It’s August, and like lots of folks, I am on the road. I’m staying in Nashville for a few days to attend a family event. It’s my first visit to the city, which so far seems to be full of women wearing cowboy boots — definitely a different cultural immersion for this New Englander. I’m keeping Mark Twain’s words in mind: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” Along those lines, I’m reposting a piece I wrote two years ago.

Paul announces his arrival long before he gets to Gate 126.

“Zombies!” he barks every few seconds as he walks through the terminal. “Look at all the zombies!”

The 120 or so people sitting at the gate in the Orlando airport react in one of two ways as Paul advances down the corridor. They either glance up from their phones to catch the eye of a fellow traveler as if to ask “Can you believe this guy?” Or they double down and stare even harder at their screens. Some travelers reposition their carry-ons to fill the space next to where they sit, the universal signal for “this seat taken.”

A FEW THOUGHTS RACE through my head as Paul walks toward where I sit, an empty seat to my left. Is this guy drunk? Crazy? Do I ignore him if he talks to me or just smile and nod? Can I pretend to be sleeping? What if I am a zombie?

How about this, my Better Angel suggests: Engage him with curiosity. But be prepared to alert the official at the gate if things get weird, my Lesser Angel adds.

With a pleasant “hello,” Paul takes a seat next to me. He smells of alcohol, or perhaps mouthwash, or perhaps a wet wipe. I see his first and last name printed on the paper boarding pass he carries. It’s as rumpled as his clothing. His hair is combed but looks in need of a wash.

He looks to the woman on his left and comments about her French fries. She smiles and turns away. He turns toward me and asks my name.

No need to get too familiar, I think. “I’m Tracie.”

“Nice to meet you, Tracie. Look at all these zombies.” He points to anyone holding a mobile phone.

“Why are they zombies?” I ask.

“Just look at them,” Paul replies, louder than necessary. “They can only exist with those phones in front of them.”

BY NOW I REMEMBER a headline from a few weeks prior. An off-duty pilot sitting in the cockpit jump seat had tried to shut down a flight in midair. He had taken psychedelic mushrooms a few days before and thought he was dreaming.

“Well maybe they’re just reading a book or the headlines,” I suggest. “Maybe they’re talking to a family member who’s going to pick them up later today.”

I hope Paul isn’t tripping. I hope he doesn’t get on our flight to Providence.

“No. They’re zombies,” Paul assures me.

“What brought you to Orlando?” I ask after learning that Paul lives in Rhode Island. Judging by his appearance, I can’t imagine how he could have afforded a round-trip ticket, much less a stay in the Orlando area.

“Oh, I just wanted to go somewhere warm,” he says.

The plane that would be taking us home finally pulls up to the ramp. As its passengers depart, Paul lets me know he could fly this 737 if he had to.

“You’re a pilot?”

Paul nods and elaborates but I’m not really listening. I’m making a note of his first and last name in case I need to alert the gate agent when I board. Better Angel urges me to stay curious, so I ask about his favorite plane to fly. He didn’t have to think twice: twin-engine prop, he says.

I’m all talked out by the time we board. I’m in group A and quickly find a seat between two people so that Paul can’t sit next to me during the flight. He’s among the last to board and sits back by the tail. I wonder whether he’ll chat politely with his seatmates or whether he’ll silently (please let it be silent!) call them out.

THE LAST I SAW of Paul, he was heading down the hallway at the Providence airport. He reported no zombies on the flight.

I thought of him again last month when I read that nearly half the men surveyed said they could land a commercial aircraft in an emergency. I’ve lived with imposter syndrome most of my life. Where does such cocky confidence come from?

Was Paul being cocky when he said he could land the plane? I can’t say for sure: He could have been an ex-military pilot, maybe now a troubled veteran. Is he weird for having strolled through the airport identifying zombies out loud? Could be, but I have yelled the word “idiots” at my TV screen. Let’s just say I’m more inhibited in an airport. I’m also the person who, in a fit of pique and professional desperation, destroyed her work telephone by banging the handset against the base until the plastic shattered. Maybe Paul could offer some insight.

What I am certain about, though, is this: Two strangers — very different people — sat next to one another, connected briefly, curiously. As Ram Dass wrote, we’re all “just walking each other home.” Here’s to blue skies and tailwinds for each of us.

Earlier this year, worry and anxiety outran my coping system, wreaking havoc on my guts. I read the contents of the toilet bowl the way a fortune teller reads tea leaves, then consulted Doctor Google who delivered ominous words like pancreatitis and colon cancer. I also consulted with a real doctor who diagnosed what I had as irritable bowel syndrome brought on by stress that was doing a number on my Number 2 and would eventually pass.

A few weeks ago, I felt traveling sensations (wouldn’t that be a great name for a band?) along my left side from butt cheek to ankle. Maybe something got inflamed or pinched from too much sitting or maybe I overdid something at the gym. I could pop NSAIDs for a few days but they mess up my stomach, which would have sent me back to where I was earlier.

In each case, I found relief through community acupuncture.

A COMMUNITY ACUPUNCTURE clinic is exactly what it sounds like: treatment offered in a group setting. There’s no undressing: clients find a seat, roll up sleeves and pantlegs and have needles as fine as a strand of hair gently poked into specific points along their arms, legs, hands, feet, ears, scalp.

This type of healing has been around for centuries. It’s a part of traditional Chinese medicine said to redirect the flow of energy.

Korben’s my acupuncture guy. He owns Kindred Community Acupuncture, located inside a renovated textile mill in Pawtucket. Light floods through windows nearly two stories high. Six big recliners – a few of them too beamy and overstuffed for a person my size – await clients.

MY MOST RECENT treatment was pretty typical. Two other clients – one of them deeply zoned out – were in the middle of their sessions. Korben approached my chair and asked how I was doing. The sensations in my leg have eased up, I said. I pointed to two spots that felt most active. “Seems to be along the gall bladder meridian,” he said as he began to place the needles. I reminded him I no longer have a gall bladder. He chuckled. “You still have a gall bladder meridian.”

He inserted about two dozen needles in all: near each elbow and each wrist, on my hands and feet, spots on my legs, a few in each ear and one in the middle of my forehead. He always puts one there. It’s where I imagine my third eye sits and that he places it there to tap into my body’s inner knowing.

The placement took no more than 5 minutes. I declined his offer of a blanket, glanced at the clock on the wall across from where I sat, and closed my eyes. Next thing I knew, an hour had passed though I swore only 15 minutes had gone by. I caught Korben’s eye to let him know I was all set. He removed the needles, I adjusted my clothes, put on my shoes and headed out the door.

I have nothing against conventional allopathic medicine; it serves me well. Even so, there’s something about sitting in community and tapping into our collective energy field that helps heal me. The connection doesn’t come through a screen or a text message. There is no chatbot. It’s real. I need more of that. I think we all do.

When I was in my mid-40s, I was visited in my sleep by three female whales. I was looking out to sea from the deck of a boat when they rose vertically within yards of where I stood, held their heads above water and regarded me for at least a minute before slipping below the surface and swimming away.

Something told me they weren’t spyhopping out of curiosity. They sought me out specifically because there was something they needed to tell me. (Telepathically, I guess.)

I’ve thought about that dream on and off over the past 25 years. These days, I think about it a lot.

This past March, scientists from Project CETI shared video they’d shot in 2023 after coming across a sperm whale in labor. She was surrounded by 11 other female sperm whales that served as midwives throughout her labor and delivery. They vocalized and kept tabs on the mother’s progress and, upon the baby’s arrival, paired up to squeeze its body between theirs and lift it out of the water with their noses and backs until it was strong enough to swim on its own.

Like sperm whales, orcas live in close-knit matriarchal pods. Like humans, female orcas experience menopause. In their post-reproductive years, they teach survival skills – hunting strategies, where the best fishing grounds are, migration routes – to the younger members of the pod.

The more I think about that dream, the more I think my visitors were orcas, matriarchs of their pods, kindred spirits telling me that growing older would not be a reason to shrink from life. At the time of my dream, I was in the early stages of menopause, caught in a maelstrom that forced me to reexamine what I thought was true about myself and my family. The process was thorny and whiplashy and discombobulating and ragey but ultimately healing and clarifying. It took decades, but today, at the age of 70, I have a sense of strength and autonomy I’ve never felt before.

DON’T TELL the mad dogs of patriarchy, the ones working to return women to a more subservient time, but I think my dream whales were telling me that the world needs more menopausal matriarch energy and they wanted me to join the cause. They were telling me to be more orca.

I’m intrigued by the orca pods off the coasts of Spain and Portugal that smash into yachts, sometimes capsizing them, and by orcas that hunt sharks, rip open their bellies and eat just the liver. When I read news about rapists and pedophiles, the Epstein class and their enablers, the global “online rape academy,” I want to tear into some bellies to get at their livers, too.

Anger and rage – especially menopausal rage – are good fuel. In her book Goddesses in Older Women, psychiatrist Jean Shindola Bolen says that when anger meets an older woman’s strategy and wisdom, she transforms “into a formidable crone.”

