I know how to breathe in the water

When your child challenges you to a water balloon fight on a hot afternoon in late July, I believe in saying yes. Always. Even if you're not wearing a swimsuit. Maybe especially if you're not wearing a swimsuit, because there is something about getting soaked in shorts and a tank top that feels whimsical and freeing. Although I do have to say that fifteen years into motherhood, I still frequently put on a swimsuit for an afternoon of Serious Water Play in the backyard, because that signals commitment, and I am a mother who pities the parents who do not find joy in this, at any age.

I've written about this before, but my perfect summer happens in my backyard.

We didn't make it to Bozeman last summer, or almost anywhere else. Our story isn't unique. We're in a Pandemic (yes, still). Matt changed jobs. The IB Global Conference was cancelled. By this time last year, we had just learned that we would begin the school year remotely, which was both a relief and a source of anxiety and dread. Last year at this time, we were about to leave for a quick trip to Glacier National Park, where we met my parents, my brother and his family, and Matt's parents. It was the only time all summer that felt something like normal, the only time all summer where I could just breathe. And I did, mostly by swimming in Lake McDonald. Put me in the water, and I am home. 

I know how to breathe in the water.

*

We did make it to Bozeman this summer, and I was so grateful. I missed the smell of my parents' house. It's a smell they probably don't notice, but to me, it smells exactly like home the moment I walk in the door, the smell I've known for most of my life. I love it so much, in exactly the way I love the smell of my own house after we've been away for a week; it's a very specific smell I never notice any other time except after days away. 

(How many homes is a person allowed to have? I have asked myself this question for years. My best high school teacher told me one night before I left for college that I would put down deep roots wherever I went. And it's true, I think. I can still smell, in my memory, the apartment I shared with Carmen in Moorhead, Minnesota. Or the smell of the heavy, late summer air there. Home is the way the air smells.)

We also spent a few nights in Glacier. We didn't camp this time, like we have since my son was in diapers. I've missed it, those nights spent breathing the sweet pine-scented air under the stars, settled into the quiet of a tent, with everything that matters held in that space. COVID changed things, yes. But pandemics do eventually end, and at some point in the last few years I have learned how to set boundaries for myself and for my family. We'll share communal spaces again, but until then, we'll gratefully accept my mother's gift of a cabin and days at the lake. Paddle boards, kayaks, the sun setting over the water. The cool water of Lake McDonald against my body, which I prefer over any kayak or paddle board. It's a strange thing: to so fully enjoy the water, to acknowledge that this lake is warm enough to swim in all afternoon, which it shouldn't be. Growing up, it wasn't. We are incinerating the planet, and this is obvious in a heartbreaking way when I visit this place where the glaciers are shrinking into snow fields.

Pam Houston writes in Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country: 

For now, I want to sit vigil with the earth...I want to write unironic odes to her beauty, which is still potent, if not completely intact. The language of the wilderness is the most beautiful language we have and it is our job to sing it until and even after it is gone no matter how much it hurts. If we don't, we are left with only a hollow chuckle, and our big brains who made this mess, our big brains that stopped believing a long time ago in beauty, in everything, in anything.

Montana is burning. It's too hot, too early. Again. I returned to my home state hoping to breathe the sweetest air in the world, but smoke filled my lungs instead. Weeks later, friends there post pictures of a red sun in a yellow sky.

Montana might never truly welcome me home; I'm an Outsider now. And yet. And yet. My soul still knows how to breathe in the water there, and the Montana prairie is not so different from the ocean tides. I'll always love it.

*

I moved to the Pacific Northwest twenty years ago. I've lived here longer than I've lived anywhere else: my entire adult life. I was born in a prairie town, grown and nourished near the mountains, returned to the Midwestern plains, and given my wings to wind up exactly where I am now. All of it, all of it, courses through my blood. My heart beats to the rhythm of the ocean tides and prairie winds. I cherish my trips home. But home is also here now: in the Pacific Northwest, in the mountains, at the coast, and quite literally in my backyard.

*

Matt and I were extraordinarily lucky to stumble into our little house, in this neighborhood, just six weeks after we were married. Before we had kids, I spent August afternoons reading in the shade of our enormous tree, or reading in the sunshine on our deck (I won't tell you which books led to my most painful sunburns, but I remember them clearly). After Suzannah was born, I spent countless afternoons in the backyard with her, taking pictures while she splashed in the little plastic wading pool we bought at Target or Toys R Us. I remember sitting on the edge of the deck trying to read while she ran through the sprinkler. One of the books I was supposed to teach for IB Literature still bears her scribbles; she grabbed my blue ballpoint pen after she tired of the water, and I didn't really care for the book anyway -- it was a complete chore to read (and I no longer teach it). Temperatures hit 100 the summer I was pregnant with Isaac, and I sat in that plastic wading pool while Zannah poured water over my belly. The next summer, Isaac kicked his fat legs on a blanket on the grass. And after that...well, the yard was his, too. The sprinkler, the lawn, the deck. The concrete patio that replaced the old, rotting deck. The swing set and sandbox, built by my husband and father-in-law before my son's first birthday.

I'm supposed to want more. More square footage? More house, less yard? Newer? Bigger? I wasn't thinking about "forever" when we bought our house, only about how we loved it then. All these years later, I still do, and even more in Quarantine, when my daily walks introduced me to so many neighbors I'd never known and showcased spectacular views of Puget Sound, only a few streets away. I've learned that what I need is not the same thing as what we're conditioned to want.

