“What Do You Do All Day?”

A childfree, never-married, self-employed aunt of mine asked me this question when my daughter was about a year old.

I froze.

I didn’t know what to say.

Blind Spots

Did she want an itemized list of how many times I breastfed, changed a diaper, and went grocery shopping?

Maybe she wanted an instruction manual on how I handled laundry and dishes with my Level 5 Klingon child who would never let go of me.

Or did she want details on how I managed my anxiety after I had almost run someone off the road in my car and my husband fell asleep ON our daughter?

Maybe I should’ve responded with: “As two sleep-deprived adults, with no help, today went like this:

1. Driving back from my doctor’s appointment, the car alarm beeped to warn me another car was in my blind spot, but my brain didn’t register it. I continued changing lanes, nearly running another car onto the shoulder, until I realized what was happening and stopped merging.

2. At home, my husband, who believed he was upright and playing with our daughter, was completely unaware that sleep had overtaken him. When I walked into the room, I thought my daughter had disappeared, but I found her tucked underneath him, both sleeping soundly.

3. I spent the rest of the day mentally flagellating myself and deciding I needed to be more vigilant, which only added to my anxiety and lack of sleep.”

The correct answer to my aunt’s question was, of course, “Survival.”

“We survive all day long.”

But she never would’ve understood that.

So I said nothing.

I often wonder how we survived that first year as new parents.

Exhaustion seemed to short-circuit our brains, yet keeping a newborn alive was 100% up to us.

Bad turned to worse.

My thyroid tanked, and we got hit with a pandemic.

It’s almost certain these turns of events are why we stopped after just one child. I remember my mother-in-law saying she thought that was enough, as if she had some say in how many kids we decided to have.

As an only child myself, I didn’t want my daughter to grow up as one.

My mother never fully grasped that life as an only child meant living in a much smaller world than the one she grew up in. My mother-in-law, with her 7 siblings, certainly didn’t understand. Raising only one child might be easier on all of us now, but would it mean a diminished village for my daughter down the road?

While the older generation had a lot of questions and opinions, they didn’t provide much support. Our extended family mostly extended their arms for social engagements and to receive pictures of our daughter.

So we stopped at one; so shell-shocked by parenting, we thought he had no other choice.

I’ve watched shows like M. Night Shyamalan’s Servant and felt deep compassion for the main characters, who are expected to raise a baby with no help of any kind.

That’s the real horror.

The fake smiles and convincing oneself that everything is okay.

I know the show’s premise provokes a deep divide of opinions about who’s responsible for what. But I strongly empathize with parents who try to do everything on their own and feel like they fail at every turn.

Older generations thought of family as a life-affirming necessity; an experience everyone participated in.

Does that even happen today?

With absent grandparents, childless weddings, and the skyrocketing cost of living that all but prevents family life, the attitude has mostly changed to: You chose to have kids, so you deserve to manage every aspect of parenting without any support.

Like it’s some kind of punishment for doing what people have done since the dawn of time.

I asked myself: “Was I crazy? Has it always been like this for parents?”

The parents of yesteryear never seemed this overwhelmed or isolated.

A book by Beverly Cleary answered the question my mother never would.

The Cursive Crisis

Last week Aurora and I started Muggie Maggie, Beverly Cleary’s 1990 novel about a third grader who refuses to learn cursive at school. It’s a perfectly pleasant book, but without Cleary’s beloved and rambunctious Ramona, it reads a bit dated and is less of a page-turner.

Maggie doesn’t want to write in loops; her teacher is scandalized, and at one point the school gets so alarmed by her penmanship rebellion that they send her to the school psychologist.

This is—A BIG DEAL.

The adults in the book are aghast that a child’s cursive is being withheld.

But it wasn’t Maggie’s crisis that got my attention. It was her mother’s.

Maggie’s teacher calls to schedule a conference.

Maggie’s mother, Mrs. Schultz, is annoyed at the thought of going to the school because she has to fit one more thing into her already packed day. Her packed day includes teaching exercise class “to a group of overweight women” in the morning (yes, it’s actually written this way) and running errands in the afternoon.

But now Mrs. Schultz is also expected to go to the school and discuss Maggie’s rejection of cursive, TOO!

Make the whole world stop—not one more thing on the To-Do List!

That’s the full weight of an overwhelmed woman’s Tuesday in 1990.

Meanwhile, Maggie’s father is separately aggrieved because there’s traffic and his office has instituted rotating coffee duty—every employee takes a turn making a pot, even the men—and he considers this a real inconvenience.

No, Starbucks didn’t exist yet, but feminism sure did!

At the dinner table, both parents mumble about how difficult their day was and how dealing with Maggie’s stubbornness is just one more nuisance in their stressful lives.

After I read this to my nine-year-old, I had to sit with the book on my own.

Was it really saying what I think it was saying?

Had the expectations of motherhood changed that much since 1990?

My List, By Comparison

Here is my list right now, in 2026,

Each day, I:

• Vet every neighbor, every playdate, every space my daughter enters, because “go outside and play” is no longer an option

• Drive my daughter to extracurricular activities, which we pay for in addition to all her curriculum, because she doesn’t have school access

• Learn entire online platforms, writing, marketing, sales, and business skills, on my own time, unpaid, for as long as it takes, because we all know one paycheck doesn’t cut it anymore

• Build and then execute my daughter’s entire academic curriculum from scratch. It changes with her needs, and no institution gives me guidelines

• Do dishes, laundry, groceries, and other errands—the same chores that made up the entirety of Maggie’s mother’s difficult day, except mine are the mundane things I mostly trudge through unconsciously

I don’t necessarily have more items on my list than Mrs. Schultz—okay, I do.

But the real difference is what goes unnoticed.

Mrs. Schultz’s list ENDS.

Teaching exercise class has a start time and a stop time.

The bank line has a finish point.

The vet visit gets completed.

Every single thing on her overwhelmed-mother list in 1990 was bounded. It could be crossed off as done.

When Life Never Turns Off

Almost nothing on my list ends.

You don’t finish vetting the world your kid moves through and then get to take a coffee break. You don’t figure out how to do business online once and keep repeating the process. You also don’t build a curriculum in June and coast until May.

People of my generation joke that our parents had to be reminded that they actually had kids with the infamous news message:

Nobody in the 80s and 90s was orchestrating a full slate of extracurriculars because kids playing unsupervised outside and literally disappearing from their parents’ awareness for 8-12 hours a day was the norm.

And certainly no one was building an entire homeschooling program because back then it would be unheard of for a child to get stabbed on the campus of the local school or for 70% of that school’s student body to be functionally illiterate.

But that’s what I’m facing as a parent in a modern middle-class neighborhood today. Embracing the permanent, never-off work duty that didn’t enter the minds of parents in past generations.

I’d love to feel safe enough to let my child roam the neighborhood.

Unfortunately, in the four years since I’ve moved back to my birth state, in the same suburban area I left 20 years prior, things have changed dramatically. There have been several murders, sex offenders have moved in, neighbors don’t speak or even wave to each other, and their children are left unattended or with questionable older siblings.

My early attempt to engage with the neighborhood kids ended when the parents began treating me like the free default babysitter while their kids bullied mine.

Nevermind. I’ll just keep my door locked. Thanks.

Even with the locked door, the demands on my time haven’t stopped.

But now… The calls are coming from inside the house.

I mean the family.

Repeated text messages from my mother, requiring me to respond to her within a specific time frame while I’m out of town with my family. Demands from older relatives insisting we listen to every crisis or drop everything and attend to other family members we haven’t seen in years. People who aren’t willing to adjust their social engagements, travel plans, or general expectations for us, yet expect us to rearrange our lives for them, indefinitely, without explanation.

All of it compounding and eating away at the little sanity I have left until it emotionally derails my workdays and time educating my child.

This is what middle-class America is like for today's parents.

Maybe some of these problems were around in the 1980s and 1990s.

What I remember was:

• My mother turning over my entire K-12 education to someone else

• Relaxed neighbors who would pop by to chat with her, or she would drop me off with them to spend the night

• 2 full sets of retired grandparents she could trust and leave me with at any time, day or night

• Affordable babysitters she could use as backup so she and my father could attend adult dinners without having to think about children

• My mother doing seasonal work, which had a clear start and end date

• My father bringing in a livable wage that paid for a house in a safe neighborhood with a strong local school district

So when my aunt asked me, “What do you do all day?” what she was really looking for was proof that having a child and not working outside the home was a privileged way to slack off. From her position, a business with a P&L is real labor, and having a baby just isn’t. Plus, she’d never account for how things had changed over the decades.

It’s the same blind spot Maggie’s mother’s entire generation had the luxury of never confronting. Their labor ended at a specific time, and so they never even considered the kind that doesn’t.

I don’t think Maggie’s mother was lazy.

I think she was living inside a set of guardrails so complete she couldn’t see them. The way you don’t focus on the walls of your own living room.

• Neighbors you could trust ✅

• Schools that handled your child’s entire education ✅

• A world where “go play outside” required no further thought ✅

• Plenty of time to just be an adult without children ✅

Take away every one of those guardrails at once, and you’ll witness the crumbling of the village—or rather, our current parenting situation.

Instead of a fun children’s book like Muggie Maggie about a kid refusing cursive, you’ll wind up with a TV horror show about unsupported parents struggling to manage the day-to-day like Servant.

So, What Do I Do All Day?

As I sit here planning a year’s worth of new curriculum for a precocious 2e child who barely sleeps, organizing my time around swaps, consignment exchanges, grocery runs, my own business, and an extracurricular farm program that requires a 45 minute drive one way, both to save money and give my daughter the best childhood I can while I also spend a week creating my first product on Teachers Pay Teacher that I will sell for $1, while I research the health conditions my doctor won’t…

I often wish it was 1990.

I wish I could call long-distance relatives once a month and be done.

I wish I could send my child outside for hours without fear.

I wish the older generation understood they handed us:

• A life with no emergency contact

• No baked-in community support

• Demands on our time they rarely reciprocate

• Complete self-reliance that never switches off

Luckily, a grandmother online understands all of this, and she’s spreading enlightening messages about how older generations can better communicate and connect with today’s parents.

She goes by More Than Grand, and she’s written articles like “4 Ways Parenting Is Harder Today” and “Grandparents as Mentors.”

Check her out. She’s doing excellent work.

The Gifts of This Life

While all the truly difficult parts remain, the reality is that when you’re required to parent in this up-close and personal way, there are rewards, too.

My husband and I are part of my daughter’s life in ways our parents never were for us. We know firsthand what she’s learning each day, and we can adjust that education to fit her needs. Both of us involve ourselves in that education, whether I’m teaching her core subjects or my husband is teaching her to swim or ride a bike. We know all her friends and their parents, and we rely on them when we don’t have relatives to support us. We encourage our daughter to try new things even when it feels difficult. When she falls, we’re there to pick her up, and she comes to us when her heart is broken.

I’m grateful my husband works from home and can often have lunch with us. And when we go on vacation, it’s usually when the beaches are quiet.

I can be fully committed to this life and be worn-smack out by it.

I can love the involvement I have with my daughter, but also wish she had extended family who were more interested and invested in my daughter’s life.

Both experiences can be true.

My life never turns off.

And I’m amazed by it.

So if my aunt asked me the same question today:

“What do you do all day long?”

I wouldn’t freeze.

I’d tell her: I build the school. I am the village. I’m the emergency contact, the babysitter, the curriculum director, and the perimeter fence, and not one of those jobs punches out at 5 PM.

That’s what I do all day. I just don’t have an invoice to prove it.

And maybe your generation doesn’t fully understand or accept that, but I’m too busy to pick up the phone and explain it to you right now.

I have work to do for my family.

If you’re a parent today who feels like everything is overwhelming with no off switch, know you’re not alone. Others are out here, and we often pull together to support each other.

The moms in my little homeschool group have become my support system.

If you need a down day where nothing gets done—take it and don’t feel guilty.

If you need to not answer demanding messages from relatives—block them for a season. It doesn’t have to last forever.

Heck, message me on Substack. I’ll listen and respond.

Do whatever you must to make it through, survive, and know that you were put in this position because you are more capable than you know.

Our current parenting situation may seem impossible, but we’re here for a reason. And if you ever find you have free time, reach out to the moms you notice hanging on by a thread. They may need the support, but never say so.

How have you, as a mom with little to no village, figured out how to get the support you need? Please tell me, and let’s keep building each other up on Substack.

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These two events occurred nearly twenty years apart. Both times, while I was reading aloud to students, completely unprepared, the word gobsmacked me.

Here’s how to handle these occurrences so you’re never ambushed by a word in classic literature that derails your teaching.

The Long Walk of Shame

The first time a problematic word from a classic novel snuck into my purview, I was a brand-new English teacher in a freshman classroom made up mostly of boys, with a smattering of girls who were as rough-and-tumble as their male counterparts.

We’d just finished Romeo and Juliet, and I was standing in the English teacher’s lounge looking over all my next book options.

Mr. “Cool” teacher walked in, and we started chatting.

He pleaded with me not to force another classic novel on my freshman after teaching Shakespeare. As if classic literature was some kind of punishment.

“Don’t do that to them,” he implored me.

My boyfriend at the time had talked me into reading Stephen King’s The Long Walk (yep, the one that’s recently been made into a movie), and something clicked: teenage boys, a walking contest that’s really a metaphor for Vietnam (in other words, a historical reference), contestants wearing each other down until only one is left standing.

It was masculine, gritty, and weird. Everything that Romeo and Juliet wasn’t.

This was three years before The Hunger Games hit theaters.

If you haven’t worked in a high school before, you may not realize how little time new teachers have to read. But if you’ve seen any of my previous posts, you might imagine I had even less time than most.

Yes, I’m loquacious, as my husband likes to say.

As an English teacher, that showed up as detailed curriculum planning and lots of writing feedback. I’d provide each student with so many writing suggestions on their papers they could not only get a higher grade, but also a publishing contract.

So, while I had read quite a bit of The Long Walk before I went through the process of getting the school to buy the copies, I hadn’t read all of it.

Time was just something I couldn’t stretch to fit in my copying, supply buying, grading, organizing, lesson planning, and general life requirements as a single woman who was now a new teacher and still hoped to sleep.

Reading everything ahead just wasn’t always possible.

Early Signs to the Kill Word

At first I was proud of myself.

The boys and even the girls dug the novel.

It was gutsy and real, with sci-fi elements.

My students seemed eager for each new chapter. The novel was so different from what they were used to reading in school that it felt like I had really challenged the status quo.

We clicked along through the story, but as the journey intensified, so did some of the language.

Many of the boys were breaking down, getting weaker from lack of food or too much physical exertion. Some were sick. The reality of what would happen if they dropped below a certain speed surrounded them and was becoming too difficult to process.

Tension was high, and it was every man for himself.

So they turned on each other, using mental games that grew from each boy like the angry fangs of wounded animals.

And there it was. Smack in the middle of the chapter.

Knee-deep into the book—the word that shall not be named.

There was no warning label, no parental advisory, on this Stephen King book.

I never saw it coming.

I stopped and explained it on the spot—that the boys were tearing each other down because it was every man for himself on that road. That cruelty was the goal when you’re trying to survive. This was King’s extended metaphor for what happens when young boys are flown away from their families, turned into soldiers, and expected to survive in a jungle they didn’t know while their friends died around them.

But I was building that explanation in real time, on the fly.

I was unprepared.

I didn’t say anything wrong; I just wish I had seen it coming.

The Crass Menagerie

The second time this happened was two nights ago, while homeschooling my own daughter. A die-hard unicorn fanatic, she started telling me a made-up story about a unicorn war in which one of the creatures loses its horn.

Where did my mind go?

To Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, of course.

Hmmm… a play.

We could read it in a night or two. As a family.

The Glass Menagerie didn’t have anything shocking that I could recall.

No rape scene like in A Streetcar Named Desire or the attack in Suddenly, Last Summer. As a former theatre major, I thought I knew my way around a Williams play.

*Spoiler alert: I didn’t. Not fully.

I knew the story:

A shy, insecure girl who collects glass animals is chatting with a gentleman caller, or rather a friend of her brother’s, who’s been asked over for dinner. He accidentally knocks her unicorn onto the floor and breaks off its horn.

Sure, I knew that was coming.

We sat down to read The Glass Menagerie aloud as a family from one of my old, old college theatre textbooks.

Did I say it was OLD?

When Amanda Wingfield, the mother, strutted in, I should have known she’d be spoiling for a fight. That faded Southern belle routine, a woman built entirely of nostalgia for a world that was never as gracious as she had remembered it, was not placed in this play to do no harm.

Nope.

Her character used the same word that pounced on me in The Long Walk.

This was the same ambush, nearly twenty years later, and I was just as caught off guard as I’d been in the classroom. But this time it was with my own kid, not an assortment of high school freshmen whose trust I was trying to earn.

My daughter saw the word.

She saw me look concerned.

And she saw me hesitate and turn to my husband.

Instead of me managing the moment for her, we just talked.

She said she’d never use a word like that, and she understood, on her own, why it was not only inappropriate but wrong. She also seemed to understand why it felt so aggressive coming out of the character Amanda’s mouth.

The difference wasn’t that I was more prepared the second time.

I wasn’t; not really.

The difference was that I had more room to sit with the discomfort, instead of performing my way out of it in front of an audience.

I’m not telling you this so you’ll avoid reading certain classic novels.

I’m telling you so you’ll stop expecting a warning label, and so you know that even when you are caught off guard, the moment isn’t ruined.

It’s an opportunity.

I Don’t Skip The Difficult Books

There’s a real difference between a classroom and a living room.

In a classroom, a teacher is managing thirty kids’ worth of reactions, backgrounds, and liabilities, with no ability to pause and check with every single child. That teacher’s caution isn’t cowardice. She’s performing work that must appeal to lots of different types of students.

A home read-aloud is a different tool for a different kind of education.

You’re sitting next to your child.

You can stop any time.

You can define.

You can watch their face and adjust.

Treating those two settings as if they require the same action plan is where a lot of the “just avoid it” crowd goes wrong.

So I wouldn’t skip the book; I’d make sure to not get caught off guard by it.

Sometimes The Word Isn’t Doing the Same Job

What these two books taught me:

The ugly word on the page isn’t always there for the same reason, and figuring out why it’s there is the real lesson.

❦ Amanda in The Glass Menagerie:

Tennessee Williams hands her that word as characterization, full stop.

She’s not a stand-in for the author’s views; she’s an indictment of an outdated place and time. Everything about Amanda is nostalgia for a South that was never as gracious as she insists it was. Williams is showing you exactly how her memory is built and what it costs the people around her. Amanda dreams of a “kinder” time when servants did all the work, as if the servants in her universe had no lives of their own.

The ugliness is pointed.

It’s providing us with characterization, and the play knows it.

❦ The boys in The Long Walk:

The word here is doing something more ambient.

It’s the 1970s, and we’re getting to know draft-age boys, walking themselves to death as a stand-in for Vietnam. They’re doing everything in their power to wear each other down, including using cutting language against each other so they themselves can survive. The cruelty there isn’t indicting one character’s worldview—it’s the entire atmosphere; it’s what boys about to be fed into a war machine do to each other under pressure.

It’s much uglier in some ways, but less surgical.

We have the same word in two books, used for entirely different purposes.

If you ask “why is this here?” every time you see an offensive word instead of assuming you already know, you end up teaching the book rather than just surviving it.

Yes, even the ugly words are worth examining.

A Framework, not a Rulebook

If you’re about to read a classic aloud with your children and you’re nervous about what’s buried in it, you might have a good instinct but the wrong fear.

Skimming for content warnings won’t help you.

No, you don’t have to read the entire book ahead of time.

I know that’s the advice everyone gives, but I also know it’s not realistic.

You’re teaching six subjects to a child, maybe to multiple children; you don’t have a couple of spare days to pre-read every classic before assigning it. What you actually need is a targeted pass, not a full read:

• Search “[book title] Common Sense Media” — most people know this site for movies and TV, but they also review books directly, with the same category breakdown (language, violence, messaging) and specific examples instead of a vague age number.

• Pull up the text online (Gutenberg, Google Books preview, whatever’s legal and free) and search for a specific word you’re worried about. Five seconds, and now you know the page number instead of finding out live.

• Read a synopsis. (SparkNotes, LitCharts, a solid Wikipedia plot summary) Specifically look for who says difficult things and why, not just what happens. You’re not looking for spoilers to avoid; you’re looking for landmines to mark.

• If it’s a well-known classic, someone has almost certainly already written about this exact problem. A quick search for “[book title] problematic language” will usually turn up an essay or teaching guide that’s done the homework for you.

None of this requires reading the whole book ahead of time.

It requires knowing enough not to be surprised.

But what if you look, find nothing, and a word shows up anyway?

I trained in performance, and the rule we were taught was: you read the dialogue as it’s written.

Not because the word is fine, but because softening a playwright’s language changes the character, and the character’s ugliness is often the entire point the author is making.

If you’re doing an actual production of The Glass Menagerie or watching a film adaptation, that’s a text meant for performance. Williams put that word in Amanda’s mouth on purpose, and an actor cutting it would be editing Tennessee Williams, which isn’t really anyone’s job.

But your living room isn’t a stage, and I think that distinction matters. In a classroom or at home, your kid can see the page. They can see the word sitting right there in black and white, whether you say it or not.

So if saying it out loud feels like too much, for you or for them, you don’t have to. You can read around it—“and then Amanda says something that I’m not going to repeat out loud, but here’s what it tells us about her”—and the lesson survives completely intact, because it was never about you voicing the word.

It was about noticing the word on the page and asking what it’s doing there.

Performance has different rules than parenting a nine-year-old through a play at the kitchen table or on the sofa. I’d rather you feel free to choose than feel bound by a theatre convention built for actors on a stage.

After:

Have a real conversation; don’t give a lecture.

Ask your children:

• Why do you think the author put that word in this character’s mouth?

• What is it telling us about who they are, or what world they came from?

Let your kid sit with the discomfort instead of you narrating it away for them.

This is the part that actually worked with Amanda’s line.

I didn’t tell my daughter what to think. I just let her sit there with it, and she landed on “I’d never say that” and “I understand why it’s wrong” on her own.

That’s a better outcome than anything I could’ve lectured about.

When It Doesn’t Even Show Up on the List

Here’s the wrinkle that might throw you: not every landmine is a word you can search for.

Some parent friends of ours read Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator to their children and admitted that Roald Dahl’s sequel reads like a fever dream from a bygone era’s assumptions. I haven’t read it, but my husband did—aloud to our daughter, completely unprompted by any of this, and both he and our friends discovered they had the same reaction to the story. It was just strange. Off-putting in a way neither of them expected. Nothing that would show up if you searched “problematic language,” so nothing a keyword check would catch.

Just an entire book’s worth of a different century’s idea of what was “normal” to put in front of a child.

That’s worth considering because there was a real stretch of literary history where children were written for, like, small adults, dropped into weirder material with none of the protective softening we build in by default now.

All you Gen X and Millennials who’ve seen the original Willy Wonka movie just think bout the boat scene—you know exactly what I’m talking about.

This weirdness is not necessarily a flaw to sand off.

It’s a genuinely interesting thing to notice with your kid.

That the very idea of childhood as a protected, cushioned category is a fairly modern invention.

What to Do When You Didn’t See It Coming

Every piece of advice up to this point assumes you have five minutes to prep.

But what if you don’t?

After I read the version of The Glass Menagerie in my very old textbook, I looked up the use of the problematic word on Google, and Gemini swore up and down that that word wasn’t in the play.

Okay, buddy.

The absolute wars I’ve had with Gemini over reality amaze me!

Sometimes a word is just there, mid-sentence, with your kid staring at you. Here’s what actually works in that moment, no prep required:

• Don’t perform a recovery—just narrate it plainly.

  “Huh, that’s a strange way to describe that” or “That’s pretty rough, isn’t it?” is enough. You’re not delivering a lecture; you’re telling your kid, “I noticed this too,” so they wonder whether you missed it or think it’s fine.

• Ask before you explain.

  “What did you think of that?” gets you further than jumping straight into context. Half the time, your kid gets to the realization on their own, the way my daughter did with Amanda’s line, and your explaining just gets in the way of that.

• You’re allowed to stop.

  You can decide to not finish the chapter to avoid making it weird. A five-minute detour to actually talk about it isn’t a derailed lesson. It is the lesson, and probably the most important one of that day.

• “I don’t fully know why this is in here; let’s find out” is perfectly fine. You don’t have to be an instant authority. Looking it up together models the exact research habit you’re trying to teach in the first place.

• You get a second pass.

  If the in-the-moment version felt like it didn’t land—mine with The Long Walk in the classroom sure felt uncomfortable—you can circle back the next day, in the car, or the next morning. The moment isn’t one shot with no do-overs.

And if you’re mid-scramble right now because none of this crossed your mind in advance, you’re not the only one. This isn’t a sign you’re underprepared or incompetent.

It’s a sign that older literature was written under a different set of assumptions than the ones we’re operating under now, and no amount of googling can catch it all.

Being caught off guard doesn’t mean you did it wrong.

It means you’re reading real books.

Where Does It End? (Or: The Roald Dahl Problem)

Here’s the question that actually complicates all of this.

A few years back, Puffin quietly went through Roald Dahl’s books with sensitivity readers and started removing words. Lots of words.

Augustus Gloop stopped being “enormously fat” and became “enormous.” Words like “ugly,” “crazy,” and “mad” got cut across the board. The Oompa-Loompas went from “small men” to “small people.” In Matilda, the line “I was her slave” disappeared entirely, and the girl who used to read Kipling now reads Austen instead.

The backlash was fast and loud, including Camilla, then-Queen Consort, defending writers’ freedom of expression.

Penguin Random House folded within the week and announced it would republish the unedited originals as “The Roald Dahl Classic Collection,” sold right alongside the revised versions.

They didn’t retract the changes; they gave readers a choice.

So if I’m telling you not to skip Amanda’s line, don’t I also have to answer for Augustus Gloop’s waistline? I think the honest answer is that these aren’t actually the same problem, even though they get lumped together.

A slur is doing targeted, historical harm—it’s a word with a body count behind it, aimed at a specific group, and when an author puts it in a character’s mouth on purpose, it’s usually doing real work: indicting the character, setting a time and place, telling you something true and ugly about how people actually talked.

Ask what the word is doing, not just how it lands:

• Amanda’s words are producing an indictment.

• The Long Walk’s cruelty creates an intense atmosphere and serves as a metaphor.

• Augustus Gloop’s waistline is a cruel punchline in a book that’s mean to everyone.

Editing for historical harm and editing for reader discomfort are two different jobs.

There’s a version of this that isn’t hypocrisy at all, because writers really do go back and change their own work.

Chekhov trimmed the ending off “The Bet” when he anthologized it.

Whitman spent his whole life revising Leaves of Grass.

This isn’t author erasure; it’s a creative mind still in conversation with its own text.