I’m not sure how “formidable” I am. At the moment, I claim space in the macho worlds of strength training and Brazilian jiu-jitsu – not to become formidable but to nourish my psychological and physical well-being. The payoff has been huge and is part of the reason I feel sovereign at 70. If my presence in the gym or on the mats helps to end the fear of menopause, if it helps the old systems lose power, I’m in the right place for now.

I hope the orcas approve.

I love my town’s public library. It is a crossroad for humanness.

Two older men read newspapers in the lobby. A preschooler nags her mother for something to eat. A man in a study carrel places a business call. The woman who always wears a skull-print headwrap sits in her usual spot, hunched over her iPad to read the New York Post. I have a sense she has nowhere else to go. The teenagers who hang out on the second floor have arrived, oozing with after-school energy. As if she were in a karaoke bar, one is singing along with something her smartphone pipes into her earbuds.

I love the pride of place given to the enormous dictionary on the second floor. It sits separate and exalted atop a wooden stand as though it were a Bible on a pulpit, the contents of its 2,662 tissue-thin pages available to layperson and priest alike.

Maybe that’s appropriate. My library was once a monastery built in 1900 by Trappist monks who left after a fire in 1950 claimed the roof, the steeple, most anything combustible, including its 30,000-book library. What remained was made of thick granite stones. Eventually, the town acquired what was left of the monastery and transformed it into the library. You can still see hints of its past in the vaulted ceilings of certain areas. Some say the ghost of a monk haunts the stairwell and gardens surrounding the building.

I love that I can check out more than books. If I want to, I can borrow tools, a bubble maker, a telescope and more from my library’s Library of Things. There’s a tall cabinet filled with nonperishable food available to folks who come in, no questions asked. I can call the reference desk with a question and an information specialist will get back to me with an answer. This is my kind of AI – actual intelligence rather than artificial, googling without Google.

My library is where I often work on my memoir. If the writing gods are with me, I stay for several hours. Lately, the words don’t seem to flow. I tinker for 60 minutes but have little to show other than three drafts and multiple false starts. I surrender, shut down my laptop and head home.

My library does not judge me, though. It welcomes me back day after day. I am a part of its fabric.

I hope public libraries can continue to be safe spaces for everyone. They are on the front line defending intellectual freedom, and increasingly serve as important hubs for social and civic services that help create stronger, more informed communities. They’re an antidote to online screed and AI slop.

Go get a library card.

•••

PS: If you love libraries, too, you might like The Library Book, Susan Orlean’s deeply researched account of the unsolved 1986 arson at the Los Angeles Public Library. In her inimitable way, Orlean turns history, true crime and personal reflection into a real thriller.

Apparently, trying to find a spider trinket in March is too much to ask.

If it were August or September – somewhere closer to Halloween – I’d have my choice: spiders with googly eyes and pipe cleaner legs; cutout spiders to sprinkle across a table; spider buttons; spider props; glow-in-the-dark spiders.

But it’s March, and Michael’s, my local big-box craft store, is primed for St. Patrick’s Day and Easter and spring with shamrocks and pastel eggs, bunny figurines and bushels of faux florals. Suddenly I understand why the people who count down the days to October 31 flock to Walt Disney World’s Haunted Mansion ride: They neeeed their off-season Halloween fix.

I literally have walked every aisle of the store looking from top shelf to bottom hoping to find some kind of spider tchotchke to use in an art project. I’m sure my thorough inspection has triggered a security camera somewhere because it must look like I’m casing the joint. I check out the sticker aisle, where I find plenty of dinosaurs and puppies and butterflies and even Spider-Man but no spiders. I peruse the ribbons and the washi tape hoping to spot a forgotten roll of something from spooky season. At this point, finding a spider trinket would be like finding a unicorn, which I did find in sticker form.

I’m not looking for a cartoony spider. I want something realistic. I admire spiders, actually, and will pause what I’m doing to watch them as long as there’s a respectful distance between us. Consider me a fan. As the girl who was called Four Eyes in grade school, I feel a bond with spiders because they, too, have multiple eyes. As a textile lover, I admire their ability to spin silk fibers. For a while, a photo of the Red Spider Nebula was the wallpaper on my computer screen. I still crank up Little Richard’s 1991 version of “Itsy Bitsy Spider” and dance. (Rock out with me here.)

IT’S POSSIBLE my interest in spiders can be traced back to third grade when my teacher, Mrs. Kunas, read a portion of Charlotte’s Web to us every day after we returned from recess but only if we settled down quickly. (Mrs. Kunas was clever that way.)

In Charlotte, author E.B. White created a character who inspired me. She used words cleverly and well – HUMBLE and TERRIFIC and RADIANT. She was a good friend.

Which brings me to my search for a spider. I am making a birthday present to give to Karyn. Next month, we both turn 70 within days of one another. She is a good friend.

We met in second grade. I was the new kid, just arrived in Salinas, Calif., from Statesville, NC. I remember standing in front of the class while Miss Canapary introduced me. I don’t remember what she said because I was too busy worrying about the fact that Miss Canapary’s class already knew how to write cursive and I didn’t.

Until my arrival midterm, Karyn had been the new kid. She quickly befriended me. We were in one another’s lives daily – riding bikes, having sleepovers, going to Girl Scouts. We joined 4-H together and learned how to sew and cook. We bonded over books — not just Charlotte’s Web but Stewart Little and Misty of Chincoteague and Beezus and Ramona. We went to vacation Bible school at her church. We hung out doing nothing and everything until junior high when her family moved to western Illinois.

But our lives kept intertwining. A few years after she moved, my family moved, too, to a suburb west of Chicago. Karyn and I kept in touch with letters, and one summer in high school I rode a Greyhound bus solo for what felt like forever in order to spend a week with her and her family. I was a bridesmaid in her wedding, but as our families and responsibilities expanded, we fell out of touch. Around the time our children were in college, Karyn sent email out of the blue – I think the subject line read A BLAST FROM THE PAST – and we picked up where we left off.

She is as much a sister as anyone related to me by blood. She was my first and last best friend because after she moved away in junior high, I stopped making friends. My life at home had gotten weird and I was too ashamed by what was happening to be friends with anyone. I put up barriers and kept secrets. I thought they’d keep me safe. What they did was keep me from people, including Karyn, but I carried her friendship in my heart.

FOR HER BIRTHDAY GIFT, I am matting and framing a page from Charlotte’s Web, and all I need to finish the project is some kind of spider to glue to the frame.

The last thing I want to do is order from Amazon, which I know could deliver the perfect spider to my doorstep by tonight. But curse Bezos! I scour the store for my Charlotte one last time.

I find my way to the jewelry supply aisle and squint at the bits and bobs: an array of good luck charms; an assortment of gold and silver initial letters; some glass evil eye beads. Next row: dogs, crystal hearts, bees. Next row: Stars and moons and suns and … AH! Six oval charms, black on white – three spider webs and three spiders about as big as a fingernail. I’m so happy I nearly skip to the cashier.

At home, I affix two of the spiders to the frame. The birthday gift is complete.

The page I’ve framed – 164 – is from a used paperback copy of Charlotte’s Web that I bought for $1 from our local Friends of the Library. It’s from the chapter titled “The Last Day” and describes Wilbur the pig’s realization that Charlotte is dying. I don’t know how Mrs. Kunas kept her composure as she read it aloud to a group of 8-year-olds. Supposedly, it took White 17 takes to read the scene for the audio version without breaking down in tears. The older I get, the more the reality of that chapter hits – the passage of time, the gift of friendship, one last goodbye.

“You have been my friend,” replied Charlotte. “That in itself is a tremendous thing.”

“What’cha thinkin’ about?” my husband asks.

We are in the shower. I’m hogging the hot water and staring into the space where the wall intersects the ceiling.

(If that’s TMI, substitute living room for shower, and sitting at the kitchen table for hogging the hot water, but I’m here to testify that couples in their 70s still shower together.)

“I’m writing in my head,” I tell him.

“I thought so,” he says. “You look like Beth Harmon visualizing chess moves on the ceiling above her bed.”

I wish my writing abilities were comparable to the chess skills of the prodigy at the center of The Queen’s Gambit.

I can spend many minutes writing in my head – showering or driving to the gym before sunrise are especially productive – but the real fun comes when I begin to put thoughts onto the page. Lately, my writing sessions last several hours at a time as I work toward completing my memoir. I get depressed when I don’t write at least 30 minutes a day. It’s as vital to my wellbeing as physical activity and chocolate.

I have to thank for the practice she helped me develop. I first took her online memoir writing class in 2022 and have taken it several times since. She does not offer a “workshop” model. Instead, she and fellow students (not a lot; I don’t think I’ve ever been in a session with more than 14 others) have helped me build confidence in what I write. (Several of the pieces on my Substack began life in her class.) It is a gentle and kind community.

Lizzie’s next online memoir class begins March 10. If you’ve got a story to tell and it’s living in your head, maybe start getting it on the page by taking Lizzie’s class.

THE VOICE came out of left field.

