if they were not attached to diamonds and bouquets and other trinkets that your mom doesn’t need or want. Those reminders are also daggers for those whose mother is no longer with us.

I know this doesn’t sound like a very thankful post. It sort of went off the rails, but it needed to go off the rails. Pointing out these little bits of information on the difficulty in motherhood, makes me very grateful for a number of reasons. Mothers do whatever they need to do to ensure the survival and success of their child. My own mother raised me amongst a village of women who could fill in the nurturing gaps when she couldn’t be there to do it. So, I am particularly grateful for the whole kaleidoscopic forms of motherhood. I am grateful for a mother who can do the hard things and navigate the unimaginable times. I am grateful for the mothers in my life who have helped to shape me into the woman I am today. My way of celebrating these women is to recognize them every day, support a government that supports them, and maybe send out some words of encouragement.

Happy Mothers Day.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

Last year around this time, I spent a weekend with my friend Heather who lives in Des Moines and one of our activities was to make a Cheetos birthday cake for another friend’s son. Heather and I make a pretty decent Lucy and Ethel and the cake, while not being the tastiest, definitely was the funniest part of the weekend. This year Heather picked up a 3d lamb mold at an estate sale and I returned to help make a red velvet lamb cake. It was a short yet necessary visit and feels like a new tradition to occur at the end of April every year. 

The drive from home to Heather’s is a very easy one. I don’t even need to make a stop for a break. It was a Saturday morning and This American Life was playing on NPR. I caught it right at the beginning. The topic of the day was graphing chaos and how to make statistical sense of the things happening in our world. So as I drove north, I listened to two American doctors about their experiences treating victims in Gaza. Both doctors were struck by the number of children under the age of twelve with fatal gunshot wounds to the heads. In one day, one doctor counted at least thirteen children in his hospital with one or two gunshot wounds to the head and chest. Once they were back in the US they started comparing notes with other doctors who had been in Gaza and they started piecing together a very horrible trend. The angle of the wounds were too precise, too deliberate, to be accidents. Israeli soldiers were, are, deliberately killing children. I listened to the whole segment, tears streaming down my face and then the program moved to the next story and I lost my NPR station. A quick radio search later and I was back to a new NPR station. This one was also playing This American Life, but I was catching the program near the beginning and once again hearing about Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian children. I pressed the seek button on the radio only to come back to this story on loop. Then I opted for no radio at all. Though, this didn’t really help. By the time I reached Heather’s, I had fallen pretty far into a black abyss.

Heather greeted me at her door with brunch and champagne and then we drank mimosas pretty much all day. We commiserated about the state of things. Her hip is in bad shape and she’s planning a replacement. I confessed to not ever feeling as hopeless about this country as I do right now. Not even after Chris died. Then she made cream cheese frosting and I turned coconut flakes green. She had already baked the red velvet cake in the 3D lamb mold and we marveled at how perfectly it had come out of the tin. There was a bit of debate over the best tools for frosting, but Heather found the right frosting tip to make curly lamb fur. We used dill pickle flavored jelly beans for the eyes and the green coconut provided a layer of edible grass. All in all, this cake turned out way better than the Cheetos cake from last year. Friends arrived and we ate cake and when they left, we swapped our champagne for wine and wrestled an entire block of cheddar cheese from one of her beagles. 

And we laughed. A lot. 

I left the next morning intent on making a detour to see the covered bridges of Madison County. As I exited the highway to make my way onto a gravel road for the first bridge, I thought about all the things I needed to do at home before the start of a Monday. My little detour was going to put a wrench in my chore list. Then I thought that maybe I shouldn't go searching for the next bridge. I should just get back on the highway and head home. But I resisted those thoughts and continued my drive through lush, green rolling hills. The landscape through Madison County is quite lovely. I didn’t expect it and with each curve of the road and crested hilltop, those thoughts about the chore list floated away. I suddenly realized that I just didn’t care if vegetables were chopped for the week or that I still might have a load of laundry to deal with. So what if the floors didn’t get mopped today. I stopped at four out of the six bridges and spent some quality time with my big camera at each of the four. I told Michael about them when I got home and he found a bicycle route map for the area. We’re talking about maybe planning a camping trip and taking the bicycles to see the last two bridges on my list. Now I want a dog stroller to attach to my bicycle so Jospehine can go with us on bike rides. That way she can see those covered bridges too!

Anyway, by the end of my drive, I didn’t feel quite as hopeless. The combination of ridiculous amounts of champagne and laughter along with my photography scavenger hunt for bridges managed to scrape some dark bits of goo from my soul. And this is something to be very grateful for this week. 

THANKFUL FRIDAY

Last Spring, a pair of geese decided to nest on the roof of the entryway into our building. I had the perfect view of them from my cubicle window and I watched as the female goose laid five eggs. Then we all watched and waited. It takes 28-35 days for a goose egg to hatch and the mother goose sits on those eggs the whole time. She might rearrange herself or stand to stretch a leg for a second, but for all of those days, she is tied to that nest. There’s a ledge around her rooftop nest that makes it impossible for her chicks to to get off the roof on their own. But those five eggs hatched and we had five healthy goslings running around the rooftop until we convinced the window washer to toss the babies off the roof. Once the family had made it to the ground they all tottered off and we assume, lived happily ever after.

The corner of the roof that she chose is not well sheltered from the elements. The mid-day sun directly beats down on her back and there is no protection from the rain. We’ve had a pair of red tailed hawks living in the eaves of one of the taller buildings for years and quite often you see one of them out on patrol or a hunt. Add in the ledge that traps the babies on the roof, this is a terrible spot to raise a family of birds. Yet, the pair came back again this Spring. There was an attempt at deterring them with predator spray, but they insisted and this year the female goose laid six eggs. Monday of this week, all six of those eggs hatched and we had six healthy babies running around on the rooftop. 