What happened to Dahl is a different thing entirely: he’d been dead for over thirty years, and he’d told his publishers directly not to change so much as a comma. Somebody else’s judgment got substituted in for his after he’d lost the ability to object.

So maybe the honest rule isn’t “never change a word of a classic.”

It’s that the only person with the authority to change a novel is the person who created it in the first place.

Here’s my favorite proof of this because it happened in my own living room.

A friend on Substack mentioned her daughter was frightened by the scene in James and the Giant Peach where the rhino kills James’s parents. My daughter wasn’t scared by this scene in the book, but she was scared by it in the movie. And then last month, she performed in a stage production of James and the Giant Peach and got to play James’s mother.

The one who gets killed by the rhino.

She died on stage, on cue, and thought it was hilarious.

She got less afraid of it by getting closer—by understanding it, performing it, and having agency over it instead of just receiving it.

You don’t protect a kid from a scary rhino by editing the rhino out.

You protect her by handing her the rhino and letting her play the part.

I’d still rather my daughter meet these words—and these rhinos—on the page, in my house, with me sitting next to her, rather than her meet them when I’m not around. With a teacher who’s not sure how to manage the words, or who wants to clean everything up because it’s too much work not to.

And that, my friends, is the beauty of homeschool.

Not everything gets sanitized to meet some status quo.

What do you do all day?

Ever have a childless friend or family member ask you that question?

Well, next week we’re going to talk about it.

The homeschool year is heating up; you are completely overloaded, and a comment like that could set off fireworks if it catches you at the right moment.

Before I could produce fully formed curricula, I first had to research the market, get better at using Canva, and understand TPT’s backend.

Whew! That’s on top of continuing my writing on Substack.

So instead of creating my elaborate mystery curriculum, I made a homeschool attendance tracker. Simple, sure. But it took a lot of work. It’s editable and digital, so it may help you stay organized this year if you need to track your children’s attendance against specific required state hours or days.

It’s also free!

Get Your Free Attendance Tracker

One area of life that has been easy lately is homeschooling.

If you’re new to homeschooling, hear me out:

4 years ago, I would never have believed this about my homeschool days.

I was pulling my hair out.

But this year has been straightforward.

It still requires work, but compared to how overwhelmed I was when I first started this journey, things are truly uncomplicated right now.

Back then, I was:

• Figuring out the Science of Reading

• Using phonics when I had never been taught phonics

• Learning how to manage advanced math as a self-proclaimed mathaphobe (okay, there’s probably a better word for that)

• Determining what to keep track of legally.

We are now operating on a whole new level.

If you’re a parent who is homeschooling and you feel like you’re drowning, just know it gets easier.

And you don’t have to have it all figured out yet.

I thought I’d give you a peek behind the curtain and let you in on how we’re running our 4th grade homeschool—our 6th year of homeschool—in 2026.

Here’s what my first week looked like:

The Weekend Before School Started:

Our Homeschool Kickoff has been Allowing My Daughter to Step Out of Her Comfort Zone Two Years in a Row!

Last year, my daughter unexpectedly fell into a chess competition and competed with much older boys at the Homeschool Expo. It inspired me to write my first-ever Substack post right before school started.

This year, the weekend before we started school, we took a short weekend trip over to Athens, GA for a concert. Ya’ll probably know Athens is home to the B-52s and R.E.M, right?

I went to college there at the University of Georgia for a couple of years and used to see Michael Stipe roaming around downtown. I even lived off the Atlanta Highway, made famous in the song “Love Shack.”

What you might not know is it’s also where another well-known singer/songwriter went to college. If you’ve watched Season 2 of True Detective, then maybe you’ve seen and heard Lera Lynn, the musician playing during the brokedown bar scenes when Colin Farrell and Vince Vaughn met for their shady business dealings. Lera Lynn has become my daughter’s favorite singer-songwriter—and no, my daughter hasn’t seen True Detective. We’re not crazy parents.

But she has been begging us to go to her first concert.

I just wasn’t thrilled with the summer’s choices:

Florence + the Machine—an arena show, too big for a 9-year-old

Sting—would love to see him, but too expensive for this time of year

Echo and the Bunnymen—too goth; I know the venue because I hung out there post-college, no thanks

When we heard Lera Lynn was coming to Athens to play an all-ages show at a small venue, we jumped at the chance to see her.

We drove the two hours to Athens, discovered our hotel was in a sketchy part of town—it didn’t look like that 30 years ago—and found ourselves quickly trying to make new accommodations on the road.

Luckily, there was this lovely couple who were renting their Airbnb for the night, and we got a tiny house in their backyard that looked like a fairy garden. Perfection.

At the concert, my daughter was the only child in attendance, but the audience members were kind, and so was Lera Lynn herself and her musician husband. Both mentioned my daughter a few times during the show since the venue was so tiny we had an up-close and personal seat before my daughter got to chat with the musical couple after the concert.

You wouldn’t believe the confidence boost this gave to my daughter:

My daughter’s been in several plays, but she’s never sung on stage solo.

When she discovered the restaurant across the street from the concert was holding karaoke night, she was determined to sing after the show. I could tell as we walked over and she saw all the adults in the dining area (again, she was the only kid) that she was getting cold feet.

Bad mom vibes were starting to well up in me.

But they were fighting with the memories of all those years I had wanted to sing but never had the guts. It wasn’t until I was in college majoring in theatre that I started overcoming my anxiety to get on stage.

I’ve still never sung in front of an audience.

Despite the terrible parent alarm going off in my head, we walked her over and grabbed the giant white binder, anyway.

She had no idea where to start her search. But I did.

Blondie. One Way or Another.

It has practically been her theme song.

She was terrified, but she got up there and sang, not hitting every note, but giving it her all. The crowd cheered, and at the very end she let out the cutest little squeak that said: “I did it. I feel relief, and I’m proud of myself.”

She had become a force. A 9-year-old who had met her idol and performed her first karaoke song all in one night.

There was no stopping her now.

Next up: The Police. Every Little Thing You Do is Magic.

And she got another roaring crowd clapping and cheering her on.

A little later, when we decided it was probably time to head out and let the bar patrons have their fun sans children, the DJ brought over two Post-Its. These yellow notes were where my daughter wrote down the songs she wanted to sing before handing them to the DJ.

“I just thought you might want to keep these as mementos for her first karaoke experience,” he said to me.

And with that, we began her 4th grade year.

Not sure how we’ll top that experirence for 5th grade, but we’ll save that for next year.

Want the same kind of self-confidence boost?

Why not find something your kid has always wanted to do and might be a little reluctant to try and dive in?

You’ll be surprised at how it makes beginning the school year feel thrilling.

Homeschool Organization in Hours, Not Days

The next day, we got home, and I was on a high.

I scurried around organizing the downstairs. If you’re a crafter, you’ll know Joann went out of business last year, and I spent many a paycheck buying up as much yarn as I could, even though I had nowhere to put it all.

Space matters.

We don’t stick to one room as homeschoolers.

It’s not just my upstairs office/classroom I have to keep organized; we often read our novels and complete online math downstairs. Moving from room to room keeps the novelty up and the energy flowing as we work.

So, if you haven’t organized your school space, start there.

Don’t overthink it. Just start.

Take one corner, set a timer for 30 minutes, and make it as neat as you can.

Now, here’s how our first week went:

Monday

I decided not to overload our first few days.

We discussed expectations. I explained what I wanted us to accomplish this year. I also reread my homeschool philosophy and asked my daughter if there was anything she thought we should add or change.

She was still happy with it.

Next, we added in memorizing the Pledge of Allegiance to kick off each day. (Other people might use a prayer or a memorized poem, just something that says we’re getting started)

Then I found a short overview of the Science of Learning. It’s all about how the brain takes in information, and it’s a great way to teach a kid how their working memory can get overloaded quickly before information moves to their long-term memory.

We read a small chunk of it on the first day and continued for the week. We’re not doing a deep dive into some in-depth field of study. I just want my daughter to have a basic understanding of how her brain learns, so it’s just for the first week.

We then started Fix-It Grammar. Each level uses one story that’s printed in the back of the book, so we read the book’s story, Nose Tree. The daily grammar is fairly easy to incorporate in 10-15 minute chunks, using one sentence from that story. Students read the one sentence, mark up the parts of speech, add editing marks for mistakes, and rewrite the sentence.

It’s quick, and my daughter loves the editing portion.

We moved downstairs and dove back into Level 3 Beast Academy—for many people this might look like we’re behind, but Beast Academy runs ahead of the standard math curriculum. It’s Level 3, not necessarily Grade 3. I spent months last year helping her to memorize math facts, which meant we didn’t finish the entire Level.

But it’s not a race; we take math at her pace.

BTW, I just purchased an electronic device called Math Shark to help keep these math facts fresh in my daughter’s mind after watching ’s video on How to Master Math Fact Fluency. I love that we stumbled onto a Substack favorite author by accident! Thanks, Karen! 😊

We rounded out our first school day reading Emily of New Moon.

We’ve just finished Anne of Green Gables, and I love reading a series of novels by the same author—in this case, Lucy Maud Montgomery. I also read The Blue Castle—to get a true sense of this author’s voice. I could never get through that many novels if I were still teaching in a classroom.

We will be taking notes daily on our novels, but for now I just wanted my daughter to enjoy a new story as it unfolds from the beginning.

She finished the day at her piano/keyboard class.

Small bites. That was my goal, and I made it happen.

Tuesday

We started with the Pledge again, read another piece of the Science of Learning, but today I received two new cursive books in the mail.

The last two years we’d attempted to use Handwriting Without Tears, but neither she nor I could get the hang of vertical cursive. We just don’t like it. It’s cursive that doesn’t slant and doesn’t require many loops. Personally, I find it more challenging to learn than the standard slant cursive, because trying to keep your letters straight and to write over the same line for, say, a lowercase “h” rather than just making a loop takes far more control.

I opted instead for an assortment of cursive materials this year:

• IEW’s Cursive Knowledge

• a random book I found on Amazon called Spooky Cursive

• some fancy printable butterfly cursive tracing sheets from Etsy

Sometimes you have to ditch curriculum that’s considered “the best” and use what works for your children.

I took the first page of IEW’s Cursive Knowledge, the first page of Spooky Cursive, and stapled them to the next page of Fix-It Grammar. Now I have an introductory handwriting and grammar packet to kick off each day.

After the grammar, we landed downstairs for our Beast Academy lessons and another chapter of Emily of New Moon.

Our week was evolving slowly and steadily for the new school year with my daughter attending Ninja class late in the afternoon.

Wednesday

By midweek, I felt like we were on a roll:

• The Pledge of Allegiance

• The Science of Learning

• 1 page Cursive Knowledge

• 1 page Spooky Cursive

• 1 page Fix-It Grammar

• A few chapters of Beast Academy

• 1 Chapter of Emily of New Moon

Just like we did the day before, but I made one small change.

We started using my version of Cornell Notes—a useful notetaking system made famous in the 1950s by Cornell University professor Walter Pauk. Rather than having her section out her own paper and take notes nonstop during our reading time, I simplified the process.

I created a worksheet and told my daughter she’d need to write down:

• 3 facts about what we’ve read

• Pose 1 question

• Draw one symbol or image

• Write 2 complete sentences to summarize the story

No extracurricular today meant we were able to take our time implementing this new skill.

If you’d like to read more about the importance of note-taking as a bridge from reading to writing, you can access that at Introducing Note-Taking.

And if you’d like to access the new 3-1-2 note-taking sheets I made on the spot while typing up this Substack post, you can get those at Teachers Pay Teachers for just $1!

GET NOTE-TAKING FOR $1

Thursday

By Thursday, the days were coming together with a nice cadence.

Unfortunately, on this day, I hit a snag.

For K-3, I focused mainly on foundational learning—number sense, math facts, and all the components of language and reading. Unfortunately, that meant we had to cram in science, history, and civics last year right before standardized testing.

I didn’t love that.

Science and Social Studies are becoming more important. And I have to finally admit it.

How could I include more of these subjects in our day without overwhelming us both?

She does love Horrible Histories and Nutty History, but would a few weird videos be enough?

I set out to find a way we could review each historical time period we’ve previously studied. Core Knowledge does a solid job of presenting history alongside language arts. And Core Knowledge is free. But I needed a way to review all previous historical periods before moving on.

I did find the Stone Age videos from Horrible Histories, so we watched them. During the videos, I noticed my daughter was drawing and creating a series of symbols, words, and pictures on a whiteboard.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Adams Chart of History, it is a 23-ft-long timeline of all the events and time periods from pre-history to today.

My daughter gave me an idea.

What if we did something similar, but created a kids’ version?

We could create panels for each historical period using titles, names, interesting fonts, pictures, dates, and symbols.

We’re working on our model now.

As for American history and civics, my daughter loves watching the game shows at PragerU Kids. I keep seeing information saying this site is extremely conservative, but all the content I’ve seen seems pretty moderate.

Beginning next Thursday, my daughter starts an all-day program on a farm with a theme of the American Revolution. I have no idea how that’s going to shape up, and it’s a long drive to get her there, but sharing pick-up and drop-off with my husband means we’ll both have full days to work.

I’m excited that she’ll get a full day to run around outside, get dirty, and learn new things from different teachers. Something I’ll gladly delegate to another teacher/mom who wants to be outside while I stay inside with the A/C on, creating curriculum.

Friday

By Friday, we had our schedule down and nearly our first week of 4th grade in the books.

My daughter woke up, did the dishes, completed typing, reviewed math facts, and played her keyboard all on her own.

This is the lightest I’ve ever felt at the beginning of a homeschool year.

In the afternoon, we moved on to her list of assignments from above, then watched a historical video and worked more on her visual timeline.

But science—it was mocking me. I had no idea what curriculum I was using.

I struggle with getting science in every year.

My husband helps out by doing some activities when he can, but he also gets busy, and then we have breaks in our science learning.

I attempted to use Khan Academy but soon learned the standards are based on the Philippines, and their 4th-grade science doesn’t seem to be fully aligned with what we require locally.

I defaulted to Brain Pop, which my daughter loves, but it’s a series of topics for 3rd-8th grade. There’s no way to know what topics are specifically for 4th grade. Many homeschoolers might not care about this mix of different grade levels, but for me, I like to keep up with the standards by grade.

Just as I was beginning to feel like I failed in the science arena again, two magical options revealed themselves—ahhhhhhhhhh!

I saw an ad for a free year of Mystery Science. Bingo. They offer a specific number of free online passes for their video program.

We’ve attempted to use Mystery Science before, but it didn’t stick. I think she was just too young. But now my daughter can manage the videos on her own.

And then I discovered Mark Rober of CrunchLabs fame is offering free STEM curriculum this year. My daughter loves his TV and has been begging for his—quite expensive—STEM boxes. But while I consider the Christmas List you can rest easily knowing that Class CrunchLabs is offering free curriculum.

Whew! I packed a lot into our first week and a lot into this post, but I see it as a win-win!

Saturday/Sunday

Review.

While our weekends can vary, I try to get in enough time to gather materials and review for the upcoming week. (BTW, I copy all pages of any curriculum we use so I can sell back clean books at a reasonable price. Cha-ching. Both our first two levels of Spellography sold within hours of adding them to eBay)

On the weekends we might have a family event—my daughter was nominated for a few awards at the local theatre Awards Ceremony this weekend.

Or we might hike.

Or my husband may take my daughter to a park or splash pad.

But each weekend, I do these two things:

• I consider what worked and how I can keep doing it by varying it a bit for variety and novelty.

• I honestly reflect on what didn’t work, and I consider how I can either do it better or do something completely different. Sometimes that even means taking a curriculum I thought we would love and selling it to free up time for the stuff that works better.

I plan ahead just enough, so I don’t feel rushed during the week.

So ask yourself on the weekends:

What went better than you expected this week?

What needs some more work? Science. It’s always science for us—but maybe not this year since I found some great options last minute.

What is absolutely essential:

When you kick off the new school year, it’s also a great time to think about what curriculum, classes, or skills are absolutely essential.

For us this year, it’s writing.

Writing is no longer something we casually get to when we feel like it.

I’m taking writing by the horns.

We are using the second book in the series, Writing & Rhetoric, but I’m also ensuring my daughter takes regular notes and uses skills from The Writing Revolution to crystallize her sentence structure.

When we read a chapter in a novel, we’re taking notes. When we watch a science or history video, we’re taking notes. When we listen to an audiobook, we’re taking notes. At least certain days of the week.

Now that we’re done learning phonics and math facts, writing absolutely must be front and center in nearly every subject.

So take stock of what you identify as essential for your homeschool. It may be different for every family and each kid in that family.

What’s essential for your child to focus on this year?

What I’m letting go of:

Now consider what you did last year that may not work this year.

For us, it’s letting go of Handwriting Without Tears and also no longer cramming in material before standardized testing.

This year, we’re going to be more committed to taking small bites each day, using retrieval practice to remember what we’ve learned, and writing it all down using notes and full sentences.

After two years of seeing my daughter score high on standardized tests, I’m also letting go of the mom guilt that I’m not providing the best education at all times. She’s doing great, and clearly she’s learning what she needs to know.

Whether that means boosting her self-confidence at a random karaoke bar the weekend before school starts or writing an essay on an L M Montgomery novel, I’m learning to trust my educational instincts as we further our homeschool experience.

What about you?

What’s working in your homeschool? What do you need to let go of?

Tell me about it in the comments.

I’d love to hear, and I respond to every post.

Leave a comment

There are a lot of mamas who love the idea of teaching their children classic literature. You know I love this idea. It feels perfect in almost every way.

Almost.

There’s one area we need to discuss before you start offering your kids classic books: outdated and problematic language.

Next week, I’m going to give you the playbook for how to handle this so you don’t end up being put on the spot like I was—twice: once in the classroom in front of 25 kids, and another time just last month with my own daughter.

So stay tuned for that next Thursday.

In the meantime, share this post with a homeschool mom who needs some support. Let’s keep talking, sharing, and making homeschool something amazing for our kids and for us, too.

Share

I’m just a busy mom who has opinions on education, parenting, and writing.

But after a year of being on Substack, I’ve realized there are a few things that either keep me reading an article or have me stuffing it in the cave of saved files where it may never come to light again.

I’m writing this piece—I actually started it then deleted it a few times—not to pick on anybody, but to help writers on Substack understand why someone like me may or may not read your article.

Maybe I’m not your ideal audience.

You might not care that some homeschool mom is skipping your content.

Just keep in mind, there are many moms who want to read what you write. Women who will not only read your words, but also comment on them, support you, and share your work. We are some of the biggest cheerleaders on the internet. We might just be your best audience if you get us to stick around long enough.

But you may be doing unintentional things that prevent us from reading.

I’m guilty of setting up articles that don’t work. To fix that behavior, I’m forever learning best practices on Substack and revising them when better ones arrive.

Speaking as a reader—I want to read your articles! I really, really do.

But my time is limited.

What prompted me to finish this piece? Last week, when I had no time to spare and was doing my usual rounds on Substack with 12 mom interruptions, I spotted an article.

An article that stopped me in my tracks.

I read the whole thing in one sitting.

I skimmed it only to find myself starting over from the top and reading every word, while shushing my daughter and ignoring my real life. It was so good I made the time to read it.

Those articles often have some key elements in common.

Here are the 7 key things that catch my eye and get me to read your posts as a busy mom with limited time:

1. Your Title

Where the main idea lives

You guys produce some pretty clever titles.

Clever or not, the truth remains: if I don’t understand the title, I’m skipping the content.

I need to know what I’m getting into before I start reading. The easiest way to do that is by reading the title.

Sure, I can quit reading at any time. But Substack has so many great authors; if I commit to your article, I want to truly commit to it. Abandoning an article halfway through feels like wasted time and gives me the ick. It also means I won’t feel like I can comment on your post.

In other words, I want my time to be valuable for you and for me when I’m reading.

So I start with the title.

Cute and interesting titles are fun, but if it doesn’t explain what’s coming in the rest of the piece, I move on. Using plain, understandable language, at least in the subtitle, can make my decision about reading easier.

Titles and subtitles are great places to give readers the main idea of the entire piece, letting us know instantly what to expect and giving us an opportunity to decide whether or not we should commit.

2. Subheadings

Giving us the breadcrumbs of your story

Subheadings are like the title, but they live throughout your piece of writing.

Using subheadings makes it easier for a reader to scan and skim. When I scan, I zero in on those subheadings. When I skim, I read a little more content to get the gist of the passage. Anyone who’s been to college knows this technique for getting through reading material. These skills translate well to a busy mom reading on Substack, as well.

If I scan a text for subheadings, I get a clearer picture of your article beyond just the main idea in the title. Subheadings function like breadcrumbs on my journey through your work. They lead me in the right direction and tell me where I’m going before I get there.

But they do more than just announce the next section of writing and what big ideas live there. They also break up big sections of text.

Which brings us to…

3. Great Walls of Text

Function like a stop sign for busy moms

In rock history, we had Great Balls of Fire, but on Substack we get Great Walls of Text. The only thing those two have in common is they both:

I can’t read them. I just can’t. They are so intimidating.

I get it. I probably write a lot like you do.

I put down a whole bunch of stuff that’s floating around in my head. It includes a lot of words nobody has time to read. When I first start a piece, I do a brain dump where I keep going and going… and going.

But before I submit an article, I do my absolute best to break it up into sections with subheadings and bold certain words for easy scanning and skimming.

Easy skimming: It’s one of my favorite things right up there with wine. I mean, my only child.

Listen, if you’re using Substack as a journal and you just need to get a lot of emotional content onto a page, by all means, write and drop a giant wall of text. I’m just probably not your audience.

As a busy mom, if I see a Great Wall of Text, I’m skipping the whole article.

So ask yourself:

• Why are you writing on Substack?

• Who’s your target audience?

Maybe I’m not your type.

But what if you’re looking to attract more busy moms to your readership? Women who will like, comment, and share your work? Then consider how you could break up those great walls of text to be visually clearer and move us through the content with ease.

4. Ways to Make Your Words Stand Out

The Big and Bold Way to Get My Attention

Beyond subheadings, there are even more ways to break up your text and make your writing stand out.

Bold words are a key strategy to make words pop on the page.

Figuring out which words to bold when I’m writing a personal article vs. a how-to article is something I’m still getting the hang of. But I would definitely encourage any writer on Substack to skim their own writing before they submit it and bold any words that would catch a reader’s attention and make the content easier to digest.

I think this goes for fiction writers as much as nonfiction writers.

You don’t have to give away the ending. But you could bold some ideas that function like cliffhangers between chapters. Points in the story that would make us want more.

For my nonfiction writing, I bold key phrases the way I’d circle or underline key ideas when reading a book. I might also use italics to emphasize specific words. For example, if I really really like a piece, italics is a good way to point that out.

Bolding phrases or even whole sentences for concepts I want a reader to catch quickly is a go-to for me. And so are italics to emphasize emotions. That means I look for these when I read your article, too.

And don’t forget the block or pull quotes to add a famous quotation or even something significant you say in your writing. I’ve noticed some writers using the callout block, but those feel more like a place for sales offers. My eyes tend to skip over the callout blocks in favor of the block or pull quotes.

I also use dividers to break up sections.

I’ve created my own branded divider. I place these at the beginning and end of my articles, so there’s a clear area where the real content lives in between the introduction and the final CTA or What’s Coming Next section. This means you can get right to the main article.

And don’t forget to use bullet-point lists.

If I read through and find at least three things (sometimes even two) in a row, I turn those into a bullet point list. Again, this helps a reader zero in on that section of content, and it pulls their eyes down towards the finish line.

Whether you bold, italicize, employ bullet points, or use some kind of quote block, the goal here is to help the eye catch certain ideas, keep a reader moving through the piece, and avoid the Great Wall of Text.

5. Who Are You?

When I Can’t Find Your Name to Give You Credit

I had this incorrectly set up on my Substack for a good 9 months until a recent article pointed it out to me.

Substack is such a collaborative platform; I shout out the people whose work I love to read so other busy moms can find them. But I often struggle to do that when I use the @ symbol to locate you.

So many times I simply can’t find you.

Not because you’re not there, but because the name you’ve listed as your profile name is different from the name you use for your @ symbol.

I decided to go with my real first name, then use the | (pipe symbol) and add my publication name, too. I still might be doing this wrong, but I want my one publication to stand out. And I think most people can find me now.

Putting my first name with my publication name, April | The Narrative Nest, has been my best option.

Originally, I was using my publication name for both the newsletter and my profile, and I decided to scrap that when someone asked what they should call me. Yes, it would be weird to be referred to as The Narrative like it was my first name. So, I’m grateful they pointed it out.

If you feel like you need anonymity and want to use only your publication name, I understand. I wrote under a pen name for years. All I’m getting at here is that to share your content so other moms can see it. I need to be able to find you using the @ symbol and feel like I’m calling you the right name when I reach out.

So make sure your naming is clear on your Substack.

Double-check that when someone types in your name, they can pull you up easily. And make it clear how you’d like to be addressed.

6. The Great AI Debate

Useful Technology or 100% Demonology??

AI. We’re all trying to figure it out.

But the dissenters might be in for a surprise if they looked more closely. Most of us may be using AI and not even knowing it. More and more companies are embedding AI into their technologies; technologies we use daily.

Do I think we should question its use? Definitely.

But screaming: I’m blocking you for using AI!!!!

Can we stop doing that, please?

Pretty please.

There’s been some powerful work written with nuance on the subject of AI. Work by , , and . I would suggest anyone weighing in on the AI debate read their work before making a judgment call.

As for me, I can draw by hand, and I’m a damn good writer.

If AI didn’t exist, creatively speaking, I’d be okay.

What I lack is time.

Pulling everything off seamlessly is a difficult maneuver.

In the past, we’d have entire departments to get done what one person is expected to make happen on Substack: graphic design departments, researchers, and editing teams.

Yet, many of us are working for free and can’t afford to hire one assistant.

So if technology can help me work more efficiently, I’m using it.

AI is not replacing my brain, my words, or my ideas. It’s filling in gaps and helping me make better use of my time.

Should we be concerned about data centers and environmental issues? Absolutely. But that should be an ever-present concern no matter the cause.

As far as AI detection to know who’s… erm… using AI… referred to that as a purity test, and I love her for saying that.

Go ahead and sew your Scarlet Letter on now, folks!

AI software looking for other AI to say the second AI is bad but not the first AI that’s looking for the second AI.

Whew! That’s a whirlwind.

I’ve recently taken classes on curriculum development where I’m instructed to NEVER make AI covers, yet the writing, directions, and research are fine if they’re all AI-based. Huh?

So, some AI is okay, but other AI is…???

If you’re on Substack, you’re most likely using AI in some capacity, whether you realize it or not. There was technology before us, and there’ll be technology after we’re gone.

I tend to sum up AI this way:

I use knives and fire in the kitchen every day.

