It happened both quickly and in slow motion. Traveling south on Route 95 through Maine, I passed a small pickup truck. Suddenly, the truck moved into my lane. Hemmed in by the guardrail, with cars ahead and behind, I lay on the horn, then held the wheel steady as the truck sideswiped my car.

I didn’t scream, but I imagined the worst. My friend on the passenger side didn’t scream, either; to her credit, she only uttered a prayer: “You’ve got this.”

The truck’s impact sounded like an explosion. My car rocked onto two wheels. But, because it’s a Mini Cooper Clubman, my car behaved like a tiny tank, stubbornly clinging to the road and moving forward. The truck fishtailed and swerved away, thankfully missing the other cars around us.

Here’s where things got interesting. Because I was in Maine, because the man drove a pickup truck, and because I’m a liberal from deep blue Massachusetts, I’m ashamed to say that I assumed the worst. My mom was from Maine, so I know how Mainers talk smack about other people in New England.

A lot of people love Maine because it’s a permitless carry state; in other words, you don’t need to get a permit to carry a firearm, whether your gun is in the open or concealed. And, in my own experience, a lot of Maine is less than welcoming. Once, I exited the highway near this very spot because one of my children desperately needed a bathroom. When I pulled into a driveway to ask if they might know of a public restroom, I turned right around again after seeing the “Bitch Parking Only” sign over the carport.

But the pickup truck driver pulled over, just as the law would ask him to do. When he climbed out of the truck, he didn’t yell or swear at me. His first words were, “Are you hurt?”

When I said no and asked if he’d been hurt, he shook his head and said, “I guess that was my fault.”

“I think so,” I said, then added, “You probably didn’t see me. It could have happened to anyone.”

His truck had suffered little damage, but my car looked like it had been kicked by a giant, with lots of bits hanging off it. We exchanged insurance information and actually shook hands before going on our way.

My next assumption was that dealing with the insurance company would be a nightmare of paperwork and denial. That’s what you hear, isn’t it? That insurance companies are one of the biggest scams in the U.S.?

Instead, everyone at my insurance company (Go, USAA!) was kind, respectful, and thorough. They took my statement, sent an appraiser to the house, offered a list of body shops, and said they’d contact the other driver’s insurer.

I contacted one of the body shops, and they took my car even though they were jammed. “We’re backed up, and it’s August,” one of the owners explained. “But we’ll do our best.”

Even more surprisingly, three days later, I received a letter from the man in the pickup who hit me, explaining that he was very sorry, but he’d given me the wrong insurance information. He included the correct insurance number, his cell phone, and his address. I wrote him a note in return, expressing my gratitude to him for pulling over on the highway.

A few days later, my insurer called with an update, saying the pickup driver had accepted liability. I wouldn’t have to pay a dime. Oh, and my rental car coverage had been automatically extended until whenever the body shop could get my car back to me.

The bottom line: Every single person did the right thing in a situation that could have been tedious at the very least, and acrimonious at the worst.

Despite the dismal news headlines and the social media sewer stream from our President, this accident showed me, viscerally, that people of all stripes are still out there striving to do the right thing, interacting without arguments, meanness, name-calling, or even dilly-dallying. For now, at least, decency and compassion are still alive and well in America. It’s up to us to keep holding onto our essential goodness, to shake hands and do the right thing. Looking after one another is the best thing about being human.

Last Thursday night, the pilot of Artemis II, Victor Glover, said, “You look amazing, you look beautiful,” in a video call with ABC News.

He meant the Earth, as seen through a window on the Orion capsule. “No matter where you are from or what you look like, we’re all one people,” he exclaimed.

Glover, the first Black astronaut to make it into deep space, is accompanied by Christina Koch, Reid Wiseman, and the first Canadian Space Agency astronaut, Jeremy Hansen. A photo circulating last Friday from a NASA video feed showed them literally hanging out, with Ms. Koch’s upside-down grin encouraging all of us to smile back.

These lovely, courageous people offer us a sliver of hope for humanity at a time when most of us are holding our breath and waiting for Trump to do whatever Trumpian act of Epic Fury he intends to aim at Iran, complete with F-bombs.

Here’s the thing I wonder, though: If we’re all one people, why the hell is Trump so intent on wiping out an entire civilization, with no practical endgame in sight?

I know a lot about the politics and history that led to this war. One of our daughters married an Israeli, and they took refuge with their baby in our house for months after the Hamas attack on October 7. They are here again now, having made it out of Israel two hours before the airspace closed in Tel Aviv, when they received warnings from the American embassy about the impending attack on Iran. Meanwhile, my sister-in-law and her family are supporting a nephew from Iran, whose family is still there.

Last night, I was so worried about the state of the world that I lay wide awake after shutting off my light, panic making my breath come in short gasps. I did all the right things to beat back insomnia: powered down my phone early, read a novel, did some yogic breathing, and opened the window to let in fresh air. When none of that worked, I decided to try reading some nonfiction. (I like to alternate reading fiction and nonfiction on the off chance that it’ll make me smarter.)

Unfortunately, the nonfiction book on my nightstand happens to be The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert, a book that delves into the reasons why Earth is losing species at many times the usual rate, and why up to 50% of our planet’s species will be extinct by around 2050.

Not exactly light reading. I put that book down and went back to reading fiction, this time a fantasy novel with enough plot to hold my attention until it was time to take the dogs on their morning walk. As the dogs and I meandered around the block, I focused on trying to feel lucky that I live in a place where, to date, no missiles have taken out our roads, schools, bridges, buildings, hospitals, and loved ones. The birds were singing. I saw two cardinals and a nuthatch. Then it started to snow, one of those spring showers where the snowflakes fall like lace doilies on the pavement.

Victor Grover was right: You look beautiful, Planet Earth. Thank you for this morning, whatever happens next.

President Trump took enough time off from threatening Iran with the end of its civilization to call the astronauts and congratulate them. During the call, he asked what it was like for the astronauts to have no communication with Earth when their ship slipped behind the moon, and Glover replied, “It was actually quite nice.”

I bet.

A couple of weeks ago, author Jane Ward and I celebrated the launch of her new novel, Should Have Told You Sooner, at Jabberwocky Bookshop. One of the questions from an audience member was about AI and whether either of us had ever used it.

There has been a lot of hand-wringing speculation lately about the death of reading and the demise of good writing. Who will need caffeine-fueled writers to create content anymore, now that AI can generate prose that fools even the most avid readers into thinking an actual human penned it? In fact, according to a recent quiz in The New York Times, a majority of people prefer the writing samples generated by AI in the style of famous authors like Cormac McCarthy and Carl Sagan.

In September 2025, the AI company Anthropic agreed to pay $1.B to settle the class-action lawsuit brought by authors (including me) whose work was used without permission to train Anthropic’s chatbot. Yet, most writers use AI, just like the rest of us.

I now employ AI tools for everything from brainstorming chapter titles to summarizing entire novels when I’m struggling to write a synopsis. While writing my last book proposal, I also used AI to help me research comparable titles in record time, a chore that used to take many tedious hours. I’ve even used AI to generate a podcast with two AI-generated “hosts” discussing the themes of a novel I’m working on. Among other surprises, the hosts asked decent questions about plot holes that led me to revise the novel. Whether we like it or not, AI has infiltrated our lives to the point where most of us probably wouldn’t work as efficiently without it.

