“Uh, oh. I missed a call from Aunt Barb,” I said to my brother. I stopped by his house around lunchtime on a Tuesday after my eye doctor’s appointment because I was in the neighborhood. “She left a message.”

I stood up and paced, my body tense and knowing what was coming. I hit the play button on my messages. “Kristine, it’s Barb. We are at your dad’s…” then the message trailed off. It sounded like a combination of static and a Charlie Brown teacher. I hit play again, out of habit, or maybe because I didn’t want to call her back, knowing what she was going to tell me.

I called her back anyway, putting her on speaker, standing in my brother’s kitchen, my stomach in knots.

“Hi, Kristine,” Barb answered, her voice strained and frantic, “We came to get your dad for his cancer doctor appointment today, and he hadn’t answered my text last night, and he didn’t answer this morning, and I had a really bad feeling ever since last night, so when we got here, we got the maintenance guy to do a wellness check and…and he’s gone. He’s gone.” I looked up at my brother, whose jaw had gone slack, tears welling up in my eyes, unsure what to ask next.

“He’s dead?” is all I could come up with, wanting to confirm that is what she meant by “gone” rather than he was missing.

“Yes,” she paused briefly to take in some air, then her words came quickly and without pause. “The fire chief and paramedics are here. And there is a police officer since it is an elderly person found alone. I am in the living room. I don’t want to go in and see him. I can’t. I guess they have to rule out foul play, and oh, wait, they are asking me something. I need to go. I will call you back. I’m so sorry.”

I hung up the phone and looked at my brother.

“Dad’s dead,” I said, as if he couldn’t hear it for himself.

Time froze and sped up at the same time. It was one of those moments where there was no precedent for either one of us. Next steps were not clear, yet the urge to do something, to let people know, was overwhelming. The next twenty-four hours were a blur. Communication with our sister in Switzerland, my kids, my mother, friends, work, airlines, hazmat teams, the mortuary, his financial guy, and the staff at his independent living facility swallowed my day. I barely had time to breathe, let alone process or cry.

In less than forty-eight hours after we got the call, my plane touched down in Phoenix, my hometown, my father’s hometown. I only knew Phoenix with my father in it. This would be the first version without him. My Aunt Barb and Uncle Richard were there to greet me. They took me to his place, and the work continued.

It was so weird to walk into his space, frozen. The scene I saw was consistent with my father. His living room was pristine and clean. His beloved paintings and sculptures were bathed in the bright Arizona sun. His beloved Camelback Mountain was visible through the window. A half-full coffee cup rested near his computer in his office. An empty pint of Häagen-Dazs ice cream in the trash next to his desk. Kleenex everywhere. I found sauerkraut in his fridge. Super Beet chews on his counter. And boxes of Alkaline Smart Water. Bottles of magnesium. Apparently, my dad was getting health advice from TikTok.

I did not go into his room. I did not want to see where my father lay for an unknown period of time after life left his body. I let the biological cleaning team, who were amazing, do their thing while I started with the low-hanging fruit—dishes and trash and separating things into respective piles.

My brother arrived the following day, and together we tackled his closet. I was concerned that this would feel like a violation. Too intimate. Too close. I was not sure what I would find from a man I had known my entire life, yet not well at all.

We found that my dad had an inordinate number of polo shirts, jeans, and khaki pants. He still had some of his bespoke suits from his younger years. He was heavy in his 40s and 50’s and started working out with a vengeance in his 60’s, after getting sober for the last time. He got fit and healthy and never looked back. None of his older suits fit his trim body. He took to wearing jeans and embracing a more casual look, something he never did when I was growing up. He was in a suit for work or shorts working in the yard. Nothing in between. His uniform changed completely.

I found it interesting to see what my father saved. He saved his Stanford track uniform from his collegiate running days. He saved articles from high school and from college, when his medley relay team was vying for the American record. Letters typed from his college coach to his parents, written in the late 1950’s. He saved pictures from his time in the National Guard, something he never talked about. He had every receipt and ticket and so many pictures from a trip he took with some college buddies through Europe in 1958. My dad would recount the details of this trip with painstaking precision to anybody who would listen. How they mistakenly climbed the Eiger and bought a Citroen that barely fit four men over 6 feet tall and rambled around, not knowing what they were doing. My dad came alive when he told these stories. He saved the receipt for that car and ticket stubs and every scrap he could from that trip.

There were pictures of his time at the independent living facility, Revel. The last picture he sent all of us, which was unusual, was at their Christmas party. My dad was wearing a festive sweater and a Santa hat, smiling for the camera. He exuded happiness.

What wasn’t there were extensive records of those middle decades. No pictures from family vacations. Very few pictures of his three children. There were pictures of his six grandkids, photos my siblings and I had sent him over the years. This was not surprising to my siblings or me.

My father’s middle decades were rough. Undiagnosed depression. Drinking. Two bouts of cancer. Stints in rehab. A career that brought accolades but not much satisfaction. A pervasive unhappiness that bled onto all of us. He had every trapping of success by societal standards, and he was miserable.

Sifting through my father’s things reminded me of a concept in the Yoga Sutras. The Sutras teach us that obstacles to clarity are inevitable. Illness, doubt, fatigue, and regression are part of being human. In this tradition, regression is not a failure. It is a new starting point. We don’t bounce back from these obstacles. We bounce forward. We take all the experience and knowledge that we have garnered into our next iteration, moving toward clarity and away from suffering.

I think about how many times my father began again in his 87 years.

The last time I saw him, he had been living at Revel for two years. He went there reluctantly. My sister worked her magic and moved him out of the townhouse he had occupied for twenty years and into his new apartment. He embraced this new iteration of life that he resisted at first. He experienced more social interaction in one meal at Revel than he did in over a month in his townhouse. This transformed him. I didn’t recognize the man I saw for the last time. He was joyful. Social. Vibrant. He hugged people. He was eating Super Beets. He participated in twice-weekly Jeopardy tournaments with fellow residents. He made friends with the staff. This place brought out the best in him. I had never seen my father so happy. I had never seen him in a place of belonging like this. Despite everything, he was loved and loving. He belonged.

My forensic dive into my father’s life started with a panicked phone call and uncertain next steps, yet brought me more peace and hope than I expected. I saw the same smile on the bookends of his adult life—when he was running as a young man and in a Christmas sweater and Santa hat surrounded by his new friends. He found belonging and joy and happiness in a place he never thought to look. Every obstacle propelled him forward, into a life he loved at the end. And if my father can bounce forward late in life, I can too. I can find belonging and love and joy in unexpected places. He reminds me how lucky I am that I get to begin again.

“I want the truth,” says a young Tom Cruise, clad in pristine Service Dress Blues, using his fist for emphasis. He’s trying to be tough in the face of a steely and steady Jack Nicholson, whose brows are knitted together just enough to look menacing, but not full-blown deranged as Jack Torrance in The Shining. It’s impressive.

“You can’t handle the truth!” Jack Nicholson exclaims, holding back just enough emotion so that when he explodes later, this seems mild. He adds a pause for emphasis before launching into his justification for his actions and existence.

We all know this scene. It became a punch line and a meme and has been circulating widely around social media this week in the wake of the murder of Rob Reiner and Michele Singer Reiner. It has been compiled with other memorable lines from Rob Reiner’s impressive oeuvre, the ones that are baked into our collective consciousness like “I’ll have what she’s having” and “But ours goes to 11.” A teary and earnest Kevin Bacon took to social media to express his gratitude and admiration for the director and the man who created what he experienced as a collaborative and wonderful work environment on the set of A Few Good Men.

Rob and Michele Reiner’s son, Nick, has been arrested and charged with their murders. His struggle with addiction has been well documented.

Addiction is a bitch. It takes out huge swaths of resources and destroys families. Addiction robs people of their fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, spouses, partners, and friends. Its wake is big and ugly and can look like scorched earth in its aftermath. Addiction is an equalizer. It is blind to gender, age, appearance, location, or vocation. It doesn’t care if you have a JD, a PhD, or a GED. It doesn’t take into account credit scores or bank accounts. Addicts come from what our society dubs as Good Families as frequently as Bad Families.

It is everywhere.

Addiction doesn’t discriminate, yet we do. We want to blame, point fingers, and “other” the addict and their families. Surely, someone did something WRONG. We file addicts into different categories. We excuse a hardworking, fun-loving, productive, white, male when he gets blackout drunk because he “is under stress” and needs to “let off some steam.” We lose compassion for an unhoused person with a heroin addiction who clearly made “bad choices” and is “lazy.” Hell, we celebrate men like the former, making him Secretary of Defense, while reviling the other, convinced that their station in life is the result of a lack of character or fortitude or whatever other lie we tell ourselves just so that we can separate ourselves from THAT.

When it comes to addiction, it is hard to handle the truth. It can happen to anyone. The Reiners’ murder slaps us in the face with this truth. Fame, fortune, loving parents, and opportunities didn’t stave off addiction in this case and in so many others. Addiction doesn’t care.

Putting addicts in categories to make ourselves feel better is not helpful. The fallout is painful and confusing and devastating for everyone in the addict’s wake, whether their drug of choice is scotch or meth. It doesn’t matter. It is like debating whether it is better to be hit by a bus or pushed off a cliff. They both suck.

In the aftermath of the Reiners’ murder, my mind and heart go out to everyone who has a loved one struggling with addiction and is dealing with the consequences. This is for you.

I think about a former patient of mine in East Tennessee. He was a curmudgeonly man who wore overalls to every appointment and refused to take off his trucker hat during treatment. He was gruff and rude, and I had a hard time connecting with him. One day, a young boy accompanied him to therapy. He introduced him as his grandson. He was ten. When his grandson went back to the waiting room, I asked, “Are you watching him today?”

“Nope. He lives with us,” he said. “I didn’t think this would be our lives now, but it is. His mom died of an overdose. His dad is addicted. We are his only hope.”

My attitude toward him softened. There were countless other patients like him. Taking on kids that weren’t theirs in their sixties, seventies, and eighties, as their health and savings declined, providing hope where there was very little. Their lives are taking a turn because of someone else’s actions.

I think about all the kids who simultaneously want and don’t want their alcoholic mom to show up for the Christmas play or to graduation or to the sporting event, because if she does show up, then the child doesn’t have to explain her absence. If she does show up, then the kid may have to excuse her behavior. The addict is sucking the joy out of the event either way. The child is being robbed of their own experience.

My heart goes out to the parents who are dealing with a child in active addiction right now. I have no answers. Only love.

It is excruciating to watch a person you love self-destruct. It is even harder to realize that there is nothing you can do to save them. It is harder still sometimes to choose your own well-being over that of the addict. Healing can be a lonely business. It is ninja-level love and acceptance to no longer participate in a dynamic of addiction with a loved one. It is almost too much for the human brain and heart to handle, because what we want more than anything is for our loved one to be well. We, or maybe it’s just me, want our loved ones to make it to that Ninth Step and beyond, where they can be active participants in life and relationships again, and we can exhale and stop worrying about their well-being, and we can see the parent or spouse or child that addiction stole from us, and we can feel normal.

Or not.

For many families, that will never happen. They are left picking up what is left on the scorched earth. They are doing their best to navigate untenable and unsustainable situations. They are making hard decisions and groping in the dark. They are taking on burdens that aren’t theirs. They are breaking open every day.

I see you.

I feel you.

I am sending you love.

That is the truth.

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“Goodbye,” I say, squeezing my daughter too tightly, feeling her hair against my face. Smelling her hair products that had been taking up bathroom real estate since she arrived. “I love you so much.”

“Love you, too, Mom,” she says, squeezing me a little tighter, yet nothing like my desperate death grip.

“Let me know when you get home safely,” I say as I let go. At some point, we both need to breathe. “Thank you for making the trip.”

“Well, this was the best Thanksgiving that I can remember,” she says. My tear ducts are straining against the backlog of tears wanting to escape. And my heart? Well, come on. It is broken open. Again.

“I agree. It was a good one.”

She rolls down her window, slows down, and reaches her hand to grab mine. My face contorts into some claymation weirdness, a feeble attempt at staving off the tears that will not retreat. “Love you, Mom,” she says as she squeezes my hand.

“Love you so much, Mags,” I say and let her hand go.

The window rolls up, and she is off.

I said goodbye to my son Ian and his fiancé Matt the day before. Hugs in the DTW departure line of cars, the harsh Detroit wind hitting our skin, wondering how their visit ended so quickly. My drive back was buoyed by the fact that Maggie was still there. She and I would have another night together.

Now, they are all gone.

I open the door to my apartment and walk into the kitchen. I open the refrigerator door, looking for something. Pie. Cranberry sauce. Stuffing. Something sweet and/or carb-laden to soak up the grief and sadness and loneliness that flood me after saying goodbye to my adult children. I peel back the aluminum foil and stare at the pie. It is calling me, promising relief from the depth of feelings that envelop me. I pause, staring at its custardy goodness and flaky crust. I check in.

I cover the pie up, return it to the fridge, close the door, and go sit on the couch. I decide to forgo the fleeting, feel-good filler and sit with the ache of my feelings instead. UGH. Because the pie is temporary, and thankfully, so are these feelings. They will pass.

I let the tears come.

My daughter, Maggie, is right. It was a great Thanksgiving. I played tour guide, despite the inhospitable weather. We gathered at my brother’s for our Thanksgiving meal, where my children bonded with their cousins over Anime and their 3-D printer, and Matt got a peek at what he is marrying into. I was able to cook for my kids, expressing my love language through the food of their childhoods. We walked to Christmas markets, had an amazing meal at a hip midtown restaurant, and played video games and drank beer at Barcade. To everyone’s surprise, we discovered my daughter’s uncanny knack for Ms. Pac-Man.