Do I cut or burn myself? On occasion, yes. Nothing major, but is there a potential for a house fire or cutting off my finger on accident?

Always. If I’m not careful.

Still, I’m not giving up my knives and fire to cook.

I’m not interested in eating room-temperature raw meat and veg.

I quite like the risky technology that helps me prepare a good meal for my family. And just because I use these tools doesn’t mean I’m not actually cooking the meal myself. With every cooking session, I’m improving my knife skills and perfecting the temperature I’m cooking with to produce a meal.

Likewise, most of us use AI not to cheat, but to make our own work more efficient so we can continue to participate and connect on Substack.

As a reader, what I’m skipping out on are the lengthy articles that denigrate anyone who may use AI at all for anything.

7. Available Audio

Listening is a Viable Alternative to Reading

Speaking of AI, voiceovers reading your articles used to be a function you had to provide yourself. While it would be lovely if everyone had the time to sit down and record themselves reading their articles in their own word, I, for one, am glad this audio feature is automatic now.

I’ve seen a few voiceovers that require a paid membership.

When I go in to find my voiceovers, they don’t pop up until I’m on the mobile Substack app, so double-check you can access your own or someone else’s voiceovers without issue.

But I believe most available Substack articles now have automatic audio.

To ensure you’ve got a voice you like reading your articles, do this:

1. Go into your Dashboard

2. Then go to your Settings

3. Stay in Basics and scroll down to Read-aloud voice; you can choose whatever automated voice you’d like.

Once you write and publish an article, the voiceover is automatically available for your work, which can be a LIFE SAVER for busy moms.

I digest more content by listening than reading simply because I can get through so much content while I do chores.

Every night when I cook, I’m listening to stuff like Dr. Death or other crazy true crime podcasts. Recently, I discovered I could switch over and listen to all my saved Substacks while I’m cooking.

All I have to do is go into my Subscriptions and click on Saved.

Once I find an article I want to listen to, I click on the arrow button at the top of the page.

If Substack was smart, they’d figure out how to make that first audio roll right into the next one for continuous play, but alas, we can’t have it all.

I’m still more likely to get to your work if I can listen while I’m cooking or cleaning than if I have to sit down. Reading is great, but it’s just not always the best option for busy moms.

In fact, I had food in the oven last night and thought I had time to read one Substack article. Nope. Midway through, I burnt half of my food. Had I been listening to that article instead of reading it, I would’ve never set off the fire alarm.

Substack even allows you to turn on two buttons right above the Read-aloud voice feature:

• Additional post languages

• Allow automatic translations

Yes, of course this means there could be mistranslations, but I say why not go for it? Why not give access to people who may not speak the same language as you? It’s one more option for accessibility.

There are plenty of ways to get supportive moms to follow your work. You just have to be willing to make the words on the page more accessible to us.

Next week I’ll be showing you how I’ve made my homeschool work for us this year instead of feeling like we’re drowning. If you’re just getting started with homeschool, you may want to take a look.

Homeschool once felt like my biggest struggle, but it now is the easiest part of my day.

If you homeschool, you might not start your year until September or October.

Or maybe you do year-round homeschool, and one flows into the next.

My goal today isn’t to tell you how to set up your year. It’s to give you some tools BEFORE you need them. So don’t stress. Just read this at your leisure as a little boost before you get going on the next grade level, so you’re covered.

The Wrong Preparation

I’ve said “…in the unlikely event of a water landing” more times than I’ve said “see ya after school” to my daughter.

Yes, I homeschool, and yes, in my former life, I was once a high school English teacher and a flight attendant. Not at the same time. But it is interesting how much those two careers have in common.

Mostly there’s a lot of preparation.

Consider the safety briefing. It’s not there for the flight that goes well.

Nobody needs the exit row demonstration when a plane lands on time with good service and a mild tailwind. The briefing exists entirely for the four minutes that might go wrong, on a flight where everything else went right.

And if there are any teachers out there reading this, you know what I’m talking about, too. This is exactly why you have fire escape plans and lockdown drills, even when you’ve been teaching for 10 years and have yet to use any of them.

Every summer, homeschool parents get ready for the next school year.

If this is you, maybe you get organized by:

• Attending curriculum sales or homeschool expos

• Purchasing some version of the Pinterest supply list or the color-coded bins on sale at Amazon

• Applying a “new year, new mindset” via some influencer

I’ve tried all of these myself.

There’s nothing wrong with any of them; in fact, you may find some of it works for you. No family is going to fail at homeschool because they didn’t buy the right supply bin.

But consider how you may struggle because nobody briefed the entire crew before the doors closed. You jumped into homeschool on Day 1 with your curriculum, but you didn’t set up a contingency plan.

As a former flight attendant, let me give you the actual briefing you deserve to have with your seatback in the full upright and locked position.

“In The Unlikely Event”

The single most useful thing I ever learned in a jet bridge: you brief for the bad event while everyone is calm, because nobody can absorb instructions once the terrifying event happens.

Homeschool planning tends to only map the good days:

• Monday: math, spelling, read-alouds.

• Tuesday: science and civics

• Wednesday: co-op

This is fine for most days, but it’s a flight plan with no contingency for heavy weather, and trust me, heavy weather is coming.

It might be a sick kid who has to stay home from a co-op when you have a deadline, a meltdown at the grocery store when you’re in a hurry, or a week when the only thing that gets completed is basic survival.

If your plan has no room for that kind of day, the whole system doesn’t just hit turbulence and then smooth itself out; it crashes. And this leaves you feeling like you’re not just behind—but like you’re a homeschool failure.

You’re not a homeschool failure and shouldn’t feel like one either.

Locate your nearest exits before you need them.

What does a scaled-back day look like in your house?

Not in theory, but in reality? Practice it ahead of time.

What’s the bare minimum that still counts as “we did school today”?

Decide that now, in late July or early August, while you’re calm and caffeinated. Not at 7 AM on the actual bad day when you’re trying to figure things out with a crying toddler, an elementary kid, and a cold.

“Secure Your Own Mask Before Assisting Others”

You know this line.

You’ve heard it enough times to say it in your sleep, and yet you still don’t apply it, and neither did I for most of my early years teaching or homeschooling.

It’s not actually about oxygen. It’s about sequencing.

You’re chemically, physically incapable of helping anyone else while you yourself aren’t breathing.

So, no, it’s not a generic self-care platitude, like treat yourself to a bubble bath or whatever. It’s an operational fact: the parent is the crew member responsible for everyone else’s ability to function, and a depleted crew member can’t manage the entire plane.

Your kids can tell.

They always know when their parent/teacher has stopped believing her own script.

So before you add one more thing to the kids’ schedule this year, add one thing to yours.

Will it be:

• A cup of coffee every morning that’s actually still hot when you drink it?

• Thirty minutes to yourself before anyone else is awake?

• Writing time without interruption?

And then apply this to how you open your day with your children.

Rather than just jumping into the to-dos, start with a greeting, a poem, a Bible verse, or the Pledge of Allegiance.

I was never into all those formalities growing up.

In fact, in my junior year of high school, I discovered a lot about what the United States had done in the world and outright refused to pledge each morning in school. I was a mini idealist who wanted justice to matter.

Today, I just want a home that has flow.

My 9-year-old got so excited about the 250th anniversary of America that she demanded my husband buy her two small American flags. So, now I’ve decided to start each day with the Pledge of Allegiance.

It’s a small decision that provides us with consistency, knowledge of our country, and a daily introduction.

My daughter can rebel against injustice when she’s a teenager. And I’ll find a way to work that into our curriculum.

For now, I’m eager to pull her into each school day with something she can easily memorize and something that feels like a little ritual.

Choose whatever your version of putting your own mask on first actually looks like. And then give your passengers their safety instructions; that’s the key. It’s not indulgent or a time-waster. It’s a sequence that sets the tone and gets everyone focused.

“Cross-Check and All-Call”

Before a flight moves anywhere, every jump seat reports in.

Doors get armed, cross-checked, and confirmed.

Nobody starts the pushback on a guess.

This is your kickoff conversation with your children—the one most families skip because it feels like a formality. But it’s actually the thing that prevents the most arguments in October or even April.

Sit down before the year starts and say the plan out loud to each other.

You want to have a conversation.

Here’s:

• roughly what this year will look like

• what I need from you

• what you can expect from me

• what we do on the bad days

Let them ask questions and even push back a little. A student who was briefed is a student who’s a crew member, not a passenger who got dragged onto a flight he wasn’t expecting to take.

You can even come up with your own homeschooling philosophy or vision/mission statement together. We created one to truly identify what our goals for homeschooling would be each year.

When things feel chaotic during the year, I pull it out to remind myself and my daughter not just what we’re doing, but why we’re doing it.

Here’s our Homeschool Mission Statement:

You can make this as basic or elaborate as you like. Make it secular, religious, patriotic, or philosophical.

Just put down a reason for why you are doing what you do as a homeschooling family and make sure the kids have some ownership over this statement, too.

Landing

Sure, everybody loves to clap after a great landing.

But nobody claps for a good pre-flight briefing because it seems boring.

Few people remember the flight attendant who got everything right.

But they sure do remember turbulence or a delay. They also remember that one time the guy in 14C had a meltdown over the overhead bin situation.

The good, boring, properly briefed flight is the one that just happens, and everyone disembarks and forgets your name when they’re exiting the airport.

But that’s exactly what you want.

Most of homeschooling is like that, too.

The good days don’t feel dramatic. They feel like a boring Thursday.

That’s not because nothing happened—it’s because you briefed for it. You built the exits in before you needed them, you put your own mask on first, you cross-checked with your crew before you ever left the gate.

And then you get well-adjusted children who score high on standardized tests, or who go out into the world and are kind and empathic to everyone.

So, when you get to the end of the year—maybe you haven’t finished your old one yet—you can mark it with celebration.

• Do a mini graduation ceremony

• Go somewhere fun like a restaurant you love or an indoor park

• Make a small diploma for your child

• Use Shutterfly or some other service to create a yearbook and highlight all the big accomplishments of the year.

Whatever you decide, make sure you do something to say this is the beginning and this is the ending of our school year.

Make it special and make it count.

Have a good year. You’re fully briefed and ready to fly.

This year, I’ve created a boarding pass for your homeschool.

My first product is up on Teachers Pay Teachers, and it’s an editable attendance tracker.

I’ve needed this tracker for the last 4 years, but never could find it, so I built it myself. It includes 18 different templates to keep you compliant no matter what state you live in.

You can choose between the tracker that focuses on required hours or days, or the one that keeps count using open time. All you have to do is type in daily hours or check off boxes. The Canva formula adds everything up for you so you know exactly how much time you’ve spent homeschooling.

There are even specific directions with screenshots on how to set up those days and hours so the tracker will keep a running total and show you how much time you have left in your school year.

The Attendance Tracker also includes a Year At A Glance Calendar you can print with July, August, and September start dates.

Best of all, the Attendance Tracker is free for the new school year.

GET YOUR FREE ATTENDANCE TRACKER NOW

I’m kidding.

I’m a redhead who doesn’t love summer, but there are days I join my family on outdoor adventures to make some memories, despite all the prep work to prevent myself from becoming a burn victim.

Yes, sometimes I play along anyway.

Yesterday was not one of those days.

We were headed to see my daughter’s “fighting off bad guys” demo after a week at Safety Camp. She learned all about Stranger Danger, fire, water, outdoor, and home safety.

I got in the car on a July day in Georgia.

The minute I sat down, I noticed the vent was blowing nothing but hot air. I was ready to march back inside the house—actually, I did to get a couple of ice packs. Naturally, I was threatening divorce and vowing to no longer participate in summer outings. At. All. If I had to endure a summer in a car with no air conditioning.

Perimenopause rage and heat intolerance are no joke.

I told my husband I seriously wasn’t leaving the house until October.

I may not.

I did my best to calm down, and to my pleasant surprise, the bad guy demo was inside. Air conditioning!

There is a God! 🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻

And yes, I apologized to my husband.

Where’s My Participation Trophy?

When we were vacationing in St. Augustine in April, after we’d seen the Fountain of Youth and Ripley’s Believe It or Not, and after we’d decided to go to dinner at a French restaurant, I was willing to make the trek to the Castillo de San Marcos National Monument.

Granted, April, even in Florida, is not July in Georgia.

When the topic of visiting Castillo de San Marcos came up, I didn’t fight it.

It was historical.

It was educational.

It was sandwiched between weird stuff at the indoor Ripley’s museum and a Brie Truffle Honey Sandwich at the French restaurant.

How could I say no?

Nope, I didn’t hesitate.

I was happy to accompany my family through the thick humidity toward the massive stone monument, where there was no circulating air. To learn things and… sweat. A lot. YAY! Detoxification.

Yes, yes, the place was a stone monument to the Spanish conquistadors and all that history. But what got my attention most was when the park ranger asked my daughter what grade she was in.

“Next year, you should sign up,” the ranger told her, “4th graders get a free pass to enter all federal parks nationwide.”

FREE!

It’s a swooning word for all us homeschooling mamas.

Every Kid Outdoors—Even if Moms Want to Stay Inside

If you don’t know about this program, it’s called Every Kid Outdoors, and it does indeed give your U.S. fourth grader and their family (that’s you) free entry to over 2,000 federal recreation sites nationwide. The pass covers your student and any accompanying passengers in the same vehicle.

Think about it.

If you’ve got 4 kids, they’ll all be 4th graders at some point, and you’ll all get free access for a full year for everyone in your family— that’s 4 years to enjoy the national parks and federal lands all over the US!

The Every Kid Outdoors pass is valid from September 1 of their fourth-grade year through August 31 of the following year.

***Just note that if you want to use it before September, you can sign up and print a paper pass. But that pass will expire August 31, 2026, so you’ll need to print a new one for the school year beginning September 1.

You don’t even have to put in any personal information.

You just have your child answer a few game-like questions (or you can answer them), and a printable paper pass pops up. There are also certain locations where you can trade your paper pass in for a plastic one, so you don’t have to continually print out new passes as your paper one degrades.

Look, as a current perimenopausal mama, the last thing I want to do is pack up and go spend a day outside in 75% humidity.

But fall is right around the corner, and there are so many great options with this nationwide pass.

For us in Georgia, the pass means:

• Seeing endangered species at the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge

• Learning war history at the Andersonville National Historic Site

• Camping at Doll Mountain in the North Georgia Mountains

Okay, so I’m not going camping, but I absolutely plan for us to do more hiking once the leaves start to change. And those are just things to do in our one state. With the pass, you have access to all parks nationwide!

Yes, even a redhead like me can make use of this gift with her family this year.

A Change of Perspective

Suppose you’re not a nature lover, but your child is?

I discovered a workaround for that, too!

Recently, while my daughter was in Safety Camp, I got the rare opportunity to take some professional development classes. If you don’t know, PaTTAN—Pennsylvania Training and Technical Assistance Network—is the bomb when it comes to the Science of Reading and Literacy. They host a PaTTAN Literary Symposium every other year, and all the free classes have just been posted. Go check them out!

The biggest names in SOR teach classes on topics like explicit instruction, reading issues for older students, and instructional design.

I was playing a phone game called Arrows Go while watching the classes.

I know. I know. I should be focused on the teaching, but it keeps my hands busy. I realized that after about 425 levels into this game, I had failed to notice the simplest technique right at my fingertips.

If I get stuck on a level, all I have to do is rotate my phone. And a path appears.

Ta-dah! New perspective.

So now, I’m turning my phone 360 degrees to see opportunities from every possible angle.

This is how homeschooling works.

If you find yourself up against a wall, you look at it from a different perspective and work it out.

I wouldn’t exactly say my daughter is a nature lover; she’s a little socialite who wants to be where the action is among friends. And lately that’s been in the woods. So, we had to change up our school schedule this year.

We found a homeschool, parent-run organization that meets for one full day a week on a farm, teaching everything from games to survival skills around a specific educational or historical theme.

Yep, starting in August, she’ll be off to run wild in the woods for one full day of the week. She’ll get to work with farm animals, do some gardening, rope knotting—or whatever that class is—and get BB rifle training. They’re even discussing beekeeping for future classes.

And that means I get a day off from teaching to catch up on curriculum planning and admin stuff without having to trek through the woods to entertain my daughter.

I’m incredibly grateful for the parents who step up and teach this program; I just happen not to be one of them. If you want me to teach creative writing or come up with a Socratic class on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, I’m your girl.

But P.E. and woodsy stuff: you’re best to leave me out of it.

I’m seeing this as a win-win.

We tilted our perspective.

Just like I did with the Arrows Go game.

I’ll go hiking in the fall, and my daughter will get all-day social time with her friends in the woods.

Keep my example in mind as you start your homeschool year.

Check out what is being offered locally in your area around homeschooling. Home education is iconically associated with being outside A LOT! But some of us truly aren’t outdoorsy people. Or there’s a mismatch between our personality and our outdoorsy children. Or vice versa.

There’s almost certainly some kind of workaround for your family.

What To Teach? What to Pay For?

You may need to teach as many classes as possible when you homeschool, but carefully consider which skills you can provide vs. areas where your children may need to learn from someone else.

This doesn’t always mean paying big bucks.

Sometimes it’s just trading time with another mom. Or finding alternative ways to learn. Reserving the bigger financial investments for the things you or your significant other can’t teach on your own.

For example, I would never enroll my daughter in an art class. For one, art was my specialty, and there’s plenty I can teach her. Secondly, she’d most likely turn it into a social engagement, distracting everyone from the actual lessons. She seemed interested in drawing last year when I had her buddy over for English tutoring. He was a natural-born artist who loved to doodle and draw, but when the year ended, my daughter admitted the truth to me:

She was only interested in art because he was.

So no, I’m not paying big money for art classes.

I tend to intertwine art appreciation with language arts, and then when she takes an interest in something artistic, I coach her on it until she loses interest in about a day.

We also don’t pay for swim lessons. There’s a small pool in our neighborhood, and my husband was a lifeguard and swim team member in high school, so he’s the one devoted to her aquatic interests.

Now we did spring for Mermaid Camp this year, because who could teach your child to be a mermaid better than the mermaids of Weeki Wachee?

No one! I simply don’t possess those skills.

My daughter’s also shown an aptitude for music from an early age. Neither my husband nor I possess music skills. We knew this was an area we’d need some outside support.

Providing our own swim and art lessons and covering all the core curriculum at home frees up money for things like ongoing music classes and mermaid camp.

It can be really challenging to figure out how to balance all of this, but take an inventory. Note:

• What you’re good at

• What you can teach/What you’d like to teach

• Where you’re going to need some outside support

Then decide where to best allocate your resources.

I also want to give a big shout-out to my friend Young for her help recently after I had surgery. She took my daughter to the park and to the splash pad several days while I was recovering.

She’s the fun mom, while I’m the get-it-done mom.

We all have our strengths.

Consider how you could work with another mom to balance out your children’s and her children’s needs.

I taught her son language arts last year, so this trade has really worked out for both of us. And I couldn’t be happier with how we use our specific skills to personalize our homeschools. We’re just two families—me and one other mom—figuring out how to step up and help each other.

Homeschooling really can be that simple.

So ask yourself: How will you make this homeschool year easier on yourself?

Your Homework

How can you make this homeschool year easier for yourself?

• What are your talents, gifts, and strengths? The things you’re best at and would love to show someone how to do? No outside help needed.

• What areas of homeschooling require you to do the work and no one else?

• In what areas do you need some support?

• What areas can you delegate to someone else?

• Who can you rely on to come through for you?

• What local organizations offer free or discounted days or events for homeschoolers?

• What extracurricular activity or membership group is worth splurging on to ensure your kids get what they need?

• Are there inexpensive or short-term programs that can help balance your free time with your child’s need for activities?

• If you’re signing up for the Every Kid Outdoors free pass, what parks do you plan to visit?

Don’t forget to get your pass for your 4th graders.

Go to Every Kid Outdoors and sign up for the full year!

To read more about taking your curriculum on the road, you can start with my series Get Lost:

Or read how last year we created our own Beach School:

We also focused on some specific examples of Illuminated Lettering. The Book of Kells incorporates large initial letters, fanciful drawings of people and animals, and Celtic knotwork. This form of marginalia is rooted in ancient history and features intricate woven patterns that symbolize the interconnectedness of all living things.

An Artform and a Business Idea

You already know that I was a little weirdo who learned calligraphy at the same time I was taught cursive and tried to teach my 3rd-grade classmates this elaborate handwriting for a quarter a lesson on the playground.

You also know that in my early 20s, I started trying my hand at illuminated lettering as an art form and a meditative practice.

What you probably don’t know is that in my late 20s, I ended up in Tempe, Arizona, with a 1/2 Italian, 1/2 Irish boyfriend from New York City who looked like he should have been planted in the kitchen of a pizzeria but instead worked as a bartender for an Irish pub.

The pub was unceremoniously stuck in a strip plaza with no foot traffic.

Sure, the crowds spilled out the door on St. Patrick’s Day or whenever Flogging Molly and the Dropkick Murphys played around the corner at the Marquee Theatre, but on ordinary Friday nights, the place was dead.

No amount of Cranberries or Pogues albums on the old jukebox was going to get anyone in there, except for maybe a Wednesday night dart tournament.

The owner wanted to put an ad in the local newspaper, so my boyfriend suggested the pub use my talents. Working full-time for an engineering firm I hated, I had abandoned my illuminated lettering years earlier. I just didn’t have the time to pull out gold leafing on the weekends while running errands and prepping my lunches for the week.

But a pencil and paper—I could handle that!

So, I started noodling with the structure of Celtic knotwork.

I was drawn to the geometry of laying down perfectly straight lines, many of which I would later erase, to work through the knotwork’s grid. This grid technique was as meditative as the lettering I’d previously mastered.

The pub included my knotwork in their small, nearly unnoticeable ad in the local paper. It was successful enough to bring in a trickle of new business, but the plaza eventually succumbed to an apartment complex that went up in its place.

I still think fondly of how that focused time drawing out the knotwork by hand taught me that my art had a purpose and a place. It gave me a reason to come home from my dreary job and make something real with my own hands.

But where does knotwork come from?

The History of Knotwork

We can go back to the Book of Durrow, thought to have been created between 675 and 700 AD, which contains the four gospels of the New Testament.

In the video below, you’ll notice the drop caps with the giant first letter of the body of text, but here you get something even more. You’ll find detailed knotted patterns inside that main letter.

But knotwork isn’t found only in medieval biblical texts. It actually first appeared on stonework in pagan forms.

The even bigger mystery: Is this knotwork strictly Celtic?

As someone currently attempting to trace my family lineage, I’m not finding that this question can be answered straightforwardly. Instead, Viking, Celtic, Germanic, Anglo-Saxon, and even Roman history blended together into a stew on the British Isles. And much the same can be said for tracing the beginnings of knotwork. Its history is just as intricately entangled as the lines of its patterns.

But if you’re curious about it, this video speaks to the interweaving of that history.

In 2000, I took a trip to Ireland with my father and visited the Newgrange World Heritage Site, home to Neolithic monuments in Ireland’s Boyne Valley. Interestingly, these mounds, when viewed from above, bear a striking resemblance to the Etowah Indian Mounds here in Georgia.

The difference, however, is that at the entrance stone and inside the chamber of Newgrange, you find carvings of the distinctive triple-spiral pattern. These spiral patterns were thought to have been carved over 5,000 years ago and to predate the Celts by 2,500 years.

Despite not being clearly connected to one particular culture, the megalithic stone provides something far more important. Due to the way the stones were crafted, each winter solstice, a beam of sunlight breaks through an open area above the entrance at sunrise, casting light down to illuminate the chamber’s triple spiral.

And what could this spiral symbolize:

• Cycles of Time: Life, death, and rebirth.

• Cosmic Elements: Earth, water, and sky.

• Spiritual Journeys: Mind, body, and spirit

So, while the true historical and cultural beginnings of knotwork may remain a mystery, these patterns have invaded the margins of many a manuscript for 1,300 years and stone work for much, much longer. Their appearance in texts as early as the 7th century, expounding upon the meanings found in those stone carvings, still speaks to us as truly timeless and human symbols.

Consider the interwoven patterns as a nod to the journeys we all must follow in life, which are intertwined with the journeys of so many others.

If you need to be pointed in the right direction. Literally. The manicule is a symbol often found in the margins of old textbooks.

Follow the pointed hand to learn more. ☞

Read last week’s Cryptids and Otherworldly Beings here.

This is not to say that I won’t be back with more roadside Americana in the future. But this one is our bridge from travel to the mystery curriculum.

Don’t discount anything along your way. Prepare yourself for miracles.

Lost or Found?

When I was about nine years old, I spent the night at a friend’s house, planning to attend church with her the next morning. This was the standard Arkansas girls’ sleepover of the mid-1980s. My family, transplants from Georgia due to my father’s work, was decidedly non-religious. We were now residing in the buckle of the Bible Belt, which not only wrapped around this geographical region but also squeezed it tightly into its day-to-day form.

My friend went to an evangelical church, and her Bible school had provided her with a workbook to list her childhood friends’ names and, beside each one, write whether they were lost or saved.

Quite a job for a nine-year-old.

Of course, when she briefly left her room, I saw her book lying open on her bed and took a peek. There was the word “lost” scrawled next to my name.

I think about that workbook now as someone who thoughtfully designs curriculum for my daughter and other children.

I contemplate the adults who crafted it and the assumption, common in many corners of American Protestantism even today, that a nine-year-old is theologically equipped to sort her playmates into eternal categories. I think about my friend, who was not unkind or cruel, just compliant. She was given homework, and she completed it.

And I think about how, almost forty years later, I’m still, quietly, persistently, responding to that workbook in how I handle spiritual matters.

My Southern Childhood

My mother grew up Methodist, but was a military brat who spent her early childhood in places like Japan and Morocco. She developed an ecumenical way of looking at religions, so much so that in her adult life, she mostly went with the flow.

My father had no flow.

He’d served his time as a child in Southern Baptist congregations and swore in adulthood he’d never enter a church again.

This made us stand out in this small Arkansas town. My father’s refusal to join any congregation meant my mother didn’t feel comfortable attending church alone, and I got to spend Sundays on art instead of God.

This was a dry county, with no alcohol served except at the local Ramada Inn, since that was the one place in town to host out-of-town businessmen. My father and two of his buddies would go there every Wednesday night for what they jokingly called Prayer Meeting, while their wives—except for my mother—attended mid-week church services.

Sure, my father bonded with his male friends who dismissed his “heathen” ways during their drinking sessions, but I couldn’t say I found my place among all the religious school kids.

A few years before we arrived in Arkansas, my father got his first transfer to Louisiana—a decidedly better fit for my family. Around Baton Rouge, everyone was Catholic. And Catholics lean far more heavily on fun than their Protestant cousins, just north of the stateline. In Louisiana, there were parades, crawfish boils, big weddings, state fairs, and drinking, drinking, and more drinking.