As Jane and I answered questions from the audience at her book launch, the conversation touched on fictional techniques, politics, pets, first love, travel, and even our favorite recipes. Afterward, we browsed Jabberwocky’s impressive shelves to find books other people had recommended and stood around chatting while we waited for Jane to sign books. Reading and talking about books created a community that evening out of a roomful of strangers--something that AI won’t ever be able to do for us.

A friend of mine—a more successful writer than I am, one who rakes in the heavy-hitting literary accolades most fiction writers only dream about—surprised me last night when she said, “Sometimes I wonder why I still write books. I should just quit and watch TV at night like everybody else.”

That would certainly be an easier life. There would be no struggle with dialogue that falls flat on the page. No hair-pulling moments over a plot that moves too fast or too slow or not at all.

So why bother writing fiction in 2026, when the number of Americans who read for pleasure has declined by 40%?

I’ve tried to quit the fiction habit. Here’s what I tell myself: If I didn’t write fiction, I would have more time to visit friends and family, enjoy restaurants and museums, travel, hike with my dogs, take art classes, and yes, watch TV. I could read other people’s novels without worrying about whether I’ll ever publish another thing. My ordinary life—and it’s a good one--would go on just fine.

Nobody asked me to be a writer. Probably nobody asked you, either. Other than a few friends, nobody cares if I quit. Like you, I have other, more useful identities than novelist: parent, ghostwriter, marketing writer, friend, volunteer, sister. So wouldn’t it be sensible to devote 2026 to all of those identities, rather than put on overalls that make me look like an Oompa Loompa and make up shit in my head?

Yet, I’m itching to drop back into the worlds I’m creating, to find out whether those characters who are living in my head right now are going to do what I think they might, or whether they’ll surprise me.

Published or not, the stories we create are portals to other realities, allowing us to step outside our own limited perspectives and experiences to live in different ways. Who wouldn’t want to keep doing that?

In other words, maybe the reason to keep writing fiction in 2026 is the same as it ever was: To find out what happens next and make sense of that ending.

This is my fourth holiday season without my mom, whom I cared for in our home until she died at 90. That means it’s also the fourth holiday season without me having someone to argue with at the table.

My mom was smart, beautiful, and fierce. She could make me laugh harder than anyone on the planet with her witty, often snarky remarks. But, when it came to politics, we couldn’t have been farther apart.

A true Trumpian who longed for her own gold-encrusted palace, my mother saw DJT as a businessman who pulled no punches and would make America great again. She believed Barack Obama was a terrorist, Hilary Clinton was crooked, and the 2020 election was stolen. And, when it came to immigrants, my mom firmly believed Trump when he said they were pouring across the border by the tens of thousands, and that most were murderers and rapists.

Despite my mom’s Fox-News-fueled tirades, my brothers and I grew up to become liberal Democrats. Every holiday dinner, and sometimes even the weekday dinners when it was just my mom and me, could end in arguments or even tears. Sometimes, my mom stalked away from the table, food untouched, because of something someone said, usually me, in defense of anything from gay marriage to universal healthcare.

Still, I continued to talk politics with my mom, and we both learned to listen to the other side. I also saw her views become more nuanced. When my son dated a Mexican immigrant who entered the country as a nanny on an H2-B visa and then earned a scholarship to college, my mom was the first to suggest that we attend her volleyball games and commented on how hard this young woman worked. And when one of my unemployed friends struggled to find healthcare for a preexisting condition, my mom begrudgingly admitted how “unfair” our healthcare system could be to people without money. She was also among the first in line for the COVID-19 vaccine and encouraged me to get one, too.

Many friends have stopped inviting parents or other relatives with divisive political views for the holidays. “I’ll never forgive them for voting for Trump,” one fumed, explaining why her parents weren’t invited to Thanksgiving dinner and likely wouldn’t be included at Christmas, either.

That’s one way to keep peace at the table. But what if we kept inviting them? What if we continued talking, listening, and yes, even arguing, with people whose views differ from our own? What if we forgave them for saying things that we think are outlandish or even wrong?

By doing so, we offer a path forward in these relationships, and we can model for our children how people who truly disagree about some things can still agree about others. Peace and goodwill depend on finding whatever common ground there is between us, and knowing we can retreat to that if things get too fired up.

For my mom and me, finding common ground was easy: She loved my children, Sunday drives, Mexican food, and watching paranormal shows on TV. No matter how badly we fought, one or the other of us could suggest going out for a drive to the beach or a taco night, and we’d come together again.

I disagreed with my mother nearly every day of our lives, but I miss her. She was a constant reminder that the world is a big place with many different points of view, and she taught me how to stand my ground, but how to listen, love, and forgive, too.

My husband and I recently returned from Spain, where we finished walking El Camino del Norte to celebrate our wedding anniversary. The trail is hundreds of miles long, so we’ve been hiking it in sections. This particular leg started in Ribadeo, a small coastal town in northwestern Spain, so my first task was to figure out how to get there.

The cheapest flights from Boston to Spain are to Barcelona on Level Airlines, so I nabbed one of those, then found a connecting flight to A Coruña, the second-largest city in Galicia, figuring we could find a bus to Ribadeo from there.

Our problems began when the Barcelona flight was delayed due to the weather. I’ve experienced many flight delays, so this wasn’t particularly upsetting, because Barcelona’s airport is one of the few where you can GO OUTSIDE while you’re waiting for a flight, into a walled-off courtyard with a decent café. (The only issue is that this is also where smokers congregate, so you’ll feel like you’re hanging out in a bar in the 1990s.)

When we finally arrived in A Coruña, our luggage didn’t get off the plane with us. We filled out the usual tedious forms with a lovely but harried desk agent, who repeated our cell phone numbers multiple times.

“We will text you when we locate your luggage,” she promised.

We took a cab to the hotel, ate dinner at midnight, then showered and fell into a coma induced by traveling overnight in cheap seats, many hours of waiting in the smoky Barcelona airport, and jet lag.

The next morning, I wrapped a hotel blanket around me and went to sit on the balcony to watch the teal blue sea frill white against the sand, thinking, “None of yesterday matters. We’re lucky to be here.”

“Did you get a text from the airline?” Dan asked, clearly worried. “Should we call them?”

“Let’s go to breakfast,” I said. “The luggage will come, don’t worry.” Secretly, I suspected the airline wouldn’t bother texting us; the suitcases would simply materialize, because why make more work for yourself by texting? I’ve spent a lot of time in Spain, and that’s not the Spanish way.

Without having to choose which clothes to wear, we were out the door in minutes. After breakfast, we wandered through the winding streets of A Coruña, admiring the architecture while listing various things we wished we’d been clever enough to carry in our backpacks.

Around 1 pm, with still no text from the airline, we headed back to the hotel, where we found our roller bags standing at attention in the lobby like a pair of loyal dogs. “Sus maletas!” the receptionist announced joyfully.

The trip went smoothly from there, with many days of meditative walking through stone hamlets tucked into the gorgeous Galician farmland and forests. We reached our destination, Santiago de Compostela, and were scheduled to fly out a few days later to Barcelona, then home to Boston. Unfortunately, we arrived at the airport to find that our flight had been cancelled because of severe weather.

