Could the world be about to turn?

“I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.”
― Toni Morrison

"As Lutheran Christians, our focus on Jesus Christ affects how this church understands justice. Because we are freed in Christ for others, we are able to respond to God’s call to love our neighbor as ourselves. In society, neighbor love takes the form of neighbor justice."
--From the proposed social statement "Faith, Sexism, and Justice: A Call to Action" (adopted with 97% of the vote at the ELCA Churchwide Assembly, August 2019)

This is a familiar scene for me: sitting down to write after a long day of travel, after a week away from home, after returning from a summer trip and feeling like I should be writing about its moments. The lake in Minnesota, and the way the evening light settled across the sky, lighting the water as I swam after dinner until dark. The way my son dove in as soon as we arrived last Saturday evening and for the next four days could only be coaxed from the water for meals. I should be writing about the completely wonderful and utterly necessary getaway with my best friend, who picked me up and spirited me away to Fargo/Moorhead, where we spent a couple of nearly perfect days visiting our college town for the first time in years. It was deeply good for my soul.

And yet, last summer, the night we returned from our first trip of the summer, this is what I wrote:

Underneath it all I have felt a relentless churning dread, a sickening shame over what our country is revealing itself to be. I sat upstairs while the kids played downstairs, listening to the sound of their laughter. I sat right down on the carpet and leaned against the bed and clutched my head and exchanged a few texts with friends who were also sitting somewhere clutching their heads, literally or figuratively. This has been a very, very bad news week. I'm just sick. I don't know where to start. We traumatize thousands of children. Children. Without apology or shame...

I could write exactly that and more tonight.

We had extra time at the airport yesterday after dropping off our rental car, and I finally had a few desperately needed moments to myself. I sat at a wine bar and ordered a turkey sandwich and a flight of white wine and wrote six pages in my journal. I was hardly even writing real sentences; I just poured the messy contents of my mind all over those pages. Migrant workers detained while their children were at school, children who waited in vain to be picked up, or children who went home to empty houses. Children who slept on a gymnasium floor. More shootings. Terrorism at the hands of toxic white men. Why don't we call it that? Why don't we say our country is under terrorist attack? Can we pause to imagine how differently this would play out -- the policy changes on the table -- if the dozens of people murdered in three different states had been murdered by someone other than a white man? How is it a fathomable thing that mass shooters invoke words used by the president literally hundreds of times?

So I slept terribly all week. But I slept terribly in safe, comfortable beds, simply because I happened to win the cosmic lottery of senseless privilege.

And then we have these absurd, obscene discussions. Thoughts and prayers. Mental health. I was stupid enough to read the comments on Steve Bullock's Facebook page. I like the governor of my home state quite a bit, but the trolling comments under literally every post on his page never fail to depress me: Tyranny of the government and "We have the right to access firearms with absolutely no restrictions!" And, of course, "But you don't care about the slaughter of innocent babies." That's about every third comment, including posts that show, for instance, a photograph of the governor eating corn on the cob at the state fair. At that point, I'm utterly reduced to for fuck's sake until I can rally enough to donate to immigration aid and gun control. Again.

The same story of America, in any season.

And then Toni Morrison died. And I just cannot. Cannot.

I've been trying to counter every horror I read about with a tribute to Toni Morrison. There is no shortage of either. All the great writers understand who was the greatest of the greats, the absolute brilliant best: Jesmyn Ward, Marlon James, Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, John Irving, Angie Thomas, Margaret Atwood, Mohsin Hamid, Salman Rushdie, Carmen Maria Machado, Chigozie Obioma. And so very many others. I would bet all the money I have that if Pat Conroy were still alive he'd have written something gorgeous about her, too.

This is where I find hope this week. Or maybe not hope, because truth be told, most days I don't have a lot of hope that things will be much better than what they are in my lifetime. But something else, some unnameable feeling fueled by a fierce and consuming combination of rage and love. Who was it that said we are not obliged to finish the task, but neither may we abandon it? That's where I'm at. That's why I keep reading and writing and teaching. That simple human need to connect, only connect. To see something beautiful and true in the artistry of our daily lives, the beauty and truth captured by writers and artists, the thing I have to believe in to keep breathing in and out. The connectedness and not-aloneness, I suppose.

And then other things happened, while I tried to grapple with the juxtaposition of soul-nurturing vacation and the horror happening in my country. The Evangelical Lutheran Church of America voted to become the first "sanctuary church body" in the country during the churchwide assembly. I'm not entirely clear on what exactly this means yet, but it could look like providing shelter for undocumented immigrants, equipping folks to serve as first responders during raids, advocating for immigrants in deportation cases, fighting for the end of mass detentions and family separations, and "extended radical hospitality." My own understanding of Christianity means I sort of feel like WHAT ARE YOU EVEN DOING, THEN towards churches that don't already do this, and certainly there are many churches outside the ELCA that engage in this work, service, and love of our neighbors, and who are expansive and inclusive in what it means to call someone a neighbor. Not all churches are silent or complacent in the face of the status quo. All the same, I'm grateful for the vote.

