-Nick Offerman, on Good Hang with Amy Poehler. Listen, just allow me to flatter myself and pretend I’m in the same category as Nick Offerman.

Alright, Dear Strangers (and anyone else who has tried to have meaningful interactions with me over the last few weeks), I need to apologize because the circle of what I have been present for recently has been very small and surrounded by a wide swath of folks and projects that I’ve neglected as I’ve rushed around. Every spring I fall under the delusion that summer will be a time in which I will accomplish great feats. Every summer, especially by the midpoint, I am wildly overwhelmed by all the VERY FUN THINGS I gave myself and my family to do. This year is no exception. I put my art in a new gallery in town! I’m still working on a book project! I’m filling in at the bookstore/coffee shop where I used to work! I’m teaching one of my favorite workshops ever, Messy Journaling! I’m teaching a story-collecting workshop! My family is flung out into all manner of adventures this month! If I’m not looking at my paper calendar, I don’t know what day it is. Some lessons take me a long time to learn.

Also, I need to let folks know that the big plan for my Dear Strangers that was going to be very fun in July is going to be postponed into August, when it will still…be very fun. I have a stack of addressed, handmade postcards waiting for everyone who has at any point this year participated in our letter writing swap. The postcards even have stamps and instructions about what to do with them. But y’all, I cannot get them out to you for a couple of weeks, sooooo:

NO, you haven’t missed any signup or opportunity since June and,

YES, you still have time to catch up on any letters you meant to write in a previous month but have postponed. Send those! Send another letter to someone you’ve written previously! They’d be delighted to hear from you again. Or, wait for the August mail from me! You’re good. We’re ALL good.

Nick and I have only grown as humans enough to bring awareness to our vices. Taming them remains on the horizon. (At least for me. Who am I to speak for Mr. Offerman?!?) I’ll be moving from one incredible opportunity to another for a couple more weeks and inwardly (sometimes audibly) muttering:

BE PRESENT FOR THIS GOODNESS.

Y’all are—this space is—part of the goodness of my life. Thank you! I am sending all of my moderately-crazed joy in your direction and wishing you rest, peace, contentment and a little bit of zany fun to keep it interesting.

Until August!!!

LG

A month ago my husband and I were walking through one of our favorite local nurseries pretending we’d only come for pond plants while actually filling our cart with salvia, several eggplant starts and (sure, we might as well) cucumber vines. As I delicately unlaced leaves from one another in an attempt to extract our chosen cucumbers, that a fellow patron across the pallet spoke up.

If I remember correctly he started with his love of cucumbers.

It was a shared love.

Then we talked about our favorite uses for them.

We make a modified Caprese salad with cucumbers throughout the summer.

That sounded nice to him.

Then he noted how cucumbers are good for fighting inflammation. Did we know that?

No! Really?

(And I’ll admit my skepticism might have shot up here because the world is full of big claims about foods that don’t necessarily need improved PR for me to eat them, BUT his enthusiasm easily overpowered any residual grumpiness I carry around about overblown food claims.)

Oh, YES! he said. My favorite is a salad with cucumbers. It is full of inflammation-fighting magic. You MUST try it.

He recited the recipe to us. I told him it was everything our family loved and recited it back to him to confirm that I had it right. There were smiles and there was gratitude and friendly waves and then we were off to continue meandering through the rows. When later we encountered him once again, the ingredients once again rolled out across the check out lines and we promised him we’d make it.

And we did, that very night. My little family devoured it. Then I made it again and again and it is on the menu for Father’s Day Dinner tonight. (Happy Father’s Day to my dad and the other fathers reading this!) The salad is very good.

Everything about the encounter with the Salad Fairy sweetens my experience of the dish itself. His eager joy, the late spring sunshine, the shared love of growing your own food - it’s all there in the salad’s crisp tanginess. I don’t know if eating it soothes my body’s inflammation, and I don’t care. I don’t think it matters. The salad carries the memory of a stranger’s generosity and that does matter.

Have you been graced by a salad fairy? Or some other unexpected recipe-giver? How about a compliment out of nowhere that’s never left you? A piece of advice offered out of the blue or stumbled upon that turned your story in a new direction? What’s the gift a (total or near) stranger has offered into your life?

That’s what I thought we could share with one another this month! You can tell the story like I did. You can pass on the recipe, advice, etc. like I’m going to at the end. You can write about a time you were the fairy. You can ignore all of this and write about something else entirely. You can also draw/paint/collage.

Yes, I know I’m sending this late in June! That’s a little bit because of my schedule and a little bit in order to give some of our lallygagging strangers from previous months time to catch up and get their letters in the mail. (It happens and IT’S FINE! We are strangers full of grace and understanding for one another!) If you don’t get your letter written and mailed off before the end of June, that will be okay. My plan is to get us back to new invitations and signups being sent out mid-month in July, but that will mean it feels a little pinched. Fear not. Sign up anyway and get to your June and July letters as you can. It’s fine.

As before, you become a Dear Stranger by sending me a message in the next week letting me know you’re in for June. If you do, I will send you a name and an address and sometime soon after that, please have your letter in the mail.

Signing up this month isn’t signing up forever. It’s only for June. You are not required to stay in touch with your stranger after this, but you’re certainly welcome to. I know of strangers who have become regular penpals. I know of strangers meeting up in real life. I also know of folks who love the experience because it happens at a distance, just the once. All of that is exactly as it’s supposed to be. Join in and make it what you want it to be!

This week those of you who have written your third letter should receive your gift from me (if you haven’t already). If June is your third letter, I’ll be sending you a gift as well soon. Do you want a gift from me? Write three letters! And if you invite a friend to become a Dear Stranger I have something extra special for you too! More Dear Strangers, y’all. Let’s find more!

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And here it is,

The Salad-Fairy’s Salad (that may or may not fight inflammation)

No exact amounts of ingredients were provided to me that afternoon and so—in the spirit of the fairy—I can only guide you along the way. If it helps, I use the chopped whole bell pepper as a rough measurement. If you start with one bell pepper, you’ll have enough for four people to eat as a side, but no one will be mad if you double it.

1 red bell pepper, chopped

Enough cucumber to match the bell pepper, chopped

Enough pineapple to match the bell pepper, chopped

Some red onion (according to your taste), chopped finely

Mix together.

Add in a handful of cilantro (if it doesn’t taste like soap to you), chopped

Drizzle with a bit of honey and olive oil. Mix again.

Add a squeeze of lemon juice plus salt and pepper to taste. Mix once more, give it a taste to make any adjustments, and then let it rest.

Yes, by all means, throw in different herbs and play with the dressing! You have my (and, I’m sure, the Salad Fairy’s) blessing to make this delicious dish your own!

Thank you, my dear ones, for being here. For reading. For joining in. For becoming the Dearest Strangers.

A few thoughts before we jump in:

If this is your first Dear Stranger letter, you can go back to the places I’ve described this letter-writing community here and here. The short of it is that if you’re in, let me know in the comments! I’ll message you to get you signed up. In about a week you’ll get another message from me with the name and address of a stranger. Write to them and then start watching your mailbox for a letter to YOU. You are not obligated to write your strangers again, but you are certainly welcome to!

And here we go…

(If you are using a screen-reader and the images below are not working for you, TELL ME. I am happy to send you a typed version of what’s below!!)

Seems like a good time to subscribe and never miss another Dear Stranger invitation, right?

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Seems like a good time to invite a friend to be a Dear Stranger too!

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(The group is called Dear Stranger and you can find all the info about it here and here. YES, you can and should join in. For sure, writing letters a little awkward at first, but then you’ll receive something lovely from a total stranger and you’ll forget how itchy you felt while writing your letter and simply bask in the joy of collective human goodness. Then you’ll sign up for the next month and we’ll have more Dear Strangers out in the world which can only be a net positive.)

But wait, I was telling you about the mess!

I provide prompts for the letters because they create common ground for everyone and they offer a starting place if the reality of a blank page is overwhelming. I always say that the prompt can be ignored if you don’t need it. I imagine it as a nice invitation, certainly negotiable, decidedly not an stress-inducing edict. And all seemed well in the world of letter prompts until April’s, when I asked:

My friends, the people were FREAKED OUT by this prompt. I heard from them in bigger numbers and with a ferocity that hasn’t happened in previous months. Their feedback (some of it verbatim):

I’M NOT AN EXPERT IN ANYTHING!

I HAVE NO ADVICE EVER ON ANY SUBJECT!

I AM A BUNDLE OF INADEQUACIES WITH NO HOW-TO!

I CAN’T WRITE THIS ONE!

I didn’t see this coming. In my teaching years I began my classes with the same first writing assignment: a letter that began Dear Mrs. Graeber, I’m awesome… then proceeded to tell me anything about oneself. In hundreds of letters, teenagers poured out incredible information about themselves, lots of it random, some of it extremely niche, all of it awesome. I had those letters in mind with April’s prompt, but I had forgotten my audience has shifted

from (humans still obviously becoming humans who are walking around like wonder machines inhaling open-ended questions, burping out short-lived but passionate declarations about life) teenagers

to (humans who think of themselves as settled creatures from whom life demands more rigidity and certainty than anyone could possibly maintain and for whom the idea of expertise is a fixed category1) adults

Oh my, what I imagined as playful turned out to be very stressful for some. No amount of my reassurance has quelled the masses. My prompt asked folks to wade into the murky waters of who are you and what does your life add up to, which we accept are open questions during development and then we expect are closing doors as we age. If the last couple of weeks fielding feedback is any indication, these ideas about our adulthoods are not helpful stances. They leave people who are DEMONSTRABLY experts at MANY things second guessing themselves into silence.

