There are so many things that happen every day that I want to tell you about. Things I stumble across, birds I see, the little daily experiences I don’t want to forget. So many questions I have. Writing them down and sharing them with you has become one of the great joys of my life. It gives me a real feeling of connection at a time when I don’t have much of that.

I want to tell you about the 80-year-old woman I have a crush on who comes into Speedway looking like Maude, her hair held close with dozens of bobby pins. The last time she came in she was wearing a sleeveless Van Halen T-shirt. Her eyes sparkle and there’s a mischievous glint in them. Every time she comes in I get giddy. I want to tell you about the woman who asked if she could give me her number and the incredibly awkward moment when all I could manage to say was, “No.”

Not I’m gay. Not thank you. Just, “No.”

I want to tell you about how I came home the other evening and found my dad sitting on the couch doing a word find because he couldn’t figure out how to watch Reacher. He knows it’s on Prime, but he can’t remember the three or four steps it takes to get there. He can get to Netflix because there’s a big Netflix button on the remote. On the coffee table were two pairs of glasses placed side by side, pens lined up, his wallet, his phone, a little black pouch, a roll of electrical atape, his coffee cup, and a photograph of him and my mom when they were younger. Everything was meticulously organized.

Years ago, when I lived in Portland, I used to photograph arrangements of things I collected because I thought they were beautiful.

That same night, in honor of Dolly Parton’s passing, my dad and I watched 9 to 5, which is one of those old movies that has somehow stood the test of time. We had so many good laughs. I’m thinking about learning Spanish. Again. I tried Duolingo before but didn’t like the game aspect of it and honestly didn’t learn much. Now I’ve downloaded an app that teaches Spanish through hip-hop sing-alongs because singing along feels like something I might actually learn from. I haven’t started. Apparently ahora es un buen momento para aprender español.

My dad is now on a pumpkin spice pancake kick. We bought the mix at the Big Barn, and I made them for him Monday morning. He was snacking on one of the leftovers when I left for work. Later that day he called me at work and said, “We should have pumpkin spice pancakes for dinner.” I laughed and reminded him that we’d had them for breakfast. Tuesday morning he had them again. After dinner Tuesday night he said, “We should make pumpkin spice pancakes for breakfast tomorrow.”

It isn’t just that he likes pumpkin spice pancakes that much. He doesn’t remember having them.

My dad and I shoot pool together at least once a week at The Cactus. I’ve learned that they’re low balls and high balls, not solids and stripes. I’ve also learned from watching him that the back arm hinges loosely, almost mechanically, which seems to give you more control over how hard you hit the cue ball. He still beats me every game. There’s a youthfulness that takes over when he plays, and sometimes I ask him for advice because I actually want it and I know it makes him feel good.

As you know, over the past four years I’ve cultivated a huge indoor plant menagerie, wild and bustling and rife with green leaves, cactus spines and blooms. I went a little gung-ho at the yard sale and sold all of them except one. It’s weird being in the apartment now with the windows wide open and no plants.

I kept the aloe plant. Don’t ask me why I chose that one. Now I’m not entirely sure how I’m going to take it with me when I move because the thing is so sprawling and delicate.

And apparently there are two different avenues for caregiving through the VA. One is the long, complicated process I’ve been dealing with since February. The other pays for hourly caregiving. I only recently learned about that one and went through the process. But because my dad can shower himself, feed himself and doesn’t wear diapers, I qualified for nine hours a week. At a whopping thirteen dollars an hour, that’s $117 a week. My dad’s response: “It’s better than poking your eye with a sharp stick.”

I went to the doctor recently and she told me I was going deaf. The news was hard to hear. 😜

My dad actually has severe hearing loss. He got new hearing aids last week because his old ones were failing, particularly the left one, which only worked intermittently. The television had gotten so loud that sometimes it physically hurt my ears. On the drive home after getting the new hearing aids, my dad looked at me and said, “Why are you yelling at me?” I’ve spent so long raising my voice so he could hear me that yelling at my dad had become my normal speaking volume.

Since my mom died, my cooking has taken a delicious turn. A while back I posted about a friend who told me, “You’re a good cook. You just have trouble with spicing, timing, and proportion.” Over the past couple of years, you’ve witnessed my awkward, trial-and-error attempts to figure out how to cook. Somewhere along the way, though, I actually learned some things.

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The thing is, in order to get better at cooking, I had to look at the ways I wasn’t good at it. Impatience and fear of failure are at the top. I wanted things to work before I understood how they worked, and I was afraid to screw them up while I figured it out. Lately I’ve had a string of successes with things I used to be intimidated to even try. I’ve learned to be bolder with seasoning, to actually follow a recipe, to wait when I need to wait, and to trust myself.

This week my dad and I made stuffed chicken breasts. He did all the chopping and prep work and cut the pockets into the breasts. Slowly, as per usual. I cooked the onions and cherry tomatoes and made the filling with cream cheese and mozzarella. I learned that if you put a thin coat of tomato paste on the inside it makes the taste even richer. We made broccoli with garlic until it was browned and crispy. The chicken breasts were enormous, so we split one for dinner and ate the other one for lunch the next day. My dad made ecstatic noises through most of dinner. “I expected it to be good, but not this good. Wow.”

I also roasted one of the deer shoulder roasts last night. After so many years of being a vegetarian, there is still something visceral and surreal about handling a piece of meat like this. And I was not prepared for what a deer shoulder roast actually looks like. I don’t know what I was expecting, but the thing looked like an entire fucking leg. I thawed the enormous awkward thing in our mini-fridge and put it into a roasting pan with carrots, celery, onions, garlic, broth, thyme and rosemary. I put the lid on and slid it into the oven. My mantra for the next three and a half hours: Do. Not. Open. The. Lid.

I didn’t.

When I finally opened it, the meat fell off the bone. It was tender and juicy and somehow perfectly seasoned. My dad took a bite and said, “This tastes as good as my mother’s.” His mother, my grandmother, was a true kitchen master. I took the compliment.

And there are so many things I want to tell you about deer. I used to go deer hunting with my dad when I was a boy. I wasn’t particularly interested in hunting. What I liked was going into the woods with him. Sometimes there would be snow on the ground, and it was cold enough that we could see our breath. We would sit beside each other without talking, staring into the trees and brush. The woods were so quiet that if a small animal scampered through the leaves somewhere nearby, you heard it. If a twig snapped somewhere off in the distance, you heard that too.

Sitting there in silence with my dad made me feel secure and connected to him. Growing up, my dad was an alcoholic and could be unpredictable. He yelled. He threw things. My parents fought viciously. I never knew exactly when something was going to set him off. But in the woods, there was none of that. We sat beside each other and watched and listened. I could be close to my dad without being afraid.

I have a deer tattooed on my forearm because when I was four years old, a deer came into my bedroom and nudged me awake. I got out of bed and we walked down the hall and around our little apartment. The deer talked to me. She told me things.

The next morning I told my mom what had happened. She told me it was just a dream. I told her it wasn’t. She told me again that it was. I remember arguing with her about it. It’s one of the only memories I have from that age. Nearly fifty years later, I remember clearly the deer coming into my room. I remember her nudging me awake. I remember walking around the apartment with her.

I don’t remember what the deer said, but whatever she told me felt incredibly important.

SUPPORT THIS WORK

If you’re in a place to support this work, a paid subscription ($5/month or $50/year) is deeply appreciated.

A few years ago I left Portland, Oregon, and moved back to rural western Pennsylvania to help care for my aging parents. Writing is the way I make sense of everything.

Calling the Birds Home is where I write about grief, family, nature, poetry, and whatever else seems worth noticing. It’s a place for paying attention, asking questions, and telling the truth about an ordinary life.

My mom died earlier this year, and now it’s just my dad and me.

Along the way, this publication has become more than a place to write. It’s become a community, and some of the people I’ve met here have become genuine friends.

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When I was younger I was addicted to the Hokey Pokey…. but then I turned myself around.

It’s September 1st. It was a hard weekend. I guess August went out like a lion. Today I feel like a lamb.

I can’t tell whether I’m just exhausted or depressed. Or both. Maybe it doesn’t matter. The leaves have noticeably started to change, and I’m wondering how to carry on, how to carry all of this. The decisions that need to be made about moving, the grief, the worry, the world.

I write about grief sometimes like I know what I’m talking about. Six months after my mom died, I’m realizing I don’t. My dad still carries pictures of her around the apartment. Yesterday my cousin stopped by to drop off four big packages of deer shoulder roast. Before he even sat down, my dad was showing him pictures of her. Anyone who comes by gets shown her picture. Even when we’re out, he pulls out pictures of her and shows them to people. It’s sweet and beautiful and uncomfortable. It puts people in a place they didn’t expect to be without warning.

I had strange dreams last night. I was so tired I fell asleep on the floor watching TV. My dad was on the couch. He wanted to rewatch The Blacklist. At some point I woke up and thought about putting the mattress down that leans against the wall during the day, but I was too exhausted. I turned off the TV, rolled over and fell back asleep. My back hurts today. I took thirty minutes out on the deck to stretch on my yoga mat. It helped.

I think exhausted isn’t quite the right word. It’s too cliché. Everyone seems to be exhausted these days. But it’s something more twisted, subtle, corrosive, tangled.

Soulful.

Caring for my dad is the single most important thing in my life right now. But where am I in all of this?

I want to care for him and I need a life of my own. I want to protect him and I know I can’t protect him from everything. I’m grieving my mom while helping my dad live without her. I love him, and sometimes I’m depleted by what that love requires.

And now we’re moving. I know we’re moving, but that’s about all I know. I don’t know exactly when or where we’re going to live. I look around the apartment wondering what gets packed and what goes, while still going to work, making dinner, taking my dad to appointments. I feel somehow already gone from here and completely stuck here at the same time.

Last week I went to our little local library to look for poetry books. I had a list. There are twelve books in the poetry section. Literally twelve. I ended up requesting two books from other libraries in the network: Robert Pinsky’s Essential Pleasures and Jane Hirshfield’s The Asking.

I don’t particularly like getting poetry books from the library. I need more time with them. I like to write in them, make notes, underline things. I argue with poems. A library book requires a kind of restraint I don’t naturally possess. But books cost money and the library is free.

The first poem in The Asking is called “Door and Sentence.” It took me days of carrying it around before I felt like I could read another one. I still can’t seem to let go of that first poem.

Lately, certainty of any kind feels hard to come by. I don’t know when we’re moving or what my dad will need six months from now. Or next week. I don’t know what his dementia will take next. I don’t particularly like imagining my life on the other side of caring for him because I know what that means.

I thought I’d be back in Portland by now. Or wherever was next. Instead I’ve spent almost four years in Pennsylvania, always with some sense that this was temporary. But what if my dad lives another ten years? I hope he does. And what does that mean for me? How do I make friends when some part of me is always preparing to leave? How do I build a life somewhere I keep thinking I’m leaving? And what if I’m still in Pennsylvania ten years from now?

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A few days ago I stood at the edge of the crick where everything has gone wild. It’s the end of August, and the late-summer plants are blooming yellow and orange. I go down there sometimes just to look around. It helps me remember astonishment.

What caught my attention first was the bees. Then, all at once, I realized how much was happening around me. Little clusters of gnats hovered in pockets of air. There were moths and butterflies, mosquitoes and weird-looking bugs, black and purple and iridescent.

The longer I stood there, the more I saw.

Then I saw the damselflies, their black wings a blurry little chaos above the plants. I happened to look just as a male was mounting and inserting himself into the female. They fluttered together from one plant to another, still attached, while I stood there watching them. It was a wild afternoon for the damselflies. They were probably looking for somewhere more private, away from my peeping-Tom eyes and camera.

Later that night I sat out on the deck. It was close to eleven. I could hear the crick and the frogs, but underneath and around them were dozens of other sounds. A constant cricket-like drone, trills, chirps, buzzes coming from everywhere and nowhere at once.