*

I love our summer travels. I do. Our trips have mostly always been to Montana and Minnesota, because our families are there, and I have no regrets about that (Montana and Minnesota are wonderful places to be, in any season). I've had some wonderful trips around the country for the IB Global Conference each summer, and once Matt and I went to Vegas on his company's dime (I'll go anywhere and enjoy it when I don't have to pay for it, but I'd be okay not going back). I have a list of places I want to go and things I want to see and experience in the next few years. But I've also learned that the summers I love best are the summers that give me the most time at home here in the Pacific Northwest. We keep discovering places that fill and feed my soul near my home here. At the coast, in the mountains, on the trails to the Sound near my own house.

(I almost wrote, "in my home state." Is this my home state now? I think of the privilege inherent in claiming a state this way in the first place. In having a childhood bedroom that still exists somewhere else. Surely, claiming a home shouldn't be limited to those of us who still have a bed in a place we lived in decades ago.)

*

I spent some time this weekend reading through old journals, which is a thing I tend to do in late summer, before I dig into preparing for the next school year. The year after I moved here, after I chose this place to begin my adulthood, my "real life," I wrote about returning to a place of wet and green Januaries after Christmas in Montana, about how I felt like I was going home. And yet, for years after I left Montana, I still wrote about weeping as I drove east or west out of Bozeman -- to Moorhead, Minnesota or to Washington. Bozeman is a hard place to leave. But those tears meant that a heart can expand to hold these other places, too, and to call them home.

*

I've lived here, in this state, in this little house, longer than I've lived anywhere else. 

My dream house is this one, I think. Maybe a few streets closer to the water, so I could drink my coffee with a view of Puget Sound instead of having to walk to that view in the mornings (all summer) or the afternoons (when I'm teaching). What I have is close enough. My perfect summer day happens right here, when I pour myself a glass of iced green tea ("Enjoy your alien pee," my son says) and read in the backyard until it's time to cook dinner, which we also frequently eat in the backyard. My perfect summer day happens when my children fill water balloons with our backyard hose and throw them at each other, and at me. My perfect summer day happens when all we need is a backyard hose, a sprinkler, a grill, a fire pit. A comfortable lounge chair, or one of the Adirondack chairs I bought in May, along with a side table -- perfect for that glass of tea, a can of lemon-flavored La Croix, or a Pinot Grigio in the late afternoon.

I'll never say no to the water. 

*

School starts again a month from now. I'll be teaching full classes in person again for the first time in a year-and-a-half. My daughter will be a sophomore. My son will be a middle-schooler, which is harder for me to process, since the last time he attended in-person school he was only in the fourth grade. But the world happens to all of us. We'll figure it out.

In the meantime, we'll run through the sprinkler, we'll have water balloon fights, we'll spend afternoons at the beaches in the state parks near our home (two of them are ten minutes from our house, in two different directions, with sandy beaches and swimming and trails), and we'll make one last drive to a National Park and a beautiful lake in the mountains near the sea. This is what feeds my soul.

But even if I don't want to drive those ten minutes on a hot afternoon in late July or August, I can bask in summer days exactly where I am. I've never needed more than our back yard, a slip 'n slide or sprinkler, a camp chair under a towering tree that shades our home. I've added better chairs, I suppose. We have that fire pit. A patio umbrella. A grill, for when we don't want to heat the kitchen. But the magic that happens here is simple: an arc of water from a garden hose, catching the sunlight like diamonds. A book. A glass of iced tea. Dinner on the patio, maybe. The cool night descending over the water, the breeze that pairs with our bedroom fan to ruffle our bedroom curtains.

And always, the water. In whatever form my children want. Because isn't this it? The moments we miss later?

(Maybe it's the Pisces in me, but I'll take the water in any moment, on any day. I want the hose, the sprinkler, the slip 'n slide, the spray park, the pool as much as my children do.)

So I say yes to the water balloon fights, the water gun fights. I suggest the spray park, or the beach when my son whines that he's bored. I don't care what we do there, whether we splash in the water or dig in the sand or buy hot dogs or hike the trails near the water. I love it all. It's a life I couldn't know I was choosing all those years ago. It's a life I wouldn't trade.

Hope, or something like it

The other night I was clearing out my medicine cabinet, getting rid of long-expired cold medicine, separated nail polish I haven't worn in a decade, things like that. A small container of muscle relaxers caught my eye. They expire tomorrow, a year after they were prescribed.

Isaac and I were driving home from his dentist appointment on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon last March when an older woman slammed into us from behind. We were completely stopped behind another car at a red light; she didn't even slow down. When she rear-ended us, our car slammed into the car in front of us.

Isaac didn't see it coming, and while he was terrified by the crash, the sickening metal crunch -- we both screamed -- he was perfectly fine afterwards, both immediately and in the days that followed. Our CR-V was only three years old, well designed to protect its occupants in a crash even when the car itself was a total loss, and his limber young body was relaxed when the car hit; he didn't see it coming.

I did see it coming, unlike everything else that would unfold over the coming days, weeks, months. I saw her speeding toward us in my rearview mirror, saw her not slowing. I couldn't do anything to avoid what I suddenly understood would happen, and my entire body braced for the impact. The next day I left school early with a terrible headache and a stiff neck and took myself to the doctor for X-rays. They came back okay, but the doctor recommended an appointment with a physical therapist.