When I got to work Wednesday morning, my first action was to look out my window to check on the birds, but they were nowhere to be found. I knew that we had contacted groundskeeping when the chicks had hatched so they could climb up to rescue them, but I guess I didn’t expect them to do it when no one was around. At first I panicked. What if they hadn’t been rescued? Nature is harsh. Talaura, Michael and I stood on a trail for half an hour at Devil’s Tower watching helplessly with a crowd of tourists as a snake devoured the eggs of a nest in a tree with the parents squawking and attempting to defend the nest the whole time. It was horrifying but we couldn’t look away. This is not just a cruel world for women. I managed to track down a groundskeeper while on my coffee walk to confirm that all the babies had been safely removed from the roof early this morning and the whole family had once again tottered off, moving on to swimming lessons. My group was a little more than disappointed to not have the opportunity to witness the rescue this year. We all agree that we’re missing a sense of closure, but we are also relieved to know that they all survived. 

Survival is miraculous. 

For months now I have been trying to gain momentum to get on my yoga mat consistently and not the sporadic routine I have going on now. The dog walks have also been sporadic. Anything involving exercise or getting into a habit of any kind of healthy movement has felt impossible. I am very busy at work right now and I go home to the usual chore list of cleaning and cooking and making sure animals are well fed and loved. By the time I sit down on the couch in the evening, what’s left of my energy gets funneled into a Duolingo French lesson and maybe the crossword. I am eating healthy meals and not using the elevator at work, but I recognize that I am in survival mode. I know I am not a wild animal and in a few weeks it will be easier to delegate the household chores to others. I have all the tools for gaining momentum. I will get back to something more consistently healthy than my current state. While survival may be a miracle, thriving is the gift of surviving. Getting back to something consistent will be more of a thriving situation.

Today, I am grateful for the miraculous, but I am looking forward to the gift.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

The other day, I was helping a graduate student set up auto imaging of a slide on a very old microscope. This microscope is the system I have used for years to run batches of slides for one of our labs. It requires me to run a fairly complicated program that works with a slide loading robot and over the years, I have developed a love/hate relationship with this system. When it is working, it is great. When it is not working, there are a million possible reasons why it is not working and I have to troubleshoot all of those reasons to fix the problem. The older the system has gotten the worse these little issues have become. So it is finally time to replace this system with something new. By the time I had given a hard stop to accepting any more slides for batch scanning, the program had become so glitchy that it was randomly not imaging slides. 

The lab I run these slides for had a really hard time with the concept of pausing their imaging experiments while the new system gets installed and we learn how to use the new robot. Finally we agreed they could still use the system until the company moved it, but they would not be able to use the robot and would have to run only one slide at a time. I trained a graduate student to set up the program and run the slides. Of course, he had loads of problems but the company came to move the system. So this week, I was once again going over how to set up the program to run one slide at a time on this old microscope that has basically been decommissioned. Part of setting up the program is entering in a number representing the z plane of your sample. I always think of it as years because the numbers are usually 1771 or like 1884. This time around the number came out to be 1998 and I said “1998! That’s the year I got married and graduated undergrad!” The graduate student I was training said “Whoa…uh…congratulations? I was one.” I did my best to laugh at this and not murder.

Then I thought…wait…he’s just starting! When he was a year old, I was getting married in Vegas and graduating college! Chris and I were just beginning to move into grownup land. We managed to postpone grownup land by going to graduate school, but we were doing the thing. Living the life. In fact, while this person was navigating through childhood, adolescence, and undergrad, I was doing the most grownup stuff of my life. I got a little woozy at the thought of all the life I have lived during this young person’s lifetime. It’s a lot! I’ve seen a lot of things, experienced a lot of things. It’s staggering to think about it. There seems to be swaths of time between milestones and events, yet no time has passed at all and I am confused about how I’ve managed to crame so much living into this amount of time. Michael keeps reminding me that we’re almost fifty. “I’ll be fifty THIS YEAR!” He’ll exclaim. It’s possible he’s more surprised by this than anyone considering he really believed he wouldn’t live this long. He seems to be leaning into being ‘old’. This week, J would have turned forty five and I am sure that if he were still with us, I’d be teasing him about a midlife crisis. He probably would have taken up Cage Fighting as his midlife crisis. This is also the twenty year anniversary of his death. Both of his children are no longer children, but married adults. Yet I do not feel old enough for any of this to be the case. 

I am old enough to have an elderly parent who no longer remembers my married name. 

But again, none of that seems possible because I am a child. If you only knew the number of fart jokes my friend Lauren and I send back and forth to each other in a week. Also, I heard a joke recently that makes me laugh every time I think about it and it is so dumb.

If science were easy, it would be called “your mom”. -unknown

Now doesn’t that make you chuckle?! When I told that joke to a coworker, we laughed so hard that tears leaked out. Because ‘your mom’ jokes, along with ‘dees nutz’ jokes are juvenilely hilarious. So while I have lived a life and grown, so to speak, I am mentally a thirteen year old teenage boy. I sent a text to Michael this week about Sweden being the place to go for moose spotting and I included a link for a place that offers Moose Safaris. I told him if we spotted a moose on the first day, we could then go to that outfitter’s Beaver Safari, wink wink. He did not respond about the Beaver Safari, but I like to imagine he found it just as hilarious as I did.

While, mentally I’ve remained childlike, I am also very aware of the possibility of retirement. CBS Sunday Morning last week was all about retirement. Then I went over to Billy and Dean’s for a game of dominoes and tea where I met two lovely ladies of retirement age and we had an enlightening discussion about my possibilities. My take away from all of that is that I will one day retire so that I can be even more childish and playful. I know exactly what the ‘little old lady’ version of me is going to look like. Spoiler, she looks very much like me now just with more wrinkles and gray hair. I’m lucky because I got my mom’s hair where the gray and blondish brown blend in a way that makes the gray look like it was put there on purpose and you’ll only notice the wrinkles when I come to a stop on my Vespa. I may end up retiring in Italy or Portugal, but I’m thinking about opening an adult only disco skate rink. Something that combines skating and dance music and maybe bingo. 

So to that young grad student who was only a year old in 1998, thank you for the congratulations. Graduating college was a big life milestone that led to so many more. That alone is worth congratulating. But maybe really the congratulations should go towards the quantity of living I’ve managed to do in the twenty seven years since then. It tells me a lot about just how much I can accomplish in a short amount of time. And there is an unknown amount of time left for me to fill up with adventures big and small.

