Usually, I’m the one who finds lost things. The ketchup hiding in plain sight (just move the maple syrup. Ta-da!), the Crocs forgotten in the backyard (you’re welcome), the wallet that’s never put back in the same place. I have that mom-memory that keeps a catalog of everyone’s things and knows exactly where they are. When I went away for two weeks this spring my family called me…to help them find things, and from hundreds of miles away I could.

I never require my own finding services because I rarely lose things. Everything has a home and I always return my things to their proper place. If someone asks me where something is and I say, “I don’t know,” I am likely lying. I threw it away. Sorry, not sorry.

When I truly lose something, it’s usually of consequence: motivation, hope, faith. You know, the usual. Hope and motivation always seem to find their way back to me, but faith has eluded me. I can’t find it behind the maple syrup and it is definitely not in the backyard. I’ve checked. And I can’t retrace my steps to find it because I’ve dismantled it. Rightly so, because that faith was distorted and I don’t want that one back.

I wouldn’t say I’ve been looking terribly hard for my faith. If I have any faith at all it’s that it will find its way back to me, or that I will find my way to it. That I will come across something I believe in and say, “Ah yes, on this I can hang my hat. In this, I can believe.” But I’m not there yet and I’m entirely fine with that. Why would I rush? Fear (what if you die tomorrow?!) demands I make a decision, but I’m resisting that old fear.

In the meantime, I’ve been attending a Greek Orthodox Church with my family and finding the habit of attending services on Sunday beneficial. For a morning, I set aside my rapid pace and my orientation towards productivity. I stand for 90 minutes and listen to prayers and readings in English and Greek. Between my wandering thoughts, I am mostly filled with gratitude for life and health. I’m not sure I believe (the virgin birth, the resurrection–they seem a little suspect), but I am there. And it seems that that is enough. No one is coming up to me after the services to invite me to attend a Bible study, no one is urging me towards baptism, no one is asking any more of me. No one is afraid that I will go to hell. Being there is enough.

Last week, we walked into church and the ceremonial table with its ornately carved legs was set to the side of the altar, on it was a tray of what I assumed to be the Greek memorial food with a candle stuck into its center. Usually, this signifies that there will be a memorial integrated into the service. As I’ve learned, the Greeks remember those who have passed 40 days after their death and then again each year on the anniversary of their passing. The priest and the congregation chant Aeonia Ei Mnimi, the memorial prayers. There are no instruments in the Greek Orthodox church, only the harmonizing of voices, resonating off the gilded walls. They are haunting and beautiful. We chant the prayer in Greek first, then in English and it translates to: “Eternal be their memory, may their memory be eternal. The first time I witnessed this memorial service I was struck by the thought: how nice to be remembered, to be prayed for each year after your passing. And for those who have lost someone, what a beautiful way to remember your loved one.

It adds another 15 minutes to the 90-minute service, but you get a little bag of koliva (the memorial food that is blessed during the service), a sweet mixture of wheat berries, raisins, candied almonds, and nuts when you exit the church. And then waiting for you at coffee hour are all kinds of Greek treats.

But this Sunday, the table was never moved to the center and instead of chanting the memorial, the priest addressed the congregation, explaining that the dishes on the table were cake.

Cake? There have been many new things I’ve witnessed in the services I’ve attended, but not cake.

The priest went on to explain that the cakes were an offering of thanks to Saint Phanourios, the saint of lost things whose feast day is August 27th. He explained how we pray to Saint Phinourios, whose name means “the newly revealed,” not just when we have lost material things, but when we have lost something of importance, something meaningful to us.

Like faith? I wondered. I watched with curiosity as he chanted a prayer over the cakes, blessing them, and then they were removed from the table, carried down to the basement to be sliced, and served at coffee hour.

I will have a piece of this blessed cake, I thought, standing in the pew as the service came to an end. To my Evangelically rooted sensibilities, eating blessed cake and praying to find something lost felt superstitious at best, heretical at worst. I will open myself up to this, I thought, regardless of what my old self might have believed.

It’s strange to be attending a church where food is so central to the liturgical traditions. It’s a departure from the puritanical roots and restrictive denial that characterized my childhood church experience, where frugality and austerity were celebrated as righteous. Here, food literally drips with oil and honey. It’s generous, just like the love and benevolence of God is more generous here. There are seasons of fasting (where a vegan diet is adopted for a period of time), but in the context of the abundance of foods rich in oil and honey, it seems natural, right.

For me, choosing to eat the cake is more than just choosing to eat the cake. As someone who once had a very distorted relationship with food and a debilitating eating disorder, choosing to eat cake is choosing a more generous approach with myself. It is symbolic of holding both doubt and faith, it is celebrating the struggle, it is recognizing that salvation is not an arrival, not a moment of conversion, but an ongoing process.

Later, in the basement, I had a slice of the Phinouropita (or Fanouropita). It was a deliciously spicy cake filled with nuts and dried fruit, covered in powdered sugar (which is a thing). I thought as I ate it that maybe this would be the week where I unlocked something critical in finding this new faith I’ve been searching for. Nothing monumental has happened, which is as life is, is it not? We want breakthroughs, but breakthroughs rarely come.

Whether or not I have a breakthrough moment regarding my faith, I like the fact that I’m partaking in traditions that are thousands of years old. The prayers, the chanting, and the foods are all symbolic and deeply rooted. These are the small practices of the faith I am exploring, which are faith in and of themselves, these little remembrances are what bring us closer to God, step by step.

Isn’t that what we’re all after: the daily struggle that reveals something greater? To not be lost in this mysterious and sometimes confusing world, but to be found in the meaningful things we pursue every day. That is faith. And if a little cake can do that too, then I’m here for it. I’m here for the cake.

Just two weeks before my scheduled closing date with the buyer or Rise Run Retreat, I tanked one of the assets included in the sale: the Rise Run Retreat Instagram account, including its 3.5K followers and eight-year visual history of a brand I built from the ground up.

What did I do to render the account, “Permanently Disabled” you’re probably wondering. Well, I violated Meta’s Community Guidelines when I unwittingly made the owner of the account eleven years old.

I was in the process of gathering all the assets of Rise Run Retreat into a neat little package that I could hand over to the new owner. Logins, passwords, a Google Drive filled with archives, operational documents, the growth plan I never implemented, and every single template and spreadsheet. The website was ready. So was the Facebook page. And I was preparing the Instagram account by changing all the information normally identified with me personally (my name, my birthdate) to something neutral. While in the settings for the Instagram profile I decided to remove my birthdate and replace it with Rise Run Retreat’s “birthday,” October 2, 2015. Almost a decade in business. That’s something to be proud of, I thought. The problem was, I wasn’t thinking. At least I wasn’t thinking like a conniving eleven year old, who most certainly would have put an older age knowing that Instagram doesn’t allow accounts for users younger than thirteen. But I’m not a conniving eleven year old, I’m an intelligent forty-three year old who made a big, big mistake.