I remember sitting in the waiting room with exactly one other patient, a flushed and lethargic woman who kept coughing weakly, her head dropping. She sat near the door; I sat as far away from her as I physically could. In early March, we weren't wearing masks yet.

*

That night I swallowed one of those muscle-relaxers before drifting into an uneasy sleep. 

I knew things were changing, but forty-eight hours earlier I was only beginning to adjust to the idea of holding student-led conferences by phone instead of flooding the school with families for three days. The next day, we learned that schools would be closed for six weeks. We had twenty-four hours to process this, and one day to gather up what we could and say good-bye to our students.

It's been nearly a year since I hugged one of my kids in D-7.

That last Friday, I expected our classes to be empty, but almost all of my students showed up.

“What about our assignments that are due this month?” 

“What about IB testing? Does that still start at the same time?"

“Are we really closed for six weeks? What about graduation?”

I couldn’t require my students to work during the break, or assign anything for grading. An issue of access and equity, we were told. I thought of my students who would be caring for younger siblings, who only had internet access at the public library—which, I was sure, would close as well. I thought about my students who would work extra shifts now, to earn money or to escape or both.

“None of us are going through this alone, even though it’s going to be hard to be apart," I said. "We’ll still figure it out together. I’m not really going anywhere. I’m going to check my e-mail at least once a day, and I promise I’ll respond to you. I’ll post ways to practice for the exams and we can have online discussions. It’s totally optional, so if you can’t do it don’t worry about it.”

They nodded.

“Try to get outside if you can,” I said. “Don’t stare at your phones all day. Clean your backpacks. Clean your rooms. Read! Read something that’s not for my class! Borrow one of my books!” I pointed at the bookshelf along the wall.

“Wait, we can borrow those?” asked one of my kids.

“What do you mean, can you borrow those? Why do you think I have them here? They’re not decorations, Babies. If you don’t borrow them, they’re just going to sit there.”

“I’ve borrowed tons of Winslow’s books!” said another. “I think I still have a couple, actually.”

“What do you think I’d like? Can you recommend something?”

I walked towards the bookshelf and they jumped up to follow me like little ducklings. When I pulled On the Come Up by Angie Thomas from the shelf and tried to hand it to one of them, her friend grabbed it before I had a chance.

“I’ve been waiting for this! Mine! I get this one!”

“Bro, what the hell."

“You can have it when I’m done. I’ll probably finish it, like, by Sunday."

“I beg and beg and beg you all to read,” I muttered. “And you do not read. And now look.” But I didn’t hide my smile.

At the end of class, I said, “You all drive me crazy. But you have no idea how much I’m going to miss you.” As I said that, I felt a sudden rush of tears to my eyes. 

I calculated quickly: if we returned in six weeks, I’d have two or three classes before they began their IB testing in May. My time with them as I had known it for the past two years had come to a sudden end, no matter what lay ahead.

They lingered after the bell, leaving slowly. Most of them stood in my doorway, waving.

“You have to go to French,” I said. “You have to go to history.”

(I didn't let the tears fall; I try to reserve that for my last day with my seniors, if it comes to that, because kids are burdened by enough without having to deal with a teacher's tears, and it felt like an important time not to fall apart. But I didn't know it was, in fact, my last day with my seniors.)

One of them turned back suddenly and threw her arms around me. By then, we weren't supposed to touch each other. But in the end, I couldn’t turn away from these kids, not with so much looming unknown. A year later, knowing what I know now, I'm so desperately glad for that last hug.

*

There are few folks I want to talk to these days who aren't my students or other teachers, frankly. I'm tired of the headlines pitting parents against teachers (what about those of us who are both?). I'm tired of the vitriol from folks who claim teachers are making excuses not to return to work.

Another teacher friend expressed a familiar sadness: friends she had always thought of as like-minded kindreds suddenly had plenty of things to say about teachers and returning to schools. Once, I tried to argue back -- yes, some schools can do it safely. But I hope my last post made it clear that not all of us can, and not before we're vaccinated. 

If you think I wouldn't give anything to be back in the classroom with the kids I know and love, already accepting the reality that I would take a bullet for them, then you don't think much of me as a teacher. Please don't consume the stories of my students for your entertainment, or to feel good. Please don't imply that I am looking for an excuse not to be with them (as our oblivious, dismissive, and tone-deaf governor has), or that I think you don't work hard too. Otherwise we know why you want us back and it has little to do with the kids.

(That said, I am so thankful for my friends who have reached out with kindness and solidarity. Please believe it matters. This has been one of the most demoralizing years I've experienced in a twenty-year career.)

Still, there are moments of magic. There are moments of joy, every week. I deeply appreciate my community, I love my students and my colleagues, and the work is worth it. I won't leave the work because it is hard right now; this isn't my time to go. I almost left teaching once, and I'm not in that place now. (But damn, have I struggled this year. I'm also a seasoned teacher who has had enough therapy and experience to understand that the world happens to all of us and still believe that I am where I'm supposed to be. I have the support and access to resources to take care of myself. Even in this struggle, I am senselessly privileged.)

*

I received my first dose of the COVID vaccine on Sunday morning. Because I write about everything all the time, I know that date fell exactly one year after the last time we dined inside a restaurant, which is? was? something we enjoy and miss. I'm looking forward to sliding into one of the cozy wood booths at the Elliott Bay Brewery with my family again. In the meantime, ordering takeout is not a burden, and I'm glad to support our favorite restaurants each week.

