I have recently achieved a level of spiritual enlightenment that I feel compelled to share with the world.

I have learned how not to take the fucking bait.

This may not sound like much. People have been meditating in caves for several thousand years trying to achieve inner peace, and I have no intention of diminishing their accomplishments. But I would respectfully suggest that none of those people had my sister.

There was a time when I believed that if someone said something about me that was wrong, unfair, ridiculous, inflammatory, historically inaccurate or so spectacularly divorced from reality that it deserved its own Netflix documentary, I needed to correct it.

This was particularly true with my sister.

For the last decade or two, but more since our mother died four years ago, my two sisters and I have been involved in the kind of family dispute that begins with grief and property and somehow ends with three grown women arguing about events that occurred on a Tuesday afternoon in 1994.

There are mediators, judges and lawyers now. There is a court case. There have been case management conferences and legal filings and emails and texts long enough to have chapters.

And somewhere along the way, I discovered Zen.

Not actual Zen, obviously. I don’t meditate nearly enough, and I remain capable of becoming homicidally pissed off when someone parks their grocery cart in the middle of an aisle.

My particular form of Zen is much simpler.

I stopped answering the parts that don’t require an answer.

This sounds ridiculously easy until you try it.

Your sister sends you a message containing twelve separate allegations, four interpretations of your childhood, a sweeping, incredibly inaccurate assessment of your character, several references to your dead mother and a detailed accounting of her own suffering.

Buried somewhere around paragraph seven is the only piece of information that actually matters:

Sunday doesn’t work.

The old me would have been off to the races.

I’d correct allegation number one. Provide context for number two. Explain what actually happened at a family dinner. Point out the rather breathtaking hypocrisy of number six. By number nine, I’d be pulling documents out of a filing cabinet and shouting to no one in particular, “OH, I HAVE THE RECEIPTS.”

And perhaps I did. It didn’t matter. Because I finally realized something that would have saved me approximately 47,000 hours over the course of my life:

Not every accusation requires a defense.

This is where the fucking bait comes in. The bait is almost never the actual subject. The bait is the little emotional hook dangling beside it.

You ask, “Can I come by Saturday at five?”

And someone answers: “After everything you’ve done to me...”

There it is. All you have to do is bite.

Explain yourself. Defend yourself. Correct the record. Remind them what they did. Reach backward into the great archaeological dig of your shared history and pull out a particularly useful artifact from 2018.

And congratulations. You are no longer discussing Saturday at five.

You are now swimming in somebody else’s ocean. These days, I stay resolutely on shore.

“Would Sunday at three work instead?”

I cannot adequately describe how unnatural this felt at first. My fingers practically twitched over the keyboard. I wrote magnificent responses that died in the Notes app. Devastating rebuttals. Closing arguments so brilliant that somewhere, an attorney was billing $750 an hour for something nowhere near as good.

None of them got sent.

Because eventually I understood the difference between having a reaction and giving someone access to my reaction. Those are not the same thing.

I can be furious. I can call a friend and say, “You are not going to fucking believe this.” I can pace around my kitchen conducting an imaginary cross-examination while making couscous.

I can think the thought. I can say the thought. I can even write the thought.

I just don’t have to deliver it to the person who ordered it.

And somewhere in that tiny space between receiving the bait and deciding not to bite it, something rather wonderful happened.

I got my peace back.

Not all of it. Let’s not get carried away. I am not levitating over the kitchen island.

But enough. Enough to understand that there are arguments we think we’re having because we want to reach an agreement, and arguments we’re having because we desperately want the other person to finally understand us.

That second category can eat years of your life.

Because they aren’t going to understand. They don’t want to. And I may never get to hold them accountable for the things they’ve said that simply aren’t true. But I trust Mademoiselle Karma will eventually make her rounds.

Sometimes their version of events performs a function for them that your carefully documented facts cannot possibly perform.

And you can spend the rest of your natural life standing outside that locked door with a PowerPoint presentation.

Or you can go have lunch.

This may be one of the stranger gifts of getting older.

At 25, I wanted to be understood.

At 40, I wanted to be right.

At 63, increasingly, I want to know what time we’re meeting and whether I need to block out an hour of my day or the whole afternoon.

There is tremendous freedom in realizing that another person’s opinion of you does not constitute an emergency. Neither does their anger or their disappointment. Neither does the elaborate story they have constructed in which you have been assigned a starring role you don’t remember auditioning for.

You don’t have to attend every performance and you most certainly do not have to read the reviews.

So here is my highly uncredentialed contribution to the self-help literature of the world:

1) Not every accusation requires a defense.

2) Not every misunderstanding requires correction.

3) Not every insult requires a bigger and better return insult.

4) Not every emotional hook requires your flesh.

5) And finally, not every invitation to chaos deserves an RSVP.

Sometimes enlightenment looks less like a Buddhist monk sitting serenely beneath a Bodhi tree and more like a middle-aged woman staring at an absolutely batshit text message, taking a sip of tea and typing:

“Okay. Does Sunday at three work?”

Kobe Bryant was always Kobe Bryant. LeBron James emerged from the womb with his name already printed across the back of a basketball jersey. And the Gipsy Kings have always been the Gipsy Kings, their guitars exploding into Baila Me somewhere in the background while the rest of us danced wildly and pretended we were in the south of France.

Except, of course, none of that is true.

There was a moment before.

And through some bizarre combination of living in Los Angeles, decades of working in the entertainment business, and having friends who knew people before the rest of the world did, I have found myself surprisingly close to a few of those moments.

Not the moment when lightning struck. The moment just before.

Kobe Before Kobe

Years ago, a friend of mine dated Kobe Bryant when he had just joined the Lakers.

This was very early Kobe. So early, in fact, that his little condo in Playa del Rey was essentially empty, but what little there was looked like Carol from Concierge Services had decorated it. Beige couch, beige curtains, blue pillows, the requisite beige-framed artwork of a blue ocean, you get the picture.

He had just gotten the place. Kobe was young, newly arrived, and standing at the very beginning of a life none of us could possibly have imagined.

And here is the ridiculous part: I never met him.

I hung out at his apartment more times than I can tell you and somehow managed not to meet Kobe Bryant.

There ought to be an award for this.

I did see him play. His girlfriend got us courtside seats at a Lakers game, so technically I saw Kobe before the world really knew what Kobe would become. But I never shook his hand or had a conversation with him. Never got to say years later, “Oh yes, Kobe and I...”

Nope. I knew his boilerplate apartment. And strangely, that’s the part I treasure now.

Because after the championships, the Olympic medals, the astonishing career and the terrible ending that nobody could have imagined, there remains in my memory this tiny snapshot from before all of it.

A young man. A new condo. Hardly any furniture. Not an ounce of personality in the space he called home.

The future hadn’t happened yet.

And Then There Was LeBron

Another friend of mine was a wardrobe stylist and was working on a commercial introducing a young basketball player.

I went along to the shoot.

His name was LeBron James. Which meant absolutely nothing to me.

I met him. I spoke to him. And I had no earthly idea that I was meeting LeBron James.

Nobody had yet explained to the universe that those two words were supposed to be said together as though announcing royalty. He was a young basketball player at a commercial shoot, but there was already a buzz around him. People were saying he was going to be the next Kobe Bryant. Clearly somebody believed it. They were already making a commercial about him. I just hadn’t gotten the memo.

Years later, of course, the name is almost absurdly famous.

But that’s what hindsight does. It makes everything look inevitable. We look backward at extraordinary careers and convince ourselves there must have been trumpets playing somewhere in the distance. Cherubs floating in the heavens as the clouds part to announce the arrival of the new king.

There weren’t. It was a workday. People were checking lighting. Somebody was worrying about what catering was serving.

And LeBron James was a young man whose name I didn’t know.

Before America Knew the Gipsy Kings

Then there are the Gipsy Kings.

Their music has been part of the soundtrack of my life for decades.

Cayman was practically weaned on them. Their songs became the theme music for different moments in our lives. They were playing throughout his childhood: in the house, in the car, while cooking dinner, while living our lives.

Later, the two of us would spend time in Arles, the Provençal city that Nicolas Reyes, the leader of the Gipsy Kings, calls home, where that music suddenly makes perfect geographical sense. The heat. The stone. The Spanish and Romani influences drifting across the Camargue. The Mediterranean light.

But my connection to their story goes back even further.

It was right around the time the Gipsy Kings were being introduced to America that I met Tony Krantz, an agent at Creative Artists Agency in Beverly Hills who was dating a friend of mine and was instrumental in bringing them here. Before most Americans knew who they were. Before Bamboléo became one of those songs whose opening notes can make an entire room start moving. Before the mythology.

There was simply someone who heard something extraordinary and thought: People need to hear this. And they did.

For years, I wanted to see the Gipsy Kings live. With Nicolas Reyes singing. Every time they came anywhere near me, there was some damned complication. They would play in Paso Robles wine country. Or Saratoga. Or Los Gatos. Somewhere on the coast. Or they’d appear on a Tuesday night precisely when the school year was beginning and I couldn’t possibly go.

Every year I thought:

Next time.

But I’ve lived long enough to know the danger in those two words.

I never saw Elvis.

I never saw Bob Marley.

I never saw Michael Jackson.

Eventually there is no next time.

So when I discovered that Gipsy Kings featuring Nicolas Reyes were coming to Tachi Palace in Lemoore, practically in my own backyard, on a Saturday night, I bought Cayman and myself very good tickets immediately.

Cayman and me, on our way to hear the soundtrack of his childhood.

This time I wasn’t going to miss it.

Waiting for the Gipsy Kings. Second row, because “next time” had officially been retired.

Last Night

Last night, after all those years, we finally saw them.

And they were magnificent.

The guitars were relentless. Nicolas Reyes still had that unmistakable voice. His sons sang.

And then the stage exploded to life.

The audience was on its feet. People were dancing. Cayman and I knew every song.

It was joyous and infectious and moving. And then something happened at the very end that I still can’t quite get out of my mind.

Nicolas Reyes, with the next generation behind him.

The stage had been full: guitars, musicians, voices, applause. People dancing.

And somehow, without my noticing it, everyone disappeared. One by one, or perhaps all at once. I honestly don’t remember.

Suddenly there was only Nicolas Reyes. Alone. The guitars. The band. Everyone else. Gone.

Just the man whose voice had carried those songs around the world. And he began to sing.

A Mi Manera. “My Way.” A cappella. It was absolutely mythic.

After all that sound, silence. After all those musicians, one man.

After decades of fame and concerts and records and millions of people knowing his voice, Nicolas Reyes stood alone on a stage in Lemoore, California, and sang A Mi Manera.

He waved and quickly disappeared. Folks in the audience waited . . . would there be an encore? Nope. Done. Like waking from a dream and lying still for a moment, trying not to lose it.

I kept thinking about it. About Kobe’s empty apartment. About meeting a young man named LeBron and having absolutely no idea why I should remember his name. About Tony Krantz hearing a group from the south of France and believing America might want to hear them too.

None of us knew what came next. That’s the part history removes. Once we know the ending, we forget how uncertain the beginning was.

We turn people’s lives into stories with neat trajectories, as though Kobe was always destined to become Kobe, LeBron was always destined to become LeBron, and Nicolas Reyes was always destined to stand alone beneath a spotlight while an audience waited on his final note.

But life is lived forward. In bland apartments. On ordinary commercial sets. In offices where somebody says, “You have to hear these guys.”

Most of the time, we have absolutely no idea when we’re standing in the moment before.

And perhaps that’s why last night’s ending moved me so much.

For once, I had lived long enough to see what became of the before. The records and the tours and the fame. Djobi Djoba traveling around the world and becoming part of the soundtrack of our lives.

I had spent years saying I’d see Nicolas Reyes someday. Last night, someday finally came.

He stood alone. He sang A Mi Manera. And then he walked offstage.

At this point in my life, I know better than to assume there will always be a next time.

Sometimes you recognize that the moment you’re living right now will someday be the one you wish you could have back.

And if you’re very lucky, every once in a while, you realize it before the moment is gone.

Walking away from the concert, still thinking about Nicolas Reyes standing alone on that stage, I told Cayman, “When I die, I want that version of My Way played over the photo montage at my memorial service.”

Because naturally there will be a memorial service. How else am I supposed to attend in spirit?

Cayman didn’t miss a beat.

“Okay. Make a playlist, because I’m not going to remember.”

And there you have it.

One final lesson that apparently comes with age:

Buy the tickets. Get the good seats. And leave very specific instructions for your children.

Long before I worked for celebrities, I worked for those opening weekends. I was the one gathering that data along with about 30 other twenty-something-year-olds waiting to “make it in Hollywood.” We were out-of-work actors, wanna-be rock stars, writers waiting to be recognized.

Back in the mid 80s, when I was young, broke, ambitious and juggling more side hustles than I can now remember, one of my jobs involved riding a brown ten-speed bicycle several miles each evening to an industrial section of Beverly Hills.

Yes, there is an industrial section of Beverly Hills. Most people don’t know that.

I would spend hours in a room full of telephones calling movie theaters throughout the Midwest and East Coast, my beat, gathering box office numbers. Every ticket sold, every packed theater, every disappointing turnout eventually became part of the statistics reported in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter.

This movie opened big. That one bombed.

This actor was suddenly hot. That actor was suddenly not.

Hollywood has always been obsessed with scoreboards and opening weekend is the biggest scoreboard of them all.

Around midnight or one in the morning, I climbed back onto my bicycle and raced home through the deserted streets of Beverly Hills. Looking back, I can’t believe I did it. I was scared every single night. Every shadow seemed threatening, every passing car made me grip the handlebars a little tighter. But I needed the job. When you’re young and trying to build a life, necessity had a way of making courage look a lot more glamorous than it actually felt. Most of the time, it wasn’t courage at all. It was simply doing what had to be done.

At the time, opening weekends felt magical. One successful film could transform a person’s life overnight.

No one embodied that more than the actress, Rebecca De Mornay.

When she appeared opposite Tom Cruise in Risky Business, her life changed forever.

Rebecca De Mornay and Tom Cruise during the filming of Risky Business (1983), the film that launched both of their careers into the Hollywood stratosphere.

That film catapulted her into an entirely different orbit. Suddenly she was one of Hollywood’s most sought-after actresses. Scripts arrived constantly. Opportunities multiplied. Her name carried weight. From the outside, it looked like the fairy tale version of Hollywood. The version magazines sell and entertainment shows celebrate. The one built on red carpets, designer gowns, limousines, gated estates, and the assumption that success, once achieved, somehow lasts forever.

But what fascinated me when I worked for Rebecca was how little interest she seemed to have in performing that fantasy.

Don’t misunderstand me; she lived well. She owned a beautiful hillside home. She dressed beautifully. I remember her shopping at Agnès b., whose understated French clothing was elegant, timeless, and decidedly not cheap.

She appreciated quality, but quality and conspicuous consumption are not the same thing. There was a practicality to Rebecca that I didn’t fully appreciate at the time.

Part of it may have come from her unusual childhood. Her mother moved the family to Austria when Rebecca was still young. No German. No transition program. No special accommodations. Just a foreign country and the expectation that she would adapt.

And adapt, she did. She became fluent in German in a matter of months. She learned how to navigate uncertainty. She learned, perhaps, that life can change at the drop of a hat.

Success can arrive quickly. And success can depart just as quickly.

Years later, when I worked for her, she drove a black Honda Accord. She could have afforded any car she wanted. The clincher was that she didn’t want one. Whether she intended it or not, that Honda Accord reflected something much more valuable than a luxury car ever could: the freedom that comes from living beneath your means.

That detail has stayed with me for decades.

Hollywood is filled with people who spend money as though summer will last forever. The athlete who signs the giant contract. The musician who lands the hit record. The actor who becomes the newest sensation.

The assumption is always the same. I have made it. This is permanent.

Some people understand something the rest of us don’t learn until much later. They know careers and income have seasons. Fame has seasons. Life has seasons. A good business manager can help, but even the best business manager can’t save someone who believes summer lasts forever.

One evening Rebecca called and asked if I’d like to go with her to the opening night screening of The Hand That Rocks the Cradle at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.

In these seats, an audience watched The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. In the back row, the film's star was watching them.