“Get the sardines tattooed on your arm,” it said. It wasn’t a whisper. It wasn’t a suggestion. It was a Field of Dreams moment, like when the cornfield spoke to Kevin Costner.

It was early August. I was sitting on a bench in a darkened alcove of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, mesmerized by the kelp forest exhibit and the school of sardines that swirled within.

The thought of getting a tattoo had never crossed my mind until May, when the Universe dropped hints in quick succession. The first: in a “suggested for you” Instagram post of a tattoo done by a San Francisco-area artist. A sardine tattoo. “Cool,” I thought, my thumb pausing a beat before scrolling. The second: in a swanky seafood restaurant where a school of 60 or more fish made of clear blown glass dangled from the black ceiling above me in a graceful, undulating swath. I glanced upward between bites to admire the shape.

By June, I couldn’t shake the idea of getting tattooed, but I didn’t know why. In July, I met with a tattoo artist who helped me create a design: a school of sardines and three larger fish – one for my husband and one for each of my sons.

Should I do it? Commit to having an illustration indelibly pierced into my body? On that day in early August, the Universe said yes. Go the distance, the voice told me. It will all make sense. It will be an image worth a thousand words.

I WAS SITTING in the aquarium that day because 36 years ago, it helped my husband and me survive a rocky chapter in our lives.

We had relocated from Rhode Island to California with our two pre-school kids because I got a great job offer. The move, however, was a mistake for all kinds of reasons.

We found solace at the aquarium. An afternoon adventure with the kids led to monthly visits for a year. It became our happy place.

There was a ritual to each visit. We began at the kelp forest, a panoramic tank as long as an average blue whale and nearly three stories high. We’d spot sharks and eels, colorful rockfish and crabs poking around live kelp that swayed to the rhythm of a current created by a wave machine up top. Invariably, a school of sardines glittered somewhere within the forest, dividing and regrouping depending on what swam nearby.

Next, we lingered at the otter exhibit and the jellyfish display, then headed over to see if the octopus was visible in its cave-like tank. There were other tanks, other creatures we spent time exploring before finally finishing at a spot where another school of sardines swam infinitely in a circle. From there, we’d head to a nearby arcade where we bought caramel corn or ice cream for the ride home.

The aquarium was a source of family stories that still make us laugh. The time our three-year-old saw a scuba diver cleaning the windows of the kelp forest tank and declared “That’s what I want to be … a submarine!” The time I confided to the boys that if there was such a thing as reincarnation, I wanted to come back as an otter. Eating whale bread – sourdough rolls we bought for lunch at the cafeteria. The speed with which the words “time for caramel corn” flew out of the kids’ mouths.

We left California after 18 months, returning to Rhode Island to start over again. But we never forgot about the aquarium and how it made us feel. It was calm, safe, the eye in our hurricane.

I NEEDED ITS SAFETY again, all these years later, because I felt like I had finally escaped a riptide that caught me one afternoon in early April. On that day, my husband confided to me that an online con artist was trying to blackmail him. I was sucked into a storm of exhausting emotions, hard truths and tears that threatened to take us both out to sea. We didn’t drown though. In the months that followed, we held on to one another, learned how to swim again, and found a new current.

In August, the current briefly led us back to the aquarium where I happily spent 45 minutes in thrall to the kelp forest. My breath slowed. My brain stopped racing. I was the kelp, swaying with the current. I was the rock fish suspended in its watery universe. I was the dazzling school of sardines zigging and zagging between beams of sunlight.

Two weeks later, I reclined on the artist’s table where she poked my skin thousands of times with her needles. Fish now wrap around my forearm from just below the crook of my elbow to just above my wrist.

In the weeks since completion, some colors of a few fish have migrated beyond the black outlines. Blowout, they call it. I’m told it sometimes happens on old, damaged skin like mine. It’s permanent. At first I was disappointed – I really liked how sharp the tattoo looked those first few days. But tattoos, like life, are sometimes imperfect. Things sometimes look blurry.

I guess that’s part of the story, the one the voice assured me would make sense. On the simplest level, my tattoo reminds me of a happy place where we created family memories and traditions, where we found calm in the storm. On a deeper level, my tattoo is a way to carry the three most important people in my life with me. It reminds me that the obstacle on the path becomes the path, that wherever the current takes us, my husband and I have learned how to swim together.

FOR MOST of April, I was in free fall. Courtney McDonald caught me.

I lost my footing early in the month when my husband sat across from me, gathered my hands into his, and said, “I need to tell you something. I’ve just gone to the police. I’m being blackmailed.”

He’d been a victim of online extortion – a con job spanning 10 months. The scammer initially connected through social media. Using faked photos and a fake backstory spooled out over weeks and months via direct messages and texts, the scammer hooked into his most tender qualities – kindness and compassion – then manipulated him into a lapse of judgment that trapped him for months in a web of panic and shame.

I was gut-punched. A hole had opened in ground I once thought was solid. Disoriented, I tumbled in.

Courtney knew none of this when I arrived for my massage appointment. She only knew what I told her: Three weeks earlier, I sprained my foot and broke a toe. Since then, I’d been walking with a limp and my hip and lower back now ached.

I had been seeing Courtney regularly for several years. A specialist in medical massage, she finds and releases the tight muscles, trigger points and compressed nerves I bring to her table whenever I go overboard in my athletic pursuits.

On this day, I had a simple request: Please make me feel better.

TO BE IN Courtney’s studio is to feel better almost immediately. There are plants big and small, including a yards-long pothos cascading down the side of a shelf alongside a string of tiny white lights. Sunlight filters through stained glass on the windows. Paintings – a landscape, a portrait, a seascape – hang on the walls, as does a signed photograph of the actor who played Captain Benjamin Sisko on the television series Deep Space Nine. We bonded over that one right away.

Let’s start face down, Courtney said. She left the room while I undressed and climbed onto the warmed massage table topped by a fuzzy blanket and a set of sheets as soft as a baby’s bottom. I felt like I had settled inside a warm peach.

She began at my feet. Her hands worked their way up the muscles, ligaments and tendons of my calves, hamstrings, glutes and lumbar spine. When I flipped onto my back, she repeated the process, this time up the shins and into the quadriceps.

Courtney and I sometimes chat as she works but I grew quiet as she began to focus on my neck and upper back, then my shoulder and chest.

When she tucked my wrist between her elbow and body and steadied my outstretched arm, I began to weep. Tears seeped from the corners of my eyes and collected in the alcoves above my earlobes. Cradled in her arm ever so slightly, I felt safe for the first time all month.

I’m sure she noticed but she said nothing. She continued to deeply massage my forearm, then my wrist, then every part of my hand, her fingers, knuckles and palm working their way over mine.

I thought I had come in for hip and back pain. Turns out my real pain – grief, sorrow, anger, uncertainty, fear – was trapped everywhere in my body. Courtney gave it a way out – through my hands.

“I can’t hold on to these things anymore,” I thought as Courtney worked.

Her hands replied. “It’s OK. I’ve got you. I won’t let you fall.”

SO I LET GO of grasping for answers I’ll probably never get: How could he let this happen? What was his Achilles’ heel? What primitive part of the brain overruled higher-order thinking, the part that says “No. This isn’t a good idea”? Had his open heart surgery two years earlier affected his cognition? Who was behind the online fraud – some transnational syndicate running an AI-driven template? And the bigger, scarier question: How strong do I have to be to get past the hurt?

I allowed myself to rest in the unknown because Courtney was there to hold me.

“I’ll give you a few extra minutes to gather yourself,” Courtney said when she finished. She stepped out. I got off the table and dressed.

“How are you doing?” she asked when she came back in.

“Hands. Who knew?” I said.

Courtney smiled. “You’d be surprised.”

Medical massage provides therapeutic care, and Courtney certainly eased my hip pain. But there was something else going on, alchemy that turned her work into healing and awareness.

I’ve heard it said that we make things sacred with our attention. That is what Courtney does. It is holy service.

Though coming forward can be difficult if you are the victim of an online scam, cybercrime experts encourage you to:

• Talk to someone you trust. Tell them what is going on.

• Stop all communication and block the scammer.

• Do not send any money or meet further demands.

• Report the incident to local police and, in the US, to the FBI.

• Remember – you are not at fault.

More than $16 billion was stolen through internet crime in the United States in 2024, according to the FBI, up 33 percent over 2023. The total is probably greater because many people who are scammed don’t report the crime or their losses.

I turn 69 next week. This birthday is hitting me hard, not because of the number – 69 is not the new 40; it’s just 69, and I am not shy about letting you know my age.

I think it’s because of my growing sense of uncertainty about what’s to come between now and when I turn 80. Who are these people who guarantee an outcome, who plant their feet so firmly in the soil of certainty? That’s not me anymore.

For the past three weeks, I’ve been deep into writing my memoir, working on a chapter that takes place between 2006 and 2016 – from age 50 to age 60. I’ve been so steeped in reliving that decade and its upheaval – it broke me – that I’m rattled now about the decade ahead. It feels similar. What will my 70s be like?