My mother informed me that her first encounter with my father in Louisiana, on a business trip, was to boat down the swamp until they reached a party barge, where they were greeted by a man wearing an eye patch.

Local color.

It tends to snake through a place and gobble everything up.

This was especially true in South Louisiana.

By contrast, South Arkansas was beige and tightly wound.

But that’s where we ended up and remained for my elementary years—the primary years for developing spiritual formation.

You might think that would make me more like my father, and I’d reject religion.

But I had something my father didn’t have.

The exposure to widely divergent brands of Christianity and a need to understand what made them so different.

The folksy and festive Louisiana Catholicism I’d experienced made me feel like religion could be wild and esoteric before I’d ever encountered the austere, musicless Church of Christ in Arkansas.

That contrast set the stage for a lifelong spiritual quest.

The Catalog I Didn’t Realize I Was Keeping

Pilgrimage is a strange thing.

It can take a person a long time to recognize you’re even on one.

That’s because recognized practice gets recorded, while unrecognized practice simply gets lived.

People who go to church on Sundays count those Sundays. They mark each Easter and Christmas. They can tell you which liturgical season it is, which feast is next, and what they gave up for Lent.

In other words, their practice has a calendar.

But what if you’re like me and you have no spiritual dates to keep?

What I had was curiosity. The habit of walking into a sacred space, almost every time one was near me, over the entire span of my adult life. I never wrote it down or thought of it as anything in particular. It was just one detour in my travels. The same way I’d stop at an unplanned exit to visit a roadside dinosaur or sign up for a local ghost tour.

Tourism with incense, some might say.

But I now see these adventures as a bigger spiritual unfolding.

I have been to the Buddhist temple in Honolulu, where our tour guide told us the temple was a replica, so we didn’t have to take off our shoes. I didn’t trust his advice, but I followed his instructions anyway. Once inside the temple, a woman looked down at my feet and sneered, “Shoes in the temple.” Ashamed, I’ve been sticking to my gut on spiritual matters ever since.

I have been to the first mission in San Francisco, Mission San Francisco de Asís. I arrived alone on a trip while my aunt, who I was working for at the time, was teaching at a conference. I slipped away to find it. There was a new automatic-pay bathroom in the middle of town, and the instructions clearly stated that if you weren’t done in 20 minutes, the sliding doors would open on you anyway. With all my anxiety about navigating a strange new place and these wild bathrooms, I took solace in the mission afterward, feeling grateful that I didn’t expose my backside to the city of San Francisco.

I have been to the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC, where I talked a boyfriend into going with me to see the glittering mosaics in the vast sanctuary. It was the first time I felt like I was truly adding a pilgrimage to my list of things to do on a city visit.

I did not accompany my father on his travels abroad, but I did make a request of him. To bring me back a Virgin Mary icon from St. Petersburg, Russia. I knew nothing about the Russian Orthodox Church at the time, but, interestingly, I’m now reading the Orthodox Bible and finding it more in line with my spiritual beliefs than anything else to date.

I have been to Newgrange in Ireland, the 5,000-year-old passage tomb, older than the pyramids, aligned with the winter solstice sunrise, and I have the three-spiral symbol necklace from the gift shop as proof of my journey.

I have been to a grotto for the Virgin Mary somewhere between Sligo, Donegal, and Derry, on our way to the North of Ireland. This was the kind of small Irish Marian site that doesn’t make it into tourist brochures but connects you to something bigger than yourself.

I have climbed Chichén Itzá in Mexico alone when my then-husband refused to walk up with me, and I’m thankful I worked up the courage to do it. Getting back to the ground was a bit harder, and I had to sit and maneuver myself down the stairs on my butt. But I’m thankful I did it. It’s my understanding that tourists are no longer allowed to walk to the top, but I can say I did.

I have been to the San Xavier del Bac Mission outside Tucson and walked the steep climb to the cross on the hill, even though my travel buddy refused to do so. I’ve found that going the extra step is my way of saying I’m making the effort. Whether God cares about that or not, it’s my way to prove I have it in me to keep going. If these beautiful places appear to me, I can make the effort to go a little further. It’s a motto I take with me into everything I do in life.

This is also where I purchased a heart milagros in the gift shop—remember that.

I have been to The Grotto at Saint Leo in Florida.

I have walked the streets of the Tucson All Souls Festival with the giant skeletons and the candle-lit procession of attendees carrying pictures of their dead relatives. The one time of the year that is supposed to close the gap between this world and the next each November.

I have gone to Madrid, Spain, for two weeks by myself, gotten on a train without speaking much Spanish, and traveled to the walled city of Avila to find the convent and the room where St. Teresa wrote about the soul as a castle with many mansions. Convento de Santa Teresa in Ávila was one of my most cherished places of pilgrimage.

While dating my current husband, I talked him into visiting the Loretto Chapel in Santa Fe, New Mexico, home to a mysterious spiral staircase carved from a single piece of wood, with no nails, screws, or wooden pegs.

I have been to Christ Church Cathedral in Indianapolis.

I have, on Easter morning during flight attendant training, walked with my Italian roommate to the DFW Airport Terminal Chapel because she didn’t have any other options for Mass and didn’t want to be alone on the holiest day of her year.

I have been to the Basilica of the National Shrine of Mary, Queen of the Universe in Orlando, after my family finally saved enough to take my daughter to Disney World, because I wanted to say thank you.

I have been to Mission Nombre de Dios in St. Augustine, where our family sat in a shrine for Our Lady of La Leche behind a crying couple. I believe they either lost a child or were praying to have one, so we said a prayer for them.

I have been to St. Michael’s Shrine in Tarpon Springs, the Greek Orthodox holy site my husband and I discovered after dropping my daughter off at Mermaid Camp. We felt a bit clueless in front of the tiny altar, surrounded by women kissing all the icons, but we simply let ourselves take in the sights, smells, and sounds of the place.

I have been to the Chapel of the Holy Dove, the tiny A-frame chapel in the woods on Highway 180 between Flagstaff and the Grand Canyon, built by a country doctor in 1962, burned by a transient’s campfire in 1999, rebuilt by an 18-year-old college student and her community in 2000, open 24/7 to any traveler. The door is held shut by a rock, and the walls are covered in Post-it note prayers.

I walked up to the Chapel of the Holy Cross in Sedona, Arizona, when I was pregnant, and breathing was at a premium. It was there I was able to contemplate where I was in the world, which happened to be amid the Vortexes (yep, they don’t say Vortices), or swirling energies known to have healing effects on visitors.

I have made three trips to the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles, the library Manly P. Hall built so that every wisdom tradition—Christian mystical, Hermetic, Buddhist, Sufi, Vedic, Cabalistic—could share a shelf and is perhaps the greatest library around. It’s here where my husband and I were allowed to hold a 17th-century book in our hands.

And in January of this year, we drove forty-five minutes from home to visit the Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Conyers, the Trappist (Cistercian) abbey where twenty-two silent monks still pray Vigils at four o’clock every morning, in a Norman Gothic church they built themselves stone by stone between 1944 and 1960.

It was my second trip there.

None of these trips would mean much to a Sunday churchgoer. I’m not giving money to a congregation, participating in an ongoing liturgy, or claiming to be part of any one community.

What I am doing is giving myself over to the spirit. And that requires me to be out of my comfort zone, to seek out something that involves risk, and to often raise more questions than I answer.

It’s my participation in the mystery.

The Map

I never made this list before or saw a need to.

When I finally created it, what struck me first was the geography.

Hawaii. Ireland. Mexico. Spain. Russia (by proxy). California. Washington, DC. Florida. Arkansas. Indiana. New Mexico. Arizona. Texas. Georgia.

What struck me second was the theology.

Catholic Marian devotion. Trappist contemplative. Greek Orthodox. Buddhist. Celtic pagan. Mesoamerican Indigenous. Esoteric Western mystery. Airport ecumenical.

I did not pick a tradition.

I picked the practice.

For most of my adult life, I have been a one-woman, low-budget, untheorized, undertheorized, unrecorded pilgrimage circuit. I have walked into sanctuaries where I didn’t know the rules, climbed up to crosses my partners wouldn’t climb with me, gotten on trains in countries where I didn’t speak the language to find the cell of a 16th-century mystic, and lit candles in shrines belonging to traditions that would not have lit candles for me.

This is, in fact, my religion.

What Pilgrimage Actually Is (A Brief Defense)

If you grew up American and Protestant, like most of the people who told me I was doing it wrong, you may not be familiar with pilgrimage as a category of religious practice.

Catholic, Orthodox, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, and Jewish traditions all have rich, ancient, and ongoing pilgrimage practices. El Camino de Santiago. The Hajj. Bodh Gaya. Varanasi. Lourdes. Mount Athos. Jerusalem itself. Tens of millions of people, every year, leave their homes and travel, sometimes for weeks, sometimes for months, sometimes on foot, to a place they believe holds something they cannot find by staying home.

The Buddha left his family and went on a pilgrimage into the world.

Jesus walked and taught, itinerant, on the road, never settled.

The Hebrew Bible is full of journeys: Abraham leaves home, Moses crosses a desert, and the people of Israel pilgrimage to Jerusalem three times a year for the major feasts.

The earliest Christians were called People of the Way. The Way. A road. A direction. A journey.

Pilgrimage is not a fringe activity. It is one of the oldest forms of religious life on the planet.

It is also one of the few forms that the American Protestant imagination has largely lost.

The Pew is the Worksheet

Here is what I have come to think about why the church, as I encountered it as a child and as I still encounter it now in many forms, never fit me.

In most American Protestant traditions, the church is a delivery model.

You go in.

You sit in the pew.

You face the front.

Someone reads to you.

Someone tells you what the text means.

Someone tells you what to believe about it.

Someone tells you what to do this week as a result.

The congregation absorbs the content.

The contract is: show up, sit still, and receive.

I’m not saying there isn’t anything valuable in this model. If you’ve developed a deep faith grounded in this model, I respect your commitment to your chosen religion. I don’t want to dismiss what others have found here. If I were to find a community that fully embraced my family, I would do the same.

Unfortunately, that’s not what I’ve experienced.

And I’ve noted that this is one model.

In the American imagination, especially in the parts of the country I grew up in, it has been treated as the only legitimate model, the default form of religious life, against which all other forms are measured and found weird, lazy, suspect, or lost.

This is the same epistemological mistake I spent my adult life rejecting in education.

I homeschool my daughter.

I do this because I believe that lived experience teaches what a classroom cannot. I believe that a child who sees a mastodon tooth at a Florida spring has been taught about Ice Age megafauna in a way that a child who reads about one in a textbook simply has not. I believe that pedagogy is about encounter, not just delivery.

Of course, both can be true. You can attend church and also take the pilgrimage. You can teach from the worksheet and then go see the tooth.

And I often do both.

What I am only now beginning to admit is that for my own spiritual life, the pilgrimage is often the worksheet and the field trip. I have been on the field trip for forty years, and I’m only now seeing its spiritual value.

What is Sometimes Said to Women and Girls

A few months ago, a friend invited me to her Orthodox church.

She invited me with conditions.

She said, in so many words, if you come, keep your mouth closed.

She didn’t mean it unkindly. She meant: there are rules in this space; I’m not sure you know them and I’m worried about what you might do or say; and the easiest solution for me is to ask you to be silent.

I sat with that invitation for a while.

I want to be careful here; I’m not trying to be judgmental. The friend is not the villain of this piece. She invited me as best she knew how, with the conditions the tradition had given her.

But I noticed something specifically after spending forty years on a pilgrimage for which there is no script.

I have been quiet in twenty-plus sacred buildings across three continents. I know how to behave in a Buddhist temple, an Orthodox shrine, a Catholic basilica, and a Trappist abbey. I have crossed myself in the right direction. I have not photographed what was not to be photographed. I have lit candles only when invited. I have sat at the back when I didn’t know whether I had earned a seat at the front.

The friend’s worry that I would not know how to be quiet in her sanctuary was, on its face, empirically incorrect.

But the deeper thing is the shape of the conditional invitation.

You can come if you keep your mouth closed.

It sounded familiar to me because I have heard that before.

Back to another spend-the-night party in 1980s Arkansas, but this time with a friend whose daddy was a local preacher. I had packed what I thought was a skirt, but when I arrived at her house, I discovered it was skorts—a skirt with shorts underneath. I checked with her mother whether it was acceptable to wear to church, because they had a strict skirts-only policy for girls.

The mother said yes—conditionally: “As long as you keep your legs together.”

What I’m hearing now from both the Orthodox friend and the mother from the 1980s is:

“You can attend my church, but only if you are quiet and there is less of you.”

While I’m not here to counter any religious beliefs around prostration or bowing before God, what I’m acknowledging is that I’ve encountered a lot of conditional inclusion and unsigned contracts since finding myself “lost” in a book by my nine-year-old friend.

For a spiritual practice where Jesus refused to chide Mary on the behest of Martha who didn’t like that her sister was studying at the feet of the savior. And for a religion where the entire story hinges on the plot point that a woman is the one to whom Jesus first showed himself, I think it’s a no-brainer to acknowledge that Christianity tells me that women showing up, participating, and asking questions is baked into the core of the scripture.

Women and even young girls know how to be spiritually appropriate and awake.

To St. Teresa’s Convent, I Go

When I went to Spain, I did everything backward; I’m sure of it.

I showed up alone—I noticed most women don’t walk around by themselves in Madrid. I had traveled for 24 hours by train from Monte Carlo, and I was exhausted when I boarded my last underground train. The wheel of my luggage got stuck between the platform and the train car as I attempted to board. And I fell—splat—inside the car, cutting up my knee on the final leg.

I began my visit in Madrid as an open wound.

I wasn’t veiled or pious or quiet. I was a mess. And alone. But willing to show up and look for guidance despite my appearance and lack of social graces.

The train situation was challenging because, unlike traveling via air, where you go to one stop and get off, trains stop in many places, and the announcements are all in Spanish. As an English-speaking traveler, I would never arrive at my destination if I weren’t truly paying attention.

You’d think one 24-hour train trip would be enough for this American. But I had to do it again. I had to board a bus this time only a few days into my stay. I had to take that next trip, leave Madrid, and head to the walled city of Avila for my biggest pilgrimage to date.

I had to see the Convento de Santa Teresa in Ávila.

I adored St. Teresa of Avila. And I carried her card in my pocket:

I made it off the bus without any new injuries to report.

But once inside the walled city, even with a map, I was confused. Where was the convent? There was so much here, much more than I had imagined.

I spotted a fountain with a statue of St. Teresa and decided to roll all my requests into a single wish and prayer. I closed my eyes and took my beloved heart milagros that I had gotten at the San Xavier del Bac Mission outside Tucson, and flung it into the fountain. When I opened my eyes, I noticed several people staring at me.

At this point, I had given up all fear of public humiliation and also all religious adherence to the rules. I was performing Mexican folk customs at a Spanish heritage and religious site. All I knew was that St. Teresa of Avila made me feel closer to God, and I wanted to acknowledge that to her in some way.

The fountain in Avila felt like my only option, as I was now indeed physically lost, if not spiritually grounded.

Looking up from my prayer, I saw what appeared to be a museum and went inside. There I was inside a gilded room with a relic of St. Teresa’s—or, to the uninitiated, her incorrupt finger. Yep, it was just me and the saint’s phalanx. Clearly, I was being pointed in the right direction. And I wasn’t the only one. A young nun in her habit entered the space. The two of us sat in silence for a full 10 minutes, basking in the glory of the gold room.

Soon after, our silence was broken when a booming voice echoed out in Latin, and the young nun jolted up, her habit rustling as she rose from the bench and ran into an adjoining room. Clearly, she was late for something. And in that moment, it made me happy to know that I wasn’t the only one who wasn’t always doing it right. But I felt compelled to follow her like Alice after the white rabbit. I landed smack in the sanctuary in the middle of a full Latin mass.

I made my way to the back of the chapel toward the door. I tried to listen and follow along, but I had no idea what was happening.

I walked backward and slowly crept out of the church. My heart pounded, wanting to stay, but my childhood fear of not performing religion properly crept back in.

I stumbled out onto the pavement in the bright light of day and saw one more building—a gift shop. It was here that I found a little brooch with St. Teresa’s face surrounded by Swarovski crystals. I purchased the brooch, taking it as a sign that St. Teresa acknowledged my visit to see her.

What Comes Next

This is the last Get Lost piece.

I started this travel series writing about Diamond Lil and the Fountain of Youth, then took you to Weeki Wachee and the mermaids, one of whom my daughter became, then to the lore behind the mermaid myth, then to Newt Perry and the Florida springs that taught Hollywood how to film underwater, then to the cryptids at the fringes of the American map.

What I didn’t tell you while we were on that tour is that I was also keeping another map the whole time.

A map of altars and grottos and shrines and chapels and burial grounds and silent abbeys. A map where the door is held shut only by a rock, and if you push the rock aside, you can enter.

That map is the one I will be teaching my daughter to read.

Starting next week, or whenever I am able to begin, I’ll be turning to a new series I am calling The Mystery Curriculum.

It will:

• Train a child to inhabit the unseen parts of the world

• Teach how to read literature as a sacred practice

• Be a place to honor what cannot be proven

• Show how to hold mystery with both reverence and laughter

Aurora will be on the road with me.

She’s already been to Weeki Wachee, Wakulla, Mission Nombre de Dios, and the mastodon tooth at the Museum of Florida History. She’s also visited Newgrange in books and the Sliding Jail of Jerome in person. She’s lit candles. And she’s walked in the All Souls procession. She’s nine years old and has been on more pilgrimages than many religious adults I know.

She knows sacred spaces.

We’ve been lost on the road and have relied on God and the universe to show us the way. And I’m excited to get lost with her again.

A small benediction for the road

If you’ve read this whole essay, thank you. I know it’s wandered.

So have I. That’s kind of the point.

If you, too, have been quietly making your own pilgrimage list, maybe keeping one without knowing it, going to places for untold reasons, or finding yourself in sanctuaries belonging to traditions not yours, yet feeling at home in ways that surprise you—you are not really lost.

You’re on a field trip to discover something bigger than yourself.

To sit somewhere other than the pew of your childhood religion. And to locate your spirituality. The map is wide open, even if you go within instead of out into the world.

I will see you on the next page.

I’ll be preparing the Mystery Curriculum. And I hope to meet you here again when I have something exciting to share. Until then, even if you aren’t on a pilgrimage, remember the interior castle inside of us all.

It is one of the oldest pieces of readers’ punctuation we have. It predates the asterisk, the footnote, the dog-ear, and the highlighter.

It’s just a finger, sketched by hand, saying: “This part, here. Don’t forget it.”

What’s fascinating about the manicule is that it’s a gesture of attention that’s also, structurally, a gesture to look away. To say “look here” is to admit there is a here and a there. That the eye is about to drift and that the page is long. That you, the future reader, the you who comes back, might need help finding your way to the part that mattered most.

Yes, the manicule is a placeholder, but it’s much more than that.

It’s a note left for a forgetful stranger, when the forgetful stranger is your future self who has forgotten half of what he previously read.

Where the Hand Came From

The pointing hand goes by many names, which is the first clue that it belongs fully to no one.

Manicule comes from the Latin manicula, meaning “little hand.”

Scholars and rare-book librarians have also called it the index (from the Latin for the pointing finger, the same root that gives us the index of a book and the index finger itself), the fist, the hand director, the pointing hand, the digit, and the gloriously odd bishop’s fist. When something accumulates that many nicknames over that many centuries, you are looking at a thing people revered, even if they never formalized it.

The earliest manicules appear in 12th-century manuscripts, though the gesture they imitate predates any book. Pointing is one of the first things a human hand learns to do that a paw cannot; it is arguably the root of language itself. Consider the move from “this” the grunt to “this” the word. Medieval scribes and scholars simply carried that ancient gesture onto the page. By the 13th and 14th centuries, the manicule was a standard tool of the working reader, especially in the law schools and universities of Italy, where students annotating dense legal and theological texts needed a fast way to mark what their masters had singled out.

Crucially, the early manicule was almost never the author’s.

It belonged to the reader.

It was the original marginal note before marginal notes were respectable; evidence of a mind moving through a text in real time, deciding moment by moment what was worth carrying with them when the book was closed. To find a manuscript thick with manicules is to find a book that was genuinely used, argued with, and returned to often.

They are fossil records of attention.

The Golden Age of the Weird Little Hand

The Renaissance is when the manicule gets strange, but strange in a way that’s deeply reassuring about the human condition.

Once a reader is already drawing a hand in the margin, the hand gets a platform to perform. Scribes and annotators got competitive and decorative with them. Some drew elegant lace cuffs, rings, and ruffled sleeves, as if the disembodied hand belonged to a very well-dressed ghost. Some drew fingers long enough to underline four lines at once, stretching across the margin like a pointer made of taffy. Some added extra fingers (see, it’s not just early AI). Some drew the hand emerging from a cloud, or from a flower, or from a sleeve attached to nothing at all.

The Italian humanist, Petrarch, a famous and enthusiastic annotator, turned the manicule into a near-signature, a fingerprint of how a particular mind read. You can sometimes identify an annotator across multiple books by the idiosyncratic way they drew their hands. The manicule became, in other words, a tiny self-portrait: not a picture of the reader’s face, but one of the reader’s attention.

When printing arrived in the mid-15th century, something telling happened: the hand didn’t die, it got hired.

Early printers cut the manicule into metal type so it could be set right alongside the words. The handwritten reader’s mark migrated into the printed page as an official typographic symbol, used to flag important notices, mark the start of a key paragraph, or, eventually, point at the bottom of a page toward whatever came next. The reader’s private gesture had become the publisher’s public one. For roughly four hundred years, from the incunabula of the 1400s through Victorian advertising and broadsides, the printed fist was everywhere: on playbills, in newspapers, on signs, jabbing at the price, the date, and the punchline.

It is still sitting in your computer’s character set this very moment. Unicode provides several pointing hands for use in your digital documents: ☞ ☜ ☝ ☟.

And as Book Historia points out in this video, the digital hand is more popular today than ever.

Why Marginalia Matters

We should keep the manicule close because it sits at the heart of what marginalia is: one of the few honest records of reading as a living act.

The word covers everything a reader leaves in the margins: notes, objections, translations, doodles, tear-stains, the furious NO written sideways next to a sentence someone could not abide (I’ve done this in certain textbooks where I wholeheartedly disagreed with a style of pedagogy). The manicule is marginalia at its most distilled. It adds no words at all, only emphasis.

The bare human insistence that this, of everything here, is the key thing.

We tend to treat the margin as empty space, the dead zone around the “real” text. My husband hates it when I doodle and take notes in our books. But the history of the pointing hand argues in my favor (sorry, Hubs): the margin is where the book stops being a monologue and becomes a conversation.

The author writes the center; the reader answers in the margin; the next reader answers that reader, and so on. A heavily annotated book is a chain of voices across time, and the manicule is the simplest way to enter the chain; you don’t even have to know what to say.

You only have to point.

That is also why the gesture works as a kind of misdirection. The hand says look here, but in doing so it quietly admits that you were not, in fact, already looking here; that your attention is a wandering thing that needs to be caught and turned gently, like a child’s chin when sitting for a school photo.

The manicule doesn’t command.

It invites.

It is the most courteous instruction in the history of the page.

☞ ☜

Which is exactly why it is the one I want to leave you with this week.

I’m having surgery. So, I had to produce this article in advance and say, “Look here,” instead of what I’d normally be writing about. I would love to tell you I have front-loaded a vault of polished pieces to release on a timer because I’m a machine of foresight.

I haven’t.

I’m, instead, going to be unconscious tomorrow morning and then aggressively horizontal for a while afterward. So consider this the manicule. The hand in the margin that holds your place while I’m gone. ☞

And here is the gentle misdirection, the part where the pointing finger does its oldest trick: I’m asking you to look away.

Not from the work, but from the screen and the feed.

• Go find your own margin

• Read the thing you keep meaning to read

• Draw a little hand next to the line that most wrecks and connects you

• Make a scene in someone else’s book

The Narrative Nest will be here when the finger points back. That’s the trick of the manicule, in the end. It says, “Look here,” but what it really means is, “I’ll keep your place in time.”

It points to the page so you can leave it.

So. ☞ Right here. This is where we were.

I’ll be back to it soon.

Hopefully, next week, but please leave a comment and tell me about your marginalia and how you interact with your reading in case I don’t feel much like writing right now.

How do you have conversations with the written page?

Leave a comment

This is part of Get Lost: The Accidental Curriculum of Roadside America, my ongoing series on the strange, kitschy, sacred, and occasionally fictional attractions scattered across the United States, and what they teach us about history and mythology. Read The Showman of the Springs here.

Last week, I introduced you to Newt Perry, the alligator wrestler who put Florida on the map and helped give underwater photography its rightful place in Hollywood with movies like Creature from the Black Lagoon.

The Creature, as you’ll recall, was a man named Ricou Browning in a $15,000 foam-rubber suit, swimming in the actual waters of Wakulla Springs.

But this week, we’re leaving Florida behind to look for creatures many swear are not just movie monsters but real beings in the US landscape.

Stop One: Expedition: Bigfoot! The Sasquatch Museum, Cherry Log, Georgia

A few months ago, on a quiet weekend, my family drove up to the small town of Cherry Log, Georgia, to visit a museum called Expedition: Bigfoot! The Sasquatch Museum.

It was early in the year, before we got back into our homeschool groove, and I wanted us to have a family adventure. That’s exactly the spirit of the Get Lost series. Your homeschool family doesn’t have to drive to the Smithsonian while filling out worksheets to make science and investigation real. Sometimes the real museum is in a metal building off Highway 515, run by people who take seriously what the rest of the world claims is fake.

Expedition: Bigfoot! is exactly that kind of place.

The museum is dedicated to cryptozoology—the study of animals whose existence has not been confirmed by mainstream science.

Just my cup of tea.

The big three, if you’re keeping score, are Bigfoot (North America), the Yeti (the Himalayas), and the Loch Ness Monster (Scotland). But there are dozens more, including: Mokele-Mbembe in the Congo. The Chupacabra in Latin America. The Yowie in Australia. And the Mothman in West Virginia.

What surprised me about Expedition: Bigfoot! was its earnestness. The staff is not winking at patrons from behind the counter and pointing to fake exhibits like they’re jokes. They present footprint casts, audio recordings, eyewitness reports, and the actual decades-long research record of people who have devoted serious time to investigating claims around Bigfoot.

They let us, the visitors, decide our own truths.

For homeschoolers, this works as a science project because it provides evidence, the gaps in that evidence, and the scientific method when applied to an open question.

That’s a full science curriculum.

Bigfoot as Helper and Protector

The Bigfoot lore that’s most interesting and least prone to making cryptids a running punchline is the long tradition of stories in which Bigfoot helps.

In Indigenous North American traditions across many tribes, the figure variously called Sasquatch, Tsiatko, Stiyaha, Mesingw, and many other names is often a guardian of the forest. Not always benevolent toward humans, but not malicious by default either. More like a neighbor with rules.