I hastily sent off a copy of my driver’s license, sure that this evidence was enough to restore the account. Twenty-four hours later I received the verdict: Permanently Disabled. The problem with losing the Instagram account is that I also lost access to the Facebook Page and Meta’s Business Suite Portfolio. It was all gone.

Rise Run Retreat was and is more than its social media presence and I still had the substantial email list. But the Facebook and Instagram platforms were essential for marketing, and for telling the story of the retreat. It was a visual history of everything I’d built. Eight years of my heart poured into this thing I really believed in–and still believe in.

I was worried the loss of the asset would impact the sale. Would the buyer back out? And when would I tell my lawyers? The buyer requested to move the closing date because of a travel conflict. I breathed a sigh of relief and agreed. I hoped that if I could just get through to Meta support, my appeal would rectify the situation. I’d made a mistake. I hadn’t done anything malicious or hateful or destructive.

I scrambled for ways to access Meta’s Customer Support, finally shelling out the $150/month fee for the Blue Check that also gets you phone support. I had multiple phone calls. First with Zul, who was very sorry, but had to inform me the decision was final. At the end of our phone call he asked if there was anything else he could do for me. I was close to tears. “Pray for me,” I said. And he laughed and then got quiet. “I am so sorry,” he said. “I wish there was more I could do.” Then with Adarsh, I shared screenshots and video of me logging into the account, proving I had the password and the login. But no, that wasn’t enough. He told me to try appealing through Facebook, instead of Instagram, I might have better luck.

Over at Facebook, Shawn responded to my appeal and over the course of two weeks, between the AI generated automations and the messages coming from “Shawn,” I felt like we were getting somewhere. They asked for my ID and anything that could prove ownership of the business to link me to both the Facebook account and the Business Suite. I sent them a letter of appeal and every certificate I had: trademark, business in good standing, LLC formation, and screenshots of everything I thought might be relevant. Shawn submitted it to “The Team.” I waited. A week later he came back online: good news. “The Team” decided to restore my Facebook Page, but if I wanted access to the Business Profile I’d have to submit another appeal. So I resent a new appeal letter and all the same verification. Hoping that if it worked for the Facebook Page and the Business Profile, then maybe it would work for the Instagram account. If I could just tell the story of my honest mistake, maybe someone would be merciful.

A week later Shawn returned to the chat to tell me that Meta is “a serious global business” that cannot compromise their standards and no, I would not be regaining access to either the Business Profile or the Instagram account.

I downloaded the data for my account and scrolled through the folders: a folder for comments, a folder for photos going all the way back to 2015, a folder for reels, a folder with the highlights. In theory, I could try to rebuild the entire page. Use a bulk uploader or hire someone to do what seemed like an insurmountable task.

I messaged my lawyers. They messaged their people. No, even they couldn’t help me. Meta had ruled, and not in my favor.

It’s funny how something that starts with panic can’t be sustained. Over the course of the three week appeal process, I slowly came to accept that the sale of my business could fall through. That maybe it was time for Rise Run Retreat to really be over, over. I let go of the fact that it was gone. I stopped wishing it had been my personal account (which I haven’t touched since February) and not the business account. And I settled in a place of total peace.

Then I wrote a letter to the buyer, Kelly.

I first met Kelly when she attended one of the first Virtual Retreats in 2020. She returned to a few more, joined the RISE + RUN Collective, then she became one of my athletes and we worked together for several years. I coached her through a few marathons and many halves. She always showed up for my Zoom Office Hours and we became friends. Kelly took a break from coaching a year ago, but we’ve kept in touch. And right around the beginning of the year, I received an email from her.

She wanted to know if Rise Run Retreat was still for sale.

It was. I’d entertained a few seriously interested parties; NDA’s were signed and there were talks, but nothing materialized.

But Kelly was serious. Well not at first, I think she was nervous at first, but Rise Run Retreat meant something to her. She knew what it was all about because she’d been a participant and she knew me and knew why I’d built it.

When she finally submitted her offer in writing, I told her: I’m so glad it’s you!

When I tanked Rise Run Retreat’s Instagram account, I felt like I’d also tanked Kelly’s dream.

So when I composed my letter to her explaining what had happened, I expressed my deep regret and let her know she had an out if she wanted one.

“First of all, don’t worry,” she wrote back. “I see this as an opportunity.”

And I think she’s right. Rise Run Retreat is headed into new territory with a new owner who gets to build on my vision with her own. It will all be so good. I know it. I can feel it. And here’s a chance to tell a NEW STORY, Kelly’s story.

I’ve re-built a little foundation over at Rise Run Retreat’s new Instagram, @rise.run.retreat sharing all the years of special memories. It’s been fun to look back at all the years, all the people, all the memories. It’s a foundation that Kelly gets to build on. Go take a look! And give it a follow! And tell your friends to follow too! If you attended an in-person or virtual retreat, drop into the comments and share your memories.

Rise Run Retreat isn’t back. It’s home. Ready for the next chapter and ready to help women gain confidence, find strength and make authentic connections through running.

I’m so glad it’s Kelly. And you will be too.

Sarah

A few words of advice for my small business friends:

• Email is Queen. Build your email list.

• Document all your Meta Profile numbers. This includes your Business Profile, Page Account Number, Ad ID Number and all identifying information associated with your accounts. If you ever need to recover anything or appeal anything, you’ll need these. Keep them in a word doc, or a little notebook in your desk drawer like your Grandma.

• When it comes to social media platforms: you are NOT the customer, you are the product. Don’t expect customer service to be on your side.

• You don’t own anything you put on social media.

• AI will increasingly make our interactions with systems “un-human.” There is no mercy or grace in the machine. Grace and mercy is a human characteristic. When we employ AI to do the job of a human we eliminate the human element. Nuance is lost and rational thought is extrapolated to the extreme. We are not entirely rational beings, we are also spiritual beings. The danger of AI isn’t that it will become sentient or “take over,” it’s that it will eliminate humanity from every system we give it access to and control over. Decisions will become increasingly anti-human, and therefore systems will become increasingly anti-human.

• Be kind, even when the outcome is not what you hoped for or felt you deserved.

  

And yet, we still have so much.

America

There are only

a few times

when you’ll ever

need. That's

what it means

to be born

to a nice family

with some money

in America. Need

is not something

you know. You only

know: want.

Fair

Like you also haven’t gotten

more than you deserved,

benefitted greatly,

shown mercy,

luck handed to you.

Think then not of fair,

but of all the times

you have been

on the good side

of unfair, and then

extend that grace too.

It feels like rebellion. But also the way it should be. Our work and schooling are seasonal, they ebb and flow, intensifying and relaxing in due course. To me, these moments feel more important than any academic pursuit.

Fish

Carefully he shows him

how to thread the hook,

winding once, twice,

around again

with once tiny fingers,

a thumb he used to suck. Both of

them once so little

they fit in the space between

my elbow and hand,

the size of a football,

a precious catch.