I have a series of photographs – one representing each decade – that I sometimes meditate on as I settle in to write. The first is from age 0-10, next is 11-20, then 21-30. Photos of my 30s and 40s don’t exist – I usually was the person behind the camera, and most of the photos were of the kids. But there’s a photo of me between ages 51 and 60, and one representing me from ages 61-69. Each photo is a leap, so much change in just 10 years. I’m a different person each time.

“When does the story of a woman’s life begin?” journalist and author Lyz Lenz wrote in her Substack post titled “The Lying Liars Who Lie.” “It’s not when she is born, but it is the moment she breaks. The moment she snaps. The moment she allows her anger to wash over her in a tsunami of fury.”

That last photo is the outcome of anger washing over me, anger I redirected into recovery, rebirth. I’m proud of the aesthetic (no Photoshop, no AI; just me in good lighting) but I’m prouder of the fact that the external is the physical representation of an internal metamorphosis.

There’s a phrase in the gym – “crushing it.” If you’re crushing it, it means you’re working out intensely, pushing yourself to the maximum, embracing the challenge. I crushed my 60s. I learned that I can endure. I learned what I was made of. Will it serve me into my seventh decade? I can’t answer that. All I know is that I will be tested by illness, deaths, the unforeseen revelations to come, shocks to the system from within and without, loss, change for sure. The timeline feels so much shorter now than it did when I was 60.

This morning, I received my Brazilian jiu jitsu combatives belt — the second rung of the ladder in a Gracie Jiu Jitsu training center. Earning it requires the candidate to demonstrate mastery of 36 self-defense techniques in different positions and combinations — mount, guard, side mount, standing, and a five-minute fight simulation, each with a training partner — in my case, Jamie Enriquez, the owner of Gracie Jiu Jitsu in Warwick, RI. The five-part drill lasts about 25 minutes. The test is videotaped and sent to Gracie Jiu Jitsu headquarters in California where it is reviewed and graded by senior instructors. A score of 90 or above earns you the belt promotion.

It’s taken me 15 months to feel capable of passing the test — longer than some folks because I had to get past some mind junk.

I’m proud of myself for pushing past my comfort zone. The process has changed me in ways I’m still trying to figure out. In the meantime, I’m grateful to everyone who supported me in getting to this new headspace.

You can read about my first few weeks as a BJJ student in this December 2023 post.

I just finished reading Grandma Gatewood’s Walk by Ben Montgomery and I’m fired up with the notion that I could set out on some kind of physical and mental odyssey, even at my age.

Gatewood was Emma Gatewood, the first woman to thru-hike the 2,168-mile Appalachian Trail in 1955 alone at age 67. She did it wearing canvas Keds sneakers and carrying a denim sack she sewed by hand and filled with a few pieces of clothing, a shower curtain to keep the rain off, and a little food. Her preparation was six decades of hard living, first as one of 15 children who worked her father’s farm in Ohio, then as the wife of a husband who, when she wasn’t farming or raising their 11 children, regularly beat her to a pulp.

I’d love to portray her in a movie. If not me, please give the role to Kathy Bates.

I’VE READ A LOT of hiking-slash-memoir over the past couple of years. Most of them involve overcoming hardship, loss and pain along the road to finding themselves. A few months before Grandma Gatewood’s Walk, it was A Walk in the Park by Kevin Fedarko. He and a photographer friend thought they could hike the entire length of the Grand Canyon — 750 miles east to west, with no prep, no marked trail. What could go wrong? Everything, as it turns out. Last winter, it was The Salt Path by Raynor Winn. Homeless and broken by the loss of their business, Winn and her ailing husband walked the 630-mile South West Coast Path in England.

But before these, before reading William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways and Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, there was Travels with Charlie by John Steinbeck. My dad gave me a copy when I was in high school. For someone like me, whose first word according to family lore was “go,” reading that book set the hook.

Since then, I’ve gone on all kinds of day hikes but I’ve never done anything requiring me to travel day after day for hundreds of miles in search of something or someone. I’m attracted to the mental and physical challenge of wrestling with my thoughts as I put one foot in front of the other thousands of times. What would I learn about myself, about my world?

MORE IMPORTANTLY, who would I encounter? Several of these books contain the word “America” or “American” in their titles. Last spring, I read American Ramble: A Walk of Memory and Renewal by Neil King Jr., who trekked 330 miles from Washington, D.C., to New York City. Travels with Charlie is subtitled In Search of America. (Steinbeck was disappointed.) For Blue Highways, it’s A Journey into America.

I think that’s interesting. Did they find the America they were seeking? I want to know, because I want to find America, too. I feel lost. I thought I was a typical American who values decency, honesty, justice, democratic (small d) ideals, the Golden Rule but the social and political climate in the United States since 2016 has thrown me for a loop.

But maybe I’m not an outlier. Maybe there are others just like me wondering where we fit in this American puzzle. Maybe we just need to meet up on the trail and start walking together toward our mutual destination.

PS: For your listening pleasure, the brilliant “America” by Simon and Garfunkel.

When I was in elementary school, I was especially itchy around Christmas time to know things.

One year in early December, bored and nosing around in the kitchen for nothing in particular, I spotted a little bundle of something that seemed out of place on the top shelf of a cabinet. I pulled myself up onto the countertop, stood on my tiptoes, placed my hand atop something made of fabric and pulled it down.

It was a stack of Barbie clothes that Mom had made by hand — little dresses of beautiful fabric and snaps so tiny it hurt my eyes just thinking about sewing them on.

I put the stash back and hoped that Mom wouldn’t figure out that I was in on her secret. I didn’t tell my sister.

On Christmas Day, we each opened a box of Barbie dresses. We squealed and marveled, but my delight was in myself. I felt quite smug about the fact that I knew what was inside that beautifully wrapped box.

Poking around was something I did often. You’d call it snooping. I’d call it curiosity. I’d poke around in my parents’ bedroom on occasion, when I thought they wouldn’t notice. They had never said explicitly that their bedroom was off limits to us kids but it still felt a little wrong to be in their bedroom without permission.

One of the chores that fell to my sister and me in elementary school was folding the family’s clean laundry and putting it away. Every once in a while, I lingered in Mom and Dad’s bedroom after setting their laundry on their bed. Sometimes, I looked in Mom’s jewelry box. She had some beautiful pieces. The sparkly ones were my favorites: a many-carat smoky topaz cocktail ring I’d slip on my finger; a necklace made of aurora borealis crystals that dazzled in the light. I looked in her lingerie drawer and saw her fancy bras and wondered what it would be like to be grown up and wear sparkles and lace.

I poked around in Dad’s chest of drawers, too. In one drawer I found the contact lenses he wore when he played football in college and later in life when he went swimming with my sister and me. They were enormous, as wide as a thumbprint — I guess so that they wouldn’t pop out whenever he was tackled on the field. And they were thick in order to correct his extreme astigmatism and nearsightedness, traits I inherited from him. I can barely stand getting an eyelash in my eye. I couldn’t imagine what Dad’s eyes felt like wearing those saucers.

I once took a look at a bank passbook that was in his top drawer. The balance was a few hundred dollars. I worried we were poor.

Another time I found a few packages marked Trojans. And another time a Playboy magazine. “He gets it for the articles,” Mom said when I got the nerve to tell her I’d spotted it while putting away his undershirts.

In the past year, I’ve been working on a memoir. Trying to connect dots through the passage of time is an interesting exercise. In building out the narrative, I’m finding questions I have no answers for. But I have a hunch. I am trying to work up the courage to hop up onto the countertop and reach toward the bundle on the shelf. To open the drawer and find out what its contents reveal.

Curiosity killed the cat. Satisfaction brought her back.

I’ll tell you where I’d be right now if I were still 12 years old: watching the Olympics on television.

From the preliminary heats to the final laps, medal presentations and national anthems, childhood me would be glued to the screen, imagining what it would be like to compete against the best.

I was the girl who had a vision of becoming a strong woman, maybe even an Olympian. In elementary school, I played recreational sports — all kinds of pickup games in the neighborhood. In fifth grade during a round of baseball (hard ball, wooden bats, boys and girls, no parents!), a fly ball careened into my face. Someone hopped on their bicycle and peddled home at top speed to fetch their mom. She arrived in her giant station wagon, staunched the blood gushing from my nose, and drove me home. The following day, my two black eyes and broken nose earned me the nickname Mr. Magoo. Classmates stared at me. I was embarrassed — not by my appearance but by the fact I had missed the catch.

I loved gym class as much as history, English and social studies. I looked forward to Field Day, held during the last week of elementary school, when fourth-, fifth- and sixth-graders played games and took the Presidential Fitness Test: a 50-yard dash, pull-ups (girls did a modified version — essentially pulling my chin above the bar and hanging there as long as possible, ignoring the burning sensation that built up in my shoulders), sit-ups, standing broad jump, shuttle run, and softball throw. If you scored in 95th percentile or above, you’d earn a badge you could stitch onto your gym uniform. I earned three.

Muscles in motion. Strength. Speed. All of them gave me joy.

And let’s just say it: I loved the competition — mostly with myself, striving to be better than before. It was about excellence and the effort more than it was about winning. (Well, maybe a little bit of winning.)