In modern American folklore, the helper tradition shows up most powerfully in stories of lost children.

The most famous recent case: in January 2019, a three-year-old boy named Casey Hathaway wandered into the freezing North Carolina woods. He was missing for two nights in below-freezing temperatures. When searchers found him alive, he reportedly told his family that a bear had kept him company.

A bear.

In January’s below-freezing weather.

For the record: bears hibernate in January, and they do not generally appear out of hibernation to babysit toddlers.

Cryptozoology researchers and a fair number of folklore-minded folks who are not cryptozoologists note that this is not the first of such stories. The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization keeps a running file of cases where lost children, especially small ones, are found alive after periods that should have killed them, and report having been kept warm and watched over by a large, hairy figure they called a “big monkey,” a “big dog,” or a “bear.”

The kindly, large creature watching over a lost child in the woods is one of the oldest and most universal stories our species tells. From the wolf who nursed Romulus and Remus, to the bear who raised the Inuit hero, to the lions who lay down with Daniel, we have always wanted to believe that the wilderness is not indifferent. If our children are lost without us, someone would be protectively keeping watch.

Bigfoot, in his most generous folkloric mode, is that someone.

Kate Bush and the Wild Man

My nine-year-old daughter Aurora has been exposed to Kate Bush thanks to her musical resurgence due to Stranger Things. My daughter’s never seen the TV show, but “Running up that Hill” has again become a staple on the radio, like it’s 1985. And that has led me to play all of Bush’s albums for her.

“Wild Man” is one of her favorite songs, the first single from Bush’s 2011 album 50 Words For Snow. A strange and beautiful pop song about a Yeti in the Himalayas.

The lyrics are written in the voice of a sympathetic narrator who has gone looking for the Wild Man there, has seen evidence of him, and is now trying to protect him from being found by other humans who would hunt and capture him.

Aurora plays it on repeat and knows all the hard-to-pronounce names of the mountains in the lyrics. (Kangchenjunga. Lhakpa-La. Garo Hills. Tengboche Monastery.)

What Bush said about why she wrote the song should be the epigraph for every cryptid museum in America:

“In our contemporary world, things of mystery are even more precious than they were before the internet… I think it would be really terrible if that mystery was taken away from us, don’t you? It’s really important.”

It is really important.

We live in a culture that has Googled almost everything, with a world that has been mapped, satellite-photographed, biometrically cataloged, indexed, ranked, reviewed, and turned into a TripAdvisor entry.

The unknown is in retreat.

And in a culture like that, the cryptid is not a joke; he’s a sweet refuge.

The Bigfoot believer, the Mothman tourist, and the Yeti devotee are all, in their way, making the same argument as Kate Bush: some things should be allowed to remain hidden within woods that hold mystery, and some creatures should never be captured.

Stop Two: Roswell, New Mexico

A few years ago, my family relocated from Arizona to Georgia in February.

I was wearing a heavy winter coat when we stopped for pasta at an Italian restaurant in Roswell, New Mexico.

Of course, I knew about Roswell’s history, but I was not prepared for how deeply the community there embraced its alien mythology.

I had imagined Roswell would be a town with one alien attraction, like a UFO museum, or maybe a souvenir shop or two, and would otherwise be a regular small American city.

Nope.

Everything is aliens in Roswell, New Mexico.

The streetlights have little alien faces. The McDonald’s is shaped like a flying saucer. The city's civic seal features an alien.

If you take Highway 285 north out of town, there is an installation of an entire extraterrestrial family stranded in a broken-down UFO on the side of the road, looking for a jump-start.

Somewhere around 1990, the entire town made an enormous collective decision to commit to the bit. But here is the wild thing: the famous 1947 incident that started all of this almost certainly was not aliens.

In June 1947, a rancher named Mac Brazel found unusual debris on his ranch about 75 miles outside Roswell. There were metallic sticks, foil reflectors, plastic, and a strange paper-like material. The U.S. Army Air Forces issued a press release announcing they had recovered a “flying disc.” The next day, they retracted their claim, saying it was a weather balloon.

The rumor died for thirty years.

Then, in 1978, a retired military officer who had been involved in the original investigation gave an interview claiming the debris was actually extraterrestrial. The story exploded.

In 1997, the U.S. military finally declassified the truth: the debris had belonged to Project Mogul, a top-secret Cold War atomic-espionage project involving 700-foot strings of neoprene balloons designed to detect Soviet nuclear tests. The reason the Army Air Forces had originally said “flying disc” and then quickly retracted was that the local officers genuinely did not know what they were looking at, and the project was so classified that even they hadn’t been briefed.

So not aliens. Atomic spy equipment, mistaken for a flying saucer, by people who weren’t allowed to know what they were really seeing.

But by 1997, none of that mattered.

By 1997, Roswell was an industry.

The International UFO Museum and Research Center was already there. The McDonald’s had already taken its spaceship form. The town’s economy had been restructured around the steady flow of pilgrims arriving to commune with the idea that something else had happened in 1947.

And the people of Roswell are so kind.

This is a thing I will never forget. We ate dinner at a small Italian restaurant in Roswell that February, and I left my big winter coat on the chair, but didn’t realize it until we were a state away.

When my husband called the restaurant because I was in a bit of a panic, the owner said yes, they had it, took my address, and shipped my coat to my new house.

A small business in a desert town that did not know me helped me get my coat back across the country in February. Did not charge me for the shipping and refused to let me pay them.

That is the Roswell I like to think of. Not the aliens. The owner of a local Italian eatery who is willing to take care of their patrons.

But the aliens are why the restaurant has tourists in February at all.

That is, in its way, also an alien story.

The Brief Detour: The Little People of Jerome, Arizona

While we’re in the desert, let me mention one more strange place I love.

Jerome, Arizona, is a former copper mining town clinging to the side of Mingus Mountain. At its peak in the 1920s, it was one of the largest cities in Arizona. By the 1950s, the mines had closed, and the population had collapsed to almost nothing. Today, it is America’s largest ghost town, saved from total abandonment by an unlikely community of artists who moved in during the 1960s and 70s and decided this strange, vertical, half-empty town was worth salvaging.

The town’s most famous local oddity is the Sliding Jail, an old jailhouse that, due to decades of mine blasting altering the geology underneath it, has slowly slid 200 feet downhill from its original location.

A jail that ran for it.

But the part I want to mention is the lore. Jerome included a large number of miners who were Irish, Slavic, German, Italian, and Mexican. But some of the most notable miners during this period were of Cornish descent. And the Cornish brought with them a deep folklore of the Knockers (also called Tommy Knockers in American English).

Knockers are small, two-foot-tall, gnome-like beings — little people — who supposedly live deep in mine shafts. They dress in tiny miners’ outfits. Some traditions say they are the spirits of dead miners; others say they are an entirely separate folk who have always lived underground.

What Knockers do is knock on the walls of the mine before a cave-in.

The knocking is a warning. To tell humans that the world is not as stable as it looks. Or a way for the dead to look out for the living.

Miners who survived collapses often credited the Knockers with their survival. Miners would leave them food, small tokens, the crusts of their pasties. The folklore was so strong that some mines were eventually abandoned because their Knockers were perceived as malevolent and the men refused to keep working there.

I think about the Knockers a lot when I think about the cryptid impulse generally.

Because the figure is not frightening, not in its most generous form. The figure is looking out for us. The figure is a small, hidden, persistent reminder that we are not alone in our most vulnerable places, that the earth has voices, and that the wisdom of the dead is still trying to reach the ears of the living.

That is a theology dressed up as folklore.

Stop Three: The Mothman of Point Pleasant, West Virginia (a place we have not been yet)

Here is the stop on the tour we haven’t taken yet, but I’m eager to visit.

In November 1966, in a town called Point Pleasant, West Virginia, on the banks of the Ohio River, two young couples driving through an old World War II munitions site called the TNT Area reported seeing a creature.

It was about seven feet tall with red, glowing eyes and an enormous wing span. And it chased their car.

Over the next 13 months, more than 100 people in and around Point Pleasant reported sightings of what came to be known as the Mothman.

Then, on December 15, 1967, during the evening rush hour, the Silver Bridge connecting Point Pleasant to Gallipolis, Ohio, collapsed into the icy river below. A single eyebar failure. The bridge, the cars, and the people went straight down.

Forty-six people died.

The Mothman sightings stopped almost immediately.

The most enduring interpretation of the legend, popularized by the writer John Keel in his 1975 book The Mothman Prophecies and the 2002 Richard Gere film of the same name, is that the Mothman was not the cause of the disaster but a harbinger of it. A creature who appears before tragedy. A messenger from somewhere else, trying to warn the people.

In 2002, the town of Point Pleasant began the annual Mothman Festival.

The following year, sculptor Bob Roach unveiled a 12-foot stainless steel statue of the Mothman on Main Street. The Mothman Museum opened nearby. The town, like Roswell, has turned its tragedy and mystery into an identity. The 2026 festival runs September 19-20, with the museum open year-round.

My family has not been there, but we are so eager to go.

We saw advertising for the Mothman Museum and Festival at Expedition: Bigfoot! in Cherry Log, and I have been holding it in the back of my head ever since.

A town that lost forty-six people on a December evening in 1967 has spent fifty-eight years asking what it was that was trying to tell them something was coming. The museum treats the disaster with real gravity.

What they teach us about being human

What do we get from these creatures?

What message is Bigfoot, the Mothman, the Roswell aliens, and the Knockers in the mines trying to convey to us, humans?

I think a few things.

We get to be wonder-struck without embarrassment. A grown adult cannot, in 2026, easily say they believe in fairies. They can absolutely say they think Bigfoot might be out there and get a knowing nod in return. The cryptid is a culturally acceptable container for adult wonder in a culture that has largely outgrown its tolerance for the rest of the mythological menagerie.

We get to imagine the wilderness is not indifferent. Whether it’s a Sasquatch keeping a toddler warm in the North Carolina woods or a Knocker tapping on a mine wall to warn of a collapse, the cryptid lets us believe that the most dangerous places have attendants. That something is watching out for us, even in the dark.

We get to share a story. In a fragmented modern culture where almost nothing is held in common, cryptids are still collective property. A Bigfoot believer in Oregon, a Bigfoot believer in Florida, and a Bigfoot believer in Pennsylvania share a real, if unusual, sense of fellowship. The Mothman Festival draws fifteen thousand people every September who would otherwise never sit at the same table.

We get to give small towns a reason to keep existing. Roswell, Point Pleasant, Cherry Log, and Jerome are not big cities. They are places whose industries have left or whose populations have dwindled. The cryptid economy is what kept some of them alive. Diamond Lil and Newt Perry would absolutely understand.

And we get to keep some mystery in a world rendered flat and flavorless. Kate Bush is right; the mystery is more precious now than ever.

The cryptid is the modern American version of the woods our ancestors couldn’t see into. It is the edge of the map. It is the place we have agreed, together, not to fully colonize with knowledge.

We need that.

Even when we know it isn’t entirely real.

Resources for the curious

Podcasts

• Sasquatch Chronicles — long-form interviews with people who claim Bigfoot encounters. Approached earnestly; good for older kids and teens.

• Bigfoot and Beyond with Cliff Barackman and James “Bobo” Fay (from the show Finding Bigfoot). Hosts treat the subject with affection and rigor.

• Our Fake History, episodes on Bigfoot and on Mothman. Sebastian Major’s approach pairs perfectly with the framing I used in the Fountain of Youth piece.

• MonsterTalk — a more skeptical, science-minded show on the same subjects. Pair with a believer-oriented podcast for actual critical thinking practice.

Books and TPT resources for kids

• In Search of Sasquatch by Kelly Milner Halls — picture-book format introduction to cryptozoology. Good for ages 8–12.

• TPT has solid Cryptozoology and Scientific Method lesson plans for grades 5–9, including Bigfoot-themed scientific method exercises that introduce concepts such as apophenia (the tendency to perceive patterns where none exist) and pareidolia (seeing faces in random visual data). These are real curriculum concepts that kids will use for the rest of their lives, and the cryptid frame makes them stick.

• Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (bfro.net) — the closest thing to a comprehensive sightings database. Use it the way you’d use any primary source: read it, examine it, and ask what kind of evidence it actually constitutes.

Music

• “Wild Man” by Kate Bush. From 50 Words For Snow (2011). Have your kid memorize the names of the Himalayan mountains in the lyrics. They will retain them forever.

Places to put on your map

• Expedition: Bigfoot! The Sasquatch Museum, 1934 Highway 515, Cherry Log, GA. A short drive from Atlanta. Worth a day trip.

• International UFO Museum and Research Center, 114 N Main St, Roswell, NM. The flying saucer McDonald’s is a few blocks away.

• Mothman Museum, 411 Main St, Point Pleasant, WV. Festival every September.

• Jerome State Historic Park, Jerome, AZ. Go for the ghost town; stay for the Knocker lore.

Coming home (and signing off for a while)

When we left Roswell, Aurora had a green stuffed alien she had picked out at the UFO Museum gift shop. It is still her favorite stuffed animal.

He is a small fabric reminder that the map still has miles we can travel.

There are the stories I want my daughter to inherit. They are not factual in the way my aquifer infographic was factual. But they’re doing truth work of a different kind.

I have some things to attend to over the coming weeks that will reduce the time I have on Substack. When I’m back, I’ll be turning toward what I’m calling The Mystery Curriculum, a more sustained, deliberate exploration of how I teach my daughter to inhabit the unseen and the unverified parts of the world.

If the Get Lost series was about the strange places humans have made, the Mystery Curriculum will be about the strange place the world itself is and the ways we must learn how to look at it.

The map is open.

We’ll meet on the next page.

The Get Lost series is on a brief pause. The Mystery Curriculum will begin soon. Thank you, as always, for traveling along.

This is part of Get Lost: The Accidental Curriculum of Roadside America, my ongoing series on the strange, kitschy, sacred, and occasionally fictional attractions scattered across the United States, and what they teach us about history and mythology. Read Where Mermaids Come From here.

If you’ve been following along with this series, you’ve already met Diamond Lil, the Klondike grifter who had a diamond in her tooth, invented the modern Fountain of Youth, and gave a nod to Ponce de Leon.

You’ve heard me argue that the mermaid is a three-thousand-year-old figure (at least) that requires immersion in the mystery to keep her alive.

You’ve sat with me in the underwater theater at Weeki Wachee while my daughter became a real mermaid in a bottomless spring.

What I haven’t told you is who built the theater. He was the same guy who taught the women how to breathe underwater. And also the same man who, almost single-handedly, brought Florida’s springs onto Hollywood soundstages to be seen by millions.

His name was Newton “Newt” Perry, and they called him The Human Fish.

He was a swim coach, a stunt double, an alligator wrestler, a Navy frogman trainer, an underwater cinematographer, a roadside attraction founder, a public school principal, a swim school owner, and the most consequential Floridian most people have never heard of.

This piece is for him.

The Boy Who Walked Six Miles to Swim

Newt Perry was born in Valdosta, Georgia, in 1908. His family moved to Ocala, Florida, when he was 14.

His grandmother used to tell stories of him refusing to get out of the bath as a toddler until he was visibly shivering. As a kid, he walked six miles on dirt roads from Ocala to Silver Springs just to swim. His biggest thrill on that walk, according to his daughter Delee in this local news article, was when a car came by and offered him a ride.

At Ocala High School, he discovered the school had no swim team, so he started one. At the University of Florida, he made the swim and diving teams. By his early twenties, he was performing underwater stunts at Silver Springs that drew tourists, journalists, and eventually movie cameras.

The famous sportswriter Grantland Rice was vacationing and saw Newt do his routine: powerful freestyle upstream, then dive down and perform somersaults underwater, swim backward, eat a banana, drink a soda from a glass bottle, and stay submerged for three minutes and forty-five seconds before coming up for air.

Over the next thirty years, Newt would help produce more than 150 of Rice’s “Sportlight” short films, but Newt rarely got screen credit.

The Invention that Created Real Mermaids

By the early 1940s, Newt had a problem.

He wanted to keep performing underwater shows, but human lungs have a hard ceiling, and audiences expected longer, more spectacular performances. Scuba gear existed but was bulky, expensive, and visible on camera.

So Newt invented his own system.

It was a free-flowing air hose connected to an air compressor on the surface. The swimmer holds the hose, takes a breath, lets the hose go, and it floats free until needed again. This means no tank or visible apparatus. The swimmer can swim, dance, twirl, perform, and yes, breathe, without ever surfacing, and without ever spoiling the illusion.

This invention is still in use at Weeki Wachee today. I saw it with my own eyes! Every breath each mermaid took during my daughter’s camp came through a hose system Newt Perry designed eighty years ago.

It was so effective that during World War II, the U.S. Navy hired Newt to train its frogmen, the underwater combat divers who became the precursors of the modern Navy SEALs.

Yes, it’s true. The man who taught soldiers how to breathe underwater for wartime missions also used the same technology to make women in costumed tails look like real mermaids who lived in the spring.

How’s that for range?

How Weeki Wachee Was Born

In 1946, Newt scouted a property on a then-deserted stretch of US-19 in central Florida. The location was a natural spring called Weeki Wachee, which is Seminole for “winding river” or “little spring.”

Unfortunately, at that time, the place was full of garbage.

According to Florida State Parks records, the spring was so neglected that it had been used as a local dump. Newt and his investors had to clear out rusted refrigerators and abandoned cars before they could begin construction.

But once cleared, the underwater theatre came to life. The original held just 18 seats. The benches were wooden, and the windows looked straight into the spring. The first show premiered on October 13, 1947.

Newt’s 13-year-old daughter Margaret was one of the first mermaids ever to perform there.

Not long after, while attending a Florida Attraction Association convention in Miami, Newt met a woman named Dot who was training for the 1948 U.S. Olympic diving team. Their mutual friend (a former Olympic diver) introduced them. Newt climbed to the top of the 10-meter diving platform and started diving, dive for dive, with Dot. They married in 1950.

He sold his stake in Weeki Wachee in 1950 and went to Texas to develop another underwater attraction called Aquarena Springs. Then he came home to Ocala, opened Perry’s Swim School in 1955, and, for the rest of his life, taught more than 120,000 people to swim.

His daughter Delee still runs the swim school today.

How Hollywood Found Wakulla

Newt’s relationship with Hollywood started early.

He was a swim double for Johnny Weissmuller in the Tarzan films, beginning with Tarzan Finds a Son! (1939, filmed at Silver Springs) and Tarzan’s Secret Treasure (1941, filmed at Wakulla Springs). When a Hollywood production needed a scene involving water, Newt was the contact man. He worked with Hollywood greats like W.C. Fields, Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, Gregory Peck, Jayne Mansfield, Ann Blyth, and Lloyd Bridges.

But the production that mattered most for the Florida springs, the one that turned Wakulla into a piece of permanent American film history, premiered on March 5, 1954.

Universal-International’s Creature from the Black Lagoon.

A 3D black-and-white horror picture about a team of scientists who travel to the Amazon and accidentally awaken a half-human, half-fish creature called the Gill-Man, who is, of course, smitten with the female ichthyologist on board.

The “Amazon” in the film is Wakulla Springs.

The set design was magnificent. The water and the fish swimming past the cameras were real. As was the Spanish moss draping over the riverbanks. The Gill-Man was, well, not as real. We’ll get to him in a moment.

My Family at Wakulla, the Day after Mermaid Camp

We drove up from Weeki Wachee to Wakulla the day after Aurora finished Mermaid Camp.

My biggest goal was to take the river cruise and see in person the stretch of water where they filmed Creature from the Black Lagoon.

The drought hadn’t shut everything down, and luckily, the boat was running. Not the glass-bottom boat, but at least the river cruise was operating, and we got on. The captain pointed out everything: cypress knees, anhingas spreading their wings, and limpkins doing their crying-bird call.

And also the alligators.

There were so many alligators, sunning themselves on logs or submerged with just their nostrils above water.

But let’s not forget the manatees.

Big, blubbery, sweet-faced sea cows, drifting through the spring or lying right by our boat like benevolent gray boulders.

I still don’t understand how anyone ever mistook one of these for a mermaid. But I was never a European explorer looking for love, so what do I know?

I listened to all the podcasts and considered the mix-up could be believable until I saw a manatee in real life.

No. Just no. There is no version of love-deprivation severe enough to make that face look like a beautiful woman’s face. Wilford Brimley in Cocoon, perhaps, but not a stunning mermaid.

The Creature, in Two Suits

For a more in-depth explanation of how Universal came to film Creature from the Black Lagoon, you can watch Antonia Carlotta’s video on it here.

But here’s a quick summary:

When Universal’s location scouts came to Wakulla in 1953 to evaluate the spring for Creature from the Black Lagoon, they were introduced to a 23-year-old part-time lifeguard and Florida State University student named Ricou Browning.

Browning showed them around and swam for them. Two weeks later, he got a call from director Jack Arnold: Would you like to play the Creature?

Browning said yes and took the job for $600 a week.

He didn’t know it yet, but he had just signed up to be the underwater half of one of cinema’s most enduring monsters.

Here’s the part most casual viewers of Creature from the Black Lagoon never realize: there were two Gill-Men. Two different actors wearing two different body-hugging suits, long before Body Glove made a splash:

• Ricou Browning (just under 6 feet tall) played the Creature in every underwater scene. Filmed at Wakulla Springs in Florida.

• Ben Chapman (6’5”) played the Creature in every above-water scene. Filmed on a Universal soundstage back in Hollywood, California.

The two men were too different in size to share a costume. So Universal made two complete full-body suits, molded directly from each actor’s body, with separately designed masks. Each suit cost about $15,000 in 1954 dollars, which would be close to $180,000 today.

Chapman’s suit was so restrictive that he couldn’t sit down between takes. The eye-holes were so narrow he could barely see. He took the heat of California in foam rubber and latex while standing for entire shooting days.

Browning’s job was easier in costume but harder in execution: he had to hold his breath, swim through the spring’s current, hit his marks for the camera, and act menacing while being unable to see clearly or breathe at will. His friend Ginger Stanley Hallowell played the underwater double for Julia Adams (the female lead), including the famous shot in which the Gill-Man swims slowly beneath her, gracefully matching her strokes before reaching up to graze her ankle.

That underwater sequence is one of the most-imitated shots in horror film history.

It was filmed in Wakulla Springs.

And one more detail that gets overlooked: the actual visual design of the Gill-Man, his head shape, gills, and iconic silhouette, was largely created by a woman named Millicent Patrick, a former Disney animator who had worked on Fantasia. Universal sent her on a promotional tour to publicize the movie under the slogan “The Beauty Who Created the Beast.”

Nuria Hernando describes in her Substack, The Aesthetics Filmclub, how Bud Westmore, Universal’s head of makeup, became jealous of Patrick’s attention. He had the slogan changed to “The Beauty Who Lives With the Beast,” and quietly took credit for her design.

She never worked at Universal again.

The dismissed-women theme that ran through my mermaid piece is alive and well here with Millicent Patrick.

Browning, by the way, kept the role. He played the Gill-Man in the underwater scenes of all three Creature films. He went on to co-create the original Flipper TV series. He died in February 2023, at 93 years old.

He once told the Miami Herald: “It’s kind of a cult thing, I guess. I probably earned less money on that than anything I ever did.”

The Lodge, the Soda Fountain, and the Ginger Yip

The reason any of this happened at Wakulla, basically the reason Universal chose this specific spring out of hundreds available in Florida, is the building on the bank.

The Lodge at Wakulla Springs was built between 1935 and 1937 by a Florida financier named Edward Ball, who fell in love with the spring in the 1920s while scouting land for pulpwood. He bought it and hired architects. Then he chose a style somewhere between Spanish-Moorish and Art Deco—what the locals call “Mediterranean Revival”—and built one of the most beautiful hotels in the South.

When I walked in, I was not prepared.

The lobby ceiling is 5,800 square feet of hand-painted folk art depicting wildlife and nature. The walls, floors, and stairwells are inlaid with Tennessee marble, cut and fitted so precisely that no grout is visible anywhere in the building. The cypress beams overhead are made of “heart cypress,” the dense inner core of cypress trees that were submerged underwater for over 50 years before being pulled out and used as building material. Once submerged that long, the wood is essentially impervious to rot.

There is no bar at the Lodge because Edward Ball was a teetotaler.

Instead, he commissioned a soda fountain.

It is 70 feet, 3 inches long. In other words, it’s the longest marble soda fountain ever built. It was cut from a single slab of marble with the top sectioned for transport but reassembled in the exact order the slabs came out of the earth, so the grain matches all the way down the bar.

I am not normally a person who gets emotional about marble work, but this soda fountain was something else!

If you go there, you must order a Ginger Yip. It is an old-fashioned syrupy surprise that is now my favorite drink.

Also in front of the soda fountain: a giant taxidermied alligator named Old Joe, who was poached out of the spring decades ago and is now on display behind glass, and a casting of the Gill-Man’s head from Creature from the Black Lagoon.

This building, with its entire setup, is the kind of roadside Americana the Get Lost series exists to celebrate. A teetotaler financier in 1935 said I will build the most beautiful soda fountain in the world in a swamp and then did just that, and ninety years later, I drank a Ginger Yip there with my husband while my daughter ran her hand along the marble.

I keep using the word real in this series. The Lodge at Wakulla Springs is one of the realest things I have ever stood in.

The Underwater Cinema Lineage

Newt Perry’s invention, those free-flowing air hoses, the system that let humans breathe underwater for as long as the compressor ran, changed what was possible on film.

Before Newt Perry, underwater sequences were brief, faked, or shot through aquarium glass. After Newt Perry, you could shoot extended underwater performances with real human beings doing real, expressive, choreographed work below the surface. The Tarzan films and Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid (1948) used it. Even Esther Williams’s MGM water-musical epics used it.

But not every underwater shot in mid-century Hollywood went through Florida.

The most famously iconic underwater image of the 1950s comes from a film that was not shot in any spring at all: Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1955).

It’s one of the greatest American films ever made, yet it was a critical and commercial disaster when it came out. Laughton never directed another picture. Robert Mitchum plays a serial-killer preacher with LOVE and HATE tattooed on his knuckles, while a young Shelley Winters plays his doomed wife. And in one of the most haunting shots in film history, the audience sees her body with her long hair drifting and dress floating, as she sits upright in the front seat of a Model T Ford at the bottom of a river.

That shot was not filmed in a real river.

It was filmed on a soundstage, using a mannequin wearing a custom mask of Shelley Winters’ face. The “river” was a tank. And the lighting and the eerie waltz music carried the rest of the illusion.

Hollywood, when it had a sound stage, a tank, a budget, and a great cinematographer (Stanley Cortez, in this case), could fake underwater photography brilliantly. But the real version, where actual human beings performed underwater for extended takes in real water, only became possible because a kid from Ocala decided he could do the impossible—invent an air hose to allow humans to breathe underwater.