Ian and Matt discussed their wedding plans and talked about their future. Maggie described her job search and plans to move to NYC. I observed with delight and overwhelming joy the transformation of my children. My children are adults. Making adult decisions. Having adult discussions. Making adult plans. They are living their lives and making their way through, and I couldn’t be prouder. This is what I have always wanted for them. To create meaningful, fulfilling, and interesting lives. They are well on their way. They are doing exactly what I hoped they would when they were younger, not yet who they were going to be.

It means that goodbyes at the airport and through car windows are necessary. It is the double-edged sword of parenting young adults.

In the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali describes that the nature of human suffering boils down to mistaking and linking Purusha and Prakriti. My understanding is this–Purusha is consciousness. It is that part of us, and others, that does not change. It is eternal. Prakriti is everything else. It is our physical bodies, thoughts, emotions, senses, objects, and everything that comprises the material world. Prakriti is always changing. When the mind, my mind, mistakes Prakriti with Purusha, suffering ensues. That is where I am when I am staring down the pumpkin pie. I forget that my children and I are forever changing. It is the nature of inhabiting these human forms. Although I will never experience Friday pizza nights where my children fight about watching Avatar or Aquamarine, new joys await us. Clinging to old versions of all of us and mistaking what must change with what doesn’t serves no one. I struggle with it at times. Now is one of those times.

As my brilliant writer friend Marina puts it, we cannot stay in old shapes. She is right. We can’t. Even if it were possible, would I want to? As I write this, still feeling the pang of my children’s departure, I can answer, No. Of course, not. If I suspended time, I would miss how Maggie, the little girl who was bewitched by the magic of Aquamarine, brings that same sensibility into her burgeoning adult life. I would not experience the joy of seeing my son in partnership with his beloved. I would miss the beautiful new shapes they, and I, are morphing into as we outgrow old ones.

And when I can hold that truth, my tears of sorrow transform into tears of joy. No pumpkin pie needed.

“I don’t understand. What does my head position have to do with my breathing?” a new patient of mine asked me this week during the evaluation.

“Let me show you,” I replied, reaching for the model of the human skull. My patience for this patient was fraying more with each minute. They started our time together with “I don’t know why I am here” and that “exercises never work.” They slumped in the chair like a sullen teenager, with arms crossed, side eyes, and eye rolls. I voiced assurance that at the end of the evaluation, if I didn’t think I could help, I would say so. I wasn’t there to waste anybody’s time and/or money.

“Here is a cross-section of the head and neck,” I said. “Here is the trachea, or windpipe. Here is your soft…”

“Wait,” they said. “That’s not my windpipe, this is.” Their index finger ran up and down the cervical spine. “Or, no, it’s that,” pointing to the esophagus.

I take a long breath in and let it out slowly. I point at the spine, “This is the spine, and this is the esophagus. And this is the trachea.”

“Well, what do I know?” they asked, slumping back in the chair, with an impressive arm cross/eye roll combo.

I took another deep breath, continued my evaluation, and explained why I think myofuncitonal therapy would indeed help their breathing and sleep problems.

“We have a lot to work with,” I said.

They still weren’t convinced, and at this point in my career, I have stopped trying to get people to engage in their own well-being and care. It rarely works. I open a door, and if patients walk through it, I am all in. If they decide to remain outside of the threshold, I no longer step outside and push them through. It is part of what has allowed me to last as long as I have.

As a Physical Therapist for over 30 years, my education, skill set, knowledge base, intelligence, treatment outcomes, methods, modalities, documentation, rationale, and ability to differentiate between anatomical landmarks have been called into question on the regular. I have been required to defend my decisions at every turn. Hospital administration, insurance companies, and patients have challenged my capabilities. The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the federal agency that administers government-run insurance programs, creates rules and regulations that determine how much we get paid and how we can treat. We are told what ICD-10 diagnostic codes go with what CPT, or treatment, codes, and when our documentation doesn’t reflect those arbitrary rules, they take money back. We are told, as clinicians, how much we need to “produce” every day. Every minute of our workday needs to be accounted for.

Yet, we all continue to show up because there are those moments when a patient gains function after a stroke, a brain tumor resection, back surgery, a unilateral vestibular hypofunction, or even a run-of-the-mill total knee arthroplasty, when they are restored to themselves. They are moving and engaged in life, and free from pain, and we guided them once they crossed that threshold. Even after thirty years, there is nothing like it. It is sublime.

Last week, the Department of Education, as part of the Big Beautiful Bill, stated that as of July 2026, a degree in Physical Therapy is not a professional degree. We are in good company. Teachers, Social Workers, and Physician Assistants are also on the list. There are others as well. I am not sure how a Theologian is more professional than an Architect or a Nurse Practitioner or me, for that matter. But hey, if quoting St. Augustine helps build a bridge or manage diabetes or recover from Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo, have at it.

Because of that designation, the amount of Federal Student Loans available to pursue one of these degrees has reduced dramatically–from $50,000/year to roughly $20,000. It is not enough to get someone through their three-year Doctor of Physical Therapy degree. It creates an insurmountable barrier for many who want to pursue one of these careers.

There is no reason for this, except for its blatant sexism, racism, and classism. Another manifestation of Project 2025. This designation, disrespect aside, will put untold and undue stress on Sisyphean systems. Our nation faces shortages of Nurses, Teachers, and Physical and Occupational Therapists already. Denying access to people who want to go into these professions will have catastrophic consequences downstream. Nursing shortages lead to poorer patient outcomes. Physical and Occupational Therapist shortages mean people don’t reach their functional potential. Fewer Social Workers mean people don’t get access to the services that can keep them healthy and safe. And those things matter. They matter to me. They matter to my colleagues. They matter to society, regardless of what the Secretary of Education, who confuses steak sauce with the ability of a computer to simulate human intelligence, says.

There is a story in the Chhandogya Upanishad about clay pots. It is a story told by a father, Udallaka, to his son, Shwetaketu. Shwetaketu has just returned from twelve years of study and is feeling flush with knowledge. Kind of like me, after my first year of PT school. I knew some stuff, and I had no idea what I didn’t know. Udallaka is trying to impart to his son the unity of all things and the unchanging nature that is within all of us. If we know clay, the story goes, then we know all the things made from clay–bowls, pots, etc. The different forms may change. The names of the objects can change. But the essence of the clay does not.

This is how I feel about my fellow PTs, my colleagues, and me.

We are the clay.

People come to us in pain. They come to us at their worst, their most vulnerable, when they are scared and uncertain. We meet them where they are and help them move to another place. One with less pain, more mobility, more certainty, more agency.

We Physical Therapists, and everyone else on that list, are human. Our jobs require us to show up for others physically, emotionally, intellectually, and psychologically while navigating our own messy lives. I have seen colleagues, and have done it myself, show up to work while relationships are falling apart due to illness, betrayal, divorce, and addiction. Colleagues have cried on each other’s shoulders before work and at lunch, wiped their tears, put on their big girl panties, and treated their patients with such respect and kindness and clinical excellence that it made my jaw drop and heart open.

I think about my former colleague Michelle, who delivered her expert care with such authenticity, respect, and sweetness that for the fifty-five minutes Parkinson’s patients spent with her, they could forget that they were suffering from a progressive neurological condition that robbed them of their previous life. Michelle made them feel whole and capable, with her Dolly Parton-esque East Tennessee accent and pouf of blonde hair. Her treatment sessions were a combination of excellent, evidence-based care and Appalachian hospitality. People left feeling seen, heard, held, and loved. Michelle is a walking Master Class in providing world-class care.

I am forever grateful to my daughter’s American History teacher and cross-country coach, who saw her brilliance and capability where others didn’t, because it wasn’t obvious and typical. Coach Osborne’s astute observations, care, and willingness to be honest created a new path for my daughter. It was this teacher’s professionalism that set my daughter on a positive, life-altering direction.

If I started regaling the thousands of ways my current colleagues show up for their patients, this piece would go off the rails. Too many stories and anecdotes to recount of how they do their job with respect, patience, skill, humor, and kindness, helping people suffer less with dignity. They make me proud of my job and of my profession.

The Department of Education can remove the designation of professional from my degree, but not from who I am and who my colleagues are and who the countless other individuals who have dedicated their lives and careers to the jobs on that list are. It is our essence. The name and designation are the forms, but not the clay. A change of designation won’t alter who we are. It will not change how we move through the world and how we show up for work.

However, it will alter where we decide to work and who decides to go into these professions. These crucial careers may be filled with people who do not demonstrate the same level of care, respect, kindness, dedication, and skill as those who currently fill those positions. Unless we let our voices be heard and vote accordingly, there may come a time when Physical Therapists can’t distinguish the trachea from the spinal cord. We can’t let that happen.

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If I were participating in a dystopian geographical game show where the stakes were life and death, and someone asked me to point to the Aegean Sea on a world map, I would most likely die a gruesome and ratings-worthy death. Luck, or a phone-a-friend lifeline, would need to rescue me so that I could differentiate among the bodies of water between Europe and Asia. Even with a hint–look between Greece and Turkey, or it is part of the Mediterranean, look north of Crete, I would need a moment to find the boot of Italy and head east, unsure of what I was looking for.

Yesterday and today, I donned my ill-fitting swimsuit, my goggles, walked along the pebbley beach, and swam in the Aegean Sea. The water is saltier than the Atlantic, warmer than the Pacific, and held me in a way that made my body feel light and capable. I swam, arms and legs propelling me parallel with the shore, swimming over schools of tiny, shimmery fish. I was the only one I could see as I looked right and then left, back to shore and out to sea. It was as if I lay claim to an enormous and peaceful infinity pool. I cried into my goggles as my arms grabbed onto the water, struck by the impossibility of the entire scene. I could not believe that I was here, experiencing the solitude and beauty of this place that I could not find on a map, thousands of miles from home.

It was magical. It was the swim that I needed.

Forty years ago, I had what I have deemed my Best Swim. It was August of 1985, at US Long Course Swimming Nationals, held in Mission Viejo, California. My Best Swim was the 200-meter butterfly. I took three seconds off my previous best time, and it landed me in the Top 10 in the country. I never swam that fast again, and for years, decades really, I could feel what it felt like in my body to glide through the water with power and speed and an ease that was the culmination of years of training. Everything came together and was magical for a little over two minutes. Everything worked.

I have wanted to reproduce that feeling in my body–powerful, strong, the perfect balance of effort and ease, and have not succeeded. I would never be that fit again. I would never be that young again. I would never be that strong again. That swim, my Best Swim, would remain frozen in time, never to be usurped.

Until yesterday, when I swam in the Aegean Sea for the first time.

Today is the last day of a weeklong writers’ retreat at Rosemary’s House in Nikiti, Greece, a town I had not heard of until I applied to this residency. I didn’t bother to look up where it was on the map before I arrived. I knew I needed to fly into Thessaloniki, and that a van would pick me up, along with other writers, and drive the 90 minutes to this place on the Aegean Sea. If I had located it on the map ahead of time, my brain would have flushed that information, deeming it irrelevant. Does knowing where this beautiful body of water exists on a two-dimensional rendering make my experience any more delightful? I think not.

I came here, to this magical place, to join what I now know is a badass group of women, who were strangers six days ago, to write. I am writing a memoir with the working title Sixty-One Beds, making sense of my Reverse Hallmark Movie Story Arc of 2024, and I need help. I need help with structure and form and plot and creating conflict and scene and all of it. Why not get that help in Greece, along the Aegean Sea, even if I can’t locate it on the map? It seemed like an excellent idea.

I was right. Even if I don’t want to admit that I had expectations coming into this week, I did, because it turns out that I didn’t necessarily get the week I wanted, but I got the week I needed. I was supported as a writer and a person. I was fed and fed and fed and fed until I could not have stomached another scoop of tzatziki or another mouthful of moussaka. I was encircled and embraced by other writers whose stories infused me with courage and awe and laughter while breaking my heart open.

I felt every bit of that when I swam in the sea.

I felt humility and pride–proud of myself for getting here and humbled by every impressive woman who attended the retreat with me. I felt the craziness of how far I have come, literally and figuratively, as a writer, as a person. I felt the fire of creativity that is smoldering in me to write my story gain heat, and I feel the support of everyone who has helped me get here.

I felt it all as I floated in the cool, clear water of the Aegean.

And just as I have cracked open and smashed so many of my perceptions and closely held beliefs over the last nineteen months, another one has fallen. Unexpectedly. Without warning. I thought I would never usurp that Best Swim of 1985.

I was wrong.

Forty years later, I did.

“Did you see it coming?”

I was asked this question no less than 43,890 times last year, from friends, family, colleagues, acquaintances, yoga students, all with a mix of compassion, disbelief, shock, and kindness. It was usually followed by a big hug and an “I’m sorry.”

“No, I didn’t,” I answered, over and over and over. I repeated this answer so many times that I began to question its veracity. Is that true? Did I see it coming? Why didn’t I see it coming? I asked myself with the eagle eye lens of hindsight, as more time and space gathered between me and that Sunday morning in January of 2024. For some time, when I was questioning everything that led up to that moment, I beat myself up, convinced that I should have seen it coming, and the fact that I didn’t was a reflection of a glaring deficit. I felt ashamed. Embarrassed. I have since come to realize that nothing good comes from shoulding or shaming myself, so I let that go.

Here is where I have landed, seventeen months after my partner of six years, the man I loved and trusted and had plans to marry, met me on the driveway of the home we shared when I came home from yoga class with the angry announcement that “We’re DONE!” without prelude, pretext, or discussion, after lots of emotional and physical space, a shit ton of therapy, a heaping dose of self-compassion, and rock solid support of friends and family–I didn’t see it coming. I was blindsided, yet all the signs that he was capable of such a thing were there, even when things were wonderful.

