Honestly, I think there must be some genetic component to knowing where you are in the world. And somehow, I was born without it. On this vacation alone, I have executed at least three “Y” turns, sat twice with my hazards on at the side of the road until I gained my bearings, and mumbled profanity at Google Maps until I felt the need to go to confession.

And I’m not even Catholic.

I really love when someone (usually of the male persuasion) insists on giving me cardinal directions. Cardinal. Directions. Like they have some type of compass implant which constantly orients them to true north. Not this gal.

I once wrote a list poem—”Things I’ve Lost So Far”—which includes the lines: “the ability to drive just about anyplace that isn’t routine without the crutch of the GPS on my phone” and “the ability to drive back home without referring to the GPS on my phone after arriving someplace with the help of the GPS on my phone.”

I have used Google Maps constantly on this trip. I used it to find the ferry station in Manitowoc. I used it to find the hotel in Grand Rapids once I got off the ferry in Ludington, MI. I used it to find the Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park in Grand Rapids.

And there, I allowed myself to get lost for a while.

The Meijer is featuring a special collection of glasswork by Dale Chihuly. The esteemed daughter and I discovered Chihuly when we travelled to Tacoma the year she graduated from high school. I’m pretty sure we saw his Isola di San Giacomo in Palude Chandelier II at the Milwaukee Art Museum before our trip, but visiting his glass studio was such a treat.

Since then, I’ve made it a mission to “collect” Chihulys whenever I can. I remember seeing individual pieces or whole collections in Phoenix and Boston, at the Biltmore in Asheville. There’s just something about his forms in glass that takes my breath away.

And the sculpture park at the Meijer is well worth the trip. There’s a Rodin. There’s an Ai Weiwei. There’s a Claes Oldenburg. There’s a 24-foot bronze sculpture of a horse which is an homage to Leonardo da Vinci.

This is the kind of place you want to be lost.

Today I used Google Maps to get me to the Sleeping Bear Dunes. It was less than an hour from where I’m staying in Traverse City. And I didn’t realize until this morning that it’s the 110th birthday of the National Park Service, so it was free admission today! Google Maps got me there in time to paint a picture with the rangers. Afterwards, I asked for a paper map so I wouldn’t get lost in the park. And then I went for a walk along the shoreline, where the wind tore the map out of my hand and sent it into the waves.

The last time I saw it, the map was headed back toward Wisconsin.

I decided lunch and shopping was in order, so I headed to Glen Arbor. I was leaving one shop when the universe tapped me on the shoulder.

I’ve always described myself as a human doing, not a human being. I have a hard time sitting still. And when I do, I feel guilty about it. But I’ve been getting a message from the “powers that be” lately. Stop doing. Just BE. And there, hanging outside of a little art and poetry shop, was the t-shirt. “BE,” with a heart. OK, universe, I hear you.

I went back and bought the shirt.

And because of that purchase, I had a little visit with the owner. Who asked me if I’d already driven down the “something something scenic trail.” I asked her to elucidate. The Pierce Stocking Scenic Drive is a seven-mile driving loop which includes scenic overlooks and plenty of opportunity to walk along the top of the dune without having to do any strenuous hiking (which the esteemed daughter warned me against trying. Sometimes I wonder if she knows me at all. I couldn’t even see the bottom of the dunes, there’s no way I’d try to hike them!)

All of this is to say that I spent some time this afternoon with my feet in the sand, contemplating the waves and the incredible shades of blue in Lake Michigan.

It was a great place to just be. I didn’t feel lost at all.

I announced my retirement two years in advance to give my employer enough time to hire my replacement and for that replacement to shadow me for a year to figure out the job before I left. I know that sounds like I was indispensable—far from it. But a beloved colleague (who happened to be my former superintendent for 25 years) and I had built our department from the ground up, and no one else really knew what it was that I did entirely.

My employer took me seriously and did exactly that. I had a full year with my replacement before I retired, and I’ve never been more content to leave a job in incredibly capable hands.

Why the two year run-up to retirement? We (the sibs and I) could see the writing on the wall. My mother had been declining in her dementia—slowly, thank God, painfully but slowly—and we were now seeing the ball rolling a bit faster. Someone needed to have a flexible schedule. I was the oldest. I could retire at sixty with a teacher’s pension. I was a confirmed Martha, after all (the biblical Martha, not the Stewart Martha, although I see a lot of crossover between these two housekeeping icons). Who else would I trust to do this work?

And then, with July 1st shining like a beacon on my Google calendar, my dad had his stroke May 3rd, 2023. Actually, he had both a clot and a brain bleed at the same time. Which meant that blood thinners couldn’t be used as a preventative measure against the next episode. Which meant more doctors visits and minor surgery and a device implanted in his heart to try to keep more clots from forming. Which meant a lot of time in the car running first to the hospital, and then to the rehab facility, and then back and forth to appointments for the first solid six months of my retirement.

At the end of that year, I took a step back and thought, “Wait, I’m supposed to be retired. Where are all of the other retired people keeping themselves?”

At the Y. I found them all at the YMCA that next year. But that is another story.

This story is about the one thing I did for myself that first year of retirement. I applied to and was accepted into an MFA program for writing.

I’ve been writing my entire life. I was published in first grade—the circus came to our school, and my three sentence “essay” was among those chosen for the local paper. I wrote bad poetry in high school (doesn’t everyone write bad poetry in high school?). I had this incredible English teacher who probably needed a break in his week, so he allowed our Creative Writing class to pretty much do whatever we wanted to. We wrote pretty inappropriate class newsletters. We created a school poetry book. Writing nirvana.