That was an easy yes.

What made it especially amusing was that years earlier I had been one of the people gathering opening weekend numbers for theaters just like that one. Back then I was counting ticket sales. Now I was attending the opening night of a major film with its star.

We drove there in the Honda Accord.

The theater was packed. We intentionally arrived after the previews had begun and slipped into the back row when darkness had descended on the theatre. Nobody turned around. Nobody suspected that the woman on the giant screen was sitting right behind them.

And that’s when I learned one of Hollywood’s best-kept secrets. Celebrities do this all the time. They sneak into movie theaters and monitor audience reactions. This has zero to do with vanity; they’re searching for honesty.

By the time a film premieres, everyone around them is performing: publicists, lawyers, agents, studio executives. Other actors.

Praise becomes suspect.

Was the movie actually good? Or is everyone simply saying what the star wants to hear? An audience doesn’t have that problem; they tell the truth in real time. The gasp, the laughter, the silence, the boredom, the tears . . . all are real. The audience doesn’t know anyone is watching.

For two hours I sat in the back row of Grauman’s watching Rebecca watch the audience watch Rebecca. It was meta before anyone ever used the word meta.

Rebecca De Mornay in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992). On opening night, I watched the audience react to one of the most unsettling performances of the 1990s, while Rebecca watched them.

People jumped during certain scenes. Others whispered comments to one another. The collective tension was palpable. And beside me sat the star of the film, absorbing it all. Truth, finally, from people who didn’t know they were giving it.

Then, just before the credits rolled, we slipped out. The audience remained behind discussing the movie, completely unaware that Rebecca De Mornay had been sitting among them the entire evening.

We climbed back into the Honda Accord and drove home.

People who aren’t famous often imagine recognition as the ultimate prize. But after spending more than two decades around celebrities, I came to understand that anonymity is a luxury.

The ability to sit in a dark theater unnoticed . . . to walk into a grocery store . . . to have a bad day in public, to order a cheeseburger without anyone making assumptions about what it means. To simply be another person.

For two hours that night, Rebecca got to enjoy something that had become increasingly rare in her life.

She got to be nobody.

Years later, I find myself thinking about that Honda Accord because, if I’m being honest, I didn’t learn the lesson right away. Hollywood is built on appearances. Before long, you start mistaking appearances for reality. I bought things and drove cars I couldn’t comfortably afford. I occasionally confused the appearance of success with security. I thought the scoreboard mattered.

Now, at sixty-three, preparing for a very different season of life, I drive a Toyota Corolla—my own version of the Honda Accord. Dependable. Unpretentious. Built to last.

Funny, isn’t it? I spent years collecting Hollywood’s scoreboards. It took me decades to figure out I was keeping score all wrong. Hollywood didn’t teach me how to recognize success.

Rebecca did. She just never knew she was teaching me.

These dishes belong in a roadside diner somewhere between Bakersfield and Barstow where the coffee costs 49 cents and everybody smokes indoors.

They are atomic, candy apple green. And truly hideous. Not an ounce of taste to them. Very 1950’s, very Cold War, very formica countertops, very vinyl, very bowling alley snack bar. Schlitz beer and Pall Malls. Capri’s and Aqua Net. From the time in my life when, as kids, we could go down to the corner market, Kenny’s Git and Go, and the man behind the counter would sell us packs of Kool cigarettes for my friend’s mama. Or if times were lean, he would sell us one cig at a time. It was those times. Visalia, circa 1974.

They’re Oneida Deluxe 3124’s. But when I say it, I say Dee-lux so it gives a used car salesman vibe.

People covet them. Aggressively. Collectors of mid-century modern are nuts about them. My son has already informed me that he intends to inherit them. My neighbor has made his desires known. “If you ever decide to get rid of those…”

Which is shocking to me because every morning I stand in my kitchen staring at these radioactive avocado monstrosities thinking, Sweet Jesus. These are vile…and sort of cool at the same time.

The strange thing is, I use them every single day. These are my actual dishes. My eggs sit upon them. My toast rests upon them. My Skinny Legs burgers.

Caribbean burger inspiration meets Cold War dishware. Somewhere between USVI’s St. John and a Bob’s Big Boy in 1968.

They have become so integrated into my life that I no longer fully see them, which is perhaps how all great love stories begin.

The provenance of these dishes only makes the situation worse.

Years ago, back when I worked in Hollywood, I worked for Laura Dern during the period when she and Billy Bob Thornton were in the middle of a fast, fiery romance fueled primarily by nicotine (his), roadside diners (his), and questionable decisions (hers).

In the spirit of full journalistic integrity, I am sacrificing both my vanity and good taste by posting the only existing photo of Laura Dern, Billy Bob Thornton, and me together. Conveniently, this also happens to be the same era I became the stewards of the dishes.

At some point they took a road trip to Billy Bob territory. Arkansas. Somewhere along the way they stumbled upon one of those sprawling roadside sales where everybody drags their earthly possessions out into a field and puts them on card tables.

And there, like a neon vision from another dimension, sat this horrifying green dish set.

He just had to have it. I can just see Billy Bob standing on the side of some Southern highway, eyes a blazin’, rocking back and forth in his cowboy boots saying under his breath “Hell yes, we’re buying these!”

Which honestly feels perfectly on-brand.

Celebrities do this sort of thing all the time. People imagine wealth means luxury, but often wealth simply means the freedom to indulge impulses without consequences. Regular people stand in Target holding a throw pillow asking themselves practical questions like, “Does this go with my sofa?” Celebrities are more likely to think, “This ceramic turkey lamp would be good dinner convo…I’m getting it.”

The purchase itself is the thrill. Just the delicious narcotic rush of: I can.

Because money, once there’s enough of it, stops behaving like survival.

So Billy Bob bought the dishes.

Laura and Billy used them for approximately six minutes before apparently realizing they looked like something you’d find in a diner in Biloxi, Mississippi with a waitress named Bunny who smelled like cigarette smoke and Jean Naté.

And then they handed them to me to get rid of.

This also happened constantly in Hollywood.

The truth is, if I really stop and think about it, probably 90% of what I own came from celebrities changing their aesthetic the way normal people change bath towels. Entire design phases swept through Hollywood like airborne illnesses. One month Rachel Ashwell dropped by to say hello and suddenly Shabby Chic became the flavor of the month. Then somebody hired Kelly Wearstler, so naturally my celebrity had to see her designer and raise her by hiring Madeline Stuart. Then an A-lister attended a spiritual lecture in Santa Monica and overnight every house in Los Feliz contained Tibetan bells, carved Nepalese cabinets, giant Buddhas, meditation cushions, and enough Illume candles from Third Street to signal ships at sea.

Celebrities are forever unloading objects into the ecosystem. My ecosystem.

“Can you get rid of this?”

And suddenly I’m standing there holding a taxidermied coyote or a four-foot tall foam-core childhood portrait of Jeff Goldblum.

Which, yes, also happened.

The problem was I couldn’t quite bring myself to throw away giant Little Jeff Goldblum because it felt vaguely sacrilegious. Also the trash cans in Los Angeles are weirdly small and circular, as though specifically designed to prevent disposal of oversized celebrity memorabilia.

So into the garage it went. Along with 23 years of my life in Hollywood. This is how, over time, my garage slowly transformed into what can only be described as an unlicensed museum of strange Hollywood ephemera such as the type to be featured on the website, Atlas Obscura.

And somehow these terrible green dishes survived all of it.

Moves. A house fire. My son growing up. Financial panic. Joy. Grief. Kitchen remodels. Trips to France where I ate off beautiful creamy earthenware under fig trees and thought, This is it. This is how civilized people live.

And still I came home to the candy apple green monstrosities.

The thing is, I am trying to downsize now.

I dream about retiring to France eventually, and I know in my bones that I cannot drag every object from my American life across the pond like the Beverly Hillbillies carrying their entire house in the back of a dusty, old pickup truck.

I already got rid of one beloved set of dishes. Gorgeous Terre de Provence dishes in deep pine green and gold. Heavy. Beautiful. Completely unreasonable. Also a relic of Laura Dern’s, but these were from the relationship with Jeff Goldblum.

Most people inherit their grandmother’s china, which sits untouched in a cabinet for 40 years. I inherited the decorative aftermath of Hollywood romance cycles.

So, theoretically, I could do it again. A purge.

But these ugly green dishes have crossed over into something else entirely. They are mythology. They’re my history. They are memories of a different incarnation. Like the way folks break up segments of their lives…before they had kids or after. Pre-Covid or post. Pre-Jeff or post-Billy.

They are proof that objects absorb human lives. Maybe that is why people want them, even dare I say, obsess about them. They are proof that once fame brushes against an object, even ugly dishes become relics.

Lordy knows they are not beautiful, but, they carry stories. And maybe that’s all any object really becomes in the end. A story someone hopes survives them.

I would prefer our children skip that particular rite of passage.

And right now, as university acceptance letters are arriving and suitcases are being pulled down from closets, this matters more than ever. Because our kids are about to leave the familiar rhythm of home and step into places where everything moves faster, feels bigger, and where not everyone is kind. Especially for those coming from small towns, where people wave at strangers, know their neighbors and doors are left unlocked, there is a particular kind of vulnerability. We do not send our children into a world where innocence can be sniffed out like a scent in the air… unprepared.

So here it is. I love giving unsolicited advice and suggestions but these are not them. There are the rules: steadfast, hard and clean. The kind that keeps you alive, intact, and able to come home with stories instead of becoming one.

And let me say one more thing before we begin, you will make mistakes. You will have nights you wish you could rewind, decisions that make you wince in the morning light. That is part of being young and alive and learning your way through the world.

But these? These are not the places where you experiment.

These are non-negotiables. Which means you don’t have to think about them in the moment. You don’t have to weigh options or read the room or wonder if you’re overreacting. The decision has already been made for you by your wizened elders.

That is what makes them powerful. They remove hesitation.

1) I don’t care how inconvenient it is: who you arrive with is who you leave with. I don’t care if someone meets someone. I don’t care if plans change. I don’t care if so-and-so wants to go to a different frat party. Nobody gets peeled off like a grape in the night.

2) Nobody makes their own way home. Not the friend who insists she’s fine. Not the one who is “just going to stay a little longer.” Not the one who met a guy who seems “really nice.” We have centuries of evidence that “really nice” requires a waiting period.

3) Your drink is your responsibility. It does not leave your hand. Not for dancing, not for the bathroom, not for a flirtation you think might turn into a rom-com. If you put it down, it is no longer yours. Let it go with grace.

4) You watch every drink poured or you open it yourself. This may sound paranoid but, in reality, it is living in the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.

5) You always have your own way home. Enough money. A charged phone. A plan that does not depend on anyone else’s mood, sobriety, or goodwill. This type of independence is a safety feature.

6) Before you even step out the door, someone knows where you are. Location shared. Not after something feels off. Before.

And now I am going to tell you something that was given to me, and it changed the way I move through the world. I was trained by Gavin de Becker, who wrote The Gift of Fear. And he taught something that sounds simple and is, in fact, life-altering:

Fear is not weakness. Fear is a gift.

That sudden shift in your stomach. The tightening in your throat. The inexplicable sense that something is not quite right, even when everything looks fine on the surface. That is your body recognizing a pattern your conscious mind has not yet caught up to.

It is instinct. It is intuition. It is intelligence. It is protection.

And it must be listened to above all else.

Which brings me to this:

7) If your gut shifts, even slightly, you leave the situation immediately. Your intuition is older than your social training. It has been keeping people alive since before language. Do not override it to be polite. No need for long goodbyes of explanations, just leave.

And here is the companion truth, the one that makes all of this usable in real time:

8) “No” is a complete sentence.

No softening, explaining, negotiating or smile required.

No.

No one is entitled to you. Not because they bought you a drink or you laughed at their joke. Not because you got into the car or walked into the party. You can change your mind at any point. That is not rudeness. That is sovereignty.

And let’s just settle this once and for all: you are allowed to be rude if it keeps you safe.

In fact, I would encourage it.

You do not need to illuminate yourself for strangers. You do not need to be accommodating, charming, or agreeable at the expense of your own safety. Whoever you are “rude” to will recover. They will go on to have a perfectly fine evening.

You, on the other hand, deserve to go home.

9) Stay sober enough to recognize when a situation turns. You need to be able to walk out the door under your own command.

10) Bathroom trips are a group activity. So is leaving. If your friend disappears, that becomes the only plotline that matters.

11) Have a code word. Something ridiculous and specific. The kind of phrase that would never come up organically. When it is said, everything stops and you go. No questions. No eye rolls. No “are you sure?” You just go.

12) Lock your doors. Every. Single. Time. Dorm rooms. Apartments. Cars. Do not rely on the goodness of strangers when a lock exists.

13) Do not broadcast your location in real time. Post your photos later, when you are home, feet up, safe. Let the world admire you on a delay.

14) Walk into spaces like you belong there. Head up. Eyes open. Know where the exits are. Make eye contact. Know where the bathrooms are. Know how you would leave if you needed to leave quickly.

15) Keep your phone charged.

16) Hold onto your essentials. Phone, wallet, keys. These are your lifelines.

17) And here is one that gets ignored far too often because youth has a dangerous relationship with invincibility: do not walk alone at night if you can avoid it. Especially on campus. Campuses are not sealed sanctuaries. They are open systems. Crimes happen there. People come and go. Doors open. Doors fail to lock. Hallways echo. You call campus security. Every time. That is what they are there for. Use them without apology.

18) When a campus or a building goes into lockdown, you do not debate it, and you do not power through your study session as if you are above the moment. You stop. You pay attention. You follow instructions exactly. Those systems exist because something is wrong somewhere. Respect that.

19) If something happens, you tell someone immediately. Silence is not dignity. Silence protects the wrong people.

20) Look out for others. If you see a girl who looks cornered, you check in. If you see a situation that feels off, you intervene or you get help. We move through the world as a watchful network.

Now let me say something to the boys, because this matters more than anyone likes to admit:

1) Your job is not to push. Your job is to protect the space and people around you. If she is drunk, it is a no. Not a maybe. Not a question. A no.

2) Watch your friends. Call them out on bad behavior. Be the man people feel safer because of, not in spite of.

And finally, before you ever walk into your first party:

Nothing good has ever come from ignoring your instincts to avoid disappointing someone.

So disappoint them. Leave early, abruptly, and without explanation. Let them think you are dramatic, difficult, and impossible. Those are small prices to pay for waking up the next morning in your own bed, with your life still entirely your own.

These are the rules passed down from those who have already walked through the dark and made it back.

Not to frighten you.

To make sure you make it back, too.

Floral surplus; paper towels deficit.

Because we are now living at the mercy of drones. Insurance companies, the very gods we pay handsomely to remain in business, are flying cameras over our homes conducting aerial inspections of our worthiness.

And the audacity is breathtaking.

My neighbors across the street have a house so pristine it’s the home an HOA would use as an example to shame the rest of us. Bermuda grass is terrified to make an appearance. Weeds? Fallen leaves? Absolutely not.

A drone flew over their house, took photos of their roof, and their insurance company sent them a notice: replace it within three weeks or lose your policy.

The roof had ten years left on the warranty. Ten.

In California, you bow to the insurance gods because if, God forbid, you lose your policy…good luck getting another one. We do not mess around by angering the gods. Paying tribute to the underworld of underwriting is a state hobby.

Applying and actually getting a homeowner’s policy is akin to applying to the Ivy League and actually securing a spot. You present yourself, your property, your moral character, your brand-spankin’ new $35,000 roof, and you hope… pray, you’re deemed acceptable. That they’ll bless you, kiss your forehead like the Pope… and not smite you at renewal.

So my neighbors replaced a perfectly fine roof. Of course they did.

And here’s the part I can’t shake: If they can come for them… what hope is there for the rest of us?

Because 99.99% of people do not have the time, discipline, or temperament to maintain a property like that. They are the suburban gold standard. And it didn’t matter.

Here in Visalia, homeowners along the St. Johns River had their policies canceled outright without notification. And why? Because the city only cuts the vegetation along the riverbanks once a year. And the homeowners suffer the consequences. No warning. No conversation. Just…poof, gone.