I started wondering what all of them were. Crickets, katydids, tree crickets, frogs, insects calling back and forth through the dark. And it turns out a considerable amount of what I think of as the peaceful sounds of a summer night is actually courtship. Males announcing themselves, looking for mates, trying to get laid. The entire backyard is basically Tinder. Or Grindr. Yeah, gayness shows up in the natural world, too.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Cain Culto lately. I discovered him a few months ago and I can’t get enough. I don’t quite know what to call his music. He calls it “Kentucky Latin Art-Pop.” There’s bluegrass and old-time country, Latin folk, hip-hop and dark electronic music. Fiddles and beats. Twang and sex.

He grew up mostly in Lexington, Kentucky, where he learned fiddle and mandolin and immersed himself in bluegrass. He also grew up deeply Christian, eventually going to seminary, working as a worship leader and making music with a Christian band, all while wrestling with his queerness and a religious world he never quite fit inside.

And dadgum, is he queer. Cowboy hats and jockstraps. Long nails and eyeliner. Horses and bare asses. He kinda looks like he just walked out of an old Western, a gay club, and a coven at exactly the same time. The music has that same collision. Kentucky and his Colombian and Nicaraguan roots, bluegrass and pop, religion and sex. He takes sounds that can feel old and traditional and fills them with queerness and all kinds of beautiful weirdness.

I love the visual world he creates around the music, too. In one Instagram reel he showed how he made a pair of these enormous, curled-up boots that look almost impossible to walk in. After experimenting with different materials, he ended up using papier-mâché and terra-cotta clay powder. He makes many of the props for his videos himself. As someone who loves papier-mâché and making things with my hands, I think I admire him as much as an artist as I do as a musician.

Meanwhile, a notification just popped up from The New York Times letting me know that the United States is bombing Iran again.

I clicked on it and read the first few paragraphs while sitting here at the coffee bar writing. My dad is restless, watching The Blacklist. U.S. forces launched another round of airstrikes today, the second time in three days.

I don’t know what to do with that information.

The yard sale was a success. I’m never doing one again.

SUPPORT THIS WORK

If you’re in a place to support this work, a paid subscription ($5/month or $50/year) is deeply appreciated.

A few years ago I left Portland, Oregon, and moved back to rural western Pennsylvania to help care for my aging parents. Writing is the way I make sense of everything.

Calling the Birds Home is where I write about grief, family, nature, poetry, and whatever else seems worth noticing. It’s a place for paying attention, asking questions, and telling the truth about an ordinary life.

My mom died earlier this year, and now it’s just my dad and me.

Along the way, this publication has become more than a place to write. It’s become a community, and some of the people I’ve met here have become genuine friends.

Subscribe now

My mom has been gone long enough that I’ve started changing her recipes.

Her food was bland. Boiled. Extra well done. I always assumed she liked it that way. Maybe she did. She made good chicken soup and chili and meatloaf, but seasoning was not exactly her thing. Recently, while my dad and I were cooking, I made a joke about how Mom didn’t like using spices. My dad said, “I don’t think she didn’t like spices. I think she didn’t know how to use them and was afraid she’d ruin dinner.”

I don’t know why I had never considered that. My mom was afraid of a lot of things. She worried. There were things she wouldn’t try because she was afraid she wouldn’t like it, then it would be ruined, then it would be a waste of money. Somehow I had never connected that part of her to the food she put on the table. I had spent my whole life assuming the chicken soup was bland because that was how she liked it.

So lately I’ve been changing up her recipes. More seasoning and vegetables. And garlic. Oh my god. Lots of garlic! Her chicken soup has gotten richer and creamier and the chili has gotten bolder. They still remind me of her, but now they have flavor!

My dad and I have been cooking together more. This requires patience because my dad has exactly one speed in the kitchen: ultra slow and exact. My brother and I joke about it because it’s a thing. I can see him sizing things up and getting anxious when something is a weird shape that won’t cut neatly into a grid. I tend to start cooking and figure it out along the way.

Years ago, my friend Matt made the absolute best frozen pizzas. Cheap ones. He’d add things to them and they always came out perfectly cooked and ridiculously delicious. I finally asked him his secret. He said, “I let the oven heat up first.”

That’s it.

It was embarrassing how revelatory it was. Preheat the oven. Wait for the pan to get hot. I’ve never been good at any of that. I want to get to the thing. I’m impatient. I skip steps. I still have to remind myself of Matt’s frozen pizza advice.

On Sunday, my dad and I made a peach pie from scratch. We’d been talking about it all week, including making the crust, which I’ve always been intimidated by. On Saturday we went to the Big Barn before I went to work. It’s a kitschy little small-town market with an Amish/Appalachian thing going on that has been around since I was a kid. My dad said it was around when he was a kid. Spices, specialty flours, canned vegetables, pickled everything, baked goods, candy and old-time country playing while you shop. (See below for the Big Barn playlist I made for the occasion.)

My dad left with pumpkin spice pancake mix, apricot preserves and a slice of blackberry pie. We bought a few things we actually needed too.

We made the dough first because it had to be refrigerated for at least an hour. Yes, I used cold butter. Yes, I used ice water. We wrapped it and put it in the refrigerator. While we waited, my dad peeled and sliced the peaches and I mixed the filling. Nutmeg, vanilla, cinnamon, peaches. The smell alone was worth it.

When the dough was ready, my dad rolled it out using his mom’s old rolling pin. It’s wooden and heavy, with handles that were once painted red. Most of the paint is gone now. As he rolled, my dad told me about helping his mom bake when he was little. He wanted to help so badly that she gave him the job of sprinkling flour over the dough. According to my dad, the ones he sprinkled tasted better.

My grandmother was an extraordinary cook and an even better baker. Someone once said she could walk outside, scoop up dirt and make it taste good. I remember her nut rolls and poppy seed rolls, but my favorite were her lady fingers. The flakiest crust and the most delicious creamy rich filling. I haven’t had one in over a decade. (Hey, Aunt Cassie. If you’re reading this, can you send me the recipe? Or even better, can you make some for me? lol)

We rolled out the bottom crust and discovered we didn’t have a pie dish. Actually, we do, but it’s packed away in one of the boxes after the flood.

So.

I drove to Dollar General and bought their last ceramic pie dish. We pressed the dough into our brand-new $5 dish, poured in the peaches and made a perfectly wonky lattice top. Eventually the oven reached 425 and we put the pie in.

There were scraps of dough all over the cutting board, and I would have gathered them up and tossed them. My dad’s parents lived through the Depression. You didn’t waste anything, especially food.

He gathered the scraps, rolled them out and cut them into perfect squares. Then he opened the apricot preserves he’d picked out at the Big Barn, spooned some into each piece, folded them over and pressed the edges together into triangles.

The pie had to bake before the little apricot pastries could have their turn in the oven, so once again there was nothing to do but wait.

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Welcome to the Big Barn

“I’m not offended by all of the dumb blonde jokes because I know I’m not dumb… and I also know that I’m not blonde.”
— Dolly Parton

I made a playlist this week called Big Barn, twenty-six songs that wander from old country into bluegrass and deeper into the mountains. The Carter Family, Doc Watson, Bill Monroe, Hank Williams, Loretta Lynn, Hazel Dickens, Jean Ritchie, Dock Boggs, and a whole bunch of voices that sound like they came up through the floorboards.

And then yesterday, Dolly Parton died.

She has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. Not only the rhinestones and wigs and enormous personality, but the songwriter, the Appalachian woman underneath all of it, the woman who could be funny and bawdy and tender all in the same breath. She came out of the mountains of East Tennessee and somehow became one of those rare people who seemed to belong to everybody without ever sanding away where she came from.

I’m genuinely heartbroken that she’s gone. So Big Barn begins with Dolly singing “My Tennessee Mountain Home,” right there at the roots of it all.

IN OTHER NEWS…

Marie Kondo, Take the Wheel

We’re having a yard sale this Saturday. It’s the last weekend before Labor Day and the first Saturday in two months without rain in the forecast. My brother is coming into town to help, and we have a crazy amount of stuff to get rid of. We’re moving soon, although when exactly we’re moving remains the anxiety-provoking TBD of it all. Moving ain’t cheap, and dragging all of this stuff with us makes absolutely no sense. So, I’ve taped a picture of Marie Kondo to the wall as inspiration.

If all goes well, we’ll have less stuff and a little more money by Saturday afternoon. Please send thoughts and prayers for a beautiful day.

I Finally Watched It…

I finally watched Saved by the Beauty of the World, the documentary about Mary Oliver. I’d had it queued up for weeks but kept putting it off, partly because I wasn’t sure I could handle it. Those who know me, even for brief periods, know my love and devotion to her poetry and the deep, felt sense of awe she conjures in me.

Her poetry didn’t just inspire me or give me unanswerable questions to ponder. It altered my attention. It changed the way I see and interact with the world. If Mary Oliver was saved by the beauty of the world, then I was saved by her sharing that salvation.

SUPPORT THIS WORK

If you’re in a place to support this work, a paid subscription ($5/month or $50/year) is deeply appreciated.

A few years ago I left Portland, Oregon, and moved back to rural western Pennsylvania to help care for my aging parents. Writing is the way I make sense of everything.

Calling the Birds Home is where I write about grief, family, nature, poetry, and whatever else seems worth noticing. It’s a place for paying attention, asking questions, and telling the truth about an ordinary life.

My mom died earlier this year, and now it’s just my dad and me.

Along the way, this publication has become more than a place to write. It’s become a community, and some of the people I’ve met here have become genuine friends.

Subscribe now

A guy I work with at Speedway rubbed his thumb and index finger together the other day and asked me if I knew what it was. I knew the joke. The tiniest violin in the world. But for some reason my brain went somewhere else and I said, “An insect masturbating?” We had a good laugh and brought another co-worker into it, though she didn’t find it amusing. Later, while stocking shelves, I found myself genuinely wondering: Do insects masturbate?

The answer is a complicated yes. Scientists are more cautious with the word masturbation than I am, but it’s a question they’ve actually considered. Fruit flies, it turns out, have been studied quite a bit when it comes to sex. Male flies will engage in sexual behavior without a female around. Other insects have also been observed rubbing or stimulating their own genitalia, although this is where things get difficult to interpret. What looks like masturbation could also be grooming, preparation for mating, or something else entirely. Apparently there are limits to what we can know about an insect’s intentions.

Every day, all day, things snag my attention. It could be something I observe around me, a song lyric, or just a thought that pops into my head. It’s like these things open doors in my mind, and my curiosity almost always walks through them. One question leads to another, and then another, and sometimes I find myself in some pretty hairy places. And now I know more about the sex lives of fruit flies than I care to admit.

Recently, I came across this question: What part of yourself are you afraid to lose if you actually heal? It kind of gripped me. I would much rather contemplate insect masturbation, but I can’t seem to let this question go.

Who would I be without the things that hurt me? How much of who and what I am is actually scar tissue? What are the patterns and habits I’ve created to avoid vulnerability, and how many of them have been around so long that I’ve mistaken them for truth? If I could somehow remove the grief, the fear, the addictions, the failures, the people I’ve lost, the things I’ve done and the things that have been done to me, would I recognize myself?

And then this week I had questions I actually needed answers to.

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My dad has been dealing with dizziness on and off for the better part of a year. He’s seen doctors and specialists, including a vestibular specialist who ruled out vertigo. But this time was different. The dizziness had become intense and constant. It had been going on for days instead of coming and going, and he was unsteady enough that I was afraid of him falling when I wasn’t home.

So the questions started. Is this the same dizziness he’s had before, only worse? Is he dehydrated? Is it one of his medications? His blood pressure? His heart? I took him to urgent care first. His vitals were normal and nothing obvious explained what was happening, but the dizziness continued. Eventually I started wondering if he was having a stroke.

I started reading about posterior circulation strokes, which can show up differently from the version of stroke most of us have been taught to recognize. The symptoms sounded frighteningly familiar. So I called an ambulance.

At the ER, most of the tests came back normal. I explained that my dad has dementia and tried to give the doctor the observations he couldn’t reliably give himself. I told him I was worried about a posterior circulation stroke and that my dad had become so unstable I was afraid to leave him alone. He asked dismissively, “Do you want to put him somewhere?”