By seventh grade, becoming a gym teacher was on my short list of possible careers. (Being a translator at the UN was right up there too.) I adored my gym teachers, especially Miss Blazina and Miss Russell, who coached the girls’ track and field team. (It was a progressive school district, offering girls a number of athletic opportunities before Title IX made it mandatory.) I ran the 100-meter sprint and 4x100 relay. I ran hurdles. I threw the discus and shot put. I tried the high jump and long jump. I loved the staccato crunch of the cinder track under my feet as I sped down my lane.

My body started to change. Along with the arrival of breasts and hips, I could see hints of muscle — strong quads, baby biceps. I liked what they could do.

But society in the 1960s and 1970s took a different view of muscular women. At my high school, thin was in; the only thick things about the popular model Twiggy were her eyelashes. Whispers of “homo” or “lezzie” followed a girl who was interested in playing sports.

I grew increasingly self-conscious about my body — the way it looked, how much it weighed. I wanted to fit in. The last summer Games I paid much attention to was in 1972, when I was 16. Those Games, held in Munich, are remembered as much for the deaths of Israeli athletes at the hands of members of a group known as Black September as they were for any athletic records set.

That Olympic flame I nourished inside me? I let it burn out.

Or so I thought.

Turns out it hadn’t been extinguished. It had smoldered somewhere inside me, the source of anger I repressed for decades. I reconnected with that teenage girl and her spirit in my 60s when strength training became a part of my life. I’m not back to watching the Olympics: I skipped last night’s opening extravaganza and, from what I’ve read, it focused less on athletes and more on spectacle. Instead, I’m heading to the gym in an hour. It’s deadlift day. Time to get swole.

Originally, I wanted no engagement ring even though Ed, my husband-to-be, wanted to get me one. It seemed impractical, I thought, an expense he couldn’t afford when we decided we’d marry.

“Get the ring,” my friend Chip told me. “You’re only gonna do this once, if you’re lucky.”

So Ed and I walked into a jewelry store at the mall and picked out a ring — a pear-shaped opal the size of a baby tooth, alongside a diamond chip. It cost $200, and Ed would pay for it in monthly installments.

Next thing you know, we’re sitting on a mall bench. The ring’s on my finger and I can’t contain the laughter rising through my body like champagne bubbles.

Joy like that — visceral joy — is not something I’m used to. Happiness, sure. Contentment, pleasure, excitement — yes, yes, I’ve felt each of these. But more often than not, worry follows in their wake and takes hold. I keep thinking something bad will happen. The universe will extract a price. The other shoe will drop.

I’ve read that one of the symptoms of PTSD are thoughts that something bad will happen, that dread follows joy. It’s a pattern I’ve been trying to unlearn as I deal with the residue of the actions committed against my body when I was young.

“Opals are bad luck unless it’s your birthstone,” someone told me when she saw my ring. I looked that up. Apparently, the superstition has roots in a legend about an opal that was given to a princess who died shortly after. The stone was passed on to several other members of the royal family, each of whom died soon after receipt.

But maybe we’d get a bye? We got engaged in October and were to be married the following October, so I figured the gem was the legit birthstone of our relationship. Plus the ring had the diamond chip — my birthstone — as part of the setting. Maybe it would counteract whatever bad juju the opal might have. Standard magical thinking.

We were fine for 40 years and then the other shoe dropped: The stone went missing.

You know how it feels when your tongue runs over the crater where a filling fell out of a tooth? That’s what it felt like as I ran my finger over the four tiny gold prongs surrounding the empty spot where the opal once sat.

I noticed it was gone during dinner. I didn’t cry. I didn’t panic. Instead, I felt dread, as though a mirror had slipped through my fingers and cracked.

I’m tired of dread. It takes up too much energy these days.

There’s a visualization technique I use sometimes when I’m lying awake with worry. I imagine myself inside an opalescent sphere and, one by one, I draw each of my beloveds into it. Together, surrounded by an aura of green and pink and blue — the colors that my opal flashed — we are safe. And I think: what if there is no other shoe. Or what if the other shoe has been dropping in slow motion all along, delivering unexpected goodness for 40 years.

I seize moments of hope, but I know that bad things happen. It’s part of the deal and I’ve learned I can endure. The shoe is always falling, but sometimes joy breaks in.

I DON’T LIKE to spend money. I prefer saving it. Letting it accumulate. It gives me a sense of control and autonomy, of possibility.

I’m ashamed to admit this lest you think I’m Scrooge McDuck sitting on stacks of bills while sifting coins through my fingers. But my first encounter with money — my own money — kind of began that way.

Eighteen silver dollars lay cold and heavy in my hands but quickly warmed to body temperature. I remember the satisfying clink they made when I jostled them in my palms. And they were big — about an inch and a half in diameter. When I lined them up, they extended more than two feet. Two feet of silver! To my eight-year-old eyes, this is what it looked like to be rich.

Mom and Dad brought the coins home from Las Vegas, where they had traveled for a weekend getaway from us kids. Luck must have been on their side, for they returned with the stash of silver to give to me and my sister along with the suggestion that we each open a savings account. I exchanged the coins for a handsome passbook that bore a drawing of a stage coach on its cover. On the first page was my name and my mother’s, and the balance written in black ink: $18.00.

WHEN I WAS 12, my parents introduced me to budgeting. Before then, I had received a weekly allowance — probably a dollar, maybe two  — for doing chores: washing the dishes, setting the table, emptying the dishwasher. But in seventh grade, I got a raise.

“We’re going to pay you $25 a month,” they said. I quickly did the math: $300 a year. This is what it feels like to be rich, I thought.

The monthly allowance came with terms and conditions: Mom and Dad would no longer give me money to go to the movies, buy extra clothing or toys or snacks or gifts to take to friends’ birthday parties. Those expenses would be on me. And if my money ran out, I’d be broke until the next payday — no loans, no advances. I’d still have to do chores, and the monthly allowance could be revoked at any time.

My first purchase was a winter coat that I saved two months for. I didn’t need it — Mom and Dad still covered the essentials. This was an extra one, a stylish one from Macy’s, not Sears. It was gunmetal grey wool, knee length, with a Nehru collar. I wore it with a chiffon scarf the color of a daffodil. This is what it feels like to have control, I thought. I could do whatever I wanted with my money, including spending it on things.

But I didn’t want things. I wanted possibilities. Options.

I WAS NO SLACKER. I had after-school jobs in high school: baby sitting, a miserable few months at Burger King burning myself on hot oil that spattered whenever I cooked French fries. The summer of the Watergate hearings, I took in ironing to make a few extra bucks, creating order out of chaos as I pressed wrinkles out of shirts while watching Sam Ervin and John Ehrlichman spar on my portable black-and-white TV. The following summer I processed textbooks for the town’s school district, saving every dime so that I could cover some of my tuition when I started college in the fall.

And I desperately wanted to go away to college. I saw it as my escape from home. I wanted my future to start as soon as possible.

The summer before my junior year in college, I had a newspaper internship in Knoxville, Tennessee. The 10-week job had a scholarship attached to it that would help cover my expenses for the coming academic year but the weekly stipend wasn’t much — I could afford to spend just $25 a week on rent. That sum got me a tiny barely-furnished studio with cockroaches the size of my thumb. This is the way poor people live, I thought as I watched a roach die one sweltering evening in a pool of Raid.

After I graduated from college and got my first job, Dad offered a piece of financial guidance: Multiply your age by $10,000. That’s the bottom line for what you should earn every year.

I took his advice to heart and began climbing the career ladder. My earnings grew along with my savings. I bought a house, got married, had children, lived modestly. For most of my professional career, I was the primary breadwinner whose jobs had the bigger paychecks, paid vacations, medical coverage. I provided for my family. This is what “making it” looks like, I thought.

•••

THREE YEARS AGO this week, I retired. I’m not earning a paycheck and that feels weird, uncomfortable, even a little scary.

Being able to make a living for more than four decades by doing something I loved, something I was good at, was a big factor in my sense of self-worth. My skills and talents and expertise were rewarded with raises and promotions because I met performance-based goals my bosses set for me. Their goals became my goals. Their approval was a means to an end.

But there are no more raises in my future, no more promotions, no more daily deadlines, KPIs or quotas to meet except for whatever I set for myself. When it came to retirement planning, I thought the hardest question our advisor asked was “How long do you think you’re going to live?” I now realize there’s a harder question — one our advisor didn’t pose and one I’m still trying to answer: How will you define your self-worth when you are no longer working?

I don’t have a roadmap for this new landscape. I read for pleasure, not for work. I am writing a book and hope to have the first 200-page draft completed by the end of October. I strength train in the hope of setting a new personal record every once in a while. I want to earn my Brazilian jiu-jitsu blue belt by my 69th birthday. But I also nap and daydream and hang out with my husband, then feel guilty about being unproductive. I travel and then feel guilty about spending money to make the adventures happen. I waste an inordinate amount of time on my social media accounts because the likes, shares, number of subscribers, the open rates are external validation, the narcotic I can’t quit.