Wakulla, Weeki Wachee, and Silver Springs were where Hollywood went for real underwater photography.

Newt is the reason why.

The Cave System Underneath All of It

Everything I’ve described in this piece sits on top of one of the most extraordinary natural systems in North America.

Wakulla Springs is one of the largest and deepest freshwater springs in the world.

The visible portion, the basin guests can see from the surface, is about 315 feet across and 185 feet deep at the vent.

But the spring is not the spring. The spring is the exit.

Under the basin, the Wakulla cave system extends for over 31 miles of mapped passage at depths exceeding 350 feet, making it one of the longest and deepest underwater cave systems on Earth. New passages are still being discovered. Karst Underwater Research divers have spent decades pushing the maps further, and the system continues to expand on paper.

The water emerges at a rate of 250 to 300 million gallons per day. The temperature is a constant 70 degrees Fahrenheit year-round. The clarity, in the right season, lets you see straight to the bottom of the basin from the surface.

When divers explored the system, they encountered:

• A complete mastodon skeleton that was found at the bottom of the basin in 1935. It’s now reconstructed at the Museum of Florida History in Tallahassee. But his tooth remains at the Lodge at Wakulla:

  

• Pottery shards and tools from 15,000 years of human habitation.

• A network of underground rooms and tunnels that humans have been mapping since the 1950s and that still has no known end.

When you sit at the marble soda fountain in the Lodge, sipping a Ginger Yip and looking out the window at the spring, you are sitting on top of a 31-mile-long cathedral. The water in your glass passed through limestone for years before it reached you.

What Newt Built

Newt Perry died in 1987, at 79, in Ocala. He’s buried not far from the springs he spent his life in.

Most Floridians don’t know his name, and neither do most film historians. He doesn’t get credited on Tarzan Finds a Son! or Creature from the Black Lagoon or any of the 150-plus Grantland Rice shorts he helped produce. He was inducted into the Florida Sports Hall of Fame in 1981, which is something, but he never became famous.

He’s not even mentioned in that Universal video above.

He just did extraordinary things.

He built a swim team where there wasn’t one. He built an air hose system that the Navy used in war, and that mermaids still use today. He built an underwater theater out of a junked-up spring. He trained the Creature from the Black Lagoon. He taught 120,000 people how to swim. He raised a daughter who became one of the first Weeki Wachee mermaids at 13, and another daughter who still runs his swim school in 2026.

He’s the patron saint of making the spring legible, of turning these wild, ancient, bottomless places into stages that audiences could sit in and believe.

So, think about Newt as you teach your homeschoolers.

Use him as an instrument of who they have the potential to become as they learn on their own terms, outside of what society deems appropriate. Maybe they just might become the next Newt Perry. Or the master of marching—or swimming—to the beat of their own drum.

Next week, we’re leaving Florida and heading back to Georgia, and then going out west. And then aiming for a West Virginia bridge town that has its own monster on a postcard. We’re going looking for cryptids, and the weird American answer to the question of what we keep at the edges of the map.

Why Mermaids?

Yesterday, I told you about my daughter becoming a real mermaid at Weeki Wachee Springs.

If you’re here from that essay, welcome back. If you’re new, the very short version: my nine-year-old spent a weekend at mermaid camp in a natural Florida spring, and I spent the weekend revising every assumption I had about what a mermaid actually is.

Today, I want to dive into the lore.

I spent years thinking I understood the mermaid as a cultural figure. Sure, I knew Hans Christian Andersen, Disney, and Starbucks. But that was about the extent of it.

The mermaid is much, much older than any of those entities.

And much, much weirder, too.

The Mermaid is Everywhere

Here is what I didn’t understand until mermaid camp pushed me to explore the history of merfolk:

Mermaid stories aren’t a European invention. Or a medieval myth. They’re a humans-near-water tradition. Wherever people have lived near oceans, rivers, lakes, springs, or fjords, they have told stories about women of water.

The oldest known mermaid figure may be Atargatis of ancient Syria, a goddess from roughly 1000 BCE. The story goes that she fell in love with a mortal man, accidentally killed him, and threw herself into a lake over her grief. Her divinity was too strong to be hidden under the water, so she rose half-fish, half-woman. This, of course, is the figure we now recognize as a mermaid, born from love, loss, and self-immersion.

That was three thousand years ago.

From there, the pattern fans out across the globe:

• Japan’s ningyo— a strange woman-faced fish figure, often associated with immortality (eat one and you live forever, but at a terrible cost).

• Mi’kmaq’s (Northeastern North America) sabawaelnu— water people who could calm storms or summon them.

• Scandinavia’s margyr and havfrue— sea-women of the cold North Atlantic.

• Russia’s rusalki— drowned-girl spirits who live in rivers and pull the living under.

• Ancient Greece has an entire taxonomy of water spirits— oceanids of the salt sea, nereids of the Mediterranean, naiads of freshwater. The Greeks had different mermaids for different bodies of water, the way some cultures have different gods for different mountains.

• Indigenous Australia’s yawkyawk— beautiful young women with fish tails who live in freshwater pools.

• Brazil’s Iara— a Tupi-Guarani water spirit who lures men to drown.

• West Africa’s Mami Wata— a powerful water deity worshipped across many cultures, often depicted as a mermaid with a snake.

• Ireland’s and Scotland’s merrows and selkies— sea-people who can shed their tails or seal skins to walk on land, marry humans, and (almost always) leave them.

This is not a list of cultures borrowing from each other. These tales developed independently, in places with no historical contact, separated by oceans and centuries.

The mermaid is not a story that gets repeatedly copied; she’s a foundational archetype.

There is something about water and women that human beings in completely separate corners of the planet have arrived at almost like a water zeitgeist.

The Manatee Question

On January 9, 1493, sailing somewhere near the Dominican Republic, Christopher Columbus wrote in his ship’s log that he had seen three “sirens” rise out of the water. He noted, with audible disappointment, that they were not nearly as beautiful as they were painted. That they had, in fact, “a face like a man.”

He had seen manatees. But he was not the only one.

In 1614, the British explorer John Smith, yes, that John Smith, claimed to have spotted a mermaid in the Caribbean with “long green hair.” He reported he had begun to experience “the first effects of love” before the creature turned over and revealed that she was, in fact, also a manatee.

Henry Hudson reported one. Sailors all up and down the Age of European Exploration reported them. The pattern was so consistent that scientists eventually placed manatees and dugongs in the taxonomic order Sirenia, named directly for the siren myth they kept getting mistaken for.

So why did this keep happening?

Was it:

• Months at sea

• Vitamin deficiencies

• Eye damage from the sun and salt

• Sleep deprivation

• Hormonal restlessness

• A culture that had been telling sailors for a thousand years that mermaids were out there, ready to be found

A manatee surfacing at a distance—round head, expressive eyes, paddle-like tail, occasionally floating belly-up with her forefins folded across her chest in a way that the Taíno word for the animal helpfully notes resembles a breast—was the closest thing a starved imagination had to confirmation.

You see what you have been told to look for.

Mermaids vs. Sirens: the Great Mix-Up

A siren, in the original Greek sense, is not a mermaid.

In Homer’s Odyssey, the sirens are not fish-women. They are bird-women. Half-woman, half-bird. Sometimes with clawed feet, sometimes with full wings. Perched on a rocky island called Anthemoessa, singing a song that contained dangerous knowledge.

Keep that in mind. Not seduction, but knowledge.

The kind of knowledge that would make you forget to go home.

If you remember the scene, Odysseus has been warned by the sorceress Circe that no man who hears the sirens sing survives. His sailors stuff their ears with wax. But Odysseus decides he wants to hear the song. He orders himself lashed to the mast with instructions to be ignored no matter how desperately he begs to be untied.

They sail past the rocks.

Odysseus begins to hear the song.

He nearly tears himself apart trying to get to it.

The sailors row.

I told Aurora that those sirens were not mermaids, but rather birds with talons sitting on the rocky shore.

“But the Starbucks one is a mermaid,” she said.

Yes. That’s true.

The Starbucks logo is a mermaid. Let’s look at how that happened.

The bird-siren held cultural ground for centuries. Pliny the Elder, writing his Natural History around 77 AD, still categorized sirens as fabulous birds. They appear with bird bodies on Athenian pottery, Roman mosaics, and early medieval manuscripts.

Then the medieval period happened. Somewhere between the 8th and 14th centuries, European storytellers and artists began depicting sirens with fish tails instead of bird bodies. By the Renaissance, the bird version was basically gone. The siren got absorbed into the visual identity of the mermaid, kept her dangerous song, and lost her wings.

Why? A few theories:

• The rise of seafaring made water dangers more relevant than island dangers. Sailors were everywhere by the late Middle Ages; bird-women on rocks were less culturally pressing than fish-women in the water.

• Existing sea-deity traditions. Tritons, Nereids, and water nymphs merged easily with the siren’s seductive song.

• Sex sells. A fish-tailed woman is, for reasons we do not need to spell out, easier to eroticize than a clawed bird-woman with talons. In fact, the Starbucks mermaid has a double tail; look it up to find out the meaning.

The result is we now use “siren” and “mermaid” interchangeably.

The Starbucks logo is, technically, a siren, even though we say mermaid.

But the original siren, the bird-woman on the lonely island singing forbidden knowledge, is worth remembering. She was a more interesting figure than what she got flattened into. She wasn’t trying to seduce sailors with her body.

She was offering them the answer to a question.

The danger happened when they decided to listen for that answer.

What We Make Real with Our Own Bodies

Most mythological figures live entirely in story.

We don’t dress up as Atargatis. We don’t perform Persephone in a basin of pomegranate juice. Zeus has no job description. The figures stay on the page or in the temple frieze.

Last week, I wrote about the Fountain of Youth, a mythical location that has probably never existed but still pulls people across the country to drink water from a spring in St. Augustine, Florida. That essay was about what we receive from the myths we decide to believe in.

They become a place to put our longing.

The mermaid is the opposite kind of myth.

The mermaid does not work unless we give her something back. She demands that we make her real only when we are willing to be immersed in her world.

She required Atargatis to throw herself into a lake. For medieval craftsmen to carve her into church bench-ends. For 19th-century hoaxers to stitch a monkey’s torso to a fish’s tail and call it the Fiji Mermaid. She has required generations of women to be her, whether on stage, in tanks, or on film.

The mermaid does not exist if no one performs her.

Since 1947, the women of Weeki Wachee have been doing exactly that.

Once, they were teenagers in bathing suits, paid in hot dogs. Today, they’re State of Florida employees with scuba certifications who use breathing tubes in a five-mile-per-hour current for thirty-minute shows, so that audiences can sit in the dark and believe in a myth that doesn’t biologically exist.

The mermaid is not a creature you just study. And getting into a mermaid tail isn’t simply wearing a costume. My daughter knows that now, and so do I.

The mermaid is a thing you make real by embodying and immersing yourself in a three-thousand-year-old mythological figure.

That is the difference between this myth and almost every other one. And it is the reason I think it deserves more of our attention than we give it.

Resources for Curious Kids (and Their Curious Parents)

If your children catch mermaid fever the way mine did, here is what I’d recommend:

Books:

• The Very Short, Entirely True History of Mermaids by Sarah Laskow. This is the book we started with. Picture-book format, surprisingly substantive content. Good for ages 6+ as a read-aloud, 8+ for independent reading.

• A Natural History of Mermaids by Emily Hawkins, illustrated by Jessica Roux, is part of the Folklore Field Guides series. Beautiful, vintage-feeling, framed as the journal of an 1872 explorer aboard the HMS Challenger. Ages 7–11.

• Merpeople: A Human History by Vaughn Scribner. This one is for the parent who wants to go deeper. Academic but readable, 117 images, traces the figure through philosophy, religion, and pop culture.

Podcasts:

• History Hit, “Singing Sirens: The Mesmerising History of Mermaids”—Dr. Amelia Brown on Mediterranean mermaid traditions. Good for older kids or solo listening.

• Bedtime History, “History of Mermaids: Myth, Mystery and Legend for Kids”—A great car-ride listen or bedtime story for younger kids.

• Fabulous Folklore with Icy Sedgwick. This strong episode specifically addresses the difference between sirens and mermaids.

To Save for Later:

• “Daughters of the Spring” by Lauren Groff, Oxford American, Summer 2014. The literary essay about Weeki Wachee that started me down this road. Not for kids. But pin it for yourself. I have my own disagreements with it (see yesterday’s piece). But it’s the kind of writing that makes a place mean more.

And the Obvious One:

• The Weeki Wachee Springs State Park, Spring Hill, Florida. Go. Watch a show. If your kid is old enough, sign her up for camp. Or go to your own camp—they have them for adults, too. Immerse yourselves in the four-thousand-year lineage.

Next week, we are staying in the water for one more piece, but moving from the mermaids to the spring itself. Florida has more first-magnitude springs than any other place on Earth. The geology underneath them is the strangest natural classroom in America. I’m building a visual aid you can use with your own kid. See you in the water.

Earning my Wings

Back in 2014, I was quite proud of myself for earning my wings as a flight attendant.

I’d always been partial to all things of the air: Birds. Dragonflies. Faeries.

The freedom of being able to take off and move through space without anything holding me back. Getting to fly routinely across the country felt like a divine grace. Something normal humans couldn’t often do.

I had a subscription to Oxford American Magazine. And on one long-haul red-eye, after all the food carts had been put away and the last overhead light had gone out in the main cabin, I pulled the magazine out of my bag and read an essay called “Daughters of the Spring,” by Lauren Groff.

It was a journalistic attempt to figure out what all the hubbub was over the mermaids at Weeki Wachee.

I had no idea that women had been dressing up and swimming as mermaids in a Florida spring since the mid-1940s. But this roadside attraction made sense to me. Coming from a theatre background, I knew plenty of women in the performance world who’d don a tail for a pool party and make some extra cash on the weekends.

But after reading that article, the Weeki Wachee mermaids felt like something bigger. A sisterhood. A way of life for certain young women.

Not unlike my experience of becoming part of the sorority of the air.

I adored the article, but I filed it away in my head under quirky Florida landmarks and moved on.

Preparing for Mermaid Camp

Twelve years later, I had forgotten almost everything from that article. Except that Florida had a park where women performed as mermaids.

So when I found out that my water-loving nine-year-old could actually participate in a junior mermaid camp there, I was on it.

My husband had been teaching her to swim for years. In high school, he had been a lifeguard and a competitive breaststroker, meaning we never needed to pay for lessons.

I prepped my child for mermaid camp on the drive down from Georgia in the only way I knew how. With literature, mythology, and stories. Podcasts: A history-of-mermaids primer. A short course on Ponce de León and the manatees, which the early explorers kept mistaking for sirens. A quick recap of The Odyssey. And finally, a sirens vs. mermaids quiz.

(The lore is its own essay. You’ll get that post tomorrow.)

Intellectually, my daughter was ready.

Emotionally, I was not.

Mom’s No Fun Saturday Night

Mermaid camp would be two full days at the park. An entire weekend. Ending with a junior mermaid performance for the parents at 3:30 PM on Sunday.

We dropped her off on Saturday morning, and we discovered there would be only Aurora and one other little girl at the camp. The perks of traveling off-season as a homeschooler—lots of individual attention.

We were also told that if the park reached capacity on Sunday, we wouldn’t be readmitted. UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES! Did you feel that exclamation point and the all caps? I did that morning at the park.

There was very little chance of this happening on a weekend in early May. But you tell a mother that her child is performing somewhere she might not be able to get back into, and she’ll spend the next twenty-four hours running low-grade tactical scenarios.

On the drive down, I had a health flare-up.

This is not new for me. My body has been reacting for a long time. But it picked Saturday to put on a show, and by the time we got to the Gulf Coast, I was barely keeping it together.

That Saturday night, I listened to my daughter tell me about her day while I clung to a heating pad. She kept emphasizing the water: “It was so deep, Mom. So deep. It scared me at first. But I got over it.”

I nodded along and told her she was brave. I sincerely meant that, but I also assumed she meant deep, as in normal swimming pool deep-end deep.

She did not.

Spying is Part of the Job

Sunday morning, my husband and I made our way through the park trying to kill time before Aurora’s afternoon show. Drought conditions had shut down the boat cruise. But we were able to visit a blind old owl—how’s that for mythology?—and we sat in on the Ranger animal show.

I had the thought, “This is weird without my daughter,” about two minutes before Aurora wandered into the audience.

She strutted in with the main mermaids and her one other campmate, and they took a seat up front. They were breaking up swim practice with educational stops around the park. She spotted us at the end of the show and bolted over for a hug, which gave one of the mermaids a mini heart attack because she thought my child, in her custody, was running off with strangers.

Educational content + a highly attuned staff, what more could a homeschool mom ask for? I liked this mermaid camp!

But the park is small. If you aren’t going for the water slides, which, as a redheaded woman wearing a wide-brimmed hat in Florida, I certainly was not, you can walk the whole place in under an hour.

I was not leaving the park and taking any chances on Sunday. Suppose a Baptist church chartered three buses, showed up at 1 PM, and prevented me from reentry. It could happen!

So I parked myself in a paid cabana I had not paid for (the section was empty, and nobody chased me off), and crept behind a palm tree in my sunglasses and hat to peek at my daughter during her open-water practices.

I looked like the world’s worst CIA agent.

If I had owned binoculars, I would have used them.

It was around my third time sneaking a peek that my unease started to creep in. The water was so deep. Just like Aurora had tried to tell me the night before. And cold. And had actual fish in it.

When the Curtain Opened

Just before the last show of the day, after I had retired from my surveillance career, we made our way into the underwater theater. I was still not sure how any of this was going to work.

I had it in my head that the show happened in some kind of tank. A tiled pool, maybe with fake coral. Like, there’d be a bunch of mermaids who floated up to the top to catch some air before doing another splashy dive for applause.

When the ocean blue curtain opened, I was in shock.

This was not a pool. And it wasn’t a tank, either.

This was a natural spring.

With fish and turtles swimming past the girls in the water. The mermaids perform in the basin, which is about sixteen feet deep. But the back of the spring opens directly into the cave system, the bottom of which has never been fully mapped.

Read that again, please—the bottom of which has never been fully mapped.

A bottomless spring.

My daughter was going to perform in a bottomless spring.

The water sits at a constant 72 to 74 degrees year-round. Sounds refreshing, until you realize that it is well below body temperature, and the mermaids stay in the water for up to thirty minutes. They walk through a literal boiler room to heat up before each performance so they don’t go hypothermic.

The breathing tubes you can see threaded along the bottom are also real. So is the old airlock dome in the back of the spring, though it’s mostly nostalgic these days.

Was my daughter really going to be performing in this?

Yes, she was.

What Lauren Groff Missed

I had read Groff’s essay from Oxford American twelve years before and loved her writing. But sitting in the audience watching the curtain rise on a sixteen-foot-deep natural spring, I realized that she had missed something.

Groff had walked into Weeki Wachee looking for danger, sex, and mythic darkness. She left disappointed. The male PR manager running the place wouldn’t let her interview the women one-on-one. She concluded that the show was charming, the women were hardworking, and that—in her own words—“the surface is often beautiful; it is often good enough.”

The surface.

She sat in the same theater where I was currently sitting. She watched mermaids in this same spring. And she walked out, telling herself that the lack of mythic profundity meant the surface was the whole story.

But the surface is only the surface because there is depth underneath it.

The mermaid is only doing the work because the cave system she’s holding her breath in actually goes down four hundred feet, at least! The performance is only enchanting because the cold, the current, the boiler room, the certifications, and the breath-holding are all real. The glamour Groff politely admired is the visible tenth of an iceberg made of women’s labor.

You cannot know what is underneath unless you go into the water.

Groff didn’t.

I didn’t either. But my daughter did.

And she came back up changed.

And so did I.

What it Actually Takes to Become a Mermaid

Sitting in that underwater theater, watching real women in crafted tails—yes, they’re functional, not just decorative—breathe through hoses sixteen feet deep, my shame started to creep in.

I had treated the mermaid camp like a glorified pool party.

I had imagined Aurora splashing around in a kiddie tank for two hours and going home with a mermaid-themed goodie bag.

I had dismissed it.

And the dismissal started to look very familiar.

One of the mermaids supervising Aurora’s camp mentioned to my husband that she had swum the 500-yard freestyle in high school.

My husband, the former swim-team breaststroker, explained, “That means she’s a beast. Those 500 swimmers sprint twenty laps at a time.”

These are NOT women sunbathing on rocks in fake tails for tourists.

These are athletes who spend their work hours in a freshwater cave system, holding their breath in a current strong enough to push them downstream into an abyss that has never been mapped to its bottom.

Flight Attendants Aren’t on the List, Either

This is where something in me came up for air. Because the dismissal I had handed out to Mermaid Camp is the exact dismissal that has been handed out to every female-centered job I have ever loved and to every job done well by the women I admire.

So much for the stereotypes of the trolley dollies.

Or attending Barbie Bootcamp.

There’s a reason all flight attendants originally were expected to be nurses in the early days of flying. The general public thinks of flight attendants as cocktail waitresses of the skies.

The reality: Flight attendants are federally certified safety professionals trained to keep two hundred strangers alive in an emergency.

The next time you fly, hope and pray you get one whose attention is on your safety rather than one who can serve you a great Bloody Mary. And that she’s had plenty of sleep.

One thing that has never stopped grinding my gears:

The building that replaced the Twin Towers has a tourist observatory on top. It offers complimentary admission to 9/11 first responders and discounted admission to active and retired military, police, fire, and EMS.

Flight attendants are not on that list.

Eleven crewmembers died on those four planes that morning. The flight attendants who tried to communicate with the ground while their planes were being hijacked are not, apparently, considered first responders.

Not as far as the ticket counter is concerned. But indeed, that’s exactly what flight attendants are.

Girl Groups and Why They Matter

The Weeki Wachee mermaid sits on a shelf, in my mind now, next to a long line of other dismissed crafts.

The teacher.

The nurse.

The dancer.

The flight attendant.

The hospice aide.

The labor-and-delivery nurse who stays on her feet for fourteen hours catching babies.

The kindergarten teacher who is also a behavioral therapist, a fire marshal, a grief counselor, and a snack chef.

The nun.

And the mother: she, whose worry and fear are palpable, and nobody around her notices the work she’s putting in.

These are jobs society has long agreed look soft. Or maybe it looks like something pretty to put on a postcard with no awareness of what the job entails.

These are jobs whose entire architecture is built on women doing excruciating things while making it look easy. And then their daughters come of age, and watch them, and decide they also want to do the hard things.

The Parents’ Show

The last mermaid show of the day ended the way they all end. The sea witch flung open the sea portal and cackled, made the babies cry, and the rest of us laughed before the ocean blue curtain closed.

We had no idea what was about to happen next.

They ushered the audience out, leaving only my husband and me and the other little girl’s entire extended family—siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandma—an entire row of people ready to cheer for their little mermaid.

The curtain reopened.

They placed Aurora and her camp friend up close to the glass rather than far out in the depths. Each junior mermaid had a main mermaid floating with them, along with her own lifeguard.

There was little concern about safety in this setup.

When the music started, I took a deep breath, and so did Aurora.

And then she dove.

She did backflips. She came up to the glass for air. She went back down. She held a pose. She came back up and dove back down again.

She did this for an entire song. And in the finality, she blew kisses.

There was no doubt: my daughter had become a real mermaid.

She had passed through the invisible gate of challenging female work, and she had come out the other side in a tail. No, she wasn’t using the breathing tubes or staying under for 30 minutes, but it was clear she had put the work in.

The Tail and The Wings

I came home from that weekend with a strange new respect for everyone whose work I had ever looked at and underestimated.

The flight attendant pouring you a Coke is also the person who will pull you out of a burning fuselage.

The mermaid posing for your photo just held her breath in a current strong enough to drown you.

The mother who looks like she’s just sitting there has spent the whole day managing her own ailing body in long sleeves at 85 degrees, planning 12 contingencies in case three Baptist church buses show up.

You don’t see most of it.

That is, in fact, the entire trick.

The women who do this kind of work are very good at making it look like nothing. We go home, and we don’t tell you about the boiler room. We don’t tell you about the cabin pressure simulation. We don’t tell you about the heating pad. We just show up the next day in the tail, or the jumpseat, or in the kitchen.

And our daughters watch us do it.

Then they put on the tail. Or the wings. And they, eventually, do the worrying.

And we welcome them in.

Tomorrow, we are diving into the lore. Where do mermaid myths actually come from? Every culture that has ever lived near water has a story about a woman who lives in it. And the strangest century-long misunderstanding in maritime history (it involves a 1,000-pound sea cow and a confused conquistador). We’re going deep.

Driving Down to Florida

Walking into my daughter’s 3rd-grade school year, I knew her curriculum covered the early American explorers. Living in Georgia, we typically visit Florida every other year, so it seemed like a natural choice to head to St. Augustine, America’s first city, on our biannual trip.

I had been to the city years earlier and even taken a little detour to Ponce de León’s Fountain of Youth Archaeological Park, but I had no idea how I’d square the over-the-top elements of a small theme park with historical fact.

I certainly didn’t want to teach anything untruthful.

Today, I believe you can present actual history alongside mythology and trust that your children will understand both. Explaining how often the two get muddled into mysteries born from storytelling is about as simple as playing a game of telephone. But there are resources that will help you along the way.

I use podcasts like Our Fake History, where host Sebastian Major first presents the mythology we have all been sold, then delves into the most likely historically accurate versions of those stories.

You don’t have to sugarcoat anything.

When you’re teaching, you can absolutely honor the truth while also exploring how mythology threads itself into our lives. Learning that history is often more complicated than we’ve been led to believe is the exact mystery I want my daughter’s brain to unravel.

Who was Ponce de León?

Your school textbook may have read something like this:

I don’t care how many sources you cite; that’s actually false.

Ponce de León sailed to find gold, land, and royal favor. He held contracts, a list of grants from King Ferdinand, and specific instructions for subjugating the Indigenous people of whatever islands he found and for dividing up any wealth he extracted from them. At 47, he died, shot by Calusa warriors with an arrow while fighting on Florida’s southwest coast.

The man was pursuing an empire, not immortality.

His claim to the Fountain of Youth is a common misconception.

It was attached to him fourteen years after his death by a Spanish court chronicler named Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, who happened to be aligned with one of Ponce de León’s political rivals. The goal was to humiliate the conquistador posthumously. Here is this gullible fool, the story went, tricked by the natives into chasing a magical spring instead of doing the real work of conquest.

This was a way to smear Ponce de León’s name, and it worked.

By the seventeenth century, the smear had become history.

The Fountain of Youth connection to Ponce de León exists because his enemies wanted to make him look like an idiot. He died chasing power and territory, yet he is remembered as a man who was seeking eternal life. Five hundred years later, we are still taught the myth beside the man.

Ponce de León would have been furious over his legacy.