That simply won’t do.

How do we bring a teenager’s flippancy around expertise and awesomeness into the complexity of adulthood so that we can honor what the accolades and knowledge we’ve rightfully earned? How do we greet life with the kind of quick-hearted, short-memoried nonchalance that teenagers are using to traverse the awkward morass of adolescence so that we can survive the ridiculous morass of our current age?

The truth is much of adult life is that same sticky feeling of being ALL WRONG about things, just papered over with a few credentials and enough success to make you forget it for stretches of time. Working with teenagers kept me in proximity to their wisdom. Now that my audience has changed, how do I do tap into a life-stance that allows me to blithely throw out prompts about expertise like they’re not going to provoke existential crises?

(Am I offering a hack? Is this #lifemaxxing?)

I take kickboxing classes. I’ve been at it for months and it is sweaty, difficult and deeply satisfying. For women in particular—but probably for everybody—I cannot recommend enough the value of punching and kicking stuff. I am stronger and somehow both more light- and sure-footed! I can almost wall-sit and jump rope for a full three minutes! I wrap my hands and pull on my gloves feeling like a badass, BUT most of the time I am not quite achieving what the exercises ask of me, and I think this may be the point. The tasks are different every time, and these little tweaks mean my body and mind are perennially offered novel problems. The goal is constant adaptation, and no instructor has ever used the word mastery. They say really encouraging things like, “This bag will always be hard no matter how long you practice.” Cool! My ego has no place in the boxing gym. What with all the flying limbs and wobbly bits, there’s just too much built-in embarrassment.

Kind of like adolescence. Kind of like any earnestly-lived adult life.

My Dear Stranger letter for April is about kickboxing and how I’m getting really good at (even expert at) stepping in and expecting to fail. Getting really good at laughing at myself, pushing through embarrassment until it transmorgifies into unabashed fun. Getting really good at feeling at home in my body by greeting it as a stranger in a circuit of three minute intervals. I’m writing about how awesome I feel at the end of class even when I felt like a wreck every minute of it.

In the gym, the instructions for an apparatus are written on white boards, all the better to erase and change up each day. I like to think of the instructions as little invitations to try something new with objects I thought I already knew. I read the boards, attempt what they advise, and sometimes use my free will to ignore them. My instructors suffer my insolence, cheer me on and offer adjustments.

THIS ESSAY IS THAT for my Dear Strangers who are very concerned about their letters this month AND it’s for you on the days when journalling or writing is an unpleasant confrontation with your own lack of expertise at any and every thing. The upshot of intentionally setting yourself down in places where you cannot always succeed is that the friction it creates within you burnishes away the shiny veneer you’ve been wasting your one wild and precious life cultivating. What’s left is your whole messy humanity, the one you’re definitely an expert at living,

the one that you could write about forever.

Dear strangers, set a timer for three minutes, haul out your journal OR YOUR APRIL LETTER and write. Look like a fool, expertly failing to succeed.

I’m over here cheering you along.

P.S. Did you read this and think I WANT TO WRITE THAT LETTER? Yeah, you did! Shoot me a message, and I can organize some fashionably late letters.

When I graduated from high school, one of my gifts was a survival guide. I’m pretty sure it was this one, and I’m definitely sure that—whichever version of this I owned—I devoured it as if my future were going to be a real handful.

This little yellow book was only one piece of my ongoing love affair with educational opinions. In childhood, I wasn’t grabbing the comics section of the paper only for Calvin and Hobbes, I was also minding my p’s and q’s with Dear Abby. Based on their location at the tiptop of my For You page, the New York Times knows that I read every advice column they publish. (The Ethicist is my favorite but I never skip a Social Q’s). Slate knew it too and may have introduced a paywall exclusively because of me. My apologies, everybody. I was a Dear Sugar reader when it was online and then bought untold numbers of Tiny Beautiful Things as gifts so that others could read a book of advice columns.

The real beauty of the how-to genre is that it’s information delivered with a whole heap of personality. The best of it is anything but dry. Sure, it’s been edited for publication, but you can hear every bit of anticipatory exasperation from the authors as they imagine how their advice is going to land. In my little yellow book of survival, I could hear the authors yelling “Don’t run in a LINE, you dum dum! ZIG ZAG” as I fled all the alligators my future life was going to present to me. Abby was pleading with all of us to send our thank you notes! Yep, send it today! Yes, even if it’s been a year! For the love of God just show your appreciation!!!

But also, when the advice is offered lovingly, with all the gentleness and generosity a reader may not have experienced enough of in their actual life, oh I weep with gratitude that humans—even strangers—can be so good to one another.

The first piece of writing I ever published, the one that first gave me a sense that I could claim the title writer for myself, was a how-to guide for surviving a miscarriage. I needed this familiar and beloved genre as a container for a difficult and unwieldy story. That writing healed many things and it helped me understand what it does and doesn’t take to be the author of advice. The real expertise necessary is rooted in paying close attention to the minutiae of your ridiculous life. It comes from noticing how you got from one moment to the next and then bringing curiosity to how you pulled it off. It’s unabashedly loving the niche stuff you’re into and then sharing it with humility and honesty, whether you’ve figured it all out, or (better yet) whether you’re willing to admit that you’re still learning as you go.

These days I remain a consummate consumer of the genre. We raise both chickens and tomatoes, two topics that are fertile ground for strong opinions, and I have a shelfful of books to prove it. My husband and I have spent the last few years renovating a barn, a process that has depended on the world of how-to videos on YouTube. Before tacking cedar boards to a pitched ceiling and before we shoved our hands shoulder-deep into trenches to lay pipe and before we hauled rocks to rebuild the banks of a pond, we watched videos. We like to sing to one another “two idiots building a (fill-in-the-blank with the harebrained endeavor du jour).” Each of those projects began and stumbled along under the guidance of generous folks who shared weirdly specific information with strangers online.

The best How-To guides make us a little smarter, more adept, an ounce more confident and blessedly more capable at being human. Can you tell I love them? I. Love. Them.

So here’s the prompt, dear strangers:

What could YOU write a how-to guide about? What’s the niche expertise or passion your life has given you? What would your TED talk be about? Your advice column? Your whole book? Your furtive whispers as you shove someone else into their life?

Whoa friend, I am not asking you to write the actual how-to guide. I’m wondering what you could write about, if you were so inclined and/or asked. If you want to share the actual advice, yes do that, but really what I’m wondering is

What do you know deeply, particularly, expertly? Maybe it is about how to survive one of life’s many travails. Maybe you know how to make a delicious salad or parallel park or how to brush a child’s hair without tears or how to identify mushrooms that won’t kill you or how to humanely remove bugs from your house. And importantly, how’d you come by this knowledge?

Do you want to write the actual advice, include the real recipe or add the intricate diagrams? Go for it as a bonus.

If nothing is sparking for you,

What are the how-to guides you still need in your life? Or, tell your stranger about all the advice you could give on how-NOT-to survive life? We all learn by making mistakes and maybe that’s what you can offer in spades.

Finally, if you have books/blogs/columns/YouTube channels/Instagram accounts/Substack subscriptions that have advised you through experiences, be generous, spread the wealth and include that list.

As always, you can opt to be a Dear Stranger this month AND entirely ignore the prompt.

A reminder about how the Dear Stranger experience works:

If you want to join in this month, let me know by sending me your name and your mailing address.

You can message me here in Substack.

Send me a text (if we know each other in real life) or

DM me on Instagram (@lauren.graeber).

This weekend, maybe on Sunday but probably I’ll need until Monday, I will send you the name and address of a stranger. You write them a letter, send it off within a week or so. Sometime in the following weeks you’ll get a letter back from a different stranger. There is more information about our shenanigans here.

One bit of potential excitement

I want y’all to know how much I appreciate those of you jumping in to write these letters, so when you’ve been a Dear Stranger THREE times (and that could be some of you very soon) I’m going to send you a little gift. Get ready.

Really Finally:

Know someone else who should be joining us? Share this post (or your summary of it) with them. Send them my way and let’s get them signed up!

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On Wednesday of this week I spent much of the unseasonably warm and gorgeous afternoon gathering, cutting down and burning some of the tree debris that has been on our forest floor since Hurricane Helene in 2024. It’s a chore with particular urgency for us after a wildfire crept within 3 miles of our home about a year ago. My strongest memory from the day we spent panicking about the wildfire is the crushing futility I felt while hosing down the area around my home. There was so much, too much to adequately cover with my measly spray. Since that time we have brought keener eyes to the brush and debris on the ground that would act as fuel should a fire ever get close again.

We, like many of our neighbors, use burn piles to dispose of all the brush, clippings, tree trimmings, whole logs that a forest creates. We also have branches and trees chipped and use those wood chips rather than mulch and we leave felled trees either down on the ground as mushroom habitat or standing as spurs for insect and bird habitats. It’s a multi-pronged approach to managing life within the forest and it’s not perfect and it means some days I need to feed branches into a fire for hours.

It’s work that I always enter with good vibes, even enthusiasm and then eventually remember how effortful it is. Managing a burn pile (at least our version of it) is hands-on and brains-on work. A fire has to be tended, monitored, fed, rustled and spread. You have to draw close to its heat and smoke. You’re sore the next day.

AND that’s the really good stuff in the whole enterprise! The elemental nature of the work is a siren song to feel FULLY HUMAN! When I’m doing it I’m not just a set of eye balls and swiping fingers, but a whole body lifting wood into a crackling fire. I’m not simply an imagination being shaped and mediated by screens and their algorithms, but a focused attention in the shadow of smoke and in the glow of flames.