There was another question our advisor asked when we were planning things: How much money do you think you’ll need? I hope I have enough to do it all.

When was the last time you received a letter? I don’t mean a greeting card or a wedding invitation but a piece of handwritten correspondence that arrived in a stamped envelope with your name on the front.

I used to love writing letters, and not just because the act of writing involves a favorite pastime — using words to play with ideas. It also involved stationery. I’m a sucker for quality paper — the texture, the heft, the color. A lined envelope sends me. I’m rationing the last few sheets of a pad of paper I bought 15 years ago featuring a watercolor botanical illustration.

And pens! I’d be the person standing in front of the pen display testing each one on the scratch paper provided. Purple ink was my go-to for a while, but it wasn’t always about the ink. Sometimes it was about the feel of the pen. Did its tip flow across the paper? How did it feel in my fingers?

Stamps have always intrigued me — so much detail in such a small space. When I was in sixth or seventh grade, I walked downtown to Woolworth to buy a muslin bag filled with about 50  foreign stamps — nothing of value but far-flung enough to spark curiosity and wanderlust in a 12-year-old girl. Most were still attached to corners of envelopes, so I filled the bathroom sink with water and dumped the contents in, letting them soak until the stamps easily slid free. Once the stamps dried, I placed them in a makeshift album that, along with my collection of rocks and shells, got lost in a move (according to my parents).

I once wrote about historian Judy Barrett Litoff, the late Bryant University professor who in the late 1980s launched a search for letters written by civilian and military women during World War II. The archive eventually held 30,000 letters that “vividly illustrate women’s growing sense of self as well as their place in the world,” according to the university. The letters were the source for many of the professor’s books.

I wonder what historians 100 years from now will use as primary sources. Archived email? Downloaded Instagram captions or Facebook posts?

Although I still have a trace of writer’s bump on my finger from decades spent holding a pen or pencil, I write very little by hand these days. My most recent initiative got scrubbed. While at Walt Disney World two weeks ago, I spent more than an hour trying to find a postcard to buy so that I could mail it to my grandkids, ages almost three and not yet one. I thought it would be a nice way to let them know I’m thinking of them, a way to span the miles between us. Maybe they’d notice the stamp — the one with a fox — that I selected especially for them. But of all the things you can buy at Walt Disney World, a postcard isn’t one of them.

Handwriting is a deliberate act. It means I’ve set up a spot with good paper and a favorite pen, taken a seat, and gathered you into my head and heart so that I can share a few delicious minutes with you.

Reading a letter is deliberate, too. When you get the letter, maybe you’ll recognize my handwriting and get excited. You’ll pause your day, find a comfortable spot, and spend a few minutes with my words, perhaps hearing my voice inside your head. Maybe you’ll laugh. Maybe you’ll be moved to find paper and pen and spend some time writing back. Give and take. Back and forth, across time and space.

We are not IM’ing. We’re not posting 15-second reels. Let’s be unhurried. We’ll borrow from the slow food movement. I made something special from scratch especially for you. It took me a little time, but I loved picking out the ingredients, assembling them, letting the flavors simmer and merge, then serving it. Please savor.

Love, Tracie

Thanks for reading. The archives currently are open to all if you’d like to explore past pieces.

It’s easy to sit in the middle of an East Coast megalopolis and overlook the tiny towns in flyover states — until they change your life.

Lava Hot Springs, Idaho, is one of those places.

A freak accident landed me there for a few days in late August 1999, along with Ed, my husband; our two sons ages 12 and 14 at the time, and my parents. We were driving back to California after a week-long intergenerational camping adventure in Yellowstone National Park.

Ed was at the wheel of the RV — the kind that looks like a stretch U-Haul truck but with extra windows — and I was riding shotgun. One kid was lolling around in the area over the cab, the others were sitting in the back.

We were about three hours out of Yellowstone heading south on Interstate 15 when Ed yelled “Everybody hang on. I think I just lost the steering.”

We were doing 60 on the two-lane highway with no guardrails.

Coming up fast in front of the windshield was a curve in the road, then a gravel shoulder followed by a sloping embankment, a grass median, a U-shaped culvert, and the two northbound lanes beyond. Ed pumped the brakes — one, two, three, release. One, two, three, release.

We were doing 60 on the two-lane highway with no guardrails.

I braced myself against the dashboard and the door. Ed braced against the unresponsive steering wheel. Please don’t lock up. Please don’t flip. Please don’t spin. Please let us live.

I remember someone in the back crying out once. I remember no other sounds.

The RV traveled about 100 feet and came to a stop on the grass. It had stayed upright throughout. The whole thing lasted a little over a minute.

We all got out, shellshocked but unhurt and unsure how far we were from help. These were the days before ubiquitous mobile phones and cell towers and we were in the middle of nowhere. The nearest city was Pocatello, about 30 miles in our rearview mirror. Salt Lake City was 150 miles to the south. We hadn’t seen any traffic in either direction for several miles.

Ten minutes later, along came an Idaho state trooper making his rounds. He stopped his car and walked toward us. Ed and my dad explained what happened, and the three popped open the hood to take a look. The steering box was missing. Somehow, somewhere, it had fallen out.

The trooper radioed in for a tow truck, then packed the six of us into his car and drove us to Lava Hot Springs, about 10 miles east, where he delivered us to a little motel that had two rooms waiting for us.

•••

LAVA HOT SPRINGS, population 377, sits at about 5,000 feet elevation in a valley between the northern and southern ends of the Portneuf Range. I have no idea what the town’s residents do for a living, but I imagine most are involved with tourism. The area is known for its recreational opportunities — fishing, hunting, camping, skiing, tubing down the Portneuf River — but its biggest claim to fame is its geothermal hot springs: five pools ranging from 102 to 112 degrees.

The motel became our base of operations for about 36 hours. Ed and Dad spent the afternoon dealing with the Cruise America people (zero stars - do not recommend), tracking down a rental car, and MacGyvering a plan to get me, Ed and the boys back to Rhode Island in time for the start of school.

Because our source of transportation — the RV — was permanently out of commission, someone related to the motel owner offered to drive Ed and Dad to the RV to help clear out our gear — luggage, a cook stove, a cast iron skillet that had been in Dad’s family forever, a fishing rod, some folding chairs, bedding, plates, utensils, food — and drive it back to the motel before Cruise America towed the camper. The same person ferried Ed and Dad up to Pocatello, where they had located a car to rent — barely big enough for six but no room for our stuff. He accepted no reimbursement for gas or his time.

That night was weirdly wonderful. Maybe the adrenaline had dissipated, leaving euphoria in its wake.

As all of this was going on, Mom, the boys and I walked around the heart of town. There was no Applebee’s, no Starbucks, no Walmart in Lava Hot Springs. Just a handful of motels and restaurants and a couple of stores selling Idaho potato tchotchkes, native American handcrafts, and other souvenirs at one end, the river at the other, and mountains all around. Small, quiet, unpretentious. Safe.

That night was weirdly wonderful. Throughout dinner, everything made us laugh, including our gallows humor about survival and the fact that we’d be finishing our trip in the equivalent of a clown car and would be leaving our camp gear with the motel owner to give away. Maybe it was the wine the adults were drinking. Maybe the adrenaline had dissipated, leaving euphoria in its wake. After dinner, the six of us walked down to the hot springs and soaked in its healing water under the star-studded sky.

•••

THE TOWN came to mind earlier this week while planning a road trip we’re taking with friends this fall. We’ll be driving from Minneapolis to Badlands National Park in South Dakota.

I am in charge of finding hotel rooms for our foursome and had hoped I could book two of the park’s cabins for our stay. The cabins opened for the season this past Monday. I called to make reservations, assuming there’d be no problem getting something for after Labor Day. Wrong. All 26 cabins were spoken for.

The nearest big city is Rapid City, about an hour northwest of the park. It would have plenty of options, I thought — all the major hotel chains, some good restaurants. I sent Plan B to our friends.

“Did you happen to see the Best Western in Wall?” they wrote back.

Wall? The tiny speck just outside the park?

Turns out Wall, population 695, has not only a Best Western, but also a famous drug store and an 80-foot-long concrete dinosaur with eyes that glow.

I fly cross-country regularly. When I have a window seat, it’s easy to spot the big cities. But from 32,000 feet, the rest is just geometry — tilled circles and squares, farmland quilts of green or brown depending on the season, the occasional massive rectangle of a contract poultry farm seemingly in the middle of nowhere.

I have to remember that these places — the Lava Hot Springs and the Walls of America, the little towns whose names are printed in agate type on classic fold-up maps — have something to offer. I sometimes gravitate to bigger cities because I think they offer convenience. But these small places — the bypassed, the hard-to-reach, the places I would never have a reason to go to otherwise — have something to offer too.

We’re staying in Wall.

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Whenever I go into a greenhouse or see a magnificent landscape, I think of my dad. It is the only time I miss him.

Look at these succulents, Dad! You wouldn’t believe the beds of bromeliads we just passed by, Dad. I wish you could have seen the dragon topiary we saw today, Dad. You would have loved it. It was 20 feet long, covered in every shade of echeveria you ever planted.