I better get busy.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

Tuesday after work, I headed to my polling place to vote. The polling place in my neighborhood is never really busy. It is plagued with by with the usual problems of a polling place in a low income neighborhood where people struggle to get to the polls because of jobs and transportation. Early mornings are busier than afternoons, but I’ve only ever had to wait in any kind of line during presidential elections. I want to see the polling place full. I want to stand in a line. It gives me hope to stand in the line at the polling place. This week, I walked right up to the election worker and got my ballot. When I got up to put my ballot in the voting machine, I was behind a young woman with three young children. I watched as the three little ones helped to place the ballot in the machine and then they all took stickers. As I stepped up for my turn, I heard the young woman say “Now, hold onto those and we will take a selfie when we get to the car.” When I got to my car, I looked over just in time to see the four of them proudly holding up their sticker while the young mom took the picture.

Then I cried all the way home.

I know I’ve told this hundreds of times. Change happens in increments and the biggest impacts happen locally. There were five things on the ballot this week: two education board members, a bond to improve KCMO schools, keeping 3.5 acres of park land, and a tax to build a new jail. Not a whole lot in the grand scheme of things, but things that will have a big impact on my community. I know I’ve talked about my parents taking me with them to the polls every time the polls were open many times here and how this imbedded the importance of voting every time. They both taught me this was a way to show up for my community even if it there is only one thing on the ballot. I can still remember how frustrated my parents would get whenever a school bond would come up on the ballot and it would fail to pass because not enough parents would even show up to vote. We lived in a town where the elderly outnumbered us and the elderly vote. I mean they vote. Even though I do not have children and the one that sometimes lives at my house does not attend KCMO schools, I’m always going to vote for something to improve the schools.

An investment in knowledge pays the best interest. -Benjamin Franklin

I don’t know that young woman’s story. Her children ranged in age between maybe six and three. Maybe she has a partner to help or maybe she’s a single mom. I do know, just by seeing her car, that she probably lives paycheck to paycheck and barely so. Making time to vote is hard and she made a commitment to do so while wrangling three small children. Seeing her cast her ballot filled me with hope, something I’ve been pretty low on these days. I’m not only grateful for her sense of civic duty, but for the enthusiastic way she involved her children. Her lesson to them on voting is not just about civic duty but it also teaches community. Voting on small ballot issues has a great impact on our communities. Every time I get overwhelmed by the latest atrocity, I remind myself to put my head down and focus on my community where I can do the most good. I have one regret from my voting experience on Tuesday and that was not saying Thank you to this young woman’s face.

Where ever you are right now lady, Thank you.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

Tuesday morning, I got up at 5:00AM to walk Josephine. I knew it would probably be our only walk this week. Our weather is tumultuous at the moment, with rain and thunderstorms, hail and possibly snow this evening. It is such a mess that Chad and Jess canceled their visit. They travel in a camper van these days and driving in high winds is terrifying. We’ve penciled in some time in June, but only with a very light pencil. Any way, right now it is impossible to know if you need your coat outside or not but everything is blooming into lovely shades of purples and pinks. While Tuesday morning was a bit brisk, Josephine and I had a lovely walk around the neighborhood.

It had been decided weeks ago that April 1st was going to be our next Ladies Who Skate night, but as the day went by, the texts started trickling with cancelations. Eventually it came down to me, Jenn and her oldest, Salem. Jenn and I are very similar about bedtimes. We both agree that a weeknight 8:00 PM skate date is a challenge, particularly when your typical bedtime is 9:00 PM. Sometime around six, Jenn sent a text asking if I still wanted to go and I could hear it. This was going to be the moment where we play the game of who says no. I did not hesitate in my yes even though I had been up and moving since 5:00 AM and here’s why. I recently bought and installed new bearings on my skates and I wanted to test them out. Also, while I was tired and could have easily gone straight to bed at six in the evening, I knew with my whole heart that doing this skate night was good for me.

It’s good for all of us.

And Jenn and I are not amazing skaters. We’re basic and we know it, but the minute the wheels are on our feets and we’re on the rink, the weight of our day, our lives, lifts up and floats away. So, even though I was tired, I said “Yes!” Tuesday evening, the three of us skated around and around the rink for a good hour. We talked yelled with each other over the music about books and movies. We danced and laughed. We marveled at the not so basic skaters on the rink. Then when we’d had enough, we sat on the carpeted floor, taking off our skates and putting the date in our calendars for the next skate night. We finished our evening with ice cream and singing along with ABBA on the car radio. In that moment, I swore to myself that no matter how tired I might be, I would not skip out on a skate night.

Nazi Germany called them Storm Troopers or Brown Shirts. They would come and just take German citizens ‘away’ for speaking out, for their religion, for the color of their skin and hair. In the US, we call them ICE. We live in a country where a group of men without identification can literally snatch people off of our streets because they protested to end genocide or their skin is not white. These people have legal status and the rights to free speech, yet they are still being deported to horrible conditions. We live in country where a growing number of citizens cannot afford health care and our government has fired thousands of federal health workers. These are people who keep our foods safe, protect us from diseases and aid in research. Those workers are there to help those who cannot afford healthcare. This administration has made it very clear that they do not care about the poor, even the middle class, or people that do not serve them. They behave in a manner opposite of Christ like. What they are doing is wrong. Not left or right. It is wrong. Meanwhile there are those people so adamant in their support of a Tyrant that they are more concerned with what celebrity may or may not be a communist than how they are going to afford the car parts for a vehicle when it breaks down. So while we’re repeating bad history, we’re going to throw in the whole McCarthy era witch hunts too.

I wonder what it is like to have that kind of privilege.

Being a witness to the dismantling of a country I believe in, a country my family sacrificed a precious member to, is unbearable. The constant calling of senators and representative, the micro aggressive email sending, the constant research and digging for the absolute truth is exhausting. This feeling is a million times worse than that time Chris and I did campaign work in Oklahoma. I have a constant sense of drowning and feelings of job insecurity because what they are doing will have some sort of impact on my livelihood. These are incredibly dark times and because of that, no matter how tired my body may feel, I am going to say yes to activities that bring me joy. If art and finding the good in people are my weapons against tyranny, then joy is the fuel for those weapons.

No one knows more than I that life is short. It’s too short to waste on this administration’s bullshit, for sure. So I’m getting out the camera. I’m sitting with my new Fortune Cookie Journal and I’m lacing up my skates. I’m grasping onto every opportunity for joyful protest. I am grateful for those people in my life who get it and who understand how we are propping each other up.