Standing now with rods

and reels, small men.

The catch: weeds, mucky

tangles hoisted in the

air and dripping. Then

they spot him. HUGE! They say,

huddled on the bank,

rain dripping down, dotting

their sweatshirts.

How big? I ask. He turns,

hands a width apart,

the distance between

my elbow and my hand,

the size of a football.

A precious catch.

Not everyone wants convention, some of us want to be wild and free, to take the path less traveled, to live out of bounds.

I still think about these young women from time to time and how their lives are unfolding. Our last morning at the hut, I wrote this poem for them and tucked it into the comment box. I hope they found it.

Salmon

It’s OK if you don’t

know yet.

A thousand unanswered

questions, no plan

but an itch, an intuition,

a gut feeling urging

you to go

against the flow.

Even when everyone

tells you to

play it safe,

pad your resume,

plan for the 401K.

Don’t let their

fear become your

prison. What they

don’t know: there is

also treasure in

swimming upstream,

braving the bears

and the current.

We’ve often lamented the fact that our fitness endeavors never overlapped. We could have built something big together.

For many reasons, I’m grateful it didn’t work out.

Empire

We could have built an empire,

he says. As if it would

have been so easy if

we’d know then what

we know now. Perhaps,

but what would that mean

for now if we had?

Making nachos on a

Monday night, our boys

out the front, sprawled

on the grass.

Our girl in and out of

the kitchen with a question

and another.

What of this empire of love?

Marriage isn’t about a perfect match. The goal isn’t frictionless living.

Marriage is about the willingness to be transformed together and by each other. It is about learning what needs to change, supporting each other in that change, and extending grace when you miss the mark.

You can spend a lifetime looking for the perfect match or you could find a match and spend a lifetime perfecting it.

The longer I’m married the more I am grateful that I married young. I was 21. Marry young. Grow up together. Like anything worthwhile it is all about the journey.

Marry Me

Don’t wait until you know

beyond a shadow of a doubt

until the account is padded securely

the job is guaranteed.

Don’t wait until the walls

of a too big house echo,

waiting. Certainty is an illusion

as is security, and the notion

that you could ever possibly

be ready. The time is never right.

To wait is a waste. Jump in,

wade through the uncertainty

together, let both your feet

graze rock bottom.

Then you will know you

can weather any storm.

I revere motherhood now as a sacred thing, perhaps less choice and more imperative; a calling to be the high priestess of your home. Somehow I missed this when I was younger. This transformation toward fully embracing motherhood has not been without pain or loss, everything has a cost. I’ve realized that I might lose a little of myself now, but there is another chapter after the intensity of mothering young children has waned where I will be reborn.

Motherhood

I am no trad wife

adorned in handmade calico.

I’ve already worn those

dresses at seven,

innocent but wise

enough to know

I wanted to be nothing

like my mother: bread-baking,

granola-making, calico dress seamstress,

homeschooling four children.

I wanted high power,

six figures,

independent city living.

Motherhood was for

the dreamless meek,

I wanted to seek

being known by more

than what was lived at home.

I shrugged it off like

an ill fitting coat,

side step, pass off, make excuses.

But then I home-birthed,

breastfed, raised-up,

schooled three

because something

inside me,

told me I was wrong.

Motherhood is mighty,

not for the meek.

Now we raw milk,

chicken-raise, school at home

and those dreams

of being know

are like the leaves that fall,

withered, dying,

the seasonal sacrifice of

the mother tree as

my sapling sprout around me.

His brother is on the bunk above. It seems he needs me less these days, stuck between being a boy and becoming a man. I ask if he wants me to sing his song. Sometimes he says, “Yes.” More often: “No, that’s OK.”

I wonder, as I attend them in their beds if they will attend me in my bed when I am old, dying and have become like a child again: needing care, touch, tender songs.

I love you more

There are few things

more precious than

the earnestness with

which my youngest kisses

me goodnight and

the thousand “I love you mores”

he squeezes between

each breath

before I reach the door.

I walked with my friend this week and her almost three-year-old clad in a yellow hand-me-down rain coat, tiny black mittens, rubber boots covered in fire trucks. The sun was shining, the first warm days of spring. His hood stayed up the whole time, because the novelty of a hood on a new-to-him jacket.

As we walked, not going very far, everything was new. The delight of the discovered: a rock, a shell, the way the waves lapped against the beach. There is a wonderful remembering that happens when you see the world through the lens of a toddler. It’s an invitation to an awe you’ve lost. Everything around you has become wrote, ordinary. But with a toddler everything is extraordinary. A hood! A rock! A shell! Oh, the joy of a puddle and just the boots to romp through it!

Last summer, with my coffee and sketch book in hand I watched the beach at sunrise. Of course, the runners and walkers. But also the parents, the grandparents-on-duty with toddlers and babes doing that vacation shuffle you do because vacation with littles is often not a vacation. My babes were asleep in the house, sleeping well past the sunrise as teenagers do. And I remembered all we have grown past.

Vacation

They walk the beach at 6 AM,

The hotel halls, dirt roads.

Strollers, carriers, tiny hands clasped in theirs.

Leaving quiet spaces behind

to bring the awake

out into the wakening world

where small, thrilled voices,

discovering for the first time don’t have

to be hushed.

So older bodies and eyes

can sleep through everything

they have already seen.

That’s where a commitment to 100 days of something can be helpful: scaffolding to provide necessary framework when faith is lacking.

When I first embarked on this 100 days of creativity, I responded to the prompts in the book. Prose. A drawing. A poem or two. After a week of this, the most natural thing seemed not to keep responding to the prompts but to instead write the first line that came to mind, turning it into a freeform poem. That’s when the task morphed from 100 days of creativity to 100 days of poetry. Poems of every topic and form began to fill the blank sketch book I’d purchased for the practice.

Some of them are terrible, but on occasion a gem might emerge. Calling it a gem is generous—it’s probably just less terrible. I took no poetry classes in college. I didn’t have room for them after changing my major three times, so I lack the technical skill and editorial talent to make these less terrible. But it’s poetry and I’m leaning in to the softer poetic rules, bending them and declaring these “good enough.”

I’ve been struggling with what to write recently. The world seems loud with opinions, everyone an armchair expert. I thought instead of adding to the noise I’d offer a little beauty. An anecdote to everything going on out there. So I’ve decided to share these poems here over the next few weeks with a little paragraph reflection. Look for them on Mondays and Wednesdays. I hope you enjoy them.

Poetry

I do not know yet how

to make the words slide

next to each other: unusual yet destined,

meaning more when paired.

I am not that kind of poet.

Instead, I write common

words that do not slide,

they arrive on the page

like a grocery list.