I went on to major in English at a university three hours from home. I was the first person in several generations of my family to attend college, and it felt like my mom was dropping me off in a foreign country during move-in weekend. I wrote more bad poetry under the tutelage of an unforgettable professor (Yes, Richard Kirkwood, I definitely miss you).

Then I spent 27 years helping high school students to write. My own writing was abandoned.

Oh, here and there I’d write an exemplar essay or compose haikus with my class during an outdoor hike. I got a master’s degree, but one in Curriculum and Instruction which I could use to further my education career. I was lost under stacks of my students’ papers for 180 contact days a year. There was no time for my own writing.

By the time I retired, I had once again found time to work on my craft. I had one poetry chapbook picked up for publication. I was finding some success placing individual poems in magazines and journals.

So I decided the one thing I’d do for myself in retirement was get my MFA in writing.

I’m about to start my last class—the thesis project class. I’ve thought a lot about my final project. At first, I planned to put together another poetry chapbook. But then life intervened and handed me a story on a silver platter.

Or, more accurately, in a small cardboard box.

I’m off to Michigan tomorrow for a writers’ retreat so I can get all of my research and writing in order. (Don’t bother trying to break into my house—I leave the husband and the dogs on full alert every time I’m gone.) And then I’ll be off to the races, so to speak. I hope to share snippets of the story with you here. I hope you find it intriguing. I hope to have a manuscript in hand early next year.

Wish me luck.

Like, literal nail. Sticking straight up out of the middle of the board. Lest you think I’m insane, my mother had one as well. And my grandmother. Sometimes you could pound the nail back out of the cutting board and use it for its intended purpose the rest of the year. But come late summer, the nail was reinserted. I’ll let you make a guess as to its use.

Ready? It was for cutting corn. This was a tradition I grew up with. When the corn was ready in the garden, everything had to be picked and shucked and washed and cut and cooked and cooled and frozen. Fast.

And I’m not talking about a dozen ears from the store. I’m talking about dozens of cobs of corn and many, many quarts of kernels. So speed and efficiency were the words of the day. The nail in the cutting board was used to impale each ear, standing straight up, so that a handy corn cutter (which can still be purchased at Fleet Farm today) could be pushed from the top down, slicing off the corn in one fell swoop. And it was efficient. But the splatter?

That shit went everywhere.

I can’t remember if we did this in the kitchen or outside on the picnic table. Outside would make much more sense, because those corn kernels became little bombs of sweetness as they were cut from the cob. I remember that the clean up process was just as arduous as the removal.

I could still be cutting corn this way today. I still process dozens of ears at a time. I can remember one August when I froze twenty-five quarts of corn. But nowadays, I prefer to stand in the kitchen and stream Culinary Class Wars while I’m putting up for winter. I need a much cleaner method for cutting corn, and speed isn’t necessarily at the top of my priority list. A sharp knife and a cake pan to catch the kernels has taken the place of the nail in the cutting board and the corn stripper.

I don’t feel bad about abandoning this tradition.

I don’t use the exact same recipes that my grandmother used, either. I know there are “rebel canners” who insist on using recipes and methods which are no longer considered safe with our crops today. They interpret safe canning rules from groups like the National Home Canning Association as the government trying to interfere in their lives. If they just do what they want, they are “sticking it to the man.”

When I read that hybridization has changed our crops, therefore, safe canning methods for those crops also had to change, it makes perfect sense to me. There are food scientists who have spent their adult lives studying the effects of different processing methods on today’s much less acidic tomatoes, for example. They recommend pressure rather than water bath canning for spaghetti sauce. They add citric acid to each jar. They understand that botulism can kill you.

Not every tradition is worth holding on to.

Poor Tevye sings about this in one of my favorite musicals, Fiddler on the Roof. His daughters don’t hold to traditions, and they teach him much about which traditions should be treasured and which should be tossed.

I am no political pundit. I’m just a retired teacher from the Midwest who votes. But I’ve been thinking about traditions lately in light of some of the new folks we’ve seen running for office. We had a contender here in Wisconsin who just missed winning the Democratic gubernatorial primary. Our Michigan neighbors have a Democratic senatorial candidate who identifies as a Democratic Socialist. Most notably, we have Zohran Mamdani as New York’s new mayor. After 200+ days, it seems like he’s doing a better job than most people gave him credit for (New Yorker Josh Greenman does a nice job giving a very balanced assessment in his Substack post). While all of these candidates ran as Democrats, this is a new kind of Democrat.

And people are losing their damn minds.

Well, some people. And think about that. Who is making the most noise? Who jumped immediately from “They’re Socialists!” to “They’re Communists!” Who is taking a page directly from the McCarthy playbook here?

As a voter, all I see is Chicken Little running around screaming, “The sky is falling!” after being hit in the head with an acorn. We’ve seen many shifts in our political parties historically. We had Whigs before we had Republicans. We’ve had single-issue parties like the Know Nothings and the Free Soilers. Our current two parties seem to have completely exchanged their platforms in the past century. When I look at what’s happening in Washington right now, I don’t think there could be a better time for Americans to have more choices. I hope we see more young folks willing to push against that two-party envelope.

For me, the Constitution is a tradition worth protecting tooth and nail. Our current two-party system? Not so much.

Me, too.

In a little over an hour, I will be 63. I have no problem owning my age. I’ve earned every wrinkle and roll. But as I was thinking about this particular birthday, I realized that my age will match my birth year. What a great reason to invent a new birthday celebration! Not just a golden birthday, but a DIAMOND BIRTHDAY. And then I found out, it’s already a thing. Oh, well.