(It's not easy to believe in much, these days.)

Anyway, as I said, we arrived at the airport yesterday with time to spare. After the turkey sandwich, after the wine, after the journalling, the kids and I found seats near our gate while Matt walked around and enjoyed his last pint of Surly's before returning to the Pacific Northwest. I opened up Facebook and saw the posting from the ELCA: the churchwide assembly also voted to adopt the social statement "Faith, Sexism, and Justice: A Call to Action." They included a video of the assembly singing "Canticle of the Turning." It is one of my absolute favorite hymns, and in that moment, listening to all those voices, it gave me chills -- and then it brought me to tears. Right there in the Humphrey Terminal in Minneapolis. I let my kids play on the iPad and I wept openly at the gate. Then I downloaded the statement itself -- all 48 pages -- and read it on the plane. This week I'm going to print out a hard copy. It gives me something close to hope.

I wasn't going to go to church this morning. We were exhausted last night, and the kids really needed some down time because after a week of the lake and grandparents and cousins and wild feral joyful freedom and about ten desserts a day, they weren't really ready to be normal humans in public. But then I remembered that it was my Sunday to help count the week's offering. I even considered just showing up after the service, but I woke up early -- still on Minnesota time -- and I really wanted to go. So I did. But I also felt all kinds of something, so I sat by myself, towards the back. I almost put on a skirt, but then I remembered that we had signed up to run concessions at the Blast Off Soccer Tournament this afternoon, and I didn't really feel like changing, either. So I dressed in shorts and a t-shirt, and I drove my weepy, tired self to church this morning, and I slipped in near the back. And the thing was that I knew it was okay. I knew I could show up in shorts and a t-shirt and be a little weird and people there would still love me, and I really did feel perfectly comfortable slipping into the back by myself. And I felt okay crying a little at times when it didn't really make a lot of sense for me to be crying.

Sometimes I have to laugh a bit when people talk about faith as a crutch, because it would be so much easier not to go to church. It would be easier not to believe in this totally crazy stuff I actually do believe. The church has caused so, so much harm, and it continues to cause harm, and on top of that, it asks us to believe in the impossible. So like, I get it. I get why people leave, and I understand why people don't walk through the door. But somehow, here I am. Maybe this is, again, a consequence of my birth -- I was born into a family who brought me into this messy church, and even though that family has drifted into different faith communities, communities into which I cannot follow and in which I don't really belong, I'm grateful for my roots.

I wasn't much older than my daughter when I read Madeleine L'Engle's Crosswicks Journals; I think that was where she wrote about someone asking her whether she believed in God without any doubt, and she replied -- and I'm paraphrasing -- that she believed in God with all of her doubts.

Roots and doubts. That's what I have.

What I have might not be hope. But it's not nothing.

My heart shall sing
Of the day you bring.
Let the fires of your justice burn.
Wipe away all tears, for the dawn draws near,
And the world is about to turn!
--Canticle of the Turning

Who will we choose to be?

“Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

Today I left the house before eight o'clock, stepping into the humid Minnesota morning, propelled up the street by Shirley Manson's voice -- the only music that could get me moving. But movement was the thing I needed after a night of broken sleep. The heat rises to the second floor where I sleep at my in-laws' house, and the fan could only do so much; more than that, though, I couldn't quiet my brain. So I tossed and turned, and then I ran.

The morning was quiet, even as I jogged along a busy road before turning onto a quieter, shadier street. The thick, muggy air seemed to muffle even the traffic. Insects whirred in the grass. A sprinkler shuddered to a stop just before I could reach it and cool off; I suppose it had been on a timer to run in the cooler dawn.

I ran to quiet my own thoughts for awhile. It mostly worked. By the time I reached the spot where I usually turn around, I was so drenched in sweat that I nearly just sat down on the sidewalk. But I had to finish packing, and we had a rental car to return and a flight to catch. So I panted my way back to the house and vowed not to check the news until I'd folded the rest of last night's laundry into the kids' suitcases, showered, and had some coffee.

It has been a terrible week.

I mean, it has and it hasn't. I've just returned from a lovely family trip to Minnesota. We spent a few days in Duluth, a city I haven't visited since college. We stayed in a beautiful old mansion with Matt's parents and his brother and family. Carmen drove over and we spent a day together, and it was wonderful and necessary -- we haven't seen each other in nearly four years, which is the longest we've ever gone without seeing each other since we were eighteen years old. Suzannah and Isaac loved spending time with their cousins. We shared meals with relatives we don't see often, both near Duluth and back in the Twin Cities. I read a few books and carved out a little time to write. Matt even made sure we stopped by Birchbark Books -- a favorite stop of mine in Minneapolis -- so I could finally use a gift card from my mother-in-law.