Mythmaking

The smear that stuck so well that we teach it to children in schools—there were several busloads of students the day we were at the park—was based on a legend that was alive and well long before Ponce de León. The Fountain of Youth was a myth entangled in the European imagination centuries before the conquistador was even born.

A magical plant that restores youth appears in the Epic of Gilgamesh, recorded in cuneiform around 2100 BCE, roughly four thousand years ago.

The hero finds the plant, but grieves over losing it to a snake.

Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BCE, describes a fountain in the land of the Macrobians that gives them their unnatural longevity. Alexander the Great, in medieval romance literature, searches for a “river of paradise” on his eastern campaigns. The medieval European Christian imagination invented Prester John, a mythical king whose kingdom in some far eastern place contained both a river of gold and a fountain of youth. Versions of the figure appear in Japanese folklore, Polynesian stories, the Canary Islands myths, and English legend.

By the time Spanish ships were arriving in the Caribbean, the Taíno people were reportedly telling Spanish sailors about a magical spring somewhere north of Cuba, on an island called Bimini. Yes, it’s possible they were told these stories. It’s also possible the Spanish heard what they wanted to hear, because their own European bookshelves were already full of these longevity tales, and they had arrived prepared to search for a spring.

The myth predates the man by thousands of years. Ponce de León was, at most, a vessel the myth poured itself into. Not the creator of the myth.

New myths almost never appear out of nowhere. They settle onto people and places that have already been shaped to receive them.

Diamond Lil Expands the Myth

In 1904, a woman named Luella Day McConnell arrived in St. Augustine, Florida, with a diamond embedded in her front tooth.

But she possessed something else that sparkled. A story she was about to fabricate from whole cloth.

Roadside America tells us that McConnell had been a practicing physician in Chicago in the 1890s, an almost impossible thing for a woman at the time, until gold fever kicked in around 1898, convincing her to abandon medicine and join the Klondike rush in the Yukon. She made some money and married a man named Ed McConnell. Then she ran a hotel at a trading post in the Yukon Territory. Later, she claimed someone tried to assassinate her, so she fled the territory in the middle of the night, traveled to Alaska and then California, and eventually landed on the Florida coast. By the time she got to St. Augustine, she had two ex-husbands, a small fortune, and that diamond in her tooth that earned her the nickname Diamond Lil.

She bought fifteen acres of waterfront land just north of the Mission Nombre de Dios. And decided that this area contained the actual Fountain of Youth that Ponce de León had supposedly visited four hundred years earlier. There was no historical evidence that any of this was true. There was, on the property, a perfectly ordinary natural spring of slightly sulfurous water.

For Diamond Lil, this was enough.

She invented stories to tell the tourists and started charging admission. She also claimed to have found an ancient stone urn containing parchment that proved the connection to Ponce de León. Not long after, and most conveniently, the urn disappeared, and the parchment became unreadable. A local biographer wrote that she “fabricated stories to amuse and appall St. Augustine residents,” which is the nice way to put it.

When she wasn’t conning local residents, McConnell had a string of interesting endeavors. She:

• wrote to President Taft to warn him about a Washington conspiracy to murder women.

• allegedly shot a neighbor’s horse.

• was rumored to have hosted illegal gambling parties.

• was briefly suspected of being a German spy during World War I.

• claimed to be a descendant of the Bonapartes and to own Napoleon’s pocket watch.

• claimed multiple people had tried to poison her, variously, with gas, Coca-Cola, apples, and a watermelon.

She is, in other words, the patron saint of American roadside attractions.

Everything I love about the impulse to drive somewhere weird and pay money to see its mythical audacity is embodied in Luella Day McConnell.

She died in a car accident in 1927. Afterward, an ex-husband came to claim her body but lost it, which sounds exactly like the kind of mythological ending Diamond Lil deserved. The Fountain of Youth Archaeological Park outlived her by nearly a century and is still open today. Adults pay $22.95, while toddlers under five get in free. The water still smells like rotten eggs from the sulfur, but you’ll find many guests clamoring to get in.

What draws us to these places, even when we know much of it is carved out of clouds and unbelievable history?

What We Gain from Participating in the Myth

So what if we know Ponce de León didn’t search for the Fountain of Youth because his enemies invented the story as a posthumous insult? And what if we are sure the actual fountain in St. Augustine was a tourist trap dreamed up in 1904 by a Klondike grifter with a diamond in her tooth?

Why are we still visiting these places?

It’s not because the people in line are gullible and ignorant. Read the TripAdvisor reviews. They know exactly what they are paying for and that the magic is not literally in the plastic cups of water.

Sure, there are some intriguing things to investigate at the park. There are free-roaming Indian peafowl, including colorful males and the rare white peacocks. There are regular cannon firings, 16th-century settlements, and excavations. There’s also a 30-foot-wide discovery globe which maps the routes of the Spanish conquistadors. But could there be another reason so many tourists visit this park each year?

Could they instead be there for the posture of seeking?

To set out for an afternoon, on fifteen acres on the Matanzas River, and be the kind of person who goes looking for something nobody can actually find. The fountain sets the stage for a feeling humans have pined for at least the last 4,000 years, most likely longer.

The yearning is the point, while the water is just the prop.

This is what myths that lie with confidence do for us. They give us somewhere to put our longing. To claim restoration and second chances. That longing is real even when its object or point of origin is suspect. The longing existed in ancient Mesopotamia, in fifth-century Greece, and in medieval Europe.

Many of you might recognize that longing in yourself today.

A myth doesn’t have to be factually true to churn up something significant inside of us. It just gives our feelings a place to go.

The Fountain of Youth is one of those places.

It’s a structure built by a grifter on top of slander from a court rival, on top of a yearning as old as written language. It is a lie all the way down, and it is also, somehow, telling the truth.

We need places like this.

To know they exist.

And to have the opportunity to take the journey to them.

Resources for the curious

• The Myth of Ponce de León and the Fountain of Youth, History.com: a solid overview of the Oviedo smear and the actual contracts.

• Ponce de León Never Searched for the Fountain of Youth, Smithsonian Magazine (Nov. 2013): scholarly debunking with quotes from historian J. Michael Francis.

• Our Fake History podcast, Episode 65, “Was There a Real Hunt for the Fountain of Youth?”: long-form treatment for the car ride. Be warned: there are a few moments that discuss impotence.

• The Fountain of Youth Archaeological Park, St. Augustine, FL: open daily and has BBQ. Drink the water. See the peacocks. Tell your kids everything.

• Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt: if you’re looking for a good novel about living forever, this is the one. It’s short and sentimental. I added a section about it to my death series here.

A note for parents (and the rest of us)

If you’re a parent, you may find, as I have, that the question of whether or not to take your kid to places like this becomes philosophically interesting.

On one hand, you don’t want to lie to your child. You don’t want to stand at a fountain dreamed up in 1904 by Diamond Lil and pretend it has anything to do with Ponce de León, who did not look for it. You want your child to understand the difference between fact and fable.

On the other hand, you want your child to understand that humans make fables. That we have been doing it for thousands of years. The fable is sometimes the only honest container for the feeling. That a “false” story can do more truthful work than a careful textbook.

I think the answer is: Go.

Drink the water.

Tell your kids everything.

Explain the smear, the grifter, the diamond in the tooth, the four-thousand-year-old yearning, and the line out the door. Those are all parts of history, too. Let’s show them what humans have built. And how modern crowds are still flocking to it.

That is what a myth truly is. Not a fact. A place we agree to share.

While the fountain of youth may not keep us alive indefinitely, the stories we tell just might.

Next week, we are journeying into the deep, and when I say deep, I mean there’s no bottom. Both to the spring and to the number of mermaid tales (tails) out there. Yes, we’re going to explore the history of the mermaid. So get ready to dive in.

I grew up in the US Deep South states of Georgia, Louisiana, and Arkansas. With everyone I loved in Georgia and my small family moving between the other two states for most of my elementary school years, we drove back “home” for every big holiday and summer break.

The landscape of this region never met a roadside gimmick it didn’t love.

A big chicken beckoned us as its eyes spun around and its beak clucked. Giant peaches, oranges, and peanuts told us exactly where to stop for a snack. See Rock City on the red rooftops of barns became a direct commandment no civilized Southerner could ignore.

These attractions were the wallpaper of getting somewhere.

But the first roadside attraction I remember consciously noticing wasn’t even on the road. It was the dinosaur from Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. We didn’t visit that dinosaur, but I do recall begging my parents to stop so I could see an enormous purple dino on one of our excursions. As I walked around it, I remember thinking that some artist had made it for no reason other than to have it admired by travelers eager to get somewhere else.

That, in retrospect, was my first lesson.

Someone creating an homage to something they loved just so they could share it with the world. Knowing it would most likely be forgotten once the wheels were rolling again.

Roadside Attractions: History or Mythology?

My second lesson came later, in my flight attendant years.

I started flying for a living, and when I did stop, I’d be in some unknown place with time to kill, so I’d visit local attractions. It was during those short breaks that I realized every region has its own mythology.

Roadside attractions just help make that mythology become real.

Sure, you can read a history of a place. You can eat its food and talk to its people. But how do you really learn about a location? Well, if a city’s got a UFO museum or a hospital for Cabbage Patch Kids, that can explain a lot. These places tell you what people in certain locales find worth preserving.

You’ll gain insight into what the local color thinks:

• Is funny

• Is sacred

• Is valuable enough to spend money on

And that can tell an extraordinary story.

Roadside Americana is more than folk art with a gift shop. It’s the “id” of a region—that primal unconscious part of us turned into a 3D representation. Funky and photographable.

I started seeking out these weird art installations the way some people seek out churches or famous tourist destinations. I made a mental list of every last one, adding to it each time I landed somewhere new. It became my framework for getting to know a culture.

Show me a city’s roadside attractions, and I’ll tell you something true about that place.

The Thing in the Desert

But the one that changed everything was THE THING.

This was before my flying days, when I still wasn’t sure who I wanted to be or where I wanted to live.

Maybe you’ve seen the signs if you’ve ever driven along Interstate 10.

They stretch from El Paso, Texas, to Tucson, Arizona, with just the words THE THING? painted in red or blue on a yellow billboard. This gets repeated like a mantra until you either pull off or die of curiosity. I had driven past these signs on several roadtrips, always too eager to reach my destination to stop.

The last time I drove back from Georgia to Phoenix, I made a decision.

I would stop.

I was in my mid-thirties. A mid-point serving me an invoice for so many deferred decisions. Like postponing motherhood. I had gone back to Georgia with the hope of reclaiming something. A sense of home, perhaps, or the version of myself I’d long left behind. In the end, the return didn’t work out. The Georgia red clay might have been stuck to my shoes again, but the feet in those shoes were attached to someone different. And those feet were pointed toward a destination I had discovered in Phoenix, Arizona.

When the signs for The Thing started to appear, I was ready to face them this time. I paid my two dollars and walked in. I followed the yellow footprints through the corrugated metal tunnels past the Model T and the Rolls Royce built for a maharajah, past the torture devices and the displays of dubious provenance, until I got to The Thing itself.

A mummified mother and child, encased in glass.

Real?

Fake?

Who knows?

Was that even the point?

The mother is curled around the child in a protective posture.

I stood there longer than I intended to. I was in the middle of the Sonoran Desert, having paid two dollars to see something that might be papier-mâché, and I was holding back tears.

I don’t know exactly what I thought I was grieving. The version of my life I hadn’t gotten to live yet. The sense that time was doing something irreversible while I drove back and forth across the country, looking for my place to belong.

The Thing didn’t give me any answers. Instead, it had me questioning everything. Why this macabre tableau of a mother and child? And why now?

Once back in Phoenix, I became a flight attendant, met my husband, and had my daughter at forty.

I don’t think The Thing was the cause of those decisions. I’m into mysticism, but not from roadside mummies. But I do think about how many times I had driven past the exit, too busy and too certain of my destination to stop.

There is mystery in the road not taken, isn’t there?

Exploring Today

Those past experiences as a single woman inspired me to share Roadside Americana with my family today.

When we go, we don’t hesitate to check out the most unusual and unlikely spots to stop for a break. We’ve taken Aurora to the EXPEDITION: BIGFOOT! The Sasquatch Museum in Cherry Log, Georgia. She acquired her favorite stuffed animal, a green alien, at the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, New Mexico. She’s been to Graceland in Memphis, Tennessee, to see everything Elvis. We’ve stopped at the Lodge in Wakulla Springs, Florida, to see The Creature from the Black Lagoon.

What I’m trying to teach her with these trips is harder to pinpoint than any lesson in a curriculum. Sure, it’s geography, history, and mythology. But it’s also something unnamed. It’s the awareness that the world is more visceral and alive than it seems when you blaze through it at 70 MPH on the highway and never slow down to really look.

It’s taking the time to see things.

To pay attention to the odd and unusual just for the heck of it.

The roadside was always a curriculum. I just had to get lost enough to notice.

Roadside Attraction List

Here are some of the roadside attractions we’ve explored:

• The Thing — Benson, AZ

• International UFO Museum — Roswell, NM

• BabyLand General Hospital — Cleveland, GA

• Unclaimed Baggage Center — Scottsboro, AL

• Biosphere 2 — Oracle, AZ

• Rooster Cogburn Ostrich Ranch — Picacho, AZ

• Bird Cage Theater Museum & OK Corral — Tombstone, AZ

• Rock City — Lookout Mountain, GA

• Expedition Bigfoot, the Sasquatch Museum — Cherry Log, GA

• Mermaids of Weeki Wachee — Weeki Wachee, FL

• Fountain of Youth — Saint Augustine, FL

• National Museum of Funeral History — Houston, TX

• Santa Claus House and Giant Santa — North Pole, AK

• Crater of Diamonds — Murfreesboro, AR

• The Big Chicken — Marietta, GA

• Fort Raleigh (The Lost Colony) — Manteo, NC

• The Lodge at Wakulla Springs — Crawfordville, FL

• The Winchester Mystery House — San Jose, CA

• The Hoover Dam Statues — Boulder City, NV

• The Fremont Troll — Seattle, WA

Where are you traveling this summer?

I’d love to know if you are incorporating roadside attractions into your trip. And if so, what are these places teaching you and your children about travel, history, and mythology? What are you noticing?

Leave a comment

Starting next week, we’ll take a closer look at specific roadside attractions, and I’ll detail how I use them to teach about an area and its history.

First up: Ponce De Leon’s The Fountain of Youth

Substack now allows you to add a drop cap to your posts.

What’s a drop cap?

It’s that big, stylized letter that opens a piece of writing.

In this short article, Patricia Gomez gives several examples of just how elaborate that initial capital can get. Take a look.

Fancy Writing

Growing up, most kids had the standard kid jobs.

I remember some set up lemonade stands.

Others mowed lawns.

A few babysat other neighborhood kids.

I did all those things, too, but my first business venture was driven by my entrepreneurial spirit.

I was in the 3rd grade, had just taken a calligraphy class, and wanted to show all my classmates how to create the stylized letters I was learning. I charged a quarter to teach each kid calligraphy on the playground.

Okay, fine, I was weird.

But I loved art and all things beautiful. And I wanted my classmates to fall in love with calligraphy, too.

3rd grade was also when we were first learning cursive. Because of this overlap, my cursive and my calligraphy became intertwined, and remain that way to this day. I still use a mash-up of both styles in my handwriting. For example, I opt for the more open L of calligraphy when signing my middle initial, rather than one with loops like Laverne’s famous initial that adorned all her sweaters in Laverne and Shirley.

My love of calligraphy never fully disappeared. It just evolved.

In my 20s, I manned the front desk at a small attorney’s office that was open from only 8 AM to 2 PM. Every afternoon, I’d rush home, put on a talk show, get out my inks and gold leaf, and dedicate hours to figuring out how to illuminate one large letter.

What I was practicing wasn’t exactly practical, but it was a meditative art form that kept my creative juices flowing.

Now, AI has given us the ability to produce all kinds of illuminated letters for fonts and logos without our hands ever having to do more than hit a keyboard. I have mixed feelings about this experience. I think there’s more to calligraphy and illuminated lettering than just producing something beautiful. When you spend time letting your hands practice moving through line and loop, your mind calms and makes connections.

That’s why, along with teaching my daughter cursive, we’re also dabbling in the art of calligraphy. It was only when I introduced her to calligraphy that she found an interest in handwriting.

How to Get the Drop Caps

My guess is that Substack wanted to give its authors a throwback to a stylized editorial look. To make our pieces appear more finished and professional. You won’t hear any complaints from me about the drop caps.

They’re easy to add to articles and look stunning:

1. From your Substack Dashboard, click on Website editor.

2. Click on the Posts tab.

3. Next to Drop caps, click the toggle to the right to turn it on, then select Save.

That’s all there is to it.

Your drop cap will appear at the beginning of every article in the web browser version, in your theme color.

Examples of Illuminations

Take a look at this short video to see how drop caps are now being added to digital documents. You’ll also notice how they compare to their older hand-drawn counterparts.

Or watch as this gentleman shows us how drop caps, or drop letters, as he calls them, are added to a printed page via a printing press.

And if you’re up for it, here’s a short history of Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts discussing what was considered a real illuminated manuscript and what wasn’t. The video also provides information on the Book of Kells and how the Printing Press changed the fate of hand-created books.

In 2011, I was lucky enough to spend some time in Madrid, Spain, where I visited the Instituto Valencia de Don Juan, which houses the Book of Hours of Doña Mencía de Mendoza, created in the 16th century. Here is a recreation of that pocket-sized book so you can get an idea of what’s inside.

Any opportunity you get to see one of these rare works of art, you should take. They are timeless classics that may never be reproduced.

What do you think?

Will you be using the drop cap in your Substack articles? I’d love to know.

Leave me a comment below and tell me why you will or won’t be using the new drop cap on Substack:

Leave a comment

Nothing sparks my editor’s passion more than the idea of distilling a person’s entire life into a concise passage that fits on one page.

If you want to watch a truly engaging and quirky documentary, I highly recommend Obit. A movie about the specific writers of the New York Times who spend their entire careers penning stories about the dead.

The 2016 documentary follows the writers—Bruce Weber, Margalit Fox, and William McDonald—as they hunt for details that pry open a life, following a death. These articles aren’t résumés or lists of survivors. They craft full narratives that hand you the whole person in less than 1000 words.

Their work is a masterclass in writing.

These biographies in miniature are worth reviewing to improve your writing skills and craft your own story. Before we get to the exercises, let’s go to school on a few of the best obituaries ever written.

The Masters at Work

Here are a few of the best obits from the New York Times. You will need an account to read these, sorry they used to be free. But I believe you can sign up for a 7-day free trial and then cancel.

Read them once for pleasure, then read them again, looking at structure.

• John Fairfax: Read this one first so you can see exactly how obituaries function like great literature. Described in the documentary as having an explosive response from readers, this obit had many calling him the original most interesting man in the world.

• Elmore Leonard: Notice where the voice enters. The obit sounds a little like Leonard, who was a novelist himself.

• David Bowie: This one is a masterclass in describing details and knowing which ones to skip.

• Ryuichi Sakamoto: For this obit, ask yourself what the writer chose to lead with, and why the music comes before the biography.

• Aretha Franklin: Study the pacing here and focus on how long the writer earns the superlatives before she uses them.

• Anthony Bourdain: The opening paragraph is practically a short story, while the second paragraph will stop you cold.

Read that Bourdain one twice, if you have to.

I’ll explain how to tackle the second paragraph later in this essay.

The Anatomy of an Obituary

The NYT obit desk has a structure they follow so reliably you can map it onto almost any obit they’ve published in the last fifty years. And it’s a structure you can emulate.

¶1 — The Who (and Why It Matters)

Full name. What they were known for. The scale of the life in one or two sentences. This is not the place for “beloved mother of three.” This is the time to establish that this person existed in a spectacular way that the world will now have to do without.

¶2 — The Death

How. Where. When. Age. This paragraph is always second. It’s the contract with the reader: you gave us the who, now tell us how and when it ended.

Notice that the paragraph doesn’t editorialize. You’ll never see a New York Times obit say someone died too soon or that they’ll be missed. It just closes the door cleanly, with a date.

This is also, for our purposes, the most important paragraph you will ever write about yourself, and you get to make the whole thing up. More on that in a moment.

Notice that ¶2 above is a declarative sentence; it makes a statement of fact.

A person existed, and then he died.

¶3 — The Nut Graf

Why does this life matter in the largest possible frame?

This is the paragraph that earns the space on the page. It pulls back and presents a cultural, historical, or deeply personal argument for why this person’s particular existence mattered.

That sentence is a hinge. It tells you: everything you just read, like how his time traversing the Atlantic, the Pacific, and his rowing, is the boring part. The writer is pulling back the camera to say, “This life was even more remarkable than the one we led with.”

That’s the nut graf reframing the whole person in one move.

¶4–7 — The Evidence

Now you build the case. Chronology is important, but you light it from within using specific scenes. You don’t say “she loved music.” Instead, you give a story about the most important song of her life. The NYT obit writers call this the telling detail. It’s the anecdote that explains all the other anecdotes. It’s like excavating a buried treasure.

Four sentences. A whole childhood, a lost love, a brush with death, a career change. Notice that Margalit Fox never explains any of it. She doesn’t say this tells us he was fearless or that he had a complicated relationship with danger. She trusts the facts. The reader puts it all together and gives it emotional depth. That’s how specific evidence works: it makes the argument without announcing itself.

The Kicker

The last line of a great obituary lands like a musical chord. Rather than summarize, it should resonate. If you read the Bowie obit to the last word, you’ll feel it. Fox ends on an image, not a statement, and the image does more than any summary could.

The kicker doesn’t explain what the life meant. It just makes you feel, in one sentence, that you’ve been in the presence of something vital. Like this:

The kicker circles back to something small, almost comic, and the contrast between that small thing and everything else in the obit is where the meaning lives. In the Bowie obit, it’s a volatile jazz-based quartet, small and yet representative of his entire musical life.

You don’t need to say he was extraordinary; the contrast does the work.

A Special Note on Paragraph Two

In the documentary, one of the obit writers mentions that the second paragraph is always where they state exactly how the person died.

When writing your own obituary, you have two choices.

You can leave this section blank, which is honest but boring.

Or, and this is what I’d suggest you do, you can take a hard left turn into pure speculation and write the death you would want to have. I’m not joking. Project yourself far, far into the future. Find the exit that is so entirely, absurdly you that it couldn’t have belonged to anyone else.

The only rule: Be bold and specific.

Some examples to get you started:

She died on a Tuesday at the age of 105 when she took a hot air balloon across the Mojave Desert and never came back.

She died at 112 while attempting to return a library book that was, by then, 85 years overdue. The librarian has confirmed the fine has been waived.

She was last seen at 107, accepting a ride from a white stag at the edge of a wood she had spent her whole life walking toward. She left her shoes behind.

The point is not to be morbid.

The point is to ask: what would be the most ‘you’ way to go?

Write it in the spirit of Ryuichi Sakamoto curating his own funeral playlist. Consider that he didn’t do it out of despair, but out of authorship, wanting to be the last one in the room making aesthetic decisions about his own life.

You can have that too, while claiming some whimsy.

The Sentence Skills, All in One Place

If you’ve been following this series, you’ve spent five weeks learning how to lean into death using solid sentence building. This week, all of those tools show up at once, because an obituary can use every single one of them.

Here is a quick map of where they land.

WEEK 1: THE KERNEL SENTENCE AND THE QUESTIONS

Every obituary starts with the simplest sentence in the language:

Someone died.

That’s your kernel. Subject, verb, no modifiers. Two words.

From there, you ask: Who? What? Where? When? Why? How?

Who died? She did, the woman who kept a cedar chest full of celebrity coats since 1968.

How? She went willingly, which is a whole different kind of sentence.

The kernel is just the door. The questions help you walk through it.

WEEK 2: THE FOUR SENTENCE TYPES

An obituary uses all four. Watch how each one works:

Declarative: She made extraordinary things out of ordinary days. (The sentence of a person who has arrived somewhere. Use it for your ¶1 and ¶3.)

Interrogative: What would she have done with another fifty years? (Still in motion. Use it in your nut graf when you want the reader to feel the loss as an open question.)

Imperative: Remember the part about the library book. (Quiet insistence. The kicker often works this way because it doesn’t summarize; it commands the reader’s attention.)

Exclamatory: His music was the anthem of a generation! (Use this only once, if ever. The exclamatory earns its point only when everything else has been restrained.)

WEEK 3: BECAUSE, BUT, SO

The three conjunctions are how you turn a fact into a story.

Take the most important thing about yourself, one kernel sentence, and run it through all three:

I kept starting over because I believed the next version of myself was worth meeting.

I kept starting over, but it always turned out I had brought myself along.

I kept starting over, so I never stopped.

Three different examples, all technically true.

WEEK 5: TRANSITION WORDS: THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE STORY

The transitions are where the obituary shows us the argument.

Before she knew what she was doing, she had already begun. —Time and sequence

She was, above all, someone who showed up. —Emphasis

She was stubborn; however, she was never wrong. —Change of direction

She loved many things—specifically, the ones the world told her were impractical. —Illustration

In the end, she got the exit she would have written for herself. —Conclusion

‘In the end’ is a conclusion transition. It tells the reader we’ve arrived. The thinking is done, and what follows is what it was all for.

That’s your kicker.

The Template

This Week’s Exercises

For Younger Writers: Write an Obituary for a Pet

This can be a real, past, or imaginary friend. No matter what, the skill is the same.

Tell your child that they aren’t writing a list of facts. They’re writing an argument for why this creature mattered. Find the detail that makes the animal’s existence important. Not what they looked like or how long they lived, but what they did, whether it’s strange, sweet, or just memorable.

Tell them to write the thing that was only true of them.

Use the template. Fill in every section. For paragraph two, you may invent the death. Your child can be as dramatic as the animal deserves.

Prompts to write toward:

• What was the one thing this pet always did that drove everyone crazy but you secretly loved?

• What did they know about you that nobody else did?

• Where were they when something important happened?

• What is the sentence that, if someone read only that one sentence, would let them know exactly who this animal was?

Have your student start with your kernel: Someone died.

Then ask them to answer the six questions.

Finally, have them build outward using everything they know.

For Older Writers and Parents: Write Your Own Obit

This is not a morbid exercise, but a clarifying one full of hope for a long life.

You’re not writing a list of your accomplishments. You’re finding the shape of your life so far. Look at the texture of everything, the surprising throughlines, and the thing you kept doing even when it made no obvious sense because it was simply you.

Use the template. And yes, write paragraph two. Just make sure you earn it.

Prompts to write toward:

• What’s the story that, when you tell it, people will say that is so you?

• What did you love before the world approved or disapproved?

• What would surprise people to learn about you, and why does it actually make total sense?

• If someone were writing this about you, what would they get wrong? (That’s usually the most important thing.)