So I was out there, sweeping, raking, reorganizing the woodpile, thinning a rose arbor that is currently performing like it’s pumped on steroids. I was looting my own garden, cutting armfuls of blooms and bringing them inside to make bouquets.

This is after thinning. Allegedly. I fear it’s not done with me yet.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, it got meta as hell. Because I realized I was directing, performing and editing...for a drone. Bathed in mosquito spray and sunscreen, I was blocking scenes, composing angles, adjusting visual clutter like I was shooting an Academy Award–winning short film titled “Please Don’t Cancel Me.”

I caught myself thinking: If the drone shoots this from directly overhead, how does this read?

Not is this clean? but is this convincing?
Does it give: she’s trying, keep her or: she’s slipping, cancel her.

Hollywood cancellation is bad. Insurance cancellation? Catastrophic.

I found a metal trash can full of leaves and rainwater operating as a luxury mosquito resort. Of course we have mosquitoes. I’d built them a spa. A maternity ward.

That got cut from the film immediately.

Because now, I am a production designer for an invisible audience. And that’s the part that lingers.

We’re maintaining our homes at gunpoint. We’re staging them. We’re letting them perform for the drones, a camera we don’t see, a standard we didn’t agree to, and for companies we are already paying. Unreal.

A small offering to the gods of overgrowth. The watering can has been promoted to floral director.

At one point, a scene out of Wayne’s World replayed over and over in my head. All of us out there in our yards, one bad aerial shot away from dropping to our knees:

We’re not worthy. We’re not worthy.

So we make offerings and bow at the feet of gods we ourselves fund. A sacrifice we are rushing to perform. Now, I will go to the north side of the house and sweep the walkway.

You never know who’s watching.

(gate clicks shut)

A few weeks ago, in the process of changing a booking for a flight, the screen prompted me to pay for checked luggage, and I burst into tears. The kind that comes out of nowhere and makes you wonder if you’ve briefly lost your effing mind.

It wasn’t about the luggage.

It was the sudden realization that time is no longer this vast, infinite landscape. I have been moving through my life like one of Faulkner’s long, breathless thousand-word sentences I can’t quite track from beginning to end, until it hit me that there is, in fact, a period waiting at the end of the sentence.

There are things I can do today that I may not be able to do ten years from now. Places I can still go. Risks I can still take. Versions of myself that are still within reach… but not indefinitely.

And once you see that, really see it, you can’t unsee it.

Around the same time, I was talking to a friend who described herself, without irony, as “vanilla.” Beige clothes. Beige rooms. A life arranged carefully around other people’s needs. No particular desires of her own. Just white on white over white. And in that moment, I felt true grief.

Because I recognized the danger in it. The slow fading. The way a life can become smaller not all at once, but by degrees so subtle you don’t notice until you’re standing in it, wondering how you disappeared.

But then something shifted and my friend, my dear friend, began to see it too.

And it reminded me of Shirley Valentine… that moment when a woman who has been talking to her kitchen wall finally turns, looks at her life, and says, almost in disbelief, “Is this it?”

That question… Is this it?… is the beginning of the awakening for many women my age.

That conversation opened something. It was like coming upon a series of old gates I didn’t realize I’d already passed through… moments where something in me stood up and said no, or yes, or I choose.

I started tracing them back. One by one. This is a piece about those gates. About refusal. Refusal to be diminished, erased, or to go quietly while still breathing.

Gate One: The Moment Life Stopped Just Happening

I was fifteen, sitting in an English classroom, when my teacher read Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.”

I was a pretty insipid teenager so I wasn’t contemplating symbolism or metaphors. But something in those lines landed like a tornado touching down.

Oh, I realized. I can choose.

Until then, life felt like something that happened to you. Family. School. Expectations. You reacted. You complied. You went along.

And then the moment cracked open.

My teacher started her period. In the middle of English class. She was wearing a white dress with tiny flowers. There was blood on the back. The class knew. Kids laughed. Pointed.

I leaned forward and told her quietly. I was the only one who did.

She adjusted herself and kept teaching.

I now realize I was holding two truths at once. She was opening a gate for us, showing us that life could be larger than the narrow road handed to us. And at the same time, she was paying the quiet cost of being a female human being in public.

That was the day I made the choice to speak up and refuse to be silent because it’s easier.

English class mattered more after that. Poetry mattered. Because it wasn’t just language anymore. It was a doorway.

Once that opens, life never goes back to merely happening to you.

Gate Two: Refusal

There is a poem that lives in my gut. Dylan Thomas:

Do not go gentle into that good night…

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

I read it as a poem about diminishment, not death. I think of little girls who once had strong opinions, colors, appetites, and then grew up to become women who folded themselves smaller over time. We were handed the message early and often that our opinions were too loud, our needs too much, and that the proper shape of a woman was smaller, quieter, easier to overlook. “More feminine,” is how it was phrased.

God bless the women who said, fuck that.

Because this isn’t accidental. Women are softened. Forgotten. Especially as we age. Especially when we stop being decorative. We are told to settle. To be grateful. To quiet down.

Once, a therapist told me I was “too extra.” I stopped seeing him immediately.

No. I will not beige myself into palatability or tuck my fire away.

The vow in this poem is about remaining alive. And fighting like hell to stay that way.

Gate Three: Fear Does Not Get the Final Vote

Audre Lorde writes:

So it is better to speak
remembering we were never meant to survive.

This poem speaks to me because it dismantles the lie that courage belongs to the unafraid. Fear has always been here. For women. For anyone paying attention.

As a Black woman, I was told exactly what I would become. A statistic. A cautionary tale. When I adopted a newborn and chose to raise him alone, people said it plainly. Not cruelly. Calmly. As if they were stating that the high today would reach 96 degrees.

Fear was real. But I did it anyway. That was my “fuck that.”

Lorde names the truth: silence does not protect you, compliance is not safety and survival was never promised.

None of us are coming out of this alive. Once you accept that, something loosens.

I spent years taking children beyond the small worlds they were handed. North Africa. Turkey. Greece. The Caribbean. Not as tourists. As travelers. For context and truth.

Was it risky? Yes. Was I afraid? Constantly. Fear was never the reason to stop. This is the gate where fear is allowed to speak, and then told to step aside.

It does not get the final vote.

Gate Four: Urgency Without Panic

John Keats wrote about the terror of dying before he could empty his mind onto the page, before everything inside him had the chance to exist. At this age, that fear sharpens. Time is no longer generous. It moves quickly now, and there is no guarantee I will have the time I once assumed was mine. The danger is leaving things unopened, unsaid, unexpressed. Urgency has stripped away hesitation.

I am not a great technical writer. I still trip over punctuation. Commas rebel. Tenses slip. Once, that would have stopped me. I wanted perfection. I no longer have that luxury. Now I step out of my own way and ask for help. Some edit mercilessly, others gently. And sometimes, the urgency is louder than all of that. I don’t ask for help at all. I just send it out into the world as it is, imperfect, unfinished, with commas out of place and sentences that don’t quite behave.

But it’s no longer trapped inside me.

The work moves forward. The ideas keep coming, even when the mechanics falter.

This is the gate where I stop standing in my own way.

Gate Five: Grace

Cavafy’s Ithaka reminds us: “Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey. Without her you would not have set out.”

When you’re younger, arrival feels like everything. Proof. Safety. Relief. You think the point is to get there.

I have a visceral fear of flying. So now, I anesthetize the journey. A couple of Ambien, and before the plane has even left the gate, I am off in Lala Land. When I wake up, I am in another country. For years, I thought that meant I was failing some kind of spiritual test. That I was missing the point.

Age has softened that judgment.

Some passages are meant to be inhabited. Some are meant to be survived. Even when I slept through parts of the journey, the journey still carried me. It did its work anyway. I was changed anyway.

I understand more now. I forgive more.

Gate Six: Declaration

There is a poem I don’t analyze.

Invictus.

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate;
I am the captain of my soul.

This is jurisdiction. Sovereignty.

I do not control everything that happens to me. Bodies fail. Systems break. People disappoint. Time presses. And yes, I disappoint people. I fail. Sometimes miserably.

But that is not the same as surrender. I adjust the rudder. I decide who I am while it happens. I am not gentle in the way I was told to be. But I am still here.

And I will not give up the helm.

Living Lightly

Not going quietly doesn’t mean carrying everything. It means learning what to put down: expectations, inherited narratives, the constant pressure to be palatable.

Living lightly isn’t fragility. It’s just having your hands free again.

I don’t know which gate you’re standing at.

Maybe it’s the moment you realize life isn’t just happening to you.
Maybe it’s the refusal.
Maybe fear is loud.
Maybe time has started to feel… finite.

We don’t move through these gates in order. We circle back, stall, miss them and find them again later.

That’s the arc of aging.

Not shrinking. Just getting clearer about what you’re no longer willing to hand over.

I’m still figuring it out myself.

But I do know this: I’m not going quietly.

Your kid goes off to college, and suddenly the house is quiet. You rediscover watercolors, painting, or perhaps photography. You travel. You take yoga at ten in the morning on a Tuesday and feel vaguely sexy about it. Empty nest. Freedom. Exhale.

Me, imagining that once my child left for college I would spend afternoons learning to draw and watercolor. Gentle reader, my workload doubled.

I am here to tell you, lovingly and with documentation, that this story is a lie.

When my son left for college, first for UC Berkeley and later for the London School of Economics, my workload as a parent multiplied. It became more technical, more bureaucratic, more invisible, and in many ways far more demanding than when he lived under my roof. An extra load or two of laundry per week ain’t shit compared to negotiating the British Consulate in New York.

He was accepted into London School of Economics. I opened a command center.

This is the part no one warns you about. When your kid gets into a competitive university, especially more than one, yes, you celebrate but then you need to get your hustle on.

You start with a spreadsheet. Actually, multiple spreadsheets. One for schools. One for offers. One for scholarships. One for financial aid packages. Pros. Cons. Deadlines. Housing. Programs. Medical insurance. Prestige versus cost. And then comes the delicate diplomacy. Which university can be pitted against another to see who might offer more aid if asked just right. This is not theoretical. This is strategy.

All of this happens while your kid is finishing one degree and preparing for the next, working twelve to fourteen hours a day between classes, papers, study groups, and usually a part-time job because for some reason, rent and groceries insist on being paid in real money.

Then there’s FAFSA. And the IRS.

Anyone who survived the pre-integration years knows the particular hell of digging up tax forms, confirming filings, making sure everything was submitted on time so the numbers would align with financial aid deadlines. One missed form, one late filing, and aid can evaporate instantly. The pressure is exquisite.

Layer on scholarships. Every one wants a different essay. Different prompts. Different word counts. Different emotional tones. Some want grit. Some want gratitude. Some want adversity wrapped neatly in a bow. For every scholarship won, there are thank-you letters that must be written properly. Not perfunctory. Not sloppy. Earnest. Gracious. Strategic.

And then there are the emails.

Hundreds of them. Every day. University accounts. Personal accounts. Housing. Financial aid. Advisors. Professors. Internship coordinators. Study abroad offices. Each one with deadlines, portals, passwords, attachments, instructions written as though the reader has absolutely nothing else to do with their life.

Which brings me to study abroad, that charming little side quest people talk about as if it’s a semester of sunlit cafés, baguettes, to-die-for cheese. Our babies become briefly, deeply insufferable: smoking Gauloises, wearing turtlenecks, and passionately arguing the finer points of Jean-Paul Sartre in public, as though this was always their destiny rather than something that began three weeks ago with espresso. What they don’t mention is that study abroad is a full-scale logistical campaign requiring the organizational skills of coordinating a NATO summit.

He’s abroad mastering café au lait. I’m at home becoming the State Department, crisis department included.

It’s passports tracked like contraband in an international sting operation. Student visas that require very specific amounts of money to sit in very specific bank accounts for very specific lengths of time. Money you cannot touch, move, or be one dollar short on, because if you miss the cutoff, your child simply does not qualify.

There are forms for the school. Forms for the country. Biometric appointments that exist only in cities fifty miles away only on Tuesdays between 9:12 and 9:19 a.m. Documents that must be mailed, not emailed, to embassies that do not answer phones. And then there’s the waiting. It’s watching your child’s passport, the one and only document standing between them and another country, disappear into the U.S. mail system on its way to the British Consulate, weeks before departure, knowing no one answers phones, no one gives updates, and all you can do is place it in the bowels of bureaucracy and hope it claws its way back out in time.

And of course, on the one day that actually matters, the biometric appointment, the photo that will live on their visa for the next ten years, your kid wakes up late, unshaven, shaggy, and looking less like an international student and more like someone who will be detained for questioning. All of this, just to get permission to sit in another classroom. In England.

Presented with this photograph, an entire government said, yes, let him in. If I were the consulate, I would have had follow up questions.

And while this is happening, your student is in class. Writing papers. Studying. Working. Running on caffeine and fear. They do not have time to spend three hours on hold with a bank or decipher whether the letter needs to say “available funds” or “liquid assets” to satisfy an embassy clerk.

So you do it.

You track the accounts. You count the days. You FedEx documents and obsessively refresh tracking numbers only to discover, after reading the instructions carefully, thoroughly, reverently, that the one thing you somehow missed is this: FedEx is not, in fact, acceptable. The only guaranteed way to get the visa back on time is UPS.

Not FedEx. UPS.

And now the waiting becomes unbearable, because this isn’t abstract anymore. This is your fault. You are suddenly living with the very real possibility that your kid will not make it to England on time to start school. That one missed footnote, one buried instruction, could derail an entire academic year.

When my son’s visa finally came back, approved by the British Consulate, it was four or five days before departure. Close enough that I still remember the exact feeling in my body when it arrived, relief so sharp it almost hurt. Until then, it was pure limbo. No updates. No reassurance. Just the horror of knowing that you did everything right except the one thing that mattered most. And when the visa arrives at the eleventh hour, everyone congratulates the student on their independence.

This is what I mean when I say the work doesn’t end when your kid leaves home. It goes underground.

Universities like to imagine students as fully autonomous adults managing all of this themselves. And yes, they are adults. But they are adults carrying impossible workloads. My son once told me that when he was at Berkeley, if he wandered more than a mile from his desk, panic would set in. Not a flicker, but something that kept expanding, telling him he should be home, studying, working, writing one more draft, doing more. He couldn’t even walk to get a burrito without feeling like he was already failing, like being away from his desk was a moral lapse. That’s not laziness. That’s a system that treats rest as a crime.

I know this isn’t just my experience. Once people start talking honestly, the stories pour out. A friend of mine, Harvard Law educated, stepped away from her executive career while her two oldest kids were in university because someone had to manage the administrative back end of their lives.

Even at the graduate level, this doesn’t stop. I know a student earning a doctorate and a master’s simultaneously. When it came time to apply for jobs, there were simply no hours left. His wife did the applications. All 145 of them.

And I know how impossible the expectations are because I worked in undergraduate admissions at UCLA. I was one of the people reading those application essays. I saw firsthand what was being asked of teenagers and young adults. The volume. The polish. The emotional sophistication. The assumption that they could perform insight, originality, resilience, and flawless executive function all at once. At 17 years old.

Yes, some families pay thousands for professional services. Most don’t. Most muddle through with late nights, shared documents, frantic emails, and parents holding up a system that insists it doesn’t need them.

Universities preach independence while relying on unpaid parental labor to function. This creates something like an administrative apartheid, not in the racial or historical sense, but in the structural one. Labor is rigidly separated. Students are credited with independence. Parents absorb the work. The system hums because that labor remains invisible.

So no, when your kid leaves for college, the nest doesn’t empty. It just goes digital. It moves into spreadsheets, portals, IRS transcripts, FAFSA deadlines, thank-you letters, visa applications, and inboxes that never stop refreshing.

Congratulations. Your kid got in.

Now get a spreadsheet.

Morocco, however, was not done with us yet.

By then, it had already taught us to expect the unexpected. But still, when the van axle snapped, it felt like the universe cracking its knuckles and saying, slow down.

Because our group was so large, we traveled in two vans. On the road back to Marrakesh, the road that would eventually carry us to the airport and home, one of them failed. Metal gave way. The axle snapped. And just like that, the pilgrimage split.