So all of that should have made for a lovely start to the summer, except that underneath it all I have felt a relentless churning dread, a sickening shame over what our country is revealing itself to be. I sat upstairs while the kids played downstairs, listening to the sound of their laughter. I sat right down on the carpet and leaned against the bed and clutched my head and exchanged a few texts with friends who were also sitting somewhere clutching their heads, literally or figuratively. This has been a very, very bad news week. I'm just sick. I don't know where to start. We traumatize thousands of children. Children. Without apology or shame. We have no regard for human life if it isn't white, "Christian," and born on American soil (or unborn on American soil. We seem to stop caring once babies are earthside). We now rank in the top ten countries where it's worst to be a woman. As a public school teacher I'm no stranger to anti-union rhetoric, but now, suddenly, I'm actually receiving e-mails on my relatively public school account encouraging me not to pay union dues. And on, and on, and on. Seattle, a city with appalling rates of homelessness, now has an app to make it easier to eject folks from camps. Where, where is our humanity? Tell me that, Christians. Tell me. Talk to me about what it means to be pro-life. Talk to me about family values. And also, what piece of your soul did you sell, Judge Kennedy?

And then today, after my run, after my shower, after our trip to the airport, after I settled in with a white wine flight and my journal and the novel I'm reading while Matt took the kids to work out their wiggles before our trip home, I read the news again: another shooting, five journalists killed.

(When you read that the suspect is in custody, you know right away that it's another angry white man -- the kind most likely to commit mass shootings, and the kind most likely to be taken alive.)

(Nothing about this is surprising, considering the president's constant and vicious attacks on the media and some of his most ardent and vocal supporters actively encouraging assaults on them. This is our country. This is America.)

It would be pretty easy for Matt and me to say we don't like to be political, because honestly, we'll probably be fine, and being political means getting uncomfortable. We don't have to do that. We're white. We're "Christian." We were born into fucking senseless privilege. No one is coming for our children. But because we are white, because we are "Christian," because we are fine, this is our work to do and it is our mess to clean up and it is our debt to pay. It just is. And we're not doing it nearly damn well enough, which is one of the things I'm struggling with tonight. I know this. (Another thing I'm struggling with: people who still say they're "not political." Isn't that great for you? Sleep tight, I guess?)

After our kids were showered and bathed and tucked into bed tonight, Matt and I caught up on this week's episode of The Handmaid's Tale. I first read the novel when I was nineteen, huddled under a blanket in my freezing crew quarters at the fishing lodge in Alaska where I would spend my first summer in college. Now, twenty years later, I teach it in IB literature as part of the junior curriculum. It has always both moved and terrified me, but now that terror is an entirely different beast because it feels real and immediate. The terrifying brilliance of Margaret Atwood is that all of her writing feels real, but this has moved several solid steps away from "speculative" fiction since she wrote it three decades ago.

I don't really even know how to end this. It's nearly midnight, and my family is sleeping. Matt kissed me a bit ago and said, "Don't stay up too late." I want so badly to just go to sleep, to turn off my brain. He calls it the hamster wheel inside my head. I'm exhausted, but what is my exhaustion? It's nothing, really.

Tonight maybe I just end with this, with Rebecca Solnit's words instead of my own: You can't know, won't know how and why it matters, and when the results will appear, but that didn't stop the abolitionists or the suffragists or the civil rights heroes or the environmental champions or the Dreamers. Ask yourself what would Harvey Milk do? What would Harriet Tubman do? What would Ella Baker do? What would Emma Goldman do? Maybe you can't do all they did, but you can do something, and that matters, and doing it is a much better way to survive this regime than doing nothing, for your soul as well as your nation.

It's not just that we can; it's that we have to. I think I still believe that.

Quiet within the chaos

It was a beautiful Saturday. The air smelled like pure heaven this morning, crisp and cool and sweet. I parked the car, walked to the middle of my driveway, and just looked up at the sky, breathing. Breathing. The neighborhood was quiet, except for the birds; they were already greeting the dawn in ecstatic song.

I made it, I thought. I'm here. I'm home. This moment is mine.

I let myself into the house, kicked off my shoes, dropped my purse to the floor, draped my hoodie over my desk chair, and walked into the kitchen to warm up a couple of my special breakfast egg "muffins" -- paleo and whole30 approved, and yes, isn't that so precious. But they're delicious, and I hadn't eaten anything but a handful of cheese puffs and a Cherry Coke since last night's 11:30 "dinner." My son padded into the kitchen.

"Hello, Mommy," he said. He turned around to trot back to his room -- or to ours, to wake up his daddy.

"Come here, Bud," I said. He returned to my hug, kissed me sweetly on the cheek.

I finished my breakfast quickly; I only wanted to quiet my hunger with something that felt truly nutritious and then fall into bed. Matt was still there. I crawled in next to him, slid my cold hands against his back.

"This bed is the most wonderful place in the world," I said. "I've been thinking about this moment for hours and hours. Forever."

We talked sleepily for a few minutes. He was just waking up; I was about to give in to the deepest slumber. We reminisced about last year's lock-in, about how I'd come home for a nap around two in the morning because I had to to take Suzannah to a track meet shortly after seven. About how I'd been irritated by the messy kitchen and thought I should just stay up and watch Friends and clean it. These are the kind of ridiculous fights we have.