With only moderately less drama I can say that the same impulses and rewards are present to me when I bake bread. I use a bread machine; don’t be overly impressed. It’s not much more than measuring and dumping in a pan EXCEPT the minutes before the final rise cycle when you reach in, pull out the dough ball and remove the mixing paddle. In that snippet of a moment when I’m manipulating ingredients into something that will feed my family, THERE IT IS! TA-DA! a few of the frayed strands in my heart are once again knitted together.

What I’m telling you is that I’ve been listening to my life and the parts that sing do not happen here where I am sitting right now in front of this screen. There are arias and harmonies aplenty in my garden and with the various animals we care for and as I sketch and paint and chop veggies and bake bread and tend the fires of a burn pile. Who knew that in the year of our Lord 2026 feeling fully human would be the shooting star we crane our necks for, but here I am with my eyes skyward looking for every flash.

Are you?

(Shameless pitch time.)

Last month I invited folks to write letters to a stranger AND THEY DID. Cards and notebook paper, stationary and art trucked across the country because a bunch of people sat for a while with their own thoughts and then shared them with someone. My particular view of this experiment was a privileged one. I received the messages after people wrote their letters expressing both their enjoyment and relief in the doing of it. Versions of “How lovely!” were the primary response. It wasn’t magic, but it did feel a little bit like it. That’s what being fully human is, though: a little bit like magic.

The invitation is open again! YOU too can write and receive letters. You can take a few minutes to get all up in your humanity AND connect with other humans. What a thing, huh?!?

Last month I suggested folks write about what they’re paying attention to these days. Some people did and some people delightfully ignored me on the way to their own aims. Because I know it helps lots of folks, I’ve got another central focus for this month for you to adopt or ignore:

I’m wondering about the activities in your life right now that help you feel fully human? I tend fires and garden and cook, all efforts just north of mediocre. What are you up to? Do you know why it works for you? Should others know about it so they can try too?

All the details for our letter writing project are here (and also a little here). Read those and/or reach out directly with questions. The long and short of it is, that if you want to participate this month:

-Send me a private message with your first name and address. If I have your address from last month, just send me a note that you want in again.

-On Wednesday or thereabouts I’m going to respond to you with someone’s name and address. Write that person a letter and get it in the mail within a week or so.

-Sometime in the next couple of weeks you’ll receive a letter from a different stranger. (I mix everybody up so that you send to and receive from different folks.)

That’s it!

What are we up to with these letters? Nothing short of being human in all our stuttering, awkward wonder. Won’t you join in?

Know someone else in your life who is great at this being-human thing? Share this post with them! The more strangers, the better!

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Here we are, Letter Writers!

We are still getting our legs underneath us, so if you feel wobbly about this first letter, ME TOO! Need reminders about what we’re up to here? Check out this post for more context. By all means, reach out with questions and/or suggestions. We’ll find our rhythm as we go.

If you’d like to participate this month, send me a message here on Substack with your first name and your address. You’ve got few days to get that to me. Within the week, I’ll reply to you with a name and address for the letter you’re writing.

Reminders of Good Faith Letter Writing:

-You do NOT have to follow the prompt.

-You do not have to (exclusively) write in your letter. Communicate how you communicate, whether that’s through words or images. Go simple. Go nuts.

-IF you include your return address on your letter you are indicating that the recipient COULD write you back, but you are NOT obligating them to.

-Don’t wait forever to send your letter! How about soon? How about within a week? The deadline = the commitment to really and truly send the letter.

-Receive your stranger’s letter with a generous heart and open curiosity. Don’t be a jerk who takes umbrage at what someone else was willing to share with you about their lives. Don’t be a butthead who critiques grammar, spelling, art or handwriting. BE LOVELY.

-While you may loudly celebrate the experience of receiving a letter, DO NOT publish someone else’s name and address or their letter online.

Happy writing, dear ones!

Know someone else who would enjoy sending and receiving a letter this month?

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Many of you (most of you? How strange this one-sided conversation!!!) first came here because you cared about me and were curious about my wildest days, whether those were BRCA or Helene related. May every click of these keys be the rhythm of my gratitude. Y’all helped hold me together all the way through. Thank you!

Now I am three (THREE!!!) years out from first suspecting I was a BRCA carrier, two (TWO!!!) years out from the mastectomy and more than a year past Helene. It’s been a helluva ride. As I am not seeking out additional life-altering experiences in the near future (she says whilst knocking on all the wood, crossing all the fingers and sending up prayers to all the relevant parties), what then could this space be? That’s what I’ve been noodling on for a while.

I know what I’d like for it to be, which is not merely a blog and not simply another email (though I realize it is). I’d love for this space to facilitate connections but not only between me and you (and critically, not through our screens).

I want YOU to know what I know, what sharing my life (on the internet) has given back to me: the reminder of how well people can care for another, how beautifully they can hold each other’s lives. My dears, it’s pretty much the best thing and you deserve to experience this too AND YOU CAN with the big fat caveat that to get it, you’ve got to be willing to share some of yourself.

Gulp, I know.

But this leads me to my idea.

WHAT IF we were real humans together in this big ridiculous world? What if we got off of our screens and WROTE TO ONE ANOTHER? Not digitally but on actual paper sent through actual mail by human hands for human eyes.

Letters - that’s my idea.

We’ll just send letters.

What?

Well, I will share a prompt each month so that our letters all have a connective tissue and so that our lives can meet along familiar lines.

AND I’ll provide the organizational connection itself. As in—if you want to join in—you’ll share your address with me and I’ll share it with someone else who will write to you. Is it a leap of faith in other people? You bet it is. Let us leap anyway!

How it would work:

-Stay here as a subscriber if you’re even moderately curious. No commitment necessary. Cost of participation is only the stamps you’ll need to buy.

-Once a month I’ll send out a prompt.

-If you want to send and receive a letter that month, message me with your first name and your address. You’ll have one week to opt in by sending your info.

-Get to writing. Or drawing or creating or some combination thereof. It doesn’t have to be a treatise!

-A week after the prompt goes out, I’ll send you a message with a recipient and their address. Send your mail soon thereafter.

(If you wouldn’t mind hearing back from your recipient, include your return address. To be clear, your recipient isn’t obligated to write you back, but you're indicating that they could. If you don’t want to hear back, leave it off.)

-If all goes to plan, you’ll receive mail! Read their letter. Be grateful. Be curious. Be connected to someone else for a little while.

-You can decide if you want and have the bandwidth to participate each month. Opt in by sending me your address after the prompt is posted OR sit it out. No pressure. No worries.

Each month I’ll mix up senders and receivers. Each month you’ll be invited to tell your stories. Each month we’ll connect across divides of all kinds and hold a few pieces of each other’s lives. What a privilege, huh?

We’ll send letters to each other. That’s all.

This is an opportunity to see what kind of strange kismet we can create together with our hearts, time, paper and all manner of writing utensils. If it’s anything like the miraculous magic I’ve received in this space, then buckle up, friends. You’re in for a treat!

Buuuuutttt…

-What if I sent a letter but I didn’t receive a letter? Let me know and I’ll gently nudge your sender to be a buddy.

-What if I’m uninspired by the prompt but still want to participate? Ignore the prompt and write anyway!

The prompts will be mere suggestions. As long as you send a good faith letter, you’re good.

-Does it have to be a letter? Nope.

Send a postcard or a greeting card or a drawing or a poem or a collage or or or or. Type it and print it out if your handwriting is a mess. Handwrite with pen or crayon. Doesn’t matter.

-You really want me to share my address? Yep, I do.

Friend, I have given my address to several business and organizations today in attempts to purchase things and sign my children up for camps. I don’t know the intentions of any of those yahoos. Not really. But just as I don’t share peanut M&Ms, I will not share your address with anyone other than your recipients.

-Can I use a pseudonym? Per the USPS, no.

That’s why I’m asking for a first name along with your address, which is still technically stretching the rules. What I do know from experience is that the post office will mail letters with even ridiculous titles in front of first names and a missing last name, because I spent a year abroad sending postcards to my Grand Duchess niece and Lord nephew. I’m tempted to think we can make this work as long as we offer up at least a first name.

-Can I invite others? Heck yes, you can!

Know someone else who would love this idea?

-Have you thought through all the ways this could go sideways? Decidedly no.

I’m leaping and trusting we could figure it out together.

Last year this spot was eerily silent, the world hushed by roads and hillsides that crumbled, fell and floated away. This year I am listening to road noise, the whine of motorcycles speeding down the Black Mountain Rag, buzzing behind the rumble of dump trucks still hauling rock for repairs still underway a year after Hurricane Helene.

A year ago I sat in this spot because the house behind me was without power and remained perpetually and frustratingly cold, even as we counted it a great fortune that the weather in the weeks after the storm was dry and easy. We had rented a generator that could keep the lights on, the fridge cold and the well-pump running, but it couldn’t run our heat. We strategically moved around the space heaters we owned, but mostly the cold of the house wriggled under your sweater and settled into your bones. As a temporary remedy, we come outside and bask in whatever heat we could draw from the afternoon.

“Like lizards,” I said over the top of my daughter’s head as she leaned against me on this spot on the driveway.

The disaster of Helene ushered in a particular kind of quiet for our family. There was no job for me to report to. Our rentals were abandoned in the mess. I had nothing but time to sit and watch the flame-leafed trees sway on a breeze. I knew that sitting only momentarily solved only the one problem of warming our bodies, and I knew it left open-ended most of my to-do list in those hard days, and yet

sitting quietly in the air under the sun soothed us.