I could not see the foreshadowing, or I chose not to. Maybe a little of both. I also fell under the spell of “This won’t happen to me” because I am human, and this is what people do. And it didn’t happen, for years, which reinforced that delusion, until it did.

I had other friends who, when I told them what happened, either didn’t ask me if I saw it coming or asked differently. They gave me a calm, knowing nod and a tremendous amount of kindness and compassion, devoid of judgment. They, like everyone else in my circle, extended love and understanding, for which I am eternally grateful.

What I have come to believe is that some people in my world were not shocked. They saw what I didn’t. Their lenses, worldviews, sensibilities, perspectives, experience, outlook, and wisdom allowed them to see what I was blind to. And when my eyes were opened, they brought me in. They did not add to my shame or hurt or grief or embarrassment. They met me with open hearts, not crossed arms and tapping toes.

I was talking to my friend Beth this week. Beth is a friend from graduate school and has been a practicing Physical Therapist for over three decades. Like me. “What percentage of your patients, the ones who are having a rotator cuff repair, a total shoulder, or a total knee, come back shocked at how much it hurts or what the recovery is like, even after you told them what to expect?”

“Oh, over 50%,” Beth answered without missing a beat.

“Yeah, same,” I said.

Part of our job in the clinic was to prepare patients for their elective surgeries. We educated them on what to expect post-operatively, what movement restrictions (if any) they were under, and why. Inevitably, more than half offered up some reason why the laws of tissue healing and recovery wouldn’t apply to them. “I have a super high pain tolerance.” “I’m a fast healer.” “I played football in high school.”

When they came back post-operatively, this group of patients, certain that their success on the football field forty years prior would obviate them from the pain and movement restrictions of other people, expressed their shock. “I didn’t think it would hurt this bad.” “I can’t believe how hard it is to move my arm.” “Wow, I thought it would be different.”

I would nod and express my empathy for the pain they were going through, and truth be told, a voice in my head wanted to say, especially to the dudes who threw their “I used to play ball” out there and expected me to be impressed, “Dude. I told you that you would need to be in a sling for six weeks. What part wasn’t clear?” But, I didn’t, because I would have lost my job, and we don’t know what we don’t know, and faulting someone for not seeing or understanding something they can’t see or understand isn’t a good program.

This week has been a doozy in the Trump Administration, even for its whackadoodle standards. Their disregard for the Constitution and the rule of law takes on more blatant, cruel, and terrifying shapes every day. As more and more lines are being crossed, some remorseful Trump voters are speaking out. I have seen them on the news and social media, lamenting their vote, regretting it, and saying things along the lines of “I didn’t vote for this…” I saw a man on MSNBC who voted for Trump and is now shocked and upset because the workers for his roofing company aren’t showing up to work out of fear, and he says these are people he cares about, and his company is suffering. He is suffering.

Hmmmm… I am of two minds here. Part of me wants to shake my head and tell this dude, “Hey, when you vote for a man who hangs out with Jeffrey Epstein and mocks a disabled reporter, and that guy puts a woman in charge of DHS who shoots a puppy because it won’t do what she wants, what the hell do you expect? How could you not see this coming? You think they care about you?”

The other part of me remembers that we are human, and this is what we do. This is what my patients do. This is what I do and have done. Our lenses are clouded by ego, fear, the need to belong, experience, attachment, denial, and other stuff that keep us from seeing what is right in front of us. And sometimes those things keep us safe. Until they don’t. Until perhaps one is voting against their own interest and the interest of people they care about, because they believe that their loyalty will immunize them from the whims of a wanna be king who surrounds himself with dangerous sycophants. Nope. It won’t.

I have been thinking about the Matrix this week, as these ideas have been rolling around in my head. “Take the blue pill,” Morpheus tells Neo, “and the story ends, and you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.” As we know, Neo doesn’t take the blue pill. He chooses to see the truth, and the story begins when he is plunged into a new world that, up until that moment, he was blind to.

Maybe, just maybe, some of those remorseful Trump voters are like Neo. Like me. (That is not easy for me to write.) And it is our job to welcome them, perhaps reluctantly, perhaps with some suspicion, into the ranks of those of us who are horrified and want to stop this administration from doing what it is so clearly intent on doing and encourage them to speak up. Pete Buttigieg said it best this week in response to Senator Alex Padilla being thrown to the ground and handcuffed while doing his job. The trajectory and outcome of this administration depend on the courage of Republicans in the House and the Senate to do the right thing. They need to be convinced, according to Pete, that they have more to gain politically by standing up to the Trump administration than “riding the tiger that will eventually eat them.” All of us must raise our voices and let elected officials know how we feel, especially those who voted for Trump and now regret it. I would bet a big sum of money that a call from a remorseful Trump voter to Tommy Tuberville or Tom Cotton or Lindsay Graham goes farther than a call from me. Especially if said voter used to “play ball.” If anything has been made abundantly clear, it is that many elected officials are nothing but self-serving. Time to use that.

Standing up to bullies is scary. Seeing the truth, when we would rather take the blue pill and sleep soundly and believe whatever we want to believe, is uncomfortable and gross at times. Breaking ranks with friends and family and long-held identities is not easy. It takes courage to say, “I was wrong.” And while so many of us, myself included, want to scream, “Why didn’t you see this before November??! ARRRRRRGH!!!” I have to remind myself of how compassionately I was treated when I was blindsided. I remind myself that we see things when we can, not before, and shaming someone for not seeing what they can’t doesn’t move things forward and may keep others, who are silent, from speaking up when we need their voices. All of their voices. Now, more than ever.

“I need a stress ball to deal with the 5 million stress balls I have,” my daughter Maggie said the other day. “Every vendor show I go to, they give me stress balls. The back of my car is filled with stress balls.”

“Enough to make a ball pit?” I asked.

“I wish. Then maybe I wouldn’t be so stressed about the stress balls.”

“Why do they keep making stress balls? Who thinks that is a good idea?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I’m over it. And pens. I have 1,000s of pens.”

“I’ll take the pens,” I said.

“Fine. As long as they are out of my car or apartment.”

I will see my daughter this week, when I fly to Boston to spend a few days with a dear friend, and then head up to Maine with both my kids for the Memorial Day weekend. She has asked me to help her deal with the mound of stuff that has taken up residence in the back of her car. I’m happy to help.

My daughter lives in a tiny top-floor studio apartment in Boston. It has been quite an adjustment from our suburban colonial home and her college condo living in Knoxville. Her Boston neighborhood has strict, and tightly enforced rules about when she can put out her trash/recycling and how much, and if it goes out too early or is spilling out even a little the landlord is fined and gets mad and sends out texts, so it is an entire thing that occupies more of her brain space and energy than those things used to. Donation locations are not close by, and she has many, many other things to do with her time. So, the stuff piles up in her car. She freezes, and her ability to problem-solve and get stuff done does not translate to this seemingly simple task.

I get it.

For me, it’s recycling. It has become my First-World-Achilles-Heel Problem. There is no designated recycling bin in my apartment building. And then there is the whole Michigan 10-cent deposit thing, which means any eligible can or bottle can go back to the store where I bought it for a 10-cent credit. The return chutes are picky. I cannot return a can of something I bought at Kroger or Trader Joe’s at my local Meijer to get the 10 cents, which means I have to remember where I bought that Topo Chico or kombucha. It’s a whole process that I am not emotionally prepared for most days. Gone are my easy-peasy salad days of recycling, where I filled my blue bin and set it out next to my trash can on the curb every other week. I usually walk to the grocery store, and I forget to bring a few cans when I go, so I have an embarrassingly large pile of recycling in my front closet. It is easy to close the door and forget it, until I polish off another bottle of sparkling water and am confronted with the coup happening underfoot.

I confessed this to my friend Amy, who is one of the most together, adulty adults and biggest badasses I know. She told me that her winter/Christmas decorations have been sitting on her dining room table for months, taunting her as she goes by. We both laughed as she described how she walks by the blank walls and piles of out-of-season decorations on her dining room table several times a day and thinks about putting away the decorations and hanging something in their place, but she doesn’t. Her sympathetic nervous system goes directly into freeze in the face of this overwhelm, which is in such contrast to the rest of her life and day, where she is getting stuff done and slaying dragons.

We all have our tipping point where our brains say–STOP. It’s too much. Tasks that from the outside or in isolation are simple, like renewing a passport or RSVPing to a wedding, but in one’s particular context, become too much. The task itself doesn’t matter. When that point is reached, things shut down.

Our bodies are the same. In my first year of graduate school, in our Orthopedic Physical Therapy course, our instructor told us the body functions like the adage of “the straw that breaks the camel’s back.” Don’t be surprised, he told us, when you see patients who are strong manual laborers, who spend their days digging or lifting or constructing things, who can’t move after reaching for the salt shaker at dinner. “It won’t seem to make sense,” he said, “until you realize that the body had been breaking down over time, until a seemingly simple task is the final straw.” I saw it over and over in my years in the clinic. Our bodies and brains let us know when they have had enough.

Late Sunday night, the House Budget Committee passed what the GOP calls their “Big Beautiful Bill,” moving it forward. This legislation, if passed, will slash medical coverage and food assistance for the most vulnerable sector of our population so that Bezos can buy a bigger boat and Musk can continue his ketamine-fueled campaign for world domination and Mars colonization. Not cool.

The people who will feel this the most are those who are struggling. Those who are already taxed to the limit with food and shelter insecurity, and the physical, mental, and financial stress of chronic health conditions. Those for whom dealing with recycling and out-of-season Christmas decorations are so far down the list they don’t bubble up in the consciousness, and for whom a stress ball in each hand couldn’t make a dent in their nervous system overload.

The GOP cloaks their cruelty in words like Conservatism, Fiscal Responsibility, and Christianity to justify letting kids go hungry. It’s obfuscation. The debate is no longer about policy or politics or party. It is about our humanity.

I don’t want to think about politics as much as I do. I don’t want to feel sick every morning when I read Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter. I don’t want to write about politics. It makes me uncomfortable. I would much rather be recounting the delicious Kimchi grilled cheese sandwich I had last week at Folk, or how Detroit’s Flower Day absolutely lived up to the hype, or how beautiful my neighborhood is in the Spring. Yet all this bigger stuff is knocking on my consciousness and won’t go away, and I write to make sense of things.

This is where I have landed.

It is easy for me to take care of the pile of junk in the back of my daughter’s car when I see her later this week. No big deal. That is not my tipping point, and when I take care of it, it frees her up to do more of what she wants and needs to do. Why wouldn’t I do that? I know that if Amy lived in Detroit, she would help me with my mountain of recycling without judgment because she has the capacity, yet not for her Christmas decorations. If I were in Knoxville, I could say, “Where do you want this stuff?” and take it off her table (literally) and plate (metaphorically) with very little inertia or effort.

It’s weird, but that’s how we humans roll.

On the macro level, the burden of doing something, anything to help protect those whose lives can’t take one more straw, falls on those of us with more capacity. The stakes have never been higher. Even if it is something small. Small things add up over time. A phone call to a member of Congress. An email. A protest. Volunteering. A donation. A meal. Buying more nonperishables for someone who will need them in the future. A hug. A random act of kindness. Something to tip the scales in the other direction, and lighten the load for those who need help. Over and over and over. If our bodies and minds reach their capacity one movement and task at a time, then we can make a difference on a larger scale, moving in the other direction with a series of small, consistent actions that add up. One act at a time, so that the mom who just lost her job and worries how she will pay for her daughter’s medication doesn’t have to be the one writing an email to her congressperson. There are lots of us who can do that for her. Like me. I don’t want to be on the side of history that allows Chip Roy and Mike Johnson to get their way. I have the bandwidth to do something.

The recycling can wait.

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A year ago, I published Stupid Couches on this platform, announcing my quest to find my new home. My task was simple, if not daunting because, let’s face it, I was a mess. I had no clear idea of what I wanted except for a list of not super specific attributes in a new location—mid-sized, mid-west, four seasons, places for me to walk, opportunities for community and career. I decided to take my friend Joelle’s advice, and start by eliminating what I didn’t want, the stupid couches, so to speak. I did. I’m here in Detroit. All is well so far.

I like marking anniversaries. Not in an over-the-top, toasting champagne and giving extravagant gifts kind of way (although that doesn’t sound half bad). I mark trips around the sun with curiosity and wondering. I wonder if I have changed or grown in any way. I’m curious if I accomplished what I wanted to, and if not why? I wonder if I am better off, however I choose to define that, than I was twelve months ago.

There have been some years when I have not answered those questions in the affirmative. Usually, the previous year is a blur, I feel stuck, and a little disappointed in the lack of change. The year since publishing Stupid Couches? Not so much. At times I have felt like I am in the Millennium Falcon and Han Solo just said, “Prepare to make the jump to lightspeed.” Umm. No. No thank you. I am not prepared. Regular speed is just fine. In fact, being stuck may be preferable. But then Chewy flipped the Warp Speed Thingy, and off I went with Princess Leia’s reluctance and skepticism.

“An adventure” is how people who were more excited than I was a year ago characterized my experiment and quest, which I resented to varying degrees depending on the day. I was, as I wrote, a reluctant adventurer, certain that the life, future, and road I was on was what I wanted and anything I encountered on this alternate, unclear, GPS-is-searching-for-a-signal-and-rerouting path would be less than.

I was like a monkey in a hand trap. Unwilling to let a fistful of rice go, the monkey seals its fate with its fist. My unwillingness to see things as they were rather than how I wanted them to be kept me trapped and tethered to the past. I clung to the rice, unable to see all the possibilities around me.