Plain

I’ve been on these trails dozens of times. I know the gear I need for the White Mountains, famous for their dangerous weather, know that dozens of hikers die here every year, most unprepared and pushing through weather they have no business pushing through. A young woman died alone on the ridge last year, disoriented, dehydrated. But it’s a perfect day, cloudless and low wind. The fairest of fair weather. I may not need the rain pants and jacket, emergency blanket stashed in my running pack, but I have them anyway. Nerves maybe. Wisdom, more likely. The weather here is unpredictable, I’ve been caught in hail on a summer day that was forecasted to be cloudless.

I change my plan as I drive up into the mountains, the rising sun casting a slant glow through the passenger window. Instead of trekking to my car at the end of the run, I’ll put the unpleasant bit at the beginning. I’ll start with four miles of road running, a warmup, before I start the climb to the ridge. I text my husband my route, arrow emojis between the name of each trail. Directions for how to find me in case something happens.

As I drive my mind wanders to the catastrophic as it often does. I think of all the ways in which I could be injured, a trip that slices a knee open, breaks a wrist. Or like my son did just weeks earlier, I could slip on a slick granite boulder and chip a tooth exposing the nerve. So much could go wrong and I am alone. The only thing I’m scared of in the woods is injury, it’s different once I leave them, find myself alone in trail head parking lots, running down remote mountain roads. Women running alone are often blamed for what befalls them. I’ve run so many miles alone sometimes I’m surprised I’m not a statistic too.

Lord, have mercy, I pray to push out the catastrophic thoughts. I petition my guardian angels for protection against accident and injury. This is new for me, well, not entirely new. Praying is something I was taught to do as a child but abandoned two decades ago when the one prayer I desperately wanted to be answered, prayed without ceasing, was never answered. It wasn’t a trivial prayer, for me it was life and death: I was struggling with anorexia and bulimia. At one time starving myself to inconceivable thinness then stuffing myself beyond comfort and forcing myself to purge. My metabolism, my blood sugar, my heart rate, my electrolyte balance, the disappearing enamel on my teeth–everything indicated that if I kept going, I’d die. I didn’t want to die. I didn’t even want the eating disorder but felt powerless against its addictive pull. I couldn’t stop and prayer wasn’t helping. It was easy to abandon a God who didn’t seem to be listening. Which is why praying for safety on a run is so foreign. A year ago, I would have scoffed at the idea. Thoughts and prayers, how pointless. But now as I pray I actually believe it will be answered. Lord, have mercy.

*

My son, almost a teenager now, was born at 6 pm on a Saturday in late September. By 7 pm we knew he had a congenital birth defect. It wasn’t life threatening, but would require surgery to reduce his risk of cancer later in life. His first surgery was at four months old. I can still remember refusing to feed him in the 24 hours beforehand. He had to go into anesthesia with an empty stomach. Something a four-month-old baby doesn’t understand. I knew what it meant to feel the painful claws of hunger scrape your insides. For him it was likely scary. For me it had been a sign of success. The emptier I felt the better. But by the time he was born I’d learned to feed myself. Becoming a mother taught me how to be full. Pregnancy pulled me from my disordered head back into a body in desperate need of healing. The disorder sloughed off me like an old skin and I was free.

My husband, scrubbed up and draped in a sterile gown just so he could hold our son to the last possible moment, walked him back into the surgery. I held back tears. Please, let him be OK, was the prayer I whispered.

They inserted tissue expanders beneath the skin on his back which we would slowly inflate with saline one day at a time. In four months, they would use the extra skin to cover the hole left when they excised the dinner-plate-sized circle of skin on his back that held pre-cancerous cells.

After his second surgery he appeared to be healing well, the incision that ran from armpit to armpit across his tiny back, scabbing over. But six weeks post-op while I was nursing him in the middle of the night, his skin flushed, his whole body warm. He pushed me away and began screaming. My hand brushed his back where the incision was. It was hot to the touch. We raced through our town, my husband running red lights, my son clutched to my chest in the front seat. We didn’t dare strap his feverish body into the carseat, pressing his painful back against the thin padding.

The incision was infected we learned before they put us on an ambulance transport and we raced through the growing light of morning north towards the children’s hospital. Sitting upright in the back of the ambulance, my head nodded and jerked, sleep licking at my consciousness. I thought of sepsis. I thought of his tiny body being overrun with MRSA. I thought of his death. I pleaded with God: If you answer one prayer in my lifetime, let it be this: please let my son live. I don’t care that you didn’t rescue me from an eating disorder. Just let my son live.

*

I park my car in the trail head lot, lace up my trail shoes, slide on my pack stuffed with soft flasks of water, applesauce packs and Nerd Gummy Clusters I can’t wait to eat, and start running down the mountain road. A mile in, I pass an orange road work sign that reads, “Road Closed.” I have no idea what lies ahead. How closed is the road? Closed to just cars or foot traffic too? I wonder if I’ll be turned around, sent back the way I’ve come, miles wasted and still nowhere near the ridge. What will I do then? There’s no cell service, no way to send my husband a new text with new arrows and trail names. Lord have mercy, I pray. When a mile later a dump truck comes into view with a crew of men standing nearby, I slow. Calculating my safety, petitioning my intuition for a signal. There are four men. I am the lone woman. Should I turn myself around? If they have any malicious intent, I’m outnumbered. Deep in the woods, no one will hear me scream. Lord, have mercy.

My intuition is quiet, adrenaline quickens my pace as I approach. I call good morning and slide past them. They don’t stop me and I run on, exhaling the breath I didn’t know I was holding. Another mile down the road I can see a front end loader, a “digger” my son used to call them. It’s straddling the road, raking a trough for the new aluminum culvert that’s lying in the dirt. The air is filled with the smell of overturned earth, leaves from a hundred falls ago, roots snapped open and weeping sap. The operator stops as I approach, gives a wave and lets me pass by on the small slice of road he has yet to touch with the teeth of the bucket. My feet quicken over the pavement as I pass by the newly dug ditch, grateful he didn’t stop me, grateful I didn’t have to swing wide into the woods thick with poison ivy. I sail past, lighter, like fear was tucked in the extra pockets of my pack, now discarded on the side of the mountain road. Lord, have mercy.

*

I know exactly when I decided to consider my unanswered prayers answered. I was standing in church–another entirely new thing for me–with my son. The rest of the family home, sick. The Eastern Orthodox Church was an entirely different experience from the Evangelical faith tradition I’d grown up with. My husband was the first to go back to church after we’d spent a decade deconstructing our faith and declaring our disbelief. I didn’t initially want to go back, but as I’d reluctantly accompanied my husband and children, I began to feel a pull to be there. Curiosity more than anything: what will this God I’ve rejected do? It’s the same curiosity that leads me into the mountains: what will this body that I once rejected do?