Hey Forrest, I'm going to lean right back up against you and you'll lean right back up against me that way we don't have to sleep with our heads in the mud".  Bubba Blue

Sometimes the simplest thing we can do is lean against one another.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

A list of gratitude for this week:

• Michael went to the DMV for the new car tag so I wouldn’t have to.

• He also cleaned the bathroom yesterday.

• We came back to Kansas City and the tulips have just started to bud out along with the trees.

• We are no longer eating foods that are some shade of brown. I am cramming spinach into every meal.

• I paired down a big box of photos into a little box of photos.

• I made plans for fun things like breakfast with friends and roller skating.

• The cat was right here when got home and we didn’t have to wait a couple of days for him to show himself.

• The geese are back that laid eggs outside my cubicle window last year. There were three eggs when I left last week and now there are five and mother goose is sitting on them, patiently waiting.

• I discovered pictures of my teenage brother pushing toddler me around on the vacuum cleaner, which I believed was the most fun. His birthday is tomorrow and I’m pretty grateful he’s still here and allows me to push him around and tell him what to do.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

Elephants that roam the dry arid flat country of Kenya’s Tsavo East National Park, coat their bodies in the mineral rich mud and dirt of the land. It starts with an abandoned termite mount. The elephants rub their bodies against the tall red mounds. With consistent visits and a little rain, the mounds get worn down to the ground, eventually turning into a wallow. As more and more rain starts to show up in the season, that wallow because a delightful mud hole for the elephants to roll around in. The more they roll, the bigger the wallow gets and then the true rainy season begins. The wallow becomes a waterhole and an oasis for all the animals in the park. The elephants visit the waterhole daily and on their treks through other muddy areas, they often pick up tiny seeds on their feet. Those seeds are the dormant embryos of killifish. The embryos are released into the water where they hatch and live out very short lives before the waterhole dries up at the end of the season.

Now, I knew that killifish embryos can stay dormant for years, trapped in the dirt. I know this because we study them here as a model in aging and development. I did not know that sometimes, they travel on the feet of elephant. I learned all of this while watching a Nature show about elephants and termites, a show where I sat riveted by the images I was seeing on my TV screen. This is not an unusual practice for me. I am still awed and bowled over by the complexity of our biological world. My curiosity feels boundless.

I have been thinking a lot about a word tossed in the direction of people like me that are meant to be an insult and that word is ‘woke’. I am a woke(ish) individual and much of that wokeness comes from my curious nature and my thirst for knowledge. I want to know why. I want to know more. I want to understand. The opposite of woke is asleep. Why would I want to perpetually stay asleep and miss out on all this color and beauty and amazement? I can’t be curious while I’m asleep. I cannot live a full authentic life while asleep. When the Nazis started rounding up people to mass murder and shove into work camps, they didn’t just come for the Jews. They came for the artists, writers and scientists. They came for those who were woke. Those artists, writers and scientists who survived the Holocaust lived to create beautiful things and make life saving discoveries. They remained curious about their world. I bet if you asked them to trade in their curiosity, or wokeness, so as not to have been put through the torture of the Nazis, they would say “Never!”

Throughout history, tyrants have understood that their major enemy is an educated citizenry. Slaveholders prohibited slaves from learning to read. Nazi’s burned books. - Robert Reich

There is bravery in being awake.

The killifish embryos are dormant because they need specific conditions to live. Well, one specific condition, really; water. Once that condition is met, those little embryos do not waste time. They hatch within hours of being in the water and then reach sexual maturity in just fourteen days. They know that their days are numbered, their life only lasting about six months. So they make the most of it. The males flash their bright colors and dance for the females. Those males take a risk in their open displays. It makes them vulnerable to predation, but they do what they need to do so that life can persist. We do what we need to do so that life can persist. My openness and curiosity might put me at risk, but it is the stuff that gives me life. I am grateful for things that remind me of my true nature, like PBS and stories about tiny killifish embryos being carried on the feet of elephants.

I am an artist and a scientist. I am woke. But I also hope that I am like a newly hatched killifish and making the most of this life and my time here.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

According to the Sleep Foundation, there are four stages of sleep:

• Stage one, or N1, lasts about one to seven minutes. This is the falling to sleep stage.

• Stage two, or N2, can last for ten to twenty minutes. This stage is kind of where you go during a good final relaxation. There’s a drop in body temperature, the muscles relax and the breathing and heart rate slow down. Even the brain activity slows.

• Stage three, or N3, is the deep sleep stage and typically lasts twenty to forty minutes. The researchers say that people are generally harder to wake when in this stage and experts say that this stage is critical to restorative sleep. As the night progresses, this stage shortens as the body moves into stage four, or REM.

• REM stage is the dreaming stage. Brain activity picks up but the body experiences a temporary paralysis of the muscles with the exception of the muscles that control the eyes and breathing. Normally, we don’t reach this stage until we’ve been asleep for about ninety minutes. There are two REM stages. The first one lasts only for a few minutes, while the second stage can last for an hour or a little longer. As we get older, we spend less time in REM.

I know all of this because I just looked it up.

I looked it up because I wanted a clear picture of what I am about to tell you. At the end of Daylight Savings Time last year, I would go to bed at my usual 9 o’clock hour only to wake up again around midnight. Then, I’d wake up again around 2:00 AM, go use the bathroom and drift off to sleep until about 4:30. Now my alarm is set for 5:25 AM. This is the latest I can get away with if I am going to walk Josephine before work. Waking up at 4:30 and then going back to sleep made getting up at 5:25 impossible. To be fair, if it’s cold, we’re not walking, but this doesn’t mean I couldn’t get out of bed and use this time for yoga or some sort of exercise. Instead, I drifted off to sleep again only to wake up around 6:00. Josephine traded walks for extra snuggle time and I don’t think she was mad about it. While I recognize that winter is for hibernating, that doesn’t keep me from feeling bad about my decline in physical activity.

But then Daylight Savings Time came back and you could hear a collective groan across America about our lost hour of sleep.