“We can get you on another plane from Santiago in three days,” the desk agent said after much clicking and clacking on his computer. He brightened. “But I can give you a meal voucher for lunch.”

By then, we’d been in the Santiago airport for two hours; now we hunkered down in a row of plastic chairs to sit on the phone with Expedia for another hour, until the agent managed to route us from Santiago to Boston with a layover in Madrid. Still a long haul, but better than waiting three days.

We checked our luggage through to Boston and arrived at the Madrid airport hotel with only our backpacks—this time carrying what we needed for an overnight. Lesson learned: The joy of travel comes from new adventures, and sometimes those adventures require carrying a toothbrush and a lot of patience, and wrapping yourself in a blanket to enjoy the view.

Like many in the U.S., my family immigrated here. My great-grandfather left England by ship to work in the woolen mills in Massachusetts. My grandmother, pictured above with my mom and two uncles, came with him. She favored wool skirts and regular cups of tea until she died at age 99.

Like many in this country, too, I attended a university graduation this weekend. I won’t say where or who it was for, because that’s not the point. The point is that it set my hair on fire. Not the graduation itself, but the contrast between that ceremony, with its earnest speakers and hopeful graduates from all over the world, and the news feed on my phone.

That Friday evening, after my husband and I celebrated the graduation with two Latin American students and a recent Chinese graduate, I opened my phone to a news story about ICE agents rounding up a dozen men who were waiting at a gas station for vans to pick them up for roofing jobs. This news headline came on the heels of a story about more than 1800 international students having their student visas revoked, often without warning. Some have been arrested and deported.

Trump made an election promise to initiate “the largest deportation program of criminals in the history of America.” But it looks to me like ICE is mostly targeting people who came here to support themselves and their families by roofing our buildings, preparing our food, cleaning our houses, mowing our lawns, taking care of our sickly grandparents, or studying to become the next generation of professionals.

I am not a divisive person. Nor am I typically politically outspoken. As the daughter of a Navy commander and a mother who wanted nothing more than Trump for President, my extended family includes kneejerk liberals who were Kamala all the way and Evangelical Christians who think JD Vance was doing the right goddamn thing when he made up stories about Haitians eating pets. But what can you do when your hair is on fire except scream?

Would Trump and Vance allow my white British family into the country now to work in the mills? Probably. I mean, look at the refugee resettlement program they suspended, then made an exception for, allowing white South Africans into this country because they’re allegedly facing “genocide.” Hello, people. What about the Congolese and Sudanese who are facing actual genocide? Is there any expedited program for them?

And what about the Afghans who came to this country legally, with protective status because they helped the U.S. military during the war, only to see that protective status rescinded despite their country being governed by the Taliban?

If the tariffs don’t sink the Republicans, their nutty deportation strategies will. Never mind the damage these strategies have already done to our global reputation as a compassionate, inclusive democracy where freedom rings.

With so few legal pathways open, people who immigrate here will be forced to live even more on the margins. Instead of diligently doing the paperwork required to be here legally, paying their social security, or sending their kids to school, immigrants will hide because they’re afraid. It’s already happening.

And those bright, ambitious young people? They’ll choose to study somewhere else, in countries where they won’t have to worry about being deported halfway through their graduate studies or, worse, arrested because they published an opinion that didn’t match the administration’s. Who can blame them for going elsewhere?

But it will be our country’s great loss, economically and morally.

“What are you thinking about?” I asked my husband recently as we walked our dogs.

“Asparagus soup,” Dan said.

Even now, almost 30 years later, I still can’t believe I married this guy.

Growing up, my mom cooked out of boxes and cans. A family staple was cream of mushroom soup dumped over hamburgers. Taco kits were the go-to meal of choice on weekends, and breakfast cereals were sugary and plentiful. If my dad cooked, it was tuna casserole with (wait for it) potato chips crumbled on top.

Is it any wonder that I grew up to be a diner girl, a lover of tuna melts and tomato soup, with occasional carrot sticks to add color? For dessert, I’d treat myself to raw, store-bought chocolate chip cookie dough. I still experience visceral pleasure pangs when I remember peeling the wrapper off that cookie dough log like a banana.

Dan taught himself to cook by age 12, not because he needed to, but because he was fascinated by the science of it. He made his way through Julia Child’s recipes by high school graduation.

The first time I cooked for Dan, I went all out and made him a lasagna slathered in sauce from a jar. He ate it without complaint, which goes to show that true love does conquer all.

The first time Dan cooked for me was when we returned to his place after a movie, and he asked if I wanted a snack.

“Sure. What do you have?”

He shrugged. “I can make whatever you want.”

I had no idea that he meant this literally. “Surprise me,” I said.

So he did, pulling out frozen pork and scallion cubes (scored for easy breakage, because he’s an engineer) and refrigerated dumpling wrappers, and whipping up pot stickers and a handmade sauce so delicious that I drank it out of the little bowl when the pot stickers were gone.

Through our decades together, Dan and I have raised five children and cooked countless meals. I managed to throw together weekday meals like spaghetti or stir-fried rice, but Dan was at the helm of every special holiday feast or dinner for friends. The downside of this is that Dan has a chef’s temperament. God help you if you use the wrong cheese knife, throw out a tiny container of some unidentifiable leftover that he was saving to incorporate into another meal, or happen to cook your eggs at the wrong temperature when he’s looking.

“What kind of idiot…” is his standard kitchen refrain, and we have joked (sort of) about putting up yellow police tape to keep children and guests out of the kitchen when Dan’s working his magic.

Recently, when Dan spent a stint working in California, the first question out of everyone’s mouths to me was, “Oh, no! What are you going to eat?”

I indeed panicked a little, but it wasn’t long before I reverted to my evil ways. Sometimes, there’s no better dinner than scrambled eggs. I also discovered HelloFresh, with its handy little colorful cards fit for preschoolers, which gave me the illusion that I was cooking and ensured I’d eat vegetables. Even now, with Dan working at home again, if I go away on a writing retreat, my grocery bags are likely to be full of things like canned tuna and hummus, bags of M&Ms and apples for crunch.

My idea of torture is Dan’s fantasy, which was realized a few years ago when a friend treated us to a Michelin-star restaurant with a 22-course tasting menu. You can take the girl out of the diner, but she’ll go back there any chance she gets. Food, for me, is still mostly fuel so I can get other stuff done; I’m happiest when there are leftovers to throw in the microwave, and incredibly lucky that Dan loves picking out his ingredients at the grocery store, sparing me from that recurring hell.

That asparagus soup Dan was thinking about? It turned out to be just one course in an eight-course meal he prepared for a couple of friends. Happily, there were leftovers

.

Recently, I streamed “Showing Up,” a movie starring Michelle Williams as a glum, frumpy sculptor working at the Oregon College of Arts and Crafts in Portland. My husband was so bored that he walked out, grumbling, “There’s no plot.”

But I stuck it out. For me, the movie’s shots of Williams’s character painstakingly creating sculptures, along with footage of other artists at the college engaged in painting, throwing pots on a wheel, or just struggling with giant pieces of foam, served as a great reminder of the ordinariness of an artist’s daily life, and of the vast number of hours it takes to complete a project that will likely be unpaid, all while the world keeps throwing obstacles in your way.

The movie hit home because it has been nine years since I published my last novel, leading to uncomfortable remarks from friends and strangers, like, “Are you still writing?”

