We have two mourning doves who are as close as I’ll ever get to having birds as pets. I want them to go away.

They’ve found the strawberry patch in the big garden and seem to have it to themselves. They linger among the plants, refusing to take flight even as we draw near, waiting as we unlatch the gate, and step inside. At the last possible moment, they flutter to a nearby tree, perturbed to be disturbed. What have they done to claim this bounty for themselves? Have they pushed out the little wrens and sparrows with their size? Or perhaps they are fiercer than they appear. I’ve always taken their smooth, tapered shape and somber colors as a sign of mild-manneredness, but maybe it’s a front for what is actually a businesslike, impersonal ruthlessness.

My child and I squat to search for strawberries that have not yet been nibbled. The doves sit in the lower branches of the locust trees and coo at us in their minor key.

The sound of them makes me uneasy, and I secretly wish for a hawk’s swift shadow—something that would scare them from their perch. Their call has no place here, in the bright light of the day, amongst the strawberry plants. I wish for cheery little chirps and fanciful trills. Where are the goldfinches? The hawk does not come and the mourning doves don’t budge, and I feel my unease grow. I want to leave, but my child is immersed in his search. He is six years old.

I am six years old, lying in the tall metal bed in the big white house that was, for a time, my childhood home, listening to the chant of a whippoorwill, waiting for the nightmare to come.

The nightmare is a recurring one. In it, I look down from the window beside my bed into our backyard. In place of my mother’s garden and the patchy lawn and the sandbox, there’s an elevated walkway, like a narrow version of a boardwalk at the beach. It turns and turns again in right angles with no beginning and no end. Below, on the grass, hungry crocodiles stalk about. Someone I love—I can’t quite tell who—is walking along the path, unaware of what I can see and what I know—that the crocodiles are following them, that the person will stumble and fall, and that there’s not a thing I can do to stop it. In the dream, I stare out of the window, rigid with fear, but I can’t move or speak. I can’t bang on the window or call for help. I’m utterly alone.

My parents have gone to great lengths to decorate my room. My brothers share a room next door, bunk beds with blue coverlets. But I’m the only girl at this time, and my room is special, adorned with Victorian wallpaper and matching white wooden furniture and a closet full of neatly organized clothes. Even though I’m very young, I know that my parents are proud of this house, proud that they’ve been able to create this perfect room for their precious girl. They don’t understand why I cry at night. They think I don’t like my room. They try to make it more beautiful, more comfortable. They buy me a special stuffed unicorn that, when I twist a metal disk on the back, plays a melancholy tune that only makes everything scarier.

I try my hardest not to fall asleep at night. I don’t want the nightmares to come, but more than that, I don’t want to make my parents sad with my tears. I hear the whippoorwill calling from the forest behind our backyard. The sound makes me shiver. I pass seconds, minutes in between calls, torn between wanting the birds to stop and wanting them to sing. If I can hear the whippoorwill, that means I’m still awake.

My son lays his hand on my arm. “Listen,” he says. “The birds. They say, ‘Straw-berries! Mmmm! Mmm! Mmm!” He smiles up at me, his dimples, his bright blue eyes. His own future memory snaps into focus: the sound of a mourning dove, the warm strawberries in his palm, the mighty grove of locust trees dipping in the breeze, his mother’s warm hand brushing his hair from his eyes.

Lately I have felt increasingly like a funhouse of recollections, an anthropologist dizzied by my own memories. But the mourning dove calls again, and this time I hear it: Mmm! Mmm! Mmm! and I laugh, too. The tunnel that I have traversed, the one that rocketed me between the whippoorwill and the dove, collapses. It has been replaced: mourning dove, ripe strawberries, strands of hair like golden filament beneath my fingertips. Together, we search for more.

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I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve been told that I should be an influencer.

Not because I’m particularly interesting or special or good-looking, but because I live on a farm and, to put it bluntly, people love that shit.

I’ll admit, I’ve thought about giving it a go. If people paid to watch me do chores that I already have to do, I could use that money to post in this Substack more than once in a blue moon. Or to finally finish my nearly complete novel. Or buy new film for my camera. I’ve even gone so far as to try it—I made a video of me breaking the ice in a water trough this winter. But when I played back the footage, what appeared on my tiny screen was a lumpily dressed woman with a bad attitude aggressively stabbing something out of frame for five straight minutes. I sent it to my friend Suleika for feedback. “It’s giving Fargo,” she said.

Another time I made a video of myself cleaning stalls. Upon review, it appeared to be a pair of legs unartfully crisscrossing a manure-strewn stall, dust motes swirling thickly in front of the camera lens like a piece of faceless, nameless and utterly uninteresting performance art.

The majority of the things I do on my farm are not pretty or even interesting. It’s just grunt work, done in the scraps of the day around my actual job, most often in a strange outfit that is a combination of my unwashed workwear and whatever nice top I put on for Zoom calls earlier in the day.

Tonight is a great example. I’ve stared at my computer from 8 am until 5:30 pm, and now I’ve dragged my carcass down to the lower field to remove dead burdock. By hand. With a screen-induced headache.

Should I have done this in the fall? Yes. Is there a better way to do this? Probably. Did I ruin my favorite pair of gloves? Looks likely. Hours of pulling these things from the ground, piling them in the back of the mule (whose tire is going to fall off any minute, by the way), driving them to a distant location that is inaccessible by any grazing animals, and dumping them. Why? Because every time I turn the horses out, they come back with tails and forelocks thickly matted with burdock, which means I spend the time I could be using to film myself attractively and compellingly riding them for my nonexistent “fans” cursing and scraping bendy little needles out of yards of horsehair.

I’m itchy, the light is bruising and here comes my 9-year-old, sprinting down from the house, fresh from a bath, in his pajamas to “help me”. I love him, but I banish him to the mule and add “tick check before bed” to my list of items I must complete before the day is done.

The thing is, I don’t begrudge these tasks. I find pleasure in hard work, even if the work is very annoying (this being tops). But I do begrudge the persistent voice in my head that says, You should be documenting this. You should be posting this. If you were smart, you’d use this to your advantage. It spoils everything, that voice. Makes me live outside of myself, to see my life as a series of potential videos, of uncaptured likes and shares and comments.

I do plenty of beautiful things on the farm. I bake sourdough. I grow a gorgeous, tidy garden. I sometimes go out to harvest wildflowers while wearing a beat-up sun hat and a vintage plaid dress with huge hip pockets. But those beautiful things are for me and me alone. No phones allowed.

I still think about becoming an influencer. I even told my younger sister this week that she should be record herself and posting it online somewhere. She’s currently weaving a willow garden fence out of trees she’s cutting down by hand and dragging out of the forest one at a time. She looked at me and sighed. “I don’t know how to do that,” she said. Then she got back to work.

So I guess I will too. And if I’m wrong, and there are people out there who would like to pay for documentation of me doing the ugliest, most annoying and banal chores by all means, let me know. We have a sheep with an abscess that needs cleaning, if that appeals? I could be an influencer yet.

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It wasn’t a good idea, and I knew it. The horses hadn’t been ridden all winter—they were sure to be fresh, a little skittish. But for the last nine years, I have wished for this exact moment: for my son to stand in the barn aisle and beg me to ride. “Please,” he said.

I am a walking risk calculator. I’d like to blame motherhood, but in truth, I have always been this way. As a kid, my sister and I would pause at the edge of a wide-open field on our horses. “Want to race?” she’d say. No, I would think, looking across the field and imagining all of the invisible holes my horse could step in, the potential rabbits, crouched behind a clump of grass that could dart away and scare my horse sideways. But her fearlessness and my big-sister pride meant I always said, “Yes!” and took off, my heart in my throat for each galloped step, counting down until we were safely on the other side.

I am a good rider, a trainer’s kid who grew up riding the worst ponies, the wildest horses. I was the captain of my college equestrian team, and I have owned and trained my own horses for a decade. It is possibly the one thing in life I do the most intuitively. I trust Lucy, our big Percheron cross who is so steady, so plodding, that she couldn’t buck, bolt or crowhop even if she wanted to (and she never wants to). I knew that, relatively speaking, this was a safe scenario.

And yet, not five months ago my six-year-old skied into a tree and smashed his little, beautiful face into a swollen mask. He recovered beautifully, but the hours when I didn’t know if he had a brain injury, the sight of him sitting in the hospital bed—that is all in my marrow now. And, practically speaking, it has really fucked with my risk calculations.