My golden birthday (the 8th) was co-opted by my baby brother, who was the one birthday present that my mother refused to return.

But I don’t have to share my diamond birthday with anyone! Not only that, but I decided that my diamond birthday should not be over in just one day. Nay nay! I should definitely get an entire year to celebrate a diamond birthday!

So, to most if not all of my class of 1981 classmates, welcome to your Diamond Birthday Year!

I’ve already had a summer of Big Things. I planned and hosted our first-ever “cousin reunion” in June. I was on the planning committee for our huge biennial family reunion in July (which is mostly for our second cousins’ extended family, but they let us tag along as the out-laws). I hosted an in-person poetry retreat for my Zoom poetry group for five days this month, which was nothing short of surreal and wonderful.

But now that my Diamond Birthday Year is about to commence, what will be on the agenda?

• First, a trip to Michigan yet this month for my own personal writing retreat and some research for another writing project.

• Next, a final fall/early winter semester of coursework and my MFA in writing from Lindenwood University will be complete in December.

• Participating in graduation in St. Charles, MO in early May 2027.

• Another trip to Scotland to attend the Gartmore House writing retreat in late May.

• Hopefully a hop over to Luxembourg while I’m across the pond to spend time with my friend Wendy.

That may be all the celebrating this 63-year-old can handle for one year. But I suspect I’ll have more celebrations, both big and small, to add to the list by next year at this time. There are already new babies to cuddle. The tomatoes are just starting to turn red, so there’s much more canning on the agenda before frost closes the garden down for the season (for the record, I really enjoy canning, so most days this is about as exciting as I get).

Tomorrow is going to be about relaxation. And reflection. And giving thanks for all of the blessings I’ve experienced so far this year. But after that? DIAMOND. BIRTHDAY. YEAR.

A diamond birthday year truly only comes once in a lifetime. As poet Mary Oliver so fittingly asked in her poem “The Summer Day,” what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? Or at least with this one spectacular diamond birthday year?

I cannot adequately describe the insanity of waking up that early on a Saturday morning in order to sit through a three-hour movie. But that’s what the esteemed daughter and I did today in Chicago.

When I first heard that there was going to be a new version of Homer’s classic, I had determined not to go. I had taught The Odyssey for years using text excerpts, made-for-classroom play scripts, selections from this awesome storyteller Odds Bodkin on cassette tape.

And, of course, scenes from the 1997 miniseries with Armand Assante. He was my Odysseus.

I simply could not imagine Matt Damon in the role. I have absolutely nothing against Matt Damon. I have thoroughly enjoyed many of his movies. But as Odysseus? Absolutely not.

I understand the argument for an Odyssey using actual Greek actors. The primarily all-American cast behind Damon’s Odysseus didn’t inspire great confidence in me. I ignored the MAGA falderal around the casting of Lupita Nyong’o and Elliot Page. Completely ridiculous and hilarious that they were determined to boycott the movie and cause its ruin.

How’s that working for you, MAGA?

I can tell you how it’s working (not), because the esteemed daughter wanted to watch the movie in IMAX as it was intended. Every single show was either sold out or front seats available only all day today. In multiple theaters. Except for the 7:15 A.M. show.

So off we went, joining the line (yes, there was a line) at the concession stand for the only movie playing at 7:15 A.M.

I frankly can’t “give away” the plot of The Odyssey, considering it’s been around for 2600 years. However, without commenting too much on the specifics of Christopher Nolan’s version, I will say that Robert Pattinson’s Antinous is the guy you’re going to love to hate, Charlize Theron as Calypso is absolute perfection, and Zendaya as Athena is not angry, just disappointed at her earthly charge Odysseus. Even though I would argue that Tom Holland’s Telemachus calling Odysseus “Dad” was a step too far in contemporizing the classic, I enjoyed the movie. I’m glad I went.

The esteemed daughter’s argument for this version is that it makes Odysseus human. Assante’s Odysseus was a man challenging the gods for a place among them. He thumbs his nose at Poseidon, sleeps with Circe and Calypso. He does not give a second thought to the utter destruction of Troy.

What I appreciated most about Damon’s Odysseus is also what is most controversial. This is an Odysseus who is wrecked by his part in the Trojan War. This is an Odysseus who regrets, who grieves, who exiles himself. I would argue that an Odysseus who actually contemplates the consequences of his actions is the type of hero that we need right now. I’d love to know what you think.

No, I didn’t bore any of my students’ souls into leaving their bodies and joining the Great Beyond (although some might beg to differ). Instead, I cleaned up my room like I did every year. I submitted my grades just before the cut-off, like I did every year. I jumped into my car and headed home, like I did on the last day every year, dreaming of late mornings and coffee on the deck and no grading for two months.

Those were the thoughts running through my mind as I turned onto our road for the final stretch until the true beginning of summer vacation. Just ahead, I noticed a car pulled over on the shoulder. Then I noticed somebody laying next to the car. I slammed on the brakes. There was a man stretched on the ground, a woman kneeling over him with her phone in one hand, trying to do CPR with the other. It had been a while, but I had gone through CPR classes at school, so I jumped in without even thinking about it. That’s what the training is supposed to allow you to do. I found my spot on his chest and started compressions, and then a rescue breath every ten seconds. The woman, who turned out to be his daughter-in-law, continued talking frantically to the dispatcher, trying to get help.

A few minutes of working on him resulted in no change. A third vehicle stopped, and a young man jumped out, running over to my side. He offered to trade places during CPR, so I moved over so he could take over. It wasn’t long until the paramedics arrived, lifting the elderly man onto a gurney and loading him into the ambulance. The daughter-in-law jumped into her car to follow. The young man and I moved off to our vehicles, and that was the end of things.