My Instagram algorithm was messing with me in March of last year, showing snippets of my former Stanford swimming teammate Rich Roll saying, “If you’re stuck, if you’re struggling, if you’re being dismantled, if you feel like your life is getting pulled out from underneath you, then I say Congratulations! What a fucking opportunity that is. You have been given an opportunity to look at yourself and reconstruct your life from the ground up. Not everybody gets that opportunity.” This snippet pissed me off. I hated how calm Rich was. I hated his little laugh when he said Congratulations! I hated that stupid striped shirt he was wearing. I had come to hate that word opportunity, because it felt like anything but, and if Rich had been standing in front of me I would have fought the urge to say, “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Rich. How can you say that? You don’t know how terrible this is! And what’s up with that shirt?” But I couldn’t really say that because he did know what he was talking about because he had been dismantled and he had reconstructed a life for himself that was beyond anything he had imagined, so a part of me knew he was right. That part was small and solid and steady and below (or above) the emotional shitstorm that the rest of me was experiencing.

During my last days in Gaylord, I went out to dinner with a friend, who told me, with a wry smile on her face, “You will be grateful that this happened one day. I’m sure of it.” That same steady part of me believed her, but that part was small. If my insides were a pie chart, the part that believed Rich, that believed my friend was nary a sliver. Way smaller than Trump’s approval numbers at the 100 day mark. She later apologized for that comment, stating that she should have kept it in her internal dialogue rather than share it with me. She feared it was insensitive.

It was not. It was kind. It was honest. I respected her, and her certainty and candor struck me. Even if only 4.8% of me believed her, it was something, and I wanted to believe her, to have her certainty, to have Rich’s confidence that a dismantling is a good thing. That on the other side of the pain was joy. Hope. Love. Opportunity.

The first wave of the gratitude my friend promised came almost six months after our dinner, in the tiny Spanish town of Mansilla de las Mulas. I had been walking the Camino de Santiago for almost three weeks, on the cusp between the second/mental third and the third/spiritual third of the pilgrimage. I was traveling with three delightful 30-something women, and we were in a too hot bunk room with the loudest snorer of the entire Camino Frances. Nobody slept well. Any break in the snoring meant she was not breathing, which made everybody around her anxious. We were ping ponging back and forth between deafening whale mating sounds and the fear of a bunk mate dying of anoxia. Not super restful. I must have slept some, because when I woke up the next morning, sitting on the edge of my cot, in that liminal space between sleep and wake, I got a download–”Be grateful he did what he did. If he didn’t, you wouldn’t be here. It is a big beautiful world out there. Now, your life gets to be what you want it to be.” I really had to pee, and every muscle in my body hurt, and it didn’t really seem like the best time to integrate or appreciate such a profound download because I wanted to get to the toilet before there was a line, but there it was. I was grateful to be on that cot in the too hot bunk room with too little sleep and a too full bladder because the world is a big beautiful place, and I wouldn’t have walked through Spain or eaten my way through Pittsburgh, or soaked up the history and art in Philadelphia or made new friends or sweated half my body weight every day in Austin or spent time with old friends in a new way or any of it had I not been dismantled and the world pulled out from under me.

As Harvard Professor Ellen Langer says, we can never know what an alternate path would bring. Regret, she says, stems from the idea that another choice, another path would have been better, but we can’t know for sure. It’s impossible. Regret, therefore, is a waste of time and energy. So is clinging to something that is no longer.

Since writing that first piece, I slowly let the rice fall through my hand, freeing myself from my own captivity. It took the better part of a year for that inner pie chart to flip its proportions–-where the majority aligns with Rich, my friend, and Ellen Langer, knowing their words are true rather than hoping and believing them to be so. A sliver remains that still grieves, bubbles up with sadness, and wonders what if…because I am human, and I feel and love deeply. I don’t want that to change.

How do I answer my curiosity and wonderings with respect to the twelve months since Stupid Couches?

Have I changed and grown? Yep. Like a kid hitting puberty. Painful. Rocky. Ugly at times. Necessary. Glad when it is over.

Did I accomplish what I wanted to? Absolutely. And then some. Like checking out at Trader Joe’s and the super smiley cashier asks “Did you find everything you were looking for?” and I answer “Yes” looking in my cart at the three items I was looking for and the dozen unexpected and delightful items I happened upon.

Am I better off, in my own definition, than I was twelve months ago? Yes. Yes. Yes. In ways I could not have imagined. So much better than being captive by a fistful of rice that I would never be able to taste or enjoy.

I listened to that Rich Roll snippet no less than 857 times last year, hoping his words would hypnotize me into having his faith and trust in the dismantling. At the end, he encourages anybody who finds themselves stuck and fearing they will be there forever to “devote yourself to the path of self discovery and respect the struggle.” He’s convinced that “no problem is unsolvable.”

I echo his sentiments and words of encouragement to anybody who wants to believe but doesn’t, especially the woman who wrote Stupid Couches a year ago. But I don’t vouch for that shirt. Sorry, Rich.

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My apartment smells weird. Well, it did, until recently.

It was the first thing I noticed when I walked into it with the leasing agent–smell first, view second, the second eclipsing the first, and the first mutable, so here I am.

I love the word weird. It kind of sounds like its definition, which changes depending on context, user, and intention. At some point, while walking through Spain last fall, my Camino friend Monique and I tried to explain its meaning to Patrice, a native French speaker. Weird escaped him, despite having an excellent command of English. Monique and I looked at each other, alternating taking a stab at what weird means in different contexts, and we gave up, all of us more confused than when we started. It was like when Australian Maria told a Swedish woman that a fellow pilgrim had the “man-flu.” It didn’t translate.

When I use the word "weird" to describe the smell of my apartment, I am not using it in the context Tim Walz used to describe JD Vance, nor in the context of me laughing hysterically with old friends and agreeing that we are weird for guffawing at something so silly and esoteric. With respect to my apartment, I mean weird is odd, unfamiliar, and unusual.

Smell is a big deal to our brains. The Olfactory nerve is Number 1 of the 12 Cranial Nerves, and it makes a beeline to the hippocampus and amygdala without passing the sensory cortex. This makes it unique. The hippocampus plays a huge role in memory and emotional processing. The amygdala is a primitive part of our brain and is important in our fight-or-flight response. Smell can trigger emotions and feelings that set off a cascade of neurotransmitters that make us feel great and relaxed or ready to run. The smell of your baby’s head or your beloved’s shirt floods the body with oxytocin, creating a bond that forms well below the logical machinations of our frontal lobe. It’s not supposed to be logical. It’s primitive.

When I think of the smells that stir up stuff in me, I think about chlorine, creosote bushes after a rainstorm, salty marshes and oceans, coffee beans roasting, freshly cut grass and wild onions, my old dog Martha, maple sap boiling into syrup, my son’s room long after he left for college, my daughter’s perfume and vanilla scented candles. Those smells are familiar and homey and linked to emotions that I want to recall and roll around in. These smells make my nervous system content, regulated, happy.

I am bombarded with weird and new smells regularly. My daily walks are not only delightful visual feasts, they are a smorgasbord of smells, many of which I don’t want to imprint on my memory. At times, I have felt like Cousin Charlotte in A Room with a View when she is prompted by Eleanor Lavish to inhale deeply to experience a “true Florentine smell.” Cousin Charlotte gags into her handkerchief mid-inhale, and I have found myself doing the same when I walk down Division Street in Eastern Market when the meat vendors have their doors rolled up. It’s a sharp contrast to the inviting smells of my new favorite coffee shop a few blocks away, where the aroma of freshly baked pastries and roasting coffee beans fills the space.

I thought that after some time, my apartment would start to smell like me; that I wouldn’t open the door and think, “Huh, that’s weird.” I realize this building is old, and there are layers of paint and new flooring and old flooring and lots of history. So many decades of other people living and cooking and doing their thing have imbued this space. I am sure prior residents would smell my stuff and think it was weird. But I wanted my place not to smell like other people. I wanted it to smell like home.

Why does it matter?

I lack the words to describe how upsetting and destabilizing the world has become since January 20th of this year. When bedrock principles like due process are thrown out the window, and Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito are aligned with the rest of the Supreme Court, and the Executive Branch goes rogue, we are in deep. When people like Stephen Miller, who lack empathy and can rationalize their cruelty, are affecting policy, all bets are off. And our nervous systems know this.

Whatever we are up against, it is a marathon, not a sprint. Unfortunately, we aren’t even close to mile 24 when many runners start talking to dead people and want to give up, and are convinced they absolutely can’t under any circumstances make the next 2.2 miles to the finish line. We must take care of ourselves and our nervous systems, otherwise, we are no good to anyone. We won’t get to the finish line. So, yeah, smell is important. Our nervous systems need all the support they can get.

Last Saturday, I returned to Eastern Market the day after gagging at the JD Vance weird smells on Division Street, and the place had transformed into its normal Saturday self. Food and flower and hot sauce and candle and clothing vendors lined the sheds. Smells of perogies and French fries and brats filled the air. It was hard to hear anyone over the din of voices.

I found myself at the end of Shed 5, in front of dozens of essential oil jars. Before I knew it, a woman with blue lipstick was asking me what kind of scent I was looking for, and although I really wasn’t looking, I caved, as I am known to do in the face of a skilled and stealthy salesperson. She started dipping wooden wicks into different concoctions, and I answered, “No, that is a little too perfumy,” or “Closer, but it’s too fruity. I like something cleaner,” and “Yes, lavender. Anything with lavender.” The next thing I knew, she had taken two blends and handed them to Jenna, who was behind the tables, to mix them. Well over six feet tall, Jenna’s hair and face were covered in beautiful scarves, revealing only her amber eyes and sparkly gold stripes on her nose and the place between her brows. She combined the two oils, smelled the new brew, and said, “Oh, this is nice! What should we call it?”

I froze. I come up with good ideas at inappropriate or ineffectual times, not when asked. After what was verging on an awkward silence, she asked, “What is your name?”

I knew that one, “Kristine.”

“Oh, that’s cute. We’ll name it Kristine.”

I rolled some of that beautiful brew on my wrist and must have looked like a weirdo walking home because I couldn’t stop smelling my arm. It smelled so good! As soon as I walked into my apartment, I rinsed out my diffuser and loaded it up with my signature scent. The diffuser rarely rests now.

In the days since, when I open my door, shaking off the unfamiliar smells of the stairwell and hallway, my nervous system says, “Ahhhh.” My apartment smells like home, no longer weird, and that is something, especially now.

My heart is heavy today.

My beloved former home, Gaylord, MI, was hit with a catastrophic ice storm over the weekend that has left most of the county without power. Gas and food reserves are dwindling, and more snow is expected on April 2. Pictures and reports coming in from friends are surreal—trudging a mile in the snow to a passable street to retrieve filled gas cans from a friend, countless trees decapitated, tracking down generators so that the local church can continue to provide shelter for displaced residents. roads littered with branches and powerlines. It looks and sounds like The Last of Us or the Walking Dead, except it’s real.

Earlier today, I was on the phone with a friend and former Gaylord resident, Erin, who shares my sentiments about the Alpine Village.

“I’ve tried to write about Gaylord before, what it means to me, but I just can’t describe…” I say, my voice trailing off.

“I know. I know,” Erin says. “I get it. And it’s not the kind of place I, or you, thought I would want to live. And yet…”

“Exactly. I wouldn’t have ever thought I would want to live there.”

I came to Gaylord, a place I hadn’t heard of until 2018, full-time in March of 2020 with my then-partner. The town and the house we lived in had a long, important history for him. It was where he wanted to be. I wanted to be with him, which meant I would be living in Gaylord.

The transition was not super easy. There was the pandemic. I was far from my kids and friends. I had never lived in a town so small, so cold, nor had I ever moved to a place without a job or kids to help establish a community for myself.

Over time, the town and its residents took root in my heart and started to bloom in a way few places have.

The yoga community at Yoga-45 became my community lifeline. That is how I met Erin. And Karen, who became my friend and hairdresser. And Toni, who became my friend and financial planner. And Dana, who became my friend and boss. And Mary B, who became a friend and whose house became my refuge. The list of beautiful and amazing women that I met in that magical space goes on and on.

Living in Gaylord changed my definition of community.

When I came to yoga class, not knowing anyone, fellow yogis were chatting and laughing and sharing quilting techniques and seeds for the garden and making plans for dinner and drinks and walks and women’s circles. They brought me in, and it felt like a warm blanket. Women of different ages, stages in life, professions, and backgrounds. It didn’t matter. We were here, now, for each other.

A tornado ripped through Gaylord in May of 2022. When I came to yoga class, I heard the women talking about where to bring gift cards and what was needed at the United Way and who needed help with clean up and what else could be done. These exchanges were shared in a practical and matter-of-fact way. There was no gossip or extraneous chatter. People may have offered thoughts and prayers, but there was action to back them up. There was a problem. People in the community needed help. Those who could helped. It was a given.

When my life fell apart two years later, these women were there for me, creating a web of support and love that kept me from splatting on the ground. They were there for me in a way that was validating yet didn’t keep me stuck. With my longtime friends and family far away, who were holding me up in a different way, these women rallied around me. Mary B let my dog and me live in her house while she was in Mexico. She didn’t hesitate when I texted her and told her what happened. She had already locked up her house for the winter, not having any idea that my dog and I would be squatting for two months. She opened her home and her heart and allowed me to pause and breathe and create a sense of safety for myself. Without my time in her house, the rest of my 2024 adventures would not have been possible. I am forever grateful for her vulnerability and generosity.

Now, the residents of Gaylord need help. My friends are safe, stuck in their houses cooking on little camping stoves and with spotty internet, yet the community at large is suffering. Houses have been destroyed. Food and shelter are in short supply. It is unclear the scope of the impact or how long the cleanup and rebuilding will take.