I know my dad. I know what his normal looks like. I’m constantly trying to figure out when to trust my own observations and when to trust someone who knows more than I do. Sitting in the ER, I kept wondering if I was pushing too hard or if I was right not to trust what I was being told.

They wanted to send him home, but something wasn’t right, so I pushed. They agreed to keep him for observation and do an MRI. The next morning I learned that he’d had a stroke. Then a nurse handed me a packet about stroke recovery. I looked at it and felt blindsided for a second. Oh. Fuck. My dad had a stroke.

And now there are new questions. What does this mean for my dad? What happens next? How much will he recover? Is this connected to the dizziness he’s been having for the past year, or was this something new? How do I keep him safe when I have to work? How much more care is he going to need?

I feel like I’m walking around with a semi-active volcano that could go off at any time.

Somewhere in all of this I keep wanting to talk to my mom. She died six months ago, and I still find myself wanting to tell her things. I want to tell her that dad had a stroke and what happened at the hospital. I want to ask her what she thinks I should do, even though when she was alive she probably would have yelled at me, complained, and then worried about it on her own.

I don’t know where she is. I don’t know if talking to her is actually talking to her or talking to memory. I’m not even sure it matters. I talk to her anyway.

My dad believes he’ll see her again. That she’s waiting for him on the other side. And I would never take that away from him. I know how much comfort it gives him, but I don’t share his certainty. Sometimes I envy it. There are days when I would love to simply believe that my mom is somewhere and that someday I’ll walk into whatever comes next and there she’ll be. Instead I have questions.

Apparently I have a lot of them.

SUPPORT THIS WORK

If you’re in a place to support this work, a paid subscription ($5/month or $50/year) is deeply appreciated.

A few years ago I left Portland, Oregon, and moved back to rural western Pennsylvania to help care for my aging parents. Writing is the way I make sense of everything.

Calling the Birds Home is where I write about grief, family, nature, poetry, and whatever else seems worth noticing. It’s a place for paying attention, asking questions, and telling the truth about an ordinary life.

My mom died earlier this year, and now it’s just my dad and me.

Along the way, this publication has become more than a place to write. It’s become a community, and some of the people I’ve met here have become genuine friends.

Subscribe now

My dad is sitting on the couch watching Quigley Down Under. He’s having an off morning. A lot of dizziness. It’s not uncommon. I’ve talked to more doctors than I can count about it, and test after test reveals nothing. The most common explanation is dehydration, so I make him an electrolyte drink every morning and spend the rest of the day putting glasses of water in front of him. Next to his coffee, of course.

I’m sitting out on the deck writing, preparing myself mentally to go to work. I swear after every shift a little chunk of my soul disappears. But I’ve made it my goal to have a new dad joke for every shift. Yesterday it went like this:

Customer: How you doing?
Me: I’m worried about the calendar.
Customer: Why?
Me: Its days are numbered.

So here I sit drinking coffee, looking out over the crick, with a couple hours before I have to leave for work. Recently, I came across a passage from a 1968 letter Lorine Niedecker wrote to the poet Cid Corman: “W. H. Hudson says that birds feel something akin to pain (and fear) just before migration and that nothing alleviates this feeling except flight (the rapid motion of wings).”

And she saw herself in those birds. “I must be going to migrate,” she wrote. “If I don’t get over into this strange new thing I feel I’ll bust!”

There’s a German word for the restlessness birds experience before migration: Zugunruhe, literally “migratory restlessness.” If I were going to learn another language, I think I’d want it to be German. I mean, besides the ancient languages like Sanskrit, Hebrew, or Latin, which fascinate me for completely different reasons. German seems to have all these amazing words that take an entire idea or some complicated human feeling and cram it into one slightly unpronounceable word with way too many letters. I love that kind of distillation. And I’ve always wanted to be able to read Rilke in the original German.

Anyway, Zugunruhe. As the time to migrate gets closer, birds become agitated. They flutter their wings, move around when they would normally be sleeping, turn themselves toward the direction they will eventually travel. Their bodies begin leaving before they do.

Bird migration itself is kind of insane. Some birds travel thousands of miles. They cross oceans and mountains, fly through the night, run into storms and predators and exhaustion and all kinds of things that can kill them. And still, when whatever ancient urge inside them says it’s time to go, they go. I don’t know whether that makes them brave. Brave is probably another human word we put on them because we need the story to make sense. A bird isn’t standing on a branch giving itself a pep talk about trusting the journey. Its body is responding to something older than language.

There’s something about the line something akin to pain that I keep coming back to. I don’t know exactly what a bird feels, and I don’t particularly want to turn a bird into a tiny feathered human having an existential crisis. But I understand the idea of a restlessness strong enough to make staying still almost unbearable. Not quite pain, but more than discomfort. Something has changed. The bird hasn’t left yet, but it also can’t quite remain where it is. And apparently nothing makes that feeling go away except flying.

I want it to work the other way around. I want to figure everything out and then move. I want to know where I’m going, why I’m going there, whether it’s the right decision, what it will look like when I arrive, and preferably whether I’ll be happier once I get there. I want a map and some evidence. I would also appreciate a guarantee, although life has been pretty consistent about refusing to give me one.

Instead, I can sit inside uncertainty for an impressive amount of time trying to turn it into certainty. I can examine it from every possible direction. I can make lists. I can change my mind. I can change it back. I can wait for some feeling inside me that says, Okay, now you know. Now you’re ready.

Meanwhile, some part of me may already be fluttering its wings.

Borrowed Words: Lorine Niedecker

When Ecstasy Is Inconvenient
Lorine Niedecker, 1903–1970

Feign a great calm;
all gay transport soon ends.
Chant: who knows—
flight’s end or flight’s beginning
for the resting gull?

Heart, be still.
Say there is money but it rusted;
say the time of moon is not right for escape.
It’s the color in the lower sky
too broadly suffused,
or the wind in my tie.

Know amazedly how
often one takes his madness
into his own hands
and keeps it.

Lorine Niedecker is a poet I only recently discovered, and I’ve become a little obsessed with her. Which is what sent me down the migratory restlessness rabbit hole. She was born in Wisconsin and spent much of her life on Black Hawk Island along the Rock River, surrounded by water, marshes, birds, floods, plants, and changing weather. All of that found its way into her poetry. She paid incredible attention to the small world immediately around her and had this way of taking something enormous and distilling it down to just a few lines.

She also lived a pretty ordinary life outside the literary world. She worked various jobs, including cleaning at a hospital, and wrote largely without recognition or much money. She published relatively little while she was alive and never became particularly well known beyond a small circle of poets. Her reputation grew considerably after her death in 1970, and now she’s recognized as one of the more distinctive American poets of the twentieth century.

I love the idea of this woman living beside a river in Wisconsin, going to work, watching the water and birds and weather, and then going home and making these strange, tiny, beautiful poems out of what she noticed.

Borrowed Art: Anthony Hurd

Anthony Hurd is a contemporary queer artist living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and I am completely head over heels for his work. It’s strange and beautiful, full of queer bodies, intimacy, longing, nature, and these surreal worlds I want to crawl inside. I also love seeing queer life represented this way. Not sanitized or explained, but allowed to be weird and tender and erotic and complicated and beautiful all at once. I want to highlight more queer artists here, and Anthony Hurd feels like a pretty great place to start.

Check him out:

Website
IG

And if you’re anywhere near LA, his show Gentle Nature is currently at MOAH:CEDAR in Lancaster, California, through November 15.

Support This Work:

If you’re in a place to support this work, a paid subscription ($5/month or $50/year) is deeply appreciated.

A few years ago I left Portland, Oregon, and moved back to rural western Pennsylvania to help care for my aging parents. Writing is the way I make sense of everything.

Calling the Birds Home is where I write about grief, family, nature, poetry, and whatever else seems worth noticing. It’s a place for paying attention, asking questions, and telling the truth about an ordinary life.

My mom died earlier this year, and now it’s just my dad and me.

Along the way, this publication has become more than a place to write. It’s become a community, and some of the people I’ve met here have become genuine friends.

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My dad had an eye exam today. The doctor asked him if he has trouble seeing when he drives at night, and my dad launched into a whole explanation of what it’s like for him when he’s driving after dark. He talked about the glare and the lights and the reflection on street signs. The thing is, my dad hasn’t really driven in three years.

He doesn’t know that he doesn’t drive.

I didn’t correct him. I let him answer the question, and when I had a chance I quietly told the doctor that he doesn’t drive anymore, to which the doctor gave me a wink. This is something I do a lot now. There are facts that need to be communicated and facts that don’t necessarily need to be corrected. I’ve gotten pretty good at knowing the difference, although I don’t always know if I’m getting it right.

Recently my dad told me that he doesn’t feel comfortable driving anymore. I was relieved because I try, whenever I can, to let him arrive at these things on his own. Taking something away from him feels different from him deciding he doesn’t want it anymore. Of course, he still talks almost every day about wanting to buy a truck. We look at trucks online sometimes and talk about which one he likes, how much it costs, the things he’ll haul in it. Eventually we move on to something else.

He needs glasses now, mostly to see things farther away, like the television. The doctor also found cataracts. They aren’t bad enough for surgery yet, but he wants to see him again in six months to a year to see how they’re progressing.

The eye doctor is about an hour away, and on the drive there we both noticed the leaves beginning to change. It’s August, still hot and mostly green, but here and there the leaves are starting to lose some of their color. They aren’t quite yellow or red yet. I love this moment every year, when autumn first starts hinting at its arrival. It’s subtle but undeniable.

Yesterday I drew a self-portrait.

I wasn’t trying to make some profound statement about my life. I just spontaneously started drawing, and what came out was a tiny face buried inside a mess of looping, irregular lines. When I finished, I looked at it and thought, yeah, this is what it feels like to be me right now. Lost. Hidden. Somewhere inside all the layers.

Then I realized it looked like a topographical map. Contour after contour of exhaustion, confusion, anxiety, tasks, grief, decisions. I’m this tiny face somewhere in the middle of it all. The lines wander and cross and double back on themselves, and somewhere in there is me.

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A month or two after my mom died, my dad found the plastic mechanism from inside a music box at The Bins. There wasn’t anything particularly beautiful about it. It was just the little wind-up part that plays the music, separated from whatever it had once belonged to. He brought it home, and eventually it disappeared into one of the drawers of his desk alongside random tools, scraps of things, broken things he means to fix, parts he knows he’ll have a use for… some day.

When I was going through things recently for the yard sale, my dad found it again. I assumed it was exactly the kind of thing we could get rid of, but he told me he wanted to keep it because it reminded him of my mom. Then he told me how much she loved when he played it for her. I knew that wasn’t possible because he got it after she died. He remembered her loving it, and I wasn’t going to take that away from him over a timeline.

So we kept it.

The other night I was lying in bed around midnight when I noticed lightning flashing outside. I went out onto the deck, and my dad came out too. A spectacular lightning storm was moving through, more intense than anything I can remember seeing. We’ve been getting a ton of rain lately, and for more than two hours there was barely a moment when the night clouds weren’t completely lit up by lightning.

We sat there together and watched it. In silence. In awe. In the kind of pure contentment that only storms and nature seem to bring these days. Eventually we got up and went back inside, my dad to his comfy bed in the bedroom and me to my not-so-comfortable mattress on the living room floor.

This morning our groceries arrived, and somehow we ended up with four big containers of cherry tomatoes. I don’t know if I ordered the wrong quantity or the grocery store screwed it up. So now I’m making pasta sauce. I’ve never made homemade pasta sauce before, but I found a simple recipe with garlic and olive oil and spices. Here’s wishing for a success.

I need one.

Support This Work:

If you’re in a place to support this work, a paid subscription ($5/month or $50/year) is deeply appreciated.

A few years ago I left Portland, Oregon, and moved back to rural western Pennsylvania to help care for my aging parents. Writing is the way I make sense of everything.

Calling the Birds Home is where I write about grief, family, nature, poetry, and whatever else seems worth noticing. It’s a place for paying attention, asking questions, and telling the truth about an ordinary life.