My son stood next to me, about to turn twelve, enough years to feel like his surgeries were a lifetime ago. I put my arm around him, a small hug, the kind of touch I craved as a child. I often pull my children’s bodies to me, memorizing the feel of them in my arms, to give them what I don’t remember having. He smiled up at me. My hand fell away and we returned our gaze to the altar, behind it: the icon of Christ inside his mother. Mary in gilded mosaic dominates the church. Mother and child. Child in mother. Lining the walls are more icons, saints both male and female. When we arrive at church we venerate the icons, we cross ourselves, we kiss them, we bow slightly. Whenever the Trinity or the Mother of God are mentioned during liturgy we cross ourselves again and again. Later, we prostrate, kneeling on the purple carpet and bowing fully, Child’s Pose. Untouched by Enlightenment thinking that made reason supreme, Eastern Orthodox Christianity integrates the body and is open to mystery. Belief isn’t just conjured in the mind, it is practiced physically. Everything about this new faith is embodied, it has brought my understanding of God from my head into my body.

Standing there with my son, I remember that he lived. His life, his presence next to me are the answer to that prayer I prayed in the back of the ambulance. Yes, it was also the doctors and the life-saving medication, but perhaps it was also my prayer and the hand of God interceding on my son’s behalf. A mercy that the interventions worked. A mercy the MRSA didn’t overrun his body. Lord, have mercy.

I spent so much time focusing on the single unanswered prayer of my own struggle, my eating disorder, that I had neglected to see the answered prayers. And even then, hadn’t that prayer too been answered? Hadn’t I also lived? It has been sixteen years since I’ve engaged in any kind of disordered behavior. Sixteen years of sobriety from bingeing and purging and restricting.

*

I climb and climb, half running, half hiking to the summit of the first peak. Once I’m there, the mountains fall away and I’m as close to the sky as I can get. I sail across the granite ridge, the wind, breath of the divine, licking at my ponytail sending wisps in swirls around my face. I am alive. My body so strong and capable. I am high on the thrill of the unbroken views, the roll of green and granite mountains as far as the eye can see into Vermont and Maine. This is the original church. Eden. A sanctuary of golden light, veins of quartz and mica in a floor of gray, walls verdant, pulsing in the wind, a dome of endless blue. The day feels like a gift. Lord, have mercy.

On the descent I’m careful with my feet, out of practice with technical terrain. I look like an awkward toddler learning to walk, unsteady and ready to fall at any moment. I don’t want to fall, chip a tooth, break a wrist, roll an ankle. I want my body to be whole and not broken. I know what a broken body feels like, hollowed out, discarded, lost. Lord have mercy. I bobble for a moment on a loose lichen-covered boulder. A surge of gratitude. I didn’t fall. I roll both ankles, but miraculously they bounce back. I love my capable body the way it is strong and durable for adventures like this. Later, below treeline, my stride catches on the stub of a sapling. I trip and pitch forward, my momentum carrying me through the air. My foot finds the dirt, I grab hold of a young Hemlock. I am upright, as stunned to have not fallen as if I had. A save. A lucky break. Lord, have mercy.

When I’m finally back at my car, seventeen miles later and nearly five thousand feet in elevation gain, I think of all the little mercies. I count six of them. Six almost disasters. Six risky moments that turned out just fine. Six answered prayers. This is how I think now. I look for all the answered prayers. My new attitude towards prayer feels like the difference between comparison and gratitude. Comparison always looks for what is lacking. Gratitude celebrates what is. It helps me see how much I have instead of what I do not have. The hallmark of the first few decades of my life was comparison. Comparing myself to the rake thin models in glossy magazines. Comparing numbers on a scale. Comparing calories in the foods I could and could not eat. But now I am noticing. My attention shifted to the mercy in everyday moments. Is it luck? Mercy? The goodness of my own body. Or God?

As I walk, I look at the warm glow in the windows, trees positioned to be seen from the inside and out, extra cars in the driveway belonging to college-aged kids home for Christmas. Overhead the ink-black fabric of sky and a billion pinpricks of light.

Our road runs east to west almost exactly. I walk west at first so when I turn toward home Orion is framed by the towering white pines along the road, rising in the east. I know the three-star belt, the sword, arms and legs outstretched. Aside from the Dippers, it is the only constellation I can find in the night sky.

My father taught me how to see it, how out of those billions of pinpricks something familiar could take shape. Something that would be there over and over and over again. As a child I must have spent enough time outside in the winter at night to learn this, although I don’t remember the exact moments.

It could have come on the nights when we stacked wood in the dark of our driveway, my father, my brother and me. Log after log into a neat row that my father would cover with a blue tarp. The wood heated the first level of our home. A giant black wood stove set atop a stage of bricks. My father taught me how to build a proper fire in that stove. How to open the flue, how to coax the smoke up the chimney, stack the kindling just so to allow for plenty of air, light the edge of the crumpled newspaper.

Or maybe our starry lesson came on the nights when we went out to skate on the rink he’d made us out of clear plastic sheeting rimmed with logs from that same wood pile. I was seven, maybe eight. When I ask my parents about these memories, theirs is as fuzzy as my own. We did the rink one winter? Maybe two? No one knows.

Maybe on these nights my father paused, between the stacking and the skating, tell us to look up. And we’d follow the point of his finger reaching toward the night sky, helping us find the belt, the sword, the trios of stars.

Sometimes I drag my own family out into the night. The sunset! The moon! The stars! I’ve pointed out Orion from the car, but we were moving, driving too quickly down the road for the kids to see from the back seat. Too quickly to make something familiar out of an infinitely impossible landscape—the night sky is like that.

I wonder if my children will remember this about me, the way I’m always making them look at what nature has on offer.

This is what I remember from my childhood: my father teaching, leading us in lessons of awe. Orion, yes. But also the way he would, on the first snow of the year, turn all the lights off in the house, make us gather quietly around the sliding glass door after dinner. A single light bulb above the deck illuminating the falling flakes. All we could hear was our own breathing. And then into the silence my father would recite “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” the familiar phrases piercing the silence. A comfort. A sign. Winter had arrived.

There’s something about the darkness of winter that drives us towards familiar things. Nostalgia. Home. Towards the light, too. The snowflakes and the stars: tiny tokens of eternity.

Orion’s Belt

A poem for my father.

“Look there,” my father says.

Three stars.

A belt.

It is cold, nose frosted,

fingers numb.

The winter sky black,

pinpricks of eternity

shining through.

The only constellation I know.

I tell my children now,

of the three stars:

the belt

the sword

repeating my father’s words.

The warrior in the winter sky.

Between the meals I help with algebra (ugh) and geometry (not so ugh), and squeeze into the “Big Chair” with my youngest to read. We trade chapters, I read, then he reads our hips mushed together, knees touching.

And in between the meals and math my hand reaches out to sweep bangs from someone’s eyes, a kiss on the crown of a head, my palm circling on a back curved in concentration. Reassuring. Comforting. Sometimes I stand between the kitchen and the dining table, arms wide to intercept them with a hug when they leave math and are on their way to the next meal.