But even as I felt the fear, I felt an equally strong urge not to be controlled by the fear. So I let my son put on his helmet and clamber up behind me, still in his pajamas. As we rode across the fields, I kept reminding—hold on to me tightly now. If something jumps out, she’s going to jump sideways, and you’ll have nothing to keep you on but me. I tried to sound serious without being scary. He wrapped his little hands around my waist each time, but as we rode, as the birds sang in the trees and the soft, new grass bent underfoot, his hands would relax, and I would remind him. Relax and remind. After a while, I started to relax, too.

Then, as we rounded the final bend to the barn, we flushed two mallards out of a shallow pond formed by recent rain. They exploded from their hideaway with a great flapping of wings and shouting of insults. Lucy tucked her butt and skittered sideways ten feet. Time slowed down. I did all of the things I knew to do, things that had been hard-coded into me since I was little. Close your leg, hold the reins, sink into the saddle. Stay calm. I was aware of my son behind me, of his body moving seamlessly with the horse, of him being centered and connected. I felt a flicker of admiration. Then it was over, no more than a second gone, the ducks a protesting speck in the sky, Lucy blowing hard through her nostrils.

I reached back with one hand to pat his leg. “You ok, bud?” He was quiet for a moment. I waited for him to ask to get off, waited for tears. He pressed his face against my back and squeezed me tightly around the middle.

I felt him smile against my spine.

“I kind of liked it,” he said. “Can you make her do it again?”

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If you’re very lucky, you will experience a series of circumstances in your life that will mean you end up in a high school gymnasium on a Wednesday night in March while a storm rages outside, cheering for a bare-chested man in glittery spandex leggings who threads a bow and arrow between his toes, stands on his hands on two protrusions welded into a steel table, bends his spine in half, draws the bow and fires an arrow into the heart of a white balloon on a pillowed plinth. POP!

If you are very lucky you will live in a town small enough and sleepy enough that the prospect of a traveling circus troupe will fill the gym with your friends and friends of friends and your kids and their friends and their siblings and their siblings’ friends, an intricate and radiating web in which no one of you is separated from the other by more than two degrees of friendship.

This is my fourth year attending Billy Martin’s Cole All-Star Circus. It’s a show stuck in time, an evening of low production value and stock-standard circus tricks: a juggler, a unicyclist, a woman who disappears into a fabric tunnel and emerges in a new outfit not one or five or ten times but twenty times. It is silly and strange and exceedingly easy to poke fun at: the over-the-top costumes and the stage makeup, the worn set and fraying props.

We are, after all, living in a world of Cirque du Soleil documentaries and Red Bull X-Games and a nearly constant stream of seemingly everyday people doing extraordinary things that defy body mechanics and gravity and technology. We accept, up front, that nothing is impossible. That someone somewhere in Dubai will figure out how to hang glide off the top of the Burj Khalifa. That we can skim along a city block alongside a beautiful rollerblader who dodges obstacles in perfect sync with the latest pop hit.

At the small-town traveling circus, you get what is just barely impossible. Furthermore, there is virtually no separation between the audience and the performers. They are there, in all of their humanness, putting on a show of less than epic proportions to a gymnasium that is more than halfway full of adults who have most likely recently seen someone ride a 100-foot wave off the coast of Portugal, up close, through the crystal-clear eye of a drone. There is a definite air of skeptical bemusement. But the kids? They sit in a vibrating knot in the middle of the polished floor, chattering and wiggling. The atmosphere in the gym is thick with this combo—a low-pressure system and a high-pressure system, adulthood and childhood, tangled up together.

By the end of the first act—a man with clown paint on his face is balancing on a 20-foot-tall unicycle—it has changed. Everyone is excited now. The audience is, once more, able to be awed by only slightly extraordinary. A man in a handstand, a woman who can juggle five iridescent bowling pins at once, a couple who hang from aerial silks, twisted into an ecstatic embrace. The crowd is laughing, kids shrieking in delight as our neighbor and friend is pulled from the audience, blindfolded, and made to hold a balloon in his mouth while a performer snaps a whip nearby. The music is too loud, the lights are flashing too rapidly, and the performers have been on the road too long, for too many years, and yet it still works. We find that the awe—the kind that asks for so little—is still within us.

The show is over too soon. Billy Martin, who just last year strutted around the stage, magnificent in his satin suit and platinum hair, is ringmaster in voice only now. He calls out the performers from his seat in the shadows, one by one, and they pause in their hurried packing up and step into the lights. The crowd cheers. The show is over, but Billy is still talking in his tent revivalist voice, his racetrack announcer baritone, a voice that pins you in place, no matter how far you’ve overshot bedtime on a school night.

“Thank you for coming,” he says. The Dua Lipa song blasting in the background reaches a triumphant crescendo. “And may God bless you and hold you in the palm of his hand.”

If you, like me, are sentimental enough, if you are constantly searching for signs that this world—your world—is a good place to be, this will make you cry. You will become aware of the two energies again. The kids, excited, buzzing, ready to go. The adults, hushed, suddenly conscious of the frailty of this moment. Our kids will never be this age again. Nor will we. The second we step out of this gymnasium, this moment will be gone, and we will be hurtled back into the slipstream of parenthood. And Billy—will we ever see him again? And, if not, will we ever see the traveling circus again? “And one more thing,” he says, calling me back from the brink. “Treat each other with kindness. Thank you, and Good night.”

The circus lights fade out, and for a split second, it is perfectly dark and quiet.

The gymnasium lights snap on. My five-year-old tugs on my hand. I follow him into the wild, windy night.

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This may be the last truly cold day my husband said to me in the driveway. He was heading off to drop the kids at school. I was making my way down to the barn to do chores. 1 degree Fahrenheit. We said goodbye. They drove away in a glittering vapor cloud.

The last cold day.

The last day I will have to pause, mid-chores, to retract my gloved fingers and curl them into my palm to regain feeling. The last day my snot will crystallize inside my nose, like a time-lapse video of a caterpillar freezing in its cocoon. The last day my exhales will drift up and coat my eyelashes in ice mascara. The last day the air will invisibly needle my face, flushing my skin bright red, and I’ll tell myself it feels good, like a spa treatment.

The last day the troughs will be frozen solid, the hooves packed with snow, the whiskers drooping with microscopic ice ornaments. The last day I’ll have to have to bend down and huff hot breath on a bucket latch to get it to come free, have to carry bags of shavings through two feet of snow from the roadside, one at at time, because the tractor won’t run, have to carry a 50-lb dog with cold paws over my shoulder, uphill, heart rate 170.

The last cold day.

If this is the last cold day, it means winter has passed, and I have not written a single word.

There are many good reasons (a terrible accident, an exciting and consuming period of work, political despair) and many bad (a literary rejection, an insistent phone, a bad attitude). Regardless, every time I tried to write (which wasn’t often, I’ll admit), there was nothing there. A deadness, a flatness, a soundproofed room painted in matte paint. Nothing gleamed within.

If it is the last cold day, that means a thaw is coming. The snow will melt and the dog turds will reveal themselves in the yard and the ground will turn nearly liquid beneath my feet and the birds will begin singing and the peepers will begin crying and my kids will run barefoot in the mud well before it’s warm enough and come in with aching toes.

If this is the last cold day (which it won’t be—there’s always a chance for snow and frost in this place), then let it be the last cold day. Let it be the end of a hibernation, a hiding, a diminishing. Let the ground heave, the ice break, the branches stretch for the sun once more.

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You can move anything if you can get your center of gravity right. My dad taught me that. I’ve watched him move impossible things—fridges and couches and round bales as big as a car. He’s right, and it’s true, but that’s only part of it. It’s also true that you have to possess a certain kind of belief. A belief in the predetermined, different from being a person who is determined. A person who is determined might say, “I will move this couch by myself no matter what.” A person who believes in the predetermined might say, “This couch must move, and therefore, I will do it.”

I inherited or learned this way of being. While in labor with my first child, the midwives said, over and over, “You can do this! It will be so worth it!” At some point, I snarled, “I don’t have a choice, do I?” They were either offended or unfazed—I was in no shape to care. I meant what I said, though. I didn’t have a choice. But it was also a rallying cry to myself. It must be done, and so I will do it. There’s no way out but through.