Literally the end. Because our efforts had been in vain. It just so happened that the older man and his son’s family were members of our church at the time, so I decided to attend the wake. After waiting in line for a time, I made it up to the front and introduced myself to the daughter-in-law. There were some tears and a long hug.

At the time, while this was a completely shocking episode, it didn’t have any direct impact on my life. But there had been a different feeling that year as I was wrapping up that last day of school. As most teachers do, I usually spent many days during the summer back at school rewriting curriculum, making changes to my classroom, taking summer courses.

That summer, I did not go back once. Something had shifted for me.

A teacher friend of mine always said you would know when it was time to stop teaching. I was not old enough to retire, but something in me knew that something was ending that day. By the end of the summer, I had applied and gotten hired for an educational consultant position that took me out of the classroom and into working with teachers for the last eight years of my career. It was the move I needed to make, and that episode on the side of the road that last day of school served as the watershed moment for that change.

Eight years later, two months before I retired, my dad had a stroke. Actually, he had two strokes. He had both a brain bleed and a clot at the same time, and somehow was able to come out of that situation with some mobility issues on his right side and largely wheelchair-bound, but with his brain completely intact. Thank God.

But that event completely changed the shape of my retirement in ways that I could not have imagined. I had set my retirement date two years before, and I let my boss at the time know that he had two years to replace me. But there’s no way that I could have anticipated that my last two months of work would be consumed with hospital visits and doctor visits and rehab facility visits and moving my dad back home and on and on and on. His stroke became the watershed for my retirement. Helping to manage care for him, and my mom, and my elderly aunt became a big part of that retirement picture.

COVID was a worldwide watershed moment. There is not one person whose life was not impacted in ways large and small by the pandemic. During that summer, I was accepted into an online writing workshop through Southampton University with Billy Collins, former U.S. Poet Laureate, and frankly my poetry guru. Ten of us had been accepted into his small workshop, and I could not contain my excitement at having the opportunity to work with such a renowned poet.

What I didn’t expect was the long-lasting implications of that watershed. The course was phenomenal. Hearing Billy Collins talk about my poetry was surreal. But it was the rest of the folks in that workshop that changed my life. I could not have imagined at the time that six of us would continue to meet monthly over Zoom to exchange poems and provide feedback to each other for the next six years. I could not have anticipated that I would have the opportunity to host them for our own in-person writers’ retreat at my house, which is about to happen just two weeks from now. I could not have dreamed that those people would become some of my best friends.

If I look back on other major changes in my life, I could come up with more of these watershed events that seemed incredibly challenging at the time, but in the end marked a transition to something positive in my life. And that gives me great hope right now. We are collectively going through a time period of major change and upheaval. There are watershed moments happening daily. Many of them are things we could not have imagined happening in our lifetimes. And yet, the Pollyanna in me is optimistic that we will come through all of this, that there will be light at the end of this tunnel.

I have to believe that. Every day, I choose to believe that.

I headed out this morning, after yet another rain last night. As soon as I stepped through the door, the droning started in my ears. Not surprising, along with a bumper crop of blueberries, the rains have brought a bumper crop of mosquitoes. I don’t understand why God decided we needed these nasty biting creatures. My backyard swallows would beg to differ.

I immediately dropped my pail and headed back into the house. A few months ago, I had finally succumbed to F-book marketing and ordered an oil from a small family company guaranteed to do just about anything besides cure cancer. I like supporting small businesses, and this had looked like a great opportunity to help a pregnant mom with her online side hustle. I grabbed the bottle, liberally applying the product on all exposed skin—as it was rumored to repel ticks and mosquitoes—and headed back to the blueberry bed.

I picked for an hour. I didn’t hear one bug.

I know that doesn’t sound possible. And it wasn’t that they were gone. Twice, I caught mosquitoes thinking about landing on my arm, only to see them reverse direction when they got within whiffing distance. The stuff actually worked.

I’m generally not one to write online reviews, but hey, I was impressed. I looked up the company website, but I couldn’t find a spot for writing a review. Then I made a possibly unwise decision—I googled the company and found a Reddit thread. Oh. My. Lord. Suddenly, my Pollyanna vision of a small family company became mired in descriptions of cults and shady husbands and trad wives and unsanitary bottling and on and on.

I had thought I was doing a good thing.

I had the same thought when I downloaded the “Goods Unite Us” app. This site allows a customer to type in a business or a brand to see which side of the political spectrum they support, so the consumer is better able to vote with their pocketbook. And it’s a great concept—you should definitely download the app. What I found was that most of my local grocery stores are on the opposite side of the aisle. And when I do shop somewhere that aligns with my values, their products may not.

It’s disheartening, to say the least.

And yes, you can just shop and not think about any of these things. Shopping doesn’t have to be political. Except it is. Just like the discussion I had with my sibs last night in our text thread about the reflecting pool. As one brother opined, “This is not a political issue. But apparently it is.” Because when shopping is about rising gas prices and rising grocery prices and rising transportation costs, it becomes political. There’s a political cause for all of these effects. When a national memorial is renovated through a no-bid contract instead of going through the proper protocols and approvals by the National Park Service and the Commission of Fine Arts, it becomes political.

The Dems are having some buyer’s remorse this week as well. They had supposedly vetted Graham Platner before supporting his run for the Senate in Maine.

And then . . .