This past summer I was working my way through The Book of Alchemy by and I came to the essay and prompt from Kate Bowler, “On Anti-Blessings.” I was asked to recall a time when I felt unlucky and yet noticed something beautiful, something that sparkled. I wrote about the day we were lizards, that day when I sat with my child, safe in the warmth of an afternoon that was blessedly gorgeous after a time that was devastatingly hard. Scribbled in my notes is this:

“for a while we could rest together on that ground and feel ourselves held.”

There’s not much better than that. Certainly not then and still not now.

The truth of those days (and these) is that I have solved very few problems. I’ve endured much and resolved little. While I have come through a few things, my progress has rarely been graceful. Stumbling through is a better description of my movement. My hair is still all mussed from the storms I didn’t see coming and I’m squinting into horizons I worry will dip away unexpectedly. The point is, there is no end to the messes that might come. And yet

sitting in the flickering sunshine of a fall day I again know peace and that peace will be enough to carry me as a calmer human into the doorstep of tomorrow’s shitshow, surely gracious enough for its travails, surely oozing with the equanimity I will need for the tomfoolery of my fellow man!

My point is this: sit down and be a lizard when you can.

Our problems are too big and our hands are too small, but our fingers surely won’t work unless they’ve been warmed by sunlight and wind dappling the earth with leaf shadows from the goldenrod and ruby canopy above.

Rest in the quiet when you can. No one is worse off being a lizard for a while.

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I write in my books now. It began with The Book of Alchemy (see for more journaling inspiration!!!)

and has gotten fully out of hand in Late Migrations by Margaret Renkl.

Write in your books! Write in your books! Write in your books!

On the first day, after the storm had blown through and we were waiting on the water to recede off the roads, I didn’t think much of our isolation. All of my energy was curious - how to explain the speed and ferocity of our normally lazy creek? How to fill the craters and gulches that had appeared in our gravel road? Where had the state road disappeared to?

All that day we pulled out our phones to call our families and to get information, but the phones weren’t connecting. We relocated ourselves around the house, down the hill, on top of the hill, out on the cracked pavement once it was safe. We compared the silence with our neighbors. No one had service. Not anyone out there wandering and marveling at everything we could see, wondering about what we couldn’t.

I wasn’t afraid. Not yet. It was too inexplicable to be scary, and the fact that everyone in our little family and on our little road were okay, this took the edge off of my panic. But in the quiet of that night the idea that no one knew we were okay finally settled in. Our parents didn’t know. Our friends didn’t. I started sending the same text to everyone who I imagined might be worried about us:

Even as it became clear that cell service wasn’t going to magically turn back on no matter where we stood, I would pull out my phone and send the text.

The second night I wept with fear that our parents didn’t know their grandchildren were alive and sent the text again and again.

To my knowledge none of those texts went through, not even after we limped off the mountain and my phone buzzed with a barrage of concern. In those first silent days my repeated messages that WE WERE ALIVE sat (and still sit in my text history) without an echo back. I suspect my flurry of posts about Helene after we evacuated (you can read them here, here, and here) were everything I couldn’t say through the long days of quiet.

When we returned about a week later, internet and cell service remained spotty and the world was littered with signs. Written messages were often the most efficient—if not the only possible—means of communication between folks. People used white boards to post information about where to pick up supplies and where to find free meals. I will forever connect that autumn’s incredible leaf display with the orange of construction signage telling me to PREPARE TO STOP and to DETOUR and to USE CAUTION, signs that were instructing me about how to navigate a world that felt utterly wrecked.

And then there were the signs of encouragement that appeared at intersections, in parking lots, along roads still being put back together. Those signs helped us keep going

They told the hard truths of our situation

about our many losses

and the indelible truth about who we are as a community.

In the year that has passed since Helene, I have led writing workshops for survivors of the storm. I often say that writing can’t heal everything but it can help some things, and that was true at every workshop. I sat in rooms with folks who were strangers to each other and to me and I watched as people found the words to explain what happened to them in those hard first days and through the long grind of recovery. And every story told on this side of that disaster—even the ones that stunned the room into silence—was a sign of life, was evidence of people’s mettle and moxie, grit and determination to figure out how to live through hell.

We’re alive in western North Carolina, and it’s been a hard year. We’re not done rebuilding or recovering and we’re certainly not done sorting through all that we survived.

Thank you for all of your support, your texts, your calls and letters. Thank you for coming up here to volunteer and to visit and to spend your money in our shops and restaurants.

I will never forget the terror of not being able to tell my loved ones I was alive,

and

I will always remember how words pulled me through.

If YOU are interested in writing about Helene I have put together some resources to help you do that for free here on my Substack. I also have a printed writing guide that you can read more about here. You can find After the Flood at several WNC bookstores (Sassafras on Sutton in Black Mountain, Malaprop’s in Asheville, Plott Hound in Burnsville) or you can send me a message about how to get a copy through the mail.

When I talk to folks around here about what happened, about how they fared in the storm, invariably they begin by telling me what they’re grateful for. Only after that list is complete will they talk about all that they lost, who and what they continue to mourn, the fears that keep rising up even all these months later.

People may have suffered grievously but nearly everybody knows somebody who had it worse, and no one takes that for granted. Those early days and weeks that stretched out afterwards may have been terrible but, my goodness, there was tremendous beauty intertwined in those hours.

I constantly remember that me and my family were so damn lucky. And,

that it’s been a really hard year.

There’s no easy and quick way to say all of that, but I tried anyway.

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I do remember her aloe plant because I once watched her snap off a piece and apply the pale goo inside of it onto a burn on my hand. I cannot recall why I was burned. Perhaps it was while helping her in the kitchen, a place where I was always welcome to sit and watch, to participate, to chat while she tucked butter into yeast rolls. Or, perhaps it wasn’t a burn she was treating at all, but a bite I had suffered in her garden, where she would have me hold the basket for her as she harvested vegetables. I don’t remember.

But I can still hear the snap of the aloe in her hand. I can still feel the sticky chill as she rubbed its end lightly against my skin. Mostly I remember my awe at the seeming magic of her, in her, at work with her.

I’ve been sitting with Marie in my imagination a lot this summer, an exercise that grew out of a writing prompt I encountered and kept returning to. I close my eyes and see her brick home set way back from the road with a pond on one side and a creek running behind it. I walk her long gravel driveway and I run my hands on the bark of her fruit trees. In many ways it’s a description of my own home now. I don’t have the long vistas that the fields around her provided, but I do have the bug song in the evenings and, every once in a while, the smell of cows from a nearby herd. It’s not lost on me that, in moving here, I might be trying to recreate something in these mountain woods that echoes with the goodness I experienced on her Alabama farm. There are worse Edens to chase.

When we meet from the chair in my office, most often we are at the card table she would pull out to do craft projects during my summer visits. It’s where, in real life, she would pull out glue and paints, sequins and clothespins and I could create anything, where she would create worlds with me. Sometimes she would leave me to finish my work and she would move to the big chair nearby to continue with one of her sewing projects. We’d each make art alongside one another with a soap opera (Was it A Guiding Light?) as our soundtrack.

When I come to her now, I come as my adult self and she looks like she did just after my Granddaddy died but before she got sick. He died of pancreatic cancer and she followed too soon after from breast cancer. If you ask me about my frenzied response to the revelation of my BRCA gene mutation over the last two years, these details are part of that story and it is my reckoning with both my response and our family history that first pulled me to her memory.

In this space set aside from reality I sit with Marie and talk, our coffee cups on saucers in front of us. Behind us on the cabinet is her aloe and her ability to ease what was hurting. Between us are questions I’ve longed to get answered, stories I want her to tell me, and everything I can tell her about the people I love most who I never got to introduce her to. It’s not unusual for me to leave my desk with tears running down my face, but they are suffused with such loving kindness, I don’t mind.

I’ve been returning to her this summer because her house remains one of the safest places in my memories. While I’m sure she got frustrated with me and while I’m sure that we misunderstood each other and that the reality of who she was in all her complexity across her life cannot withstand the hagiography she has endured since her death, sitting with her heals things in me even now. She retains her magic to this day.

I keep an aloe plant because of my Grandmother. I keep it for her and in honor of her, but I’ve never cut into it. Never snapped off part of it, haven’t used it to soothe one of my children or myself. I think in this she’d be—if not disappointed—bothered. She was too practical for that kind of preciousness and wouldn’t have tolerated the waste of something plainly useful for the sake of nostalgia. Or at least that’s the conversation we’ve had in the dream state I conjure of her as I’m writing.

I want to show her my aloe. I want to talk to her about everything. I want to walk her to my garden, stopping on the way to notice what’s blooming along the path and noticing what needs to be trimmed back. I want to show her my Appalachian plants and hear the stories of her Alabama ones. I want her to love what I love about this place .

But the real thing I long for is to embody her sturdy gentleness and her ability to transmute attention into love. She could do it while on a walk or when choosing the perfect pebble, while standing quietly along a creek or pulling out a folding table. She could do it while snapping a plant and soothing a child.

I am finding my own ways and always chasing down hers.

She’s turning a cup in her hand.

She’s saying with love and little tolerance for excuses,

There’s still time, Lauren.

Get to it.

Did you have a Marie who could do magic? Who loved you well? In whose home you always felt safe and whole? Yes, I want to hear about them!

And might I suggest you go sit a spell with them in that place. Even if only in your mind. Even if only for a while. Even if it makes you cry.