I am still writing, and joyfully so. But here’s the thing: writing and publishing are two different beasts. Sure, if you self-publish, you can take charge of your own publishing calendar. Some indie authors publish several novels a year, or even several novels each month. There is even chatter online about certain authors using AI tools to help them generate hundreds of novels a year. Good for them if they’ve figured out how to make a living as writers.

For better or worse, I am not one of those writers. My novels have been traditionally published, which means having an agent accept your work and shop it around to find an editor who wants to publish it. This process, as anyone knows who has tried it, is so damn daunting that it’s tempting to lie down and give up. Just querying agents can feel like a full-time job. And the rejections? Let’s not even talk about those.

Or no, let’s talk about them, because rejections in any artistic field are typically more common than acceptances. Since my last published novel, I have researched and written a novel based on the life of a 19^th-century poet, a psychological suspense novel set in San Francisco, and a suspense novel set along El Camino in Spain. None of them sold. My previous agent and I parted ways (amicably), which meant I had to find another agent.

My new agent, whose opinion is gold to me, liked the Spain novel but had suggestions for revisions. Another three months went by at my desk. Finally, the manuscript was ready to submit to my editor. She liked the first half of the novel, but saw problems in the second half, so it was back to my desk for another few months. Then I sent the book to the agent again.

And guess what? He made yet more suggestions, so I’ve revised it again. Now I’m hopeful that the book is ready. But if not, I will return to my desk and chew on it some more.

Showing up in art, as in life, is everything. We must be accountable, present, and engaged in our daily lives, earning enough money to pay the mortgage, taking the kids to soccer practice, driving a friend to chemo, or volunteering in our communities. Our lives are made up of these tiny, seemingly inconsequential moments, as are the books we write, the music and paintings we create, and the sweaters we knit. Every time you show up, you are making progress, even if it doesn’t always feel that way.

My youngest son called yesterday with an apology. “I’m sorry, Mom, but do you mind if I don’t spend Christmas with you?”

He had a valid reason: his girlfriend’s parents are coming to their apartment for Christmas, and she asked him to stay and share the holiday.

“No. I don’t mind at all,” I said. “Of course you should stay.” Then we hung up and I cried.

Why was I so sad? It was stupid. I know I should be ecstatic—and let’s be clear, I am—that my children are fully fledged, with partners, jobs, apartments, and busy lives. But like most of us, holidays are weighed down with an absurd amount of emotional baggage for me. I am a child of divorced parents. My childhood Christmases were fraught with tension. When I got divorced and was a single mom with two kids, then got remarried to a man with two kids of his own, I swore that our family Christmases would always be holidays of joy and abundance.

Our holidays have changed now that everyone is older and partnered. One or more kids have been missing from the Christmas table in past years. Sometimes that’s easier. Like all families, ours is full of Personalities with a capital “P.” There have been rifts, slights, and silences. But this is the first time I’m celebrating Christmas without a single child on the holiday itself, and it feels wrong.

To be fair, it’s partly our fault. For the first time in 30 years of marriage, my husband and I are not hosting Christmas. We are, instead, going to New York to my niece’s place because her parents, my brother and his wife, will be visiting from England. When we first hatched this plan, it was partly because two kids had already announced they would be on the West Coast for the holiday, visiting their in-laws.

So when we got the invitation from my niece, my husband looked at me and said, “Wouldn’t it be nice to be guests, just this once? No buying a stupidly expensive roast and tree this year!” he added gleefully.

“No beds to change or sheets to wash. I’m not even putting up the lights,” I declared. “And forget wreaths.”

“Yup. Mr. and Mrs. Scrooge, that’s us,” my husband said.

Except then our youngest daughter, who lives abroad and has a two-year-old, was upset that we weren’t having Christmas. We hated disappointing them, so they got on a plane and came here for a Christmas celebration the second week of December. Yup, the whole she-bang: a tree, stockings, presents, a Christmas roast, and a wreath. And you know what? It was lovely, introducing the two-year-old to Santa and stockings, and seeing her face on “Christmas morning.”

Now our oldest daughter might come for an early Christmas, too. It’s a good thing we got the tree and I put those lights up after all. (All these years, I’m the one who wanted lights. I can admit that now.)

I’m adjusting to my new reality. The children will gather with us, and with each other, too—my oldest son and daughter just had an early Christmas dinner together in New York with their spouses—but on their timetable.

And, on Christmas Eve, my husband and I will travel alone to New York, and maybe I’ll talk him into walking around Rockefeller Center and Central Park. Or we’ll see the light show at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. It won’t be the postcard-perfect holiday of an entire family gathered under the tree, but I’m discovering that the trick to feeling joyful lies in celebrating the moments we have, not the moments expected.

Every window is an art installation with mobiles and colored glass bottles. Nothing is on the oak desk except my humming laptop and notebook. The house is silent except for the dogs occasionally turning over in their sleep with soft snorts. I’m in heaven.

Thanks to my artist friend Tom, who needed someone to walk his dog today, I have a place to bring my dogs and write outside my house. You’d think I wouldn’t need a writing retreat to put words on the page. My kids are grown and I’m a seasoned writer with many published books. But you would be wrong.

Writing any book takes more head space than most of us have at home. Facing a blank page can spark a flurry of panic brought on by the steady drumbeat of “I’m writing crap.” It’s easy to let family or chores interrupt your concentration. A writing retreat can keep your manuscript moving forward.

There are many writing conferences where you can meet other writers, attend craft classes, and workshop your manuscripts. These serve a purpose. You might network and meet your dream agent, or a mentor could critique your manuscript in a way that lets in some fresh air. But you won’t put many words on the page at these conferences with so much stimulation.

If you’re lucky, you might qualify for one of the “real” writing residencies in a place like Yaddo, MacDowell, or Ragdale. These provide ideal spaces and quiet time for writing, but they’re often tough to get into and require a lengthy stay. And, if you don’t qualify for a scholarship, these residences can be expensive.

Luckily, there’s a solution: Create your own writing retreat. Borrow a friend’s empty house or rent a cheap place off-season (like in a beach town in the dead of winter or a ski area during mud season.)

If you don’t have friends with spare houses and can’t afford a rental, another solution is to join a site like TrustedHousesitters.com. In exchange for taking care of someone else’s pets, you can have a quiet retreat.

Religious retreats are also an option. One place near me provides inexpensive private retreats to anyone in a contemplative mood; it’s an ensuite bedroom in a rambling house on a reservoir. For a few extra dollars I can take my meals in the cafeteria with the Unitarians and Episcopalians gathered for group retreats.

If none of these options are available, make use of your public library. Most offer tutorial rooms with doors that close, or you can find a quiet study carrel among the stacks of books. I’ve even driven to certain libraries outside of my town because they offer cafes or indoor atriums.

The toughest part of creating a retreat is believing in yourself enough to make it happen. If you make a habit of writing retreats, you’ll write more, guaranteed, because you’ll also start thinking of yourself as a writer.

I gasped as the car navigated a hairpin turn and confronted new obstacles: a parked Amazon truck, a double-parked Toyota, and a woman pushing a stroller. To complicate matters, we were on such a steep San Francisco hill that I instinctively leaned forward in a misguided effort to keep the car from rolling backward.

“What will Waymo do?” I asked my husband.