There was a time when I didn’t want to be touched at all. After my third was born and the two year old and four year old still needed so much assistance, so much energy, so much of me. I was nursing, and holding the potty training toddler up to the sink, a knee pressed to the cabinet, their body straddling my leg because someone moved the stool and you can’t leave them with actual poop on their hands to go look for it. In another part of the house the four year old is yelling for me, needing me desperately, RIGHT NOW! I avoided eye contact with my husband, I didn’t want him touching me either. It was all too much.

Now that they need less of me, spend more time doing their own thing, I want to touch them more because I can feel them slipping away. “The threads are thinning,” I said yesterday of motherhood and the way the link between you and your child dissolves the older they get. As if at one point it was a great thick tapestry that you were wrapped in together, like a burrito, but now that’s unrolled. You sit on the tapestry together, the weave wearing thin with time. And then later, held to the light you can see through it. Soon the fabric of it will be gone and all that will be left is a single iridescent string. Fishing line. Only visible in certain light.

I barely touch my own mother who lives two towns over. I see her a few times a month. Sixteen years ago, when my daughter was just born, I drove twenty minutes to her house eager for her help, to sit in her cozy kitchen and feel at-home. She would cradle my daughter, let me nap in the guest room, cups of tea, a hug, a hand on my shoulder while I nursed. Now we hug a greeting hello and good bye when we see each other, but that is all.

When I tuck my youngest in at night I kneel by his bed and kiss his still-soft skin as he mumbles sleepily, “I love you more, Mama.” I kiss him over and over and hope that he will always let me kiss him, love him in this way.

My daughter comes back down at night after we’ve tucked her in like she used to when she was little. Stealing quietly into our room. She sneaks around the end of my bed, her head bowed as if I’d admonish her like we did when she was four it was impossibly annoying, now at sixteen it’s endearing. I am tucked under the covers, a book in my lap. She bends, wraps her arms around my body. I can smell her shampoo: mint and tea tree, and kiss the part in her hair. She presses herself down on me and says, “I’ll hug you forever.” And my mind without a pause gives me this impossible thought: “Please don’t let me die.” Because I want to hold her forever, to kiss her brother’s sleepy face all over, to ambush my teen son with a hug on his way to make ramen, to be this close to my children always.

By Friday, the internet (specifically women) had lost their minds, clapping back on X, Threads and in articles like this one at Vanity Fair or this one at Ms. Magazine. Not to mention the myriad Substack responses (this one included). Some scolded the New York Times: ‘how dare they!’ Some trolled the author by posting his picture with captions like: ‘of course this man would write something like that’ (how unfortunate to look like Kevin from the Office).

Meanwhile, Times editors were likely high-fiving. Outrageous headlines are the milkshake that brings all the boys, or in this case girls, to the yard. They later backtracked on the title, changing it to the slightly less outrageous “Did Liberal Feminism Ruin the Workplace?” In a world where attention is the highest valued commodity, can you blame them? They took a page from the Taylor Swift publicity playbook: if their name or headline are on your lips they are winning. Looks like the New York Times won.

Outrage and clickbait aside, I think the conversation (which a majority of the staff at Vanity Fair admittedly didn’t listen to or read in its entirety) is an important one. We should be asking ourselves what the negative impacts of the feminist movement are.

If there’s one clear casualty of modern liberal feminism it is motherhood. In liberating women from the home and from their children we’ve lost the essential sacredness of what it means to be a mother. Our social perceptions of mothers and motherhood have been greatly diminished by feminism which calls marriage and motherhood outdated and unnecessary. Instead of elevating the distinct feminine roles of birthing, nurturing, and instructing the humans that emerge from the female body, we’ve delegated these roles in service to transforming the mother into a worker who feeds the capitalistic machine. And we call this progress.

Progress for who? Certainly not for the children who are separated from parents as young as 6-weeks old, served into a system of education designed not to nurture them, but to form efficient and obedient workers. That isn’t to say that within these systems there aren’t rebellious pockets of nurturing. I existed in this system as a high school English teacher for a time, trying to do just that before the whole thing felt oppressive in its inability to be changed for the better.

And maybe not as much progress as we claim for women either. It seems that Girl Bossing all the way through the Glass Ceiling hasn’t made women happier as evidenced by all the self-help books instructing women how to optimize their lives inside a system that wasn’t designed for human thriving. Take Eve Rodsky’s books, Fair Play and Find Your Unicorn Space, both written to help career women navigate a life that is overwhelming, fast paced and has them pulled in a multitude of directions. Even Jennifer Brehney Wallace’s book, Never Enough, speaks to the fact that this toxic culture of achievement starts young, so young. In her book, Power Pause, Neha Ruch, encourages women not to be afraid to set aside career for motherhood if that’s what you feel pulled toward. She bravely takes on liberal feminism and challenges it to reframe its idea of motherhood, arguing that it is an inherently feminist choice to stay home. These books are praised as ‘groundbreaking’ and ‘necessary’, but no one seems to be questioning why we need these books, that perhaps the entire system is broken.

In his recent book, Against the Machine, Paul Kingsnorth, talks about the way in which ‘The Machine,’ which he defines as the system of modern life, has separated us from our humanity. Instead of being rooted in place, interconnected with the communities around us, we have become untethered and alternately plugged into the constant churn of commerce. “The liberation of women,” he argues, “often translates into the separation of women from their self sufficiency, as men were separated before them…she is out adding numbers to the gross national product like the men were before.” He makes the point that it’s not just women who might be better off returning to the home, men should also rejoin the family in the kitchen, in the living room, in every room. This erosion of the family and home is the result of a multitude of forces, industrialization, consumerism and yes, liberal feminism.

In the New York Times conversation, Libresco Seargant points out how feminism and our society at large has made a mistake in campaigning for absolute liberation. “The sense that the fundamental nature of the human person is someone who isn’t constrained by someone else’s need isn’t just a problem for women, it’s a problem for all of us. Each of us has people who depend on us even if we go through our whole lives childless.” She and Kingsnorth are on the same page in arguing that our humanity is at stake here, we’ve bought into liberation as the ultimate “freedom” and somehow forgotten that there is substantial meaning in sacrifice.

I don’t think we’ve forgotten how to sacrifice, I think we are sacrificing the wrong thing. We’ve decided to forsake the family dinner for youth sports. We’ve sacrificed our closest relationships for late nights at the office to advance our career. We’ve convinced ourselves that all this stress and missing out will one day be worth it, forgetting how short our lives really are. Are we really liberated? Or have we just sacrificed ourselves to the machine in the name of prosperity and progress?

Mothering is the least machine-like thing we can do. It is organic and messy. It starts with blood and vernix and an entire temporary organ designed to keep a human alive inside another human’s body. It is mystical and miraculous. It is unpredictable and inherently unsystematic. Ask any mother of small children who tries to meal plan or implement sleep schedules or systems for doing laundry. Motherhood is chaotic and inefficient. Small children ask the same question over and over, want the same book read again and again, and change their food preferences weekly, if not daily—too bad you stocked up on those snacks they now hate. Sure you can be liberated from all this chaos, but you lose all the joy too.