I am the exception. I’m probably the only person to actually thrive by losing an hour of sleep. I have been awake and ready to go every morning this week at 5:00 AM. I still wake up around midnight, but that second wake up doesn’t happen now until 3:00 or a little after. So I fall back to sleep for about two hours and wake up ready to start the day. Josephine has lost her puppy mind every morning when she sees me pull my walking shoes from the closet. The weather has been perfect, so perfect that I’ve also ridden my scooter all week and I can honestly say I have been more active this week. Yes, I know I have fallen completely like a dupe for Fake Spring.

I don’t care.

Wednesday evening around eight, I opened my mouth in a jaw cracking yawn and Michael said “I know right?!? Why are we so tired this week?” I mentioned the time change but then I said “I feel pretty good about being tired at this time of day. I should feel tired. I’ve been up since 5:00 AM doing stuff. All day long.” This is the most active I’ve been in months and I believe it’s because adding an hour screwed up my second REM stage. This has been a great week for my physical health with some slight improvements with my mental health. Sometimes I just sit and pretend that President Elon and VP Trump are not dismantling our country, that they don’t even exist and science will get funding and my gay friends can stayed married. I allow myself about ten to fifteen minutes of this where I’m not thinking about what representative or senator I have to call next or keeping track of my weekly tasks so I can email them to Elon. It’s a tiny delusion, a bit of an indulgence really, but the moment rejuvenates the activist in me.

Always there is a song playing in my head whenever I am riding the Vespa. Usually, it’s Beyonce’s All The Single Ladies. Look, I can’t explain that. It’s the beat, I guess? I just like it, but this week, the song playing in my head is one from vacation bible school.

I got that joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart. Where?! Down in my heart! Where?! Down in my heart! Where?! Down in my heart to stay!

We have the capacity to hold a mixed array of complicated feelings all at the same time. This week I am grateful for the reminder that I have the capacity to hold large amounts of joy while still feeling a little bit of dread. Joyful moments fill our batteries. Last week, I received a fortune cookie fortune that reads “The one who laughs, lasts.” I had a complete mental block and thought this was the dumbest fortune until I woke up the next morning and slapped my forehead. It was the comma throwing me off. Laughter, humor, joy, this is the stuff that is going to sustain us through this fight.

Those who laugh, lasts.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

Sometime between Tuesday and Wednesday, while a blizzard raged outside, I dreamed of tornadoes. In the dream, I stepped out the front door to look around and then the tornado sirens went off. I looked to the west and could clearly see a sizable tornado making its way in my direction. I hurried back inside and told Michael “We need to go to the basement right now.” I scooped up Josephine and we all scrambled down the rickety basement steps. Michael said “I don’t understand. I didn’t hear the sirens.” I replied “I only heard them for a beat and I don’t know why they’re not still sounding the alarm.” We watched through the basement window (that doesn’t really exist) as the tornado danced into our front yard. It then skirted between our house and the neighbor’s to the east of us. We continued to watch the tornado move along through backyards and between houses, luckily leaving people’s homes undamaged.

This dream happened while the wind outside didn’t as much howl as it did roar. It almost sounded like waves from an angry sea crashing onto a beach. Occasionally there would be a loud thump or thud of something being knocked over or very likely a transformer blowing. Our power flickered off long enough at some point during the night to require the time to be reset on the stove. When I peaked out a window, I could see a number of small tree branches littering the backyard. Even though there was very little snow accumulation, school ended up being closed Wednesday mostly because of power outages across the metro. The roads were icy in patches, worse for side streets as per usual, but I had no trouble making my way to work. We didn’t even bother shoveling the driveway. At lunch time, I stood waiting for the elevator with one of our postdocs and their five year old. The child was literally vibrating with pent up energy and I asked about his snow day. The postdoc, being very patient but also having a look of worn depleted mom, said “I hope it’s the last one.”

Maybe this is the last snow storm for the year.

Probably not.

In the fourteen years since moving here I have never seen a tornado. I have only twice looked up at the sky and said “Yeah….the weather person might be right about this. We should go to the basement.” As if I know more than the weather people and in someways I just might. KCMO is a vast area of various terrain. When they say there’s “tornadic activity” in the KCMO area they’re talking about the flat areas near the Kansas side. Tornados prefer to travel across flat lands. My house sits on the nubby hill side of town, the part where everything begins to slope towards our great river. Not that this means tornados are not possible in my neighborhood, just less likely. And if I don’t know what a wall cloud looks like or the sky signs for a tornado by now, then I never will and quite possible will have to relinquish the part of my identity that was born and raised in Tornado Alley.

Technically it is still winter. Yet, here I am dreaming about spring time tornados in places not normally seen. I am sure it is a bit of wishful thinking. There’s always a bit of exhilaration at the first sight of the tulip greens poking up out of the ground even while knowing we will see more snow before they actually bloom. I suspect this dream has less to do about weather than it is a commentary of current events. We’re all hiding in basements from a real life tornado causing minimal damage to maximum destruction as it weaves it’s way through our communities, taking away jobs and scholarships, building an economic structure that will force a choice between paying for healthcare or paying the rent. This tornado might spare my house, but not the houses of our LGBTQ+ families or nonwhite Americans.

When I say ‘spare’, I mean not completely destroyed. I still stand to lose my job and my retirement money due to cuts in federal funding for science. Funds for my work place are also linked to an investment company. If the investment company isn’t doing well, we don’t do well. The tariff situation is going to make it difficult for the investment company because no one is thinking about investing money when they’re just trying to pay the bills. Meanwhile, I’m trying to figure out ways to communicate with those who use the phrase “respectfully disagree”. This would be easier if the disagreement was over pizza toppings and not the value of human lives. The word ‘respectful’ is subjective and often employed in arguments where the user has little constructive, factual or relevant words to aid in their argument. It is a card thrown when the card holder doesn’t want to listen. It is used by people who have enough privilege to allow them to not question their government or the ‘news’ they are watching. This privilege also allows for a lack of empathy towards those impacted by this administrations decisions.

I do not have the luxury of such privilege.