My mom died earlier this year, and now it’s just my dad and me.

Along the way, this publication has become more than a place to write. It’s become a community, and some of the people I’ve met here have become genuine friends.

Subscribe now

It’s August now, and somehow the days are already beginning to feel different. The evenings arrive a little sooner, the deck has become my favorite place to eat dinner, and everything is at its fullest. Life has settled into a rhythm that, at least for the moment, feels surprisingly ordinary. There’s a strange anxiety that comes with that.

But I’ll gladly take ordinary because I know what’s coming.

The other evening I was outside on the other side of the house, sitting in an Adirondack chair talking with a good friend, when I noticed a storm rolling in. The kind with big purple clouds and hard wind. I hurried around putting a few things away before the rain hit, then went upstairs to check on my dad.

This is how I found him.

Sitting on the deck, completely content, watching the storm roll in. We’ve both always loved thunderstorms. I don’t know exactly why. Maybe it’s the way the air changes beforehand, or the smell of rain, or the distant rumble before it finally arrives. Whatever it is, neither of us has ever been the type to run inside. I snapped this picture because it captures something about my dad that I’ve always loved.

The other day he was doing one of his word finds and asked me, “What’s a stroopwafel?” I realized I had absolutely no idea. I looked it up and immediately recognized them. I’d eaten them before, but somehow never knew they had a name, so naturally I added a package to our next grocery order.

When they arrived, you would’ve thought we’d won the lottery. My dad’s eyes lit up. I poured him a cup of coffee, opened the package, and handed him one. He took a bite, looked at me, and immediately said, “I’ll have two.” It was Tuesday, so I figured, why not?

A friend sent me a meme this week that read, “My whole feed is a perfect playfully mischievous frolicsome raccoon and the collapse of civilization.” I laughed because…same. Then I realized my own algorithm has become even stranger.

Apparently the internet has concluded that my personality consists of:

27% people unexpectedly falling and dad jokes
24% Jimothy the raccoon
18% men’s feet
31% existential dread

One minute it’s someone accidentally stepping backward into a swimming pool. The next it’s Jimothy stealing cat food, riding in a shopping cart, or somehow becoming the unofficial mascot of Seattle. Then Instagram decides I need to see another pair of attractive men’s feet. And just when I’m feeling delightfully entertained, someone reminds me that democracy is ending, the oceans are boiling, AI is replacing us all, and we’re probably weeks away from the complete collapse of civilization.

Then I find out Whole Foods is making Jimothy cupcakes.

Honestly, I don’t mind it. The world really is on fire in a hundred different ways. If a mischievous raccoon can interrupt the dread for thirty seconds, I’ll take it. Maybe that’s part of the job now. Not pretending everything is okay, but remembering to laugh anyway. Besides, Jimothy seems to be handling the collapse of civilization remarkably well.

Apparently this was also the week of cucumbers. This is the time of year when everyone’s garden is ripening, and cucumbers are basically forced on you. It’s less of a gift than a drop-and-dash operation. One day you don’t have any cucumbers, and the next you’re opening the refrigerator wondering how six of them mysteriously appeared

.I decided to lean into it. I made chicken salad and started piling it onto thick cucumber slices instead of crackers, topping each one with a couple of cherry tomatoes. They were cool, crunchy, and surprisingly satisfying.

Then, last night, I made grilled shrimp with a Mediterranean cucumber salad: cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, red onion, kalamata olives, feta, lemon, olive oil, oregano, salt, and pepper. It was exactly the kind of meal I wanted to eat out on the deck with my dad while watching the evening settle in.

Support This Work:

If you’re in a place to support this work, a paid subscription ($5/month or $50/year) is deeply appreciated.

A few years ago I left Portland, Oregon, and moved back to rural western Pennsylvania to help care for my aging parents. Writing is the way I make sense of everything.

Calling the Birds Home is where I write about grief, family, nature, poetry, and whatever else seems worth noticing. It’s a place for paying attention, asking questions, and telling the truth about an ordinary life.

My mom died earlier this year, and now it’s just my dad and me.

Along the way, this publication has become more than a place to write. It’s become a community, and some of the people I’ve met here have become genuine friends.

Subscribe now

I’ve been asking myself a lot of difficult questions lately. Questions about belonging, about direction, about how we find our bearings when the old maps stop making sense. I wrote about some of that yesterday in We Have to Move.

Then I remembered this poem by Mary Oliver. It feels like a good companion to that conversation.

There are times when an honest question doesn’t lead to an answer. Instead, it opens something. It invites us to keep looking, to keep paying attention. Sometimes one question simply leads to another. Sometimes an answer gives rise to more questions. And sometimes the question itself is the answer.

Some Questions You Might Ask
by Mary Oliver

Is the soul solid, like iron?
Or is it tender and breakable, like
the wings of a moth in the beak of an owl?
Who has it, and who doesn’t?
I keep looking around me.
The face of the moose is as sad
as the face of Jesus.
The swan opens her white wings slowly.
In the fall, the black bear carries leaves into the darkness.
One question leads to another.
Does it have a shape? Like an iceberg?
Like the eye of a hummingbird?
Does it have one lung, like the snake and the scallop?
Why should I have it, and not the anteater
who loves her children?
Why should I have it, and not the camel?
Come to think of it, what about maple trees?
What about the blue iris?
What about all the little stones, sitting alone in the moonlight?
What about roses, and lemons, and their shining leaves?
What about the grass?

Source: Mary Oliver, “Some Questions You Might Ask,” House of Light. Beacon Press, 1990. Also published in New and Selected Poems (Beacon Press, 1992)

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One more thing.

The new PBS American Masters documentary, Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World, premieres nationwide on August 25. It’s already making its way through select theaters, and several people have written to tell me how much they loved seeing it on the big screen. Unfortunately, it isn’t playing anywhere near me. But if it’s coming to a theater near you, I’d encourage you to go. And if not, mark your calendar for August 25. I know I’ll be watching.

PBS
Trailer

Support This Work:

If you’re in a place to support this work, a paid subscription ($5/month or $50/year) is deeply appreciated.

A few years ago I left Portland, Oregon, and moved back to rural western Pennsylvania to help care for my aging parents. Writing is the way I make sense of everything.

Calling the Birds Home is where I write about grief, family, nature, poetry, and whatever else seems worth noticing. It’s a place for paying attention, asking questions, and telling the truth about an ordinary life.

My mom died earlier this year, and now it’s just my dad and me.

Along the way, this publication has become more than a place to write. It’s become a community, and some of the people I’ve met here have become genuine friends.

Subscribe now

Is this just me?
Or is there something about this prolonged, disruptive moment in history that’s leaving so many of us feeling untethered and unsure?
How do we find our bearings in a world that seems to be losing its own?

I don’t ask these as rhetorical questions. I ask them because I have a hunch many of us are asking similar questions. I’m not looking for answers so much as trying to find some ground to stand on while the swirl of the world challenges, provokes, and disorients me.

Last week, I ran into my landlord. We talked for a while about the flood and everything that’s happened over the past month. Then she told me she’d decided not to rebuild the downstairs apartment after all. The flooding had changed her thinking, and now she was seriously considering selling the house altogether.

My dad and I had already been loosely talking about moving to the Philadelphia area to be closer to my older brother. We’d been turning the idea over ever since my mom died, but there had never been much urgency or a catalyst to spark any movement. Standing there in the driveway, though, I realized the conversation had changed. We weren’t simply weighing our options anymore. The decision suddenly seemed obvious, even if it was complicated.

We are moving.

And I’m beginning to wonder: How many moves do I have in me before nowhere feels like home? Maybe, in some ways, I’m already there.

I’ve moved more than most people. I grew up in western Pennsylvania before my family moved to Florida, then Maryland, then New Jersey. These weren’t carefully planned moves. Some of them were literally midnight moves. I’d come home from school and find out we were leaving, and within a day or two we’d be on the road to another state. The day after I graduated from high school we moved to Amish country in eastern Pennsylvania. Before long I was gone too. Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. Colorado. Three years living full-time on the road. Vermont. New Hampshire. Florida. Boston. Western Massachusetts. New York. Eventually I landed in Portland, Oregon, where I lived for thirteen years before moving back to western Pennsylvania to help care for my parents. Now another move sits just over the horizon, and I honestly don’t know how I’m going to do it again.

As I write, I realize I’m not thinking about moving anymore. I’m thinking about what it feels like to lose your bearings. As I sit here on the deck, I realize this isn’t really about changing location. It’s about not quite knowing where I am. I don’t mean geographically. I mean inwardly. I find myself reaching for old maps that don’t seem to describe the territory I’m standing in anymore.

Mary Oliver writes in her poem Bone:

“…truly I know
our part is not knowing,
but looking, and touching, and loving…”

What if not knowing is the work?
What if the questions we spend so much energy trying to answer are actually what we need in order to change and grow?
What if certainty isn’t the goal?

I keep thinking about what David Whyte wrote years ago. He says it’s actually the fortunate ones who arrive, willingly or unwillingly, at that place where the road is no longer clear or no longer makes sense. Not because being lost is pleasant, but because it loosens our grip on the life we imagined or hoped for.

It’s easy enough to agree with David Whyte while reading one of his books in a comfortable chair. It’s something else when you’re looking at another move in the midst of grief, disruption, and financial strain. It’s something else when you’ve spent the last several years exhausted, lonely, and trying to rebuild a life that no longer feels familiar. His words don’t feel like an explanation to me anymore. They feel like another question.

I think I’m still trying to find the right question. Then I catch myself wondering if searching for the right question is just another way of trying to find an answer. As though if I can finally ask the right question, I’ll discover the solid ground I’ve been looking for all along.

And then I wonder: Can I lose my bearings without losing my capacity for amazement?

What I believe, and what I’ve spent years practicing through yoga, meditation, poetry, long walks, birds, and simply paying attention, is that uncertainty and beauty are not opposites. I’ve never believed the world had to make sense before it could be beautiful. If anything, I’ve found the opposite to be true. Some of the deepest experiences of amazement have arrived precisely when I couldn’t see very far ahead, when I was forced to pay attention to what was directly in front of me.

That’s where I find myself today. My dad is back home in the little upstairs apartment. I made curry for lunch. Groceries will be be delivered before I leave for work. The birds are singing. Somewhere in the distance that damn rooster has been crowing since early this morning and still hasn’t run out of things to say.

I’m still full of questions.

But somewhere beneath them is an unshakeable conviction that this world, for all its darkness and bewilderment, is still astonishingly beautiful.

Support This Work:

If you’re in a place to support this work, a paid subscription ($5/month or $50/year) is deeply appreciated.

A few years ago I left Portland, Oregon, and moved back to rural western Pennsylvania to help care for my aging parents. Writing is the way I make sense of everything.

Calling the Birds Home is where I write about grief, family, nature, poetry, and whatever else seems worth noticing. It’s a place for paying attention, asking questions, and telling the truth about an ordinary life.

My mom died earlier this year, and now it’s just my dad and me.

Along the way, this publication has become more than a place to write. It’s become a community, and some of the people I’ve met here have become genuine friends.

Subscribe now

Hey Y’all,

I’ve been home alone in the upstairs apartment for a week now. My older brother came for a visit and took my dad home with him for a couple of weeks. Everyone was excited for me. “You’re finally going to be able to relax,” they said. “This is going to give you so much relief.” I was excited too.

Well… kind of.

This is the longest stretch of real solitude I’ve had in years. Literally years. I’ve had a day here and there. I’ve gone to visit friends, but that’s different than solitude. Before caregiving, I spent a lot of my life alone. I wrote alone. I hiked alone. I cooked alone. I drove across the country alone. I knew who I was in solitude.

I knew enough not to romanticize suddenly having two weeks to myself. I thought I’d catch up on paperwork, organize the apartment after the flood, and unpack boxes that had been packed without any kind of logic. I thought if I could finally get the apartment in order, I’d be able to settle down too. Instead, solitude uncovered something much more uncomfortable.