Lately, many of the personality traits that I was brought up to believe were inherently good are being called into question. Am I dogged or am I stubborn? Am I a self-starter, or am I an egomaniac? Am I steadfast, or am I a martyr? The internet is trying to convince me of this and that, therapy is casting everything in a new light. I watch the videos. I nod in therapy. But I feel myself resisting. My knees lock beneath the table. My jaw sets itself without me realizing it.

You’re just like your father, I’ve heard more than once, mostly in exasperation. I am just like my father. I will work myself to the bone. I will shoulder whatever needs to be shouldered, and not necessarily cheerfully. But I’m also just like the father who wears sunglasses at children’s events to hide my tears. I’m just like the father who came straight over after an exhausting workday at the scrap metal yard to walk my screaming newborn up and down the stairs—the only thing that made him quiet. I’m just like the father who can lift, move, carry more than should be possible. I am just like the father who always finds a way to make it work, who gives all of himself even when he probably shouldn’t.

A martyr, you might call him. Us. I can see that there are better ways to be. Healthier ways. But I love my dad. I have been wholly, singularly loved by him. And so I think I’ll keep on. Being like him, that is. And if, at the end of the day, my loved ones feel wholly, singularly loved, well, they can call me whatever they want.

I’ve changed my mind about spring.

Where I live, people are either winter people, or summer people, or fall people, but no one is a spring person. Why would you be?

Spring means mud and snow and rain and mud and snow and rain in a maddening combination. The robins huddle near their nests in the fields, feathers fluffed, backs turned to the wind. The same wind buffets red-winged blackbirds who cling to fence posts, too busy trying to stay warm to sing their songs. Even the daffodils look forlorn when they finally come up, set as they are against all the brown.

I feel like those robins during spring. I hunker down. I try to stay busy with inside chores. But this week, I forced myself to stay out in the damp, to linger long enough in the barn to run a shedding comb over my horse, Lucy. She didn’t appear to be shedding, and yet the hair came away in staggering amounts—with just a few swipes of a toothed metal tool, I had enough hair to fill a pillowcase. She turned to me in appreciation, as she does, pressing her nose into my palm.

As she huffed her breath into my hand, I wondered how it felt to be in her body during spring. Did she feel the exact moment when her winter hair released from the follicles? Does she know that that feeling means she’s made it through the winter? All of the animals on our farm have been acting differently—at times, they are unusually playful and rambunctious. Other times, they are contemplative, their faces turned to the wind, ears focused on something far-off that only they can perceive.

Spring, to me, is just a continuation of winter. The same snow, the same thick gloves, the same heavy boots. I don’t perceive that anything has changed. And yet. Beneath the snow, a crocus blooms, and I don’t notice. Within the maple trees, the sap runs, and I don’t see. In our top field, a patch of snow has most likely melted, and dozens of deer are no doubt gathered there to furiously nibble the first grass they’ve seen in months, but they would scatter if I tried to look. While I am enduring, spring is seeking, searching, marching forward.

When the first rain of the year arrives, it is startling in its sonic intensity, raindrops on the roof so distracting that even the kids get quiet and listen. Oh, they say. I forgot about rain. I think, Oh. Here comes the mud.

The mud is annoying and exhausting. Every step is accompanied by a backward slide. But then there’s the moment when the kids pull off their shoes and socks and step onto the bare ground in their bare feet. The mud is icy between their toes, which will grow numb within minutes, but they won’t complain. They shriek with delight, little animals finally released from the layers of wool, down, and rubber. I stand on the porch and watch them, my feet safely encased in my shoes. I notice how the breeze blows across my bare arms and makes the tiny hairs there bend and sway. It tingles, itches. I consider grabbing a sweater but I don’t. I let myself feel it.

It’s a misery, spring. It’s wet and uncomfortable and glum. But it’s also an awakening of the most furtive sort. It’s a wonder.

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1. One summer, I was a little kid, running free on the beach, and the next, I was a body in a bathing suit. I’ve remained in this state ever since.

2. This week, whenever possible, my child tapped my belly or jiggled my resting thigh with his little hands. “You’re so juicy,” he said, over and over. “I love it.” The irony is not lost on me. I try to let this message soak in—that the things I don’t like about myself are the things he loves—but my brain is like an old garden bed. The first few inches are soft and permeable, but underneath, everything is so compressed that this lesson pools on the surface of my sense of self.

3. To watch my Aquarius son in the water is to feel pure, acute joy. He lolls in it. He luxuriates in it. He leaps into it again and again, with his arms spread as wide as he can, as if he could wrap the entire ocean in his embrace.

4. The first time I fainted, I was on the beach. I was 13. I stood up from my beach towel and blacked out. First, pieces of my vision turned black, sunspots over technicolor. Then came unbearable nausea that I had no choice but to endure, cresting within me like a wave. And then the swift drop into total darkness. The first thing that came back was sound—the concerned voices of people wondering what to do with me. This is also the moment when I wished I didn’t have to come back. That I could slide back into the comfortable darkness for a while longer.

5. In an undergraduate creative writing class, a fellow classmate told our professor that the sight and feeling of sand made her vomit. He looked at her with delight. “So the beach for you is…” he said.
   “A nightmare,” she finished. He grinned.
   I felt acute jealousy. I worried, not for the first or last time, that I was too normal to be a writer.

6. By sheer luck I once lived steps from the ocean. Every day, multiple times a day, I could walk down a flight of stairs and step into the cold, clear Pacific. I was homesick and lonely and the water felt like a cure. But at night the sound of the waves on the rock was unceasing, a white noise machine I could never turn off, not even by closing the windows. Now I live far from the ocean, in a nighttime silence so complete that you can hear only the quiet ringing of your own ears.

7. The Internet feeds me endless videos about “hacks” for braving the beach with kids. Baby powder, to remove sand. A special, soft makeup brush for applying sunscreen. An inflatable kiddie pool, filled with water bailed from the ocean. I used to save them, used to diligently record notes on my phone. I always want to do everything correctly. But now I understand that the actual correct way is to doing nothing special at all. Let them feel the stickiness of the sunscreen and accept it. Let their feet be sandy on the car ride home. They will survive. The idea is to feel the difficult parts—the discomfort and inconvenience—and love it all the same.

8. My little one is learning to love the beach, slowly. This week, for the first time, I coaxed him onto a boogie board and tugged him along behind me in sand coated with the barest slick of water. “Faster, mama,” he cried, this child who would usually rather not go too fast, too high, too far. I walked faster. I could feel the people on the beach watching me. “Faster, mama!” he cried again, and I started to jog. The faster I ran, the louder he laughed—the effervescent, uncontrolled laughter of someone who is experiencing something truly exhilarating for the first time. I ran faster still. The sand gave way underfoot in just the way I remembered. My legs pumped in just the way they used to. The hardened soil of my psyche loosened. I let myself run as fast as I could. I let the rest go.

In June 2020, I bought a doll kit. I had a 3-year-old and a 5-month-old, and we were just a few months into the COVID-19 pandemic. We were spending 100% of our time at home, with the exception of my husband who left only once a month to buy as many groceries as he could. My baby had officially been in isolation for most of his life.

I saw other people making the doll online and it was so adorable that I decided this was just the thing to do during these heartsick times. I messaged a best friend who also had two small children and suggested that we could buy these kits and sit on either end of my porch and make them, together. Maybe it could even become a regular thing—making little dolls that our children would tuck into their fists and treat as friends in lieu of their real human friends.

When the time came, we sat on the porch, unpacked the kits, and proceeded to make no progress at all. Life at that moment was too strange and too overwhelming to allow us to do much of anything but hungrily, greedily, talk to each other. The fabric sat in our laps, the needles pinched, unthreaded, between our fingers. After she left, I went into the house and made two legs before tucking the bits of fabric back into the box and going upstairs to hold my baby. I lost track of the doll kit, as I lost track of so much during that time.

My home is full of unfinished projects. Sections of window trim left unpainted, framed pictures propped up against walls. There are sewing projects piled in a basket, books on the shelf with a bookmark halfway through them. There are stories and novels waiting in journals, starred in my computer. I have long since released myself from feeling any guilt about these projects, but they register nonetheless. What does it say about me, I wonder, that I have left so much unfinished?

Last week, when I opened my closet looking for something that was, no doubt, obscured by a pile of unfinished projects, I saw the doll kit right there, on the floor. I looked at it. I felt sad. My children, now 5 and 8, were interested in black holes and mythological beasts, the allure of a tiny doll long since gone. I shut the door and tried to forget.