Yesterday was my last official day on the job as Communications Coordinator for the Otsego Community Foundation, a position I have enjoyed for the last two years and will miss deeply. I have seen how my colleagues at the OCF responded to the tornado, how they rolled up their sleeves when needed, and how much they love and care for their community and their neighbors. They are seasoned and compassionate professionals and know what to do when disaster strikes.

I can’t do a lot from my apartment in Detroit for the community that gave me so much except share information and a link for donations to the Disaster Response Fund of the Otsego Community Foundation. This fund is a centralized opportunity for donors to contribute to response efforts. Grants from this fund will go to local nonprofit organizations that are providing immediate relief, such as food and shelter, to Otsego County residents. When the time comes, funds will go toward short-term recovery and long-term rebuilding.

https://give.otsegofoundation.org/give/305769/#!/donation/checkout

You can choose Disaster Response Fund in the dropdown menu.

Thank you for your support, and thanks to Gaylord for being the home and community I didn’t know I needed.

“I just got back from a walk, and I saw yellow blooms and some tulip shoots coming up from the ground…. It makes me so happy! Spring is miraculous!” I said to my friend/colleague on our weekly Teams call, feeling a little dorky and super middle-agey with this declaration.

“Spring IS miraculous,” she said. “I didn’t appreciate it as much as I do now because I lived in the South for so long. But now…” She didn’t have to explain further. She lives just outside of my former home Gaylord, MI, where winter can last more than half a year and there are blizzard warnings well into spring.

“It wasn’t until I lived in MA that I got it,” I said. Then I went on a tangent about writers like Richard Russo and Alice Hoffman whose novels, set in New England, usually have a line about how spring happened all at once. I didn’t know what they meant until I drove down 6A from Sandwich, MA to West Barnstable one spring day and realized every tree had sprung to life overnight. I was certain it didn’t look like that yesterday on my way to the Stop and Shop. The yellow forsythia blooms indicated that winter was over—a cause for celebration.

“It makes me so happy to see the first crocus,” my friend/colleague said. I concurred.

It is the miracle of spring—and the rest of the seasons, for that matter—that narrowed my search for a new address to a particular geographical area. I love living with four seasons; my time in Northern Michigan instilled this in me. I was in awe that trees and landscapes that were feet-deep in snow and looked like the ice planet Hoth would be green, lush, and very summery six months later. It was miraculous.

I spent the first half of my life in Arizona and California where the weather was beautiful or super-hot or a natural disaster. There was very little in between. There were no quiet, slow, soft rainy days in Arizona where one was compelled to sit inside and read a book or bake bread or make soup. No. Rain came down in buckets during the monsoon season, saturating the baked earth quickly and washing out gulleys that were dry 362 days a year. Storms were fast and furious, and then the sun would reappear burning off the water and the smell of the damp creosote bushes like nothing happened. The perfect temperatures of March and April in Phoenix were harbingers of the nasty triple digits that were right around the corner and wouldn’t leave until October, maybe even November. Summer was the season to be inside, unless you were in or near water, or on a golf course for a 4:45 am tee time. It’s a dry heat doesn’t matter when it’s 118. Trust me.

My time in California was, well, Californian. The bougainvillea vines bloom year-round. Spring does not pack the punch it does in other parts of the country.

When my ex-husband and I moved from Cape Cod, MA to Knoxville, TN in April of 2002, I was not on board. Yes, it was going to be good for his career. Yes, housing prices and cost of living were low, a feature that went into my calculus for staying there when we divorced two years later. But it was Tennessee, and I didn’t want to live in Tennessee. I didn’t want to raise my children in Tennessee. I didn’t want to be from Tennessee, the state that was ranked in the bottom 5 in Stuff That Mattered to Me.

My kids and I, along with our pets, came out to East Tennessee a few months after my ex was there. The last and only time I had been to Knoxville was the previous December when we looked at houses. It rained for the entire five days of our trip, and I’m certain more rain fell during that time than during my entire childhood in Phoenix. It was damp and cold and gray and not like any place I had become used to, there were no places to walk or run, and my 20-month-old daughter was sick and threw up in my mouth while I was holding her. I had no good or familiar associations with the place that would be our new home. The uncertainty of moving to a new city without a lot to look forward to made me anxious.

Yet, when my ex picked up the entire two- and four-legged crew from Tyson McGhee Airport, and we made the trip down Alcoa Highway and Pellissippi Parkway in April of 2002, the landscape had transformed from our previous visit. I looked out the window at the trees and realized that I didn’t know there were that many shades of green. Crayola would have run out of names if they had to label them all. I was in awe. And I knew, one of those weird knowings, the kind I am paying closer attention to, that it would be okay. And it was, eventually, after an upending and some very rough times. I couldn’t have predicted what was ahead of us, and me, during that car ride, but the green gave me hope. Spring gave me hope. And joy.

From my apartment window, which has been my home for less than a month, signs of spring are taking hold. The trees I look down upon are leafless, yet there are tinges of green on the ends of their branches. I saw a forsythia bush in full bloom, and redbuds explode on some trees in the park. Spring is here, right on schedule.

These are anxiety-producing, crazy-making, rage-inducing times. I find myself walking the tenuous line between staying informed and making myself crazy with Breaking News alerts. Man-made systems and institutions and historical records and facts and checks and balances and truth and stuff we thought we could trust are being dismantled with cruelty and greed at an alarming speed. Not much makes sense to me except for the green buds on the trees and the tulips breaking through the earth and the equal hours of daylight and night today and the increasingly long days until three months from now. The onset of spring will not stop the chaos or the upending or the uncertainty we face. It will bring me joy. And on this particular Spring Equinox, joy is important.

When I pulled up to Bob’s Furniture over the weekend, dodging the big GMC truck with a plow on the front as it cleared the parking lot, I thought of my friend Joelle. Joelle is part of my beloved Gaylord Posse. I was talking to her on the phone as I packed up my Subaru Forester last April, leaving Mary B’s Magical House in MI in search of my new home, and completely unsure how things would play out for me. Joelle helped, as she tends to do, by saying, “You don’t have to know where you want to be yet, Kristine. Start with what you don’t want. It’s like buying a new couch. I told my husband when we were looking for a new couch last year that I didn’t know what I wanted, but I would find it after I eliminated all the Stupid Couches. Start there. With the Stupid Couches.”

Of course, I thought of Joelle as I found myself no longer metaphorically eliminating Stupid Couches and faced with the literal ones. That was the task at hand. I trudged through the slushy parking lot of Bob’s Furniture, walked through the double doors, and as I was stomping the snow off my boots, a woman approached me with a single-minded stride. She seemed no-nonsense, and I wanted this errand to be no-nonsense.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m here to buy a couch.”

“Great,” she said. “Anything you are looking for in particular?”

“I want a sleeper sofa.” I didn’t know much beyond that.

We got to business finding my new couch.

The entire process took about 20 minutes, and I ended up with something I am really happy with. It is what was left after I eliminated all the ones that were stupid and had things that I didn’t want like cup holders or were too soft or too deep. Joelle’s wise counsel comes through again. When I texted her that my shopping trip was successful, she congratulated me and described a good couch as a “good friend, comfy, cozy, a soft place to land.” Indeed.

When I left Gaylord, MI last April, I decided to write my way forward, documenting the crazy-yet-I-couldn’t-come-up-with-anything-better adventure I was embarking on in real-ish time. I had no idea when or where the story arc would take me, or when it would feel complete. It feels complete now, starting and ending, sort of, with couches.

Joseph Campbell said, “If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s.” I don’t know if this is universally true, yet for me---yes. That has been true at times in my life. I tucked into my partner’s vision and ideal life when I lived with him in Gaylord. The path was clear, extended well into the future, and I was all in. Committed. Excited. In love. I adapted to my new surroundings. Built a life for myself. A life for myself that was in the confines of someone else’s path. So, was it really mine? Ours? I don’t know. Maybe not. Certainly not now. Maybe that is why I was pushed off that well-groomed, extend-to-the-horizon path that I thought was mine because I agreed to it and into the dark where no path existed. There wasn’t room for me on that path.

I heard on a podcast or Instagram or a meme, so it is gospel, and I am running with it like Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible—that the reverse of Joseph Campbell’s quote is also true. If the path in front of you falls away, if the way forward is obscured or nonexistent, then you are on your path. When phrased that way, it’s not super soothing. It’s counterintuitive. And it’s an indication that I am currently machete-ing my way through the jungle on my path.

I will continue to write my way forward and through as this new story arc begins. My next quest, now that I have found my new home—make it my new home and all that task entails. I will document it here, in real-ish time, making it up as I go along and trusting I will get there and know when this arc is complete. I will also start writing in retrospect, trying to make meaning of my essays, scribblings, journals, memories, experiences, emotions, and impressions of my gap year and put it all together in a cohesive form. It seems like the way forward.

When I announced to my kids last spring what my intent was, my son exclaimed, “Mom! You’re going to have an Eat, Pray, Love year,” which cracked me up because the story of a woman in search of everything has become so ensconced in our culture and lexicon that a 27-year-old guy knew the shorthand. He was excited, thinking I would have adventures similar to Elizabeth Gilbert's, which set the bar ridiculously high. He was kind of prescient, though, since I did a hefty amount of eating, praying, and loving, just not at all in the way Elizabeth Gilbert chronicled in her Super Duper Mega Blockbuster Bestseller. Neither one of us could have predicted where our story arc would end. My story came full circle on a snowy Sunday morning as I sloshed in and out of Bob’s Furniture to buy a couch from Janie, the to-the-point and helpful salesperson. Elizabeth Gilbert ended up in a boat with her Brazilian lover in Bali jetting over to an isolated island where they would spend a week in paradise and then cross over together into their new life. Same, same. It’s all good.

I am turning the page on the unfolding story that is my life. I feel like I am moving toward something rather than away, which brings a welcome sense of possibility and curiosity. One step at a time, as the path reveals itself incrementally. And who knows what is next? Perhaps this installment ends with me in love with a man in a boat or on a beautiful island or walking through a foreign country or sitting on my awesome new, comfy, feels-like-home, not-stupid couch.

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“When do you move in?” my friend Caroline asked me on a FaceTime call.

“I can start moving my stuff in on the 14th. I will do it in stages. I need to house sit until the 26th, so I have time to get situated. I still have to empty my storage unit in Gaylord and get furniture,” I said, trying not to let my mind create a Moving To Do List at that moment. “I bought a bed.”

“Ooh, I look at moving in on Valentine’s Day as a good omen,” Caroline said.

“I know. And I found the apartment the day before my birthday.”

“Yes! I think you are going to love it there!” Caroline effused.

“I think so, too.”

I have signed a year lease on an apartment in the Lafayette Park neighborhood of Detroit. Last week, I sprung my pottery, the other half of my winter clothes, some shoes, and my favorite pots and pans from my storage unit when I was in Gaylord. I wept when I saw some of my favorite things, things I looked at for years in the home I shared with my kids, things I had forgotten about, and was so grateful I had the presence of mind to keep last year when my state of mind was less than optimal. Things that I have already started mentally putting on the walls in my new place.

When I walked into the apartment that will be my home for the next 12 months, I knew. I had been waiting for that feeling, that knowing when I walked into a place that signaled to me “This is it.” The day before, I looked at a place that fit the category of I-can-do-this-for-6 months, so I had that going for me. But when I walked into this place and saw the view, I felt relaxed and expansive, and my jaw dropped a little bit as I said “WOW” under my breath. When the leasing agent confirmed the rent, I saw nothing but green lights and didn’t want to overthink it. I put in my application without even knowing if it had a dishwasher or not. (It does, thank goodness.)

Yet, when it came to signing the lease a week later, I hesitated. A year? In one place? Ugh…was I ready to do that? Part of me was resisting.

At this time last year, I would have given my mouth full of teeth and two fingernails to know where I was going to live for the next twelve months. I was panicked. Terrified. Pan-ICKED! I had that out-of-control feeling like being tossed around under a wave in the ocean most of my waking hours. I was a mess. I wanted something, anything to cling to, anything to provide some sense of security and safety. A home—a place for me and my stuff seemed like the only thing that would assuage the discomfort that plagued me. It seemed like the only balm and antidote for my panic.

I couldn’t have known it then, but I was wrong.

My day-to-day internal and external lives bear very little resemblance to those of a year ago. Constants remain like my important relationships, my minimal wardrobe, my job, and my car. I feel so different than I have for decades that I wonder whose life I have dropped into. It’s weird. It’s not Scott Bakula/Quantum Leap weird, where I look into the mirror and see an 11-year-old boy in a 1950s baseball cap, yet even my physical reflection looks different to me.

Over my nomadic months of 2024, my tolerance for change and uncertainty expanded. It grew to a level I could not have thought possible. It had to. I arrived in Austin in May and felt so Topsy Turvey that I needed to lie on the floor of my Airbnb and cry—the only thing I could think of to ground myself. I couldn’t look ahead very far. I couldn’t problem solve or plan beyond my next location, and over time, I became comfortable with a level of certainty that didn’t extend beyond thirty-to-forty-day chunks. I settled in, out of necessity, to the reality that I was fine, safe, and secure, despite my ever-changing living situation. Walking the Camino shortened my plan ahead time frame to thirty-to-forty-hour chunks, often less. And I was still fine, safe, and secure. I would even go so far as to say I looked forward to the change, saying yes to each city’s invitation for me to explore and enjoy. Change was not the enemy I thought it was. Fighting it was futile; fearing it was fruitless.

With all change comes loss. If change is inevitable, then so is loss. A new chapter can’t start without the end of the other. With loss comes grief, and part of me is grieving the end, and the loss of my nomadic year.