Rolling smooth through the middle of nowhere. Five minutes before fate tapped the brakes on the white van and reminded us who’s really driving.

Half of us were stranded on the roadside in the middle of Morocco, one van immobilized, dust rising around it. Karen was in that group, along with another adult and several kids. No Lahcen. No anchor. Just heat, nervousness, and waiting.

The rest of us were ferried ahead into a café down the road where men sipped mint tea in silence, and where a chorus of our kids promptly ordered Coca-Colas and French fries, then broke into “Bohemian Rhapsody.” The men shook their heads, entertained, as our group sang about Galileo and Beelzebub.

While half our group followed a shepherd into the middle of nowhere, we were holed up at a roadside café singing at the top of our lungs and playing Two Truths and a Lie with men who had been strangers an hour earlier.

It was absurd, quaint, sweet, one of those scenes that travel gifts you every once in a while. But it was nothing compared to what the stranded group experienced.

The Shepherd

Our other half waited where the van had died, on the shoulder of a highway that cut through nothing. No town. No buildings. No dogs barking, no voices, no call to prayer drifting on the air. Just scrub and stone and miles and miles of miles and miles. The kind of landscape that makes you suddenly aware of how small a human body is.

At first there was noise. Confusion. Everyone talking at once. The driver crouched, peered, made phone calls. And then Karen looked underneath the van and said, calmly, with the confidence of someone who has lived a full life and survived it, “The driveshaft just fell out. This bus is going nowhere.”

No one quite believed her.

Then the noise subsided. The phones went quiet. The helpers left to summon parts that would take hours. Cars passed occasionally, fast and indifferent, and each time the silence closed in again. When local helpers arrived, they spoke in Arabic, circling the van, pointing, gesturing. And then suddenly the guide turned, pointed at Karen, and the whole group stared at her in wonder. She waved. She later told me she gave them the short version of the time a driveshaft fell out of an overstuffed U-Haul on a harrowing road in Ukiah, years ago, back when life was wilder and less forgiving. Experience, it turns out, is a universal language.

They waited. Watching the light shift. Watching the driver negotiate on the phone, his voice rising and falling. The mid-afternoon sun tilted. The horizon shimmered.

And then, from that shimmer, a man appeared.

Not approaching from the road. Not cresting a hill. Just there. A shepherd. Staff in hand. Goats trailing behind him as if they had stepped out of scripture, bells tinkling against the silence. No dust plume. No warning. One moment the land was empty, and the next it was not.

Karen told me later that her heart lodged in her throat, just a little bit. She and the other adult were trying to haggle with their fear because adulthood doesn’t make you braver; it just makes you more aware of what can go wrong. But they also knew they couldn’t leave the kids sitting on a highway with cars flying by. When the shepherd lifted his staff, gesturing a wordless come, all of them rose.

Together, they followed him.

The path was dust and silence, punctuated by the soft bleat of goats. The shepherd moved without urgency, as if he had been waiting for them all along. He led them to his home, a modest place of mud walls and cool shadow. Inside, he laid out what he had: mint tea in small glasses, a plate of cookies. Hospitality without fanfare.

And then time stretched. The replacement van did not come for a very long time.

Hours of sitting on a stranger’s floor, sipping tea, nibbling cookies, watching goats nose at the doorway. Three hours for the kids to look at one another, eyes wide with the shock of being somewhere so entirely other. Three hours for the adults to balance their concern and their trust in the same trembling hands, knowing, with more years behind them, just how fragile and how rare such moments are.

Inside the shepherd’s hut, the children sat silent and wide-eyed, fear written plainly on their faces as a blue curtain billowed like something alive. They didn’t know it yet, but this was the moment that would later glow brightest, the instant before fear softened into wonder.

By the time the van was fixed, they had crossed some invisible threshold. Karen said they returned wild-eyed, lit from within. The kids poured the story out with urgency, their voices tumbling over one another as though the telling itself was part of the miracle. It was Exodus, and Tinariwen and Grimm’s fairy tale rolled into one.

For years after, it wasn’t the kasbahs or even the Sahara they spoke of first. It was this: the shepherd. The man who emerged out of the shimmer with goats at his heels and, with nothing more than a gesture, led them into his home until the road opened again.

Was he an angel? A mirage? Just a man doing what shepherds have always done? It doesn’t matter. He was the story. The one they carried. The one I heard secondhand, over and over, until I could almost see it myself: twelve kids and two adults, cross-legged on a shepherd’s floor in Morocco, drinking tea as if it were holy water.

The Communal Table

On our last night, Lahcen gave us one more gift. He arranged for us to eat in the home of a Moroccan family, twenty-six strangers welcomed into a modest living room lined with cushions.

We sat shoulder to shoulder, passing plates of lamb tagine stewed with prunes and hard-boiled eggs, tearing bread still steaming from the oven, scooping up Berber salad bright with parsley and tomatoes. Their child, shy and toddling, smiled among us, while the parents watched with quiet pride as their food disappeared into our hungry mouths.

After a long day, Lahcen arranged for something rarer than a restaurant: dinner in a family’s home. We sat cross-legged on the floor of their living room, tearing warm bread by hand, eating from a communal bowl of Berber salad.

After the shepherd, this dinner felt like the grounding epilogue. If the shepherd had been biblical, this was the gospel of daily bread. No goats trailing out of scripture. No shimmer on the horizon. Just food shared, walls dissolving, strangers made kin for a night.

Coming Full Circle

By the time we rolled back into Marrakesh, Morocco had carved itself into us.

Take one of our travelers who I affectionately call Cindy Lou Who. Twelve years old, all blonde hair and blue eyes, the very picture of what her evangelical parents feared would make her a target. Before she left, they sat her down and filled her ears with warnings: whispered prayers, kidnappers, strangers who would snatch her away. Fear was the water she had been swimming in since birth.

She carried it with her onto the plane. She carried it through airports, through the van rides, clutching it like a talisman she didn’t even choose. Fear had been handed to her as her inheritance.

But Morocco did not honor her parents’ script. It gave her olives warm from the market. It gave her donkeys brushing past scooters in Fes, a shepherd offering cookies, stars that burned holes in the sky. It gave her days where strangers showed kindness without agenda, nights where she danced to drums without self-consciousness, mornings where she woke unafraid to breakfast buffets teetering on feasts.

And in eight days, she changed. The girl who had left trembling at shadows returned furious at her parents’ fear-based worldview. She had seen more. She had tasted more. She had grown into someone who could look at her parents and see not flawless guardians, not omniscient protectors, but humans. Humans who were fallible. Humans who were not always right.

That realization is no less than a revolution. It cracked the foundation she had been standing on, but it also gave her a new one, her own. And she was not alone. Each of those twenty kids had crossed their own thresholds, small and large. They had left California as children whose world was narrow, rehearsed, afraid. They returned as emissaries. Changed.

Eight days. Nine, if you count the jet lag. That was all it took for Morocco to make pilgrims of them.

Epilogue

The adults were changed too. My son Cayman, steady as a compass. The nurse who once saved my life, now saving sanity with his calm. Karen, whose awe was so immense she tried to smuggle Morocco itself back with her, rock by rock. And me, watching them all, realizing that what we had stumbled into wasn’t just a trip, but a pilgrimage we hadn’t even known we were on.

And Lahcen was no longer just a guide. Seven years later, he is still my friend. Still proof that travel isn’t about where you go, but about who you meet, and how they stay with you.

Lahcen, steady as the hills. Watching the road ahead, guarding the story behind us. When things wobbled, he stood firm.

Looking back, Morocco was absurd. It was biblical. It was beautiful. It gave us roses, kasbahs, storms, shepherds, and stars.

It gave us reminders too: that sometimes the axle must break to slow us down. That strangers can become anchors. That children can outgrow the fears their parents hand them.

So yes, stop and smell the roses. In Morocco. In your own garden. Wherever life plants you. Because you never know when the axle will break, when the shepherd will appear, or when the stars, or a child’s courage, will demand your awe.

And with that, dear reader, I am latching the garden gate for tonight. Morocco, and her lessons, will still be there in the morning, waiting. 🌙

You ever notice that the big moments in life never arrive gracefully? They come barreling in sideways, like a cat thrown into a bathtub, claws everywhere, and yet those are the moments that brand themselves into you forever. The desert had one of those waiting for us.

We left the camp riding high on that half-feral thrill you get when you’ve slept heavily in what can only be described as a lived fairytale. The kids were vibrating with excitement, because this was it. The Big One. The “we actually rode camels in the Sahara Desert” moment they’d be telling at parties for the next sixty years.

The sand storm was still raging, but the intensity had died down to being, let’s say, survivable. Still aggressive, needlepoint, face-scouring, like a microdermabrasion treatment from hell. We wrapped our heads in turbans like our lives depended on it, tucking in every wisp of hair, every vulnerable inch of ear, and nose.

But then we mounted the camels. Camels are no joke.

Our Berber guide, indigenous to the Sahara, knew the way back where none of us could see one.

These beasts are huge, regal, lumbering creatures whose gaits feel nothing like a horse. Horses glide. Camels heave. Suddenly you are eight feet up in the air thinking, “This is how I die. Right here, in a desert far, far away, clutching a saddle that looks like a DIY craft project from 500 BC.”

The line of camels rocking through the dunes in single file . . . all the movies, the books, the childhood cartoons, they don’t prepare you for how real it is. The silence, the vastness of it. You’re a speck. A very nervous speck with a turban holding on for dear life, every muscle flexed, eyes scanning, minds wondering how it is even possible to lead us out of miles of miles of shifting dunes. No landmarks to guide the way. Changing scenery every moment.

About twenty minutes in, I glanced left and froze. There, at the base of a dune, I saw what looked like a dead camel. A great hulking body blending into the sand, half-claimed by the desert already. Maybe it was a mirage, another trick of wind and light, but I felt that jolt. The reminder that this place is as unforgiving as it is beautiful. The Sahara doesn’t do sentimentality. It takes, it gives, it buries, it reveals. A whole theology of sand.

We swayed on those camels for what felt like both five minutes and five centuries until finally Merzouga appeared ahead of us like a mirage.

The desert left its mark on us. The sand ground into our scalps, gums, camera lenses, and souls. There was a hush that settled over twenty American teenagers who hadn’t collectively stopped talking since birth. Even after we piled back into the vans, dust-covered and delirious, skin polished down to its emotional and literal nub by what felt like 40-grit sandpaper, it was there. Awe. That morning, a part of us had been stripped clean, and left out there in the Sahara, never to be retrieved, thank God. A memory sharpened by a thousand tiny needles of wind.

Our next destination had a name so intoxicating it practically purred when you said it.

The Valley of the Roses. I had imagined petals and perfume.
Instead, there were buildings, riverbanks, and the work of living.

When Lahcen said that the Valley of the Roses was our next destination, something unhinged and operatic unfurled in my imagination. I blame every myth, fable, and illustrated book of wonders I eagerly swallowed as a child. We were heading toward part Hanging Gardens of Babylon, part Greek idyll, part Moroccan mirage.

My brain went straight into a fantasy-fueled legend. Maybe a valley tucked between the dunes like Persephone’s private garden, the kind Hades himself would have stolen her for. Or something older, something North African, an Atargatis secret garden of a Berber queen, hidden from invading empires and still tended by the descendants of priestesses who whispered to the moon. Ever the unrepentant romantic, I pictured palm oases shimmering like illusions, Barbary lions from biblical times padding silently through date groves, springwater trickling through hand-built terraces. A whole valley blooming in defiance of everything around it.

A flicker of something past entered my mind. Production Designer, Anton Furst describing how he envisioned Tim Burton’s Gotham City for the film, Batman, as if "hell had erupted through the pavement and kept on going". The Valley of the Roses was going to be the flip side, where heaven ruptured reality. There was going to be a shimmer. A Shangri-La tucked into a fold of the Atlas mountains, where the air would turn cool and sweet, and the world would soften into pinks and reds so lush they’d make Eden feel positively boring.

That’s what the name alone did to me. The Valley of the Roses had already unlocked something in me. A door to a fantasy world. I kept expecting that at any moment we’d crest a hill and see it.

We rounded a final bend.

And instead of paradise, we pulled up to — a building.

A small one. Plain. Beige. The kind of “nothing to see here” structure that could just as easily have sold spare tractor tires. I blinked.

But then we stepped inside.

And that’s when the real magic hit.

The place was filled with enormous sheets laid out across tables and floors, each one covered in mounds of rose petals in every shade imaginable. Pink. Red. White. Champagne blush.

The roses were being readied for their own transformation: dried, sifted, coaxed, pressed, their fragrant souls destined for a few vials of oil so precious it makes gold look vulgar.

It hit me how absurdly sacred a single petal is. The thing you’d sweep off your lawn without a second thought was treated here like treasure.

Lahcen had sequenced the days with care; but, our bodies and spirits had finally caught up to the speed of it all. The camel ride arrived first, too early in the usual narrative arc, a resolution delivered before the story had time to rise, leaving us wrung out and strangely consecrated before breakfast. It felt like being delivered from Dorothy’s tornado after being lifted abruptly into something mythic before we’d agreed to land. By the time we reached the Valley of the Roses, I watched the distillery demonstrations with polite attention, already emptied, already in that post-ecstatic flatness that comes midway through any real spiritual journey. This is the quiet crisis no one warns you about. The point when jet lag finally settles in, when the romance has burned clean through, and you begin to wonder what you thought you were going to find in the second half of the trip. Not disappointment exactly, but a threshold, a pause in the story.

While the distillery demonstration continued, I ducked out to find the bathroom. And that’s where the moment happened, the kind that doesn’t announce itself with fanfare, but immediately answers the question of spiritual crisis.

A bathroom matron stood near the sink, quietly waiting. She was small, nearly folded in half, her spine shaped like a question mark. She carried a rag and a little plastic bucket, moving between stalls with the slow, practiced care of someone who had been doing this job for decades, maybe her whole life.

When she looked up at me, her eyes had that mixture of pride and exhaustion that always breaks me. Her dish for tips sat empty on the scrubbed sink tiles. It asked for the equivalent of a quarter.

Twenty-five American cents.

Something inside me cracked. Not loudly. A hairline split in the part of me that had been taking in the petals, the perfume, the ancient rituals of beauty.

I wanted to empty my wallet into her hands, all of it. I wanted to hand her my purse, my passport, my entire earthly security system and say, Here.

But I didn’t want to insult her dignity, either. So I slipped her two dollars.

When I stepped back out, the kids were still swirling their bottles or rose oil and inhaling like they were auditioning for a perfume commercial. We piled back into the vans, the rose scent trailing us.

And Morocco, God love her, wasn’t finished with us yet.

We pressed on, the land shifting again, pulling us into the Route of the Thousand Kasbahs.

I was struck by how lavish the names were, and how restrained the land beneath them remained.

Mud-brick fortresses lined the road, their walls the same red as the mountains they rose from. Some still stood firm, others crumbled in on themselves. They whispered to us as we drove past: We were here before you. We will be here after.

By nightfall we reached the red cliffs of the Dades Gorge. Our hotel, appropriately named Babylon, was carved into the mountainside, its walls the same color as the rock. For the first time in days, the storm was gone. The desert’s roar was behind us, the road’s rattle silenced.

The Hotel Babylon. . . sleeping there felt cave-deep and grounding, as if the earth itself had taken you in for the night.

After dinner, we stepped out onto our balconies, and the world opened its mouth.

Above us stretched a sky I had only seen pictures of from telescopes deeply probing space. The Milky Way spilled across the heavens, galaxies upon galaxies coming into view. The stars weren’t polite dots as they are back home, faint pinpricks over the glow of Walmart parking lots. These stars were wild, infinite and unfathomable.

The kids went quiet. Even the loudest of them, the ones who measured time in TikToks and playlists, stood still with their mouths slightly open. Awe doesn’t need a translation app.

I thought of the bathroom woman again, her bent back, of the Kleenex boy weaving between cars, of the desert storm that battered us and the camel half-buried in the Sahara. Under that sky, they weren’t footnotes. They were constellations. Their lives, their smallness, their dignity, all of it part of the same endless pattern I was standing beneath.