Once as a child, I stared directly at a tornado as it traveled feets away from the family camper. I did not scream or flinch. I just stood still, pinned to the trailer by my mother’s arm. I am strong and brave. I am tenacious and I’ve learned how pace myself in a fight. I’m finding great joy finding little ways to mess with the methods of destruction being implemented by this tornado. Amani sent me a link this week were I can provide a description of discrimination by the administration. I tried writing a whole paragraph but the form errored. So I’ve been entering one sentence at a time and submitting it. This feels so much more satisfying and fun then an all at once thing. Whenever I’m feeling a little down, I go on over to The Department of Education , and type in ‘White House’ for my school with the zip code (20500) and then leave a sentence about the discriminatory practices committed by this administration. I’m still sending Elon my weekly updates. I know it’s not a big change, but I know it’s annoying for the person on the other end. I am one gnat, but I know I’ve generated more gnats by sharing my little micro aggressions. I’ve seen what happens when someone gets swarmed by gnats with the running and waving, flailing arms. It drives a person crazy.

This post doesn’t really sound like much of a gratitude post, but maybe if you read between words you can see it. I am grateful for the small things and I am grateful for the parts of me that have no fear. I am grateful for dreams that remind me that there is growth from destruction. I am grateful for the tiny bit of hope that we can rebuild, better and stronger. I am grateful for those who have joined the gnat army.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

Let’s face it, new friends after a certain age is not an easy find. When Chris and I moved here, we both felt the isolation of our new unknown. We had left all of our closest people in Oklahoma, people we met with for meals or coffee at least once a week. Sure, we had the internet and the ability to chat with those people daily, but it just wasn’t the same as face to face time. And many (if not all) of those nearest and dearest are friends we made during our college years. Now we found ourselves in a quandary of how to meet new people in a town you are unfamiliar with when you are past the age of hanging out in bars, not church goers, and not in school. Chris and I were very happy with each other’s company, but we knew that making new friends was going to be important in the making of our new home.

Then Chris died.

I have a handful of friends that I met through Heather and Terry and I love them even though I hardly get a chance to see them. They all have lives that are bit more fabulous than my own with bedtimes after nine PM. I recognized that I needed at least one friend my own age with a similar bedtime, someone who would hang upside down in hammocks with me or go roller skating. I started my search for new friends by joining a meet-up social club. I joined two, actually. One was a photography group. I met with them once when they all gathered for a lunch at a Mediterranean place and the topic of discussion around the table was everything but photography. I was one of two women at the table and completely ignored after someone asked me what I do for a living. The guy at the head of the table kept a suspicious eye on me the whole time. That group didn’t really seem like a good fit. The other group was a non-themed group consisting of members of various ages who liked to visit museums and then go bar hoping. We were all a bit socially awkward with each other and I never ended up swapping contact information with anyone. At this point I was also deep into the world of online dating. Juggling new potential lovers and making new friends became a lot.

I stopped juggling.

I just stopped looking and immersed myself into doing the things I liked doing. I am one of those people who is happy to sit alone at dinner with a glass of wine and book or journal. I am also happy taking myself to a yoga class even if I don’t know anyone else there. Movies by yourself is like a vacation. I grew very comfortable with spending time with just myself as company. There’s always that saying floating around about finding the thing once you stop looking for the thing. This is basically what happened. I met Michael, but romantic partners are not always the friend you can drag to the roller rink or a yoga class. So, I went to camp and made those kinds of friends. All without looking or trying to fit in with the crowd. I’m pretty sure this came about because of all the time I had spent alone.

I have always felt that most (if not all) of those nearest and dearest people mentioned above are my nearest and dearest because of Chris. For probably a bit too long, I felt that there was no way I could have those people in my life if it were not for him. I was not smart enough on my own or charismatic or brilliant or funny enough. Good God, Chris was funny and I rode his shirttails. I know now that this simply is not true. It was never true. I remember our friend Tiffany saying once years ago about the day we all met; she said something about what she remembers most was how I walked right up to her and introduced myself and shook her hand. I pulled her into our flock. I was not just an accessory for Chris. We were partners in the true sense of the word and we were equally good at collecting interesting people.

I have a newish group of women friends and we went to an area roller rink for adult skate night earlier this week. We are a group of various ages though I’m sure I’m the oldest and we are also a group of various skating experience. I made an even newer friend (friend of a friend) at the rink who let me pester her about skates and wheels and I learned soooo much. When we had skated ourselves to exhaustion, Jenn drove us all to Andy’s Custard. It was finally just tolerable enough for us all to stand outside eating our treats and being ridiculous. Which we were. I have a whole wonderful series of photos of Lauren jumping into a picture I was I attempting to take. We laughed so much that I was sore the next day, though that could also be partly from skating. We made a pact over custard treats that adult skate night would be a regular thing and going on the calendar at least once a month. And I know it sounds so fucking stupid, but in this moment, not just surrounded but included by this smart and hilarious group, I realized that I am like-able.

I’m good enough. I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me. -Stuart Smalley

In our late night confessions during Chris’s last few weeks, his only concern for me was that I would try to do too much on my own. This is not an unreasonable concern. Michael has the same concern because I will totally believe that I can lift the far too heavy thing or fix the thing I have no idea even works. I like to remind Michael that I have taken apart the lawnmower, replaced a belt and put it all back together without losing any fingers or needing to buy a new mower. I appreciate their concern, but I more capable than either of them realize. There was no discussions with Chris about the possibility of me moving back to Oklahoma or that for some reason I would be without a support system here in KCMO. He didn’t mention any of that because he knew what I didn’t. He knew that people would love me and just be there and that I would have no problems building a Kansas City family. It would have been nice if he’d told me that, but I also appreciate the time I spent learning all of this on my own.

Girls’ night out with roller skating, ice cream and hilarity was a balm for this soul that has been battered by winter and current events.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

I started following Ella Emhoff last year partly because I think she helps me to stay in touch with what the young arthouse club is into these days. They are also very cool and the kind of young person I’d want to hang out with, meet for coffee and discuss needle point. They recently posted a thread in substack about writing down every positive and negative feeling you have each day and this reminded me of the complaint free bracelet I had to wear as an exercise during yoga teacher training. The idea of the bracelet was that you moved it from one wrist to the other every time you voiced a complaint. The goal was to not have to move the bracelet. The exercise for yoga teacher training was to wear the bracelet for one week and then write about your experience. This meant wearing the bracelet outside of our yoga space and into our regularly scheduled lives. The whole exercise inspired Chris to invest in a bracelet and then he bought a whole bunch of them to hand out to our friends.