“The system is trained to calculate situations like this. Relax.”

Waymo, in case you haven’t visited San Francisco, Los Angeles, or Phoenix lately, is Google’s fully self-driving robotaxi, and on a recent trip to San Francisco, we rode in one every day. To be clear, I’m more accustomed to robots than most people. My husband is a robotics engineer, and so is my son. I’m familiar with robots that do everything from climbing stairs in dog-shaped bodies to growing plants or loading boxes onto conveyor belts. Some have even become part of our family, like the little robot vacuum that committed Hari Kari when it swallowed one of my scarves in the closet.

Still, even for me, riding in a driverless car was a freaky experience. With Waymo, you use your phone to summon it the way you call an Uber or Lyft. When your sparkling white chariot arrives, it’s equipped with a swirly gadget on the roof and other protrusions. These are the lidar, cameras, and sensors that allow the car to “see” objects around it. You can see them, too, as a weird little video game playing out on screens inside the car. The pictures are fairly accurate: if a man is walking a dog on the sidewalk beside your Waymo, there’s a little cartoon man with a dog on a leash. Ditto with kids on skateboards and bikes.

There’s music, too. Entering a Waymo, you’re greeted by name, reminded to fasten your seatbelt, and then you hear space-age elevator music, enhancing that feeling of being caught in a Jetsons cartoon with flying cars. (Those, too, are coming soon.)

The Waymo, as my husband predicted, smoothly navigated the narrow channel between the two vehicles clogging the road and summited the hill with ease. Well done, Waymo.

After a few more rides, I trusted the vehicles not to lose their brakes on steep hills or hit anything, so it took me a while to realize why I still felt uneasy. Just to compare, we also called an Uber while we were in San Francisco. The driver was from Nigeria and we chatted as he drove. He told us about his three daughters: a lawyer, a nurse, and an engineer. “I miss my country, but it was worth coming to the U.S. to educate my girls,” he said.

For someone like my husband, who is fascinated by technology, Waymo was the transportation winner. For me, not so much.

Sure, Waymo cars are electric, and if people take Waymo, they don’t need to bring their cars into the city. The air is cleaner as a result. That’s great. But robotaxis also keep us separate from other people. Do we need to isolate ourselves even more than we do?

Think about it. Many of us no longer work in offices, thanks to remote work options. In the evenings, most of us aren’t out socializing, either, because we’re playing video games or streaming shows. (Okay, a few of us are still reading books.) Instead of walking, we ride around in our private cars or, increasingly, in robotaxis like Waymo. Even if we go to a bar or a diner, we’re apt to be on our phones instead of chatting up the strangers on either side of us. We like being in our safe bubbles.

Safe bubbles take the stress out of life. But the problem with being in a bubble is that you can’t feel the beat of a city. You might argue in favor of avoiding urban decay—I’ll admit that walking in downtown San Francisco can be a hellishly unpleasant experience at times-- but, if we avoid seeing the people around us, and I mean all of the people, we’re less inclined to get involved with the humans sharing this planet. It takes all kinds of people to make the world go around. We need to acknowledge, and embrace, this shared humanity if we’re going to work toward making the planet better for everyone.

For me, the best option in any city is still to walk its streets or take public transportation and chat with the people I meet who are willing to lift their heads from their phones. Barring that, I’ll choose a conversation with an Uber driver over a car that drives itself.   

I visited my son and his wife in Brooklyn just before the election and went for an early run. The run took me through the projects and down along Broadway beneath the screeching subway tracks, then to Domino Park, where I ran beneath the Williamsburg Bridge and watched tugboats and commuter ferries gliding through the molten-looking water.

On the other side of the river, the Empire State Building’s iconic silhouette reflected the morning sun, and the Chrysler Building, the queen jewel of Manhattan’s skyline, stood tall and elegant. From the water, I looped back through Williamsburg’s tree-lined streets past vintage stores, coffee shops, and yoga studios.

Running through a different city is one of my favorite things to do. That day, though, midway through the route, I felt tears streaming down my face as I watched people walking their kids to school, climbing the daunting metal staircase to the overhead train, or sweeping the stoops of their corner stores. I cried when I passed a girl with pink hair smoking a cigarette, a sleeping woman sitting in her shopping cart of worldly belongings, and a pair of men in expensive jackets.

It took me another mile or so before I recognized that I was crying not because I was sad, but because I was so honored to be here, “on this the green side of the sod,” as my Uncle Pete used to say. I felt privileged, even ecstatic, to see the tattooed artist going into his studio, the guys in safety vests stopping at the corner store for their egg sandwiches, and the mom nursing her baby on a park bench. Life was flowing all around me on the streets of Brooklyn, people of all colors and sizes and histories, and I was flowing with it, one more speck of humanity being carried by her own feet, yes, but also by all of the lives around me.

Here's the thing: whenever people talk about a divided nation, they forget that all of us are in this together. We live and work and raise our children the best we can alongside our neighbors. In Brooklyn, in San Francisco and Chicago, in Dallas and Portland, and every place in between, we are all muddling along, trying our hardest to feed and house our families, and to do work that matters, or at least a job that pays the rent. We are keeping our cars running and worrying about whether our sports teams will win or not, and maybe planning a special celebration for someone we love.

As the poet Mary Oliver wrote:

“Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.”

The world will go on after today’s election, and even if there is chaos in the days to come, and we will still belong to it. So go ahead and dare to be hopeful about the future.

The tree branches tunnel above me as I run down the path. The sky is growing darker. The rain, when it comes, whispers through the leaves at first, then falls hard enough to mask the sound of my footsteps.

Ahead of me a robin flits along the path, then is joined by another bird and another. Soon there’s a flock of robins flying ahead of me, close to the ground. I never knew robins gathered like this, but here they are, a dozen orange-bellied birds darting swiftly across the path as the rain comes down so hard that I have to take off my glasses to see.

I’m lost, but happy, running along this trail through the rain. I’m in a park near my in-laws’ house in suburban Minneapolis; it would be easy enough to whip out my phone and use a map to get back, but I don’t. Mini adventures like these fuel my days.

Before becoming a wife and mother in my thirties, I had much grander adventures: trekking through Nepal, taking trains alone through India, snorkeling in Bali, horseback riding in Mexico, climbing in the Andes. I was often lost. We had no cell phones then and my paper maps were constantly getting shredded in my backpack. Map folding is not my forte.

These days, my adventures are more curated. My husband Dan and I walk sections of El Camino in northern Spain every year. We’ve hiked in New Zealand and biked through the San Juan Islands. But, even in the most remote areas, even on the original pilgrimage path through the Pyrenees Mountains, Dan has maps downloaded on his phone. He’s an engineer and takes no joy in being lost.

The thing is, when you always know where you are, a part of your brain falls asleep. You pay less attention because you don’t have to remember that tree you passed with the crooked trunk, or that odd white fungus that people call “ghost pipe.” You just happily plod on by.

The same is true in a city. If you always look down at the map on your phone—something I see people doing not only in cities, but even here in our own small town—you aren’t observing your surroundings. You miss admiring the ornate door knockers in Back Bay or the lush wisteria on someone’s backyard trellis because you’re too busy navigating to your destination to notice any of it. And you never, ever have to ask for directions, which of course is a relief for many people who loathe talking to strangers.