On Sunday I drove across the tide flats in the early morning light, parked on a quiet street, and walked into a building next to Tacoma General. I took a seat, answered some questions, accepted some papers. Vaccine information. Call this number if.

I scanned the room: lots of teachers. A few older couples who had come in together. I listened in on everyone's conversations, because I'm always curious. Teachers were there from so many districts. What do you teach? Oh, that's my son's grade! He's doing okay, but he misses his friends so much. It's just hard, you know?

We know.

The nurse who handed me my Vaccine Fact Sheet was beaming.

"I'm so, so happy we're getting so many teachers!" she said. "Our kids need to be back in school, but not until it's safe for everyone."

I nodded. "We know."

*

I drove home, the morning still quiet, the sky still lovely.

I felt something like jet lag before lunch. I thought I'd curl up for a nap in the quiet afternoon, but the fatigue wore off before then. I napped for an hour anyway. I felt fairly energetic for the rest of the day. By dinnertime, my arm was sore and I slept restlessly on Sunday night, but after a hot shower the next morning, I felt perfectly normal.

I took a long walk on Saturday morning, and I saw the first buds of spring on a tree along a quiet street. 

It is cherry blossom season again. 

Yesterday, I saw more of them. Soon, the cherry blossoms will flutter over the sidewalk and land in my hair. I'll reach up to touch them when I walk underneath their fluffy canopy. I've written about cherry blossoms in this space every year, I think, and who can blame me? I love the language of trees in any season, but cherry blossoms are about waking up. Last year, even as the world shut down, the cherry blossoms in the spring air were a reminder to stay awake and present in the only life I have.

I'm grateful to be here.

This broken and beautiful world

“Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Suddenly, they become the bleached bones of a story.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

I posted this quote on a discussion board for my seniors during our first official week of remote learning. They'd read most of Roy's novel before the school closure, and suddenly her words took on new meaning. So we started there. Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted.

Little events: Trips to the grocery store.

Ordinary things: A walk through a neighborhood. A package of toilet paper.

Smashed and reconstituted: Prom. Graduation. English class on a Monday.

The bleached bones of a story. Our stories. All of them. These small bones, and the way we pay attention to them now.

***

Almost exactly ten years ago, we were in Montana for my grandmother's eightieth birthday. Isaac was just four months old, and I was still on maternity leave. April was strange that year, too. I remember: snow on the mountain passes and staying the night in Helena when the roads became too treacherous. Eating at a diner, too late, but cozy anyway. A vanilla latte before we hit the road. I read Stieg Larsson's The Girl Who Played With Fire when I wasn't driving. We drove into Gildford after lunch in a brisk wind in time to celebrate with my grandmother at the little general store: someone had baked her an Elvis cake. My daughter, only three at the time, remembers the blue frosting. We stayed overnight at the hotel in Havre I still I love, even though the tiny pool is cloudy with too much chlorine.

Even with an infant and a not-quite-four-year-old, I remember sleeping so peacefully.

I remember my aunt Liana taking family pictures; we were all so rarely together. I remember one day in Bozeman, and a quick visit with Julia, my oldest childhood friend, when we stopped in Great Falls on our way down to my parents' house. We had a date night for the first time since Isaac was born.

I miss my family.

I miss my grandmother.

I miss crisp hotel sheets and lattes on the road, the highway through the mountains and across the prairie. (I miss road trips.)

I miss date nights. Restaurants. I miss the wood booths at the Elliott Bay Brewery. I miss the Seattle skyline when we drive over the West Seattle bridge at sunset. (Now that the bridge is closed for safety, I will miss it for a long time.)

I miss hugging the people I love. (I love the people I live with and I am grateful for their hugs every day. But I love a lot of people.)

I miss my old friend Julia.

I miss the landscapes of my childhood.

I miss writing alone in coffee shops, and drinking wine in cafes.

I miss hugging my toddler nephew, I miss my parents, I miss my friends.

It is not lost on me how lucky I am to live in a life that brings me joy exactly where I am, even now. But sometimes the missing is a deep ache, all the same.

***

How quickly we adapt and change.

On a Monday morning in early March, I pulled up to the espresso stand I drove through every day on my way to school. (Drove. Past tense, for now.) My favorite barista had seen me in line and made my drink already, so she handed my Americano through the window without my asking.

“Isn’t everything so crazy?” she said. Her words sent me spinning back to the first month of my teaching career, when I’d driven through on my lunch break. September eleventh. I’d ordered a mocha that day, my standard back then. She’d said the same words.

That day, though, she said, “I guess I don’t understand all the hysteria. Why can’t we just live normally and be smart about it and let it pass?”

The previous Friday, one of my coworkers asked about social distancing at our upcoming student-led conferences, an event that brought hundreds of parents and family members pouring through our cafeteria and commons area, where we had tables set up in close proximity. Our principal replied, “It’s way too late to reschedule or change the format. Families already have the schedule and the expectation. We’ll proceed as normal, but we can talk about your questions and concerns at next week’s staff meeting.”

But on Monday morning, we received an e-mail: the district had decided to hold conferences remotely instead. Students would sign up for a time slot with their advisory teacher, and we would make phone calls. We were still expected to hold the same hours, our principal said, to accommodate our families. The building would be open, and we could call from our classrooms. We would discuss the details further at the staff meeting on Wednesday.

On Wednesday, instead of discussing the logistics of remote conferences, we watched Governor Inslee declare that schools would be closed for six weeks, effective no later than Tuesday, March 17. We limped along until Friday afternoon, when we were all hustled out of the building. I walked to the parking lot in a daze, watching thin flakes of snow drift from the gray skies.