I’m tired of hearing about politicians (or wannabe politicians) behaving badly. Like, ALL of them. On BOTH sides of the aisle. From the top down. I don’t think I want to read Thomas Massie’s list of members of Congress who used taxpayer funds to settle sexual harassment claims if his bill gets passed. I’m afraid it won’t shock me. At all.

I know the world is filled with decent human beings. I know some of those decent people are politicians. But not enough. Not nearly enough.

What a load of crap.

I’m not going to go there. Instead, I’m going to tell you why I love my farm stand. I built it myself under the supervision of my 90-year-old father-in-law the summer after I retired, as a way to keep myself busy and bring in a little money. We have a huge garden, and I love to can, and I craft, and I write, so I have some things to sell in a farm stand.

There’s just something elemental about a farm stand that isn’t the same as a booth at the farmer’s market or an advertisement on Marketplace. A farm stand in the wild just appears on the side of the road without any fanfare, catching you unawares. It’s nearly a requirement that you stop and see what’s available.

This week, I decided to up my game with a bake sale. Nothing like spending the day celebrating Christmas in July by baking four kinds of cookies. And two kinds of sourdough bread. And cinnamon roll sourdough focaccia. I put a little sign out on the highway to direct folks down our road. I had a pretty good sales day yesterday.

My farm stand is a tiny microcosm of the America I want to continue to live in. I buy my neighbor’s eggs. She buys the cookies I make from her eggs. My sister-in-law gifts me plants to put in the stand. I offer to sew cushions for her new window seats. We live out “love your neighbor” on a daily basis.

My immigrant ancestors traveled to this country and immediately went to work. In 250 years, that really hasn’t changed much. Immigrants come to this country looking for better opportunities for their children, and most times they immediately go to work. And, unfortunately, for most of those 250 years, the children of immigrants who now run the country make decisions about which immigrants will continue to be allowed in and which will not.

Talk about the height of hypocrisy.

Every year on the 4th of July, we watch Independence Day. It scratches my husband’s itch for an action flick, and I will rarely pass up a chance to watch Jeff Goldblum in action. I guess we could take away the lesson that the countries on the planet had to work together in order to save themselves. But this year, we also watched Project Hail Mary. Oh, Ryan Gosling. This is the movie I want to think about when I ponder the future of the United States. If we were Project Hail Mary, we would have someone in charge who doesn’t think they can do the job, who has to basically be forced into a position of leadership. They would then find allies in the most unlikely of places. Working with those allies against insurmountable odds, they would still find a way to save the planet, understanding (as Spock would say) that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Or the one.

That’s the America I want to celebrate this year. That’s the America I want to find again.

When Marissa was about sixteen, I planned a service trip as the youth group leader for our former church. The kids made the decision to volunteer for a week at a sleep-away camp for developmentally disabled adults down in Indiana. As the event got closer, the students learned that they would spend Monday in training and then Tuesday through Friday, they would each be the 24/7 caregiver for a developmentally disabled adult. We had no idea what to expect. There was trepidation. About a week before we left, Marissa told me she wasn’t going.

Spoiler alert—she went.

Six teens and four adults filled the rented van after the service on Sunday morning for the trip down to Indiana. When I say it was quiet in the van, that is a gross exaggeration. It was silent except for meal stops during the nine hours it took us to get to camp. We got checked in, found our bunks, and tried to sleep.

The next day was filled with meeting new friends who were also serving as caregivers during the week, attending medical training sessions, and participating in team-building exercises. The jitters dialed back minutely as the kids talked to their cohorts who had participated in the camp during previous years. Then everyone got individual information on their camper for the week and the unique needs that they would encounter. Some campers would be in wheelchairs, some were nonverbal, some had Down’s Syndrome. Jitters returned.

On Tuesday morning, each camper arrived to much fanfare and our kids jumped into action, taking their campers to get settled in and then bringing them back to the commons to play games and visit with other camper/friend pairs.

The week raced by. Each volunteer was on their own journey, even as they saw each other during meals and devotions and activities. Our number one focus was our camper and making sure that camper had the best time possible during what was, for many, the only week out of their year that they were seen as a person and not as a disability. This was their vacation, and it was our job to make it memorable.

Friday came with goodbyes and hugs and tears. We loaded the van and settled in for another nine-hour drive back home (adding in a stop at the Albanese Candy Factory in Merrillville, Indiana). But this time, the van was ELECTRIC! Everyone talked at once, recounting their experiences, sharing details about their week. The talk was immediately centered on making the trip down again the next year. Which we did. And again. And again.

I lost count of the number of times I made that drive with my youth group kids down to Anderson, Indiana. It was magical every time. Marissa has told me more than once that it was one of the most impactful experiences she has had in her life.

This morning, I could see that same excitement on the faces of the youth from our church who had traveled to Louisville. Pastor Stuart shared the importance of being seen. If the lesson tomorrow’s leaders learn is that every single person is your neighbor and deserves to be seen, we’ll be taking a step in the right direction.

Yes, my niece and her hubby were raising meat chickens, as they do every summer, and it was time to dispatch the top-heavy creatures. I envisioned that I would be helping with the harvest, as my niece is eight months pregnant, but the two of them have the whole chicken killing and plucking and gutting thing down to a science, so they had eighteen birds cooling in under two hours. Heads did roll.

Instead, I was on pool duty with the boys, which consisted of scooping beetles (and one very long-legged spider) out of the pools, refilling the pools and water table as needed, and cheeky spraying of the great-nephews, but only from the waist down.

I have to admit, spending time with them is a delightful combination of great fun and pure exhaustion. Having raised only one boy, I find there is just something about having two or more that completely changes the equation. Brothers profess their love in one breath and then try to choke the life out of each other the next.