"I left the kitchen in pretty good shape this time," Matt said. Indeed he did. I arrived home to clean, wiped counters, although I was so tired I wouldn't have cared if it had been otherwise. We laughed for a few minutes, snuggled sleepily, and then he got up to make breakfast for the kids and I pulled the covers around myself, took a moment to appreciate the sheer physical comfort of our bed, and lost consciousness.

I choose to spin this as a cozy moment because it is one. Even though I looked at the clock shortly past one this morning and thought, "Hm. When Isaac was born, my water broke around one in the morning, I think. He was born just after five. We took him home a couple hours after that. So basically I just have to get through all of childbirth and then I can go home to bed." Those were my thoughts halfway through this year's leadership lock-in; I'd downed a latte at six and a Starbucks Doubleshot out of a can around, I don't know, midnight? But I was struggling. I hit my second wind a little later, only to find myself desperately struggling to stay awake at four o'clock in the morning. My friend and fellow chaperone managed to curl up on the concrete floor of the commons area and nap, but I knew that would be futile, so I didn't even try.

Free time--the hours between three and six o'clock in the morning--are hardest. Kids either find little corners to curl up and nap or they spend those hours being hyper and insufferable. Some of the kids with energy to burn played in the gym; the ones near me watched videos on their phones and screamed with laughter. I resisted the urge to punch them in the throat, only because I am thirty-seven and not seventeen, not because they were doing anything wrong. Teenagers at a lock-in are supposed to be silly and ridiculous.

I didn't nap. I alternated between wandering around like a zombie and trying to read (I'd brought a book that is entertaining enough to hold my attention in the middle of the night). Shortly past four, one of the Leadership kids came over with a camera, politely inquired as to whether I was "busy" (no, Sweetie; I'm slumped against a wall), and interviewed me for the lock-in video. (To my pleasant surprise, when they played it at breakfast a couple of hours later, I sounded much more coherent than I felt at the time.) At five, I thought, "I wonder if Becca is up yet. It's eight o'clock in New York." But it was Saturday morning, so I resisted the urge to call her and demand that she talk to me to keep me awake. Shortly before six, kids started to set up tables for breakfast and I thought, I made it. Also, everything my fellow chaperones said for the next half-hour was hilarious. Or maybe they weren't funny, I don't even know. But I laughed a lot.

And it was worth it. This is my third lock-in, and I always think, okay, I've done this, I can check it off, someone else can do it now. But I keep going back, because there is something really beautiful about sharing this experience with other teachers who are also willing to step out of their comfort zones, and with kids who create these safe spaces for each other in which to be vulnerable, reflective, silly, trusting, accepting. I watched two girls who couldn't stand each other during first semester curl up together on a couch and giggle. I saw kids I know have trouble fitting in find a space in which they felt included, and I pray that carries over into the rest of their high school experience. Something about this thing, this event -- it embodies everything I love about teaching, about teenagers, about human potential, really. It's all about kids who are trying to figure out who they are and who they want to be. I listened to freshmen talk about their goals for the rest of their high school years and I listened to seniors talk about what's mattered to them. It was beautiful. I love it. I love it.

And it was a good way to end my week, even though, truth be told, I was dreading it. April has been frenetic. I began the month flying to Minneapolis for IB training over spring break, which was wonderful but not altogether relaxing; I could tell the story about how Matt and the kids drove me all the way to the airport but my suitcase was left behind, for instance. But it all worked out, especially because on that very stressful day of flying my little brother, a pilot, just happened to be at the airport that morning and was waiting on the other side of a hellish security line with a latte in hand, and the next day my family joined me, and Matt stayed with me in my cozy room at the Hilton while his parents lavished attention on our kids, and then we all spent the rest of the week just enjoying our time together.

But it was busy. And by the time all the Winslows had landed safely back in Washington, seventy-five percent of us had colds. I slept in the study for a couple of nights because I didn't want to keep my better half awake with my coughing and, frankly, he wasn't doing so hot himself. And grades were due. And we had conferences, which meant I had to stay at school until eight o'clock for a couple of nights. And because my physical defenses were lowered my emotional ones were as well, so when I encountered a spectacular instance of adult mean girl behavior, I didn't weather it very well; I sent my children over to the neighbor's house and cried for an hour, exactly like a girl who has nowhere to sit in the middle school cafeteria, and I e-mailed Becca, who happened to be online at that very moment and e-mailed me back right away. And that made everything okay, because she gave me the perspective I needed in that exhausted, foggy-headed moment.

Yesterday morning the kids and I had a day off, so I decided to get my hair cut; I didn't really need one, but nothing makes me feel better than a fresh hair cut. I decided that this will be the weekend I deep-clean my oven with baking soda and vinegar. I decided that the kids and I were going to go out and have a cozy lunch together, and then we came home and I let them watch Full House (Suzannah loves it so much!) while I napped on the living room couch. I decided that yesterday, just for a day, I would try my very best to forget about everything but what was right in front of me. These little moments: the way my freshly shampooed hair feels swinging around my shoulders, the way my kids hold my hands when we walk across a busy parking lot, the way the afternoon settles cozily around me when I pull a quilt around my shoulders for a nap, knowing my kids are hunkered down in front of a movie in the next room. Everything else fades away.