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In the last years I’ve made complicated medical decisions based on nothing more than probabilities. That’s the #brca story. You are given numbers in a document and asked to respond to lifetime risks. Not diagnoses (thank goodness), but the possibility of them. Not on a timeline that is tomorrow (thank goodness), but potentially one day. Maybe soon. Maybe not ever. Now what do you want to do?

While we’re ALL acting all the time on information that is a shade similar, this is a technicolor experience, dizzying in its kaleidoscopic nature. It’s stressful, exhausting. It’s a hard privilege to get to make the kinds of choices I was offered.

When I didn’t know if I was doing the right thing, I walked. I walked the forested mountain I live on, stepping along paths lined with Hellebores and Daffodils. I walked and knelt down to see the Fern fronds unfold and the Lily of the Valley push through the leaf litter. I walked and waited for the Dogwood trees to bloom and later for the Mountain Laurel to burst open. While theirs would have been a welcome whisper, the plants met my racing mind with only their quiet but insistent growth. Their rooted stillness became mine. Their unfolding beauty—cyclical, turn-taking, responsive, nurtured in the hidden dark of the teeming soil—all of it felt bigger, older, wiser than me. Walking with the immensity of these kindred creatures I could place my grief and anxiety within the web of other lives and see it held, feel it met, and tug on the thread of what was coming with more confidence.

These amazing plants accompanied me through some of my hardest days, just as so many of you did. I suppose as I considered my mastectomy tattoo I could have asked for a bouquet of your stunning faces across my chest. You are as dear to me. Your support, prayers, meals, cards, notes, memes and Reels, comments, laughter, presence - all of that buoyed me along and is inked within the lines of my last two years. But inked metaphorically, my loves. For the literal ink injected permanently into my body, I went with the plants.

I’ve been imagining what this tattoo might be for over a year, holding it out as a promise to myself that I could overwrite the story my surgical scars told were telling with another set of lines. I’m clear that I chose ALL of it: the mastectomy scars, the drain scars, the revision scars. ALL of it I opted into with trepidation and gratitude, and I wasn’t interested in hiding any of the evidence that,

1) I had the gift of choice and,

2) I chose a path that lowers both my risks and the mental energy I would have spent on those risks.

Living with my changed body is an ongoing adjustment. Living with the scars wasn’t the problem, but alone on my chest they felt incomplete. What I had were marks of my endurance, not lines of celebration. I didn’t want erasure; I wanted a gorgeous addition.

For that, I’d need a tattoo.

Thank goodness, thank the plants, thank the incredible artistry of my tattooist, thank the care of my medical team, thank this good body that’s still around to be drawn upon, thanks on thanks on thanks for a beautiful image that’s mine for the rest of my (much less likely to be touched by breast cancer) days.

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It consciously began when I sat down a couple of weeks ago to watch one episode of the new limited series Dying for Sex and ended up finishing the whole series in a single day. Then I listened to the podcast on which the show is based. Then I also listened to the 2017 On Being episode with the doctor and writer of Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, Atul Gawande. All three works include frank conversations about death and dying and all three have has their North Star the idea that if we listen to ourselves and each other deeply and without judgment, then it is possible to find ways to live well all the way to our last days. They also tell us that when we’re lucky and when we are in systems that care for us humanely, we can die well too. I HIGHLY recommend all three, but do read my footnote at the end with all the caveats1. But do then still watch and listen.

I have had a couple of years that invited a lot of questions about mortality. The knowledge of a genetic mutation and the potentiality of cancers that might make me very sick and kill me as clear percentages contributed. The actual cancer inside my sister (and now my father too) is an invitation to consider death. So was Hurricane Helene, its destruction and the lives it ended, an ungodly number of them just a mile or so down the road from me. Mortality has been in the air I breathe.

And then a month ago there was small-ish wildfire that was uncomfortably close to our home and we panicked. While my husband was packing our Christmas decorations in our cars, I was spraying the house and the nearby vegetation with a garden hose. It wasn’t going well. I would finish on one side of the house and walk back to where I’d been before and you couldn’t tell I’d done anything. I’d read the advice to drench ALL the trees that are close to your house, but we live IN a forest, there’s nothing BUT trees. Too many to count, much less keep wet on a day when what I sprayed was evaporating immediately in the heat and wind. On that day it wasn’t exactly mortality I was ruminating as I sprayed the home I love; it was futility, a close and related corollary.

In the days after, what had been a low thrum of death-y thoughts burst through in ways that called me to pay attention. All my stress tells showed up. So I turned to the techniques I know address stress for me. I walked, looked closely at plants, painted tiny dots in bowls and sewed bookworms out of felt and got very quiet. AND I watched a show and listened to some podcasts that explicitly helped me ask the questions about what I’m afraid of and, alongside that fear, how do I want to live?

In his interview with Krista Tippett, Gawande says that the nature of his curiosity bends towards potential and goodness, a posture I am here for. He stubbornly looks for what else is possible. When he finds it, he studies it, and what do you know, it’s there. He says that even in broken systems, if you go looking for it, you’ll find people that are thriving. He calls them “positive deviants.” They have habits and outlooks that they harness to be a force for good, and Gawande believes that if you pay attention to the positive deviants, you can get clues as to what is replicable and scalable between humans. To be clear he’s not talking about questions of efficiency or cost-saving measures. He’s not talking about budgets. He is talking about humans who find ways to care for others despite being trapped in inhumane systems where budgets have top billing.

Positive deviance feels like a ripe term for our time right now, as we move through deeply inhumane days. Which vulnerability isn’t feeling more precarious at the moment? The project of how to remain human—by that I mean caring, empathetic, available, gracious and generous to others—bumps right up against futility it seems when you read of the instability and uncertainty of so many lives. Except(!!!) futility isn’t always the case and not everywhere. Positive deviants exist.

I encounter them in the faculty of my children’s school, at my local post office. My local library is staffed with nothing but actual rockstars. I’m connected to artists whose work and ethos and pricing and community support imbue the world with more beauty, who increase access to art for wider portions of the population and who raise awareness about local needs. Positive deviants aplenty! They insist that creativity and dogged effort as human endeavors aren’t worth out-sourcing to technology or cutting from spreadsheets. Instead they toil daily at mundane tasks that add up to beautiful gifts meant for others. They pay close attention and then share what they notice through words and colors and shapes and sounds.

Deviants like Nikki Boyer and Molly Kochan, artists who chose to make a podcast even as (especially because!!) Molly was dying of breast cancer AND living her life so fully it had to be remembered. These were two women actively engaged in a world that wasn’t built to be kind to Molly and her illness. Yet theirs is a relationship of love and laughter, support to the very end. Then, Boyer honored the life and death of her friend by allowing other positive deviants to transform the medium of those conversations into a whole visual and storied world through the series Dying for Sex. It offers a path through the end of life and into dying that is honest, funny, tragic, and generative. Want to think about sexual pleasure and contentment? It’s there. Want to think about healing from sexual assault and familial dysfunction? That’s there too. Want to hear someone tell you how our bodies know how to die and do it with grace and not a lick of shame? There’s a gorgeous scene with that too. There’s a lot of full frontal male nudity and crying. It’s incredible. It’s deviant.

In the last month I have needed clarity to open up what was threatening to become closed off in me. We curl up when we’re in pain, close our fists, clench our jaws. The pain of perceived futility and the long trail of mortality’s shadow had me shrinking inward. A little disruption, a little deviance was what I needed, not as a cure, but as a compass to point a way through fear (which isn’t to be avoided, but accompanied) towards living well.

Gawande says that the question to ask, not just when you’re dying but across your life, is What does a good day look like? That’s not a question that will resolve international trade agreements or fund schools or cure cancer but it might tell us how to act tomorrow with the staff at the restaurant and when we listen to school board members and when we’re making medical decisions with our loved ones or for ourselves. Which is about the level that I engage the world these days, and the level, I suspect, where most of us live.

Dying for Sex adds another question worth chewing on: If you met the world with radical curiosity about what it has for you, what might you find? In light of her terminal cancer diagnosis Molly gives herself permission to ask that question in concrete and wild ways, but listening to the podcast it’s clear that she always had the instinct in her, as I think we all do. It’s just that we humans live complicated and difficult lives. We get scared and fear shrinks the horizons of our imaginations until curiosity and openness feel impossible. But Molly’s life and Gawande’s work reveal they aren’t.

We should be on the lookout for the positive deviants out there making good trouble in the little circles we inhabit. Inquire as to how they pull it off and see what can be replicated in our own days. If you know of a deviant the rest of us should know about, you should definitely tell us. Share their work. Point us towards them. Spread the deviance!!

Perhaps YOU are a positive deviant. Well then, tell us YOUR stories, about how you maintained your humanity. Created the conditions for a good day, a curious mind, a life well lived.

Keep it up, my dear mischief makers.

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But THANK YOU for allowing me back into your inbox again today.

If you’ve been a reader of the Previvor Archives a while you know that I opened this space in order to write about being a carrier of the BRCA2 gene mutation. I’ve written posts on posts about it. All of them honest. Much of it raw, but usually with a bend towards an upside.

When I go back and read through what I’ve written, I find myself assuring you that I’m okay or that I’ll be okay, that good has come from the experience or that it will or that I can imagine that it could. I did the same in my posts about Hurricane Helene, in that, while writing I knew where that story was headed - that my family and our home were safe, even if those early days were dire and if recovery remains unfinished and slow. It’s clearly a writing habit of mine to blunt the sharpest edges of my thoughts, to find the potential meaning (often with a trajectory towards goodness and beauty) in even the gnarliest moments. Well, it’s my public writing habit. My journals tell a less edited story.