I love asking for directions because that often leads to impromptu conversations. These conversations with strangers have led to invitations to tea or even a walking companion. Once, in New York City, I stopped to ask directions and ended up talking about politics in Paris with a French diplomat who not only gave me directions, but carried my suitcase up three flights of stairs because the subway escalator was broken.

But the mini adventures I love best involve getting lost on a trail through the woods, where my senses have to kick into high gear to find my way. These are the times I’m most connected to the planet, to the small ferns quivering bright green beneath the trees, to the robins darting along the path and the sound of a creek tumbling over rocks. When we are lost, we have no choice but to be fully present.

Eventually, the path forks and I recognize the uphill slope by a pair of park trash cans that I noticed on the way into the woods when I arrived. Back at my in-laws’ house, my husband looks relieved. “We were worried about you running through the park in all this rain,” he says.

“It was great,” I say, and toe off my sodden shoes, happy to be in a warm dry place, and happier still for having felt the wet earth beneath my feet.

I’m at our house on Prince Edward Island, and yesterday morning I went down to the beach for a run. It’s a beautiful beach, one you access by a red dirt road. The sand is the singing sort. It’s a joy to run here at low tide when the beach is wide and flat, with tide pools that make you feel ten years old again as you splash through them.

This morning I was feeling energetic, maintaining a decent (for me) pace, and feeling good about life in general. I’m here with a friend on a writing retreat and we have similar rhythms; we work toward pesky book deadlines and take beach breaks, share our writing, and live in t-shirts and sweatpants. So I was all smiles, even while running and panting, until I saw the shipwreck.

I mean that literally: it’s an actual shipwreck, the remains of which I have observed at low tide on this beach since my youngest son was eleven years old. That’s the year we bought this house, the year we found the shipwreck together; he’s twenty-six now. Aidan and I made up stories about pirates and mermaids as we examined the remains together. We talked about the engine and the wood, how the ship was made, and what could have caused it to sink and run aground. Every day at low tide, for many summers, Aidan wanted to walk to the shipwreck, and whenever we brought his friends to the island, that was often the first thing he wanted to show them.

Now, seeing the shipwreck at low tide, and spotting another young boy examining it with his mother, the two of them squatting in the sand, heads close together as they imagine what brought this lichen-covered vessel with its rusty engine to our beach, memories clamor to be seen and heard. Aidan hasn’t come to the island with me in years, nor have my other adult children.

I keep running past the shipwreck to banish the memories, but of course that’s impossible. That is the joy and the grief of parenthood, isn’t it? We bring children into the world and devote ourselves to giving them the love, knowledge, and dreams we believe will lead them into a world where they will thrive and be better people than we are. My children are, thankfully, doing just that, but at times it’s a painful pleasure to see them live so independently. A few years ago, I traveled to Alaska to visit my daughter, who was a forester there at the time, and she packed our things for a hike, including homemade granola bars and bear spray. It was clear to me then that our roles had reversed: this curly-headed beautiful creature, who I once made hold my hand while crossing the street, was taking care of me in a vast, bear-infested wilderness. Yet still I can feel that little phantom hand in mine.

My oldest son is now in his thirties and married, with a successful career and a passion for music and writing. He was a peaceful child, observant early on. When he was a toddler I’d sometimes bring him to the library to do research and spread a blanket at my feet with toys. He’d sit there for as long as I wanted to write, playing and entertaining himself. A few weeks ago, this son and I met at a Boston WeWork space to hang out and work on our separate writing projects. At one point I turned to him and saw not his bearded, Brooklyn-dwelling self, but the bald and quizzical baby he once was, flipping through cloth books long before he could read. That, too, was a joyful memory that brought the sharp sting of time passing.

Recently, I asked a young friend how he felt about being a father himself now that he had a baby. He thought for a minute and said, “I am no longer the main protagonist of my own story.”

This is true for a time. When children are young, good parents put them first in most things. But then the children leave and you are left with the old art portfolios from third grade, bins of Legos and stuffed toys, base amps that work, and forgotten hoodies. Your story is your own again, as you continue working in your often empty house or making vacation plans that no longer involve booking multiple hotel rooms. It is a new sort of freedom, one you treasure because it’s a novelty. Yet there is this thing you carry, this box or suitcase or shipwreck of memories, of the person you were when the children were young, as well as the person you were before parenthood and the person you are now. It’s a many-layered self, and sometimes you wish you could go back in time, peel back some of those layers, and have your children hold your hand one more time when you cross the street because you didn’t realize that last time was, in fact, the last.

I am still running on our beach as I think about this, until eventually I turn around at the Basin Head bridge where my children, as teens, used to jump off into the river below. As I run back, a man jogs toward me. He’s about my oldest son’s age, bearded, too, and for a moment my heart leaps.

Then the man gives me a “V” sign with his fingers, and I do the same to him in return, acknowledging that, by running, we are accomplishing something, achieving a small victory by moving our bodies through space and time, even as we are awash with memories we can’t, and shouldn’t, try to outrun.

Bella is cowering beneath my desk because a motorcycle roared by. This dog’s list of fears knows no bounds: plastic bags, umbrellas, rolling trash can lids, inflatable holiday decorations, bicycles, car rides. Oh, and brooms.

Yet, if you put this knee-high animal--a chihuahua/rat terrier/Jack Russell mix—on a leash, she morphs into Cujo, threatening pit bulls and horses with noisy bravado.

I’ve never owned a dog like this. My dogs tend to be calm. Even laconic. Merlin, my Pekingese, is as Zen as they come, rolling onto his back for a belly scratch whether he’s greeting the Amazon delivery person or a bunch of shrieking kids.

Bella was my mother’s dog, an ill-considered pandemic choice made in 20 seconds in a church parking lot after my mom’s previous dog, also a trembling chihuahua, died suddenly of a heart attack.

“I know I shouldn’t get another dog, but I hate being without one,” Mom said as we waited in the parking lot for some stranger who claimed she had a dog to give away—free.

“I understand,” I said, and I did.

My mother was in her late eighties and still living independently during the pandemic, which meant she was completely isolated. Other than seeing me, her world had shut down. She wasn’t isolated in a nursing home, thank God, but her beloved senior center activities had all been curtailed. The days stretched out, long and lonely, in her tiny apartment. She needed a companion.

Bella, we discovered when the woman arrived, had been rescued three times already, first from Puerto Rico and most recently from the woman’s own daughter, who was moving into an apartment that didn’t take dogs.

“She’s not too friendly with other dogs,” the woman said when I tried to bring Merlin over to greet Bella.

That was an understatement. Bella lunged at Merlin and acted like she’d tear him to pieces, nearly pulling over her owner in the process.

“Mom, this dog is a bad idea,” I said.

“Oh, nonsense. I can handle her,” Mom said. “And look at the poor thing. She just needs love.”

Bella needed a lot more than that. With her hyperactivity level, she needed a race track, but my mom suffered from chronic lung disease and couldn’t walk more than a few feet outside her apartment. The dog was clearly going crazy, so one day I let her loose in my backyard with Merlin. Bella raced around the yard in dizzying circles. To my surprise, when I called her name, Bella trotted right over to me.