This morning, I napped for a couple of hours and then rose to brush my daughter's hair into a ponytail before gymnastics. I collapsed back into bed and slept again. I got up before my family came home, stood under a hot shower, was drying my hair when I heard them return. I told Matt that I wanted to go out for dinner, because if we didn't, I'd just spend the rest of my waking hours slumped on the couch. We headed out in the afternoon sunshine; he dropped me off at Starbucks to write while he took the kids to the park. We ate at our favorite place. We treated the kids to ice cream for dessert. These moments are all so ordinary, like so many we have had before, and yet they are the ones I crave, the ones I think are the foundation of our collective memories. The way I curl up on the couch with a particular quilt, one my aunt made for my college graduation. The way we head out for gymnastics every Saturday. The afternoons in which we play in the sunshine, and wind up at one of our favorite restaurants, and decide where to go for dessert. It could be any weekend, really, but these are the moments are the hard kernels of memory I want to hold in my hand. They become tangible, and for that very reason, I want to make sure I really feel them, their weight and texture, before I tuck my children into bed each night before they wake again, another day older.

I'm very tired, and in one sense I've almost lost half my weekend; I slept through half of our Saturday, and I've felt a little loopy even as I've joined my family in the land of the living. On the other hand, I haven't lost anything. Time churns, it passes so quickly -- I'm grateful for anything that makes me want to hold each moment up to the morning light, to say, I'm here, to breathe, to be thankful for it all.

Settling into August

And then there comes a day when you take your children to a water park, and your daughter tells you she wants to go down one of the water slides -- one of the big water slides, let’s be clear -- and you are torn between heart-bursting pride and just the tiniest wish that she was a little more afraid of it. And finally, finally, you relent, and you climb the wet stairs to the top with her. It is so high up there. You can see the entire water park from the top of those slides. Your son is throwing himself down the little slide in the kid’s pool, wild with joy and totally confident that a grown-up will keep him from drowning should he hurl his little body into deeper water. Your husband and mother-in-law are standing guard; you are often glad that you married such a tall man, because he is easy to spot in a crowd. You can also see the surrounding neighborhoods, which seem so quiet on this hot afternoon in August. Everything is green -- the urban forest of Minneapolis and its suburbs. For a moment you are vaguely disoriented, caught between the peaceful surroundings spread out before you and the chaos right there in front of you.

And you’re about to watch your daughter go swirling down into the midst of all that.

She steps up to the top of the slide when her turn comes, and she turns attentively to the lifeguard, waiting for his signal, just like you’ve coached her. He nods impassively. She hesitates, just barely, just enough for you to notice, and the lifeguard says, “You can go.” And before you can blink she’s pushing herself off, and you watch from the top as your seven-year-old slides away, down and around and around. She doesn’t attempt to slow herself by bracing her legs against the side, the way she did so long ago on those slides at the playground. She’s sailing now, and at the very bottom she plugs her nose and you catch your breathe just a bit as she shoots into the pool, pushed completely under the water.

She emerges, dripping and triumphant, and swims towards the edge. And when she finally sees your smile she can’t contain her own.

When you ask her if she was a little nervous she says, “No, not at all!” and you remember the first day of first grade nearly a year ago when you asked her the same question and she gave you the very same answer.

This is your baby girl, your firstborn, your beautiful little fish.

***
Years ago, in college, when I traveled to Ireland, England, Wales, and France on a May Seminar, my professor talked about recording the “hard kernels of memory” from each place. Last night, I returned from a week-long trip to Minnesota with my own little family, and when I sat down to write tonight, the hard kernel of memory that came to mind was this: my little girl on that water slide. Which surprised me a bit, truth be told, because while our day at the water park was incredibly fun, I didn’t expect it to be such a moment. And yet -- and yet. The moments in which I am completely overcome by the spontaneous joy of parenting these two children of mine tend to hit me upside the head when I am least expecting it.

Of course there were other moments as well: watching the airplanes take off at sunset while we waited to board our own flight from Seattle, and hearing Isaac shriek, “Oh, look! A plane!” Tucking my children into bed with the Star Wars blankets their Grandma Cindy made for them. Running up a quiet highway in northern Minnesota one muggy morning, dense trees on either side of me. Waking at three, four, five o’clock in the morning to claw desperately at my mosquito-bitten feet. Playing board games with Matt’s cousins late into the night (or what feels like late into the night for me these days). Watching my daughter hug every single person there -- aunts and uncles and cousins -- before she would consent to going to bed. Isaac’s temper tantrum on a napless afternoon when he realized he didn’t have his Legos at the cabin and responded by throwing himself down on the grass and screaming about it. The lake, always the lake -- splashing at the water’s edge with Isaac, swimming out a little deeper with Suzannah, and the way it felt when I plunged in myself, the surface closing over my head like a cool curtain. (One evening, I went by myself shortly after a sudden rain sent us scattering inside after dinner, hurriedly gathering up the last of the plates. The clouds parted just a half hour later as the sun began to set across the water. I swam back and forth for forty-five minutes. The lake was perfectly still and reflected the orange light and pink clouds moving across the sky. I was completely alone; I could see the odd campfire through the trees on shore and heard distant bursts of laughter and conversation. Closer to me were the loons, swimming near the reeds. Their eerie cry, that sad crazy laugh, is one of my favorite things about the lakes in northern Minnesota. I swam until the sun dropped behind the trees, obscured by the last of the rain clouds, and the lake was glassy and dark.)