Feminism has ruined motherhood and my generation and those behind us are stumbling through trying to reclaim it. Which is why you’re seeing the rise of the Trad Wife. The pendulum is swinging to the extremes in an effort to correct the damage we’ve done. So even as we have Ballerina Farm we also have Bonnie Blue, the Only Fans porn star who Louise Perry argues is the symbol of liberal feminism taken to its extreme end. Both are outliers. Both aren’t the story we want to be telling. So where does that leave us normies and our daughters?

The truth is that we need a new story of motherhood, a post-feminism story that isn’t necessarily a return to anything but charts a new script. Reactionary feminist, Mary Harrington is adding to that story with her commentary on “The Triple Goddess:” The Maiden, The Mother and The Matriarch. “The maiden centric world of feminisms,” has no place for the mother or the matriarch, argues Harrington. “‘Girl Power’ tells her she can do anything, ‘Sex Positive’ tells her she can fuck anyone, ‘Girl Boss’ feminism says she can rule everything.” And that’s the story we see over and over in the media and in literature. We are stuck in the first act, and to move on to act two or even three requires a kind of courage we see few examples of. It’s no wonder so many women struggle with postpartum depression. They are no longer a maiden and have been shunned from that world, but there are few communities of mothers for them to move into, even fewer of matriarchs willing to lend a hand and their hard earned wisdom. Everyone’s too busy getting Botox and snatching their waists at Pilates to have time to care. When young mothers look around they don’t see themselves because we think that acknowledging, supporting or celebrating mothers is somehow supporting tradition and convention—tell tale signs of the patriarchy.

Embracing motherhood could be the most radical thing you could ever do as a woman—whether you do that as a mother or in support of mothers. It’s resurrecting the divine feminine. It’s reclaiming the mystical and magical. It’s choosing to rage against the machine. Many women I know are already writing a new script, opting out of the machine rat race, choosing to sacrifice or set aside ambition temporarily, knowing that there’s a third act to this story.

In 2023, I accompanied my daughter and a group of her friends to the movie theater to watch the Eras Tour. Mostly there on chaperone duty, I wasn’t so much interested in the music as I was captivated by this entertaining poet who seems to be whip smart about the business end of making and producing art. Say what you will about the quality and content of the music, this woman knows how to build and wield an empire.

Later that year, when her relationship with Travis Kelce became very, very public I was captivated. Here was a culture-shifting model of feminism falling for a quintessential manly man, all brute force and strength. What struck me was that in nearly all the video content of their interactions one thing was clear: there was mutual adoration and admiration. He adores her (see the low bows as she exits the stadium after a performance), she admires him (see the genuine pride when his team wins the superbowl). According to John Gottman, these things are the anecdote to contempt and the foundation of a successful relationship.

Her latest album, The Life of A Showgirl is just a public offering of what we all knew was there, especially those of us who’ve found a “best friend we think is hot” and have committed to “a forever night stand.”

She’s making some people uncomfortable by pushing back against the idea that materialistic individualism actually doesn’t make you happy. In Fate of Ophelia she sings that she “swore allegiance to me myself and I,” but she wasn’t fulfilled until “you” (presumably Mr. Kelce) “lit up her sky” and rescued her from the “melancholy” and “purgatory”. Our modern culture has sold us a narrative that the most fulfilled version of ourselves is the version that is unattached and uncompromised by change. It’s all about finding and living your individual truth, whatever that means. But maybe, as Taylor Swift seems to have discovered, that kind of isolating individualism is actually suffocating and the only way to escape is to find something outside yourself to care about, to give yourself to. That meaning actually comes from hard things that demand sacrifice, like an unbroken vow, like marriage. Which according to Eldest Daughter she once didn’t believe in, but now does.

What I find interesting is the pushback against her healthy relationship and happiness. Both The Atlantic and The New Yorker published critical pieces decrying her happiness and arguing that they’ve rendered her uninteresting.

Some are going even further to call her MAGA and tradwife propaganda. All because she’s found something meaningful in traditional gender roles: the English teacher and the Gym Teacher. Our culture is so determined to turn everything on its head: everything worthwhile should be non-traditional, strange, different. Maybe in doing so we’ve lost the plot and with it meaning. It seems that in turning everything upside down we’ve rendered ourselves very, very unhappy.

Apparently we want our artists tortured, addicted and suffering. As if only profound art can be made from profound loneliness. We want Stephen King coked-out. We want Amy Winhouse drunk. We want Heath Ledger unraveled. So we definitely can’t have Taylor Swift happy and happy with something that today is counter cultural: marriage.

Swift’s new album offers a correction to this cultural sidestep away from tradition, while still maintaining a feminist bent that a woman can have what she wants if she wants it. The strong arm of culture will continue to criticize the content and themes and sounds in an attempt to diminish her impact, but looking through the comments on these critical articles you’ll find that she’s as poignant now as she’s ever been. She’s a cultural phenomenon with serious sway and has just declared that her life is better with a man who loves her.

I know I’m not the only one (enter all the non-MAGA and non-tradwife mothers) wondering what kind of music her motherhood era will produce. And if there’s anyone who can prove that you can build an empire and enjoy marriage and “a couple of kids”, it’s her. Just wait until she starts singing about all those feels, they will lose their ever loving minds, because there’s little our culture hates more than a woman who finds joy and fulfillment in motherhood.

I don’t particularly need help remembering death, my anxiety does that for me every time I merge onto the highway and picture a collision with another SUV, or logs tumbling off an eighteen-wheeler Final Destination 2 style.

I think about death often, not in a morbid way, but a thankful way: like, how lucky that I made it through another day. That I am breathing, that all the people I love are still breathing. And all this thinking about death has led me to the conclusion that it might not be a singular event, but it’s a thousand little dyings. That our life comes in stages, blazing bright for a glorious moment and then fading into a new moment, perhaps just as bright and just as glorious in it’s own way.

I think of all the ways I’ve “died.” Like how the singular me or at least a part of her, died when I met Mark, that when we were married my singleness died. Not in a bad way, but in a way that made room for this new and wonderful thing with someone I loved deeply. And the new thing we seeded has grown into this beautiful tree with a sturdy trunk and sweeping branches. Our children.

Their birth marked a kind of death as I entered motherhood. And motherhood is not just a single death of self, but a thousand daily dyings, some good and some not good. And you have to fight to keep alive parts of you, the parts you love that you don’t want to lose: the writer, the runner, the creative. And there are parts of you that you gladly let die, like the part of you that was self-obsessed, that counted calories and pounds and had time to look critically in the mirror at the curve of your belly, the sag of your skin.

And then there are more deaths, ones you’re not entirely ready for, like when the babies morph into little girls and little boys and those give way to teenagers who don’t need you and soon, the life, the busy life will die and the house will be quiet.