For years my attention has been pointed outward. My mom’s illness. Caregiving. My mom’s death. My dad’s dementia. Working at Speedway. The endless VA process. So many doctor’s appointments. Tornadoes. The flood. There’s always another problem to solve or something that needs my immediate attention. Those things became a buffer between me and myself. What I’ve discovered is that waiting inside an extended moment of solitude is grief and a kind of loneliness that’s different from what I’ve written about before.

I’m realizing I don’t know myself in solitude the way I used to.

It’s strange what happens when you have to pack up your whole life in the middle of a disaster. Sacred things and ordinary things lose their categories. My mom’s urn ended up in a box with the bathroom towels. Some of the kitchen utensils somehow ended up in there too. I keep looking around thinking that if I could just put everything back where it belonged, something in me would finally settle too. Or at least start to make a little sense.

I’ve been waking up around seven every morning. Some days I get up. Most days I don’t. I lie there for another hour, sometimes three. My body hurts more than I want to admit, but if I’m honest, there are mornings when getting out of bed means having to meet the day, and I’m not always ready. I’ve settled into a morning routine that I genuinely enjoy. Coffee on the deck. Reading and writing. Listening to the birds. Making a list of everything I want to accomplish that day. Some mornings I’m rewriting the exact same list I made the day before.

The wildfire smoke from Canada interrupted that routine for a few days. Perryopolis was under a Code Purple air quality alert, so I had my coffee inside at the kitchen bar my dad and I built together when we remodeled the upstairs apartment. It’s one of my favorite places in the house. Right now it’s surrounded by open boxes, stacks of clutter, and things waiting to be sorted, thrown away, or boxed for storage. This morning I sat there drinking my coffee and looking around, realizing I’m not just trying to organize an apartment. I’m trying to organize a life that no longer looks the way it did a year ago. Or three months ago. Hell, even a month ago.

A few days ago an older woman came through my line at Speedway. She reached into her purse to pay, and I looked down at her hands. They looked so much like my mom’s that it startled me. She paid, smiled, and walked out the door. I walked into the back room and cried.

What also surprised me is how much I miss my dad. We’ve talked every day. He sounds happy. My older brother has him organizing tools in the garage, which is one of his favorite things to do. I love hearing him happy. Over the last three and a half years my dad has become one of my closest friends. I confide in him. He leans on me. Yeah, we still squabble over things like how much coffee he drinks, but he’s my closest companion through all of this turmoil.

I thought this week was going to be about relaxing, writing, and putting an apartment back together after the flood.

It turns out I’ve been trying to figure out how to put myself back together.

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Borrowed Words

“Isn’t it odd. We can only see our outsides, but nearly everything happens on the inside.”

Source: Charlie Mackesy, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse. HarperOne, 2019.

A Few More Things

Knavin

The other morning I sat on the deck looking through old pictures of Knavin and cried.

July always brings him back. It’s the month he died, and even after all these years I find myself thinking about him more than usual. I got him from an Amish farmer when I was twenty-one and living in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. He was a yellow lab with soulful eyes who, after an accident, spent much of his life getting around on three legs. It never seemed to slow him down. He climbed mountains with me, wandered deserts, and lived with me in a van as we traveled coast to coast. Wherever I went, Knavin went too.

People always noticed his eyes. I always noticed his smell. I’d bury my face in the fur around his neck and breathe him in. He smelled exactly the way a dog should smell. Warm. Sweet. Familiar. Even now it’s one of the strongest memories I have of him.

For fourteen years he was my constant companion through some of the hardest and most wondrous years of my life. Those years gave me some of the greatest adventures I’ve ever had. They also brought me close enough to despair that I don’t think I’d have survived them without him. There were times when taking care of myself felt optional, but taking care of Knavin never did. He needed me to get out of bed. He needed to be fed. He needed to go outside. He needed to go for a walk. Without either of us realizing it, he kept pulling me toward another day.

I don’t think I’d be here if it weren’t for that dog.

I miss you, my friend.

❧

VA Process Update

There is no update. We had to send in more paperwork and we’re just waiting.

Sigh.

❧

Fortune Cookie

I hadn’t had Chinese takeout in literally years. It had been long enough for me to forget how cheap Chinese food makes me feel, but a woman I work with was picking some up for herself and the man she cares for, so I decided to get some too.

I ordered General Tso Chicken, sweet and sour soup, and a couple of egg rolls.

I got home, took out the trash, put my food on a plate, and carried it out to the deck. Before I took the first bite, I opened the fortune cookie.

It read:

“Take time to relax, especially when you don’t have time for it.”

I actually laughed out loud.

At The Table

PENNE WITH SHRIMP, ITALIAN TURKEY SAUSAGE & SPINACH

I’ve really been enjoying cooking on the griddle out on the deck.

Partly because I enjoy cooking outside, but mostly because my upstairs kitchen is tiny and still cluttered with boxes and all the other things that got piled upstairs after the flood. The Canadian wildfire smoke hadn’t completely cleared, but the air was finally good enough to be outside again. So I cooked almost the whole meal on the griddle: Italian turkey sausage, shrimp, cherry tomatoes, garlic, and spinach. The only thing I made inside was the pasta.

The full recipe is below.

SUPPORT THIS WORK

If you’re in a place to support this work, a paid subscription ($5/month or $50/year) is deeply appreciated.

A few years ago I left Portland, Oregon, and moved back to rural western Pennsylvania to help care for my aging parents. Writing is the way I make sense of everything.

Calling the Birds Home is where I write about grief, family, nature, poetry, and whatever else seems worth noticing. It’s a place for paying attention, asking questions, and telling the truth about an ordinary life.

My mom died earlier this year, and now it’s just my dad and me.

Along the way, this publication has become more than a place to write. It’s become a community, and some of the people I’ve met here have become genuine friends.

Subscribe now

❧ Unless otherwise noted, all photographs and original artwork featured in Calling the Birds Home are my own.

PENNE WITH SHRIMP, ITALIAN TURKEY SAUSAGE & SPINACH

You’ll Need

8 oz. penne pasta
8 oz. organic Italian turkey sausage
8 oz. shrimp, peeled and deveined
2–3 cloves garlic, minced (Or more. I almost always use more.)
1–2 cups cherry tomatoes, halved
2 large handfuls fresh spinach (It looks like way too much until it cooks down.)
2–3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
Italian seasoning
Salt
Black pepper
Crushed red pepper flakes
Freshly grated Parmesan cheese

The Recipe

Bring a large pot of well-salted water to a boil and cook the penne until al dente.

While the pasta cooks, brown the Italian turkey sausage in a large skillet, breaking it into bite-sized pieces as it cooks. Once it’s browned, transfer it to a plate.

Add the olive oil to the skillet, then sauté the garlic for about 30 seconds before adding the shrimp. When the shrimp begin to turn pink, stir in the cherry tomatoes and cook for another couple of minutes. Add the spinach last and cook just until it wilts.

Return the sausage to the skillet, add the drained pasta, and toss everything together. Season with Italian seasoning, salt, black pepper, and a pinch of red pepper flakes if you like a little heat. Finish with a generous handful of freshly grated Parmesan and serve while it’s hot.

Enjoy! If you make it, I’d love to hear how it turned out. And if you have ideas for making it even better, let me know. I’m still learning.

A few days ago my friend Don Shewey and I exchanged a few poems, and he sent me this one by Ellen Bass. It was one of those poems that broke something open in me and shifted the way I see people.

I work behind the counter at Speedway. I wait on hundreds of people a day just trying to get gas, buy a snack, or get somewhere. Most are kind, some are impatient, and some seem angry before they’ve even reached the register. Ever since reading this poem, I’ve caught myself looking at each person and thinking, You’re going to die. It sounds much harsher written down than it feels in my head.

The grumpy customer isn’t just the thirty seconds they’re standing in front of me. They’re a whole human being with a life I know nothing about, and one day that life will come to an end. People will mourn their passing. Somehow, remembering that has made me a little less reactive.

The poem also keeps turning that same truth back toward me. I’m going to die too. And my dad. And everyone I know.

I’ve been fascinated by death and dying for most of my life. It’s one of those subjects that, if you know me, you’ve probably found yourself talking with me about. It’s one of the reasons I’ve always been drawn to poets like Mary Oliver. So many of her poems return to death, even when she’s writing about geese, trees, or grass.

For the past few days I’ve been seeing the people around me differently, and I thought I’d pass this poem along.

If You Knew
Ellen Bass

What if you knew you’d be the last
to touch someone?
If you were taking tickets, for example,
at the theater, tearing them,
giving back the ragged stubs,
you might take care to touch that palm,
brush your fingertips
along the life line’s crease.

When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase
too slowly through the airport, when
the car in front of me doesn’t signal,
when the clerk at the pharmacy
won’t say Thank you, I don’t remember
they’re going to die.

A friend told me she’d been with her aunt.
They’d just had lunch and the waiter,
a young gay man with plum black eyes,
joked as he served the coffee, kissed
her aunt’s powdered cheek when they left.
Then they walked half a block and her aunt
dropped dead on the sidewalk.

How close does the dragon’s spume
have to come? How wide does the crack
in heaven have to split?
What would people look like
if we could see them as they are,
soaked in honey, stung and swollen,
reckless, pinned against time?

Source: “If You Knew” by Ellen Bass, from The Human Line (Copper Canyon Press, 2007).

This poem came to me from my friend Don Shewey, a writer, therapist, and self-described pleasure activist in New York City. His Substack is full of poems, quotations, and reflections that I think many of you would enjoy.

Don’s Substack: Don Shewey

If you’re in a place to support this work, a paid subscription ($5/month or $50/year) is deeply appreciated.

A few years ago I left Portland, Oregon, and moved back to rural western Pennsylvania to help care for my aging parents. Writing is the way I make sense of everything.

Calling the Birds Home is where I write about grief, family, nature, poetry, and whatever else seems worth noticing. It’s a place for paying attention, asking questions, and telling the truth about an ordinary life.

My mom died earlier this year, and now it’s just my dad and me.

Along the way, this publication has become more than a place to write. It’s become a community, and some of the people I’ve met here have become genuine friends.

Subscribe now

❧ Unless otherwise noted, all photographs and original artwork featured in Calling the Birds Home are my own.

Hey Y’all,

Somehow, against all odds, every single thing we owned from the two-bedroom downstairs apartment fit into the one-bedroom upstairs apartment.

I’ve always loved creating space. Rearranging furniture, finding homes for things, making a room feel livable. It’s basically life-sized Tetris, and for reasons I don’t entirely understand, I find it incredibly satisfying. After days of lifting, carrying, stacking, and restacking, we’ve managed to create something that doesn’t just function. It actually feels like home again, even if only for the next month or so.

I keep catching myself looking around and thinking, How on earth did all of this fit? Looking around, it feels like a small miracle.

More than anything, though, I’ve been overwhelmed by the kindness we received this week.

Many of you became paid subscribers after reading about the flood. Others sent messages, offered prayers, checked in on my dad and me, or simply reminded us that we weren’t in this alone.

I’m not trying to pretend everything is okay. It’s not. We still have a long road ahead of us. There are expenses we weren’t prepared for, and the downstairs apartment has to be rebuilt before life can begin to look normal again. Whatever that means.

But I’ve felt your generosity in tangible ways. It has lightened the financial burden, but it has also reminded me that one of the best things about writing truthfully about my life has been the genuine, heartfelt connections that have grown from it.

Thank you.

Even in a week like this one, there were still things worth noticing. I wanted to share a few of them with you…

If you missed the story of the flood earlier this week, you can read it here: Our House Flooded

Field Notes

The Fireflies are Back

Every night the darkness fills with them until it feels like there must be millions. They blink from the grass, drift through the trees, and rise out of the crick like tiny embers. I don’t know that I’ve ever gotten used to them. Every summer they convince me all over again that there is still real magic in the world.

Maybe “magic” isn’t quite the right word. Maybe I just mean beauty. Proof that even in a world that often feels broken, there are still things that twinkle and shine. Living things. The stars do that too, of course, but they’re impossibly far away. Fireflies are there the moment I step outside after dark. They’re floating through the humid Pennsylvania air, close enough that, if I wanted to, I could catch them in my hand.