There were more moments back in the Twin Cities, after we packed up most of our belongings (there is always at least one forgotten t-shirt) and returned to Matt’s parents’ house -- making pizzas in the wood oven, experimenting with beets and goat cheese and trout. Walking to the local library in our swimsuits before the water park opened. My deep-in-the-gut panic when Suzannah threw up a couple of times 24 hours before we were scheduled to fly home, tapping into my deepest anxieties (flying, flying with a sick child, the fear of all of us finding ourselves similarly afflicted during the night; thankfully, she was fine the next morning, so we chalked it up to too much heat, humidity, activity, and greasy food for lunch that day). Watching my children tear around the play area at the airport and thanking God that such a thing exists, for our flight home was delayed a couple of hours. On the plus side, I had time to go have a glass of wine on my own and breathe a few quiet breaths first.

We’re home again now, settling into some kind of late-summer normal for a couple of weeks before back-to-school preparations begin in earnest. I spent most of July feeling a little desperate, which, I’ve learned, is what I do; it all moves so fast, these summer days, even when they’re filled with languid afternoons running through the sprinkler in our own backyard. But then we usually take our family vacation in early August, and by the time we return to our home in Washington, I am ready to make my peace with the end of summer.

This year, we returned from a long weekend in Glacier National Park (one of my oldest and truest friends was kind enough to get married there, my very favorite place in the world) a mere four days before our Minnesota trip. And that trip was wonderful as well, because I love weddings and because my parents were there too and because every time I visit Glacier I feel like I am visiting every self I’ve ever been, at every age. As soon as I breathe the air I start to hurt, because I know my time there has to end. I can’t explain it, really; it’s just so physical, so visceral. It is the most perfect place in the world. The shore of Lake McDonald brings me more peace than any other place I’ve ever been in my life, ever. We tried camping with the kids for the first time, and while I admit I approached this with a certain amount of anxiety, I can tell you that my hard kernel of memory for that first attempt was falling asleep in our new tent, a soft rain spattering the roof, knowing that we were all safe and warm and dry and everything important in the world was contained right there in that cozy little space. I hope I always remember how peaceful I felt in that moment.

So it was a lot of summer in that last week of July and in this first week of August, a lot of swimming in lakes, a lot of reconnecting with people from my past, a lot of deep breathing, a lot of gratitude. And that is what allows me, in some form, year after year, to settle into the golden afternoons of August. Vacations are behind us, and just enough of those lovely languid summer afternoons lie ahead. The light has already shifted. A month ago, my evening runs were hot and sunlit; tonight, the shadows stretched across the sidewalks. I’m beginning to make notes about lesson planning, the new books I’m going to teach soon. I’m filled with the earliest twinges of excitement instead of dread at the end of summer. It’s a cycle I know, and I’ve learned not to fight it. Summer is sweet because it doesn’t last forever.

Summer, and the end of it

The year I'm not excited to set up my classroom and shop for school supplies is the year I should no longer be teaching. Thankfully, I don't think I'm anywhere near that. We arrived home last night from the longest vacation we've taken -- well, ever, really, and I haven't even finished unpacking my suitcase yet. I did, however, head into school today to get my classroom ready. I left it in pretty good shape back in June, but I needed to work on the walls a bit and clean my desks and organize things. It's more or less ready to go, and I'm beginning to get excited.

The rhythm of the seasons is like this, always: I end the year a little burned out and more than a little tired. This past year, for various reasons, I was more stressed than usual. I was so ready to get out of there in June. But at precisely the right moment in August, something clicks -- it's quiet and subtle and I almost don't realize it's happened, but I reach a point where I can consciously say to myself, I am ready to go back. I want to buy new notebooks and pens. I want to sit with my planner and my notebook and a stack of novels and flip through my poetry collections and figure out how to talk about it all with kids. It's a good feeling. Sometimes August is like one long Sunday afternoon -- there's a certain amount of dread involved, combined with a strange inertia -- but at some point, anticipation for September kicks in.

September is nothing like Monday. September is golden, optimistic, hopeful. September is warmth and crunchy fall leaves and the transition from shorts to sweatshirts. September is a huge box of markers my students haven't yet ruined, it's new shoes, it's stacks of crisp white paper. September is kids who haven't grown too comfortable or too complacent yet. September is settling into a rhythm that hasn't yet become routine, hasn't yet become drudgery. September is falling in love with my life all over again, the way I do every autumn even when I am stressed and overwhelmed and seriously doubting my own competency.