I grieve the end of the freedom, the extended time with friends—new and old, the possibility, the adventure, the growth, and the calm my gap year brought. I continue to grieve the loss that set my gap year in motion. I carried that grief like a steamer trunk filled with rocks with me from Austin to Pittsburgh to Virginia to Detroit to Switzerland and through Spain to Philadelphia back to Pittsburgh and to my landing place of Detroit. The load lightened along the way. It is more like a fanny pack now, easier to manage, and I look forward to the day when it is the size of a coin purse.

My new home is in a type of building that I have never lived in before—the kind with an elevator, a common room with a super duper coffee machine, and a gym. I am close to places that I look forward to exploring—Eastern Market, Riverfront, Belle Isle, Dequindre Cut, and all the cool coffee shops that keep popping up on my Instagram feed. I look forward to getting some space in a community garden to grow tomatoes. I look forward to creating a community and making friends. I look forward to finding a job I love. I look forward to seeing my favorite things on the wall and in my kitchen. I look forward to sleeping in my own, new, comfy bed.

My gap year expanded my tolerance for change, widened my world, and stretched my mind, allowing it to hold a three-ring circus of seemingly disparate and contradictory thoughts and emotions. My insides feel as expansive as an enormous Circus Tent, where excitement and grief, joy and sadness, fear and trust can co-exist and do their thing under the Big Top like jugglers, trapeze artists, clowns, and lion tamers. I discovered courage I didn’t know I had. I deepened friendships. I went to therapy regularly. I experienced gratitude and equanimity and joy and awe by the truckload. I made a pilgrimage through Spain. I laughed and cried in earnest. I saw things, experienced places, and met people that made my heart sing. I fell in love with my life.

It is no wonder I hesitated to sign on the dotted line and mark the end of an adventure that gave me so much.

“Are you a Wednesday class regular?” a woman asked me as she unfurled her yoga mat next to mine.

“No. This is my first time in this studio,” I answered, coming out of my pre-yoga class reverie.

“Welcome. This is a special place,” she said. “My name is Jill.”

“I’m Kristine,” I said.

It was the beginning of July 2024, and I was maybe a week into my first month in Pittsburgh. I knew nobody. One of the first items on my To-Do List was to find a Yoga Home for my short stay in The Steel City. My experience in Gaylord, MI, taught me that wonderful things flow from a yoga studio that is the right fit, so it seemed like a good starting point.

As soon as I walked into 1.1 Yoga, I felt at home. The plants, the energy, the conversation, the stuff on the walls, the laughter and smiles—this seemed to be the place for me. It was the second yoga studio I attended in Pittsburgh, and the difference in how I felt was huge. I paid attention.

That Wednesday class was amazing, cementing 1.1 Yoga as my Pittsburgh Yoga Home. After class, Jill told me that she and some other yogis usually meet for coffee after Friday’s class and asked if I would like to join them. This offer fit squarely into the "Say Yes to Things That Won’t Endanger My Life" criteria I had set for myself, so I said YES.

Jill, who has since left Pittsburgh for London, leads Wild Writing groups, a practice she learned from Laurie Wagner. When she invited me to join one of these groups, I had to say YES based on my decision-making framework. Despite what the title suggests, bodily harm wasn’t imminent.

I started my third round of Wild Writing with Jill on Wednesday, 1/15/25. Each group of writers is different, a constellation as Jill calls it, and she offers poetry readings as a jumping-off place for our minds, hearts, and creativity. Then, we write wild and free, silencing the critics and voices and fears that tell us not to write that or go there. The voices of grade school grammar teachers are mute. We let it all hang out. One thing everyone has in common—the courage to show up as they are and share their hearts through their words.

Our first prompt on Wednesday was to write Ten Things I Want You to Know About Me. What follows are the stream-of-consciousness words that came out of me in the ten minutes we had to write wildly. It is pretty much in its original form.

***

Ten Things I Want You to Know About Me:

The first is that I’m afraid to stand still right now. As a woman who has craved stability her whole life, has wanted deep roots, and to be able to answer the question, “Where are you from?” succinctly, this is odd to be resisting stillness.

Two—I slept in 61 distinct beds in 2024—some more than once—all by myself. Some of those beds were surrounded by strangers and friends and fellow peregrinos.

Three—The women in my life held me up when I was falling—they wove a net of love and kindness and non-judgment that caught me before I splatted to the ground.

Four—I can no longer plan very far into the future. It doesn’t make sense to me. Take the right next step. That is all I can do.

Five—I will be 58 on Saturday, and although this age looks nothing like I thought it would, I am more grateful to be alive than I ever have in my life.

Six—I want to be in love again and to be loved. I hope that is on my Bingo card.

Seven—If I don’t move my body, my mind goes off track, spins, and isn’t kind or helpful to me. Moving my body is a part of who I am.

Eight—One of my greatest joys is to share a meal with my children and other people I love and care about.

Nine—I try to laugh every day. Sometimes, I hate to admit, it is when I come across a meme of someone falling, and I share it with my sister and daughter.

Ten—I liked this exercise more than I thought I would.

***

I wanted to share this not because it is a good piece of writing but because it is honest. True. Unedited. Surprising. Wild. It is a little window into me that I couldn’t have plotted, planned, or predicted to come through my pen onto the page. That is why I love it.

When I lived on Cape Cod in the late 1990s to 2002, I was part of a small group of women who embarked on a writing experiment. Every Thursday night, four of us, and then three, met around each other’s dining room tables and wrote, a box of tissues and snacks within arm’s reach. We modeled our meetings around Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones, where anything went, sharing our work was optional, and feedback was always constructive and positive. Over the years, we rarely missed a Thursday. Two of us gave birth during that time, and we wrote while cradling infants. I was back in the writing circle with my daughter Maggie a week after her birth. We wrote wild, we revealed truth, and we grew to know each other and ourselves in a way stripped of normal conventions. It didn’t matter that we weren’t “writers.” The writing was a vehicle—a means to get where we needed to go, especially if we didn’t have a road map to get there.

I have been trying to recapture that lightning in a bottle for over twenty years.

Although we are now gathering through Zoom rather than in each other’s homes, writing from different states and continents, the magic exists. Jill brewed up the kind of enchantment that allowed us to dig deep and let things flow and then share them with strangers who somehow felt safe and receptive to each other’s hearts. I don’t know how it happened; I just know I want more of it going forward.

“I’m calling as your friend, not your boss. I wanted to let you know that I’m wearing the camel blazer you gave me last year. I feel good wearing it. I just had to share,” my friend/boss said last Friday on the phone. I was wandering through a Giant Foods supermarket in McLean, VA, gathering ingredients to make soup and chili at my friends’ house. “It’s the little things,” she added.

“I get it. I got here a day early so I could hijack my friends’ laundry room and wash all my clothes before they got back from their vacation. I did laundry only once in Pittsburgh, which is kind of gross, and I loooove having all my clothes clean and smelling good.”

My boss laughed at this: “Our washing machine was broken for almost a month, and with three teenagers at home, it was bad. Now that we have a new one, I do laundry every day. It doesn’t matter what the size of the load is. I am doing it because I can!”

“Jackets that feel good and clean clothes,” I said. “It is the little things.” I paused. “I’m at the grocery store right now. I’m cooking for Ian and Matt and my friends whose laundry room I have commandeered.”

“You’re cooking.”

“I’m cooking,” I said.

I hung up the phone and wandered around the strange-to-me-grocery store. My list was small, yet as well as navigating unfamiliar grocery aisles, I also needed to hunt for gluten-free ingredients. I could not apply this level of concentration to the task if I was still on the phone. Plus, I don’t want to be one of those people who seem to be talking into the ether while going about my chores.

When I left Pittsburgh for my VA/DC visit, I brought some on-their-last-leg vegetables that I couldn’t bring myself to toss. I wanted to make my signature clean-out-the-fridge soup for Ian and Matt. For my hosts in VA, I wanted to have a big pot of gluten-free chili waiting for them upon their return home from Florida.

I wanted to cook.

I wanted to do laundry.

When my son and daughter were little, I was cooking and doing laundry all the time. Or at least it seemed like any waking moment not spent at work or kids’ activities was consumed by those chores. Cooking dinner for the three of us was a self-imposed non-negotiable. The three of us needed to sit down every night to a Mom-cooked meal before or after whatever sports/activities they were into, even if it was only for 20 minutes. It was something I insisted on. Those years were characterized by razor-thin margins and quick turnaround times. I needed to have dinner on the table by X time so that we could be out the door at Y time to get to whatever important activities were on the calendar. Yet however small those windows were, we ate dinner together, I cooked, and I loved it.

Stop. Rewind. Play the next day. And the next, and the next, and the next…

Of course, there were days when I needed to take a minute, pause, and gather whatever it is that parents gather when they do the same thing the 119,348^th time, even when they don’t feel like doing it. Cooking is my love language, and putting good-for-them, nourishing food on the dining room table every night was part of how I loved my children. So, I did it even on those nights when I didn’t feel like it.

From 1996 to January 2024, I had people to cook for—people or someone whom I loved and to whom I conveyed that love through hearty soups and stews in the winter, bright salads and ratatouille in the summer, and various baking experiments throughout the year.

That changed a year ago.

I spent the first months of The 2024 Upheaval unable to eat, which has never, ever, ever been normal for me. It was all I could do to choke down a poke bowl a day, eating half for lunch and half for dinner. It was the only thing that tasted good to me. It wasn’t enough sustenance or nourishment, yet it was all I could do. After it became clear to my colleagues that I was not eating as I normally do, my friend/boss started announcing that “we were all going to order from a place in town,” ensuring that I got something as well. It took a few rounds of this new lunch routine for me to realize what she was doing. She was making sure I was eating. She was taking care of me in a way that I couldn’t take care of myself. I am still so grateful to her for this tremendous kindness.

When I took refuge in my friend Mary’s house last winter while she was in Mexico, I didn’t cook. Her house has what she describes as a one-butt kitchen, and since Mary doesn’t cook, it wasn’t really set up for making my normal winter fare. I make a big fat mess when I cook, spreading out over counter space and dirtying many bowls, knives, and pots. Mary’s kitchen is beautifully decorated like the rest of her house, in a way only Mary could pull off, sporting equal parts Angels, Hearts, and Fucks with Rumi poems sprinkled about. For various reasons, I couldn’t bring myself to mess up her kitchen, nor did I feel like it. I made my morning coffee, my afternoon tea, choked down my poke bowls, and delighted in Mary’s artwork.

I fell into the habit of not cooking. I snacked. I grazed. I got takeout. I reverted to how I ate in grad school, which could not be described as well by any stretch. I didn’t prepare myself a meal with different components and consideration put into it. No love. No nourishment. I ate to survive or to numb.

When I arrived in Pittsburgh in July of last year, I cooked for the first time in months. I made some perogies with tomato sauce, and while the potato dumplings were cooking and the smell of tomato sauce filled my tiny Airbnb, I called my friend/boss to let her know. As a fellow show-my-love-through-cooking person, I knew this momentous development in the form of a simple meal would not be lost on her.

It wasn’t.

That day, I wanted to cry into my tomato sauce. It was a huge leap along the path back to me.

During my latest stint in Pittsburgh, I cooked soup and followed that up with chili. For me. Nobody else. And of course, I called my friend/boss to let her know.

This return to the joy of cooking (less so laundry) is significant. I realized that I was willing to express my love language of cooking to others for years, many times when I barely had the energy or bandwidth to pull it off, yet I was not keen on doing it for myself. It was a given, a self-imposed non-negotiable that I would cook for my kids and others, showing them that I cared through a frittata and maple bars, yet when it came to showing myself the same kind of love, I fell short.

Why wasn’t it a given for me?

The answer is multi-layered with roots in the patriarchy and being a woman of a certain age and ridiculous societal expectations and best discussed with my therapist. Perhaps the reasons why aren’t as important as the shift that is happening within me now. I not only want to delight in the simple things like a jacket that I feel good in and clean clothes, but I also want to cook. I want to cook for me.

This is huge.

Moving forward, I pledge to get into the habit of taking care of myself the way I take care of others, whatever that entails. I deserve that same nourishment and consideration, thought and commitment. I deserve someone wanting to put a good-for-me meal in front of me every night. Even if, especially if, the person doing it for me is me.

“We haven’t watched Elf yet,” I told my daughter last Friday. “We need to do that tonight. Before you leave.”

“Oh, right. We do,” she said.

“We’ve watched that movie at least once a year for over 20 years. I’m not willing to break that streak. Not yet anyway,” I laughed as I told her. She and I had been sucked into watching a grisly crime drama during her stay and had yet to partake in our longest-running family Christmas tradition—watching Elf.

Maggie smiled. “We can’t break that streak,” she said.

We sat on the couch eating the chicken tacos I made for dinner and laughed our way through Elf for the 985^th time. At least. It was my daughter’s favorite movie as a child. She was 3 when it came out, the first year we watched it as a family. Elf is the only movie I have watched more than Under the Tuscan Sun, which says a lot. Besides all the times I have watched it the entire way through, I have also watched random bits and pieces more than that. We owned the DVD for years, and when my daughter was little, I would hear her laughing from the family room only to find her replaying the Elf burp scene over and over and over, laughing harder with each subsequent watching. Her obsession with the movie was not tied to Christmastime. She watched it any time of year. At one point, I had to ban Elf from the family movie night rotation until after Halloween because we would have viewed it every third Friday from July until December if I hadn’t. In retrospect, it seems a little harsh.

Even on its 985^th viewing, I laughed out loud at Will Farrell’s face when he got the news that Santa was coming to Gimble’s and giggled at James Caan playing the straight man while Buddy the Elf eats cotton balls at the pediatrician’s office. Genius. And, for the 985^th time, when Buddy saves Christmas at the end, I teared up because that’s how I roll. I admit it. Suspension of disbelief? What’s that?