The remarkable thing is that fireflies make that pulsing light themselves. Inside their bodies, a chemical reaction creates what scientists call “cold light” because it produces almost no heat. It’s one of the most efficient light-producing processes found anywhere in nature.

What’s even more fascinating is that those flashes aren’t random. They’re a language, a form of communication used to recognize one another and attract a mate. What looks like a field full of blinking lights is actually thousands of tiny conversations happening all around us.

Somehow, knowing all of that makes them even more astonishing to me. Knowing how and why the light is made doesn’t explain away the experience of standing outside surrounded by thousands of blinking lanterns. It simply means that reality is even stranger and more beautiful than I first imagined.

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Borrowed Words

Sometimes a poem doesn’t need interpretation. It just needs good timing. This one found me at exactly the right moment.

Red
—Mary Ruefle

I fucking depended on you and
you left the fucking wheelbarrow
out and it’s fucking raining
and now the white chickens
are fucking filthy

Mary Ruefle is an American poet and essayist known for her startling, often humorous poems and her belief that paying close attention to the ordinary is one of the deepest forms of wonder.

Source: Mary Ruefle, Red, from Dunce. Wave Books, 2019.

At the Table

My First Curry

Before the flood, I made curry for dinner. Believe it or not, I’d never made curry before, and honestly, I wasn’t sure how it would turn out. Curry is one of those meals I always assumed you had to know how to cook to make. Turns out, you don’t.

I mostly used what I already had in the kitchen: chicken, sweet potatoes, a red bell pepper, spinach, and a can of coconut milk. The only thing I had to order was the curry powder. It made far more than my dad and I could eat, so I packed up a big container and the two of us took it over to my cousins.

Looking back, I’m especially glad we did. I had no idea that two days later we’d be hauling waterlogged furniture out of the apartment instead of planning another good meal.

The full recipe is at the bottom of this newsletter.

A Few More Things

LONELINESS

A while back I went through a period where I wrote a lot about loneliness. I was gripped by it and the intensity of it chiseled away at my sense of self. Then, just like that, I stopped. I wrote about other things. Not because the loneliness disappeared, but because I gradually stopped noticing it.

It’s a little like a smell or a sound. At first it’s all you can think about. Then, over time, your brain decides it doesn’t need to pay attention to it anymore. The smell hasn’t gone anywhere. The sound hasn’t stopped. You’ve just adapted to it.

I think loneliness has been like that for me.

I’m still lonely. I still haven’t made any friends, and I still miss the simple comfort of physical affection. It just feels so normal now that I don’t think about it very often. Every once in a while something reminds me that the loneliness is still there. Like a shadow I no longer try to outrun.❧

❧

IN BROAD DAYLIGHT

A man came into Speedway the other day wearing a T-shirt that read, in giant block letters, ANTI SEMITE SOCIAL CLUB.

I was shocked. After he left, I looked it up because I had to make sure it meant what I thought it meant. I wish I could say I was wrong.

It needled at me all day long. Not just because of the hatred those words represent, but because someone had the audacity to announce it publicly.

What unsettled me most, though, was how safe he seemed wearing it. Safe enough to wear hatred across his chest in broad daylight. As though he never expected anyone to question it. It felt more like someone who believed he was among people who saw the world the same way he did.

I don’t know what to do with that except to say it broke my heart. It made me angry. And after he left, I couldn’t stop wondering whether I should have said something, or what I could have possibly said in the few seconds he was standing at the counter.

❧

MY MOM’S HOSTAS

While I was cleaning up the yard after the flood, I noticed my mom’s hostas had bloomed.

She planted them years ago, and every summer she looked forward to those soft purple flowers opening. The flood ripped through the yard and around the house, leaving mud and destruction everywhere. And somehow, in the middle of all of it, the hostas were doing what they’d always done.

I stood there for a long time.

SUPPORT THIS WORK

If you’re in a place to support this work, a paid subscription ($5/month or $50/year) is deeply appreciated.

A few years ago I left Portland, Oregon, and moved back to rural western Pennsylvania to help care for my aging parents. Writing is the way I make sense of everything.

Calling the Birds Home is where I write about grief, family, nature, poetry, and whatever else seems worth noticing. It’s a place for paying attention, asking questions, and telling the truth about an ordinary life.

My mom died earlier this year, and now it’s just my dad and me.

Along the way, this publication has become more than a place to write. It’s become a community, and some of the people I’ve met here have become genuine friends.

Subscribe now

❧ Unless otherwise noted, all photographs and original artwork featured in Calling the Birds Home are my own.

EASY HOMEMADE CURRY

You’ll Need:

2 chicken breasts, cut into bite-sized pieces
2 medium sweet potatoes, peeled and cut into ¾-inch cubes
1 red bell pepper, chopped
1 onion, diced
3 cloves garlic, minced (If you’re like me, 5 or 6.)
1-inch piece fresh ginger, grated
2–3 cups fresh spinach
1 can (13.5 oz.) coconut milk
1–2 tablespoons curry powder (I definitely used more. It just didn’t seem like enough for all those vegetables.)
½ teaspoon cumin
1 teaspoon turmeric (Optional, but it gives it a beautiful color.)
Pinch of cayenne or red pepper flakes (Optional. I like it hot!)
Salt and black pepper
Olive oil

The Recipe

Brown the chicken first. Don’t worry about cooking it all the way through. It’ll finish once you add it back later.

Take the chicken out and throw the onion into the same pan. After a few minutes, add the garlic and ginger. Stir in the spices and let them cook for about thirty seconds, just until the whole house smells like your favorite Indian restaurant.

Add the sweet potatoes and bell pepper and stir everything around until it’s coated in the spices.

Pour in the coconut milk. Mine looked a little too thick, so I splashed in some chicken broth. Cover and let it simmer until the sweet potatoes are tender. Mine took about twenty minutes.

Add the chicken back to the pan. A few minutes later, stir in the spinach and let it wilt.

Serve over rice. I used jasmine because that’s what I had in the cupboard.

Enjoy! If you make it, I’d love to know what you think. And if you have tips from your own kitchen, send them my way. I’m still learning.

“All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.” —Havelock Ellis

Saturday evening I was working at Speedway when the storm arrived. It happened so fast that within minutes it went from broad daylight to looking like midnight without a moon. For more than an hour the rain came down in one sustained wall of water.

I had no idea our house was filling with water.

By the time I picked my dad up from my cousin’s house and we got home, the rain had mostly stopped. The tall grass and plants along the crik had all been washed flat. So had our yard. Our kayak, which normally lives beside the shed, was sitting against the back door.

Opening the door was shocking. There was a thick layer of mud over nearly every inch of the first floor. The rugs were soaked. Furniture had been sitting in water. The whole house smelled like mud, manure, and swamp water.

I stood there trying to take it in. I knew immediately that we had been thrown into a disaster situation.

There wasn’t much to do except start cleaning. My dad and I worked until 3am pushing mud across the floor, dragging out soaked rugs, filling buckets, and trying to make sense of what we were looking at. It had worked its way into corners, under furniture, inside the kitchen cabinets, and into places that didn’t even seem possible.

We argued. We were exhausted. Stopping wasn’t an option.

I called the landlord immediately that evening. The next day someone came out to assess the damage, and it quickly became clear that we’d underestimated almost everything.

First thing Monday morning the restoration crew arrived. Within minutes they were explaining what had to happen. The apartment had to be emptied. The flooring was ruined. The drywall had to be cut away several feet from the floor throughout the downstairs. The kitchen cabinets had to come out. The bathroom cabinets too. The damage was extensive enough that my dad and I wouldn’t be able to live downstairs for at least a month while everything was rebuilt.

It took a minute to realize what they were actually telling me. Every single thing downstairs had to come out. As fast as I carried things out the front door, the crew was behind me ripping up flooring, cutting drywall, and taking the house apart.

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By the end of the afternoon there wasn’t a single object left downstairs. Everything hanging on the walls had to come down. Even the plants had to come upstairs.

The mattresses were ruined. The rugs were ruined. So many things were tossed into the dumpster without a second to think about what they had meant to us or how we’d ever replace them.

The temperature climbed into the nineties, but it was the humidity that nearly did me in. There were moments I literally had to stop because I couldn’t catch my breath. My shirt was soaked through before noon. By the end of the day even my underwear were soaked. More than once I wondered if I was on the verge of heat stroke, but there wasn’t another option. Another storm was on the horizon, so nothing could be left outside. By the end of the day my legs felt like rubber. My back hurt. My arms felt like they were going to fall off. I was caked in sweat, dust, and mud. My brain had turned to mush from making one decision after another while watching the sky for the next storm.

My dad wanted to help, of course, but I knew a few minutes of lifting boxes would cost him days of pain. I took him upstairs, got him settled in the air conditioning with Solitaire on my iPad. I told him the absolute best thing he could do for me was stay cool and play cards. He looked disappointed. Something in him deflated before he nodded.

Somewhere in the middle of the afternoon I realized it was almost three o’clock and neither of us had eaten since breakfast. I hurried into town, picked up lunch, and brought it back because our kitchen no longer existed.

While I was driving into town, I found myself talking to my mom out loud. Flooding was one of her biggest fears, and every hard rain made her anxious. She worried that one day the crik would flood into the house. Four months after she died, the thing she’d feared for years finally happened. I told her she had been right. I told her how much I missed her.

Then I said, “Thank God you’re not here for this.”

I’ve never been more grateful that I didn’t give up the upstairs apartment. A few weeks ago I came within inches of letting go of the upstairs apartment and moving back downstairs. But through an incredible amount of grace and generosity, I was able to stay. At least through the summer.

Now the upstairs apartment is home for my dad and me while the downstairs is rebuilt. I don’t know what we would have done without it.

So that’s where things stand tonight.

My dad and I are living upstairs for at least the next month, surrounded by boxes and trying to settle into a one-bedroom apartment too small to hold everything. I’m exhausted. My dad is safe. There’s a lot of rebuilding ahead of us. I’m sure I’ll have more to say once we’ve had a chance to catch our breath.

More to come…

This flood has left us with expenses we simply weren’t prepared for. We do have renters insurance, but like many policies, it doesn’t cover flood damage or the costs that come with being displaced from our home. Between replacing what can’t be salvaged, living upstairs while the downstairs is rebuilt, and all of the unexpected expenses that keep appearing, we’re doing our best to stay afloat.

If you’ve been reading Calling the Birds Home for a while and have thought about becoming a paid subscriber, I’d be deeply grateful if this was the moment that tipped the scales.

Every paid subscription makes a real difference.

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There is an irreducible mystery at the center of things.

The other day I was sitting at the kitchen counter drinking coffee and sorting through the mail when I noticed what appeared to be a strange kind of winged ant carrying a dead spider up the back door. The spider was considerably larger than the ant. Some of you have had the audacity to accuse me of exaggerating when it comes to the size of the spiders I write about. Still, the ant appeared to be carrying an enormous burden.

I got up from the kitchen counter to get a closer look, to make sure I was seeing what I thought I was seeing. The ant would move a few inches, stop, adjust its grip, and continue on its way. The back door is painted with a glossy paint, so the surface is smooth. I had questions. How? Does it have suction cups on its feet? Was it taking the spider home to eat? Bringing brunch back for the colony? Is this even an ant? Do ants have wings?

I hollered for my dad to come look. We both stood there with our coffee, staring at it, talking but not really talking.

After the excitement was over I sat back down to finish my coffee and get some answers. Winged ants are real. They are the reproductive members of the colony. They don’t have suction cups. They have tiny hooked claws and adhesive pads that let them climb smooth surfaces. They can carry many times their own body weight.

I told my dad what I’d learned, and he pulled out a photograph of my mom that he’d come across. That’s how it often happens now. We’ll be in the middle of lunch, halfway through a movie, talking about something completely unrelated, and suddenly he’s holding a picture of her or telling me their origin story again or reminding me, for the thousandth time, that she was the most beautiful woman in the world. There usually isn’t a transition. Grief doesn’t work like that.