She was happiest off-leash, clearly, so I started taking Bella on hikes with Merlin and me. (Pekingese are surprisingly good hikers if you don’t treat them like lap dogs.) Bella loved these woodsy runs and gradually relaxed. Off leash, she sometimes barked at other dogs, but she quickly became more social. Our dog-walking neighbors stopped having to cross the street when they saw us coming as Bella learned she could have friends.

The only problem was that, when I took Bella back to my Mom’s apartment, I’d hear the dog fling herself against the door when I left; clearly, Bella had decided she was meant to live with Merlin and me. Even when I visited the apartment, Bella would sit in my lap or, worse, curl up behind me, hiding from my mother.

“Well,” my mother sniffed, “I guess you’ve got another dog.”

I didn’t want another dog, especially not such a high-maintenance one, but a year after the world opened up again, my mother’s health declined and she moved in with us. Now Bella could sleep on my mom’s bed and sit on her lap, but still hang out with Merlin in the living room. She flourished. “You’ll take care of Bella for me, won’t you,” Mom said a few days before she died. It wasn’t a question.

“Of course,” I promised.

After Mom was gone, friends who’d heard me joke about “Little Miss High Anxiety” suggested I find another home for Bella. I love to travel, and Bella hates car rides and freaks out in hotels. Having two dogs is expensive as well. Several people offered to take her for me and would have given Bella a good home, but I couldn’t do it. Mine was the lap Bella always chose in the TV room, and Bella followed me everywhere in the house, upstairs and down, no matter what I was doing. She had become my shadow.

I thought I was simply keeping my promise by putting up with Bella. Recently, however, I lost her on a hike and started to cry when I thought I might not find her. When Bella came running back to me a few minutes later, I laughed at the sight of her tiny body flattened out like a greyhound in her hurry to return. My mom was right after all: I’ve got another dog.

My husband is staring at me in astonishment. “Are you actually carrying that around?”

“Of course.” I cocked a hip, trying to look extra cool as I heaved my new orange Stanley cup off the counter.

If you don’t know what a Stanley Cup is, you probably aren’t hanging around people in their twenties who are all toting around 40-ounce metal mugs with straws like they’re about to trudge across the Sahara.

Those who swear by Stanleys believe you should drink two full Stanley cups of water per day. To be fair, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine say men should drink 125 oz. of liquid daily, and women should be downing 91 oz. But I grew up during a time when we never drank water. Sure, we might sip it from a trickling fountain at school, but we did sports and watched TV, partied, and joined protest marches on Washington with nary a water bottle in sight, never mind a manly Stanley mug. And guess what? We survived—even though we never put protein powder in our smoothies, either.

But that’s not the point. The real question on my mind is whether I’m cool enough to carry the Stanley in public. Because guess what? I, too, am now addicted to the Stanley. Maybe it’s because my son gave it to me and I love him. Or maybe it’s because the color orange makes me happy, or because lifting a Stanley all day means I feel justified skipping the dumbells at the gym. Whatever the reason, I’m carrying my Stanley everywhere: to my office, out to the screen porch, in my car. I just haven’t yet dared let anyone see me do it.

Here’s the thing. This winter, I bought a warm jacket on sale that happens to be bright teal with flowers, and everywhere I went, people would say, “I love you in that jacket!” or, “That’s an adorable coat.”

Slowly, it’s dawning on me that I am at the “adorable” stage of womanhood. Not cute, as in girlish, and not pretty or beautiful or elegant, as in being a good-looking woman, but adorable, aka, nonthreatening.

I’ve heard lots of women talk about feeling invisible once they cross a certain age threshold, but I haven’t heard anybody complain about being called “adorable,” so I started asking around.

“Oh, God yes,” said one friend.

“Absolutely,” said another, adding, “The only thing worse than being called adorable is when they call you ‘spry.’”

True. On the other hand, why not embrace the possibilities?

Recently I had a complete loss of sanity in a clothing store and bought a pair of black denim overalls that make me look like a toddler, and my rainhat has a lining of brightly-colored birds. I also own a bunch of striped headbands for running that made my brother say I look like Richard Simmons. Can a sparkly gold romper be far behind?

“Eccentric lady writer,” I told my husband as I headed out to my office with my Stanley Cup and two dogs in tow. “That’s the look I’m going for now.”

It’s a good look, right? After all, I’m one of the lucky ones, having reached an age of grace where I can relax and be exactly who I am, navigating the world in a way that gives me joy.

We took a friend to Portsmouth, NH for dinner recently. It was a busy Saturday night, so my husband suggested the parking garage. “You’ll never find a parking space on the street near the restaurant,” he said.

“Of course I will,” I said, and I did.

“Good parking karma,” our friend suggested.

Is there such a thing?

“You just have to visualize what you want, say your affirmations, and it will come to you,” says another friend who is a big believer in the power of positive thinking. She’s extremely successful in her writing career, but is that because she’s using the power of visualization to manifest what she wants—known in pop psychology circles as “the law of attraction?” Is she lucky? Or is she simply outworking everybody else?

Social media has been flooded with young women reciting affirmations like “everything works out for me” and declaring how “lucky” they are, a practice the media quickly dubbed “lucky girl syndrome.” Here, the fundamental belief is that, if you think of yourself as lucky (in love, finances, health, or whatever), then you will manifest your own good luck.

Do any of these manifestations and affirmations work? Or is this the adult equivalent of leaving cookies for Santa?

I say it’s worth hedging your bets.

My first real visualization of “the writing life” began when I was in my twenties and housesitting for a professor one summer. I spent a lot of time sitting on the deck and pretending to read every morning because I was spying on the neighbor across the street. This woman was a well-known writer and I admired her books. Every morning, she drove her children to camp after her husband went to work, and then brought her laptop out to the deck. She wrote for hours out there.

And I do mean hours. Sometimes this woman didn’t move until someone dropped her children off and her husband came home. After dinner I’d often see her outside again, sitting with her husband and drinking wine while the kids played in the yard.

I very badly wanted what she had: a creative life filled with love.

Fast-forward to the present. I am a writer, a mother, and a wife. My house doesn’t have a deck, but it has a patio and a porch; I have spent countless hours writing in both of these places while my kids were at school and my husband was at work.

Did I manifest this life by visualizing it?

Not a chance. I worked countless side jobs to put myself through college and an MFA program. Like most writers, I’ve had more rejections than acceptances, and in the early years I had to work in marketing to sustain myself as a writer.

On the other hand, if I’d never seen that professor’s life, if I’d never believed it was possible, I couldn’t have wished for it. I might not have spent years working to achieve that visualized goal of being on a lifelong creative journey.

And the parking karma? That’s the same sort of thing. I believe I will find a parking space because I’ve done this before and the odds are in my favor: somebody will be leaving as I arrive, and that space will be mine. I just have to be in the right place at the right time to seize that opportunity instead of giving up.

So maybe that’s what manifesting really is: knowing something is possible, wanting it, and using all of your passion, intellect, and problem-solving skills to achieve it.

Try these five steps for fun:

1. Think of something you want that seems out of reach.

2. Imagine yourself living the life of someone who has that thing you want, whether it’s a toned body or a successful career.

3. List all the ways your imaginary person could have achieved your fantasy goal without inheritance or nepotism. Did they likely go to college and study a certain subject? Go to a gym five days a week? Work two jobs so they could buy that fun car?