Besides opening presents on December 25, watching Elf with my daughter was the only thing that was a through line in our Christmas this year. My tree was tiny and did not have the ornaments we look forward to putting on the tree every year. There were no stockings or decorations or lights. We celebrated in my Airbnb in Pittsburgh, the apartment above a UBreakIFix, a space unfamiliar to her and is home only for another 4 days for me. We navigated around each other in the tiny kitchen while I cooked dishes per her request, none of which was traditional Christmas fare. It was the most cooking I have done in one stretch this year, which reinforced how much I miss it.

It was quiet and unscheduled, and except for missing my son and his fiancé, who were visiting their new niece in London, it was a wonderful Christmas.

Her visit was too short. They always are. For those of you who have adult children living away from home, you know what I mean. Another two days would have been fantastic, allowing us to cook and walk and thrift more, yet I would still feel the same when I drove her to the airport and hugged her goodbye. It is never enough time. She has her fantastic, fledgling adult life to get back to. And as lovely as it is to cook for her and laugh at Elf together, she will never be that 8-year-old who wants to watch the burp scene over and over in the middle of July. I won’t be the mom who could lift Elf’s ban from movie night. We are not those people anymore.

I returned to Pittsburgh to see if I loved it as much as I did in July. (I do.) I planned a longer stay to have a place for my daughter to visit during Christmas and to allow myself enough time to look for a longer-term rental if I decided to stay. A few months ago, when asked where I thought I would “end up,” I thought Pittsburgh. I was almost certain. All those Google and ChatGPT searches I did in the spring were right. It has everything that I was looking for in a city. It seemed like the perfect couch for me.

It turns out the saying about not being able to step in the same river twice is true, even when the river is Pittsburgh. I am not the same person I was when I was here in July. The neighborhood is slightly different since I was here last—the dance studio where I took drum classes and an accidental belly dancing class has closed, as well as my favorite Thai place on Liberty Ave. Those changes in this neighborhood would not tip the scales away from living here. The yoga studio is as wonderful as I remember. The older, short man with a flexed and side-bent spine still walks up and down Liberty every day regardless of the weather. I feel safe, there is lots to do, it is home to Phipps Conservatory, I can walk for hours, the food is amazing, yet I have changed.

I leave Pittsburgh this Friday and drive to DC. It will be a short visit to celebrate my friend Monique’s birthday and to see my son Ian and his fiancé, Matt. Then, it is back to Detroit, where I have decided to live for at least a year. I am house-sitting through the end of February and will use that time to find a place to rent. Soon, I will be springing my furniture, boxes, and bins from storage and reacquainting myself with my lifetime of stuff. I look forward to collecting succulents and books again. I get to make soup in my favorite Le Creuset Dutch oven and fill my kitchen with spices. My first weekend in Detroit, I start a year-long 300-hour yoga teacher training program that I did not know was a possibility until mid-December. It helped me make the final decision and determine my timeline. The opportunity to house-sit fell into my lap after that decision was made. I am excited to hit the ground running and dig into my new city. It feels like the right next step. Things are falling into place.

I thought I had ruled out Detroit in May, before I left for Austin. It didn’t check the boxes the way other cities did. It didn’t show up in any of my Google or ChatGPT searches. It didn’t seem right. After living peripatetically, walking the Camino, and coming home to myself, I realized this task wasn’t as complicated as I was making it would be. And the stuff that I thought I was looking for? Well, that may not be what is important after all.

Since I left Michigan in April, I have spent more time alone than I have in my entire life combined. At times I hated it, yet I needed to be by myself to shed what was not me. I wanted to learn more about who I am without the roles that defined me for so long; I wanted to deepen my relationship with myself. To do that, I needed to be alone. I wanted to do things differently moving forward, change my neurological wiring, put down new pathways, and create new habits. It would have been too easy to slide back into the familiar way of doing things if I had been surrounded by stuff, places, and people that felt like a warm cozy blanket.

What became clear the first week I was here in Pittsburgh was that it was time for me to emerge from my sorta self-induced isolation. Being alone served its purpose, and I am grateful for the lengthy solo time. I have had enough. Visits with my kids and friends reinforced how important my relationships are. I find myself wanting more human interaction, wanting to cook for people, wanting to go out to coffee after yoga class with friends, wanting to go into an office, and wanting to see familiar faces when going to the store. I have none of that in Pittsburgh. And not even the coolest coffee shop or thrift store or best pancakes will make up for that. I need connection. I feel too alone in Pittsburgh.

So, Detroit it is. I have friends, family, personal and professional contacts, and it feels more like a warm landing than a cold plunge. I know I could make it work in Pittsburgh because I have done it before in strange cities. But I like the idea of picking up where I left off. I get to take my yoga training to the next level, I don’t have to get a new driver’s license, and I think Dan Campbell is cool.

I will return to Michigan exactly one year to the day after my life unexpectedly veered off the intended path, setting me in a new direction. (I love that unplanned, life-winking-at-me, full-circle, delicious detail.) At that time, when I felt utterly lost, my brother described it as my GPS needing to recalibrate. It was looking for a signal, and eventually, I would be rerouted and find my way. I feel like I have, for now. Only time will tell. And if nothing else, I know in what city I will be watching Elf next year. There is comfort in that.

Share Progress Notes

“Oh, my god. I haven’t had this many carbs in I don’t know how long. I think it has been over 15 years since I had a pancake. My kids are going to freak when I tell them,” my friend Amy said as we waited for our brunch at Pamela’s Diner. She came to visit from Knoxville, and we were eating our way through Pittsburgh’s Strip District.

“Your digestive tract must be wondering who has hijacked Amy. I bet it is very confused.”

“Exactly!”

About that time, our pancakes and Pittsburgh hash arrived at the table. The pancake looked as good as it had been billed: thin with crispy edges, perfectly browned, and a big dollop of butter in the middle. The Obamas fell in love with these pancakes, making them famous outside their local sphere. 

Did they live up to the hype? Yes. Yes, they did.

Amy and I had walked to the Strip District from my Airbnb in Bloomfield and were following the advice of her friend and colleague, a Pittsburgh native. After Pamela’s, we went to Enrico’s for biscotti, Mancini’s for bread, and wandered around Penzy’s and the Pennsylvania Macaroni Co. We ducked into Penn Avenue Pottery, and each got a mug that seemed to be made for us. Thank goodness for locals who know what they are talking about. I would have passed these gems by and missed out on the best pancakes I have ever eaten, and I would never have smelled the fresh bread in Mancini’s.

The next day, we went on an urban hike on the south side of Pittsburgh, climbing and descending hundreds of stairs and enjoying amazing views. Hungry after the walk, we went to Primanti Bros because we were told we had to. They are famous for their sandwiches. What makes them so good? As the story goes, they set up a sandwich shop in the 1930s to cater to truck drivers dropping off and picking up their cargo at the docks. The sandwiches were served with fries and slaw, which was too messy for the drivers. The solution? Put the fries and slaw IN the sandwich. What kind of genius is this? We split the Reuben, and who knew that adding coleslaw and fries could make the perfect sandwich better? The Primanti Bros. Obviously.

We had a delicious curry lentil soup from Brothmonger in Bloomfield, got a takeout pizza from Pizza Italia, and ate it at Spill, paired with some excellent Italian wine. Some restaurants have BYOB; Spill is BYOF. They supply the wine; you bring your food. Amy and I did a puzzle while watching cheesy Christmas movies in the cozy Airbnb and drank Kombucha from the local co-op. It was a great visit, even if it did shock the hell out of Amy’s GI system.

About a week ago, my son suggested I listen to a recent Rich Roll podcast featuring a runner and coach named David Roche. David is a super nerdy science-y dude who recently achieved the seemingly impossible—he broke a 19-year-old record at this year’s Leadville 100 running race. For those who don’t follow ultra running or have a son obsessed with running who keeps you in the loop, the Leadville 100 has been around since 1983, is iconic, and is a beast. The 100-mile course traverses the mountains around Leadville, CO, so the air is thin, and the climbs are steep. This guy ran it in 15:26.34, beating an up-until-then unbreakable record by 16 minutes. And the kicker to all of this is that he had never run a 100-mile race before. Most of his training weeks totaled around 70 miles. How did he do it? He is not even sure exactly what combination of ingredients created the perfect conditions for him to shatter this record the first time he ran a century race.

Months before he ran Leadville, David set an audacious goal of breaking the almost two-decade-old record. He didn’t keep this goal to himself. He put it out there on running forums. His assertion that he could break the record was not based on hollow confidence or cockiness; it was all based on his training methods and going over some numbers and making a magical spreadsheet. He had no idea if he could really do it, but he trusted his training and his spreadsheet. He went for it and in his words, ran fearlessly.

The podcast is long and contains all sorts of stuff specific to running and endurance sports, which is interesting, but it is when the conversation veers toward the emotional, psychological, and even spiritual that it begins to speak to me. At some point, David describes running an ultramarathon as stripping away all the stuff that was not him, allowing him to meet himself at his essence. The coolest part—he loved that person he met on the unforgiving Leadville trails.

Now we’re speaking my language.

At about the 2:10 mark of the podcast (I said it was long), David says that he thinks his job as a coach, and now as a runner who practices what he preaches, is to get his athletes to shoot the shot they are scared to take. “Unless you take 100 of them, then you’ll never have the one that swishes from halfcourt,” he says. He is such an advocate for this madness that he wants everyone to choose some goal that is so freakishly scary and so seemingly impossible that it “motivates daily process that is fulfilling so that at the end of the day if you don’t achieve the goal, it is okay.” He wants people to go for something beyond their wildest dreams and set an audacious goal that they don’t think they have a shot of fulfilling.

Yes. Yes. YES.

About 15 minutes later in the discussion, David makes this plea again, with a little twist. He encourages people to try that big scary thing that they are intimidated by and KNOW that they are enough as they are, so if they fail, it’s no big deal. All of us have nothing to lose. We just need to realize that. We can all run fearlessly.

Earlier this year, I set the big, scary, hairy, audacious goal of finding my new home without any roadmap that had led me in the past. I had no idea how to go about doing this, and the idea and process scared the crap out of me. (My process, if I could even call it that, did not involve a spreadsheet.) What if I failed? How would I even know if I achieved what I set out to do? These questions paralyzed me at the beginning. At times, it seemed impossible, fanciful, crazy, and impractical. But this crazy idea did what the most recent Leadville champ advocates—it created a process that has been deeply and surprisingly fulfilling. I did not expect that at all when I left Michigan in April.

Through this process, I met myself as I am over and over and over, whether it was in therapy, spending more time alone than I ever have in my life, trying new things in unfamiliar cities, confronting my thoughts and beliefs, taking the advice of locals, or walking across Spain. The more I have let the things that defined me for decades fall away, the more I love who I meet. The more I do stuff that scares me regularly, the smaller and smaller my fear becomes. The bonus—I have experienced some super cool things this year, big and small, that I would never have done if I had run for security and safety immediately. I didn’t see any of this coming. When I am in the middle of an urban hike and looking out over the dozens of Pittsburgh bridges or eating a crazy good sandwich or enjoying a delicious biscotti and coffee and wondering how the hell I got here, I am dangerously close to getting Too Blessed to Stress tattooed on my chest. Thank goodness I have friends who would rein me in!

So, as 2024 comes to a close and people are looking ahead to a new year, I echo David Roche. At the risk of sounding like a Home Goods sign, it is my wish, too, that people set an audacious goal for themselves and shoot that ridiculously scary shot. Chances are it will not be breaking the record at Leadville. Maybe it is knitting an intricate fisherman’s sweater or creating a beautiful flower garden or picking up singing again or running a 5K or writing a book or learning how to throw a pot. Maybe it is eating at all the places your friend suggests in Pittsburgh even if it means eating more carbs than seems reasonable. Anything that gets you out of your routine and creates a fulfilling process you can be proud of. Anything that allows you to try and learn and stretch and fail and have fun over and over and over and over to the point where achieving the goal itself seems secondary because you know that if you succeed or fail, you are loved. There is nothing to fear.

And who knows, whatever goal you set and the process it creates may lead you to the world’s best pancake.

“You are going to love it!” my friend Sally said when I told her about my Airbnb in Detroit. “My favorite stays have been when Chris and I stay with the hosts. I can’t explain it, but it’s awesome.”

“Really?” I asked. I was about 15-20 minutes away from my destination and was feeling a little apprehensive, which is normal before I land in a new place. Although my tolerance for the unfamiliar has grown exponentially this year, coming into a new location and place to stay creates a little bit of anxiety. This was the first time staying in a shared space Airbnb—something new on top of all the other new stuff I have done this year with new variables. Sally’s comment made me feel better. A little.

“Really,” Sally added. “Chris would agree. We always had the best time!”

I hung up and navigated the freeway offramps and streets until I found my Airbnb on Grand Avenue in the Islandview neighborhood of Detroit. I had never been in this part of town. I chose it because I wanted to see what it was like and check out the new Riverfront and Belle Isle. I need to land in a place where I can walk and walk and walk, and this seems to have that potential. Not to mention, I felt like I needed to give my brother and his family some space. I would be over there for Thanksgiving and cooking leading up to the big feast, but some space would be good.

I parked my car in front of the large Tudor house that matched the Airbnb description and made my way up to the front door. I unlocked the lockbox attached to a post on the front porch per my instructions and unlocked the front door. As soon as I put my key in the lock, I heard the barking of Stella. My hosts warned me that she would bark, eventually calm down, and was harmless.

The small entryway opened into a large room that could have been a time capsule except for the flat-screen TV in the corner. I was greeted by Elena, who was holding a baby.

“Welcome,” Elena said. She was beaming, holding her baby close, and moving with the subtle bounce/rock ubiquitous for infants' parents. It must be working since he seemed unphased by Stella’s barking. “This is Phillip,” she said, her face beaming even more as she turned her body so I could see her son.