***

“Staff, you have five minutes remaining. Five minutes remaining before you need to exit the building.”

The office manager’s voice echoed over the intercom. I stood behind my desk, my arms around my desktop monitor. I set it down and yanked the cords for my docking station out of the outlet. Sweat trickled down my back. I wondered how I would carry this out to my car with the three overflowing bags at my feet. Could I sprint to the parking lot with the books, the binder filled with senior IB material, the chocolate and snacks I’d stashed in the back of my file cabinet (I didn’t want them to go stale or attract ants) and make it back for the monitor, all in five minutes? Could I just cram the docking station into one of the bags?

I could not.

“Three minutes. Staff in the building, you have three minutes remaining. Please gather the last of your things and exit your classrooms.”

“Fuck it,” I muttered. “I don’t really need another screen.” My laptop would have to do.

I slipped my mask back onto my face and took one last, long look around my room. It looked like the end of summer, only cleaner. The student desks had all been scrubbed and stacked in the back of the room. My desk was completely clean. I thought the carpets had been shampooed, and the harsh scent of disinfectant lingered in the air. Everything was wrong. When my room looked like this, it was time to set it up, arrange the desks, touch up the paint on the walls. Now I didn’t know when I’d be back.

“Bye, D-7,” I whispered. I grabbed my bags before my tears could dampen my mask, and I flipped off the lights.

“I’m out. I’m done,” I called to my assistant principal who sat with her laptop in the breezeway between buildings, noting our times in and out. We’d been given twenty-four hours to sign up for a time slot and twenty minutes to gather what we needed. It wasn’t enough.

My coworker (or, more accurately, my work wife) and I stood in the parking lot, separated by two spaces. We hadn’t seen each other in exactly one month.

“Coffee?” I asked. She nodded. We drove up the street to that drive-thru espresso stand I’ve loved for my entire adult life, ever since I discovered their black-and-white mochas the weekend before my first day of teaching. She parked in the back of the strip mall parking lot, skipping the coffee. I pulled through the stand and ordered an iced chai latte. I didn’t know the afternoon barista. She was nice, though. She took my card and wiped it with Clorox before handing it back to me.

“Stay safe,” she said.

I parked two spots away from my friend in the nearly-empty lot. She rolled down her window.

“I have camp chairs in the back,” I said. “No one’s touched them in a month. Want one?”

She hesitated. “Okay,” she said.

I hauled it out of the car, slid it from its canvas cover, and set it up next to her car. When I’d retreated to my own space, she opened her door. We slid on sunglasses in the afternoon sunshine.

“Do you think we’ll even be back in September?” she asked.

“I cannot think that way right now,” I said. “I cannot.” My heart began to thump with anxiety and my stomach churned. I sipped my chai and remembered my friend Jessica's words from a few weeks ago: When Sean was dying of brain cancer, we had to find a way to live in ever increasingly horrible new normals. We learned to keep going by living in the present and finding good moments. This means trying not to think about what your day would have been like in the circumstances of a few months ago or what your day might be like a few months from now. It means trying to find good moments in today.

I try to remember this every day -- not as a trite admonition about positive thinking, but as the only way I can live, to breathe in and out and try to put forth some good in this world anyway. If I start worrying about a situation I can't control three, four, or five months from now, I am no good for anyone.

We chatted for awhile. When we stood to head back home, she gave the chair a shove so we didn’t have to get any closer than eight feet apart. All the same, it mattered -- that brief human contact, face-to-face.

***

I think about the things that bring me joy, like my early-morning walks. I've watched the spring unfold and bloom in a way I never have. Every day, I walk through the streets of my neighborhood and beyond, exploring new routes, new views of Puget Sound. How have I lived here for so long without realizing what shimmering expanse of water can be seen from a street so near my own? I've met other folks on a similar schedule: the older gentleman who walks with a cane at the same time every day. Last week he raised his hand in greeting and said, "Hello, Dear," and it filled my heart. Hello, Dear. When would I have the chance to encounter him in another, ordinary life? Or there's the jogger who sprints up the hills I walk every day, and sometimes we cross paths in the middle--maintaining a respectful distance on the other side of the street. A month ago we nodded greetings; now he shouts a cheerful "Hey!"

My son and I play games in the middle of the day, after he finishes his math and reading. I unearthed a board game all about U.S. geography; I have no idea where we got it, or when, and Isaac showed zero interest in it, proclaiming that it was "so boring." But! I bribed him one afternoon, because obviously I parent (and teach) through bribery and emotional manipulation, and now he begs to play every single day. I guess it isn't so boring after all.

The kids and I get outside every day. Unless it's pouring, this is non-negotiable for me. My son hops on his bike and I walk and we head to the school, where he zooms around the playground and I walk or jog on the track. Fresh air and sweat. Every single day.

My children are experts at trolling each other, but we have settled into a rhythm now, and there is something sweet about looking up from my laptop and watching my daughter at hers while she works on her math or typing. I watch my son curled up on the recliner in the living room, reading. They are old enough to read what their teachers send and "do school" without too much guidance from me; I think I merely set the tone for our classroom. It's possibly the sweetest time to be quarantined with children. They're old enough to manage themselves (and ask their teachers questions, instead of me) and young enough to follow my basic expectations of routine. We work in the morning and head outside in the afternoon, at at lunchtime we watch the Cincinnati Zoo "Home Safari" which features a different animal each day. Fiona the hippo is still my favorite. And I know I'm going to remember these moments sweetly someday.