I WAS 9 WHEN I took my first photograph of Dad. I recently rediscovered it in an album I kept back then. “The gardener” I printed unevenly underneath the black-and-white photo of him mowing a postage-stamp-sized patch of lawn.

By the time I was in high school, we had moved to a house with a half-acre yard where he planted a vegetable garden. I remember him swinging a mattock to dig through sod, pry out rocks, and prep soil. I’d leaf through his seed catalogs, taking note of the plants he had circled, but I have no memory of any harvest except for kohlrabi, a turnip-like vegetable that tastes like cabbage. He ate it raw with a sprinkle of salt.

IN THE FINAL two years of his life, he and I would tour the backyard whenever I visited. I’d trail behind him and we’d pause in each section — the deck, the contemplative area, the north fence — and he’d answer all my questions: What do you call this one? How do you propagate that one? How often do you need to water these? Would this work in Rhode Island? As we talked, his hands would deadhead a flower, pluck a stray shoot, or snip a spring of rosemary to use for dinner.

His camellias were astounding. Bushes laden with acorn-sized buds that opened into pink or red or white blooms as big as the palm of your hand. He’d pick a blossom or two to float in clear glass bowls he’d set around the house.

He had jade plants indoors and out, including one that was four feet tall with a trunk that had to have been at least four inches in circumference. They were so happy that they’d bloom regularly. I didn’t even know jade plants bloomed. “They just need the right amount of sun,” he said, as if it were that easy.

In March of the year he died, I photographed his garden. I knew the plants would never look the same afterward and I wanted to remember every shoot pushing skyward from every terracotta pot encircling the deck, every tendril cascading down the side of a tall planter, the azaleas thriving along the north fence, the protea he finally succeeded in growing.

MY FATHER DIED nine years ago this Sunday and I don’t grieve his passing. At least I don’t think so. Is grief something I’m supposed to feel? Because I don’t feel anything.

I’ve never admitted this to anyone, just like other secrets about my father that I kept for so long. In writing this, I fear I am tempting the Fates. “Ah,” Atropos will say as she cuts someone dear out of my life. “Now you shall know grief.”

Dad wanted no funeral, no formal service. If there was to be a ritual, he said, it would be a variant of what he called the oenology protocol, which he instituted several months before he died. Friends had a standing invitation to drop by the house at 3 p.m., drink a little wine, nosh.

It was this group I walked in on when I finally arrived after getting the pre-dawn call from Mom that Dad had died. “Your dad was such a good man,” they said. “He was such a good friend to me.” “He gave me some of his plants.” “I’ll bet you were close.” “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

I smiled. I returned hugs. I nodded, lowered my eyes, said um-hm as I mentally palpated for a lump in my throat, a tear, the ache people assigned to me. For weeks, I wondered when my ugly cry would happen. It never came.

MAYBE MY GRIEF is entangled in three jade plants that are in my house. Each plant is related to my father’s death. Each seems to be dying.

Two plants are dwarf jades, part of a dish garden given to me after he died. I let them grow willy-nilly until they looked like Medusa. They’re shriveling now.

The third is from a cutting Dad gave me a year before his death. I wrapped it in a moist paper towel, placed it in a plastic bag, and brought it home in my carry-on. It took root and flourished until last year when its leaves looked like they were covered in mildew. I saved one stalk and stuck it in a small planter. It struggles still.

Maybe the plants are diseased. Maybe they are potbound. Maybe there’s some insect attacking the roots.

Maybe my grief is in the soil, waiting for conditions that allow it to sprout.

The roots of this essay

This essay evolved from a writing assignment that writer / editor / teacher asked us to do as part of her wonderful seven-week memoir writing class, which she structures in such a way that everyone feels safe and supported. Her 2024 session just wrapped up. She’s offering it again next year. See her website for details.

My Brazilian jiu-jitsu breakthrough came from a Disney movie. (God help me I can’t believe I’m admitting this. Forgive me, Gracie brothers.)

I come to BJJ after six years of strength training. I love swinging a kettlebell, lifting a barbell. Up/down, bend/lift, push/pull — I understand those movements and I feel them in four-four time at about 120 beats per minute. My brain is the conductor, my body the orchestra.

I brought this internal metronome to my BJJ classes, and the more I tried to move in four-four time the more frustrated I became. BJJ has many techniques and multiple steps within each. During my first few months (you can read about it here), I’d speed through the movements and wound up getting lost in the choreography. Slow down, my instructors said. Wait for the moment. Just breathe. They showed me how a certain hold, a certain block would kept me safe as I practiced the punch block series, an elbow escape, or some kind of positional control.

I’ve taken 70 classes so far but only in the last dozen or so have I been able to internalize the coaches’ guidance. It happened because of music.

I was driving home after class one morning. Spotify was going through my Liked Songs queue when the first bars of “Surface Pressure” started to hammer.

It’s a powerful song — and not just because I have the bass turned up — that the character Luisa sings in the movie Encanto. The first 35 seconds are filled with notes and silences, beats and breath — literally! You can hear her sigh between the downbeats. The song builds in speed and intensity, then changes direction and plays with tempo and rhythm.

Turns out that my internal metronome for jiu-jitsu is a cumbia-inspired reggaeton song. It’s now the earworm that plays as I drill, a musical reminder to pause, to feel, to understand this unfamiliar way of moving my body against other bodies — quick move / pause sense feel / slide and lift / use momentum / pause sense feel / pressure and balance. Jiu-jitsu is geometry and physics, neither of which I was good at in school. I’m more of an algebra girl who solves for “x.”

Now five months in, I’m still a work in progress. I understand why people my age might hesitate to try something so far outside of their comfort zone because at times I’ve felt like an aging fool — too slow, too confused, too clumsy. Sometimes I can’t hear the instructors well. Sometimes my hamstring cramps. My arthritic thumbs hurt.

Life’s tempos and rhythms may change but I’ve made a conscious decision to keep learning.

Luisa Madrigal sings a song we can all understand

(I identified with Luisa and wrote this essay shortly after seeing the movie Encanto. Reprinting it here for your reading pleasure.)

I have a guess as to why Luisa Madrigal has become the surprise breakout character in the new movie Encanto.

It’s not just that her superhuman strength, muscular build and athleticism are attractive to girls who don’t see themselves reflected in the standard Disney princess mold.

It’s that her powerful song, “Surface Pressure,” speaks to any woman who has ever felt the crushing weight of expectations, the woman whose identity is tied to being “the strong one,” shouldering every burden, and keeping the family safe. She’s the woman who, at some point in her 40s or 50s, finds herself exhausted, drained, one blowup away from cracking and in a near panic wondering “What happens if I’m not who I thought I was? If I’m not who everyone else thinks I am? What if I’m not strong enough? Where did I go?”

“Surface Pressure” speaks to any woman who has ever felt the crushing weight of expectations.

The lyrics of “Surface Pressure” might as well have been written by a woman who has reached the pivotal moment of her menopause transition. Some excerpts:

• Under the surface, I feel berserk as a tightrope walker in a three-ring circus.

• Under the surface, I'm pretty sure I'm worthless if I can't be of service.

• Under the surface, I hide my nerves, and it worsens, I worry something is gonna hurt us.

• Under the surface, I think about my purpose, can I somehow preserve this?

• Who am I if I can't run with the ball? Who am I if I can’t carry it all?

• Who am I if I don't have what it takes? No cracks, no breaks, no mistakes, no pressure.

The excerpts don’t do the song justice. Just listen to it. The beat hammers away; the words hit hard. Note her sighs. I feel them in my heart. Frankly, I am so sad for Luisa I get teary each time I hear this song. Maybe I identify a little too closely to her fears.

The story carries other moving messages and themes about  family dynamics and the pressures of living up to expectations. Isabela, who conjures beautifully perfect plants, wants to leave behind her image as the “golden child.” Mirabel, who has no magical powers, feels left out, though I would argue that her true gift, which comes to the fore toward the end of the movie, is critical to the family’s survival.  

The message I take from Mirabel’s character: Our true gifts may take time to reveal themselves.

MY MOM HAS a clock in every room of her house, including each bathroom. I don’t know why, because she’s stopped looking forward. She’s nearly 88, and I think she’s just waiting to die.

This is a woman who lived independently for the first time in her mid-40s, learned how to cross-country ski in her 50s, and traveled throughout the western United States in a camper van until her late 60s. I want to know where that woman went. I’ve always admired how active she was in midlife. I wanted the same for myself and have been following in her footsteps but I don’t like where hers are going anymore.

•••

SHE GREW UP in a house that included her paternal grandmother, a heavy-set German woman who shooed her out of the kitchen. That’s probably why she didn’t know how to cook until she got married at age 18.

The first meal she ever cooked for Dad may have been the first time she cooked for anyone. They were on their honeymoon in a cabin on the shore of Lake George, NY. It was a boxed pizza kit. She burned the crust.

It must have been traumatizing. Each time I visit now, she goes on and on about how she’s such a bad cook — this despite the fact that for as long as I can remember, she made perfectly edible dinners every night for decades. Somewhere along the line, one burned dinner became her identity.