Never fear if you’re here for exactly that. I’m not giving up the habit. It serves me well in writing and in life. But it is a muzzle of my own making, one I have felt as a low murmur all along and more keenly since the beginning of this year, a check on another impulse to make clear that for all my personal growth and learning (blah blah blah) I have not enjoyed the drama/trauma of the last two years. It has been rather terrible.

Maybe I couldn’t stand it anymore because I hit the one year anniversary of my mastectomy on February 14th, which was also the two year anniversary of learning there was a high probability I carried the mutation. It’s been over two years of worrying and waiting and gearing up and waiting and recovering and waiting and I’ve had time and the headspace recently to think about what all that adds up to. Maybe it was sitting down with another friend and learning she too is potentially a carrier, a fact she learned because her sister (who is my age) discovered she carries BRCA2, a fact she learned alongside her breast cancer diagnosis. Or maybe it was watching another beloved friend bravely navigate the awful twists and turns of having her DIEP-Flap double mastectomy rescheduled at the last minute.

Maybe I just needed to find the right form in which to express that for me (and for others) BRCA is a big ol’ load of crap.

Maybe I needed to make a zine!

Short history of the zine form (that I learned at a zine workshop at the Center for Craft in Asheville with the two founders of the AVL Zine Festival!!!):

Some folks trace the legacy of zines back to early printing press days. Think pamphlets: short, easily mass produced and pass around, often transgressive in relation to broader culture. The form really takes off with the invention of the modern copier because they are almost always cheaply made, outside of traditional publishing, often constructed out of a SINGLE sheet of paper that has been folded and cut just so. Zines have been produced regularly for the last 50+ years in punk circles, within the music world by fans of obscure bands, by feminist writers, as protest publications, etc. etc. AND (as my son and his friends use them) to tell screwball stories in just a few comic frames. One common feature of zines is that they are not always sold. They’re traded or given away as an act of community sharing. Of course they can be sold, but it’s in the DNA of the form (in its production and history) to not be produced with profit in mind. I am HERE for this exact form of art.

Truth is, I’ve been scheming up a BRCA zine since before my first surgery in September 2023, imagining something cooler and funkier than the slick brochures with calming colors that were slipped into the packets my oncologists handed me. As I first dreamed it, sketched and drafted it, mine would be encouraging but without being pollyanna. I’d distill down the stuff the doctors didn’t talk about enough, but that I kept coming up against - the absolute novelty (and thus stress) of making medical decisions based on probabilities not diagnoses.

That zine remains a draft.

The zine I needed to write first was different. And though I made this one for me, I also made it for the rest of my previvor and survivor kin, those of us walking around with news we both did and didn’t want to have, with ugly decisions to make based on partial information, those of us recovering and waiting on results and appointments, those of us worrying about what this means in the near term and for our kids. I made it by hand because I tell people all the time that writing is a bodily act (SO USE PAPER AND PEN!!!) and BRCA is an experience best explained with the very body that is learning to live with it. I made this because it’s true that BRCA SUCKS and I haven’t said that quite like this in this space. Until now.

Here’s what my zine looks like on its single sheet of paper:

And here you can see it coming together, first as pieces, then as a whole:

And in case you’re fussing that you can’t read the pages:

It could be that my zine isn’t for you, but even if that’s the case, zines might be. I bet you have a topic on which you have 6 small pages (or three spreads) worth of something kind of messy to say. Our lives are messy stories, friends. Tell them in a zine on a single sheet of paper! Google “single-sheet zine” and the internet is FULL of clear instructions. Or ask a nearby 9-year old who probably already knows how.

If my zine is for you or for someone you know, I can send you a ready-to-print PDF and a link to how to fold and cut it. Just send me a message and we’ll figure it out. It’s free.

And if you’re tempted to bright side BRCA to yourself or to the person who is working through what it means to be a carrier or here in the comments, resist that urge. Let it suck. Not forever or always, but for a time. For today.

I have spent the last several days constructing paper mache pickles for a Valentine’s Day themed art market in a few weeks! Yep. Pickles.

My vision is to offer folks a chance to “Fill a Dill” with small hand-sewn objects I’ve made: heart-shaped pins with crazy eyes, small love letter keychains and spools that unwind a ribbon declaring one’s love, and maybe some candy. The filled pickle will then be completed with tags replete with pickle-puns and packaged up in a jar, ready to give as a gift to someone you love. As one does on Valentine’s.

Making paper gherkins is perhaps the strangest art project I’ve embarked on. I realize this. But reader, (with the exception of tying off the balloons before applying the paper mache) it’s been pure delight, absolute fun.

AND it has been my intentional creative act of defiance against everything else February 14th might mean for me as it approaches, which is an anniversary to grieve. As I approach ONE YEAR since my preventative double mastectomy I am a little sad, but I’m also out here painting pickles and giggling to myself, so if you get unduly bummed on my behalf as I reflect below, please keep in mind that as you read this I am potentially painting a pickle. I’m potentially RIGHT NOW covered in green paint, and that’s enough to get this lady through a day.

But…

it is fair to say that a year (give or take some months if you add up the full BRCA journey) after making the biggest and most radical health decisions of my life, I’m all over the emotional map about what the last year adds up to.

By this time a year ago I had learned that my sister did have breast cancer, which meant that I had an unusually heightened sense that my breasts might one day be very dangerous to me. Her cancer meant my lifetime risk for breast cancer ticked up and above the crazy high odds I had already been looking at (because of the mutation and our family history on their own), numbers that had been high enough for me to opt for the mastectomy even before we knew of her diagnosis. The news of her cancer was its own piece of the last year’s crazy puzzle and it underlined for me my own decision-making.

A year ago today, I was preparing for my surgery, setting pieces into place so that I could be out of town for a while, out of work for several weeks, out of commission in my family’s daily routines.

I was also spending a lot of time looking at my breasts, trying to commit them to memory before they were removed. I was mostly recovered from the hysterectomy I’d had the September before and was very aware that I’d not taken much time to say goodbye to those now-gone pieces of my body. While that didn’t feel like a mistake, it did feel like a missed opportunity, one I didn’t want to make again. So I scribbled in my journal and made notes on my phone and wrote here in this space about what my breasts had meant to me and what their loss might mean.

A year ago I was also deep into a lesson about making choices based on probabilities, a skill any adult is regularly practicing without much thought, but one that genetic mutations flip into technicolor. I was already getting good at sitting with the questions of What can you tolerate? What can you control now and what do you want hedge against in the future? What are you willing to risk?

Since then (and this is the part that’s wildest to me), not having boobs is not the most interesting thing about the last year.

• Surviving Hurricane Helene and living through its aftermath and now the slow rebuilding of our community, that has required more of me emotionally and psychologically.

• Our dog nearly died because of a stomach blockage right before Christmas and I will forever remember finding her motionless in the woods, where I presume she’d laid down to die. Not cool, Nollendorfplatz (our very curious German Shorthaired-Pointer)!

• I wrote a little book and can hold it as a printed thing in my own two hands. That’s a big deal for me.

To be sure, not having boobs has been in the background of all of that, all mixed in and complicating/clarifying/helping/hurting things.

When Helene hit I was prepping for my revision surgery which meant I wasn’t drinking and was being very mindful about what I ate. I went into that storm as strong and healthy as I could have been, which served me well as we prepared the property the day before the storm and then made it through the days after when we were stuck here. I could clear road drains and haul buckets of water like a champ! It also meant, however, that a week later I was back in surgery and this recovery was not as smooth as the mastectomy’s. Only now, three months later, am I beginning to feel my strength and flexibility return in my chest. That’s after too many follow-up procedures and near-constant compression binding and heating pads, massage, silicon goo and bandages, etc. I’m pretty confident that the stress of the storm made healing harder. Waiting to heal also rendered me far less useful than I’d have liked to have been in the months since. I’ve tried to be a good patient and haven’t picked up a chainsaw or a tree limb that really counts or a box of supplies that one of my kids couldn’t have carried on their own. Color me (deeply) frustrated by all of this.

And when the dog was creating the emergency none of us had time for, all I could think was that our hearts couldn’t bear any more loss. She had to survive because we as a family were all grieved-out, which is what I told her there in the woods as I tried to pull her to her feet. I stayed with her in the days after Christmas while my family traveled and those were quiet days of stillness for us both. She slept and I rested and, mercifully I had the first sense that maybe, just maybe the seroma I’ve had since surgery in October might actually be resolving. We were both healing.

The book? It’s about processing Helene, our particular storm, this one that roared through the last year. But it’s really my way of offering others a guide to surviving all manner of storms, including (though I don’t say this outright) a genetic mutation that upends your life. I got through all of this by writing and if writing can helps others (and I believe it can), I’m in a position to help them try. When I first got the news about BRCA I told my therapist that “I oughta at least get a book out of this shit!” Ha! I did, but it wasn’t the shit or the book I saw coming.

Yes, I am definitely sad sometimes. Like I predicted, sex is different. I navigate that with a partner who won’t (until my death) get to touch a breast again. That blows and I hold that sadness with him. Sometimes I still forget that they’re gone and be surprised and bummed when I see myself in the mirror. I’m still working on giving away all the clothes that don’t fit anymore. My armpits are hard to shave now. All of that is crappy to varying degrees.

Living without breasts is an adjustment, but there’s been so much more in the last year that’s asked me to shift my plans and rethink my choices. Making the choice to live without breasts has made me well-practiced at doing that confidently, firmly planted in what I believe matters and what I can hold loosely and what I can let go of without regret. That’s an unexpected benefit (in addition to the dramatically reduced lifetime risks of developing breast, ovarian, uterine and cervical cancer!).