So today, today, on this first day back after vacation, I decided not to dwell on the fact that summer is essentially over. I decided, instead, to look forward to the start of a new school year. I am stressed and overwhelmed; I am teaching a lot of brand-new stuff this year, including two brand-new classes. Frankly, I'm sort of terrified. But I'm also excited and desperately hoping I can rise to the challenge, because if I can pull this off, I'll be teaching my dream schedule.

Also, also, this is the year my daughter starts kindergarten. This feels so huge and wonderful and scary to me. I'm not quite sure how much I'm going to write about it on this public blog, to be honest; as she grows, I wonder if I should be a bit more selective in what and how I write about her in such a public space. I also feel a little protective about her schooling experience, knowing how opinionated people are about school in general. For now, I'll say this: we're blessed with what seems to be a great neighborhood school, and she's excited and ready. And I'm working on feeling ready myself. It's wonderful, it's bittersweet.

I can't believe I'm already writing about school. On the other hand, while we always talk about summer passing so quickly, it seems about right. I've had an absolutely lovely summer, and planning our vacation for August meant that I had to let go of a lot of my usual anxiety or I wouldn't have enjoyed it so much. And I did. We spent almost two-and-a-half weeks on the road between all the places we love the best. Our vacations right now always involve trips to visit our families instead of, I don't know, more exotic locations, but at this point in our lives I am really very okay with that.

I wrote a lot on the road, but I'm not really sure how to condense it here, and anyway, I'm not sure how interesting it would be to the general public. Instead, I'll share some things I've learned (or had reinforced) in the past couple of weeks:

It is very, very difficult to be vegetarian in North Dakota.

Planning for time out of the car is crucial on long driving days. I know where to find a park in just about any town between Seattle and Minneapolis.

I am not as patient as I want to be.

Spending so much time in extremely close quarters with my family really enhances all of our, um, quirks. Maintaining a sense of humor about all of this is absolutely key to our survival.

Moses Lake, Washington and Miles City, Montana are so very hot in August and there is just...no relief anywhere. Moses Lake has no shade. Miles City has way too many bugs. And yet, I have an inexplicable fondness for both towns.

I don't think I am ever as truly relaxed as I am when we spend time at Pleasant Pines in Minnesota.

Mosquitoes still love me. Especially in Minnesota, where they are big enough to shoot.

My best friend is happier than I've ever seen her, and even though this has come through in our various forms of long-distance communication, it was wonderful to see in person and I'm so honored to have been a part of her wedding day. Also, Dan has turned her into a big old softie, because we both bawled our faces off when I hugged her good-bye. (Should I not write that in public? Sorry, Carmen.)

The wedding was in the middle of Nowhere, North Dakota and it is beautiful there. It would challenge all of your assumptions about what North Dakota looks like.

I don't know if MacKenzie River Pizza is actually the best pizza in the world, but I have such a fierce devotion to it that I still tell everyone it is. Same thing with Pickle Barrel sandwiches.

If someone throws up in Bogart Pool in Bozeman, it closes for the rest of the day. (Thankfully, it was not because of either of my children that I had to learn this.)

Splash parks are perfect for our family right now. I fell in love with two of them on this trip, and I'm not one of the moms who sits on a towel and watches.

I need to do a much better job of breaking in my hiking boots before hiking ten miles.

Emerald Lake with all those alpine meadows full of wildflowers is still worth the blisters.

Suzannah prefers to be barefoot as much as possible, like I do. She hardly wore shoes at all at the lake; she looked so golden and brown and summery by the time we left.

My parents will still happily sacrifice their dignity to please the children they love. They both ran through the sprinkler in their backyard in their work clothes because it delighted Suzannah. (I never had all that much dignity to begin with, so you don't even have to ask if I joined in the fun.)

To my children, Grandpa and Grandma's house is better than Disneyland.

I was really naive to believe that my children were too young to find so many creative ways to a.) annoy each other and b.) annoy me during our long hours on the road. Let's talk about how Suzannah taught Isaac how to make vomit noises. And the "Smell my feet" game. And the way they managed to yell "Mine!" at each other for like a hundred hours straight -- they sounded like the seagulls in Finding Nemo. You'd think they'd have grown tired of these things after the first ten hours of driving, BUT NO.

Despite all that, I still love road trips.

The more time I spent away from Facebook, the less inclined I was to check in. When I did, I wondered how I sort through so much noise on a daily basis. Now I'm wondering how to continue to use it in a way that doesn't suck so much of my time/annoy me/frustrate me and still stay "connected" to people I care about.

Making sure I build in time for exercise on vacation makes a significant difference in my mood, energy level, patience, etc. Matt and I went for long runs, long swims, or long hikes pretty much at least every other day -- until this week, because my heels are in bad shape after Wednesday's epic hike. Today was my first run since then, which I needed because I'm running a 5k in less than a week. Also, I've spent a lot of time in the car again over the past couple of days, it's been hot, I ate way too much pizza for dinner last night, and I feel just generally kind of gross.

After living in our little house for eight years, I still love the way it smells when we walk through the door after a long absence.

