Then it’s the rides, and our little group divides itself: I go with the five-year-old and Mom to the carousel, train and ponies while the seven-year-old guides Dad toward the vertigo-inducing, stomach-wrenching, rib-crushing rides.

We spend our ride tickets and, feeling peckish—as this medley of sights and sounds is apt to make anybody—we head to the food stands, where everything is overpriced, fried, dipped in sugar, or served on a stick. We opt for popcorn and soft-serve and tuck into a shady square to marvel at the improbable rides, particularly the double-ended pendulum that swings people from top to bottom, right-side up and upside down. Everyone is screaming.

I begin to feel vicarious vertigo and turn the other way to read tattoos inked on legs and arms and backs, all bared to the sun. It is high in a cloudless sky, shining down on livestock and roller coasters, popcorn and tattoos, blue ribbons and shrieking children—this old-fashioned, utterly delightful scoop of Americana.

I don’t know what time he landed, or how he got to the beach with his wing all akimbo. There were no signs of a scuffle in the sand. No feathers. Just his wing drooping like half a superhero’s cape. Maybe he misjudged the landing. I don’t know how a pelican can twist a wing into something so heavy and useless.

Not much gets in the way of my morning meditation, so I started to walk on, telling myself I would come back when the Wildlife Rescue offices opened in an hour. I got a little ways down the beach, but all I could think about was that pelican and the many what-ifs in his life. The neighborhood has bobcats. Bears. Dogs. One bald eagle.

I turned back, circled him, taking pictures like he was a celebrity. I sat on a rock. Named the pelican Staid, which seemed to fit—respectable and unmoving, like a judge wearing robes. I texted a few people and within minutes my phone silently blinked and we were no longer alone.

A couple of teenagers had seen the pelican earlier. They didn’t know who to call so they called the police and the fire department and 9-1-1. Is a wounded pelican an emergency? They thought so. So did a manager of the resort. By then, Staid had people. I hadn’t planned for my day to start this way. But it turned out to be just what I needed to remind myself that most people want things to turn out all right.

Learning to ride a bike is a metaphor for many skills one has to master in life. It begins with balance, and takes a lot of falling down until brain, feet, and body mass come to some agreement.

Throwing your leg over a vehicle with a seat and handlebars and nothing to hold you in can be scary but after not too long, you realize that you can lift your feet and still make forward progress. Gliding is fun, but you can’t glide up hill so eventually, you want pedals.

That’s the tricky bit. It looks easy when your older brother or older sister does it, but when you crush down the pedal that’s up, the handlebars go that way and it’s wobble city and you just know you’re going to crash and get scraped up, and the scrapes will sting when you go swimming and life will be terrible. That’s how you talk yourself out of doing it in the first place.

Before you accomplish anything, you have to be willing to fall down.

That’s the thought a certain cloud that looked like a puffball satellite inspired as I watched it being torn into wispy bits. A temporary illusion created by water droplets and ice crystals transforming themselves continuously: spaceship… manta ray… a pinscher beetle with a slug on its back…a fat, happy superhero with three teeth… Becoming. That’s the word.

Now the last car has departed, the family has scattered, and quiet has settled like night, but remnants of revelry remain. From my window I can see a narrow path of shiny bottle caps leading to a fairy garden beneath the currant bushes. A single strand of gold is all that’s left of the Happy Birthday banner strung between pines. The swing hangs still and the slack-line is empty. Cards—mostly funny—and gifts—mostly whiskey and wine—still populate the table on the deck.

The cards will be packed away. The bottles will be opened one by one. I’ll pick up the balls the dog forgot. But for another day, the gold ribbon still catches the light between the pines, and the bottle caps still mark the path to the fairy garden—quiet evidence that birthdays are not about counting years. They’re about the people who come to count them with you.

Alone on the beach, she carved a warren of corridors, trenches, and tunnels. Along the lakeside, she built a sturdy wall, complete with a deep moat, to protect the world she was building.

She paid no attention to the occasional boat wake that threatened her handiwork. Nor did she notice the teenage boys pummeling each other in the water behind her—splashing, wrestling, throwing sand.

Her concentration was absolute. The wall grew higher without so much as a glance over her shoulder.

When she decided her work was done, she explained to her audience of one about the beings who lived there and where the secret cave was if they ever needed to hide.