But a few days later, alone in the house for 48 hours, I went back and retrieved the box. It took me many, many hours to finish her, which meant I had many, many hours to chastise myself, to quit, and to decide to keep going over and over again.

This is taking too long. This is a waste of your time. There are a hundred other, more important things you could be doing. You could be cleaning out the pantry, washing the windows, organizing your sweaters so they’ll fit in your drawers. You could be reading a book. You could be writing your novel. You could be sleeping.

But something in me rose up against every argument. The fact that there were a hundred more pressing things was exactly why I should keep on. The fact that this doll was the least important project in the world was why I couldn’t give up. I realized that these personal projects—making a doll, or sewing a quilted vest or needle punching a handbag—are so much more than the objects they’ll result in. They’re me, reaching for hope. A hope for a bit of time, a little solitude, a life with enough ease that I can do things just because I want to and not because I have to.

The project, I have always thought, will make the space necessary for me to do the things I wish to do, to be the person I wish to be. But now I see that the opposite has to be true. I have to make the space. I have to decide that I can choose what is a good use of my time and what is not.

I finished the doll, and as I did, I had the sensation of an overburdened scale, weighted too heavily in one direction, lifting ever-so-slightly, as if the smallest of weights had been removed. Right then I declared 2025 The Year of Unfinished Things. I’ve been thinking about it all the time, telling everyone I know. It’s not the year of finishing things—I know enough to know that this kind of pressure to accomplish is a recipe for disaster. But it is the year of unfinished things. The year that I take stock of all that lies waiting and decide to pay attention, to make progress, to consider that I am a person who finishes things. In my own way, in my own time.

for Kallie ❤️

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For seven years we’ve climbed into the truck on the Sunday after Thanksgiving and driven across the valley to Salo’s to cut our Christmas tree. The truck has changed, the children have increased in number and grown larger, but Salo’s, beloved tiny Salo’s, with no internet presence and no phone number, has been open.

There’s nothing that obviously special about Salo’s. There are no festive lights or decorations, no hot chocolate, and certainly no wagon rides or Christmas music. There’s just a row of ancient saws hanging on a peg board, a handwritten sign, and either the husband or wife stepping out of their little wooden house to greet you. To find the trees you have to make a steep climb to the top of a hill where they all stand atop strangely long, bare trunks, like flamingos perched on a single delicate leg. When choosing a tree, it’s necessary to take many steps back, crane your neck upward, and use your imagination. It is one of a handful of activities we do each year (diving into the swimming hole on a hot summer day, picking wild blackberries on the ridge, stacking split firewood in the shed) that feel like a direct line to our relatives, going back for generations. It’s a deeply unmanufactured experience.

But this year we packed into the truck, drove across the valley and up the hill to see a sign that said CLOSED FOR THE SEASON.

We knew this was coming, hypothetically. The owners, older with adult kids living in California, had been warning us for years that they were in the process of closing. They weren’t planting any new trees, they said. They’d stay open until they sold what they had, and then it would be over. But last year there were still plenty of trees. I didn’t think it’d happen so soon. As my husband said in the quiet truck, each of us silent in our disappointment, “Salo’s was the only thing close to us.”

It’s true. We live close to nothing—not a gas station, not a Dollar General, not a restaurant, not a hardware store. Salo’s was the closest thing, the one thing that was convenient. You don’t realize until you’ve lived rurally how good it can feel when a task feels convenient. We drove the ten minutes back to the house, trying to think of what to do. Where else was there to go? We couldn’t think of a single place, and a Google search revealed nothing within a 45-minute radius. It was the afternoon. By the time we got anywhere the light would be gone.

Surely, we said to one another, we can find a little tree on our own land. We have 210 acres after all, and most of it is wooded. Never mind that it was 20 degrees, and there were twelve inches of snow on the ground. This would work, and maybe even be better!

I did a mental scan of the evergreen trees on our property. There were the two pine groves, about an acre each, planted on the hillside by my grandfather sixty years ago, the result of a government-funded incentive program. They grow in rows, perfectly straight, eighty feet tall, with no branches and no seedlings. That wasn’t going to work. We have dense, sacred groves of wild hemlocks (we call one spot in the center of the hillside grove “The Cathedral”), but they are so big and grow so densely that absolutely nothing survives on the floor beneath them except for the occasional fungi sprouting on a rotting log. We considered, for a few minutes, the one little fir tree below the barn, near the creek. It stands all alone, growing only marginally larger over the years, its roots perpetually soggy from seasonal floods. We went so far as to grab the saw and begin trudging toward the flats where it stood, but in the end, we couldn’t do it. I’d miss looking out and seeing its lone shape, which, in the right light from the distance of the house, often looks like a person gazing back at you.

Unflagging in our quest, we hiked up the hillside under the golden end-of-day sun, the snow blowing like sand from our footsteps, and searched, fruitlessly, for some tree we’d never seen before. Very quickly the boys lost interest—H hiking down to the edge of the pond to break ice, R throwing snowballs at his dad, who darted between tree trunks. I set out by myself, walking in wider and wider circles, scanning for trees. There was nothing. I’m a little bit embarrassed to admit I sat down on a fallen tree in four-inch-deep snow and felt like crying.

I love the Sunday-after-Thanksgiving-Christmas-tree tradition, although, in all honesty, it has often been fraught. Inevitably, on that day, something had always gone wrong and spoiled everyone’s mood—my husband and I would have a petty fight and wouldn’t be speaking to each other, or we’d all be tired from a long trip to Virginia to see family, or everyone would be sour because it was 40 degrees and raining, or because one kid skipped a nap and the other was hungry. The one exception was 2020. It felt momentous to be able to go somewhere—anywhere—as a family. To be in “public”. It was an incredibly special outing (one of the only ones I did with R in his first two years of life!) in a time when nothing felt special, just scary.

I sat on my log and threw a silent, invisible, little fit. Even if it was sometimes miserable, I still wanted it! I didn’t want to be traipsing around my own farm, looking for trees that didn’t exist. I wanted to be at Salo’s. I wanted to be doing the thing we’d always done. I wanted to wrangle this unwieldy, overwhelming, complex thing we call life into a little box that made things seem simple, if even for a few hours. You go to Salo’s, you cut down the tree, you decorate the tree. Nothing more, nothing less. Please, I said to the forest around me, give me this one thing.

We went to sleep in a treeless house. The next morning, I woke up full of determination. I Googled “How to open a Christmas tree farm.” A very helpful guide from Cornell Cooperative Extension popped up. I read the whole thing from top to bottom before I even took my first sip of tea. It’s an incredible undertaking. There’s the upfront cost, the land preparation, the planting, the maintenance, and then, of course, the selling of the trees, assuming they’re not taken by weeds or pests or blight or inclement weather. Assuming they even grew in the first place. And on top of that, if we planted trees this spring the first one wouldn’t be ready for harvest until my 7-year-old was a 17-year-old, probably leaving to go to college. I put down my phone. I was still sad, but I no longer felt angry. I don’t blame Salo’s. It’s a miracle they ever existed at all.

My kids, for their part, aren’t upset. More than anything, they want a glimmering tree to lie beneath on these snowy mornings—how we get it doesn’t matter so much to them. They trust that we’ll figure it out. And they’re right. We will. We always do.

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I would like to tell you that, when the moth dropped into the beam of my headlight, paused, and headed straight for my face, I stayed calm. I’d like to tell you that I gently removed my headlamp, held it down by my waist, and drew the moth toward me so that I could observe it—the size of it, the blurry beating of its wings. I’d like to tell you that I was brave. But that’s not what happened at all.

One thing that no one tells you about becoming a parent is how brave you’ll have to be. You will have to be brave about little things like cockroaches and dead mice and cuts that bleed. And you will have to be brave about big things, like turbulence over the Pacific so intense that everyone on the plane shrieks with every bump. You’ll have to look into your children’s huge eyes and say, “Weeee!” when, really, you want to claw your way out of this metal tube, unfurl your gargantuan wings, clutch your children to your chest, and fly them back to dry land. You’ll have to be brave when you drop them off at school after another school shooting, when you wish them a wonderful day and tell them how much you love them, all the while your heart is less a fish flopping in your chest than a fish gasping for air, expanding to the point of explosion, and contracting again into a painful knot. You will not be the one who teaches them to be afraid. The world will do that for you.