It was a more recent picture of her. I don’t remember seeing it before. She was sitting in her wheelchair with one of her granddaughters dressed for prom standing beside her and my dad standing proudly on the other side. What caught me off guard was my mom’s beaming smile.

My mom rarely smiled for photographs. But when she did, it transformed her whole face. The moment I saw it I could feel my heart throw up the hand. Not now. I knew what would happen if I kept looking. Ever since writing about that in my last post, I’ve realized how often I avoid things that remind me of her. I sat there anyway holding the picture in my hand. I let myself look until looking turned into crying. My dad started crying too. Neither of us said much after that, and I cleaned up the dishes leftover from breakfast.

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I still think about her a thousand times a day. I still catch myself wanting to call her on the drive home from the grocery store or tell her that dad made it through another doctor’s appointment. I still hear her voice. I still want her to be here.

Lately I’ve been trying to write about other things. I worry that I’ve written too much about my mom, too much about grief. Sometimes it feels like everyone else has moved on and I’m still standing in the same place. Sometimes I wonder if people are tired of hearing about it. I wonder if I should keep those parts in my journal and write about winged ants or other curious things that capture my attention instead. My attention and my grief don’t seem to exist separately. I can’t seem to follow one without running into the other.

Which is probably why I haven’t published anything in a couple of weeks.

On the way home from picking up new hearing aids for my dad, the clouds were impossible to ignore. Towering white columns, dark wisps, and long streaks stretched across the far sky that looked more like galaxies than weather. We started guessing how fast they were moving. Thirty miles an hour? Fifty? Eighty? Turns out some clouds can move up to 150 miles an hour.

All are welcome here, but if you’re in a place to offer support, a paid subscription ($5/month or $50/year) is deeply appreciated. It’s not required, but it helps me keep showing up, to write, to share, to keep this thread of connection alive.

Out here in the countryside, caring for my folks is deeply meaningful, but often lonely. Writing about my experience and sharing it with you helps me stay grounded, inspired, and not quite so alone. Think of a paid subscription as a tip jar for the kind of storytelling that makes space for truth, tenderness, and the beautiful mess of being human.

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This morning I watered the plants.

Most of them are doing fine. The spider plant babies that a visiting nurse gave me in a little plastic cup have taken hold in their new soil. The succulents seem happy. The monstera keeps sending out new growth and is beginning to feel a little like Little Shop of Horrors with how large it’s become. My mom’s favorite plant, a begonia, however, has taken a turn and has been barely hanging on. I’ve tried everything I know how to do. Different lighting. Plant food. Pinching off dead leaves. Every week I would find some small sign of life and convince myself it might recover.

Today I finally admitted that it’s dead.

The irony is that my mom had planted it in an ugly shiny mauve pot that we got at one of our Goodwill outings before she was unable to go shopping anymore. It looked completely out of place among all the clay and earth-toned pots scattered around the house. It wasn’t something I would have picked. It wasn’t something anyone I know would have picked. But she loved it. Looking at it this morning, I realized that even now there are little corners of the house that still feel unmistakably hers.

Standing there with the dead begonia, I found myself thinking about my mom. Four months after my mom’s death, I’m not grieving my mom directly. I’m grieving a plant. Or maybe I’m grieving the fact that she isn’t here to fuss over it anymore. Grief has a way of attaching itself to ordinary things, even that ridiculous ugly pot. I know there are still things I haven’t been able to feel yet. Thoughts and memories that still grip me and I can feel my own resistance, a way that my heart throws up a hand that says, not now.

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Thinking about the begonia reminded me that when I was young, I read a book called A Begonia for Miss Applebaum. It was about a beloved teacher who dies. I don’t remember much about the plot anymore. I couldn’t tell you the names of the characters or exactly how the story ends beyond the fact that Miss Applebaum dies. What I do remember is crying. It was the first book that ever made me cry.

Before that, I loved reading series like The Elfstones of Shannara and Flowers in the Attic. Those stories taught me to love reading, but A Begonia for Miss Applebaum showed me a story could break my heart.

As I got older, my reading style changed. In high school and college, I found myself drawn toward more literary fiction, poetry, and philosophy. When I was a student at the University of Delaware, I took a class called Introduction to the Novel. We had to read and analyze seven novels that semester.

Our professor insisted that if we encountered a word we didn’t know, we were to underline it, look it up, and write the definition in the margin. At any point during class he could ask for the definition of a word from the reading. If you didn’t know it, or if it wasn’t written in your book, your grade suffered. At the time it felt a little severe. Looking back, it may have been one of the most valuable habits I ever acquired.

I’ve always been fascinated by words. The professor’s rule turned that fascination into a practice. To this day, if I encounter a word I don’t know, I look it up or write it down to look up later.

One of the novels we read that semester was The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy. I knew the moment I finished it that I would return to it. Later, in private, I had a conversation with the professor about the book. He told me that The Crossing was the basis for his doctoral thesis. He said it revealed something about God and the human condition. I remember leaving his office feeling electrified.

I’ve read the novel at least six times since then.

This afternoon I took the dead begonia to the compost heap and washed out the pot. It’s sitting on the porch now beside the other flowerpots. Part of me wants to keep it because it was my mom’s. Another part of me thinks it’s time to let it go.

If anybody is in the market for an ugly shiny mauve flowerpot, let me know.

P.S. Some of you may have missed my last essay. I published a follow-up about my dad’s hospital stay, but for a variety of reasons I never sent it out as an email. If you’d like to catch up, you can read it here: Well. Things Didn’t Go as Expected.

All are welcome here, but if you’re in a place to offer support, a paid subscription ($5/month or $50/year) is deeply appreciated. It’s not required, but it helps me keep showing up, to write, to share, to keep this thread of connection alive.

Out here in the countryside, caring for my folks is deeply meaningful, but often lonely. Writing about my experience and sharing it with you helps me stay grounded, inspired, and not quite so alone. Think of a paid subscription as a tip jar for the kind of storytelling that makes space for truth, tenderness, and the beautiful mess of being human.

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As I wrote about last week, my dad had his outpatient ERCP procedure Wednesday morning. Before it started, everything felt reassuring. Dr. Wilen is exactly the kind of physician you hope to meet when someone you love is being wheeled into a procedure room. He is skillful, attentive, dedicated, and genuinely kind. He also happens to be remarkably handsome, which probably has nothing to do with his medical abilities, but well, it feels worth mentioning.

The procedure itself went well. Unfortunately, everything after that became considerably more complicated. What was supposed to be a routine outpatient procedure turned into four days in the hospital. I spent my days camped out in the hospital recliner next to his bed writing, watching TV, napping, and eating cafeteria food. Thankfully, he finally came home Saturday.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, I woke up one night with chest pain. I was home alone and, if I’m being honest, I panicked a little. I chewed up three aspirin while sitting on the edge of the bed wondering whether I was having a heart attack. At one point I found a piece of paper and wrote a short note to my family telling them I loved them, and I scribbled down a few passwords. Just in case. I don’t currently have health insurance. I’m working on it, but in the meantime the possibility of a medical emergency occupies a lot of my thoughts. So I did what I suspect a lot of people do. I googled it to affirm the worst, hoped for the best, and eventually fell back asleep.

My dad finally came home Saturday. We were both happy to be back in our familiar routines, so Sunday morning we headed to Bad Rabbit for breakfast. Five minutes after we sat down, he started shaking and became so lightheaded that I thought he might pass out right there in the middle of the restaurant. I boxed up our breakfast, got him back to the car, and headed home. Once there, I gave him one of the medications the hospital had prescribed for dizziness and got him settled on the couch with a blanket and a movie. He chose Trading Places. Eddie Murphy to the rescue. A couple hours later he was doing much better.

It’s Monday morning and as I write this, we are sitting at the picnic table at the laundromat. He’s reading Understanding Wood Finishing by Bob Flexner. Every couple of paragraphs he looks up and tells me all about what he just read or shares a story about how he used those techniques in his own life. Of course, this was before electricity. Before civilization. I think maybe he was actually a caveman.

All are welcome here, but if you’re in a place to offer support, a paid subscription ($5/month or $50/year) is deeply appreciated. It’s not required, but it helps me keep showing up, to write, to share, to keep this thread of connection alive.

Out here in the countryside, caring for my folks is deeply meaningful, but often lonely. Writing about my experience and sharing it with you helps me stay grounded, inspired, and not quite so alone. Think of a paid subscription as a tip jar for the kind of storytelling that makes space for truth, tenderness, and the beautiful mess of being human.

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Saturday afternoon the tornado alert siren went off on my phone instructing us to take cover immediately. Go to the basement. Stay away from windows. Find the most interior room in the house. I usually ignore those warnings, but within minutes the world outside turned dark. Then, with no transition, rain and wind moved past the windows sideways carrying everything not robustly fastened to the ground.

Almost immediately the power went out.

I guess this wasn’t one of the to-be-ignored warnings. The National Weather Service has now confirmed that six tornadoes touched down in my area of western Pennsylvania during the storm. One of them touched down just down the road in Star Junction where the Dairy Queen roof was partly blown off.

I got home from work around eight that evening to a house filled with candles and my dad sitting on the couch. We were both still full of adrenaline. My dad and I love storms and, despite the damage, there was a shared excitement about the whole thing. We compared notes and traded stories about what we’d seen. Eventually we gave up on the power coming back on and went to bed.

Sunday morning I drove into town early to buy ice before everything in the refrigerator spoiled. We packed coolers and tried to save what we could.

It was sunny and warm with blue skies like nothing had happened. Along the roadsides, though, the damage was impossible to miss. Trees were down and limbs were scattered everywhere. Branches hung tangled in power lines. We had received a notification that power would be restored by 11:00 that evening. After the coolers were packed and the errands were finished, and since we had no way to cook breakfast, we decided to head back to Bad Rabbit for coffee and food.

The people there recognized us immediately and seemed genuinely excited to see us again. We ordered breakfast, drank our coffee, and lingered for a while before heading back home.

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My dad and I ended up sitting outside on the front stoop in the shade for nearly two hours. We didn’t talk much. We just sat there, as they say, watching the grass grow. Then a flurry of white butterflies drifted through. They twisted around each other in the air and I wondered whether they were playing, fighting, or mating. I honestly couldn’t tell. From a distance I suppose all three look pretty much the same.

As the morning stretched on, I started noticing there were butterflies everywhere. The white ones continued drifting through the yard. Larger brown butterflies floated past. Spring azures flickered in and out of view. Bees moved from clover flower to clover flower. Flying insects I swear I’d never seen before seemed to appear out of nowhere. Three cardinals passed through. Then a pair of blue jays. Robins hopped through the grass pulling worms from the ground. A red-winged blackbird landed on the telephone wire and flashed the bright patch on its wing. A rabbit emerged near the edge of the yard, paused for a moment, and disappeared back into the grass.

The longer we sat there, the slower time seemed to move.

At one point my dad pointed toward the sidewalk where a huge spider was making its way across the concrete. It was one of those absolutely ferocious garden spiders covered in fur with fangs so large they appeared to scrape the sidewalk as it walked. The second I leaned forward to get a closer look, it shot into the grass like a lightning bolt. I told my dad that the thing was trying to get in the house, which made him laugh.

By Sunday evening we still didn’t have power. The 11:00 restoration estimate came and went. The lights didn’t come back on until the following evening.

My dad and I headed into town for dinner at The Cactus. The lights were on. Every bar stool filled. The televisions were running. It felt good to be somewhere that wasn’t dark. After dinner we played a few games of pool. Back in the day, my dad was really good. Dementia may have taken a lot from him, but he still had it. I managed to win one game, mostly through luck, but he took the rest.

Later that night we sat at the kitchen table playing cards by candlelight. Every now and then one of us would hold a card closer to the flame before laying it down while shadows moved across the walls. We played hand after hand until it was time for bed.

This morning I’m sitting in a hospital waiting room while my dad has an outpatient procedure. Preparing for it became its own project. Certain medications had to be stopped beginning five days beforehand. No food or drink after midnight. With dementia, “no food or drink after midnight” isn’t quite as simple as it sounds. Before going to bed I taped large handwritten signs on the refrigerator, the coffee pot, and the pantry reminding him not to eat or drink anything.