I admired her creation and her story, which will have a longer life than the structure. She smiled at me, clapped the sand from her hands, kicked a hole in the seawall and stomped her little world flat.

Sometimes the joy is in building.

Sometimes it’s in being the wrecking ball.

Our awards celebrate spectacular qualities like courage, speed, strength. Patience is all of that, yet it is a still pond, quiet, steady, reflective. It’s not newsworthy in modern world that seems to admire loud voices, whether they speak truth or not.

Patience is what allows parents to step aside to give space while their two or ten or twelve or twenty-year-old needs to rage, grieve or simply sort out the limitations of being human. It’s patience that carries those who care for the elderly when everything takes longer than it once did. Longer than last week. Longer than last year. Much longer than a decade ago. But that time has passed.

Japanese stories often linger on the passage of time and the impermanence of all things. Maybe that’s the essence of patience: not merely waiting, but letting go of judgement and expectation. Meeting each moment without trying to hurry it along. Just let it be.

Whatever is happening will pass. And in its own time, so will we.

Mono no aware: literally "the pathos of things"; the gentle awareness that life's beauty is inseparable from its impermanence.

I am usually the first to leave tracks on the beach in the morning. A few days ago though a mother bear and her cub beat me it.

The bears around here are black bears. They forage for currents and apples, then stroll along the hard-packed sand, following the shoreline much as we do.

Every so often they lumber with their heavy fur coats into the lake for a cool dip. Before he was compelled to remove it, they seemed to prefer my neighbor’s pond, treating his ornamental water feature like a private spa. We warned him that a shallow pond with a gently burbling waterfall was practically an engraved invitation to bears. But I think he thought that the giant grizzly sculptures flanking the pond would discourage the real thing.

They didn’t.

Unlike humans, bears know a fake the moment they catch its scent.

Asking for help is hard. It’s also an essential skill if you want to live a long life in a world that includes other people.

Parents have to learn this paradox. They spend years teaching their children to be independent while also teaching them to ask for help when they need it. It’s a question of timing. Offering help before it’s requested undermines the long reach for autonomy that begins at age two and stretches until the child is ready to visit the nest on occasion and not call it home.

By the time kids go off to college, they’re usually pretty self-sufficient—if, that is, their parents have let them solve their own problems, struggle, and ask for help when they need it. Bruises, tears, and failure are all a necessary part of this cycle. At the other end of the spectrum, highly capable adults often have trouble asking for help for the opposite reason. They know they can carry the load. They’re just exhausted.

Most of the adults I know who fall into this category never play the pity card. Their requests are understated, easy to miss. In fact, the fewer the words, the more urgent the need may be because gathering the energy to ask for a favor is almost as draining as doing the task itself.

If we’re lucky, we live long enough to learn that asking for help isn’t the opposite of independence—it’s one of the ways we sustain it.

Right now she doesn’t even have a herd. She has only me, which is a substantial reduction in numbers since the rest of her family is away. Still, she has me to herd and I’m supposed to be working so she’s at my feet, where she will sense not only movement, but intention to move. She’s not a very good editor and she agrees with everything I say, so she’s not one to broaden my perspective on any subject. Still, she’s good at nudging me to get up and go for a walk and between those interruptions, her quiet vigilance keeps me on task, which makes her a very good assistant, even though she knows next to nothing about a writer’s trade.

Except tone. She knows tone.

During that iconic performance, Anderson changed a single pronoun in her opening song: “Of thee I sing” became “Of thee we sing.” A small pronoun, but a profound gesture—one that emphasized an inclusive body politic that her presence helped assemble on the National Mall and symbolized from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. She never mentioned being barred from Constitution Hall. Instead, she opened with a hymn of shared patriotism, and closed with a spiritual: “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.”

This may have something to do with getting trapped in a tiny bathroom in my grandparents’ house when I was a child. I remember trying to turn that little locky thing above the handle, but my hands were too small, or maybe it was just stuck.

I pushed and pulled. I could hear my brothers and sisters playing in the distance. I could hear the low rumble of adults talking, lingering over breakfast. Nobody noticed my absence. Nobody wondered where I was. I did not like the feeling of being Nobody and a little electric current started in my stomach and made my throat tight.