I’ve learned to love moths. I do not fear them. But when the hummingbird moth dropped into the beam of my headlamp on my walk back from the barn several weeks ago, I didn’t have time to remember what magical creatures they are. When it began moving toward me like it was on a high-speed retractable leash attached to my face, I didn’t have a chance to put on my curiosity hat. Instead, I screamed. I SCREAMED as loud as I could ever remember screaming. I ripped the headlamp from my head and flung it as far as I could and then I fell to the ground, onto my knees and covered my head with my hands. I stayed crouched there, on the dampening grass, my two dogs sniffing my hair, my ears, my armpits. I could hear only Cinder’s tail furiously wagging, womp womp womp, but not the lawnmower hum of the moth’s wings. I sat up on the mowed footpath. Around me, the grass was deep and dark, grown long in this unusually warm autumn season. Somewhere out there was my headlamp.

Sometimes, when you pretend to be brave about something for long enough, you actually become braver. I can now see a cockroach cross the sidewalk and not jump out of my skin. I can get information from a stranger, dress a wound, and talk about the future death of my animals without crying. But sometimes my bravery is just a veneer. Sometimes it doesn’t go deeper than that.

After I found my headlamp in a goldenrod thicket, I laughed thinking about my kids witnessing that encounter. They would’ve been so confused—why was their mother, who was always stopping them to observe this moth and that beetle—on the ground in a fetal position? I chided myself. You are so silly.

But wait. It’s not silly to be scared. It’s not a small thing to feel your feelings without having to temper them or shape them for anyone else. It’s a scream in the night; it’s a return to yourself. Tomorrow, I’ll be brave again.

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I picked this summer’s holiday out of a novel. I didn’t pick it because it sounded particularly beautiful, or interesting. I picked it because the narrator was changed there. She experienced a “sense of well-being that I had never known before.” I wanted to experience a sense of well-being that I had never known before, and so we went.

The narrator is Elena from Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, which, for me, is a foundational text. In the months leading up to the trip, when the subject of my summer travel came up, I found that people split into two camps: those who have never read My Brilliant Friend and therefore responded to my largely unknown (by Americans and Australians) destination with vague puzzlement, and those who had read My Brilliant Friend and immediately knew where I was going and why I was drawn there.

My husband and I did virtually no research or preparation for the trip, which was unlike us. Maybe because we were busy, or tired, but we were both feeling deeply unambitious. We agreed that our only goals were to swim in the sea and be with our kids.

And that’s what we did. The same routine every day—wake mid-morning, feed ourselves and the kids cornetti, put on swimsuits, and walk to the beach. There we swam, laid beneath frondy umbrellas, had lunch in an echoing cafeteria with freshly shaved ham and bowls of melon, then back into the water until the sun began to descend in earnest. Gelato on the walk home. Home, where we showered off the salt, visible on our skin. The boys watched Looney Tunes in Italian on the old TV for an hour before we set out for a late dinner by the sea.

We did this again and again, day after day, the four of us sinking into the very kind of atmospheric happiness Ferrante wrote about. Each day was fully known upon waking. Despite our kids being young, and usually very eager for stimulus, they, too, wished to change nothing. They wanted to sit in the same beach chairs, eat the same food, climb on the same rocks.

The one threat to the peace was “seal rock.” Far out in the bay, where the boats docked, was a bright white rock that resembled a seal on its stomach, with its nose lifted. On our very first day, my 7-year-old watched a group of adults swim what seemed like miles out to it and then clamber over its surface. He told me he wanted to do it. Absolutely not, I said.

But the next day he studied more groups of people who successfully completed the journey—most on paddleboards, but some others laughing and splashing their way there in large groups. He observed that he was a better swimmer than the adults who were making the journey. He told me he knew he could do it. Absolutely not, I said.

He was a better swimmer than those parties. He is a better swimmer than me, a better swimmer than most adults I know. He first taught himself to swim in the Mediterranean two summers before, after we cajoled him into putting on a snorkel mask and looking beneath the surface. From that moment, he has been in the water every possible second. He was the youngest member of our town’s swim team last year, and once described the seemingly endless laps he swims as “not hard, just relaxing.”

But still, the answer was no. So he, clever boy, got my husband alone and asked him instead. Sure, my husband said, I’ll go with you. Veto, I said. My husband reasonably suggested that if our son got tired, he could hitch a ride on his back. What if you have a brain aneurysm? I asked, but even I knew this was too far. My husband is a very strong swimmer, and I knew he could easily tow our son. Tomorrow morning, we agreed.

My son, who at times seems so big and other times so small, ate double his usual amount at breakfast, “for strength.” I could count his vertebrae as he sat eating his yogurt, but I could also see the muscles in his shoulders and his arms. I could see the physical strength he contained, the strength that he’s been building on since he started walking and hanging and climbing at 11 months old. What I didn’t know, and couldn’t know, was whether he was strong enough inside. What if he got scared out there? What if he panicked? What if he failed and, in doing so, never took a risk again?

Reader, he swam to seal rock.

There’s a wild black raspberry bush that grows directly on our fence line, half in the safety of our yard and half on the vulnerable edge of the road, where the town’s great winged mowers can—and do—reach at least twice a summer. It first started growing here four years ago, seemingly springing from thin air. In reality, it has probably been in place for much longer, biding its time in the way that wild plants do—waiting for the right temperature, the right amount of rain, to be spared a slicing blade. At first it was just a few canes, just a few small berries. We roped it off with fluorescent tape and checked each day for ripe fruit. My boys, one a toddler and the other a baby, demanded to visit the plant twice a day, even if just to eat a single ripe berry.

When I first became a mother, it seemed like everyone I interacted with told me to “soak it up” and that it “goes too fast.” It was a baffling piece of advice to process, but I’ve tried all the same—in the sunshine on a beautiful day, in the hospital with a feverish boy, in a darkened room waiting for a child who won’t stop asking for “one more sip of water” while my precious free time dwindles away. I’m forever reminding myself to remember how fleeting this all is. To be grateful. But with that comes a sense of mourning, too. “Soak it up” becomes a lament, a place to dwell that is heart-achingly beautiful but also almost unbearably sad.

One night I paused to gather a handful of berries as I walked back from the barn, tempting fate with an impending severe thunderstorm (that arrived moments after I walked in the door). This year, the plant is more bountiful than ever. The canes are taller, more arching, and more laden with fruit than seems possible. The plant seems to have reached its peak. The caution tape that ringed the plant has long been lost. We have grown complacent, counting on the size and visibility of the plant and the memory of the town employee in the tractor.

As I picked berries I had a thought so contrary to my usual mode of thinking that I stood still beneath the swirling sky longer than was safe: if something happens to the canes now, it will be okay. We have been lucky.

The next morning, my boys, now 7 and 4, woke up excited to go to their beloved summer camp. All morning, they asked, “Is it time?” Not yet. “Now?” It was only 8 o’clock. The morning passed with excruciating slowness. Finally, when we arrived, promptly at 9 o’clock, my eldest said, before getting out of the car, “We're a whole hour older.”

I kissed them goodbye. I drove away. I felt the sadness creep in. When I picked them up from camp at 12:30, they would be 3.5 hours older than when I last saw them. And so would I. And on and on.

But god, what a beautiful day. What beautiful boys. I cannot put them into a time capsule. I cannot soak this up any more than I am. I am doing my very best. But I will go home and put the caution tape back around the berry bush. I will do what I can to have another summer of fruit, another hour in the sun with my kids, another walk beneath a dramatic sky with a palmful of berries.

If we haven’t met…

I’m Holly! I’m a writer, living on a far away farm in rural New York. I live with my husband, our two boys, two dogs, two cats, three horses and a steadily growing flock of sheep. When I’m not taking care of the variety of living beings on our farm, I write fiction and work on .

My great-grandparents were the first generation of our family to live on this farm, which was once a dairy farm. You can read the origin story here. About once a month I share scenes and photos from our life here that range from the difficult to the sublime.

Thank you for reading—it means more than you know.

Holly

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It’s summertime. It’s been light outside for 15 hours and will be for another hour more. Down in the barn, the horses are whinnying to go out in the pasture for the night, where the grass is crisp and the threat from biting flies is less. The stalls will need to be cleaned because tomorrow, first thing, they will demand to come in as soon as possible, though never soon enough. No matter how early you wake up, they will be waiting for you, impatiently. The stalls must be cleaned tonight.

In Fury

You’ve had an argument minutes or hours before. It doesn’t matter—you’re in a red rage, the kind of anger that is threatening to come out in a guttural scream. You stomp out of the house and march away, so tense that even the dogs, who normally frolic and range during this walk, stick close to your feet, looking up at you out of the corners of their eyes.