I have learned a very certain thing about myself: I am not meant to be an online teacher. I need to be in the room with my kids. But I can't be in the room with my kids now, and I am grateful for the technology that allows me the next best thing, which is to see their faces in a Zoom classroom meeting. Truly, it is one of the highlights of my week. I miss them so much.

This isn't forever, and I know this. But I can't think about teaching this way long-term. Not now. It's already hard enough to know that the last glimpse of my senior class will be when we line the streets for them as they pick up their caps and gowns for a graduation that won't happen -- at least not as we envision it. I will be there in whatever capacity I can. On the street, with a sign, anything I can do. But it isn't the same.

I suppose the fact that this hurts so much shows how deeply privileged I am. To love someone so much, to miss my work so much. Please never believe this fact is lost on me. It isn't.

***

Things fill me with anxiety and rage, too.

Armed (and white) protestors screaming at our healthcare workers are not "very good people." Friends of friends in my homestate who tell the whole internet that no one will force them to wear a mask or get a vaccine because they're not sheeple, thank you very much are also revolting (and to be fair, I probably have friends who say the same thing, but apparently they're doing a good job of filtering me out of those particular posts). So are the conspiracy theorists and the "Do Your Own Research" people who think watching a YouTube video or reading an article in a publication that requires you to pay for your submission counts as research. The flippancy -- if I'm not sick, why shouldn't I do whatever I want? If you're immunocompromised, you stay home! I think about the relative who e-mailed me over a decade ago with concerns about Obama's death panels. He'd euthanize all our grandmothers as soon as they turned seventy. That aged well, didn't it? I have no idea what that person thinks these days, because after I told them I didn't think I was their target audience, I never received another e-mail.

It's too easy for me to spiral into anger, rage, and anxiety, so I'm trying to put down my phone during the day, read balanced sources I trust, and avoid scrolling through social media. It really does help.

I actually think it's important to stay angry. And awake. But I can't drop anchor at anger.

So instead I'm trying to focus on gratitude, and, yes, joy. It doesn't negate the anger or the anxiety, but it means I can slow down and take notice of the world I want to preserve. The friendships that last through physical distancing and the hope that I can hug my people again. The kindness of neighbors and the kindness of strangers. The way the spring comes again, every year, whether we notice it or not, and the unexpected privilege of witnessing it each day. And maybe I can send a little of the fierce hope and love I have into this broken, beautiful world, and maybe it will land on the people I love and miss every single day. I don't know how else to live.

Bonus Days

During my freshman year of college, I waited nearly a full day longer than almost everyone else on campus before I began my 11-hour drive home; four of us were driving two cars and had agreed to travel together, and two of the girls had late finals that meant I had to wait until the next day. Despondent, I called my grandmother to vent about my loneliness and boredom as my dorm emptied. She offered a different perspective.

"Just think, though, hon," she said. "You're already packed, you're done with finals, and you have the day all to yourself. I call days like that 'bonus days.' You have this gift of time to do something you really enjoy."

As tempting as it was to sulk, or feel that I was missing a day of my Christmas break, I remember it fondly all these years later. I rarely had my dorm room to myself, but my roommate had left early. I basked in the quiet, stretched out on my bunk bed, and spent the entire day reading a book. I even remember the book; it was Madeleine L'Engle's A Live Coal in the Sea, and I read it cover to cover that day.

***

I've been anticipating snow since last weekend, when the forecast predicted snow all this week starting on Sunday night. Sunday night produced nary a single snowflake at my house, and we didn't have as much as a late start. I woke up every hour all night long to peer out the window, waking for good at four o'clock on Monday morning. I was grumpy and tired and disappointed. This Montana girl loves the romance of a snow day, since we didn't get them growing up. It's easy to romanticize snow when you don't have to shovel it well into March and April, and it is precious to me now.

(And I know I've written this before, but if you live in a place accustomed to snow, kindly keep your snarky comments to yourself. Driving on ice out here, where we have steep hills everywhere, is so much harder than driving on snow and ice in any other place I've lived. I'm far more comfortable driving in heavy snow in Montana or Minnesota than I am driving in just a little here. When it snows here, we have ice, the roads are terrible, we don't have the infrastructure to handle it, and we stay home, thank you very much.)

On Monday afternoon, I decided to clean my kitchen to cope with my disappointment. Not ordinary cleaning, like wiping down the counters and making sure all the dishes were put away, but the kind of cleaning that involved emptying every single cupboard and cabinet and scrubbing the inside, and then scrubbing the outsides as well. I washed the silverware tray. I cleaned the junk drawer. I watched a movie (The Fugitive with Harrison Ford from 1993, because I picked it up at Easy Street Records for like three bucks and I love it, shut up) and an episode or two of Friday Night Lights, and somewhere in there I managed to cook West Indian red beans with coconut rice.

I made Matt admire the silverware drawer more than is normal. He's a good sport. But later he said, "You...do this sort of thing. When you're sleep deprived."

The first flakes fell just after eight o'clock last night and hope surged again.

"It's not going to snow," Isaac grumped. We'd been so disappointed that morning. "It's not going to stick. It doesn't even matter."

But hope is a killing thing, and it kept me up all night again. It was nothing like the beautiful fluffy flakes of last February, but before I went to sleep we had enough to coat the grass, our patio furniture, and the swing set with a thin, glistening layer of snow.