And the part of you that loved to push physical limits will also die. And that competitive drive will not go quietly, but in letting it go you’ll make space for something new, a seed that was planted long ago, a seed that you fought so hard to preserve its tiny delicate sprout when it was threatened to be trampled by little legs and busy life, it is showing promise now, sturdy and strong and soon it will bloom.

But the bloom can’t come without the wilting and the dying. So I die a little every day to make way for something new.

But I sit and watch because this is what the family wanted and I am trying very hard to sit still and be present. Something I am not very good at. I’m wedged in on either side by my boys, piled on top of me. My husband, who’s sunk into the other side of the couch, adores me. Therefore my kids adore me. It’s wonderful. Except for when I don’t want to be touched, which is often. I feel bad that I am like this, which is why I’m trying to enjoy this pile-on. My daughter calls from the chair across the living room that she feels left out, that our couch isn’t big enough. As if to prove her point she comes over, plops herself on the arm rest next to me and slides down into a non-existent spot, squeezing her brothers closer. We’re sardines. All five of us on the couch.

It’s the IKEA couch we bought not long after we were married. I insisted on the white slip cover because I was thinking more about the aesthetic and less about toddlers. Its sagging frame and permanently stained cushions anchor our living room. I’ve wanted a new couch for a while, thinking that after 24 years together it’s about time we graduated to a more “adult” couch. I browse websites, make lists in the Notes app on my phone: Crate and Barrel, West Elm, Joybird. I’ve ordered swatches from all of them, held them up, narrowed them down to my favorites and then tucked them in a drawer.

I’ve heard Arthur C. Brooks say more than once that its better to buy experiences than a new couch. “If you have money, there’s five things you can do with it: spend it on stuff, buy experiences, buy time by paying people to do things for you, give the money away or save it,” he says to Ginny Zurich on her podcast. “Buying experiences with your loved ones brings happiness.”

My husband and I have made a lot of mistakes in our years together, but if there’s one thing we’ve done well it’s that we’ve prioritized experiences as a couple and as a family. “Always take the trip,” is a mantra we adopted that has pushed us into what turns out to be exactly the thing we needed, even if it seemed foolhardy or irrational. We’ve traveled abroad, gone on ski trips, and explored unique AirBnB’s just for the experience of being in a new place together.

But without fail, whenever we visit a new place, the AirBnB always has a great couch, some big sectional we can all pile onto, or a chaise lounge where my husband naps comfortably. I turn over the cushions of these couches wondering where it’s from, looking for the brand label. I’ve even messaged hosts asking: where is your great couch from? Do you love it? Thinking maybe we would love it too if we had one of our own to replace the sad, sagging IKEA couch in our living room.

Back at home I look up the couches, I get out the measuring tape to see which size would work best, dig the swatches back out from the drawer. I price the layout we like: left facing chaise lounge in the stain resistant chenille, or maybe the forest green velvet would work? My selections reveal a price that is the same as a four-day ski vacation. I close the tabs, put the swatches back in the drawer—Instagram will remind me later of my couch obsession.

I book the ski vacation.

The songbirds are gone, the only sounds: crickets and the mechanical chirp of a truck backing up, the hiss of the school bus' breaks. A card door slams.

Back to school, to work. Everyone has a box to be in for the day.

Meanwhile we're out here living wild, free, which makes some people nervous: shouldn’t we tame our children? Saddle them with expectations of academic success, bridle them with debt before they have even left the nest.

All this choice, this freedom it’s too much for some: “a privilege!”

Like saying to a salmon, “How nice it must be to swim upstream.” As if the current will comply, as if there are no bears.

And even still they are worried about normalcy, socialization. But when you look around normal is a bent neck, a gaze that no longer meets the eye, out of touch with each other and the natural world.

And we know the outcome: everyone is suffering maladies of the mind and body. Every book self-helping how to be happy/successful/content inside the box.

When the best medicine is found outside the box: wild and free.

But only if you’re prepared for your sacrifice to be called luck, the not-so-subtle implication that you’re doing it wrong.

Warning: only go against the flow if you can handle the current and the bears.

I’m an adult now and summers are still fun, but August gets me every year. It feels like all the good things: the daylight, the warmth, the unbridled energy is ending. I feel the turn of each year more in August than I do in January. The way my kids have grown, raced through more milestones in a hurry to grow up. Swim diapers and naps and floats are a distant memory, replaced by weeks away at summer camp, infrequent letters saying they are having so much fun without me. In January, things are dark and cold and unchanging, but in August, in August time slips by noticeably.

I feel weepy and I’m not even sending a kid off to college, though many of my peers are. I just don’t want it to end: summers filled with child-like wonder. What I didn’t know at sixteen was that it wouldn’t be the end of summer fun, that when you have children you re-live it all over again. The waterlogged days in the lake, eyes so bloodshot and limbs so weary from water and sun, that when you finally slump into the cool sheets, and the old mattress folding around you, you’re asleep before you even have time to recount the day’s adventures.

But now even those days feel numbered, the older my kids get, the faster summer seems to slip by. Like a blink. A breath. An unfinished gesture.

I was feeling it all so much last night. That and somehow I was lucky enough to receive three rejections in one day, two for the novel I’m querying and one for an article I pitched. I’ve been quiet around here because I’ve been drafting a new novel and trying to place several essays I’ve written, revised and polished with my writing group. I’ve been feeling like my writing bio needed a few new bylines that weren’t exclusively related to running. These new essays range in topics from Dawson’s Creek to Lindsey Vonn to Beach Leaf Disease. Normally when I receive a rejection for an essay, I just put it here on Substack. It’s easy enough, it gets the work out into the world even if the audience is small. But lately I’ve been trying to have some patience, to spend more time revising pieces for a specific outlet, polishing them until I think they have a chance.

They aren’t finding homes though, neither is my novel. August is the saddest month, especially when you keep putting yourself out there and keep hearing “no.”

When I feel like everything is ending or a dead end, the only medicine for me is to get outside. So last night I announced at dinner I was going for a walk on the rail trail. I needed to see the ripples on the lake, walk through the tunnel of oaks just past the boat launch, hear the crunch of my feet on the gravel, my arms swing through the still air. It’s the best way to get un-sad. The best, best way is a sunrise hike or a long day above tree-line, then I feel so high no amount of sad can touch me. Not time slipping away, not even rejection.

We walked for longer than anyone wanted to. “How much longer?” They asked. “To the boat launch,” I said, powering ahead carrying the sweatshirt of someone who was too hot. I told him to tie it around his waist so I wouldn’t have to carry it, but he was off and running before he heard me. I bunched the sweatshirt in my hand, so it swung in time as I walked. Then I tucked it under my arm, hugging it to me. Glad to have something to carry, glad to be mothering in this way. As I walked I could feel the sad seep out of me, gratitude taking its place. Oh, these legs! Those oak leaves! The tunnel of fading light. The final pink of sunset shimmering on Back Bay. “Red at night sailor’s delight,” I said to everyone as we walked back to the car, reminding them of the good weather to come, reminding myself of the good days to come.