Once in the barn, you’re all noise— you slam the rake into the wheelbarrow, slam the wheelbarrow to the ground. With the first scoop of dirty shavings, the words come stuttering forth—all of the things you wanted to say, but knew you shouldn’t. The more you clean, the louder you speak until you’re shouting, now mostly curse words. No one can hear you. You don’t have to make sense. You may cry now, or you may go silent, depending on which nerve has been hit, but no matter what you keep working. As you lift and toss, lift and toss, your anger becomes a warm, quiet thing, like a rock heated in the sun. You can manage a rock heated by the sun.

In Sorrow

You’re so sad it hurts to turn your head, to walk forward. All day you’ve been pretending not to be, but now your children are asleep and you have to go to the barn—no matter that you’d rather lie on the floor indefinitely. You start crying on the walk down without meaning to. You didn’t realize how much you needed to cry somewhere that isn’t your house—the place that you have to eat in, fall asleep in, be brave in. Keep walking, even though you are really crying now—for your dead dog, for your friend who’s hurting, for yourself for yet another disappointment.

Your muscle memory helps you to position the wheelbarrow correctly, hold the rake at the right angle, and thank goodness because you’re useless. You’re a nebula of sorrow. You stop crying so that you can begin cleaning, but after just a few shovelfuls, you remember that there are no rules here about how to behave, and no one can hear you. Squat down among the pine shavings and cry as loud, as ugly as you need. Your human sadness has no context here—it can just be, and because of that, it begins to diffuse. You go through your ritual and, with the tattered, translucent cloak of your sorrow wrapped around you, you walk down to the pasture where the horses either ignore you or press their warm noses into your hands or against your cheeks, and both ways are good.

In Exhaustion

Your bones have been cast in solid brass. On the 25-minute drive home earlier you’d had the urge to nod off even as you answered question after question from your children. What is the longest river in the world, mama? What is the heaviest metal on earth? You haven’t really slept in months, maybe years. Time is passing with excruciating slowness. Somehow you make it through dinner, through a bedtime spent fighting to stay awake in the dark as your children drift to sleep on either side of you. You understand the phrase “to drag oneself out of bed”—to escape you must move forward by sinking your sharply clawed ghost limbs—the ones you grew when you became an adult with so many living things dependent on you to survive—into the floor and pulling yourself along inches at a time. Down the stairs, where you absolutely can’t stop to drink a glass of water. Momentum is the only thing saving you. On the walk to the barn, you decide to sell your horses.

In the barn, the rake is heavy in your hands, the wheelbarrow even heavier, but it takes almost no time for you to find your rhythm, and you feel a glimmer of gratitude for your body for taking over. Scoop, toss, pivot, scoop, toss, pivot. But now your blood is flowing. You feel good. No. Great! You take extra time to sweep the shavings and hay out of the corners of the aisle, to empty and refill all the water buckets. Now you are so awake that you will, in fact, have a hard time falling asleep when the time comes and the time is coming, rushing toward you. You must catch it before it leaves and so off you go, into the darkness, up the hill, back to the gently glowing house.

In Quietude

How lucky are you to be in the barn on this beautiful evening? The light is golden, the horses are glossy in the pasture, and your kids are playing some wildly inventive game involving water rivulets and leaves nearby, chatting to each other. You reach for your rake gratefully, eager to fall into the rhythm of your task. You have been cleaning stalls since you were seven. Everything is familiar, even though the barns and the horses have changed many times over the last three decades. The box of the stall, the weight of a full water bucket in your hand, the sweet dry smell of the hay. Everything smooths out and simmers down. The dopamine is high—even higher if you rest your cheek against the sun-warmed back of one of your gentle, beloved horses. They are a comfort, taking care of them is a comfort. You will never, ever, give this up.

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The stadium lights at my brother’s baseball games held a particular kind of fascination for me. From a distance, as you approached the baseball field from the dark parking lot, you could see only the moths. Before you were surrounded by the ball players and fans and cousins and potential boyfriends, before they all joined together to draw your attention down to earth, to the bleachers, to a single white ball tinged with red dirt, there were the clouds of moths in the night sky. They swirled around each stadium light in a desperate mass, equal parts heartbreaking and unnerving. No one could give me a good answer as to why they did it, though I asked any adult I could. No one seemed to care. Just ignore them, I was told. Don’t think about it too much.

When I was twelve or thirteen a bug flew into my eye as I galloped my pony beneath the arena lights in the riding ring. I screamed, slumped over. My mother came running, panicked, shouting What happened what happened in what sounded like an increasingly angry voice when I only responded with shrieks. What had happened? A white-hot needle into my eye, a pain that squirmed until it didn’t, an eye that swelled shut around a carcass no bigger than a fleck of pepper. There is so much other pain that I’ve forgotten or can only remember abstractly, but I can recall that particular pain with such clarity that I’ve come to think of it as a thing of great beauty. A needle, my pony’s coarse mane beneath my hands, my mom’s hands on my leg.

Last summer a bee flew into my son’s mouth and stung him. He screamed and ran toward me. I didn’t have to ask him what was wrong—he shouted it between sobs. On his face, a mixture of pain and horror. This was something he hadn’t imagined happening. This was something I hadn’t imagined happening. He opened his mouth willingly for inspection, though his feet danced in pain. There was no trace of the bee, I assured him. And we could fix the small swelling with a popsicle. Now, he brings the incident up often, with great reverence. Do you remember? he asks. Can you believe it?

Two weeks ago I went down to the barn and was startled by a cecropia moth on the door. I had been lost in thought as I walked between the apple trees, as I leaned my shoulder against the edge of the heavy door to roll it open. What appeared to be a thin brown leaf stuck to the door dramatically unfurled, an inch from my eye. I jumped back. I may have yelped. I don’t remember that part.

I watched with incredulity/breathlessness/exultation (there is no right word) as the moth flexed and rotated its wings and moved its pipe-cleaner antennae gently around. I had never seen anything like it before, didn’t even know a creature such as this existed. It was as big as the sparrows that dipped along the barn rafters. I stood there for a long time, a longer time than I had. I kept feeling waves of luck, then guilt, remembering that the moth was only here, with me, because I left a light on in the barn. It no doubt got disoriented and flew to this door, beneath what it might’ve thought was moonlight and now had to rest until nightfall. I felt impossibly sad and impossibly glad, 50-50.

I have a tendency to fret about all the things that could go badly in this world. The gnat in the eye, the bee in the mouth, the things I have not yet imagined. But I hardly ever account for the moths on the door. The unexpected beauty. The unheralded gifts.

These last few days I’ve hesitated as I leave the barn in the evenings, my hand on the exterior light switch. If I leave it on, might I find another silky moth as large as the breadth of my hand the next morning? Might I be able to revisit that moment, to stand in the sunshine and the birdsong and cry over its beauty and my unworthiness one more time? Maybe. But I am not greedy, not for beauty, not for anything. I will leave this crystalline memory alone. I will turn off the light.

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My mother saw or felt ghosts regularly when I was a child. Once, at a bed and breakfast out in the country, miles away from anything, she told me she’d seen a young girl in the glassed-in sunporch off our room. It was very late at night, and there were no other living guests besides us. “She didn’t seem mad,” my mother said, then stepped into the bathroom to wash her face. I was twelve years old and plenty reassured. My child's logic worked like this: if my mother could see ghosts, then she could also be trusted to accurately read their intentions, and if she said the girl's ghost was harmless, then she was. I fully believed that my mom saw spirits, but I never had any expectation of seeing a ghost myself. This was something only she could, or wanted, to do.

Last month, I read North Woods by Daniel Mason, which is a novel about what happens at one homestead over centuries—deaths and births and murders and natural disasters and many, many ghosts. I hardly ever think about the fact that I live in a house that was inhabited by my ancestors, but this book left me no choice. Normally, I think of my house as just my home, the house my children will grow up in, a place so crammed with our own lives and memories that there’s no room for anything else. I only remember when the light catches my great-grandmother’s portrait as I pass by.

Over the years, people have asked if I “feel” any of my deceased family members in the house. The answer is an unequivocal no. There are moments when I feel a sudden recognition that I am standing in the same spot my great-grandmother must’ve stood, looking at a hardly changed view (more trees, fewer cows). Or that I’m doing the same thing she would’ve been doing more than a hundred years ago (changing diapers, or weeding the garden, or lugging something very heavy).