I didn't sleep well until the first call came at 3:38 this morning alerting us to a two-hour delay; the call announcing that schools were closed followed at shortly before six o'clock. We managed to keep the kids inside until first light, at which point they donned snow gear and headed outside to make the best of it. We have enough lawn to support quite a few snowballs, even if the snow isn't thick.

I stayed in bed as long as I could, listening to the kids and their early-morning restlessness. Matt and I cuddled sleepily for awhile.

"I'm going to clean out the dining hutch this morning," I said against his chest. He laughed and laughed.

I know we have to make up the day, that we now have a three-day weekend instead of a four-day weekend over President's Day. I know my colleagues were hoping for a two-hour delay -- all the benefits of sleeping in without the penalty of making up the time. But listen: today was perfect. Reader, I cleaned my dining hutch. I dusted my house, and then I scrubbed the bathrooms and vacuumed and mopped floors and found other random dusty corners to clean. I made tomato soup and grilled cheese with The Good Bread Matt thought to buy for me. We all had hot chocolate. I had the coziest, most delicious nap, the best sleep I've had in days. I finished one book and started another. Isaac and I worked together building the model Space Needle I bought him on our Day Out together, our trip to Seattle Center and lunch at the top of the Space Needle, his belated birthday gift over winter break. I snuggled with our daughter on the couch.

It was a Bonus Day in every sense of the word.

We're returning to normal this evening: Tae Kwon Do classes and trumpet practice. But the coziness lingers. Isaac ate his bowl of roasted vegetable curry and said, "Supper's really good, Mom." I'm not evening opening my school planner. The dishwasher hums. I've had a perfect day cozily together with my favorite people. I know I have to make it up, but every single moment is worth it.

Better Than Perfect

I have long believed that the Friday at the end of the first week back after winter break is more important, more restorative, than the Friday that begins winter break. So here I am, wearing pajama pants and sipping wine and typing away here after spending an hour on the couch with a book. The kids are watching whatever silly thing they're watching. I'm baking some appetizers from Trader Joe's before I start roasting sweet potatoes and wilting spinach for our easy yet satisfying and nourishing dinner. It might snow on Sunday night.

Everything feels cozy, and I'm doing okay.

But as much as I had a truly wonderful winter break, and as much as I understood that to prolong it would only result in anxiety (two weeks is the perfect amount of time for me to have "off" before I get edgy and need a bit more structure), I have really struggled this week. I've cried too much during my lunches and planning periods. I felt so demoralized on my first day back; my school is under construction, and there isn't even enough parking for staff, let alone students. I have the privilege of a "part-time" schedule that allows me to take a deduction in pay in exchange for a sweet schedule in which I can take my children to school in the morning before I go to work, but that also means that by the time I show up in the auxiliary parking lot 45 minutes after the first bell, suddenly, there are no spots left for me, even though I didn't have this issue before break, ever. I parked illegally for an hour until someone else left (I went down to check the lot during my planning period) and I could move my car.

"If I show up tomorrow and have nowhere to park," I said tearfully to a colleague, "I'm going right back home." I meant it.

My seniors left me upset and frustrated before break, and things didn't feel any better on Monday. I'd caught a rotten cold, and I was chugging water and sucking frantically on cough drops that made me queasy just to get through a class. My head was pounding before lunch. And because I'm a logical person, I decided that was a good time to examine the inherent value of my job -- both in the teaching (am I even doing anything worthwhile for these kids? Is there even any point?) and in the program I coordinate, which, right now, feels incredibly lonely and futile, and like, if I'm the only one who cares, what is the actual point? These were my thoughts as I bought a Pepsi from the vending machine. I hate Pepsi so much, and I don't think I've plugged coins into that machine since I was pregnant and needed white cheddar popcorn in 2006, but my head hurt so much and I needed something.

Tuesday was slightly better. I snagged an actual parking spot. My sophomores, who've been sort of a tough bunch this year, were engaged and sort of charming and I had a good time with them. Matt had chopped all of the vegetables for supper the night before, so it took very little effort for me to cook a soup three of us enjoy and one of us tolerates and then I managed to get everyone to Tae Kwon Do on time. On Wednesday, I wasn't coughing so much, and I cleaned the bathrooms and vacuumed the house. Yesterday, I woke up after the best sleep I'd had in a week (no cough drops gluing my tongue to the roof of my mouth all night!) and decided there was a small chance I might still love my job after all.

And then the package came, delivered to my door in the rain on a cold and damp January afternoon.

***

Matt and I were married seventeen years ago, on a December night in my hometown in Montana. Seventeen years ago, we didn't feel the need to see each moment unfold through the cameras on our phones (because seventeen years ago, phones didn't work like that). We experienced everything as it happened, unfiltered. Seventeen years later, we have, simply, an actual album of photographs, an album of photos taken from the disposable cameras left on the tables at the reception, my journal entries, a CD and a video, and our memories. It was one of the best, most perfect days of my life, and the days that followed, hunkered down at our little cabin along a snowy river in the mountains, are forever memorialized as perfectly, wonderfully cozy as well.

But marriage isn't perfect. Nothing is perfect.

Perfect is, for instance, the dinnerware set we registered for seventeen years ago, when we headed to Macy's on a summer evening. We were so young, barely into adulthood; everything we had in our little apartment had come from my family's farm or IKEA, so I felt a certain weight to this task of choosing plates and bowls our children, God willing, would eat from. We aimed that little gun at sheets and towels, at kitchen gadgets. But the pots and pans, the plates and bowls and saucers and coffee cups -- those mattered the most to me. Sheets would be replaced, and gadgets were gadgets, but the plates meant something more.