“He’s adorable,” I said. He was. A perfect little three-month-old, looking around with big eyes and a curiosity that reminded me of my son at that age.

Just then, Devin emerged. He, like the room, looked just like the Airbnb profile. This was comforting. Nothing like the disappointment of the pictures not matching reality. So far so good.

“Hello, I’m Kristine,” I put out my hand to shake his.

“Welcome,” he said. “Your room is this way.” He motioned toward a grand staircase, the likes of which I have rarely seen outside a tour or in a period drama. It was wide and interesting, with carved details that wouldn’t ever show up in modern construction. I took the first flight up onto a large landing where more period furniture lived, and I felt for a moment like I was in a movie—the wide-eyed ingénue looking around with wonder at her new digs. This house was cool!

The second floor was where this family lived, and I tried not to rubber neck into their room or the baby’s room too much, but it was hard not to sneak a glance. A fireplace with a beautiful mantle in what was certainly Elena and Devin’s room caught my eye, and the details of the wooden molding in Phillip’s room also made me look.

“Up this way,” Devin motioned to a straight, much narrow staircase up onto the third floor. He led the way, and I followed.

Devin opened the door into a large bedroom furnished with a desk, wardrobe, a comfy-looking bed, two chairs, and an old radio that looked like the kind that people would gather around when FDR was giving his fireside chats. Cozy. Comfy. My home for the next 6 days.

“Just let us know if you need anything,” Devin said.

“Thank you,” I replied. “This is perfect.”

And it was. Sally was right.

Devin and Elena had included a brief history of the place on a bulletin board along with different postcards and stamps for their guests. Books on Detroit and its history were placed around the room, offering me lots of options to familiarize myself with my temporary home. It was evident that this couple loved their city as much as their home.

As I suspected, their writeup on the history of the place stated that this room was most likely the staff’s quarters at one time. Made sense. The staircase up to this floor could be hidden by a door at the bottom. It was functional, not grand, and this room was its own little oasis. Very different feel than the rest of the house.

In the past, when I have toured old houses built by Gilded Age Tech Bros like Vanderbilt, Frick, and Dupont, the staff’s quarters are usually part of the deal. Tour guides point out the sparse accommodations. The fact that they were removed from the rest of the house and that these rooms were more than adequate to accommodate meager possessions that could also fit into a medium-sized carpet bag. The contrast of the rooms speaks to immense wealth disparity and power imbalances and operates under the assumption that more is better. I remember looking at the uncomfortable cots and wardrobes at places like The Biltmore and feeling sorry for whoever lived in one of these rooms. Certainly, their life was lacking. How could life be fulfilling if all that one had fit into a tiny room?

Part of my intention for staying in a different part of Detroit, besides giving my brother and his family a break from playing host to my peripatetic butt, was to explore if different parts of the city spoke to me. Whether I like it or not, Detroit keeps pulling me back. Not with Michael Corleone in Godfather III pulling me back intensity, but something keeps nudging me to give Detroit another chance. There are lots of logical reasons for me to settle longer term in Detroit—family, work connections, familiarity, a good airport, friends close by—but I threw out logic somewhere between Indianapolis and Santiago de Compostela. Was something else at play?

Detroit is experiencing a resurgence. And as I walked from my Airbnb down Grand Avenue to Belle Isle and the Detroit Riverfront, that resurgence was palpable and evident. Tyvek covers buildings undergoing renovations, work crews are out early in the cold fall air, and houses along Grand Avenue that were all vacant when Devin and Elena bought their home 7 years ago are occupied. Change is happening.

The Detroit Riverfront is lovely. On a crisp Sunday morning, I was astounded at how many boats were out on the water. I wondered what it looked like in July. I crossed the bridge into Belle Isle and was greeted with natural beauty and echoes of what was certainly a grand past. The park was designed by Central Park architect Fredrick L. Olmsted and has an aquarium, conservatory (an obligatory feature for anything designed during this era, it seems), statues, and playgrounds. The Belle Isle Boathouse lives close to the bridge and is home to the oldest rowing club in North America, according to their website—The Detroit Boat Club Crew. Trust me, if I end up here, I will be joining them. Cyclists, joggers, dog walkers, and lots of goose poop peppered the walking trails and streets. It was nice. Peaceful. Beautiful. Serene.

Elena recommended that I walk over to The Red Hook in the West Village, so I did. This six-block span seemed to be a microcosm of the city as a whole. New construction popped up next to vacant lots. Abandoned homes showcase early 1900s beautiful craftsmanship and brickwork that implore someone to lovingly restore them, as Devin and Elena have done with their home. A church on Kercheval has a food pantry that was active every time I walked by. People dropped off produce and canned goods and baby supplies; others received the generosity of their fellow community members.

A dog park/bar lives on the corner of Kercheval and Van Dyke, and on a Sunday mid-morning, the big outdoor space was filled with people in their 20s and 30s with their fur babies and sometimes human babies in Baby Bjorn-type carriers. No doubt, it is the kind of place I would have brought my dogs and then infants back in the day. I didn’t see any solo middle-aged women in the mix. Not our kind of place anymore.

I walked into The Red Hook on Agnes in West Village and was greeted by a warm staff. I got my chocolate croissant and latte for here because hey, one never knows what’s going to happen in a coffee shop. The crowd was eclectic, including what appeared to be an unhoused man about my age, who was enjoying the warmth and some coffee and had his possessions in bags next to him on the bench and under the small table. He greeted me with a smile and a nod. I returned the gesture. The other tables were filled with people younger than us--friends, couples, and young families out on a Sunday morning. I ate my croissant and sipped my coffee slowly, trying not to rush through it, reminding myself I didn’t need to be anywhere else. Everyone seemed at home.

I spent Thanksgiving Day at my brother’s place, enjoying the food and company of my nephews, sister-in-law, my brother, and their neighbors from across the street. The food was excellent. I wrestled some kitchen time away from my brother and made our mother’s roasted red pepper soup, and we all watched the Lions almost blow a decent halftime lead over the Bears. Phew. I FaceTimed with my kids and did an inventory of all that I am thankful for. The list is long. Overall, a great day.

I left for Pittsburgh the day after Thanksgiving and am writing this from there. I have returned to the apartment beneath the one I rented in July, so things feel familiar. More on that later.

What keeps drawing me back to Detroit? I don’t know yet. Certainly, I love the idea of a comeback and a community coming together to create something beautiful and sustainable from what was once seen as ruined. I love that people are investing and are excited and looking forward. I love that new is emerging from the rubble. These are things I want to get behind and be a part of.

Last winter, when I was unsure how I was going to navigate the upcoming months, a friend said, “You can’t rebuild your life. It’s on the floor in a million little pieces.” The moment she said that I felt something in me relax and make space. She was right. I couldn’t rebuild. There were too many pieces to pick up and glue together. “You need to stomp on that glass until it becomes sand, plant some seeds, and see what comes up.” A part of me already knew that and didn’t want to rebuild. A part of me knew I needed something new.

Months later, I feel little shoots take root. Like when grade schoolers plant a dried bean in a Styrofoam cup, water it, and wait for something to happen. It’s happening. The little sprigs haven’t differentiated into their particular plant yet, but something is emerging.

There have been shifts inside me that I could not have orchestrated or would have even necessarily wanted. My tolerance for outside discomfort is huge and is almost inconsequential when it comes to my happiness; my tolerance for crap is less than it ever has been. It is clear which relationships I want to put energy into; I am letting others fall away. I am more likely to take a risk for something I want; I am less likely to do something solely to please another. I am more likely to see the benefits of being in the staff’s quarters; I am less likely to equate having less with lack.

Like Detroit, I’m a work in progress.

“Have you heard of a falcon sex hat?” the man to my left, a few tables away, asked the man in front of me at another table. I was mid-sip, trying to enjoy my latte in the back room of the Chestnut Hill Coffee Shop, when the up-until-then banal (to me) discussion on birds of prey between these two men took quite the turn. I tried not to spit my latte out when visions of falcons in fedoras or peaky blinders hats flooded my brain. Did falcons need jaunty berets to seem attractive to the opposite sex? I stayed still as silence fell between them. I mean, seriously, where does a conversation go from there?

“Does the bird wear it?” asked the man in front of me. Phew! That was MY question, but I could not answer it since I was hiding in the corner and not a part of this conversation. The man in front of me looked like Wilfred Brimley if he had been on Nutrisystem for 4 weeks—not quite an After picture, but something in-between.

I took another sip, trying to act cool.  

“No. The falconer wears it,” the other man clarified. He was wearing a herringbone coat, Nike Air Force ones, and was reading his crossword puzzle with an antique magnifying class. A modern spin on Sherlock Holmes. Both men were older than I am, but by how much, I have no idea. “It is leather, and there is a little dimple in the top, and the falcon makes a deposit in the reservoir, and then they can use it for fertilization.”

Just when I thought it couldn’t get any weirder…  I looked up at skinny-ish Wilfred with curiosity. He nodded. I could imagine the gears turning in his head.

As if to save us all from the awkward silence that hung in the room, Sherlock intervened. “Yeah, I have one. They are a couple of hundred bucks, but I work hard, and I can spend my money on what I want.” Umm…can you tell me you’re single without telling me you’re single? Not that there is anything wrong with being single. I am, after all, single and do not view it as an affliction or a deficit, yet this seemed different. I hope.

Wilfred did not ask any more clarifying questions, which could have been a blessing, but I will never know. (My curiosity was piqued enough to Google falcon sex hat later that day, and once I saw the pictures, I had enough. Nope. Not going down that rabbit hole.) Wilfred steered the subject toward his teaching days when he introduced birds of prey to his students. He said the little girls (his words, not mine) loved it when he discussed reverse dimorphism, the phenomenon of females being bigger than males. “They thought that was so cool,” Wilfred said.

I couldn’t stay silent anymore.

“Yeah, big girls would think that is pretty cool also. I don’t think we outgrow that,” I said, startling Wilfred and Sherlock. Perhaps they had never noticed me. I don’t know. But my interjection jarred them. I didn’t care. “And, for the record, this is the weirdest conversation I have ever eavesdropped on.” I sipped my latte and left it at that. I knew I would never see them again, and anonymity made me bold.

That conversation happened about halfway through my stay in the Chestnut Hill area of Philadelphia. I fell into a routine pretty easily during my stay there. Wissahickon Park is less than a mile away from my Airbnb, and it beckoned me every morning. After a beautiful walk in the woods, I stopped at Chestnut Hill Coffee Shop for a coffee and/or whatever else I was feeling like on a particular morning. On that morning, I made the split decision to have my latte “for here” rather than “to go,” because I was making a conscious effort to be in restaurants alone rather than retreating to my Airbnb, and that is what happened.

By that time, I had decided that Philadelphia was probably not going to be my next more permanent home. Why? I can’t really say. I had a lovely time there, and there is nothing objectively wrong with the place. It just didn’t feel right. Moving to a new place has too many data points. The Pro and Con list is way too long for the frontal lobe to deal with, so a decision like this goes to the gut. I have heard Real Estate agents say that people know within 60 seconds if a house is for them or not, well before seeing the entire house. I get it. That was the case with my house in Knoxville. I knew before seeing beyond the foyer. The rest was confirmation. So was the case with Philadelphia. It wasn’t a resounding “Yes” despite all the great things it had to offer.

When I go to a new city, I try to adopt the attitude of saying “yes to anything that won’t kill or maim me.” When locals tell me I “must see” something before I leave a place, I go. Even if I don’t think I want to put down roots in a certain place, I am there, so I might as well dig in and see stuff. And that is what I did in Philly.

I had a contact there, Amira, a college classmate I didn’t meet until this year. Our circles of friends had overlap, but not for us. She was an awesome tour guide! I met her delightful daughter, Noa, and her dogs, Ivy and Rose. We took an indoor rowing class (it did not kill me, but it made me sore) and went to the Barnes Foundation and Pat’s King of Steaks for Philly cheesesteaks (there was so much grease in that sandwich that it may kill me later), and took in a history lecture given by one of her childhood friends at her mother’s assisted living facility (made me feel young and mobile.) The lecture was fantastic, a brief history of our country’s eight-month-long Centennial celebration, which was held in Philadelphia and drew people from all over the world. After the lecture, when Amira was visiting with her mother, I chatted with the woman sitting next to me—Judy. She told me about a book she was writing that was a compilation of different stories around characters with epilepsy. Why epilepsy? I don’t know. We didn’t get there. Amira and I listened to music at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and saw a moving collection titled The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure. (I highly recommend!) I had dinner with my dear friend Monique, whose work trip to Philly coincided with my stay, and I went to a city on the Main Line to see another college friend, Jim, and his wife Megan, for dinner. When they told me I couldn’t leave the Philly area without seeing Longwood Gardens, I believed them, so I wandered through Longwood Gardens and got lost, metaphorically, in its magnificent conservatory. Jim and Megan were not wrong. I was the only person on a Constitutional Walking Tour of old Philadelphia given by Michael Stahler, in which I learned more about Benjamin Franklin than in the Ken Burns special. It was awesome. All of it.

I have found myself at the oddest times, like on a cot in a small Spanish village or walking along the beautiful Detroit Riverfront this morning or seeing the Rocky statue or being surrounded by Cezanne paintings at the Barnes Foundation feeling enormous gratitude. Gratitude overtakes me like an enormous wave washing over me and upending me. I am so grateful for my friends, old and new, who have welcomed me to their cities and homes with open arms and awesome suggestions. I have seen, learned, experienced, tasted, heard, and felt things that were not on my bingo card. Or so I thought. Thank you. It has been a trite yet true reminder to eat the greasy sandwich, wander among beautiful paintings, try something new, and say “for here” when the barista asks you. How else would I learn about falcon sex hats?