4. Finally, list practical steps you can take to achieve that same thing. Start with the tiniest, easiest one, like taking an online class or spending a weekend afternoon researching your options. For instance, I’m thinking of writing a biography. I’ve never written one before and have no idea how to go about it, but I signed up as a member of Biographers International Organization to find resources.

5. Keep taking more tiny steps every day toward your goal while continuing to imagine yourself as someone who has achieved it.

Will this work? Maybe not. But, whatever happens, you will be moving forward.

I was walking the dogs this morning when our young neighbor drove by in a Jeep. Her bumper sticker said it all: “Jeep Hair Don’t Care.”

In a flash, a memory hit: me singing to the radio in my first car, a beast of an 8-cylinder Buick sedan handed down by my grandfather. Riding in it was like sitting in a living room, with its long blue bench seats and the scenery floating by. That Buick was so old and rusty, I had to duct tape the wheel wells so it would pass state inspection; within minutes of inspection, the tape would come loose and start flapping like streamers.

The next notable car was the forest green VW Beetle I bought in graduate school. The only way to defrost the windshield was to aim a defroster tube straight at the glass. If there hadn’t been holes rusted through the floor, I probably would have asphyxiated from the exhaust fumes. Still, like all of my favorite cars, this one served as dressing room, camping van, living room, and dining room as I shuttled between classes, restaurant gigs, and a moldy basement studio apartment.

It wasn’t until I finished my master’s degree that I got my first “real car;” that is, a vehicle that would reliably start every morning. This was when my mother gave me a manual shift, 6-cylinder Pontiac Sunbird as a graduation present. She regretted the decision when I announced that I intended to drive to San Francisco.

“If I’d known you were going to pull a stunt like that,” Mom grumbled, “I would’ve given you a watch instead.”

I set off on my cross-country adventure nonetheless. I was 26 years old with a newly-minted MFA, an unpublished novel, and no job skills beyond being able to balance multiple hot plates on my arms. No credit cards or cell phone. Nothing but cash—and not much of that—a couple of suitcases, cassette tapes, my cat, and a wooden Japanese screen from a thrift shop. I navigated from the East Coast to the West using paper maps that were never properly folded because I couldn’t be bothered with the complex origami of it. The cat howled any time we were in motion and I sang to drown her out.

The adventures on that particular cross-country trip were enough to set any mother’s hair on fire. I received a speeding ticket for going over 100 mph from a cop who said, “If you were my daughter, I’d throw you in jail.”

In Denver, I was nearly car-jacked by a guy in a hotel parking lot who threw himself onto the hood and demanded a ride. I floored the accelerator instead and knocked him off.

Then, in the middle of Death Valley, my car overheated. When I pulled into a remote rest stop, the bathroom was filled with women and children. They had washed their clothes and hung them on the bathroom stalls, and had set up a hot plate for cooking.

Outside, I was immediately surrounded by men who told me they’d lost all their money in Las Vegas. They pleaded with me to pay them to fix my car. “Our kids are hungry and so are we.”

“I don’t have much to give,” I said, handing them ten dollars just as a truck driver pulled into the lot and jumped down from his cab.

“Leave her alone,” he barked and asked me what the problem was.

When I explained, he fiddled with the engine, added water to something, and followed me the rest of the way to San Francisco to make sure I reached my friend’s house in the city. I’ll forever regret not knowing how to get in touch with him to say thank you.

In San Francisco, I drove up and over the crest of a hill with such speed that the car flew into the air like something out of a movie and landed a bang on the other side. Once I’d found a job, I sold the Pontiac to a guy in his twenties with a goatee and pockets full of cash and bought my first new car ever: a sensible Honda.

That Honda ferried me to Mexico and Canada before I married and moved back to Massachusetts, where I rapidly moved into the dreaded Minivan stage once the children started coming. It wasn’t until a few years ago that I realized I could once again fall in love with a car.

This time it was a Mini Cooper Clubman in a deep plum color. It’s small enough to park anywhere in Boston, but big enough for my dogs when I road trip to Prince Edward Island. Good on gas, but still a joy to drive.

“So do we have a deal?” the salesman asked after I’d done a test drive with that car.

I shook my head. “Not unless you include racing stripes on the hood.”

He gave me a look that said Really? I suppose because I’m over sixty and meant to be sedate.

“Yup,” I said. “That’s the deal.”

Maybe now I need a bumper sticker: “Mini Hair Don’t Care.”

It’s fifty degrees and the forsythia is budding. That means one thing: I will try, and probably fail, to do a serious spring cleanout.

Here’s why I want to try: I’m embarrassed by the thought of my kids cleaning out our house after I’m gone. It’s too easy to imagine them saying things like, “Who still uses paper clips?” or “Why are there DVDs mixed in with the cookbooks?”

They’ll moan over the collections of hand-embroidered aprons and Spanish fans. They’ll puzzle over hundreds of photographs of relatives whose names nobody remembers, piled together in a wooden box gathering dust in the living room.

I’ve got a spring cleaning “to do” list that includes sensible steps like buying boxes, so I can pack up extra mugs, clothing, and silverware for Goodwill; calling local consignment shops to see if they want that extra furniture; and ordering a dumpster.

Yes. A dumpster. That’s because we don’t just have a house that needs purging, but a whole barn. A stately, 18th-century barn.

A barn that now contains, among other things: my father’s ancient camera equipment; several bikes; my mother’s wedding china; my husband’s science fiction books; a toboggan we’re all afraid to ride; Halloween costumes that don’t fit anyone; a fender from one son’s old car; several pairs of skis nobody uses; and countless piles of lumber and boxes of screws, nuts, drill bits, and plastic pieces that my husband is certain will come in handy one day. (Just recently he crowed about having found a screw that fit perfectly when he was fixing a broken desk chair.)

In other words, whenever we can’t find something, we say, “It must be in the barn!” Then we hang our heads in despair because that barn is our Bermuda Triangle.

Other people are better at spring cleaning than I am. They must have the sort of ruthlessness I lack. An ability to say, “Nope, I don’t care if I give away my son’s old guitars.”

My problem is that I cherish our family memories, and many of these objects represent different eras in our family. Pictured here, for instance, is a table, some pottery, and two paintings. The table is an old gardening table I found in the shed of our first house—the house where my husband and I were married. I sanded, painted, and varnished it so I could use it as a writing desk for many years.

The pottery? That was on my mother-in-law’s shelves in her living room until she died. I miss her every day and it makes me feel better to see it.

And that painting of the horse? Primitive, I know. But it was done by my great-grandmother when she was sixteen years old—before she sailed from England to America.

Every object we possess tells a story. (Okay, maybe not the boxes of screws or stacks of lumber.) Those art projects my children created remind me of how it was to have a house full of their ideas and energy. The things cluttering my desk—a paperweight from my first husband, a mug from my son’s high school, and a handmade box from a good friend—are reminders of my path to get to where I am now.

The reason why so many of us have trouble following the reasonable Marie Kondo philosophy of discarding and tidying all at once is that our objects contain multitudes: ourselves as children, parents, friends, and partners. With so much information coming at us every minute via phones and computers, our memories of past selves get pushed into dusty mental corners and become trickier to access. Our objects act as magic portals to the past.

Ideally, our house and barn will be tidy one day. I’ll keep whittling away at the clutter. But I suspect many of these objects will be with me to the end, including that box of old photos. Even nameless, they are still family.