I had to get out of there. My grandparents’ home was built in the Tudor Revival style in the 1920’s and the bathroom had a little pointy window with opaque glass stitched together with wandering lead seams. I stood on the toilet seat and unlatched it, but it was chained and only opened a few inches.

Now I knew I was trapped. I jumped off the toilet and started pounding on the door and yelling and also crying. All this commotion brought a lot of attention. Mostly I remember Granddad’s voice. It was soft, gentle, he must have been kneeling, getting his voice close to the keyhole. Step by step he walked me through how to turn the latch hard to the left with my left hand while pulling the door toward me with my right, the one I had recently learned to print my name with.

It took a couple of times, but I did it, and when I got out, I was not exactly a returning hero, but at least I rejoined my pack. I never closed that door with me inside again.

I still don’t like to lock doors because some are finicky and there’s always the possibility of losing the key, which I seem to be particularly adept at. And who knew that hotel card keys get demagnetized if you nestle them next to your iPhone? Once in a little village on the west coast of Ireland, I snuck out of a cozy B&B to take a short sunrise walk, which stretched into hours because the whole town was asleep and, like Alice in Wonderland, I had the little golden key but I couldn’t make it work. In the wind, I heard Granddad’s gentle voice.

May the wind be at your back and may the key always turn the lock.

The butterfly in my yard has come a long way: from a lone egg on a single leaf to a hungry caterpillar that looked like a bird dropping with legs. Then on to the next stage: a camouflaged chrysalis hanging in a tree. Now she’s a brilliant insect with six legs and kaleidoscope wings.

It’s an elegant curve, ending with beauty and grace.

We humans travel that same curve, but in the opposite direction. Butterflies spend their cycle becoming lighter. We spend ours growing heavier with years, memories, responsibilities, the accumulated weight of living.

But all those years can also buoy us.

I have a friend who just turned 100. Childhood polio has left her unable to walk very far and macular degeneration has taken her eyesight. She has scrapbooks full of photos and clippings of the world she witnessed—including the rebuilding of Europe after WWII and the birth of NATO. Years ago she told me that she would need them later—to jog her memory.

She has moved to assisted living now. I asked if she had the scrapbooks, as she had planned.

Oh yes, she did.

She can no longer lift them, but if someone sits beside her and opens one, she can tell them about it. The scrapbooks are oddly like butterfly wings. They are heavy, yet they carry her.

I talked to her a couple of weeks ago, and she was in quarantine—isolated from the community for some contagion she couldn’t name. I offered to send her a book on tape.

She expressed gratitude, but demurred,

Her life, she said, was already too full.

I think about how children change every single aspect of adult lives—the rhythm, the texture, the warp and weft. The daily grind becomes categorically different as careers go on hold, or are abandoned altogether. But explaining the paradox of parental love—that it can be both deeply fulfilling and utterly consuming—is not easy. If it’s true that his parents love him to the moon and back, why did they leave?

I tell him that parents sometimes need to spend time together—just the two of them. It’s like taking a break, but not really, because no matter where they are, they carry their children with them always, tucked close to their hearts.

He suggests that they can take a break right here. Like a time out.

I think about how to respond to this impeccable logic; about how, of all the roles mothers and fathers play, being a parent eclipses the others. Should I tell him that it’s their anniversary and that anniversaries are a chance to celebrate the life they built together?

But the seven-year-old will not understand any of that.

Before he arrived, they did not exist.

But they did.

It’s easy for parents to forget that, too.

In the twentieth century, we scooped powdery soap out of a box to put in the washing machine or dishwasher. The box was cardboard and lived under the sink. You opened it, guessed at a quantity, and spilled some on the floor. The transaction required a tiny amount of judgement and a tiny amount of mess.

Now we have a pre-measured portion of detergent inside a dissolving polymer membrane, packaged in a plastic container. An easy exchange: we gave up decisions and messes and got convenience. There’s nothing wrong with that. Convenience has given us a whole lot more free time than our grandparents had.

I was thinking all this as I dropped a blue-green pod into the dishwasher. Convenient? Definite yes. Cost? I have no idea. Am I littering a distant beach with microplastics? Is someone else paying for my free-time?

A shallow dive into the interwebs suggests that the debate is ongoing. The shell on the pod is not plastic, but a water-soluble PVA/PVOH film. Whether it’s entirely biodegradable remains an open question.