And I thought: this is the sermon we came for. Not the kasbahs, not even the roses, but this, a universe that stops you cold and demands you remember your scale.

That night, I lay on the balcony floor, back pressed against cold tile, and felt the stars burn through me. This sky gave us perspective.

By morning, we would be back on the road, heading toward another lesson, another fracture in the itinerary that would reveal itself as a gift. But in that moment, we were small, and smallness had never felt so holy.

From the back of the van, one of our American boys laughed. He lifted an invisible tissue, waving it like a flag of mockery, not realizing how sharp the gesture landed. He wasn’t intending to be cruel, just trying to make the others laugh, to earn his small slice of belonging. But it stung anyway. When I travel, my skin thins. Every small unkindness scrapes raw. Maybe it’s the glare of the road, or the way poverty sits closer to the surface out here, impossible to ignore. Even the others went quiet for a beat, as if they too had glimpsed what I did.

I might have sounded a bit harsh.

“Knock it off,” I said, turning hard toward him. “You flew halfway across the world to laugh at a kid working for his dinner? That boy’s hustling to live while you’re here playing tourist.”

The boy who had laughed is on the spectrum, and sometimes the world only makes sense to him in pieces. So I broke it down piece by piece: selling cigarettes, gum, tissues on a corner isn’t shameful. It is survival. It has value. It is dignity.

I watched the mocking fade from his face, replaced by something slower, more thoughtful. A click of comprehension. After that, none of them laughed at hawkers again. Instead, they started to see them as lifelines of the street: Men, women, children, and grandparents weaving survival out of small trades, one lighter, one box of mints, one Kleenex at a time.

That was the last lesson of the cities. The final recalibration before the desert.

The road bent south. Mountains thinned, forests gave way, and the land stretched itself into vast ochre silence. By the time we reached Merzouga, the air itself seemed to hold its breath.

Merzouga, where the dunes glow in gold and rose. I still can’t get over it. The colors didn’t just brush the horizon; they seared themselves into my memory.

The road ended, and the sand began. Inside the bus, the noise died down to a hush of nerves. The kids had been waiting for this moment since the trip began. This was Morocco. The Morocco they’d seen in movies, in picture books, in Disney’s shimmering make-believe, the one with magic carpets and moonlit dunes. But now, the mirage was real, and the anticipation was mindboggling.

You could feel it in the way they straightened up in their seats, faces pressed to the glass. The horizon seemed to move. Camels waited in the distance like creatures pulled from another century, their handlers silent shadows clothed in henna-red djellabas and indigo-blue cheches. It hit the kids all at once: they were about to leave behind everything they knew. The van, the snacks, the Wi-Fi, the predictable. Ahead was nothing but wind and fiercely blowing sand.

This wasn’t a field trip anymore. It was their threshold moment. The trip’s version of a cinematic quinceañera, a bar mitzvah, a first kiss under bad lighting and better intentions, the moment that divides your life into before and after. Every person only gets so many of those: the first love, the first heartbreak, the first city that takes your breath away and never quite gives it back.

And this was theirs, their first brush with the infinite. The first time the world cracked open and whispered, you have no idea how big I am.

But Morocco never lets you do anything simply.

Before the desert, we stopped at a fabric shop designed for people exactly like us. Bolts of cloth rose to the ceiling: Indigo, saffron, crimson, colors pulled straight from the land itself. The men who worked there knew what to do. They wrapped each of us with quick, sure hands. Layer upon layer until hair, mouth, nose disappeared, leaving only our eyes visible. Sunglasses slid into place. Kohl lined their own eyes, not vanity, but survival, a trick that made tears flow just enough to wash away sand.

Wrapped for the desert and hidden in a swirl of pink, the only clue to where I am is the reflection in my sunglasses, a quiet little secret that I am riding a camel across the Sahara.

We were being prepared. Not tourists dressing up. Initiates. Pilgrims. The wrapping wasn’t costume; it was ceremony. We were being veiled, altered, modified into something the desert might accept.

Instead of camels plodding across dunes, we mounted SUVs. The desert storm was deemed too intense to ride in on camels. Six black vehicles cut across the desert like a fleet of beetles, headlights straining through haze. The radios played Tinariwen, desert blues, electric guitars echoing centuries of caravans and rebellion. The beat matched the pulse of our blood. Some of the kids swore they saw a mirage: a Malian palace floating just above the sand.

A Malian palace appeared in the storm, watched us with its dark windows, and vanished. A mirage, maybe. But it felt like something older than imagination, something the desert wanted us to remember.

Cayman saw it. I saw it as well. I still question what I saw, a massive sand-colored structure with darkened windows. From the six different SUVs, someone from each car saw it. Others had no idea what we were talking about. Was it there amidst the Saharan dust storm? Or did the desert simply decide to play with our eyes?

The wind rose, flinging sand like knives. It hissed against the glass and rattled the doors. Outside, the world was obliterated. Obscured. Inside, we were silent, staring out at a horizon that refused to be still.

By the time we reached camp, the storm had become the norm of the desert, as we had nothing to compare it to. The tents glowed crimson and cream, stitched palaces with hand-painted sinks and beds draped in softness. Fantasy and reality blurred until we couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began.

Dinner was served in a communal tent: tagines with lamb, chicken, and vegetables, couscous, Berber salads, mint tea, and honey-dripped desserts. Drummers started beating a hypnotizing rhythm. The teenagers hesitated. All limbs and self-consciousness, they stood on the edge of the circle, watching Berber men pound the skins, waiting for someone to make the first move. Their bodies were taut with the fear of looking foolish. We were handed instruments to play along.

I knew that fear. I carried it too. But I also knew that this was their moment, the kind that would never come again. So I stood up and began to dance. Alone. Clumsy, awkward, stubbornly unashamed.

The kids stared, sort of horrified, and simultaneously seeing it as their invitation. Then, one by one, they followed. First in twos, then in threes, until the circle was a whirl of sneakers and turbans and laughter. The drums pushed us forward, and suddenly we weren’t tourists at all. We were participants. Not in Morocco, but of Morocco.

Our tent in the Sahara, glowing like a secret tucked into the dunes, all velvet shadows and lantern light, proof that even in the middle of nowhere you can still sleep like a sultan.

Later that night, lying in those tents, the desert slipped into us in quieter ways. Sand infiltrated everything. In our scalps, in our ears, in the folds of our clothes, in the teeth we flossed days later. The Sahara claimed our belongings and us, grain by grain, refusing to let us go.

That night, I lay awake long after the drums faded. The desert pressed itself against the canvas walls, whispering its stories. I thought of the Kleenex boy. Of the American boy who mocked him and then listened. Of how quickly reverence can bloom if you stop long enough to explain. I thought long and hard about the Malian palace . . . it had to be real. How could different people see a shared mirage?

I thought of the Valley we had left, its flags, its suspicion, its slogans shouted into the wind. And I thought of this storm. The desert doesn’t care who you are. But if you let it, it will teach you how to see.

The image of an inverted ziggurat hovered in my mind. Years earlier, we lived on a five-acre farm built from adobe shipped from New Mexico. To raise the house three feet above the flood line, the builders dug deeply into the back acreage, leaving behind a crater about the size of a small amphitheatre. Cayman and his friends used to race along the rim and tear down to the bottom, shouting and laughing, hoping they wouldn’t spook a gopher snake or a kingsnake along the way. They’d come up covered in dust and victorious, and I’d stand there thinking how easy it is, when you’re young, to throw yourself downward and call it play. Only later do you realize that’s exactly what life keeps asking of you . . . to dig deep, to descend, to find the beauty at the bottom. That was what Morocco was asking of us, imploring us to do. Dig deep, disguise it as play, as folly, but acknowledge that depth, the change that was slowly happening, perhaps unnoticed.

That night before, under a sky so crowded with stars it looked like God had spilled a bag of diamonds across the heavens, we felt nudged down into something deeper. And the next day, when the kids sat behind the glass of that cool, cushy van watching street hawkers sprint toward us with desperate hope in their faces, it asked again.

It asked them to stop laughing. To stop judging. To recognize the immense, almost embarrassing privilege of being the ones traveling through someone else’s struggle. It asked them to see that the line between “us” and “them” is mostly an illusion, one shift of fate, one birth in a different village, and any of us could be out there in the heat, hustling for a few dirhams. Morocco was holding up a mirror, saying: Look deeper. Your comfort isn’t a shield. Your experience isn’t universal. And if you’re brave enough to descend into that truth, you might just find something beautiful at the bottom. Sleep came in fits, heavy and strange. And when I woke, there was sand in my hair and a new kind of quiet in my chest.

Tomorrow would bring roses and kasbahs. But tonight belonged to the Sahara Desert.

The Hassan II Mosque feels like prayer expressed in mathematics: perfect symmetry, fractal tilework, and ratios so exact they border on the divine. It is geometry made sacred.

In a café near the Hassan II Mosque, I met a Berber man whose eyes had the softness that comes from a life observing people. He told me that Jews, Christians, and Muslims had lived side by side for generations. He said he was Berber first, Muslim second, and that government was one thing, but people? His neighbors? Friends? They make peace for themselves, and then they guard it with bread, with tea, with their children’s futures.

It landed like a stone in my chest. Back home in the Valley, someone hears the word “Muslim” and immediately rehearses their 9/11 fear. Here was a man sipping mint tea, living proof that the story could be different, that it had been different all along. He said tolerance is not a slogan here; it is a habit they choose to keep. He did not say it to impress me. He said it like he was telling me the secret ingredient that makes Moroccan mint tea just so.

The kids leaned in. I watched their faces do that brightening thing that only happens when your old story gets edited by a kind stranger. Headlines shrank. Actual lives got bigger. I wrote it down on a napkin because I am a magpie for sentences, and because I knew that when we got home, someone would ask me what we learned. We learned that peace here isn’t gentle or accidental, it’s built every single day and defended in doorways and window sills, held in the way neighbors pass bread and stories between them. Jews, Christians, and Muslims hold the line together, not with weapons, but with shared meals, shared streets, and the stubborn refusal to let the world’s hatred cross their threshold. The same effort others give to war, they give to keeping peace alive.

By late afternoon, we had moved north. Rabat was clean and official, and flirting with the sea. Meknes wore its age like velvet. Volubilis rose out of the hills with that Roman talent for showing up everywhere and building something heavy that refuses to leave. The kids discovered olives and carob trees. A few tried their middle school French on a patient fruit seller and came away with oranges and a sense of triumph. Language is a door that opens two ways.

In Volubilis, the mosaics haven’t just survived, they’ve out-waited time itself.
Thousands of years ago, Roman workmen knelt here, pressing one tiny tile after another into wet mortar, never knowing that their geometry would outlive gods, kingdoms, and the language they spoke. It’s impossible not to stand over it and think, holy hell, it’s still here.

And then Fes. Fes is not a city as much as a labyrinth someone whispered into being. Donkeys shouldered past scooters in corridors that would make a claustrophobe pray. Carpets rolled down from stone archways like waterfalls. The kids who had packed Doritos now nibbled at bread hot from a woman’s oven, their fingers burning but their faces lit up. A few dared to try olives, not the black, dull, watery Lindsay olives that grew a few miles from home, but small black wrinkled olives, tiny shreds of lemon peel still sticking to their oiled surface, sharp, briny, and alive.

This was the day the kids stopped being tourists and started being travelers. They asked prices in dirhams without flinching. They, begrudgingly, started to negotiate with vendors as was expected. That was the hurdle the kids tripped over repeatedly; it was expected. A stickered price tag is more of a suggestion on where to start the haggle; certainly not a stated commandment. A few students even found they enjoyed haggling. It is an art that is reciprocal, honed from much practice, and a threshold lightly crossed where interactions with people are invited, nothing to be shy about. They learned to greet and thank, and bargain without a pocket translator. They saw a cat asleep in the window of an all-blue alleyway with a bright yellow post box and decided God loves details. They trailed their fingers along smooth, plastered medina walls and felt time answer back.

A yellow postbox on a blue wall . . . Morocco accidentally styling itself for a Wes Anderson film. English, Arabic, and French all crammed across the front like it’s perfectly normal to speak in three languages at once. I even slipped a postcard inside and sent it home, just to see if the magic was real. It was.

That night, when the call to prayer braided the sky into five equal parts and carried the day away, I had a quick moment alone to breathe in Morocco and exhale the first day’s success. Somewhere below, a woman was chopping parsley. Somewhere above, a hawk drew a line between rooftops. Somewhere in between, our group of Americans dared to be smaller and happier.

We were only at the beginning. The road east would take us through cedar forests where monkeys bully you for peanuts. It would pull us down the long green ribbon of the Ziz Valley, where date palms hold the heat, and it would dress our heads in indigo and saffron and teach us that kohl is not a fashion statement, it is a survival trick for eyes that must see through flying sand. It would put us in a storm that tried to erase our outlines and in a tent where a drumbeat put them back.

But that is tomorrow. Tonight is jet lag and laughter and someone discovering that a shower in a country not your own can wash off a version of you that was never yours to keep. We checked on the kids, one by one, because mothers and fathers and older brothers and sisters do that even when the kids are not ours alone. As we checked on the students, Cayman met my eyes, not as a boy, and not quite as someone fully separate from me either. He’d just graduated from Berkeley, bound for law school, older than the students and wiser than most of us when it came to Morocco. He’s lived abroad more than I have, and still, in that glance, I saw both things at once, the man he’s become and the child I carried across oceans.

My best friend Karen was the chaperone everyone requested. She didn’t just make people feel comfortable; she pulls them in. It’s not just warmth, it’s gravity. Kids, waiters, airport security, strangers in line at the Medina, they all end up orbiting her, telling her their stories, handing her their hearts like she’s been carrying them for years. She isn’t like magnetic north; she is magnetic north. It’s a power, almost unnerving if I didn’t love her. While I was counting passports and barking timelines, she was gathering souls without even trying. She kept the emotional universe from unraveling.

I am the “bad cop” to Karen’s “good cop.” I wasn’t born paranoid; I was trained. Literally. The FBI taught me how to protect high-profile clients, and my ADHD just welded it into my nervous system permanently. So now, whether I’m in Marrakech or the Walmart parking lot, my brain runs like a 24-hour security feed: exits, shadows, crowds, which kid is missing, which kid is about to go missing, wind direction, camel trajectory, all before I’ve had my coffee.

It’s not glamorous. It’s exhausting. I wake up in surveillance mode and go to sleep counting oh-shit scenarios instead of sheep. The only time it shuts off is during a silent retreat, and even then, I spend the first day tracking the escape routes of monks. But nothing truly bad has ever happened on one of my trips because while everyone else is buying postcards and argan oil, I’m basically running Secret Service for teenagers.

I turned out the light in my room and lay there very awake, listening to the city argue with its cats. Somewhere around three a.m. I cracked the window and let the cool night air into our stuffy little hotel room. I whispered a ridiculous little prayer that sounded like this: Let them experience something beautifully life-altering tomorrow, and let me be less afraid of everything. Between those two pleas, our twenty Valley kids were becoming something else, not just travelers, but observers.

Sleep finally took me like a wave. The desert waited on the other side of the shore.

Some trips are vacations. Some are escapes. And then some become pilgrimages you didn’t even know you were on until you come home with sand still in your hair and a shepherd lodged in your memory.

This is the story of Morocco. But really, it’s the story of an odyssey, a journey that traces not just one country but the whole perimeter of the Mediterranean, that ancient basin where history has been fermenting for millennia. Where Romans built and collapsed, where prophets walked and prayed, where Jews, Christians, and Muslims still weave their lives side by side.

I took a couple of dozen Valley kids and a handful of brave adults and flung them into Morocco. We left behind evangelicalism and fear, Trump flags and suspicion, and we landed in a place of roses, kasbahs, sandstorms, and stars. It was chaotic. It was biblical. It was absurd.

What unfolded over eight days was not a tour but a pilgrimage. The desert wrapped us. An axle broke us. A shepherd appeared out of nowhere and offered us cookies and tea. And the students, blonde-haired, blue-eyed Cindy Lou Who, perhaps most of all, returned changed. They left as the children of fear. They came back as global witnesses.

This is that story, told in five parts. An odyssey, yes, but also a love letter to the moments that undo us and remake us.