When my own grandmother was dying in a hospital from a stroke during the pandemic, I sent her a voice memo about this very thing. I told her I was standing at the sink in the kitchen where the sun was coming in the window onto my face, and I was watching my children play in the side yard in the way she must’ve once watched her children play, and her mother-in-law before her. I cried when I hit send and my mother and grandmother cried together behind their masks while listening to it, the three of us crying together across a great distance in a way that felt transcendent. That’s as close as I’ve gotten to anything spiritual.

But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that ghosts exist. If that’s true, I feel certain that all of mine have left. The last time I saw my grandmother, she pleaded to have her and my grandfather’s ashes scattered on “the farm” as she called my house. I, of course, agreed. But after she passed my grandfather made it very clear that he was vehemently against this plan.

He told us that he was miserable as a child and young man in this house, on this farm. Always cold, always working. He wanted his ashes scattered on the golf course he’d made in the next town over, where he had sculpted smooth rolling greens out of rocky cow pasture, or better yet in the marshes of Lowcountry South Carolina where he caught crabs and shrimp in a cage off the dock and watched the Yankees play in his plush recliner, the air-conditioning on full blast.

I’ll admit, it made me a little sad to hear this. If you’ve read this Substack for more than one minute you’ll know I’m the sentimental sort. For my whole life, the farm had been talked about as a kind of Eden—when my husband and I bought it back into the family, we were celebrated like heroes. How was I to make sense of the fact that the person who was born in the house, who lived here the longest, hated it and wished never to return?

In North Woods, Daniel Mason writes, “The only way to understand the world as something other than a tale of loss is to see it as a tale of change.” Our farm is an Eden to me, regardless of what came before. I can’t see it any other way. And so we plant trees that we’ll never see mature and perennials that will continue to bloom long after we’re gone. And when it’s all said and done, I’ll plan to come back and haunt the shit out of this beautiful, beloved place.

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Last week, I stepped out of the house and left my 4-year-old alone with a bowl of frozen blueberries to snack on. This is not remarkable—he loves frozen blueberries, has a mouth full of teeth, and often prefers to sit with a book instead of coming outside on a frigid morning to do chores. The blueberries were small, he’s a slow and methodical eater, and I was close by, searching for the spot in our fence the dogs are using to escape. But after a few minutes, the image of my son asphyxiating on a blueberry came rushing into my mind.

I’ve had my share of anxiety in life, but it has never taken this particular form. Catastrophizing—that’s the term, one that I’ve only learned recently. It’s my mind making leaps. It’s taking a bruise on my son’s leg and worrying it’s leukemia. It’s watching the horses run in a slick field and waiting for a broken leg. It happens so quickly that all the steps between the noticing and the nightmare aren’t even a blur outside the window of my speeding mind. I’m just there, in one jump.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always been able to approach worries or problems one step at a time. It’s the way I move through the world. It’s what makes me a good project manager, a good mother, a good writer. I can work through things.

But a series of unrelated events—the painful illness of my dog and his death, a 5-year-old friend’s near-fatal drowning accident, and another’s cancer diagnosis, not to mention the atrocities being inflicted on the Palestinian people, have combined to leave me in a particularly anxiety-riddled state. Maybe it’s the same for you.

I rushed through the yard, the rational side of my mind and the irrational side of my mind screaming at me, simultaneously—something I didn’t realize was possible until that moment. One part of my brain told me I was overreacting, that I was turning into my mother, who worries over many small things. If I can’t calm down, what does that say about who I am? I took a series of deep breaths. The other part told me to run faster, that he was dying or, perhaps, was already dead. I ran faster.

From the door, I called his name. “What?” he asked, looking up quickly at my tone, his mouth and fingers stained a deep purple. “What’s wrong, mama?”

When my husband and I first moved to the farm nine years ago, I worried incessantly about a bald eagle taking one of my two brother cats. I tried keeping them inside for a time, looked into reflective collars, and hung bells around their necks that were promptly lost in the tall grass. Every time I heard the peculiar call of an eagle and saw its shadow racing across the ground, I whirled in a circle, heart thumping, ready to save a cat.

Over the years, that fear has subsided. The bald eagles are preoccupied in their battles with the crows and have plentiful fish to eat out of our wide, winding creek. We have so many eagles on our land that I sometimes joke we’re inadvertently running a sanctuary. When people ask me when we’re going to get chickens, I gesture to the sky. No time soon.

The cats, too, have shown themselves to be savvy beyond my comprehension. They know every hollow, tree limb, and secret spot on this place and will often surprise you by popping out when you think they’re snoozing on a sunny window ledge in the house. They shepherd me from place to place, sometimes following along, sometimes running ahead. They watch traffic go by (when it does come by) before crossing the road and know which dogs are friendly and which should be hidden from. They seem, at times, to be fully omniscient, and I find comfort in this.

It’s been years since I’ve worried this particular worry, but then, just this morning, I heard the cry of a bald eagle. My old fear was there in an instant. I saw one of my champagne-colored cats clutched in the claws of an eagle in my mind. I whirled around, adrenaline surging, but there they both were, green-eyed, watching me from the porch.

I had to laugh. What else is there to do?

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It was sweltering and sticky and the water was the color and opacity of milked tea. The river was swollen—an unusually high tide—and there were warnings from the staff at the Daintree River Cruises office that crocodiles would be hard to spot. As we waited to board the tour boat, the children complained, the mosquitos feasted and, in the distance a storm threatened. No one was in a good mood.

We were one week into a long-awaited trip to Australia—our first as a family of four, and the first since my father-in-law died, the second since my mother-in-law died. It had been six years since I last set foot in Australia, eight years since we packed up our apartment and moved back to the United States and started on the trajectory that landed us in rural New York.

I’ve written about how places can serve as time capsules before, and Sydney was no exception. It is a city like no other, and we lived there during such an intense time (the last years of my mother-in-law’s terminal cancer) that the whole place is preserved in a kind of amber for me. To be there, just two days after the death of our beloved family dog, was to be constantly moving through memories and emotions. The more our kids enjoyed themselves—playing with the cousins they’d never met, splashing in rock pools, eating Bubble O’Bills and mango hedgehogs, the more surreal the experience became. Here was our alternate life, the path we could’ve taken, laid out before us. Here was the field we were married in, the restaurant we ate at with San, the flat rock in Gordon’s Bay where I spent many hours thinking, thinking, thinking. Here was home. It was too much. I tamped it all down—my layers of grief, my regret, my guilt for being the one that brought us back to the US. I willed my mind blank.

It worked, until the crocodile cruise. We moved down the Daintree River at a painfully slow pace, everyone’s eyes scanning the banks, mistaking every log in the water for a crocodile. My sweaty, red-faced children lolled in my lap. At places the mangrove was thick and impenetrable. In others, it had been wiped bare—felled trees piled like matchsticks, standing trees bare except for their very top leaves—by record-breaking flooding in December 2023. All the while, the guide talked into a microphone fluidly, the sound of his broad accent obviously part of the admission price. He was a puzzling mix of crass and tender (not the first Australian to be described this way, I’m sure), telling off-color jokes about a female crocodile named Bruce Jenner and quipping three too many times about using my children as bait to lure the crocodiles to the boat. But he also described the ecological damage done to the mangroves with feeling, and told loving stories about the crocodile residents of the river by name.

And then, as we observed a large male crocodile (who might’ve been Bill or Gary or Bum-Eye, but it was hard to tell) drift through the water, he pointed to the partially submerged creature and told us that the small bumps on his skin were full of nerve endings that are more sensitive than human fingertips and that they covered every inch of his body. “They feel everything,” he said.

I immediately thought about this phrase from my childhood, “suck it up.” We were constantly telling each other to suck it up, or being told, or telling ourselves. Something is hard, or difficult, or painful? Suck it up. For a long time, this was my way through, the only way I knew how. But sitting on a small boat on an ancient river looking at this prehistoric being who appears armored but is, instead, sensitive beyond comprehension, I am saturated. My pain and my joy and my melancholy can’t be contained, tamped down, reduced by my sheer willpower any longer.

I promise myself to let the feelings come, but not right now. Right now I have to take a deep breath and fan my children with my hat and play I-Spy in a landscape of brown and green until we make it home.

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It has been a hard week. My beloved dog, Mackie, has something growing in the cavity behind his eye, and it’s pushing his eye outward in a way that has not yet caused permanent damage, but it is heartbreaking to look at it and, no doubt, deeply uncomfortable.