My dad, like me, tends to get up in the middle of the night to graze. Every once in a while our grazing schedules overlap and I’ll find him standing in the kitchen in his pajamas looking for a snack. He’s always a little disappointed when he sees me because it means he knows I’m watching.

This morning, on the way to the hospital, the car in front of us suddenly slammed on its brakes. A deer came running alongside the road darting one direction and then another as though it couldn’t decide where it wanted to go. My dad watched it through the windshield and said, “That deer must have so much anxiety right now not knowing which way to go.”

There was such sincerity in his voice when he said it.

As I sit here in the waiting room, I keep returning to that deer. The more I think about it, the less it sounds like he was talking about the deer.

All are welcome here, but if you’re in a place to offer support, a paid subscription ($5/month or $50/year) is deeply appreciated. It’s not required, but it helps me keep showing up, to write, to share, to keep this thread of connection alive.

Out here in the countryside, caring for my folks is deeply meaningful, but often lonely. Writing about my experience and sharing it with you helps me stay grounded, inspired, and not quite so alone. Think of a paid subscription as a tip jar for the kind of storytelling that makes space for truth, tenderness, and the beautiful mess of being human.

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Earlier this week I was sitting in the doctor’s office waiting room with my dad getting ready to meet his new doctor. Medical trivia was on the screen. One of the multiple choice questions was: What is singultus? The correct answer was hiccups. I’d never heard the term before, so I wrote it down in my notebook to look up later.

That night I learned that singultus is the medical term for hiccups. The word itself comes from Latin and originally was defined as catching your breath while sobbing. I’ve been thinking and talking about that definition ever since. There is something strangely precise and poetic about it. Reading the definition, we all know that experience. The moment your breath catches. The moment you have to stop and pull yourself together before you can continue.

I’m writing this from Bad Rabbit coffee shop. I was supposed to be doing laundry, but when I got there I had to toss that plan out. Several of the large washers were out of order while the others were occupied. I stood there for a minute staring at the machines before deciding screw it. Laundry could wait until tomorrow. I grabbed my notebook and came here instead.

On my way to the laundromat I stopped at the post office to mail 3 months of rent for the summer!

Last week I wrote about preparing to give up the apartment. At the time I thought I knew how that story was going to end and had surrendered to letting it go. Then people started subscribing. Messages started showing up. Someone reached out privately. One thing led to another and I found myself standing in the post office this morning with enough money to pay rent for June, July, and August.

After I dropped off the rent checks, I walked back to my car, shut the door, and before I could put the key in the ignition I completely lost it. I sat there in the parking lot of the Perryopolis post office trying to catch my breath while sobbing. A few weeks ago I was preparing to let the apartment go. This morning I was mailing rent checks for the entire summer. Every once in a while grace barges into the middle of your life and completely rearranges the story.

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We were seeing my dad’s new doctor because in the VA appeals process the doctor needs to establish that his dementia is “at least as likely as not” connected to the severe hearing loss he developed during his years as an Army engineer working around heavy machinery. I spent weeks digging through research papers before the appointment and was surprised by how strong the evidence actually is. Hearing loss is now considered one of the major risk factors associated with dementia. The plan was simple. Meet the new doctor. Explain the situation. Get the paperwork moving.

Instead, my dad ended up in an ambulance.

The nurse checked his vitals and everything seemed mostly fine until suddenly it wasn’t. His blood pressure dropped. His heart rate dropped. He turned pale, started sweating, started vomiting, and nearly passed out. We barely made it to the bathroom. One minute we were waiting for the doctor to come in and the next minute nurses were rushing into the room and Dr. Faith was calling an ambulance. I called Speedway to let them know I wasn’t going to make it to work. Six hours later we were still sitting in the emergency room waiting for answers.

The final diagnosis was that he had a vasovagal episode, which is basically when the nervous system overreacts and causes blood pressure and heart rate to plummet. They were also concerned about dehydration and nearly kept him because of it. That part didn’t surprise me at all. As you know, my dad drinks coffee from sunrise to sunset. Getting him to drink water has become one of the recurring arguments of our lives. The ER doctor looked at him and told him he needed to drink more fluids. “Well, coffee has water in it.” Oy.

I remember sitting there thinking that if medical degrees carried any real authority, maybe this would finally be the thing that convinced him. But of course by the time we got home he had no recollection of even being in the ER, let alone what the doctor said about hydration.

Cue Wile E. Coyote gif.

The more I’ve thought about that word this week, the more I’ve found myself wondering if interruptions are just an uncomfortable and unpredictable form of grace. Most of us spend a lot of our lives trying to avoid them. We make plans. We build schedules. We try to keep things moving. An interruption is usually something that throws us off course. But some of the most meaningful moments in my life have arrived that way, rudely uninvited and not of my own volition. The older I get, the more I find myself wondering if not every interruption is something to overcome. Some of them are beautiful interruptions.

I’ve also developed a new anxiety about working at Speedway wondering what happens if something like this occurs while I’m gone. My dad may not have the cognitive ability to call for help if things go sideways. I’ve been looking at Ring cameras for inside the house so I can check on him while I’m at work. I was joking with my brother the other day that maybe we should just lean into it and create our own version of The Truman Show. Let people tune in and watch Dad wandering around in his natural habitat.

Honestly, if you watched long enough you’d mostly see him drinking coffee, forgetting where he put something, and wandering from room to room looking for it.

PS: All the paperwork for the VA appeals process has been turned in. Now we wait.

All are welcome here, but if you’re in a place to offer support, a paid subscription ($5/month or $50/year) is deeply appreciated. It’s not required, but it helps me keep showing up, to write, to share, to keep this thread of connection alive.

Out here in the countryside, caring for my folks is deeply meaningful, but often lonely. Writing about my experience and sharing it with you helps me stay grounded, inspired, and not quite so alone. Think of a paid subscription as a tip jar for the kind of storytelling that makes space for truth, tenderness, and the beautiful mess of being human.

Subscribe now

Many of you know that yoga has been a huge part of my life for a very long time. For years I taught classes, workshops, retreats, and teacher trainings. More recently, caregiving and life have taken center stage, and while I’ve talked about creating online yoga videos for quite a while, I never quite got around to it.

A few weeks ago I decided to stop talking about it and start recording.

This video is the first in what I hope will become an ongoing series of mindfulness based practices focused on nervous system regulation. I’ve also created a new section on Substack called Sacred Tremor Practice where I’ll be sharing yoga classes, meditations, and other practice based offerings as they become available.

I’m excited to finally begin sharing them with you!

Practice #1: Regulating the Nervous System, Part 1: Slowing Down

This is the first practice in a series focused on nervous system regulation through mindfulness, breath, and simple movement.

The practices in this series are intentionally slow and uncomplicated. They are not designed to be workouts. Instead, they are invitations to slow down, pay attention, and cultivate a little more steadiness in the body and mind.

Each practice begins with a short movement meditation before gradually unfolding into a fuller sequence. The movements are accessible, the pace is gentle, and the emphasis is on awareness rather than achievement.

For those who enjoy practicing with music, I’ve also created a Spotify playlist to accompany this class. The practice was recorded without music, so feel free to use the playlist, choose your own, or practice in silence.

PLAYLIST

I hope you’ll roll out your mat and join me.

A note about supporting this work

This practice is free and will remain free.

If you find it helpful and would like to support future yoga and meditation videos one option is to become a paid subscriber here on Substack.

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If subscriptions aren’t your thing but you’d still like to support this work, you can also make a one time contribution through Venmo: @Roger-Mckeever

Either way, I’m grateful you’re here and practicing with me.

People sometimes read my writing and assume I must be miserable all the time.

I understand why. Over the last few years I’ve written about caregiving, grief, dementia, anxiety, depression, and financial stress. If someone only knew me through my essays, they might reasonably picture me wandering around western Pennsylvania wrapped in a blanket of existential despair.

The truth is, I spend a surprising amount of my life delighted.

I find myself excited about things all the time. A conversation. A new poem or a classic Mary Oliver poem that reappears. A bird. The geranium that spent all winter dormant then finally bloomed again last week. A weird thrift store find. The way evening light comes through the trees. A song someone sends me. If you know me, you know I love receiving new music (hint, hint). The older I get, the more I realize that my enjoyment of life has very little to do with happiness in the way we’re usually taught to think about it.

Years ago I wrote something in one of my newsletters: happiness isn’t about being happy. At the time I knew the sentence was true, but as it goes, truth goes deeper the more life reveals itself, the more we pay attention. What I’ve come to understand instead is that some of the most satisfying moments of my life happen right in the middle of uncertainty, when nothing is resolved and life is still messy and unfinished and complicated. The satisfaction comes from something else entirely.

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This morning I took my dad to breakfast at a new coffee shop that recently opened in Perryopolis called Bad Rabbit. Walking inside feels like somebody carved out a little pocket of imagination in a place that badly needed one. The walls are crowded with artwork, old photographs, rabbits, antiques, paintings, odd little objects, and the kind of beauty that happens when somebody builds a place because they actually give a damn. Every table has a sketchbook sitting on it where customers can leave drawings, poems, notes, ideas, or whatever happens to be moving through them that day. In a part of the world that can sometimes feel culturally sparse, Bad Rabbit feels like a reminder that culture and art still exist.

While we were waiting for breakfast, I picked up one of the sketchbooks and started flipping through it. One page featured a drawing with the words, “The Girls, The Gays & The Theys Love Bad Rabbit.” As a queer man living in a rural area it gave me the feeling of being welcome, of being somewhere I didn’t have to explain myself, of being in a place where I didn’t have to protect or disguise that part of myself. I didn’t realize how badly I needed that until I felt my body soften.

Maybe that’s part of why the conversation unfolded the way it did. Like most families, we have a version of my parents love story that has been told so many times it has become polished smooth. Everybody knows the basic outline. I’ve heard it my entire life. But sitting there over coffee that morning, surrounded by artwork and sketchbooks, I found myself wanting to know more.

My parents eloped. I knew that part. They got married in Maryland because getting a marriage license was cheap, easy, and fast just across the border. I knew that part too. But somehow, in all the years I’ve heard this story, nobody had ever mentioned that my mom wore a yellow dress when they got married. A yellow dress! After all these years, there was still a part of the story I didn’t know.

My dad smiled when he talked about it and started describing how beautiful she looked. Then more details began emerging. The kind of details that never make it into the official version of a story. One memory opened the door to another and another. At one point his eyes filled with tears.

So did mine.

Driving home, I kept picturing my mom in that yellow dress standing next to my dad. I don’t know why that detail got under my skin the way it did. Maybe because it was so ordinary. Maybe because it was hers. Maybe because I have spent my whole life inside the story of their marriage and somehow there was still this one bright piece of it I had never been given. A yellow dress! It made her feel young again for a second. Not my sick mom. Not my dead mom. Just a woman in love, standing beside the man sitting across from me at breakfast.

The older I get, the more I think happiness has less to do with feeling good and more to do with attention. It has to do with curiosity and vulnerability. It has to do with asking one more question. And then one more. It has to do with allowing yourself to be surprised by life.

This is also why I continue to write the way I do. Honesty is rarely comfortable. Sometimes it’s embarrassing. Sometimes I publish something personal and immediately wonder if I should have kept that part to myself. Last night I had a dream that I was standing in front of a huge crowd telling a story. I kept talking and talking while people shuffled their feet, looked bored, rolled their eyes, and turned away. Then somebody else started talking about something everyone actually cared about and the crowd came alive. I felt humiliated. I started shrinking in the dream. I woke up with that awful exposed feeling, like I had said too much again, like I had mistaken being open for being interesting.

But honesty creates the only kind of connection that I’m interested in these days. Again and again, I’ve watched what happens when the truth is told. The real truth. The truth we hesitate to tell.

Maybe that’s why I spend so much of my life delighted. Not because life has been easy or because I have figured anything out. I clearly haven’t. But there is something deeply satisfying about paying attention, staying curious, and being met in the places where I was afraid I might be too much.