Yet this is the woman who taught me how to cook. Once I was tall enough to stand on a chair and reach the kitchen counter, I would help stir, sift, measure, peel and, when I was old enough to wield a knife, chop. I still think of kitchens as places of sensual delights.

She taught me how to cook. I still think of kitchens as places of sensual delights.

She taught me how to follow recipes, most of which had been clipped from magazines. The ones that became household standards made their way into a three-ring binder she kept up to date for years. I still use the one for chili. I know the recipe for Peanut Butter Yucks by heart.*

One day she tackled Julia Child’s recipe for Le Marquis au Chocolat, “a splendid cake for chocolate lovers with sylphid figures,” the recipe notes. She had watched Child make it on “The French Chef” and sent away for a copy of the recipe. The dessert – a chocolate butter sponge cake with rum-flavored butter cream frosting “covered with a light cloak of melted chocolate” – was a day-long production, and Mom used nearly every pot and pan in the house. To this day, it is the best chocolate cake I’ve ever eaten, but she never made it again. Perhaps we were not sylphic enough — weight always was a reference point in our household.

When I graduated from college, Mom gave me my own copy of the three-ring recipe binder. On the title page she wrote “Like Momma Used to Make.” It includes a copy of Julia Child’s marquis recipe.

•••

MY MOM TAUGHT ME how to drive. I remember a left-hand turn I took at a traffic light, when I forgot to yield to an oncoming car. “What are you trying to do – get us killed?” she screamed as the other car screeched to a stop.

She herself learned how to drive with 6-year-old me, 5-year-old Terrie, and a black-and-white hound named Gina sitting in the back seat of a Volkswagen Beetle in Darien, Connecticut.

I asked about that last year: Why hadn’t she learned sooner? She told me she didn’t need to — Dad had provided the wheels when they were dating in high school, early in their marriage, and when we were little. We lived in a small apartment building in Cincinnati then in a neighborhood rich with kids and other stay-at-home moms. Those probably were the days when if you needed something — a cup of milk, an onion, a consult about a kid’s goopy eye — you’d knock on your neighbor’s door and ask.

For her commute, the woman who learned how to drive in a VW Beetle stuffed with kids and a dog breathing down her neck bought a sports car.

When she was in her early 40s, Mom got an administrative assistant job at a San Francisco ad agency 45 minutes away from where she and Dad lived. For her commute, the woman who learned how to drive in a VW Beetle stuffed with kids and a dog breathing down her neck bought a sports car – a British racing green Triumph Spitfire. I was stunned – not just by her choice of car but also by the fact that for the first time in two decades she was no longer a stay-at-home mom even though my two youngest sisters, who were in high school, were still at home.

Mom still drives, but I worry about her declining eyesight, her slowing reflexes. The last time I visited her I skirted around the edges of a conversation about giving up her car because, just a few months prior, she drove into the front of a Trader Joe’s. Fortunately no one was hurt. “What would have to happen to make you stop driving?” I asked. “I guess if I got into an accident,” she replied. “Isn’t that a little too late?” I said. I’m proud of myself for not screaming.

•••

THE MOST MAGICAL thing Mom taught me was how to see color.

When I was in elementary school, she and I used to sit side by side at the Formica-topped table in the eat-in kitchen, a coloring book between us. Sometimes we’d lay on the floor next to each other, propped up by our elbows. We had the 64-crayon box of Crayolas, the one with the sharpener built in. I liked my crayons as sharp as possible – sharp crayons meant I was able to keep precisely within the lines – and I stuck with the basic ROY G BIV colors: green for grass, blue for sky, yellow for the sun, red for a rose.

I once glanced over and watched as Mom colored. Her grass was green but not just green. It was yellow-green and pine green, too. Her sun was yellow and yellow-orange and a hint of goldenrod. Her shadows weren’t black; they were violet-blue. The way she colored taught me at an early age that what you see isn’t always as it appears.

I used to love the sound of her pencil against paper when she would sketch portraits of me in the evenings. I loved the smell of the special eraser she used. She probably loved the fact that I was sitting still.

I always viewed her as the artist in the family. I wish I had her talent. Even now, I pause in her hallway to admire a lunar landscape of the Sea of Tranquillity that she painted in 1969 shortly after Apollo 11 landed on the moon. She used a photo from Life magazine as a reference. The work, acrylic on canvas board, is maybe 20 inches by 16 inches. It is white and black and gray, but of course not just those. It is also cream, and midnight blue, and charcoal, and she used a little plaster of Paris to create crater walls.

The way she colored taught me at an early age that what you see isn’t always as it appears.

Two years ago, I asked her whether she’d be interested in taking up painting again. “Not really,” she said. She didn’t want to have to clean up the mess and besides, “I’m not very good. Maybe I’ll look for one of those paint-by-number replicas of Starry Night.”

I know if I bought that for her as a gift, it would sit unopened in a closet. The brushes aren’t good, she’d probably say, or she’d complain that she can’t see the numbers well.

•••

MOM HAD THE patience to teach me how to knit, how to sew, how to fold towels and iron shirts. She taught me the proper way to wash dishes: glassware first, then utensils and plates, greasy pans last.

In the last six years, that patience has evaporated. She’s exasperated by any delay. Told that she would have to wait several months for cataract surgery, she decided not to pursue it. When we were waiting at the gas station for a pump to be available, she saw a queue one car shorter than ours and suggested we move over. “Mom, it’s not like you have somewhere else to be,” I said.

And she doesn’t. She has lost her interest in going anywhere, doing anything. She won’t fly anymore — the headlines about pieces of planes falling off, about missing luggage, cancellations, passengers accosting flight attendants scare her. Things that make such headlines are uncommon occurrences, I assure her, thousands of flights take off and land safely every week. She’s unmoved.

So I’m the one who visits. We live 3,000 miles apart, and twice in the past two years she asked me to cancel my trips, the first time because “it’s going to be too hot to do anything” and the second because “we’ll just be sitting around talking.” Isn’t that the point of visiting, I asked?

She has the longevity gene from both sides of her family. What if her remaining time, even if it’s just a year, included some joy?

I think one reason she waved me off was because she’s smoking again, three decades after giving it up.  “I’m going to quit,” she promised after asking me to cancel the second time. She didn’t. During my latest visit in January, she’d slip on what she called her smoking jacket — a tired-out zip-up sweatshirt — and head to a corner of the garage where she sat on an old fold-up camp chair and lit up. I suggested she smoke inside to be more comfortable — “after all, Mom, it’s your house” — but she said she didn’t want the house to smell.

I think she’s afraid to talk to me, probably because my questions come with follow-up questions. Our Q&As, whether in person or over the phone, have the feel of a parent-child tug-of-war. Now I’m the parent and Mom is the child who wants the final say. And the final say is usually “Besides, I’m 87.”

Tracie: Why are you smoking again, Mom?

Mom: Because it relaxes me. I’ll stop soon. Besides, I’m 87.

T: What are you stressed about?

M: I’m just a worrier. I take an antidepressant when I need one.

T: Antidepressants don’t work that way. And you need need to stop watching the news. How’s that walking program you said you wanted to start?

M: My hips hurt too much to walk.

T: If you started to walk more, your hips would stop hurting.

M: I know, but it’s too smoggy and it’s not safe near the park. And besides, I’m 87.

T: What did you have for dinner last night?

M: I had half a sandwich and a little soup. I’m not a very good cook. The microwave makes things too hot, and the oven doesn’t work right.

T: Why just a sandwich?

M: Because I’m getting fat. And food is expensive and doesn’t taste good.

T: Were you able to sign up for the meal delivery service I told you about?

M: I called them, but they said there’s a three-month waiting list so I said never mind. Besides, I’m 87.

I think she stopped looking ahead when the pandemic hit.

But your life isn’t over, I want to tell her. She has the longevity gene from both sides of her family — her dad lived into his early 90s, her mom to about 99. What if her remaining time, even if it’s just a year, included some joy? I skirt around this discussion as well. My mom and I never had heart-to-hearts, and I don’t think she’s ready to start now. The closest she came was this January. “I’ve had a good life,” she said, repeatedly. I probed for anecdotes, scraps of stories, but the “good life” was as far as she would go.

I think she stopped looking ahead when the pandemic hit. She was alone — Dad had died several years earlier, and my sister’s death in 2018 sucked the air out of her. She grew fearful, depressed, isolated. She has fallen, and she can’t, or won’t, get up.

They say that for the elderly, falls can be fatal. I blame the pandemic for her fall. She was grieving before, probably depressed, but Covid broke my mom’s spirit. I’m afraid the injury is fatal.

* Peanut Butter Yucks

Stir together 1 cup light Karo syrup and 1 cup granulated sugar in a large saucepan over low heat until it just begins to bubble. Remove from heat and stir in 6 cups Rice Krispies and 1 cup peanut butter, more to taste. Using a wooden spoon, press the blended ingredients into a buttered oblong glass baking dish. Spread 1.5 cups of melted semi-sweet chocolate chips (more to taste) across the top and let cool.