Yesterday I went to CostCo and bought a big cardboard box of powdered detergent. Inside is a plastic bag with a plastic scoop for measuring the amount you pour into the washing machine drum before adding the clothes. I also bought dense, unwrapped dishwasher pods. I don’t know if those are better for the environment or not. I’m not especially interested in proving that my way is right. I’m more interested in noticing the trade-offs embedded in the decisions we make so casually.

Marriage offers plenty of opportunities to notice trade-offs instead of keeping score.

My husband has not yet discovered our new-old-fashioned method of soap dispensing. He won’t be a fan. He will have many reasons for not changing something that is not provably broken.

But he’ll let it go.

Letting go is one of the essential skills of a happy marriage.

I have no idea how many trees I see on my daily walk, but it’s safe to say I could reach out and touch hundreds. Beyond them are thousands more, millions across the Tahoe Basin. Many stand closer together than they once would have because decades of fire suppression and regrowth after logging have allowed young trees to fill in the gaps. Some forests have become crowded, while others—like the one near my home—still open into meadows and boulder fields, where trees have room to grow into unique living sculptures.

On my walk I see many old trees, some of which seem to have two trunks, called “leaders.” Trees grow a second leader when the first is damaged. I don’t know what happened in these trees’ past, but because so many double-leaders cluster around Zephyr Shoals, the cause was likely shared—a heavy snow year, an insect infestation, or excessive snacking by resident deer.

Each tree has recorded its own injury. Read alone, their Y-shaped trunks are mysteries; read together, they become a chapter of collective history written in bark.

Every year about this time, great gaggles of Canada geese waddle along the beach, dropping feathers as they go. This morning I walked right through a group of twenty-two, nestled in the sand, some with heads tucked beneath a wing. A big male briefly stretched his neck, but I’m a familiar presence and I walk with intent, hands in my pockets, signaling my lack of interest in them.

Some watched me, but none moved. That’s because it’s molting season and every year about this time Canada geese take a sabbatical from flying as they shed their worn flight feathers and grow shiny new ones. For a few weeks, they’re grounded, like me.

The geese on the beach are not nesting. They’re either too young, or didn’t nest successfully this year. The nesting pairs have retreated to quieter places, hidden away while their eggs hatch and their feathers drop.

I won’t see them for a month or so. But in July I’ll likely see mated pairs shepherding their offspring as they learn the skills they need to survive. By the time the goslings are ready to fly, their parents will be newly upholstered and ready to teach them.

“Would you identify as an introvert or an extrovert?” she asks.

The room splits 50/50, which makes sense to me. I’m a 50/50 myself because I’m socially adept, but a natural introvert.

Psychologists define an introvert as someone who recharges through solitude or low-stimulation environments. That’s me. I prefer deeper conversations to large-group interactions and while I am socially confident, I find extended social activity draining.

My friend is the opposite. He gets his energy from being around people. It doesn’t matter what they’re talking about; he just needs to be in the thick of it.

I understand that. I like people, too.

But after the cacophony of a crowded room?

I need a quiet tree.

Decades ago when I taught high school, I once received an entire essay written in Cholo script. Later, I had a conversation with the author.

“You know,” I told him, “there’s a binder in the principal’s office that identifies taggers by their lettering style.”

He nodded. He knew. He said it didn’t matter.

“If I get in trouble for tagging, at least I know someone saw what I wrote.”

I told him I wanted to read what he wrote, too, but I was having trouble reading a 250-word essay on Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men written in Cholo script.

He grinned, revealing a jumble of teeth, and glanced down at the paper.

“I wrote about mice.” He let the word hang in the air. “Because we—that is, people like George and Lennie and me — we’re all mice, aren’t we? Lennie is strong but he’s retarded and he doesn’t really know what he’s doing when he kills the mice in his pocket. George is smart, but he’s poor, so he’s a mouse, too. And he has Lennie to take care of, so he tells stories about how everything is going to get better.”

We talked about the book for a while. We were only partly through it, so he didn’t know it would get worse.

I didn’t want to tell him.

After a moment, he looked up.

“So am I in the book in the principal’s office?” he asked.

I nodded.

“That’s good,” he said, “somebody knows I’m here.”