I don’t get it. I definitely fought with my sister, but brothers are next level. My husband’s stories of growing up with two brothers makes me wonder how he survived his childhood. In the end, though, the fights are fast and furious and then done, without much grudge-holding or plotting for revenge.

And that’s the point. It’s something that I think we’ve lost lately. That ability to disagree, even vehemently, with someone but then still see the “brother” in them. Instead, we hear rhetoric from the very highest levels of government that those who disagree with them are “animals.” That, sure, we should love our neighbors, but not ALL of our neighbors EQUALLY. Instead, first we should love our family, then our physical neighbors, then our community, our fellow citizens in our own country, and then finally—maybe—the rest of the world. As long as they aren’t trying to live with us and gain citizenship.

I’m pretty sure I won’t find that hierarchy in any Bible verse.

Last weekend at our family reunion, I sat down next to one of my “little” cousins. He’s the same age as my son, with a beard that would do him proud in a ZZ Top cover band. He looked at me and said, “I know we’re probably on opposite ends of the political spectrum.” “Really?” I answered. And then we both laughed and went on to discuss a topic about which we both had questions. No hatred. No vitriol. An acknowledgement and then a decision to continue to treat each other as family. As we are ALL family.

I wonder what it will take for us to return to caring for each other as brothers. I wonder if those days ever existed in the first place.

Let me back up. I’d spent the last two days at the Janesville Book Festival, attending some great workshops and networking. Driving back this afternoon, I was somewhere along Highway 26 south of Rosendale when I passed a large freestall barn on the right. There was a cow making her way toward the road. I went by so fast I really wasn’t sure that I had seen what I thought I saw, but my inner Farm Kid went into overdrive.

Was there a person?

Was there a fence?

Was there really a cow?

If you’re a fellow Farm Kid, you know there are many things that will cause a farmer to stop breathing momentarily. Smoke. Fire. Tornado. A call at any time of day that starts with “Your cows are out.” I watched my rearview mirror. No one else in the string of cars behind me had slowed down. But my inner Farm Kid just would not let it go.

Let me tell you about Farm Kids. I had many in my classroom over the years. I don’t want to overgeneralize, because academically, I’ve had some Farm Kids at the top of my class and others who were just barely hanging on. But for pure work ethic? Give me a Farm Kid every time.

My inner Farm Kid knows that you never wait for someone else to do the job for you, so I pulled into the next driveway and headed back the way I had come. Topping the rise in front of me, I was hoping not to see a cow/car collision. You think a deer will mess up your vehicle? A cow will kill you.

Nothing, thank God. I pulled into the driveway, but the cow (from here on out, we’ll call her Bessie) had disappeared. Parking in front of the barn, I could see that she had found her way inside, where she was watching me with her big brown eyes, wondering if I was going to ruin her fun. She was not wrong.

I got out and “helloed” to no avail. I checked around each side of the barn. I went back to check on Bessie, still loose but stationary. The farm house was down a slope from the barn, so I drove down the lane and parked. Quiet. No cars in the garage. I knocked on the door, and the resident St. Bernard and his pal were happy to let anyone who might be around know that someone was trying to break in. Still nothing.

I could not leave with a cow loose. I drove back up to the freestall barn, where Bessie had decided to wander back outside again. I blocked the driveway with my SUV. Time for 911. I got the county dispatcher on the line and was explaining the situation to her when the teenage farmhand pulled up next to the house. I ran (ok, jogged) back down the lane, and the two of us walked up the hill together as I ended the call to the dispatcher.

“I don’t know where she could have gotten out,” my new friend said as we walked into the barn. Then we noticed that a second cow was also out, although this miss was laying in the silage enjoying a late lunch. “Do you think you could help me?”

Why, yes, young sir. I certainly can.

I stayed at one end of the aisle with my arms spread while the farmhand walked to the other end of the barn, shutting the gate outside and opening the entrance to one of the pens. I then proceeded to clap my hands and wave my arms to encourage Bessie and her buddy to join their colleagues.

Once corralled, my young friend explained that the owner was putting in robotic milkers. “I’ll be out of a job soon,” he said. Then he thanked me for my help. “No problem,” I answered. “I grew up on a farm.”

On the way back home, I noticed that my new sweater now carried the scent of Eau d’Bovine. My sneakers will probably need the attention of an old toothbrush to dislodge the manure caught in the grooves. Still, I smiled the rest of the way home.

Once a Farm Kid, always a Farm Kid.

I’m a shoulder-season traveler myself. Hike the Cliffs of Moher in September, a little drizzly and fifty degrees? Yes, please! Easter in the Lake District, just as Wordsworth’s fabled daffodils are turning their sunny heads skyward? I’ll be there. Punta Cana or Cancún at any time of year? Absolutely not.

My church is planning its first adult mission trip, and I’d love to go. Mission trips can be a great combination of exotic locales and essential service. But my church is going to Mississippi. In August. And I’ve learned one thing about myself as I have gotten to that golden age of qualifying for the senior discount—I simply cannot take the heat. Literally. Antiperspirant is a joke. When I get too hot, I sweat from the crown of my head on down. Sweat drips from the ends of my hair. Trying to wear mascara in the heat is an act of futility—it just ends up on my cheeks.

So I do not know how my sister talked me into Savannah in August two years ago. It is her favorite city, and I’d only been there for an afternoon a few years ago, so I thought I was prepared. We’d gotten a hotel right on the main drag, with a hop-on-hop-off bus stop just around the corner. If things got too hot, we could just jump on a shuttle and ride back to our room. I packed my lightest summerwear. Once we arrived, we dropped our bags and headed out. It was ninety-plus degrees. It was not a dry heat.