I also don’t think I’d have spent the weekend making pickles if it weren’t for BRCA. Nothing blows away your pretense like repeatedly baring your body to strangers in cold, brightly-lit medical offices for over a year! Why not make pickles?!?!? Why not choose the ridiculous joy when you can?!?

Recently-ish I found the poem “Lullaby for the Grieving” by the poet-laureate of Alabama Ashley Jones. In her notes about the poems she acknowledges that it came from the recognition of how fear and grief come together and what is revealed to us about navigating them when we pay attention to them.

Lullaby for the Grieving

^{at the Sipsey River}

make small steps.
in this wild place
there are signs of life
everywhere.
sharp spaces, too:
the slip of a rain-glazed rock
against my searching feet.
small steps, like prayers—
each one a hope exhaled
into the trees. please,
let me enter. please, let me
leave whole.
there are, too, the tiny sounds
of faraway birds. the safety
in their promise of song.
the puddle forming, finally,
after summer rain.
the golden butterfly
against the cave-dark.
maybe there are angels here, too—
what else can i call the crown of light
atop the leaves?
what else can i call
my footsteps forward,
small, small, sure?

Dear reader, there are fires raging in California. Mountains came down around me last fall. My boobs were cut off last February. What else can I call these pickles, but small, small footsteps forward?

They are steps towards joy and the freedom to claim that joy on my own terms. They are footholds towards acceptance that there might be another big thing waiting around the corner and I’ll have to rise to that too, even if I haven’t recovered from the last things.

It’s just a few weeks until Valentine’s Day, my loves. Who knows what might happen in the meantime!?!? Lord only knows, it could be ridiculously hard to handle. There are prayers to offer, wild places to traverse, disasters to live through and parts of ourselves to excise in order to live with a little less fear in the mix. Grab your people, then reach out wider to welcome in others. Find (or make out of paper mache) all the reasons to laugh as it all it goes down.

AND plan on using Valentine’s Day to practice crazy big Love. Do it for me and my boobs which were never crazy big, but I loved ‘em anyway.

And I’m proud of it and I do want you to use it and share it.

Buuuuuut…

The writing teacher/guide in me believes that the best thinking and writing most often happens away from screens and their many distractions.

So…

I had it printed!

Y’all, this is my first time I’ve held my writing as a printed object. I have magazines and journals that have my articles printed in them, but my own book (even if it’s a book-let)?!?!? This is a very exciting first for me.

I’m really proud of this too, and I want you to have it.

Is it everything that’s also online? Yep, PLUS additional prompts I didn’t include in the weekly series.

How do YOU get one? If you leave a comment below, I’ll send you a message via Substack and we can figure out the details of getting the booklet in your hands. The price if you order directly from me is $12. If you order more than one, they are $10 each. I can put it in the mail for you or send it to someone on your behalf. Expect the booklets to arrive in about a week.

Is it available in stores? Yes, in ONE so far, at Sassafras on Sutton in Black Mountain! I’m looking for additional places willing to carry it, and if/when my children ever go back to school (Darn you snow days after a long winter break!!!!) I’ll be heading out with copies in hand to see where else might carry it. If you have a connection in WNC, let me know in the comments or via a direct message.

When I turned off my road this morning, I didn’t pass the FEMA representative who had come to assess the repairs we had already begun. I turned left to drive away from our house because, when we woke up this morning, we had no cellular service. None at all. Just like we had none in the four days after the storm a month ago when we couldn’t leave this valley at all.  No cellular service like the three days last week and the intermittent days before that when we have found ourselves fully disconnected from the outside world.

Today I needed to send texts and had to send an email for work, so I got in my car, grumbled over our newly graveled road and turned left to get to somewhere in town where I could use my phone as a hotspot. But I was almost immediately stopped by a man in a neon yellow vest waving me down.

You can’t go this way, he yelled.

Like not at all? I yelled back.

No. You need to turn around. He turned then, turned back to the other men he was standing with.

I flipped my car around, breathed to settle the nerves that were flipping on inside my body. I was working up against a deadline I didn’t want to miss and this other way he’d sent me on is slower and even less predictably connected to the internet. Then not a hundred feet from where I’d just come a white truck was hurtling towards me and again someone in a yellow vest was waving their arms, this time from the cab.

Road’s closed this way, said the driver pulling up beside me, a woman with intricate tattoos running from her neck, across her cheeks and around her eyes.

I choked out a laugh, pointed back the way I’d come and replied, They told me the same thing that way.

She began to explain how she’d been sent to move the signs and cones to block folks from coming in but I interrupted by barking out I just need to leave! and she stopped abruptly.

I don’t normally yell at strangers. Embarrassment rose alongside my anger. I’m sorry, I hastily offered. I know this is not your fault. I just need to send an email and I cannot do that at my house and that way is blocked and I need to get away. I tried to explain with some semblance of composure but tears were falling and I was hiccuping over my words as I spoke.

It’s been a month, I added weakly.

She looked at me for the space of a breath.

Can you give me a minute? she asked kindly. Let me grab these signs and you can either follow me back or go wait for me at the cones. I’ll let you through.

Thank you, I croaked.

She rolled up her window and I mine, and I drove slowly in the direction she had indicated. It was a line of cones more than mile down the way, a place where utility crews and firefighters mingled on either side of me as I frantically texted with the one bar of cellular service that fleetingly appeared on my phone, trying to tell the people waiting on me that I wasn’t forgetful or incompetent or unable to keep commitments. I was, however, a little bit trapped and so frustrated for so long that anger ran through my bones like a current, making my hands jittery and my breath shallow.

Ten minutes later from behind me came the white truck with the woman in yellow who silently created a way through for me. I ended up in a parking lot eight miles from my house where I could safely sit, upload a video, send three emails, notice texts I didn’t have the wherewithal to respond to, and wonder what I should do next.

Turn around and go back the way I came. That’s all there was to do.

I drove with windows down and my music up, allowing the volume to match my emotions, an old trick for letting drum beats and chords draw out feelings I’m better writing about than actually expressing. I covered five miles in an intensifying rage at everything that was inconvenient in my life today, one month out from a devastating storm.

No internet and no idea when it will be back.

No cellular service and no promises about its reliable return.

No f-ing road to or from my house.

Then I pulled around a turn, past a small lake that is still brown from the sediment that poured into it four weeks ago and entered the mile of the most visible destruction near me, a mile in which the hills came down in at least three places in wide swaths that pulled down every tree, ripped most houses off their foundations, cleared land as far as you can see in both directions. I slowed down because the roads in that area are precarious, rebuilt but unpaved and without guardrails against their steep drop-offs. I had entered an area where true suffering begins and inconvenience is a luxury I can afford to rail against.

Snapped from my own thoughts by perspective wrought from the tangled debris rising up on either side of my car, I registered that the place I had waited earlier at the cones was within spitting distance of one of the only houses that survived in an area called Craigtown. And I registered that firefighters had been milling about in that yard of a brick house, surrounded by the remnants of a landslide which caused the deaths of eleven members of a single family. You may have seen the story on national news.

In those first few days after the storm one of the landmarks folks around us used to describe this area was that brick house. The one “where the old man who waves” lived. Everyone knew that house and that old man because he sits on his front porch every day when the weather is good enough. We’ve been waving to him for years. We worried last spring when, despite warmer temperatures, he hadn’t appeared at his chair. Then there he was again, waving, smiling, watching the world go by.

Through the network of information that rural folks create I had recently learned that “the old man who waves” is a patriarch of the family that lost eleven of its people .

Approaching his house once more, I realized that in my haste to get away I hadn’t seen him. What if the firefighters had been there for him? What if the road blockage was not about the road at all, but about a medical emergency? I knew that he, like his house, had survived the storm. But what if he hadn’t survived the month since?

The yard was still full of uniformed people. There was a group of them on the porch as I slowed. I squinted to see between them. There on his chair was the old man. And he waved.

I raised my hand to wave back but then I was sobbing again, this time in relief. Then I was waving with far more gusto and at a full stop in the road.

I don’t know if he could see my face or my teary smile from where he sat, but his wave changed to match the enthusiasm of mine. Maybe he recognized my car which has a ridiculous front vanity plate and which, in better times, contains a family that always makes a point to return his lovely gesture. We smiled across the distance to each other. I blew him a kiss, waved once more, and crept forward to the line of cars waiting at those same damn cones.

There was a woman out of her car having a heated conversation with the woman in the yellow vest. I pulled around the empty car and in between them when the yelling woman stopped for a second to throw her arms up in frustration. Rolling down my window I smiled my blotchy smile and told her, Thank you for letting me through. I’ll go home now.

The scars that were formed in the last month are, in some places and in some ways, too big to ignore. There is a boulder field that cuts through my normal route to town. Its presence marks one of the more than 100 landslides that occurred in my county because of Helene. While we have newly formed stunning vistas of the mountainsides, we also have hills of stone to navigate. Around the house of the old man who waves they will eventually clear the mud that sits on the ground five feet deep. That hill has been denuded of most living things. That won’t fix itself quickly. The loss of his eleven family members will surely remain an open wound for a while. These moments are still obviously marked with cones, official personnel who stop you from going the way you wanted to go. My inability to ignore them today was a reminder of how the landscape of daily life has been irrevocably shifted.

The fit I threw in my car about the little things I didn’t have, that was a surprise to me. Or at least the speed at which it overwhelmed me was unexpected.

Now sitting on my own porch with my breath once again regulated I can see that in the car I felt trapped again, that my body reacted inside the memory of those first days a month ago. When we were trapped without roads and without connection and without an obvious answer to any of that.