Write the obituary. Be specific. Cut anything that performs instead of reveals. Earn the reader in the first sentence

I hope you’ve enjoyed these writing exercises as we’ve looked more closely at death. If you didn’t catch all of them, you can start over with Finding the Words.

How about plans for your own funeral?

Okay, sure, it’s a bit much to consider on a Tuesday morning, I’ll give you that.

But hear me out.

Planning for your final moments might yield more than morbid curiosity. What if it could help you create the conditions for a life well-led?

I bet you don’t doubt that your life choices have made the biggest difference in getting you to where you are right now. The road less traveled and all that poetic stuff. Now consider how there’s no bigger life choice than deciding how you want to be remembered.

Your own mindful exit.

We’ll get to that in a moment, but first…

A story about a dog.

Molly, Everybody’s Best Friend

There was once a dog.

A dog who was never really my dog, but definitely became my daughter’s dog, even after we had to find a new home for her.

Her name was Molly, and she came to us through death.

Molly was my husband’s uncle’s dog. Uncle Chris was divorced, with his only adult daughter living in another city. He had recently adopted Molly, a lovable chihuahua/pomeranian mix, from a shelter, just before he received a diagnosis of terminal cancer. With no close family nearby, all he had was Molly. My husband and his brother kept a vigil for Uncle Chris until his final moments. Afterward, Molly needed a new home, making my husband the most likely candidate.

You can read my husband’s essay, Night Watch, where he explains what it’s like to be on watch for a family member’s impending death. Consider it the origin story to this one. Without that first loss, the rest of this story wouldn’t have ever taken place.

This was before my part of the story began.

When I met my husband, Molly was already firmly anchored in the family.

I loved Molly. I want to be clear about that. I remember being pregnant, Molly lying on my belly like she was claiming me. Contented as she poked me with her cold doggy nose, while I rubbed her soft, fuzzy ears.

Unfortunately, things changed in a way that felt beyond my control.

Once Aurora was born, my health tanked, and I found it increasingly difficult to give Molly the attention she needed. She was sweet but unruly, mostly overly excitable with each new visitor to our home. I could never calm her in the way I felt a pet owner should. This was compounded by the fact that she simply wouldn’t listen to me. Probably because I was just one more person in a long line of owners who’d come in and out of her life.

But Molly was never an unwanted dog.

When we moved across the country, our rental agreement didn’t allow pets.

We decided Molly would be better off at a farm with one of my mother-in-law’s closest friends. She would have other dogs for company and goats as buddies. Most importantly, she’d have a retired owner who could finally give her the full attention she deserved. So Molly spent her last days at this rural dog haven. In a place the rest of us could only dream of visiting.

And my daughter did visit her. My mother-in-law regularly took Aurora to see Molly, so their relationship remained intact.

Then, after several years of dog freedom on the farm, Molly began to grow old. Eventually, her trachea collapsed, and a decision had to be made. My outspoken, determined daughter first advocated for the chance to see her one last time. During that visit, my daughter then advocated to be allowed to attend Molly’s final vet appointment, where she would be put down.

My husband and I weren’t so sure about this decision.

Should we let her experience death at this visceral level?

Would it be too real for Aurora?

She had never even attended a funeral before.

In the end, my daughter’s determination won out.

She was there when it happened and was able to comfort her furry buddy, while I stayed home and bit my nails. A few weeks later, Aurora received the small cedar box with Molly’s ashes. A treasure I now realize encapsulates not just memories but those final goodbyes.

That closure is something we, as parents, would never have been able to provide simply by talking it through. I’m happy that we agreed to allow my daughter’s first experience with death to be the full transition. Yes, she was able to sit with Molly as she crossed from our realm to the rainbow bridge. And I believe she’s now better for having had the experience.

Choosing To Participate

I think about the arc of Molly’s life a lot.

She entered our family through death, and she got to be Aurora’s first experience with death. But in between, there was a lot of life that happened.

My daughter, who grew up in the shadow of that first grief—my husband’s uncle’s cancer, the vigil, and the inherited dog—also got to choose to participate in the second grief.

She didn’t opt out of it.

She showed up to face death in a way many adults would turn away from.

The Man Who Put Together His Own Funeral Music

In 2023, Ryuichi Sakamoto died.

You might know his music, even if you don’t know his name.

He was a Japanese composer and musician of staggering range. My guess is you most likely know at least one of his film scores, perhaps The Last Emperor, The Sheltering Sky, or 1992’s Wuthering Heights. But he also created electronic music and collaborated across every genre boundary you could name. He worked with David Sylvian of Japan (the British 80s band, not the country) on “Forbidden Colours,” my favorite New Wave song. He also scored and starred in Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, alongside David Bowie.

Sakamoto has often been called the David Bowie of Japan.

They were both ever-evolving and experimental in making cutting-edge music, and both gained popularity by crossing into film.

Like Bowie, Sakamoto also knew he was dying of cancer several years prior to his death. So he compiled a 33-song playlist for his own funeral.

You can listen to it on Spotify. It’s the perfect playlist for contemplation and writing. I turn to it when I need music without lyrics.

What strikes me about this last musical decision isn’t melancholy. Rather, it’s the most profound act of authorship one can accomplish. Sakamoto looked at his final moment, one he wouldn’t even be present for, and decided: Here’s what the ending should sound like.

Most of us probably haven’t contemplated anything like that before.

Many of us assume someone else will handle our finality. And most likely they will, but what if we could do what Sakamoto did?

What if we could choose the ending to our own story?

Obituary Writing—A Life’s Calling

A few years ago, I watched a documentary called Obit. about the New York Times obituary writers who pen the lives of people in under 1000 words.

I fell completely in love with how these obit writers talked about their work. The best obituaries, they said, are not death notices. They are argument essays:

• Here is why this person mattered

• Here is the shape of their life

• Here are the sentences they get

The sentences.

Feels final, doesn’t it?

But someone has to decide on what those sentences mean.

A few weeks ago, a childhood friend of mine—someone I was no longer close to—posted that her older brother had died. I didn’t know much about what happened to him, so I went looking for his obituary. All I found was a short paragraph. A birth date, a death date, where he lived, and who he was survived by.

It felt more like a receipt than a story of a life.

I was so disappointed after reading those scant details.

I firmly believe he deserved a narrative.

Everyone does.

That’s when it dawned on me how this Death Series should end. I believe the most defiant, loving, clear-eyed thing you can do, for yourself and for anyone who will one day have to find words for you, is to write your obit now, while you know exactly who you are and what matters most to you.

Only you truly know what those final sentences should say.

Watch the Obit. documentary if you can.

Then come back tomorrow for the writing exercises on How to Write Your Own Obituary. This isn’t going to be some downer exercise. I’ve used many of these skills to create my own author’s bio and short bios for my literary and performing arts friends.

When you write like this, you strip away everything unnecessary and focus on what truly matters about your life. It’s really an approach to living fully rather than a meditation on death.

Tomorrow: How to Write Your Own Obituary. I promise you it will be enthralling and exciting, not morbid.

And for younger children, I’ll have a special section on how to write an obituary for a pet. ❦

The place where one thing ends and another begins.

This could be where:

• Life meets death

• Grief meets memory

• The living catch a glimpse of the departed

It could also be a transition word in a sentence.

Transition words are mini thresholds. The place where one idea crosses into the next.

What W. B. Yeats Offers Us

William Butler Yeats spent his entire career as an author living at the threshold.

The Celtic Twilight, his collection of Irish folklore and ghost stories, is a book about people who reside in liminal spaces, including fairy-led wanderers, spirits who lingered too long, and holy men who stood so close to the other side they couldn’t quite find their way back. “The Second Coming” is a poem written at the hinge point between one world and what comes screaming in to replace it. “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” is a transition that takes place entirely in the mind—a man who has not yet gone anywhere, saying, “I will arise and go now,” as if his decision is already half of his crossing.

Yeats didn’t just write about thresholds; he wrote in them.

What a Transition Word Claims

A transition word is not decoration.

Every transition word makes a logical claim about the relationship between two ideas:

• When you write ‘however,’ you are claiming contrast.

• When you write ‘therefore,’ you are showing causation.

• When you write ‘for example,’ you are identifying what comes next as a specific instance of what came before.

Transitions are the visible architecture of your thinking. The joints that let one idea move into the next.

Without joints, a body can’t move. In fact, without joints, you don’t have a body at all. You have a pile of bones.

There are dozens of transition words. These transition words fall into five categories, each one answering a different question about how two ideas are related. Yeats, it turns out, uses all five.

The Five Categories

1. Time and Sequence

The claim: X happened before, after, or alongside Y.

Word bank: first, before, after, initially, meanwhile, previously, soon, later, at last, simultaneously, earlier, finally

The Lake Isle of Innisfree — W. B. Yeats (1890)

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

The sequence in this poem is almost physical.

Peace doesn’t arrive; it descends, step by step, from morning veil to cricket song. The time transition is built into the image’s movement itself. And notice the structure of the whole poem: the speaker is not yet at Innisfree. He is standing on grey pavement, projecting himself forward with “I will arise and go now.” The entire poem is a time transition, from where he is to where he imagines he’ll be.

Sentence stems for practice:

• Before Yeats heard the lake water lapping, _____________________.

• Initially the speaker was standing on grey pavement, but later _________________________________________________.

• At last, the peace came _________________________________.

• Meanwhile, the deep heart’s core ___________________________.

Pitfall: Help students avoid stacking sequence words when the verbs are already doing the work. Rather than writing, “Then he turned. Then he looked. Then he left.” Teach them to cut the redundant ‘thens’. Explain to students that the verbs are already sequential.

2. Conclusion

The claim: This sums up, results from, or follows from what came before.

Word bank: therefore, thus, as a result, consequently, so, in the end, ultimately, clearly, surely

You’ll continue using “Innisfree” for this section. Look at the closing stanza. The speaker has spent the poem building a case: the vision of the cabin, the peace dropping slow, the bee-loud glade. By the time he writes “I hear it in the deep heart’s core,” he doesn’t need to say therefore. The conclusion has been earned through image and rhythm.

But read how the poem opens: “I will arise and go now.” That “now” is a disguised conclusion transition. It says: given everything I have been feeling, given how clearly I hear that water, I have arrived at a decision. Now is the word that names the arrival.

Mature writers often don’t announce their conclusions with “in conclusion.” They earn the ending through image. But a beginning writer needs to use ‘therefore’ and ‘as a result’ first to feel what it means to claim that one thing follows from another. You have to know what is actually happening before you can do it invisibly.

Sentence stems for practice:

• The speaker heard the water night and day; therefore, ________________________________________________.

• The grey pavement held nothing for him, so ___________________.

• _______________________________________________, and as a result, he knew he would arise and go.

3. Illustration

The claim: Here is a specific instance of what I just said generally.

Word bank: for example, for instance, such as, specifically, in particular, to illustrate

From The Celtic Twilight — W. B. Yeats (1893)

“The country people say that people are sometimes carried away by the fairies. After a year or two they come back again, but they are never quite the same. They have a look in their eyes that was not there before. Sometimes they have a gift—of music, or of seeing what others cannot see. For example, I knew a man who was away three days and came back with a tune he had never heard.”

In The Celtic Twilight, Yeats moves constantly between the general claim— that the Irish countryside is haunted, or rather that the veil is thin here—and a specific case. He writes about men who were fairy-led, such as the one who wandered the same field for three days without knowing it, or the woman who heard music from inside the hill. ‘Such as’ produces compression work: it tells the reader that what follows is an instance of the larger truth, not the whole truth.

Without ‘such as’ or ‘for example’, a writer either drops examples with no frame, which feels abrupt, or has to build a longer sentence to introduce them. Instead, Yeats uses two words for instant logic.

Sentence stems for practice:

• The Irish countryside holds many thin places, such as _________________________________________________.

• Yeats collected stories of the fairy-led, for example _________________________________________________.

• The gift that returned with them took many forms, specifically _________________________________________________.

Pitfall: Encourage students to avoid giving examples that don’t fit the category. The example has to be a true instance of the thing you claimed, or the joint snaps, and the transition doesn’t work.

4. Change of Direction

The claim: What follows reverses or complicates what came before.

Word bank: however, but, yet, although, even though, in contrast, instead, on the other hand

The Second Coming — W. B. Yeats (1919)

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs; while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The entire poem is built on ‘but,’ even when the word only appears once.

• Turning and turning in the widening gyre. But the falcon cannot hear the falconer.

• Things fall apart. But the centre is still held enough that we can name its absence.

• The best lack all conviction. But the worst are full of passionate intensity.

The tension we experience is the poem. Yeats doesn’t use the word ‘however.’ He builds the contrast directly into his images. For students learning to sharpen their writing, ‘however’ works the same way as ‘but’ when they write it. ‘However’ becomes the same logical move, made visible.

A note on choosing specific words:

But this changed everything.

However, this changed everything.

The first sentence is close, conversational, and fast. The second is formal and considered. They make the same claim, yet they don’t feel the same. Yeats almost always chooses ‘but.’ He’s writing for your ear, while a formal essay would reach for ‘however.’

Word choice is voice. Synonyms are almost never identical.

Sentence stems for practice:

• The ceremony of innocence was drowned; however, _________________________________________________.

• Although the falcon could hear nothing, ______________________.

• ________________________________________________, yet the rough beast moved toward Bethlehem.

• I expected _________________________________________. Instead, ____________________________________________.

5. Emphasis

The claim: Of everything I’ve said, this part matters most.

Word bank: most importantly, in particular, notably, above all, certainly, primarily, keep in mind

Return to “The Second Coming” and look at the line that lands like a stone:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

At last. Just two syllables.

The whole poem has been building to this creature, and Yeats waits until the final image to tell you: it’s been waiting. Its hour has been coming for a long time. ‘At last’ is an emphasis transition wearing the costume of a time marker. It insists you feel the weight of the arrival.

Emphasis transitions tell a reader: don’t skim this. Of all the things on this page, stop here.

Pitfall: Let young writers know, if you emphasize everything, you emphasize nothing. A paragraph stuffed with ‘most importantly,’ ‘notably,’ and ‘above all’ has no hierarchy, which means the reader can’t find the center of gravity. Help students learn to reserve emphasis for genuine high-stakes claims.

Sentence stems for practice:

• Above all, the rough beast _______________________________.

• Most importantly, the thin place ___________________________.

• _________________________________, and notably, the centre _________________________________________________.

Practice: Walk Through the Door

Here is a passage from The Celtic Twilight with the transitions removed. Read it once without them. Notice how the sentences sit beside each other, separate, and how you have to do the work of figuring out how they relate.

Afterward, put the transitions back and feel the difference.

The country people say that people are sometimes carried away by the fairies. ______ a year or two they come back again, but they are never quite the same. They have a look in their eyes that was not there before. ______ they have a gift—of music, or of seeing what others cannot see. ______ I knew a man who was away three days and came back with a tune he had never heard.

Answers, in order: After / Sometimes / For example

A Question Worth Sitting With

Yeats wrote “Innisfree” while standing on a street in London, homesick, and heard the sound of a small fountain in a shop window. The water reminded him of the sounds of the lake from his childhood. In that moment, something in him crossed over.

He wasn’t at Innisfree. He was thinking himself there.

Think of a place, real or imagined, where you feel the membrane go thin. Where you are closest to something you can’t quite name.

Use the transition categories above to write about it. Let the words do the logical work. You might:

• Let ‘before’ pull you back.

• Let ‘although’ hold two truths at once.

• Let ‘at last’ tell us what finally arrived.

You don’t have to resolve anything.

Thresholds don’t usually have resolutions. That’s what makes them thin.

A Note for the Teaching Parent

The final question to ask your student, after they’ve found the transitions in Yeats and practiced writing their own:

What does this writer’s choice of transition words tell you about how they think?

Yeats leans on ‘but’ because he lives in tension. He believes in two worlds and can’t fully inhabit either one. His transitions are the evidence.

Your student’s transitions will eventually become their own evidence, too. The joints in their writing are a map of how their mind moves, which ideas they push against, which ones they follow to a conclusion, and which ones they need to illustrate before they can be believed.

That’s a portrait of their minds in action.

Next week we’ll tackle a longer piece of writing—something you may have never considered before: writing your own obit. Don’t be afraid. There’s an art to the way a New York Times obituary writer pulls a story together for someone who has just died. And you, too, deserve to map out your own narrative. Few of us will ever get the New York Times treatment, but we can ensure our stories get told our way.

I had never, really, known anyone who had died.

At least not anyone I was close to.

I was in college, driving the hour-plus from the north side of Atlanta down to the south every week or so to do work for my aunt and make ends meet. All of my family lived on the southside, including my two sets of grandparents. Stopping in to see one or both was a routine part of my trip.

But this trip was different.

The Big Chief

My mother’s father had been battling every health problem imaginable. He had long lived under the shadow of rheumatoid arthritis with one of the worst cases anyone had ever seen. That’s not according to me. His autoimmunity was so pronounced that doctors at Emory wrote about him in clinical literature.

The wild thing about my grandfather’s health journey was that it didn’t slow him down. I know he was in pain and badly deformed from his disease, but he seemed mostly in motion to me. Traveling extensively up until the last two years of his life, when his health forced him into hospitals.

My grandmother told me he had risen to the rank of Chief Master Sergeant in the Air Force faster than any enlisted man before him. She also revealed, almost as an aside, that an early flare in his twenties had paralyzed him physically for two weeks, and he had been completely dependent on her.

Eventually, his body forced him into early retirement because he could no longer reliably pull the trigger on his gun. Not something you’d want to be cursed with as a military policeman. But even upon Air Force retirement, he had work to do. He held a senior post at Dobbins Air Force Base, over the Chief of Police, in my grandmother’s telling, although I still don’t know his exact title. What I do know is he coordinated Air Force One across multiple administrations.

I’ve seen the letters and the photographs from Johnson, Nixon, and Ford.

What I remember most about him, though, was far less storied.

He’d watched The Young and the Restless every day, followed by eating a sandwich for lunch—Miracle Whip, never Mayo. Then he’d pick me up early from daycare so we could spend the afternoon together. A funny thing to recount about a man whose subordinates called him Big Chief.

But I can’t fathom what it must have been like to fall from the ranks of that position to soap operas and sandwiches every day.

I remembered the way he would take my little hands into his and study them. His own hands looked like the gnarled roots of an old tree, twisted by violent storms, or rather by years of extreme joint damage. Mine were small and smooth. He’d hold them like he was trying to remember how young hands actually worked. But even his twisted hands didn’t fully stop him. He traveled to all fifty states, and that was after all his deployments to places like Germany, Japan, and Morocco. He had his car outfitted with one of those knobs for easier steering, and off he’d go with my grannie. Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, my mom called these jaunts. To biker weddings or gambling in Las Vegas. My grandparents were wild ramblers. More recently, my grannie told me that in the 1990s, they’d drive down to Disney World, not for rollercoasters or tea cups, but to rent the Disney scooters and joyride all over the park.

A small escape into freedom for a body so thoroughly imprisoned by itself.

Big Chief, it turns out, was also a Disney Adult. Who knew? One more hilarious contradiction I had never considered.

How Time Moves

But on this visit, things were different.

The night before, I had visited him in the hospital, and he was no longer speaking. After kissing him on the cheek, I left to stay with my father’s parents before planning my usual work trip down to my aunts. Normally, when I stayed with them, I slept in their spare room. But for some reason that night, I decided to sleep on the couch instead. I had felt spooked around midnight when I spotted a strange shadow pass across the front door, and I didn’t want to be locked away in the back room. So I dragged a pillow and blanket into the living room where I could sleep in front of the television and let the noise distract me.

The next morning, I was in earshot as I woke to hear my other grandfather answer the phone. My father’s father was clearly talking to my mother. Even groggy from sleep, it was abundantly clear: my Pawpaw had passed in the night.

He died at 12:01 AM.

Yes, he possessed enough spunk to get that extra minute in to claim one more day. That you can be certain of.

But there wasn’t time to reflect on his passing or even the shadow I saw the night before. My mother and grandmother had to get to the funeral home to finalize details, and they needed me. Not at my aunt’s house, as I’d planned, but at my grannie’s house, where I could answer the door for the neighbors who would inevitably arrive bearing food.

So that’s what I did.

I drove to my grandparents’ home. And after my mother and grandmother left for the funeral home, I stood there in the living room, alone.

The Quiet Room

I’d never been in this house by myself before.

It was unnervingly quiet.

That was the part I couldn’t get over. My grandparents always yelled at each other because my grandfather refused to wear his hearing aids and my grandmother refused to lower her voice on principle. The house had a liveliness to it, the banter of old people pushing each other’s buttons.

But that was gone now.

The doorbell rang, and I answered it. It was a neighbor I half-recognized who handed me a casserole and a card and left. I carried the dish into the kitchen. And the doorbell rang again.

Another neighbor. Another casserole. Another small condolence.

By the third casserole, the house settled down and fully exposed its silence to me. No more neighbors. At least, not for now. And I sat not with emptiness exactly, just Silence.

I had never had anyone close to me die before. I didn’t know what to make of the noiseless space. But it felt unusual. Present in a way I had never noticed. As though the very air itself was arranging the grief.

I felt spooked, so I did what any self-respecting twenty-something does when a room becomes too thick to breathe in.

I turned on the TV just as I had done the night before.

The Middle Ground

The Twilight Zone was on.

I had seen most of the episodes, but not this one.

“Nothing in the Dark.” Originally aired January 5, 1962.

An old woman lives in a basement apartment and won’t leave it, even refusing to open the door to guests, in case Death comes for her. She has spent decades shrinking the world down to the size of this single locked space.

Then a young police officer is shot just outside her door. He falls, bleeding, and pleads with her to let him in. The actor is, of course, a young Robert Redford, who possessed the kind of handsome that could rearrange a person’s principles quickly. He begs to be let in. And the old woman finally obliges, breaking her one rule.

I mean, it was hot young Robert Redford.

Once he is inside, she figures out what she has done.

She has, in fact, let Death in. He admits it. He tells her he had to trick her to gain her trust. Her building will be demolished within the hour anyway.

She wants to fight against this realization. I don’t want to die, she says.

He extends his hand to her and calls her mother.

And something in her softens. She takes his hand and asks, “When will it happen? When will we go?”

He tells her to look.

As she turns towards her bed, she sees herself, just her body, already lying peacefully as if she’s asleep.

“We’ve already begun,” he says.

And the two of them walk out of the apartment together, hand in hand.

A Message from the Other Side

That was the moment, sitting on my dead grandfather’s couch in his too-quiet house, that I felt comfort.

I knew this old TV show was a message from my Pawpaw, just as the shadow across the door the night before also was.

He was at peace. Death had already happened, quietly, hand in hand, and there was nothing in this silent house to fear.

Big Chief had walked out, in his own way. And he was no longer in pain.

Between Two Worlds

I’ve been thinking about that day for years now, but only recently have I had the language for what I was actually standing inside of that morning.

A threshold.

I don’t mean it metaphorically as I did in my article Standing on the Threshold. I mean it almost architecturally. I had been answering a real door, taking casseroles across an actual sill, while standing inside a house that had become, in the night, a threshold itself. A place that was no longer entirely here and not exactly anywhere else.

A place where the membrane had thinned.

Some cultures have a name for this.

The Jewish mark a door with a mezuzah.

The Celts call it thin places.

Locations where the veil between worlds wears so soft that you can almost see through. Traditionally, these were geographical: particular hills, a special well, or specific shorelines. But I have come to believe that thresholds aren’t only places. They’re moments. Hours. Rooms in the wake of something. The first quiet morning of a death.

Liminality is the term anthropologists use for it, from the Latin limen, meaning ‘threshold’. The state of being on the doorstep. Neither fully on one side nor fully on the other. A bride at the altar. A boy at his bar mitzvah.

A granddaughter on the porch of her grandfather’s house, holding a tuna casserole and trying to figure out where to put it.

In many traditions, the veil is not a wall.

It’s more like a curtain, and curtains, by their nature, move. They thin, billow, and part. The old woman in “Nothing in the Dark” spent her whole life trying to nail her curtain shut. What she discovered, in the end, was that the curtain isn’t the enemy. The curtain is the kindness. It is what lets us cross over without having to look at the whole truth at once.

The Irish Poet

Years before I stood in my grandfather’s quiet house, I had stood at Yeats’s grave.

In Sligo at Drumcliff churchyard, Benbulben rises behind his headstone like a verdict. The epitaph is one of the most famous in poetry, and Yeats wrote it himself:

Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Horseman, pass by.

I had read his poems and even taught them to classes of high school students. But standing under that mountain, I understood, for the first time, why people insist some places are more porous. Why the Celts bothered to give thin places a name. The air there had a hand in it, too.

After we’d read “The Second Coming,” I’d have my students listen to The Police song “Synchronicity II.” I’d explain that Sting, like Yeats before him, was reaching for mythic language by feeling the membrane go thin.

The beast is slouching while something is being born in the dark.

The center cannot hold.

That is a thin place, too.

The kind that doesn’t come hand in hand. The kind that arrives distorted.

I taught my students to understand. I hope they still feel it, fifteen years later, when that song comes on the radio.

And I had felt it myself at midnight before my grandfather died, when a shadow moved past the door, and I dragged my pillow out to the couch and refused to be locked in the back room. That wasn’t exactly a ghost story. It was the beast slouching past the window on its way to take a man who had spent his whole life refusing to let pain control him.

The other threshold came in the morning.

Hand in hand. With a casserole and a black-and-white Robert Redford TV show. That one I keep coming back to, just as I do this line from Yeats’ “The Stolen Child”:

Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

Hand in hand, the same image.

Yeats wrote it in 1886. Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone broadcast was in 1962. I felt it in a quiet house in the early 2000s. The image keeps surfacing because the image is true. Crossings, when they come gently, show up this way. Not snatched or in violence.

Yeats spent his whole life writing toward both faces of the thin place—the slouching beast and the small lake island where the bee-loud glade hums and the heart finally stops shaking. He understood that the veil parts in two directions.

Sometimes it parts to terrify.

Sometimes it parts to walk you home.

My grandfather got both. The dread of the night before, the gentleness in the morning. Most of us, I suspect, do.

The world is more full of weeping than we can understand. My grandfather’s body knew that better than most. Every joint of him had been arguing with the world for decades. He had a body that should have stopped him from doing anything, and he drove it across all fifty states and into Disney World to ride a rented scooter anyway.

When the hand finally extended to him at 12:01, I have to believe he took it the way he took everything else.

With one extra minute of spunk and a story to tell on the other side.

We sit so close to death in so much of our living spaces.

We just keep the curtain closed.

Sometimes a casserole, a quiet house, and a black-and-white Robert Redford show come along to part it for a moment, gently, so we can see what has actually been on the other side all along.

Hand in hand.

Nothing in the dark.

If you missed last week’s trip to the National Museum of Funeral History in Houston, you can read When You Think Life is Over now.

Next week, I’ll conclude the Death Series with a unique way you can identify and honor your own legacy while life is still very much happening to you.