I’m not saying it wasn’t a fun trip. We walked around every square, we got tickets to a food tour that actually offered more tastings than we could consume (all of it delicious). We did the obligatory ghost tour. I’d read Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil before the trip, so of course we had to see the Mercer-Williams House and hear about Jim Williams and his trials.

But for me, the revelation was the women of Savannah. I was reminded of Harper Lee’s description of Southern women–“by nightfall, they were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum,” and I want to call bullshit because these same women were gliding toward me down sidewalks in the heat of the August afternoon in layers of clothing. Layers. And there was not one drop of sweat to be found on any of them.

Meanwhile, within minutes, I looked like I had just run suicide drills with the Green Bay Packers, perspiration cascading from my hairline and sliding down my back in sheets.

On the last day of the trip, after emerging from the Mercer-Williams House and stepping into the inevitable gift shop—a curated collection of ephemera for women of a certain age—I thought I had finally hit on a solution to my overheating issue. I entertained, for just a moment, that maybe the roomy cotton caftans and oversized island print sundresses should become my new retirement vibe.

“Are you out of your mind?” my sister hissed, flicking the sleeve of the closest garment with unbridled disdain. She kept looking through the rack. “Well, I guess not everything is heinous.”

Heinous was not the look I was going for. Luckily, I was headed back to Wisconsin, where native Arizonans come to spend their summers. Here, I can keep my “hot mess” days to a minimum.

I come from a long line of folks who lived off the land, who planted gardens and raised animals and tended orchards and then canned and froze and butchered and smoked and “put up” in the summer and fall in order to survive during the frigid Wisconsin winters. Each generation taught the next, passing on ancestral knowledge and recipes. At five, I sat at the picnic table with my next-door-neighbor grandmother, shucking the peas she had picked earlier in the morning. Each of our childhood summers was spent planting, weeding, and picking our garden produce. If we got hungry mid-day, we knew that snacks weren’t found in the refrigerator or the kitchen cupboard. Instead, we ate currants or mulberries or apples or fresh rhubarb dipped in a bowl of sugar. In the winter, we found those same treats in jars in the cellar.

I didn’t always have this love of preservation. In fact, as I snapped green beans as a teen, I distinctly remember refusing to learn the intricacies of canning. “When I’m an adult, I’m going to have a job so I can buy food instead of doing all of this work!” I’d bragged. Then I married and had kids, and I realized that it wasn’t only necessity (and her mother-in-law’s expectations) that drove my city-raised mom to learn how to preserve our produce. It was the reassurance of knowing what she was putting on her children’s plates each day.

I hosted a small family reunion of sorts yesterday. I have four first cousins total, the progeny of my dad’s only brother. He got a late start on family, so I was married by the time he started having kids. I decided it was high time we spent some time together, so I gathered all eight of us and our children and their children for a picnic lunch. It was loud and joyful and musical, and it filled my soul.

As the oldest cousin, I’ve inherited the formal portraits of our ancestors who were the first to travel to Wisconsin back in 1862. I displayed them on one table, along with the 1862 Tower Enfield musket that my great-great grandfather used during his service in the Civil War. The gun was recently gifted back to the family by an antique collector friend of my father’s who had possession of the musket for the last fifty years or so. I shared the story of my great-great grandmother, who gave birth to my great-grandfather on the morning of April 21st, 1865 (while her husband was still off serving in the Union army) and then hitched the horse to the buggy in the afternoon and rode over to the neighbors to tell them to get their cows out of her crops. These are the things we’re choosing to preserve, to pass on.

Nowadays, it’s not necessity but nostalgia that drives me to keep canning. And there’s something meditative about the repetitive processes of preservation. I lose myself in the actions of picking and washing and mashing the fruit, mixing it with pectin and sugar, boiling and filling and sealing each jewel-colored jar. When I organize my canning cellar, I feel a tremendous sense of satisfaction that I find hard to replicate with other pursuits.

As I looked around my noisy garage yesterday at everyone who I claim as family, I realized that each of us preserves things in our own way. Preservation isn’t just about gardening and canning and putting up; it’s about the things we hold on to over the years. It’s the habits and traditions that form our lives. It’s what we hang on to for the future.

It’s only in the last five years that eagles have started visiting our pond. Initially a single bird would land heavily on the shore, curved talons gripping the water’s edge. He might stay for an hour, rarely more, before unfurling his tucked wings and taking to the air.

Growing up in the world of DDT and casual regard for carrion birds, I never witnessed a bald eagle in its natural habitat as a child. My glimpses of the magnificent bird were reserved for zoo visits (live) or tours of our state capitol building (stuffed).

An eagle is just a bird. Yet something happens in my heart whenever I glimpse that snowy head, those alabaster tailfeathers. As silly as it may be, my chest swells with patriotism. I love my country a little more.

“Patriotism” is a very loaded word these days. We currently reside in a country in which a small, loud portion of the population believes patriotism is only found in one party, one brand, one individual. They wrap themselves in the flag. In my little corner of a pretty red state, I don’t fly a flag or put out any political signs promoting my candidates of choice. I’ve been patriotic behind closed doors. Coward, I know.

I caught the flap of wings outside of our window not long ago. This time, the eagle barely had time to get his feet wet before a murder of crows (well, it was only three birds, so I guess it was an attempted murder) was upon him, swooping and diving around his head, driving him off. There were almost certainly nests nearby. They were relentless.