Here is what we learned from that one week. We learned that we complain a lot about tiny insignificant shit. I’m not going to say that complaining is bad. Complaints are valid, but this exercise taught us what complaints are truly valid enough to be voiced. Am I whining or is this something I can constructively complain about to be fixed? It also helped us communicate our wants and needs to each other in a kind and thoughtful way so as not to hurt feelings. The bracelet taught me to really pause before voicing my complaint. In that pause, I would ask myself “Am I complaining about a problem of my own making? Is this something I have the ability to fix?”. Everything in life is a choice and this pause allowed me to choose my reaction to a problem. I abandoned the bracelet years ago, but every once in a while I pull it out of my jewelry box to wear for a day as a reminder.

It might be time to wear that bracelet again.

At the end of my yoga class this week, a student that only shows up once in a while to my class remarked on how much she really needed my class that day. She said “What is happening?! Wildfires and snowstorms and flooding and the current administration firing so many people. This year isn’t getting off to a good start.” But for forty five minutes, I had just provided space for her to set all of those thoughts aside and focus only on her physical well being. I like to think of it as nourishment or a moment of pause before reactions. I am providing sustenance to power us through future difficulties. Because, no, this year has not started out well and has created large messes that is forcing our communities to clean up and rebuild.

Just this week, the USDA rescinded grant money to the Ivanhoe Neighborhood Council, a local non-for-profit neighborhood improvement organizations who provides fresh vegetables and produce among other benefits to a low income area of Kansas City. A lot of that produce comes from urban growers and the majority demographic of the neighborhood is black. This is considered to be a DEI project by the Trump administration. These cuts and funding freezes are also having a hard hitting effect on rural farmers. Any farmer who signed up for a project supported by the USDA that pays farmers for planting up to 500 acres of cover crop are not getting their reimbursement money. This amounts to a $16,000-$17,000 dollar loss for each farmer. These are the people feeding this country and these are just small blips of horrors committed by this administration in this week alone.

My complaints against this administration are for problems not of my making and ones that I can do little to solve. I use the 5 Calls app daily to constructively voice my complaints and wishes. I make sure I know what is on the ballot and how those issues will impact my neighborhood. Then I make sure to vote at EVERY opportunity. Starting in May, my summer vegetables will come from local urban farms purchased at the Ivanhoe Farmers Market so that my dollars can benefit my community. I canceled my Amazon unlimited books subscription so that I can be more supportive of my local library and small business book shops. It is easy to get overwhelmed right now, but there are things we can do. Maybe you have a friend who recently lost their job with the National Parks Service. Hire them for a day to give you a tour of a park or invite them over for a meal. Maybe you have a friend who’s a veteran and struggling. They no longer have a crisis hotline to help them in times of need. Invite them out for coffee and a chat and just be a listener for them. Buy produce from local growers. Start building a secret room for hiding your LGTBQ+ friends when the time comes. Learn how to safely stock pile and administer the abortion pill.

These small acts of good make for bigger impacts that any of us can imagine. I am grateful that I have the ability to do small acts of good.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

Sometime last month I noticed that the enamel on my Tiffany’s Vespa charm was about to come off. So, Michael and I took it into Tiffany’s for repair. The manager was his usual wonderfully charming self and worried that my charm could not be fixed. He said that not all of them were repairable which is unfortunate because they don’t make that charm any more. In fact, I purchased the last one that the Kansas City store had in stock. He did some checking and came back to me with a sigh of relief. It could be repaired and then we started to fill out the paperwork to send it off to Tiffany’s New York for repairs and cleaning. I picked it up yesterday and squealed with delight as I placed it back on my chain that also holds Chris’s wedding band.

They belong together.

I got in my car today to drive to work and the sounds from the radio alerted me that today is Valentine’s Day. I’ve fully transitioned over into my mom’s car. That happened unexpectedly this week and Michael has been doing little things to make the transition more appealing to me, like programming the radio with my usual radio stations. So the Bridge was talking about Valentine’s Day and how this is their day to raise money and bring awareness to organ donation. Right away a woman started telling her story of the tragic death of her husband and I made the decision to change the channel. I flipped it over to NPR figuring that even the news would be better than what was happening on the Bridge. Except I flipped it to NPR just in time for today’s Story Core.

When the Story Core series started on NPR, Chris and I immediately changed the name to Story Cry. Every Friday morning as we drove to work together, a Story Core would start playing and Chris and I would start crying. Today’s Story Core, Love and taxidermy: The story of Bud and Jackie Jones, turned me into a snotty mess. Bud and Jackie had been married over 65 years and after telling their story, The Story Core producers brought Jackie and her daughter back to talk about how life has been since Bud passed away last year. They both said the usual things about missing him, but Jackie said things that I have also said. Our relationships and our loves were very similar in emotion.

When I got to work, I sent a text to Michael asking him if he had heard the morning Story Core, knowing he usually had NPR playing on his way to work and we had left the house at the same time. He replied with the crying face emoji and an “I love you”. I replied back with “Thank you for tolerating me.” because I know I’m demanding and at times obstinate. I know that it can’t be easy for him to share me with a dead man, yet he does it. Then he said this:

You get to love two men that will love you forever. That has to count for something.

I am very lucky. And this will probably be as close as we get to sending Valentine’s to one another.

This week has been filled with reminders of how fortunate Michael and I are. His truck brakes failed, like FAILED, on his way to work Tuesday. He managed to safely park the truck in a parking lot, get a tow truck to take the truck into the repair shop that had just finished putting new tires on Mom’s car (I’ve got to come up with a new name!) and drive that car into work. Not only are we fortunate enough to have a ‘spare’ vehicle, we can take the financial hit of the repairs. It just eats into the Paris fund, but I have no problem with putting beans on the menu for multiple days in a week. We’ve had a few unexpected nickel and dime moments recently and each time we’ve found ourselves dolling out money for the unexpected, Michael has said “We’re going to Paris no matter what!”

This week in Duolingo I learned Je vais a Paris.