The entrance to Meknès, the Gate of Al-Mansour, caught in sun-softened golds and blues. Théo van Rysselberghe painted it this way, and even though the city has changed, the glow feels exactly as I remember it: walls warm with dust and history, shadows pooling at the archway, and the quiet hum of a city that still carries its imperial bones beneath the everyday. We stood here once, but this painting feels like the version that lingers in memory: brighter, quieter, almost dreamlike.

Part 1 — The Veil Lifted

Airline travel is sorcery disguised as boredom. You sit in the Oakland airport in a chair that smells like faded disinfectant and old coffee, you argue with a plastic bin about whose turn it is for your shoes, you consider the morality of a six-dollar pretzel, then you get into a long metal tube or two. A day later, you step out into a different century. Dorothy had her twister. We had Royal Air Maroc.

With twenty kids and a handful of adults brave enough to be with this many teens for eight days straight, we left the San Joaquin Valley, a place where the words “Muslim country” can still turn a church potluck into a panic. The reflex is suspicion, the vocabulary is cruel, and tolerance inches forward like a snail. Trump flags flap on porches, and “America First” is shouted loudest by people who’ve never left the county line. That was our backdrop. That was the soil we lifted from. Which is why, when Morocco finally opened its door to us in a plume of spice and roses, the soundscape punctured by the haunting rise and fall of the call to prayer, it felt less like a trip and more like a jailbreak.

They’d let their children go, whispering warnings and praying to the good Lord Almighty, half convinced we’d be kidnapped before breakfast. Parents hugged their children like life preservers. Some of them whispered, “Call me every hour.” Everyone had seen the film “Taken” about three times too many. We loaded up anyway. Fear is loud, but curiosity and fulfilling the need to wander are louder.

Morocco, in the early morning hours, is a smell before it is a sight. Cinnamon and exhaust. Hot dust and roses. The aroma of mint tea trying to make peace between them. The airport was the usual fluorescent haze, the conveyor belt of dazed and confused suitcases rolling out in familiar gray, but the minute the sliding doors parted, the air said, “Hello, I am going to rewrite you.”

We were supposed to land in Marrakesh at 10:25 p.m. Of course, we did not. Delays, plane changes in Barcelona, where one student accidentally left her luggage…by the time our wheels touched down, we were off the clock and off the map. Twenty-six exhausted bodies with no idea what time zone their souls had chosen.

I had booked a small dream of a hotel. A riad nestled in the old city walls of the medina, Zellige-tiled fountains, lanterns, hanging plants, a courtyard that could cradle every childhood dream of far-off places and exotic atmospheres. When our vans pulled up, the ironwork looked like lace, and the doors looked like heaven. They were also locked. The night manager had gone home.

There is a special pitch of silence that happens when you are in charge and the plan collapses. I could hear every mother who said “Be careful,” tolling in my head like a bell. The kids were good and quiet and starting to wobble. That was when Lahcen moved.

Before that moment, he was just the guy with the sign. The man who knew which lane to choose and where the bathroom was. In that dark street, he made a phone call and then another, and then he did whatever alchemy Moroccan guides do when they are part concierge, part uncle, part unlicensed miracle worker. In ten minutes, he had twelve clean rooms with chocolates on the pillows, in a downtown hotel that looked more continental than North African. At two in the morning, plain is a lullaby. Hot water is a sacrament. We slept like rescued people.

Morning pulled the curtain open, and Morocco stepped out in full costume. The light had a color I do not have a crayon for. Vendors tuned their voices like instruments. Pigeons negotiated rooftop treaties. Minarets lifted the sky a little higher. Language layered on language. Arabic in the mouth, French in a ledger book, Spanish riding shotgun from the north, and beneath all of it the Berber words that feel like smooth, time-worn river stones. I told the kids to listen with their noses. They tried not to smile, but breathed in, and the morning rose around us like a dream of warm bread, cumin, sunlight, and faraway prayers. It felt less like arrival and more like waking up inside a childhood fairytale.

Winston Churchill painted this view of the Koutoubia Mosque long before I ever set foot in Morocco. We never stood in this exact place, but the Atlas Mountains rising in a soft, painted haze and the sun burning the edges of the earth pull me back every time I look at it. It feels less like a painting and more like a time capsule, holding a Morocco that still exists just out of reach and entirely in memory.

We loaded back into the vans and hit the road that became our classroom and our confessional for days. The city gave way to the long edge of the Atlantic and then to fields that had been coaxed into green by stubborn farmers and a generous winter. The highway signs read like a fairy tale index. Rabat. Meknes. Fes. Names you want to say out loud just to hear how they change the shape of your mouth.

And so the first curtain falls. In a few days, Part II —Roads North and Names Like Spells— will open like the next page of a secret book. That’s where the road begins to shimmer a little at the edges, and Morocco stops being a place on a map and starts becoming a tale, the kind told in whispers, with lantern light, and names that taste like spells. If you come with me, we’ll follow it, past the city gates, past what is seen, into the Morocco that hides its wonders the way a storyteller hides the best part until you’re leaning in, breath held.

My mother resisted at first. She was a teacher and knew better, but I was relentless. So she finally gave in, taking my christening record and, let’s just say, “editing” it. On the first day of school, she reminded me that if anyone asked, I was five years old. She stood at the chain-link fence as my teacher leaned down and said, “Hi Heather, how are you?”

And I, brimming with pride and fibs, declared, “I’m five!”

That was my first act of reinvention, pretending to be ready for something the State of California said I wasn’t, but determined to begin anyway. I didn’t know it then, but that would become my lifelong pattern: Impatient to evolve, to leap before the ground has even formed beneath my feet.

The Reckoning

At my 45th high school reunion, that same impulse, the memory of performing, of pretending, came roaring back. I’m 62 now. Most of my classmates are 64. There were hugs, double takes, and “You look exactly the same!” Lies said with love. But the real story of the night was illustrated along the back wall, draped in white linen and candlelight; the memory table.

The Class of 1980: five hundred of us, all feathered hair and afros, certain we were headed somewhere, never realizing life doesn’t go according to plan. There’s no straight line from A to B, only the long, beautiful zigzag that some of us would be delivered from, and others would leave far too soon.

Out of the five hundred of us who graduated in 1980, about fifty are gone. The reasons are heartbreakingly ordinary: car accidents, overdoses, heart attacks, cancer. One woman’s death is still a mystery. Her photo smiled out from the table like an unanswered question.

It wasn’t just a reunion; it was a roll call of the living and the dead. Every laugh, every drink, every dance carried a silent gratitude; we’re still here, but for how long?

The Reunion of America

The crowd was a small-town portrait of the country itself, a blur of conservatives, a few vocal liberals, and the rest somewhere in between, just trying to keep their blood pressure down. My friend Erin, who rode with me to the venue, took one look around at the growing crowd, turned on her heel, and walked right back outside for air. She texted me, “Hiding outside. Will try again later.” Some things never change.

And then there was Billy. Sweet, ice hockey-playing Billy, who now sported a gap where a tooth used to reside, a little souvenir of loving a violent sport. Whereas in high school he was sort of quiet and unassuming, he was now our de facto DJ, chock-full of spunk and personality and a die-hard Trump supporter. From the venue’s stage, he spotted me across the room and hollered, “Hey! How’s my favorite liberal friend?”

I rolled my eyes so hard I saw 1980, but before I could blink, he had me in a bear hug. “We gotta have breakfast again, talk politics!” he said. Which, to me, sounds about as fun as elective dental surgery. The politics part, not the brekkie.

That’s the strange paradox of these years, learning how love and disbelief can inhabit the same heart. How someone’s humor and kindness can somehow coexist with their devotion to a man who seems to revel in moral rot, and you’re left trying to reconcile how both truths can live in one soul. It’s the modern spiritual reckoning, loving the person, not the platform.

Later, Billy spun Play That Funky Music and Billie Jean and, like a man possessed, demanded a Soul Train line. Before I could even finish hesitating, he leapt off the stage, grabbed my hands, and twirled me straight down that human tunnel of laughter. Still delicate from lower back reconstruction surgery, my body voiced its objections. My spine protested, and my surgeon would have fainted, but the joy won. For a moment, it was pure, unfiltered life. We were seventeen-year-old kids again, laughing, reckless, untethered.

Richard’s Declaration

After I caught my breath, I saw another familiar face, Richard. Cowboy hat, easy grin, older now but still carrying that quiet steadiness. I’ve never forgotten him.

Back in eighth grade, we’d shared a table in the leather-working class. One afternoon, as we worked pounding designs into belts, he told our table that he wasn’t going to drink. Not in high school, not ever. While everyone else bragged about fake IDs and heisted six-packs, he just said it flat out, no apology, no arrogance, just his truth.

Decades later, I told him I still remembered that and the courage it must’ve taken to do a 180, go against the grain. He chuckled and said he’d long forgotten it, but then told me why. His father had been a violent drunk. “Every day was hell,” he said. “I just knew I didn’t want to be him.”

It hit me that all of us, in our own clumsy ways, were trying to escape something: Our parents’ mistakes, our own fears, the smallness of that town. His weapon was abstinence. Mine was ambition. Erin’s was retreat. Beneath all that teenage swagger, we were terrified of being made fun of, of being seen for who we really were, or what we feared we might become.

And maybe that’s what reunions are for, not nostalgia, but recognition. Seeing, finally, what we couldn’t back then: That every one of us was doing the best we could with what we had.

The Quiet Terror of Reinvention

In quieter corners, the conversations got heavier. So many of the men, especially the former jocks, mechanics, and firefighters, spoke of retirement like a slow erasure. A guy who was seen as one of the most accomplished of us all told me, “Every job I had was a young man’s game. When I stopped, I didn’t know who I was anymore. Turns out, my ego defined who I am.”

That’s the quiet terror, not of aging, but of being unmade. We spend forty years building a framework of identity: the job, the marriage, family, the rhythms of usefulness. And when the scaffolding comes down, what’s left can feel unbearably empty.

For some of the lucky ones, there is a chance for reinvention. For those of us who live long enough. For those with the courage to face our past and our grief. Because if rebuilding and reinvention are to happen, the grief comes first. Grief for the time spent being someone else. The sorrow of realizing how much of your life was lived in costume.

That grief is sacred. It’s the funeral of the false self.

And then, once the old self is dead and buried, almost imperceptibly, light returns. You begin to feel it in your chest, in your step, that slight lift of no longer carrying who you’re not. Reinvention doesn’t make you weightless; it redistributes the weight to where it belongs.

The person who emerges isn’t new. They are the ones you buried beneath expectation and effort. They’ve been there all along, waiting patiently for you to remember.

And that authenticity, that soft, grounded lightness, is as close to heaven as we get while still walking the Earth.

The Pilgrimage

Reinvention, I’ve learned, is its own kind of pilgrimage. You don’t walk the Camino de Santiago or circle the Mediterranean to find a destination; you walk through yourself.

Every dark passage asks what you will surrender to be light again.

I didn’t come to that understanding from a place of ease. My own reckoning was brutal, years of stress and loss and a slow, grinding unmaking of everything I thought defined me. The pressure became so great it nearly killed me, quite literally. An ulcer ruptured while I was in St. Thomas, and the doctors said I had a fifty-fifty chance of surviving had I been anywhere without the kind of skilled, forward-thinking care I somehow lucked into there. My California doctor told me they must’ve been extraordinary; performing that surgery laparoscopically was no small feat. That was my rock bottom, the dark night of the soul, where the body and spirit both said, enough.

On a catamaran in the Caribbean, Cayman standing over me, I thought I was finally at ease. I didn’t know it was my last day of tortured innocence, the moment before the universe stripped me to the studs and started rebuilding the woman I am now.

Somewhere in that aftermath, years later, during a silent pilgrimage on Île Saint-Honoré, a tiny island off Cannes, I finally crested the mountain. I could see my life from a distance, not as victim or hero, but as the witness. The pain was still there, but it had lost its power to define me. That was the beginning of peace, the true threshold of reinvention.

You shed layer after layer of what no longer fits, grieve what’s lost, and move toward what’s true. There’s no map, no medal, no finish line or goal post, just the sacred exhaustion of becoming real.

And sometimes, if the Universe is feeling poetic, it gives you one last sign to seal the lesson.

The Grace Note

At the pre-reunion get-together, my friend, a retired pastor, asked if my son Cayman could play the bagpipes at his mother’s funeral. Without hesitation, Cayman said, yes.

The next day, we drove to a small church we’d been to once before, sunlight slanting through the front windows. Cayman stood in front of the congregation, lifted the pipes, and played Amazing Grace. The sound rippled through the sanctuary, solemn and pure, as my friend bid his mother goodbye.

In that moment, the weekend became a perfect circle: birth, reckoning, death. Three acts, one story. A mom forging a christening record so her daughter could start her academic life early. A woman facing the ghosts of her youth. A son playing her generation home.

The pilgrimage, complete.

But that song, that word, grace, stayed with me long after the final note faded. We talk so much about giving grace to others, about forgiving the people who’ve hurt us, but no one teaches you how to give grace to yourself. To forgive the version of you who didn’t know better, the one who stayed too long, spoke too often, or trusted too easily.

Folks talk about forgiveness as something you hand out like an overdue library book to someone else, but the hardest, holiest forgiveness is inward. Giving yourself grace is the only way reinvention can even happen. Otherwise, you’re just hauling the old shame into a new life and calling it progress. Grace isn’t approval. It’s permission to begin again without dragging the guilt of every mistake behind you like a roller suitcase with one broken wheel.

Île Saint-Honoré. I came seeking, not knowing this was the island where I’d crest the mountain, where Silence would turn me from participant to witness, and the past would finally settle into grace. In Saint Thomas, I was photographed the day before the unmaking. Here, I was the one holding the camera, the day before the becoming.

On Île Saint-Honoré, during that silent retreat years ago, I finally understood forgiveness not as an act of surrender but as an act of sovereignty. Seeing my own story from a distance, as a witness instead of a casualty, I truly understood, at a cellular level, that forgiveness wasn’t for them. It was for the part of me still chained to the memory.

When you finally give yourself grace, the world gets lighter. Not because it changes, but because you do.

Latching the Garden Gate

That night, I came home, slipped off my shoes, and stepped out into the garden. The wisteria was thick in the air, the stars soft and close. I thought about the faces on that memory table, about Billy’s laughter, Erin’s retreat, Richard’s quiet strength, and Cayman’s steady breath through the pipes.

Latching the garden gate under the watchful eye of Marseille, the self-appointed god of bougainvillea and brick, claiming dominion over the gate as if guarding the port of his namesake city.

And then, without ceremony, I reached back and latched the garden gate.

The sound was small, the click of closure and continuation, but it felt like prayer. The night behind me, the road ahead.

Because reinvention isn’t about starting over. It’s about finally coming home, lighter, truer, and wholly alive.

Author’s note:

This essay is part of my ongoing Mediterranean Odyssey — a series exploring pilgrimages of body and soul, from the sunlit edges of the sea to the quiet corners of the self.

I’d been thumbing through gardening books, swooning over the dreamscapes of England, France, and Italy, the Chelsea Flower Show, and even the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh. Why not here? Why not a little Provence tucked into California clay?

At the heart of my vision was an arbor dripping with roses, climbing three arched trellises in a pink ombré that could make a French stylist weep: Soft blush in the front, deepening into darker, velvety pinks at the back. Double-petaled, heady with perfume, abundant enough to stop traffic. That was the dream.

My three wild rosy arches before getting a haircut.

But God bless her heart, Mother Nature set down her glass of rosé and had a good laugh. Then she slipped her warm arm around my shoulder and rode shotgun as I drove to Luis’s Nursery in Farmersville.

I arrived armed like Martha Stewart hopped up on caffeine: One enormous coffee-table book titled simply Roses, bristling with Post-It notes. I also held my own hand-painted watercolor map of a front yard Elysian Fields, complete with a dried stream bed representing the River Lethe. Lethe being the river of ancient Greek mythology whose waters would erase all memories of past lives, especially the thorny ones, and prepare you for being a part of the mortal world once again. In my vision, there would be arches of roses, seven varieties of lavender, and an olive tree for my never-ending obsession with olives. Seasons were plotted, colors layered, and waves of fragrance orchestrated. From shocking pinks and yellows of spring fading into lavender and fuchsia in summer, it was a masterpiece waiting to bloom.