Last June, five eagles landed at our sea of tranquility, a rarely-seen convocation. Three juveniles with their adult minders spread themselves along the western shore. By dusk, all of our feathered friends had departed, save for one adolescent. He was stone still except for his head, which swiveled back and forth, tracking the thread of swallows sailing low over the pond, snacking on mosquitoes. There might be a lesson here. Maybe sometimes, patriotism looks like stillness. Maybe it’s acting as a witness as events unfold. Or maybe it’s time to become a crow.

Back in 2004, after nearly eight bumpy hours in a cramped plane, my high school travel group touched down at Heathrow, ready to experience southern England for the first time. This was the smallest group of the four I’d escorted across the pond—eight girls and two boys who were well-behaved and minimally whiny, plus one mom, Laurie, and me in England for ten days in August. The shortest of our group at just over five feet tall, I was like a hummingbird constantly circling my charges, warning them: “Watch your step!” “Watch your bags!” “Watch both ways when crossing the street—especially to the right!”

An hour after landing, we boarded our mini-mini bus, choosing to start our trip in the countryside taking in the sites of Oxford and Stratford, Warwick and Salisbury before finally heading into London. I heard excited “oohs” and “aahs” as Melony and Amy recognized the inspiration for the Great Hall at Hogwarts in the dining hall at Christ Church. Jousting at Warwick Castle and a parliament of owls at Mary Arden’s house were other highlights the first two days.

Day Three began with an early-morning trek around Stonehenge. Alex compared the ancient construction to Lego bricks as we studied the bumps in the lintels fitting into the depressions in the standing stones. I was amazed that the only thing standing between the sarsen stones and the modern riffraff (us!) was a little white plastic fence that even I could easily hop over.

Less than twenty minutes later, we arrived at one of my favorite historic British sites—Salisbury Cathedral. While a challenge, the climb up the 332 steps to reach the base of the tower rewards visitors with a spectacular view of the English countryside. The brochure warns: “A reasonable level of fitness is required and we advise anyone with any mobility issues or pre-existing health conditions to consider this before booking.” No problem!

I was definitely huffing and puffing as I followed my students up the winding stone and wooden staircases. As we reached the final landing, our guide reminded us to watch our heads as we ducked beneath the stone doorway to reach the balcony ringing the base of the tower. Even six-foot-something Peter listened carefully to our guide as he maneuvered himself onto the rampart. Spectacular Wiltshire views can be distracting, however. One by one, the kids circled the tower and headed back inside, dutifully ducking their heads. I was conversing with Laurie and taken by the scenery, so I didn’t remember to follow suit as I walked full tilt into the stone doorway, the stone head jamb catching me right across my forehead. There must have been a tremendous crack, as our guide gasped and asked me repeatedly if I was ok. I definitely stumbled but managed to stay upright, completely embarrassed that, as the shortest member of our group, I was the only one who forgot to duck.

Twenty years later, I’m standing outside of our house chatting with my nephew when a big black pickup turns into our driveway. I watch as the unfamiliar truck stops and a large bearded man emerges. It takes me two seconds before I respond, “Is this Peter?” Sure enough, my former student, now a father himself with his two young sons in the back seat, has stopped in to say hello. We chat for a couple of minutes, and I expect him to talk about the cars he remembers from the trip. As a gearhead even in his younger days, Peter was pretty nonchalant about the architecture and history of England. For him, the biggest thrill was the high-end European sports cars which could be found everywhere in London. But, of course, it doesn’t take long before he says, “I will never forget, on our England trip, that you were the only one to hit her head at the church.”

Sigh. Neither will I, Peter. Neither will I.

Once the two delivery guys had taken off our front door, navigated our old refrigerator out onto the front porch, brought in and placed our new unit, and replaced the front door on its hinges (I wasn’t sure of the tipping policy, so I sent them off with a bag of fresh cookies for each of them), I started the unpacking process. It took nearly an hour. You’d think this refrigerator was going to face an unfriendly sea with the way every hatch was battened down. Every shelf had, at minimum, four long pieces of tape protecting its corners, not to mention the styrofoam cushioning, the protective shelf bags, the clear wrap keeping the stainless steel doors from being injured during delivery.

It was while I was unwrapping the shelves that I realized the grave error of my ways. Why, oh why, had I been so engrossed with all of her bells and whistles? How, as a born and bred Wisconsinite, had I missed the most important feature? I searched through the shelves and drawers in vain.

There was no cheese drawer.

I completely missed this because, as anyone from the Midwest will tell you, there is ALWAYS a cheese drawer. And it’s not just for traditional cheeses. Tortillas, wraps, deli meats, cream cheese—they all make their way into the cheese drawer eventually. At waist height, the cheese drawer is perfectly situated for a midday snack or late night nosh. With its clear plastic front, you usually know what’s in the cheese drawer. It’s a nice shallow drawer, so it doesn’t take up too much real estate in your limited refrigerator space. How could I continue without a cheese drawer?

I actually Google “cheese drawer.” I learn there are “modular under-shelf pull-out drawers” which one can order in the absence of a dedicated cheese drawer. Avoiding the website of “he who shall not be named,” I see that OXO has a ten-inch undershelf refrigerator drawer for $34.99. Which will necessitate me purchasing something for $14.01 so I can qualify for free shipping. But I like OXO as a company, and I’ve purchased many of their kitchen do-dads before, so into the cart it goes, along with a container for my bread flour. Seconds later, my email pings with a message from OXO that my order is being processed and my cheese drawer is on its way. Crisis averted.

I’m not ready to talk about the missing flip-top butter compartment yet.