Sometimes it takes a trip through time, so to speak, for me to realize how lucky I am to live exactly where I do. I can't even articulate how much I love Montana, and in many ways I also feel perfectly at home in Minnesota and would probably be happy living there as well, but I really do think of the Pacific Northwest as home. And it feels so, so good to be back.

My love letter to the road

(For Traci, on the day before her own epic road trip)

I've always believed that people who consistently choose the shortest distance between two places miss the essence of travel. Flying is convenient, to be sure, especially if the destination, rather than the journey, is the point of a trip. But I hate flying. During my high school and college years it held a certain novelty for me, and I still admit to feeling a little thrill in my stomach when the plane takes to the air. I also deeply appreciate the perspective and occasionally the peace that comes from seeing the world from the sky, but those moments are usually fleeting for an airline passenger -- soon the plane rises above the clouds and there's not all that much to see. Instead, one's attention turns to the beverage cart jostling down the narrow aisle, to seats leaning too close to one's knees, and the unsettling proximity of unidentifiable odors.

I actually enjoy airports, espcially when I have the luxury of enjoying some good coffee or a glass of wine while I watch the travelers bustle through, heels clicking, luggage rolling, eyes fixed ahead. Brisk, efficient movements. But now that I have a three-year-old and a baby on the way, that leisurely people-watching is -- at least for now -- a luxurious memory. Flying itself fills me with more and more anxiety as I grow older -- no need to tell me dismissively just how irrational that is, please. It is what it is. (And the truth of the matter is that, for me, flying with small children can be challenging, the exact opposite of relaxing. If you've done it, you probably understand, and if you haven't, kindly refrain from sharing your opinions on what parents should be doing to shut their kids up, and be grateful that at least you can plug in your music and ignore it.)

But I don't love road trips simply because I don't enjoy the alternative. I love them because I completely believe the cheesy bumper stickers and inspirational posters proclaiming that "Life is a journey, not a destination!" Memories are made on the road.

Sometimes I think my relationship with my husband began as a road trip. In August of 2000, following what I had briefly imagined would be a European summer fling, Matt rode a Greyhound bus for twenty-five hours, traveling between Minneapolis and Bozeman, Montana. Almost immediately we filled my car with camping gear and drove five hours to Glacier National Park for our first camping trip. We took day trips to Yellowstone and the Lewis and Clark Caverns. We spent weekends during my senior year at Concordia driving back and forth between Moorhead and Minneapolis.

But the real magic began after both of us moved to Washington state, a move which meant we'd be seeing a lot of I-90 and I-94. We flew to Minneapolis at least once or twice a year before we became parents, since it isn't exactly practical to drive over 1500 miles one way for a long weekend. But we drive to Bozeman a few times a year, and we've taken a few extended vacations that allowed us to drive from the Pacific Northwest to the Midwest. These trips carry me across every landscape I've ever loved, all the landscapes of my youth: my life's history written in prairie grasses and mountain passes. I breathe best in open spaces. (In 2005 I wrote, There really is no sky like the Montana sky, even in other wide-open states. I can't explain it. The drive between Chester and Fort Benton is like breathing deeply for the first time -- your lungs expand and fill with air you didn't know you could hold.

"Wow," Matt kept saying. "This is just...huge." But it's really a struggle to find a word to attach to it. The evening sun lit the fields against the distant Highwood Mountains. We braked for pheasants, for a new spotted fawn. I lost track of time, my age, of what car I was even driving. I just kept breathing, clinging to the thought that at least some things never really change.)

We're building our memories on the road. I know where to find the best coffee, the cleanest bathrooms, and the most reliable food between Seattle and Minneapolis, as well as all over Montana. I've learned to be present and aware driving through golden fields lit against a backdrop of purple, snow-capped mountains, to notice the Yellowstone river running lazily parallel to the interstate and the storm clouds gathering above the mountain ranges, the Painted Canyon in North Dakota, the hills and rock and sagebrush. But the treasures are also found in the most ordinary moments:

Eating the world's creamiest tomato soup at a truckstop 4B's in Missoula (which, sadly, is no longer -- a fact we mourn each time we pass exit 99). Heading north to Great Falls in August, my bare feet on the dash, reading poetry to my husband and telling him, "I'm going to find a poem that knocks your socks off." Lowering our fourteen-month-old toddler into one of the bucket seats on a swingset in the park in Miles City, Montana, and nursing her later on a park bench amidst the sounds of laughter from the community swimming hole and the buzzing of the overhead power lines. The heavy, humid air in Fargo, so thick it was almost tangible, like I could have pulled it down out of the sky with my fingers. Clothes flapping on lines near the road, old cars, and grain elevators along Highway 2. My daughter's first carousel ride in Riverfront Park. Ordering homemade egg salad sandwiches and drinking fresh-squeezed lemonade in a tiny small-town diner with flowered tablecloths, and being the youngest people there by about forty years.

Separately, these are just moments, of course. It's impossible to write about any one of them as a reason my heart belongs to the highway, but together, they form a beautiful mosaic -- snapshots of the sweetest, most untroubled moments of our lives.