Masked up, weighed down by wild foliated fantasies, Roses, and my watercolor garden plan, I hauled a sturdy nursery cart down sandy rows of greenery, carefully listening as Mama Nature guided me in different directions amongst the rose choices. Reading every five-gallon bucket’s rose description card in fine detail, I chose six for the arched entrance to my house and hauled them all home, their canopied foliage hanging out the windows of my Corolla. Driving past the miles of open countryside, I was reminded of my childhood when sometimes we’d go out for a Sunday drive, when those were a “thing.” All of us kids would be hanging out the windows, which were rolled all the way down, letting the wind blow past our faces…another nostalgic memory from when times didn’t seem as fraught with the question of whether we would even live to see the next week.

Estate sale signage found buried in the mud now housed deep in the foliage of my rosy-colored bougainvillea.

After my front yard had been denuded by a team of men with stronger backs and heavier machinery than anything contained in my gardening sheds, my son and the neighbor boy and I set to work. We rolled out massive rows of weed cloth, hammered landscape nails to secure the cloth deep into the soil, constructed the arches, and planted each rose in two neat rows with the prayer that someday, these climbers would grow up and meet in the middle. There was lavender to plant and other things to tend to. After it was all done, I waited patiently through the first spring, summer’s endless hot days, fall’s relief, winter’s rest, and finally, for the next spring’s wink. Finally, Gaia smiled upon me, and my archway burst into bloom.

My dark pink beauties give the scent of citrus along the walkway.

When Mother Nature Rearranges Your Garden

But Mama Nature had a lesson for me in humility. One of my “pink” beauties came in fully orange. Not coral, not peach, but orange. Like a Creamsicle from the neighborhood ice cream truck. Another bloomed single-petaled, despite my having purchased “lush doubles,” but its flowers had a citrus fragrance so enchanting it made me forget my disappointment.

My Dreamsicle ice cream roses

The plan I thought was perfect? Someone had other ideas. And honestly? Her version was better.

Fast forward to this year. Last week, after months of summer sun, bone-dry clay soil, and my daily pleading with the hose, the skies cracked open. A storm dropped inches of rain in a single night. The next morning, I wandered out expecting flattened plants and wreckage. Instead, the trellis was delivering a small bumper crop of roses, light pink and blooming as if it were spring all over again.

The “intended” rose color variations

It reminded me of those first years, when my roses kept surprising me with their lovely unplanned explosion of color and scent. Mother Nature seemed to be telling me something again. So I finally gave in to what a jam witch-in-training would do: I made rose petal jam.

Rose Petal Jam With a Hint of Sass

(Makes about 1½ to 2 cups)

You’ll need:

• About 15 unsprayed, organically grown roses (quirky rebels welcome)

• 1½ cups sugar

• 1½ cups water

• Juice of one lemon

• Optional: a drop or two of rosewater if your roses are shy on fragrance

• Patience. And maybe a gin and tonic.
  

Step 1: De-bugging the Bounty
Drop your petals into a vinegar-water bath. Watch as the critters scatter like tiny tenants evicted without notice. Ladybugs, I gently gather and take back outside after giving them a rinse off. Spiders? Not so much. If a straggler or two makes it into the pot, well, extra protein. Very rustic.

See that tiny critter? He did not end up in the jam pot.

Step 2: Petal Triage
Toss the leathery, handbag-textured petals. Keep the silky ones. This is jam, not jerky.

Step 3: Simmer Down, Sugar
Make a simple syrup by mixing the sugar and water over a medium fire until it is a thickish syrup consistency. Stir in your petals and lemon juice, and let them melt into something that smells like perfume but tastes like magic. Twenty to thirty minutes of gentle simmering should do it. If foam rises, skim it off the top. If you forget, no one dies.

Step 4: Jar It
Pour into jars, let cool, stash in the fridge. Spread on scones, swirl into yogurt, or eat it straight from the spoon when no one’s looking.

There’s something quietly radical about turning visual beauty into something edible. You don’t wait for perfection; you start with what blooms right in front of you.

The Slow Fade

Roses, like divas, can have an afterlife. When the blooms start to droop, don’t toss them; let them go out with style. Dry them.

Rachel Ashwell, empress of Shabby Chic, taught me that beauty doesn’t have to be fresh. It can be brittle, dusty, and more interesting for the wear. So I dry my fading roses in the sunroom, on the same cookie sheet trays I use for drying my herbs. And I wait. In two weeks, they’ve become ghostly little relics: Dusky pinks and faded browns that look like Victorian secrets.

Display them in chipped teacups, tuck them into old silver bowls, or leave them on the branch dangling from mirrors like love notes from another century. They’re haunting, romantic, and proof that there’s poetry in letting things fade.

Some roses, accompanied by a few sprigs of lavender, are ready for drying.

What My Roses Taught Me

This week, my garden and Mama Nature reminded me: Life doesn’t stick to your plan. It storms when it feels like it, blooms when you least expect it, and hands you both jam and ethereal decor.

Living lightly means saying yes to the roses when they arrive, even if they’re the wrong color, the wrong season, or only here for a fleeting encore.

Tonight, I’m latching the garden gate with sticky fingers in one hand and a dusty bouquet in the other. May your jam be sweet, your blooms hang soft, and your imperfections shimmer.

With love for, and from, my ever-changing garden that wants constant tending and brings never-ending joy.

Heather

Last year, I had tomatoes all year, through fall, winter, and spring. This year? A total bloodbath.

The culprits? Spider mites. Garden mafiosos. Tiny Tony Sopranos shaking down my tomatoes, extorting the zucchini, running a full protection racket on my peppers. They rolled in like wiseguys in Cadillacs, chewing toothpicks and whispering, “Nice crop you got here. Shame if something happened to it.”

Something did. It was a full mob operation, and I was left standing like a bewildered shopkeeper after the shakedown. They took out about 95 percent of my vegetables before I even knew what hit me. The fruit trees survived, bless them, but my heirloom tomatoes, the ones I researched, drew planting guides for to map which tomatoes went where, ordered and planted from seed, didn’t stand a chance. And it’s not like they got scorched. We only had four or five days over 105 degrees; most of the summer hovered around 100, which is practically spa weather for a tomato. This wasn’t weather; it was organized crime.

Devastating. Absolutely devastating. But also a good reminder that the universe, and the Don Corleones of the insect world, don’t care about my tomato spreadsheets.

Snack Households vs. Ingredient Households

When the fresh vegetables go, the question always comes: What’s my pantry going to look like? And by pantry, I mean fall pantry. Not the one bursting with jars of olives, capers, and various vinegars, but the one I’ll actually live with when the days get shorter.

Here’s how I frame it, and I ask myself often: Are we a snack household or an ingredient household?

Snack households keep chips, pretzels, store-bought salsa, grab-and-go stuff. Ingredient households keep flour, beans, olive oil, onions. You can always cook. You can always make. Snack households are about consumption. Ingredient households are about production. And spoiler alert: The producers survive garden mob wars even if, at this very moment, it wasn’t feeling like it.

Which one are you? Snacks or ingredients? Consumers or producers?

Mrs. Sciacca and Mom’s Kitchen

Mom dragged us three kids out of Los Angeles in the early ’70s and plopped us in the wilds of the San Joaquin Valley. Sidewalks? Not a thing. Walnut orchards, dairy farms, and the constant whiffs of cow shit; that was more like it.

Fresh off her divorce, Mom leaned on her dad to find a new life, a new place she could afford to live. She gave him her criteria. She wanted three things: A university town, a river, and preserved historic neighborhoods. What she got was: A community college town with a river that had been paved over, and where the remaining historic homes were mostly in rough neighborhoods.

Part of my producer mentality came from Mrs. Sciacca, the little Italian woman who sold us her 1920s Spanish cottage. She cooked like she’d survived wars and famines because she had. Breadcrumbs, cheese, and an egg turned into polpette. Waste not, want not. Survival food that social media now treats like haute cuisine. For Mrs. Sciacca, it wasn’t chic. It was how you didn’t starve. It was home, culture. Tomatoes, garlic, resourcefulness.

And then there was Mom. She was never big on meat, couldn’t stand the taste or texture, and after learning the wily ways around an Italian kitchen, found that she didn’t need to have it in her diet. Then, to add insult to injury for us, her three meat-eating, sugar-loving children, she read Sugar Blues by William Dufty, who eschewed the over-consumption of refined white sugar. Mom decided she was a vegetarian and sugar was poison. So in our house, meat was rare, sugar was gone, and vegetables ruled.

For us kids, this was tragic. No Frosted Flakes, no Carnation Instant Breakfast, no Pepperidge Farm apple turnovers. While our friends were chasing Pop-Tarts with Tang, we were cracking walnuts from the massive tree in the backyard. And crack them we did. Every fall, we spent hours at the kitchen table prying out the meat for Mom’s cooking. There was salsa di noci, pappa al pomodoro. Mom’s creativity in the kitchen went on with Mrs. Sciacca’s cooking lessons.

Now TikTok influencers are jetting off to remote Italian villages with camera crews in tow, “discovering” peasant food like they just cracked the Rosetta Stone. “Look at this nonna making bread with her bare hands, so rustic, so authentic.” Please. Mrs. Sciacca didn’t call it rustic. She called it dinner.

The Backyard Eden

Our yard was Eden with a Central Valley twist. At our house, aptly close to the intersection of Garden and Paradise Streets, Mom dug a winding little river that snaked through willow trees, past a mulberry bush, by grapefruit trees. A huge avocado tree grew outside the kitchen window. When in season, we ate them daily, without ever using the word “avocado toast.” The front yard boasted an apricot tree we gorged on every summer. Grape vines climbed the fence line, feeding us and separating our driveway from our neighbors, the Hunsuckers, Clay and Alice.

The Hunsuckers

Mr. Hunsucker was many things: Native American, jeweler, rock hound, revival-tent preacher. He wore turquoise and opals and scared the hell out of us with his sermons about the evils of dancing, but then turned around and let us steer his truck as it barreled down Highway 198 after fishing trips up at Lake Kaweah. He taught us how to slice a fish belly open, pull out the guts, scale it, and fry it up. We ate a lot of fried catfish, trout, and perch.

Alice, meanwhile, was a nurse and ran the home. While she didn’t cook with garlic or strong herbs like Mrs. Sciacca, she worked her own Southern magic by spending hours in the kitchen making okra, biscuits, and every Sunday, a roasted or fried chicken, a luxury then. There was always something bubbling on the stove. Their kitchen’s screen door was never latched. Their Formica-topped table was always ready for whoever walked in.

When their grandchildren visited from Arkansas, we had built-in playmates. I remember summers of laughter, bare feet, and playing in the rotating sprinkler that watered the front lawn.

Feral Summers

Looking back, our summers were feral in the best way. No air conditioning, just swamp coolers sucking hot air through wet pads. The occasional YMCA summer camp up at Camp Tulequoia. Mostly though, it was just us on bikes, tearing through neighborhoods, swimming in ditches, riding ponies, drinking from garden hoses. Mom’s only rule was: Come home when it gets dark.

Then there were our other neighbors up the street, the Artley boys, Terry, Tracy, and Tony, neighborhood scamps who were always lighting fires, experimenting with cherry bombs, pulling the kind of stunts that were “bad” back then but would look positively quaint now. In high school, kids drove trucks with rifles proudly displayed on gun racks. No one dreamed of doing what’s done today. Cruelty existed, racial cruelty that scarred me deeply, but in other ways, life was strangely more humane.

We weren’t idyllic children of the countryside. We were scrappy, sunburned, a little wild, and tougher for it. Feral, yes. But resilient.

This Year’s Garden

So here I am decades later, staring at my garden after the mob hit, but also at the herbs that grew like they had something to prove. The basil, oregano, thyme, and rosemary basically flipped the bird to the spider mites and flourished. Which means it’s time to harvest and dry them.

Here’s my ritual: spray down the herbs with the hose and at the end of the day, trim each of them back to the planter boundaries. I spread the various branches of herbs on cookie baking sheets and trays in my sunroom (which is still like an oven in September). Within a few days, the leaves are crisp. I strip them, compost the stems, and grind everything down in my little coffee grinder that’s never once seen a coffee bean, only herbs. The scent? Knock-you-over potent. I start with the least potent, the basil, and end with the most fragrant, the rosemary. One by one, I refill my shelves of herbs’ coffers, preparing for the cold months ahead when being inside is more the focus.

This year, there will be no jars of homegrown tomatoes. That hurts. But there will be jars of dried herbs, powdered and ready for fall soups and stews. There will be olive oil and beans. There are the vats of olives still preserved from last year’s harvest, as well as many jars of home-produced peach preserves, rose petal jam, and elderberry syrup I created from the bushes surrounding my work site. There are copious amounts of locally-produced honey, teas, tinctures, soaps, and incense I have been gifted from dear friends who are also producers. And there will be a lighter kind of living that comes not from preserving an abundance, but from cherishing what survived.

The Shift into Fall

Fall always feels like exhaling after the marathon of summer. Less watering, less weeding, less canning. More reflecting, more tending, more cooking. My beautiful, tall pink-flowered magnolia tree died this summer and had to be removed. The grapevines have overtaken the plum tree as well as the defunct phone lines that stretch from my house to the phone pole in my neighbor’s yard. The bougainvillea and avocado are overdue for trims. There’s lavender to rip out and replace.

But there are also herbs to harvest, grind, and tuck into jars. There’s the promise of cooking with what I do have instead of mourning what I don’t. And there’s the comfort of knowing that even when the garden mafia wipes out your tomatoes, you can still channel your inner Mrs. Sciacca and your mother’s walnut-cracking, sugar-banning spirit.

Because survival cooking, cucina povera, may be having its 15 minutes on Instagram, but for me, it’s not a trend; it’s the way living lightly tastes.

Latching the gate, I can still hear the Don Corleones of the insect world making my tomatoes an offer they couldn’t refuse.

I thought I was prepared. I wasn’t.

The Descent

The museum begins two floors below ground. You walk down gently sloping walkways, like a ship’s gangway, and it feels intentional, like stepping into the belly of a slave ship. The walls are dark, the air feels heavy, and suddenly you are surrounded by the brutal birth of America.

With each display, the weight grew heavier. And then I came to the case holding an actual whip. Not a replica. Not a symbol. A whip that had torn open the skin of human beings, actual people. People with names. People who were someone’s children, someone’s grandparents. People who laughed once, who sang, who were stolen from their homes and families.

Beside it was a ship’s manifest. A long, chilling list that reduced entire lives to nothing more than “male, 14,” “female, 20,” “child, 6.” No names. No stories. No loves, no talents, no mothers waiting for them. Just age and sex, as if that was all they ever were. To stand in front of that paper and know that each line represented a human being stripped of everything: identity, dignity, even the right to be remembered, was almost unbearable.

My breath caught, and my chest tightened as though the air itself had been stolen from me. I wanted to stand steady in front of the crowd, to keep composure, but the gravity of it all swept over me. The very things used to strip people of their dignity, a whip, a manifest, stood inches away, undeniable. And so I surrendered. The tears came before my mind could hold them back. Out came my handkerchief, off came my glasses, and I dabbed and dabbed, not ashamed, but moved by my own humanity. Because truly, how could I not? How could anyone stand in the presence of instruments meant to erase human lives and not be undone?

And then, a few displays on, was Harriet Tubman’s lace handkerchief. Fragile, hand-stitched, impossibly delicate. I had just pulled out my own hankie moments before to catch the flood of tears the whip had unleashed. That whip was worn, frayed, no doubt cracked across human backs hundreds of times. An instrument of breaking.

And here, in the very same space, a square of lace. The handkerchief of a woman who outran bloodhounds, slipped past bounty hunters, and defied every law and terror of her time to lead hundreds to freedom. A woman who shouldered the impossible logistics of rescue again and again, who was a strategist, a general, a revolutionary in a skirt. The woman was a legend, and somehow this delicate bit of lace, something that must have caught her own tears a hundred times, survived right along with her story. Still holding together just fine.