We are trying things—antibiotics, steroids, a tooth extraction. We were hoping for an abscess, but that hope is dwindling. Now, we are on a waiting list to be seen at a clinic in Albany and at Cornell, but there are no appointments until late April.

As a way of coping, I’m lavishing him with attention and special privileges—I let him ride in the car to pick up the kids from school, let him crawl into my lap in the evenings after everyone’s asleep (despite the fact that he’s quite heavy and very long). I’ve fed him thinly sliced apples and let him snooze by the fire instead of trudging through the snow to the barn. It feels good and useful to spoil him this way, but it doesn’t put a dent in my sadness. I’ve tried some remedies for that, too—namely, assuming the worst so that I won’t be so devastated when my fears are confirmed. But today, I’m trying something else.

Today, I’m remembering a list of beloved animals who defied the odds.

First there was Casper—our childhood dog who arrived on Christmas morning when I was 7. He was a scruffy Westie who was bred to be a show dog but preferred to sleep in a pile of old towels in the garage. One day, when Casper was an old man with bad hearing, he fell asleep in the driveway too close to the tire of our eggplant-colored Chevy Suburban. My mom ran over his tiny back leg, and broke it.

At the vet, they recommended putting him down. He’s old, they said. He won’t recover. My mother said absolutely not and came home in a rage with Casper tucked under her arm. She pulled a CVS bag from her purse and, from within that, a metal finger split lined with blue foam. I stroked Casper’s head while she fitted the splint around his back leg. He never flinched. His little leg bone, no thicker than my middle finger, healed straight. He lived many more years, happily snoring in the corner of the garage.

And there was Lark—my mother’s problematic but deeply loved horse who ran through a barbed wire fence on my grandfather’s farm. The day that it happened, I sat in the car outside of the pasture, watching my mom and a selection of my uncles trying to load Lark, who was delirious and defiant with pain, into the trailer to take him to an emergency vet. His chest looked like hamburger meat.

The vet advised my mom to put him down, but when she denied his offer, he stitched up what he could of Lark’s chest and sent him home. They quickly became infected. I watched my mom unstitch the wounds. I watched her clean and debride the wounds (which were so deep she could fit her fist inside) every day for weeks, filled simultaneously with great admiration and revulsion. He stood perfectly still and let her. Lark’s wounds healed, leaving two flat starburst scars on either side of his chest.

And, of course, there was Sully—my dog soulmate, who I got at 15 and could read my mind. One afternoon, while chasing a tennis ball thrown by my then-boyfriend, he ran beneath a horse trailer and caught his back on the jutting metal support. It opened up his back in a massive U-shape, cut all the way down to his muscle. He sat in my lap, looking up at me for hours as we drove around rural Lowcountry South Carolina, begging vets to help him. Two separate places took a look and told us to put him down. The third, an hour and a half away in Bluffton, said he would give it a try. The vet said he couldn’t promise anything, but he let me, stroke Sulley’s head as he went under anesthesia, politely ignoring my weeping.

For weeks, I lay on the cold cement floor of the barn apartment we were living in, curled around Sulley. This time, I was the one cleaning his sutures, carrying him outside to use the bathroom, hand feeding him pieces of kibble. The vet had removed the entire U-shaped chunk of flesh (it had taken us too long to get him help, and the flesh was dying) and stitched him back together. The tension was so great that the vet predicted the stitches wouldn’t hold, but they did. When it healed, there was hardly a scar. We graduated from college and moved to Brooklyn. We kept growing up together.

It feels, sometimes, like I know every one of my animals inside and out. But I’m reminded that there is something that I cannot possibly know. I cannot know the animalness of them. The depth of their resilience. Their overwhelming will to survive. Tomorrow, I will probably go back to preparing for the worst-case scenario. But today? Today, there’s still hope.

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It is the end of the day, and a small group of kids mill peacefully about in the high-ceiling, many-windowed room they sometimes visit at this mostly outdoor nursery school. The walls are gently stippled in pink and yellow paint. The toys are all wood or felt. They are each intently absorbed in the varied tasks before them, all of them wearing some stripped-down version of the elaborate winter gear they usually wear to withstand the elements of an Upstate New York winter. My own son is one of these—three years old and determined to finish moving a magnetic ball through a maze with a magnetic wand. He ignores me as I sit down on a child-sized stool and Kerstin turns to me.

I’ve already messaged her that I’m writing an essay about this song, and she says she has a story for me. The song, Down with Darkness, comes from a Waldorf songbook and hasn’t always been part of the nursery school’s song repertoire. It first caught Kerstin’s eye because it is in a minor key—something that rarely happens with children’s songs. Kerstin introduced the song as part of the annual Lantern Festival, in which the children of the school and their parents gather in the dark of a November night to sing songs by the light of homemade lanterns.

The kids liked the song, she says, but it wasn’t until one year, shortly after she’d introduced it, that it became beloved.

It was November 13, 2015, and Kerstin says that night, at the Lantern Festival, the children sang Down with Darkness with a fervor she hadn’t heard before. She was surprised and delighted by their passion. That year, the celebration was everything Kerstin wanted it to be—the beautiful lanterns, the collection of wonderful children, the support of the small and kind community. She came home feeling buoyed by all of this beauty and togetherness. Then she switched on the news.

I've suppressed my memories of being in Paris during the attacks up until this moment. But sitting on that very small stool in that beautiful room, surrounded by busy children, Kerstin begins to cry and my own memories come so quickly I can hear the subway train rush of them as they slide into place.

My husband and I are living in San Francisco but working in Paris for the month. I have one day left at my job before I enroll in a full-time language school. To celebrate, we’re eating in a very small restaurant in our favorite neighborhood with two of my coworkers. We debate trying the more famous and popular place around the corner, Le Petit Cambodge, but agree that it will be too busy and we likely won’t get a seat. Not long into dinner, we hear a great number of sirens and then nothing. The flashing lights of the vehicles strobe into the restaurant. The waitress casually walks to the front, draws the blinds, and then deadbolts the door. The gentle chatter in the restaurant pauses.

For a long time that night, we don’t know exactly what’s happening. Our waitress fills our wine glasses to the top and assures us everything is fine but that we’re not allowed to leave. We heard sounds of footsteps running on the roof over our heads and the occasional quick blip of a siren. Slowly, information began to trickle in via frantic texts from co-workers and loved ones who are back home and watching the news.

The waitress pushes us out sometime around 4am even though we beg her not to. “You can’t stay here,” she says matter-of-factly, physically shepherding us outside. I feel ashamed for being scared when she is so clearly not. On the street, we turned away from the sirens and walked through the cold night, chatting nervously. We quickly realize we can’t cross Canal Saint-Martin to return to our apartment just on the other side. All the bridges are closed, the cabs have seemingly evaporated, and the ones we do spot wouldn't pick anyone up. The shooters are still on the loose. Could we be them? We begin to walk so quickly that we sometimes break into a run. We don’t know where we’re going, just that we need to go.

Kerstin tells me, as I’m remembering the survivor in the silver trauma blanket, the yellow emptiness of the streets, the sound of my own heart in my ears, that back in New York, one by one, the parents who had been at the Lantern Festival called her. They, too, had felt the whiplash of the beautiful evening and the horrifying news, but more than that, they had felt what she had—the sense that the children had channeled something greater than themselves when they sang Down with Darkness. Tears roll down Kerstin’s cheeks. The children in the room with us don’t look up from their blocks and books and puzzles.

I think about the days after the attack—the seeming constant sound of sirens, the feeling of wanting to jump out of my skin at every moment, and the grief as the full story of the attacks came into increasingly sharper focus. I think about how our French friends carried on, but I could barely bring myself to step outside to get a handful of groceries every few days. I left Paris, my favorite city in the world, and I haven’t been back. I buried it all.

But now I know that, at some point in that night, maybe when Oli and I were huddled in the restaurant, or running through the streets or begging a cab driver through a barely cracked window to take us the very long way home, there was a group of small children standing in a park I’d never been to, singing a song that I’d never heard but that would someday come to mean a great deal to me.

That one day, I would stand in that park and hold my own children’s hands and sing it with all of my heart. And it might feel something like healing.

Down with darkness
Up with light.
Up with sunshine,
Down with night.
Each of us is one small light,
But together we shine bright.

Go away darkest, blackest night.
Go away. Give way to light.