Nous allons a Paris.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

Yesterday was Chris’s birthday and for some reason, my phone calendar has this listed multiple times as all day events. One of them is not even correct. It reads “Chris Maddera’s 43rd Birthday”. If Chris were alive today, we would be celebrating his fifty fourth birthday. I would probably be making everything jambalaya, a dish I have not made since the last birthday he was alive. There was a moment yesterday when I thought I’d get through the day unscathed, but that didn’t happen. After a vigorous and intense personal yoga practice (I’m up to 30 sun salutations and that may be my limit because of time), I settled myself down for a much earned savasana and immediately started sobbing. Grief gives zero shits about your savasana or time and space. This is the second time in the last six days where grief has rolled up to sucker punch me in the gut. The first time got me sobbing in my car in the Trader Joe’s parking lot. That was less about Chris and more about my mom and her mental struggles.

Grief is an onion. Cut into any layer of it and it’s still going release syn-propanethial-S-oxide gas.

There is no antidote for syn-propanethial-S-oxide, but you can reduce your reaction to it in a number of ways. You can wear goggles and use a very sharp knife. You can also chill or freeze the onion. Bottom line is that you can make it so that you cry a little less, but not completely. This is grief plus time. As each year passes, I cry a little bit less. I feel the string between us getting longer and longer and I just want to wind it up tight around my finger to shorten the distance. I may cry less, but I don’t miss him less or think about him less. Now more than ever. I mean can you imagine what Chris would be writing and doing in the midst of this current administration?!? He’d be inciting our anger and disgust, handing out the pitchforks, all while making us laugh uncontrollably over the ridiculousness of it all.

Look, I stared at a blank page for a really long time trying dig up something for today’s gratitude posting and instead I told you about Chris’s birthday and my dumb calendar. How do you find gratitude in the face of such great loss? Better yet, how do you find gratitude in the face of such great loss without it sounding trite or contrived? The answer is that you don’t. I can list off a half dozen things of gratitude from this week for you right now and every single one is trite and contrived. I’m grateful for the sunshine. I’m grateful for that one day this week it was warm enough when I go home from work that I could take Josephine for a short walk. She was so excited about it that she pooped four times. I am grateful that mom is being cared for and that I don’t have to do it. I am grateful for the friends in my life who continuously have my back and provide me with support.

Trite or contrived gratitude, to me, is just an act of honing the practice. It’s not any different from saying grace before a meal and being thankful for the food on the table. Of course you are thankful for your food. Unless the meal before you is your least favorite food. When I was a child, my heart would sink every time I ran down the stairs for breakfast and discovered Mom had made French toast. I hated Mom’s French toast. It was always soggy and to this day I do not ever order it. That’s beside the point. I was still grateful to have food and a mom who made sure I had breakfast every morning. I found that even the simplest, most obvious things to be grateful for makes the hard, painful stuff like grief a little easier to handle.

It’s like putting on goggles before cutting up that onion.

THANKFUL FRIDAY

I’ve seen so many memes about the length of January and how it feels like the month that will never end. I mean, January sure has set a particular tone for the year by starting with a blizzard. Then we entered a chaotic period of governmental change immediately threatening people’s jobs. Oh, hey…did you hear about the tuberculosis outbreak happening over on the Kansas side of this city I live in? State line is a street, not a barrier and I’m four miles from that line. So masking up is a very reasonable thing to do while roaming the city. Yesterday, we witnessed a horrific plane/helicopter crash over the Potomac, killing everyone involved. Today, leaves us holding our breaths in anticipation of the next tragic thing. And maybe by tomorrow, everyone will be sighing with relief that January is finally over.

I don’t know if I will be one of those sighing with relief.

January is complicated. This month, named for the god of beginnings and transitions, was added to the Roman calendar sometime around 713 BC by King Numa Pompilius. At this time there was still much debate and speculation about how to create a calendar. The first of January didn’t become the first day of the year for another hundred years and of course this is just the Roman calendar. Don’t get me started on the Lunar Calendar, though in a quick research glance, I did note that Anglo-Saxons (White, English, “Christian”) are the only ones who do not celebrate the new year based on the new moon. We’ve also grasped tightly to the narrative of the month being a new beginning. January is National Healthy Weight Awareness Month, National Codependency Awareness Month, Veganuary, and many more self improvement awareness things.

I find the expectation to make great changes to be stressful.

Thirteen years ago, January was a month of great change for me that was not one of my choosing. It holds more weight now then it did previously. Some of the weight is pure terror of the unknown of illness. Though the time was terrifying, painful and so fucking sad, still it was the last month I had with Chris. In between the pain and terror there were moments of great sweetness. We laid next to each other, hands clasped, and talked about everything and nothing. We laughed so much even while crying. The illness had not taken Chris’s mind yet and we spent hours together, just the two of us, soaking up the time we had left. I can’t really sigh with relief at the ending of January because February is so much worse.

Michael and I had a date night last Saturday that was really a hold-over birthday celebration. For the last three years whenever Michael has asked me where I want to eat for my birthday, I always say Earl’s Premier . This never works out because of some reason or other. This year, I stomped my foot and pouted. This is how we ended up with reservations almost a week after my birthday. It was all worth it. We took my scooter charm into Tiffany’s to be repaired and had the most pleasant experience. Then I went to Anthropolgie to spend my gift card. Again, I had the most pleasant experience, which was a surprise for me because I was not feeling good in my skin. The sweater I purchased is so so pretty and the colors make me feel joy. I will be sad to not wear it year round. Then we went to Earl’s and had the most spectacular dining experience. Simple. Delicious. Fabulous. A lesson for next year: Do not attempt birthday celebrations on actual day of birth.

Psst….I’m planning on celebrating a month earlier…in Paris!

So on this very last day of this first month of a new year, I’d like to celebrate the good that is tucked away between the bad. I survived another year! I’m relatively healthy! I can still touch my toes and move my body around. My mother also celebrated another birthday this month and I feel lucky to still have her with us. I ate a dozen perfect little raw oysters. I now own a sweater that contains the colors of a dessert sunrise. Only the giant piles of snow left from clearing streets and sidewalks still remain. All the rest of the snow has finally melted this week. Olga, my sourdough starter, is still alive and kicking. I may attempt ciabatta again this weekend.

Tucked inside the bad of the month were warm soothing hugs, silly giggles, and fascinating stories. I have gratitude for this messy, but lovely month.