The contrast stopped me cold. One object built to destroy, the other built to comfort. Both weathered. Both survivors. That little square of lace undid me. Cue the floodgates. Cayman stood beside me, patting my back, as though he could keep me from drowning in my own tears.

The Difference in How We Move Through Life

Here’s what I want my white readers to understand: When you are the majority, you move through the world differently. You don’t think about the things I think about as a Black woman. You don’t scan every grocery aisle hoping for one other face that looks like yours. You don’t carry, deep in your body, the cellular memory that your or your child’s very presence can be deemed a threat.

You move freely, without ever realizing that freedom.

And I don’t say this to guilt you or saddle you with your forefathers’ sins. I say it because it matters. Because the things that fill your emotional tank are not the same things that fill mine. I live in a California town that, in my lifetime, was still a sundown town. If you were Black and caught here after dark, you risked becoming “strange fruit.” That history doesn’t vanish. It lingers. Lodged right between my shoulder blades, especially apparent when my son is out on one of his nightly walks.

So standing in a museum packed with Black families, in a city that is almost 50 percent Black, it filled me. I didn’t know how empty I was. That I was running on fumes, until my tank overflowed. The same need I felt as a young woman the first time I donned the UCLA Track and Field uniform, as part of a team brimming with future world record holders, or that deep hunger to belong to something bigger than myself rose up again here. Community is oxygen, and I hadn’t realized how long I’d been holding my breath.

Ascending Generations

The museum rises floor by floor, each level represents different periods. Generations of slavery. Emancipation. Jim Crow. Civil rights. Black power. Hip hop. Obama.

By the time I reached the floors that covered the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, I wasn’t just looking at history; I was looking at my life. Every display, every wall, every photograph carried memories. My memories. I remembered where I was when those marches happened, when mom and dad whispered about assassinations, when those TV shows premiered.

The first time I ever “saw” the marches, I was maybe two, maybe two and a half, living in Southern California, far from the in-your-face action of the hardcore Civil Rights Movement. My mother had taken me to the doctor’s office for vaccinations. Most waiting rooms back then had Highlights for Children, and we always loved flipping through them. But that day there were no Highlights. It was just me, with my hair in two pigtails, sitting beside my mom, clutching her hand hard, scared of the shot I was about to get. She knew I was nervous. Whenever we had to face shots, she sang to us. It was always Burl Ives’ “A Fox Went Out on a Chilly Night.” It was her way of steadying us, and it usually worked.

But this time, after she sang, the doctor still hadn’t appeared. So I picked up another magazine, Life. And there it was, a color photograph of people marching across a bridge. Selma. Page after page filled with violent images from the marches. I was so small, but I remember it clearly: A man who looked like he could have been my daddy, his head wrapped in bandages after being beaten. And right beside that picture, another photograph of a white police officer with a fat cigar clamped in his mouth, the picture of smugness.

I pointed at another photograph, and my mother leaned over and said softly, “That man’s name is Martin Luther King Jr.” It was the first time I ever heard his name. It’s strange, the way life loops around, because decades later, in Beverly Hills, of all places, I would sit in a synagogue on Wilshire Boulevard and hear Coretta Scott King speak of the Civil Rights Movement from her perspective, as Martin Luther King Jr’s widow.

Those images seared into me. Tattooed on my brain. Some of my earliest memories of the Civil Rights Movement came not from schoolbooks, but from sitting on vinyl chairs in a doctor’s waiting room, clutching my mother’s hand, my chest tight with fear of a needle, and instead being pierced by the truth of America.

Just as clear to me was when the TV show Julia, starring Diahann Carroll, came out. I must have been about five years old. 1968. At that point, television itself still felt shiny and new, like magic in a box. And suddenly, there she was, someone who looked more like me than not and she was the star of her own television show.

This was back in the days when Sunday nights meant Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom followed by The Wonderful World of Disney, when The Wizard of Oz was such an event it came on only once a year. Commercial breaks were a mad dash to the bathroom or kitchen because you couldn’t pause or rewind. If you missed it, you missed it.

And in the middle of that ritual, there was Julia. It wasn’t loud like the marches in Selma, it wasn’t front-page news. But it was steady, quiet, and radical in its own way. A Black nurse, widowed, dignified, self-reliant, raising her child alone. Representation matters. We say it now, but that was probably the very first time I understood it. Even at five years old, I knew: This meant something.

As we moved through more levels of the museum, another museum-goer, a Black woman two years older than I am, stood next to me as we explored the evolution of hip hop. And before I could stop myself, because let’s be honest, my filter is basically a window screen with holes big enough to drive a Lincoln Continental through, I turned to her and rapped: “Now what you hear is not a test, I’m rappin’ to the beat…”

Before I could even get the next line out, she joined in, two women in their sixties, belting out the whole first stanza of Rapper’s Delight. Our audience? A couple dozen strangers in the exhibit, amused and quietly laughing. It was ridiculous and perfect, because history isn’t just solemn, it’s joy and rhythm too.

And then there were the faces on the walls. So many of them were people I knew. Friends. Teammates. People I shared my twenties with, ones I cried with through devastating heartbreaks and celebrated with through stunning wins. People I worked for, worked alongside. People I broke bread with while we tried to fix the world’s problems before dessert. We played together, traveled together. I lifted glasses at their weddings, cradled their newborns at christenings, and, yes, stood graveside at some of their funerals, too.

When I first started at UCLA in the early 80s, I immediately joined the track and field team. My teammates weren’t just talented, they were effing legendary. Florence Griffith. Jackie Joyner. Jeanette Bolden. Alice Brown. Olympic medalists-in-the-making. Out on the UCLA track, you never knew who you’d see: actor John Lithgow jogging a few laps, hurdler Renaldo Nehemiah working out, or neighborhood kids pressing their faces against the fence to watch. I remember Florence, tiny, immaculate, her nails long and fire-red, her makeup flawless, walking over to those little girls and telling them, sweetly yet powerfully, that they too could become anything they dreamed of. They looked at her like she was an angel in spikes. And maybe she was.

The 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles were electric. Jeanette, Alice, Chandra Cheeseborough, and Evelyn Ashford won gold in the 4x100 relay. Four years later, Florence, by then Florence Griffith Joyner, or FloJo, smashed the world record in the 100 meters, a record that still stands. Jeanette, my closest friend of the four, was supposed to be there too, but she ruptured her Achilles tendon at the ’88 Olympic trials. Triumph and heartbreak, all in the same breath.

And then, ten years later, life had carried us all in different directions. I was working as a celebrity personal assistant by then, filling my 4Runner with gas one chilly September morning on Robertson Boulevard. I turned the key in the ignition, and the radio came alive with the news: Florence had died in her sleep. A seizure. She was gone. It was one of those moments you never forget: the exact corner, the smell of gasoline, the weight of sudden loss. Florence had been so full of life, so generous, so dazzling. To think of her slipping away quietly in the night felt impossibly wrong.

And there she was again, almost thirty years later, on the wall of the museum. Larger than life, yet gone too soon. Seeing her face brought back all of it: the track, the camaraderie, the fire of youth. And underneath it all, that deep, almost primordial need to belong to something bigger. When I left my small California town and came back to Los Angeles, the city of my beginnings, I was just a young girl searching for where I fit. With those women, with the UCLA track and field team, I found it. I found a community that filled my tank in ways I didn’t even know I was starving for. And isn’t that what we’re all after? To belong to something larger than ourselves. I let out a deep sigh, remembering those days, and felt the flood of memory rise inside me, as powerful as any exhibit.

It was dizzying. History is supposed to be “then.” But for me, it was “then” and “now.” It was personal. And it left me thinking that maybe I do need to write it all down, not for acclaim, not even for myself, but for Cayman and for the children and grandchildren who will come after him. Because our stories vanish too easily. And sometimes the line between a history book and a lived life is thinner than lace. To leave no trace would be its own kind of erasure.

A City Under Watch

After Cayman graduated from law school, he came back to California for a while before ultimately deciding to give up his apartment in Washington, D.C. He left San Francisco ten days before me to get everything ready for the move.

Cayman is a walking encyclopedia: Trained in law, business and political economy, steeped in international history, and carrying his own lived experience as a young Black man in America. When he described D.C. this time, it was chilling. He told me he never left his apartment without his passport. Not his driver’s license. His passport. Proof that he belonged in his own country.

He said it felt like Paris in 1940, a city occupied by its own supposed protectors, where soldiers on every corner weren’t there to defend, but to intimidate. Where ordinary people moved about their days in fear, calculating each step under the gaze of those with the power to detain or destroy them.

One morning he had an interview at the SEC, and he took the Metro to Union Station, the very place where the National Guard presence was thickest. The “stare-downs,” the intimidation, the way they positioned themselves as if daring civilians to blink first, it was exactly what he had studied about occupied Paris. And now he was living it. Afterward, he wanted to stop at a little antiquarian bookstore he’d discovered, a place where he hoped to lose himself in old atlases and maps. But the Guard followed him inside, watching as he browsed the aisles, waiting him out. The intimidation was suffocating. Instead of carrying on with his usual routine, he left the shop and went straight home.

And as his mother, listening to him, I felt both awe and terror. Awe at the way his education and his lived reality braided together so seamlessly that he could name what he was experiencing, and terror that my son had to name it at all. He wasn’t exaggerating; he was interpreting, analyzing, surviving. His words carried the weight of history and the pulse of the present. Just as Paris learned that occupation was only the beginning: collaboration, betrayal, deportation came next, D.C. carried that same electric dread. The uniforms weren’t simply about keeping order; they were conditioning the city to accept fear as normal. And the terror wasn’t only in the presence of armed men, but in the knowledge, sharpened by both history and lived reality, of what so often follows when soldiers arrive to “keep people in line.”

Fragile and Enduring

Listening to Cayman, I realized the museum isn’t just about the past, it’s the lens through which I see the present. The whip, the manifest, Harriet’s lace handkerchief, the Selma marches, Julia on TV, Flo-Jo on the track, and now my son carrying his passport through the streets of his own capital city, it is all of a piece. History is not behind glass. It is alive and breathing, pressing itself into our bodies, demanding to be remembered.

The whip and the lace handkerchief. One was worn smooth from tearing open backs, the other softened from catching tears. One built to destroy, the other to comfort. Both scarred by use. Both survivors.

And Harriet herself, she wasn’t fragile at all. She was a force of nature. A woman who outran dogs, outwitted bounty hunters, and pulled off rescue missions that would humble a Navy SEAL. She was a strategist, a general, a revolutionary wrapped in lace. The handkerchief is delicate, yes, but its survival is proof of hers, and of the lives she carried with her into freedom.

The National Museum of African American History and Culture is not just history, it is revelation. Blackness in America has always been fragile and enduring at the same time.

History is heavy. But so is being unseen.

Fragility and endurance exist side by side, lace can outlast centuries, and memory can weigh more than iron. But, also, history isn’t sealed in a display case. It walks the streets of Washington, it sits beside me in the doctor’s office, it laughs two tables over at a café. The question is whether you notice. And in the noticing, in that small act of recognition, there is a kind of grace, a way of saying: I see you.

As my former employer, neighbor and friend, Leonard Cohen once sang, “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” The whip, the handkerchief, the memories, the fear, the belonging, they are all cracks. And through them, if we’re willing to look, the light pours in.

Thank you for walking with me through this. I know this wasn’t the lightest of chapters, but sometimes to live lightly we first have to hold the heavy things up to the light. Museums preserve objects; stories preserve souls. My hope is that by sharing mine, and Cayman’s, you might begin to notice the living history all around you, in the faces of your neighbors, in the quiet rituals of your own family, in the cracks where the light still gets in. That’s where belonging begins. That’s where grace lives.

There was a time when I had front-row seats to everything: fashion shows, concerts, luxury villas, first-class travel to Europe, impossible egos. I spent 23 years as a celebrity personal assistant, orbiting the high-gloss world of wealth and fame. And let me tell you: it was never enough.

The people I worked for had it all, at least on paper. But paper burns. So much of what I saw was a frantic, grasping performance. It was me, me, me, all day, every day. Be the first to start the trend. Wear what no one else can get. Have the best, the most. Marry for optics. Divorce for attention. Cling to youth. Buy the latest and never, ever stop upgrading.

There was no reverence, only relevance.

And even though I wasn’t the one in front of the camera, I lived the same rhythms. My house was filled with designer-brand furniture and original works of art. I drove the same cars as celebrities, dropped the right names, made the right reservations, and used my leverage to get the best of the best, the highest quality, and the most deeply desired things everyone wanted but not everyone had access to. I was very good at keeping up with the Joneses, except the Joneses had private security and Michelin-starred private chefs. And even they weren’t happy.

Eventually, I stepped away. Not with a bang, but a breath. I left quietly. I didn’t announce it. I just stepped away. And in that quiet, I began to hear myself again.

That’s where this chapter begins.

Welcome to Living Lightly With Heather.

This little corner of the internet is a reflection of the life I found on the other side of all that noise. A life that isn’t about more, but about enough.

Now, I live in a simple house, by celebrity standards. Nothing super extravagant. My greatest luxuries are a sunroom filled with seedlings each February, roses trained along a weathered trellis, bundles of herbs drying in the kitchen, and lavender tucked into old fabric sachets. I bake bread. I grow oregano. I dabble in watercoloring. I work a nine-to-five. I delight in the way a simple meal, seasoned and shared with love, delights people, not because it’s extravagant, but because it’s real.

What comes next is what this Substack is about.

Welcome to Living Lightly With Heather

This space is my love letter to the kind of life I never saw in the celebrity world: one filled with peace, pleasure, connection, and enough.

Not more. Just enough.

It’s simple. And it’s sacred. My home is my sanctuary. This life is gentle. Unhurried. Beautiful in the most grounded, tactile way.

This life isn’t Martha Stewart, and that’s the point.

Martha has 15 acres. I have a backyard.
I don’t need a dedicated cutting garden or a wood-fired pizza oven to live beautifully.

This life is accessible. It’s life-sized.
It’s about gathering & growing, sourcing & savoring, reclaiming what we already have.

It’s:

• The Art of Simple Living – cultivating beauty with what’s around you

• Rooted & Refined – rustic, but never rough

• The Everyday Sacred – finding reverence in rituals and routines

• A Life in Bloom – nourishing, homemade, full of light

• Reclaimed Living – restoring value to what we thought was used up

If you’ve ever looked at a photo or an Instagram well-curated post of a Mediterranean table, sun-drenched and scattered with olives and herbs, and felt a pang of longing, not just for the place, but for the feeling, you’re not alone. How do I live that life? I’m here to say that life isn’t far away. You don’t need a vineyard in Tuscany. You just need intention.

Over time, I’ll share what this looks like for me. Recipes, projects, reflections. Ways to live more lightly and feel more at home in your own life. There may even be the occasional tale from my past life; those stories still bubble up from time to time.

This isn’t a guidebook or a lifestyle pitch. It’s more like a letter from an old friend. The kind that arrives on a slow morning when the kettle’s just boiled, and the light is soft, and you finally have a moment to sit and breathe.

And you don’t need a villa in Provence to do it. Although let’s get real, if I could escape to the South of France at this very moment, to live the dream, you’d see skid marks from how fast I pulled out of my driveway.

Thanks for being here. Truly.

What You’ll Find Here

Every week or so, I’ll share stories and inspirations to help you:

• Cook with what you grow (or swap with neighbors)

• Create beauty with found and repurposed materials

• Develop rituals that ground your spirit

• Connect more deeply with nature, with others, with your own home

• Live more lightly on the Earth and more fully in yourself

There will be recipes, reflections, DIY projects, simple-living wisdom, and occasionally, tales from my old life behind the velvet rope. (Spoiler: they’re wild.)

Join Me

Subscribe to Living Lightly With Heather for a weekly letter that feels like tea on the porch, bread still warm from the oven, and a friend who reminds you that your life doesn’t need to be bigger, just more yours.

Here’s to living slowly, sweetly, and well.

With reverence,
Heather H. Howard
Author of Chore Whore: Adventures of a Celebrity Personal Assistant
Red carpet dropout. Garden gate devotee.

Until we meet again, may your tea be warm, your herbs fragrant, and your day full of ease.