When I drive into town later today (if the road is clear. God willing the road is clear), I will pass those boulder fields. I will also pass a number of places that look like the picture above, a few cones marking a not-so-obvious problem. A number of these have been present since the Monday after the hurricane came through, places where someone is warning that—despite all appearances—this portion of the road remains unstable. There are no flaggers to ensure everyone travels around these safely, only a few cones, maybe some spray painted words of caution on the ground. The one in the picture is unusually precarious because it forces you to drive into the lane of oncoming traffic. Each time I approach it, I drive slowly, say a prayer that no one is approaching and hope for the best.

I need a thousand such cones to mark the tender spots in my heart these days, places where—at first glance—nothing is amiss. These are areas of sorrow and latent fear that I can zip around without much thought most of the time. Until, like this morning, I can’t. They are lists of inconveniences that grow too long for me to be magnanimous anymore. Occasions I cannot rise too, being too weary from all the prior problem-solving moments a month of disaster presents. They are too much all at once. Too little to make anything easier. Altogether a lot.

My town, Black Mountain, is officially on the list of Western North Carolina towns now receiving visitors again. The return of tourism is vital to our economy. Your patronage of our stores and restaurants means families can rebuild their lives. We need you. We want you to come.

If you do, you’ll see our scars from the storm. They are big and upsetting. Be kind because this area is deeply wounded.

You might also encounter surprising flashes of emotions, when our welcoming veneer drops and our pain is plainly evident.

Maybe the moment wasn’t well-marked and you weren’t forewarned.

But we weren’t either.

And it’s only been a month.

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The mood:

1. We are so damn lucky.

2. We are devastated.

There’s a bright clarity to knowing this, so sharp at its edges that I catch myself wincing around it. I move through the days emotionally dizzy, tripping over everything the hours might contain. Count the blessings. Tally the losses. Hold onto hope. Hold space for grief. Rise to the occasion. Now rise again. Make a way. Make a new way. Celebrate what is returning. Mourn what will never be the same again.

Do it all again.

There exists an instinct to say everything at once, everything that’s awful AND all that is good. As if in the rush I’ll be able to better help you understand how it feels, the turbulence, the buzzing hum of it.

The realities:

We’re three weeks without power at our home. That sounds dire (and maybe at times it is). A few caveats: we weren’t here the whole time because we left 4 days after the storm and then I had surgery and we stayed away a few days more. Also, we came back with a generator that’s been roaring outside our house for more than a week. Because we have a well, our generator has been running our well pump and hot water heater so we have had clean, potable water. We have nearly perfected our routines for flipping circuit breakers so that we’re not frying our appliances and now we know how to prioritize the kitchen so that I can run our two-burner hot plate and we’re experts at moving ice packs into the fridge every night to maintain its temperature and knowing what to turn off and switch out to make sure we can warm up the bedrooms at night while also allowing everyone to take a shower and the kids to read in bed.

As of yesterday the gravel road on which we and three other families live has had enough new gravel added to fill in the worst of its holes and to be truly passable. There’s more to do, particularly in the areas where the creek’s diversion piled tangles of branches and roots and left 6 inches of silt on the road, BUT the next rain will not catch a car in mud.

Every time we leave home now we discover new sections of the state roads that are being repaired. We do a lot of idling in dusty lines as dump trucks unload rock and excavators shift it into place, but lanes widen and reappear each time we pass through. I won’t be driving after dark for a while, BUT I’m not trapped in the mountains anymore.

We had linemen assessing our property yesterday afternoon making loose promises that by the end of today our lights would be back on! This would be a major improvement to our daily lives. If WiFi is back on in a few days (as an email suggested it would be) and if our cell service would stop cutting out, then we might be fully connected once again to the outside world. This too would introduce some ease into our days.

The what’s next:

If you’ve kind of forgotten about this whole mess…

Listen, we have ALL forgotten about and moved on from other folks’ tragedy at some point! I am living my comeuppance, paying for all the times I had the privilege of ordinary days and the gift of distraction while others continued to struggle. If you’ll overlook our lack of enthusiasm for the world outside these mountains, we’ll see vacation pictures and hear petty complaints with all the grace we can muster.

Signs and t-shirts and hashtags all around me proclaim we’re strong. WNC strong. Black Mountain strong. Asheville strong and forever. We are. And our strength is our generosity and creativity. It’s our food, beer, and our art. It’s all our folks who know how to fix just about anything and won’t accept a dollar for the time. It’s our sense of humor and hope and the doors we’ve opened for each other and the help we’ve accepted. It’s these hills, y’all. It’s these people. Strong and devastated and so damn lucky.

This one has been a mess, I know. Swirled like the storm that blew open our lives. I sure appreciate you reading!

…we allow (sic) positive experiences too often to float into the landfill of lost memories. And we remember with exquisite detail the conversations that went poorly…

It turns out that as a people, as creatures, we focus on the incidental, the isolated negative events with more clarity and with an outmoded sense of their importance over the abundant good that surrounds us. We do it before we realize we’re doing it and it adds up, and it hurts us.

But we don’t have to.

There is much to say about the wreckage wrought by Hurricane Helene, but that’s not what I want to say here. Here I want to tell you about some of the goodness that sustained us through the storm.

In part two I mentioned that when my husband was seeking a way into town, he was leaving our information with anyone who might be able to relay it to the outside world. There was a woman with a satellite phone, a couple up the way who lived high enough on the ridge that in one room of their house, they could sometimes get a signal. He wrote down for them what to say and the two numbers to send it to. And for another agonizing day, all we could do was hope our messages got through.

We’d become unreachable Friday morning. Saturday we depended on the goodness of strangers to tell our families we were alive. Sunday afternoon, when John sat in an grocery store parking lot and called our mothers, they were relieved to hear his voice because it was confirmation that the unknown callers from the day before had been telling the truth. Their children and grandchildren were indeed okay. John remained in the parking lot, using the mobile WiFi set up by the government, to post our wellbeing on social media, hopefully easing some worry for friends who, when we finally emerged into full internet connectivity, had inundated us with messages of love and concern.

That’s goodness in the rubble of everything else Helene destroyed.

I also mentioned in my last post that our two cats were housed with neighbors of my parents, two veterinarians who own an animal hospital. Hearing of our plight and with an ear out for the menagerie of creatures we’d be arriving with, they were ready to see what they could do.

What they did was give our sweet girls, Bean and Ollie, the run of four cat condos at their clinic. They spayed Ollie because that was supposed to be happening here at home this month and now felt impossibly delayed. They put microchips in both cats and brought a lepto vaccine for our dog which they administered in my parents’ garage. That’s what they did.

What all that eased was our compounding stress. What that soothed were our tremulous hearts, the ones that couldn’t bear to tell our kids that we had no idea what we were going to do with the two cats as we left our home. We were piling into my parent’s house with our dirty clothes and a dog that likes to bop their dog in the face (and is also known to sneak bites of his food). The two cats were more than we could ask of them and the vets took that off our plate. I could give my children a hopeful promise rather than the pragmatic (but emotionally unsatisfying) wait-and-see approach we were using for all their other queries: Will they rebuild? Will schools reopen? Is that family okay? Will town be normal again?

Their cats were safe. We could (and did) visit almost every day. They were being loved by a staff of trained and effusive cat experts/lovers. They were and would be okay.

That was goodness sharing space with much that was hard..

One of the great perks about working in a bookstore—which I do part time—is being the recipient of free advanced reader copies (ARCs) of upcoming releases. The store gets them every month and we, the staff, share them amongst ourselves. We also place them in the little free library that sits next to our doors, offer them to beloved regulars, and last year handed them off by the box-load to a neighboring school for staff appreciation week. About a month ago, we received Robin Wall Kimmerer’s newest book The Serviceberry and my coworkers, who generously listen to me extol the wisdom and beauty of Kimmerer’s writing and who lead customers asking about ecological writing directly to me, set it aside for me.

The rules for ARCs mean I can’t quote the book to you now (but I wish I could!!!). BUT I can tell you that it’s so lovely. I can also tell you that Kimmerer offers an economic vision that is rooted in gifts, reciprocity and abundance. It’s a discussion of an ecological rather than market economy with the Serviceberry Tree as her central analogy. As with her two previous books, it is quietly insistent, stubbornly certain that we have options beyond what the dominant culture presents us with about how to live well and there are a variety of plant teachers to guide us. Also as before, she’s quick to name her human teachers, economists, farmers and family who helped shape her thinking in this book. Her writing is as generous as are her ideas. You should pre-order it right now from a local bookseller so that you’ll have it in your hands on November 19th.

That gift economy that Kimmerer explores in her writing: I lived it out over the last two weeks! I was the recipient of others’ abundance without expectation that I could repay. What a stunning experience. What balm. What goodness.

And this is just two of our stories.

There are church and municipal parking lots full of the water, canned goods, pet food, clothing and gas canisters that y’all have sent into our area. My momma did folks’ laundry because she could. My dad bought batteries and sent them with John for some of our friends. I had Venmo notifications that appeared so we could (pardon or celebrate the language) “do whatever the fuck we needed to.” That money bought instant coffee and carrots (among other things) for a community marooned on a mountain.

And that’s just some of the stories from within my tiny circle of influence.

Goodness that looks like gifts freely given amongst strangers has been as widespread as the destruction of Helene. It’s as alive as our sorrow and as powerful as the floodwaters. For our family, the story of this storm is dog-eared by acts of generosity exactly when and how we most desperately needed it.

We are so grateful.

We are now home to do what we can with what we have. That’s how goodness moves through us, how we fight back cynicism, how we live in our community well.