It's not that they were fancy -- the opposite, in fact. They were the things that would bear our use every single day. Our cereal, our coffee, our dinners. Seventeen years ago, we ate Tuna Helper and four-cheese macaroni from WinCo off those plates; today I serve up food cooked from fresh vegetables, straight from the Moosewood cookbook or my favorite recipes from whatever food blog I've decided to follow. Appetizers from Trader Joe's baked on a Friday afternoon. Cookies baked from a child's fundraiser. I never needed or particularly desired fancy china, but I put more thought into this dinnerware than any other thing we registered for. These would be a part of our life, every single day.

Matt, unsurprisingly, was less opinionated on the matter, so he was agreeable to my choice: a set of dishes patterned in green and blue, in swirls of vines and leaves against a white background. My favorite colors. They also reminded me a bit of the dishes from my own childhood, a blue-and-white Scandinavian pattern. I simply loved them.

But dishes used daily are dishes subject to daily life, and that includes some fumbles, some cracks. A wineglass shattered before we moved from our apartment into our house. A plate broken. A bowl dropped. And then another. And another. I realized recently that our bowls -- used for cereal, for rice, for stir-fry, for soup -- have suffered the heaviest use and the most casualties. As the bowls broke, we replaced them hastily. We have a handful of functional, perfectly serviceable and reasonably attractive bowls from IKEA. They're blue; they don't terribly clash with my dishes. But I've noted the absence of the bowls I chose out of love. Love for the pattern, love for the new life I was beginning. And I mourned a bit. Oh, it was silly, I thought. They're just bowls. We're a family of human beings who drop things sometimes. We are blessed beyond measure, and we want for nothing. But I saw our stack of those beautiful bowls shrink, replaced with the perfectly plain, functional IKEA bowls. And I mourned. I did.

***

Matt and I have everything we need, really. He is notoriously difficult to shop for. If there's something I want but don't need, I send him a link, which is why I have some beautiful journals embossed with my initials, with the particular paper and thickness I like. At Christmas we like to donate to organizations we care about instead of using that money for gifts (though we both still find little things to give each other, which is why I always have a lovely box from LUSH, for instance, because Matt knows how much I love bubble baths).

I am grateful for everything I receive from people who love me, but I truly want for nothing.

And yet, the box that arrived this week brought me to tears.

***

Matt looked up the pattern for our dishes -- now long discontinued -- and ordered another set of the bowls we've eaten from, loved, abused, dropped, cracked, and shattered. I sliced open that box with my children looking on.

"What is it?"

"Ohhhh."

"There's no scuff marks!"

A set of perfect bowls, in our perfect pattern, the one we chose for the family we didn't yet have more than seventeen years ago. They were pristine, unmarked by the scrapes of spoons. But that wasn't even the point. The point was that they were there, that my husband had thought of them, that what had been broken and cracked had arrived whole again. I didn't care about the scuff marks. I cared about their ability to hold a bowl of Honey Bunches of Oats or the soup my son likes.

Last night was Leftover Night. It was Scrounge For Your Food night. We had Sunday's chicken soup, Monday's white bean gratin, Tuesday's buffalo cauliflower Soup, Wednesday's Thai peanut noodles with broccoli. We had various unopened packages from Trader Joe's: fish sticks, chicken drumellas. The kids dug around in the freezer for vegetables.

"Can I use this bowl?" asked my daughter, lifting one of the new bowls in her fingertips.

"Of course," I said. "Be careful." I couldn't resist adding that last part, but I almost bit my tongue. I want them to be careful in the way that I want them to take care always. Not because any one thing they touch is sacred, but because we try to move through the world with care, with attention.

I want my children to use those bowls. Those bowls are precious to me, but I don't want anyone to be afraid of using them. I don't want anyone to fear scuff marks.

***

Matt lost his wedding ring at the pumpkin patch a few years ago. It slipped off his finger in the hay pit on a cold October day while he romped with our kids. He searched for it in vain, but finding a ring in a hay pit is the equivalent of finding a needle in a haystack.

We could replace the ring. Because, in the end, the ring is the symbol, and not the thing itself.

"I miss the scuff marks," Matt said, when he slid his new ring onto his finger. A Christmas gift. "I miss the scratches." I understood.

Because nothing is perfect, really. It's life. It's ours. I'm grateful for every moment that reminds me of this, scuff marks and all.

What I want is what I've got, exactly where it is

This morning, on our last morning before the school year begins in earnest, I poured myself a cup of coffee and curled up on the couch with a book. I have to snatch these quiet moments when I can, because Winslows don't really sleep in. But Suzannah is also a teenager now, and this summer she has been "sleeping in" for the first time in her entire life -- which means she emerges from her bedroom, rumply and sleepy-eyed, sometime between 7:30 and 8:00 in the morning. (Once or twice she even slept in just past 8:00, at which point I wondered if I should check to make sure she was still breathing.)

She curled up on the recliner across from me, not quite awake. I didn't say anything right away, hesitant to disturb the quiet balance -- or, more accurately, hesitant to attract the attention of the youngest Winslow, who was already breakfasted and wide awake and ready to troll someone. But I watched her. She didn't even really seem aware of me right away. She arched her back and stretched her arms way over her head, exactly the way she did when she was an infant. Arching her back, sticking out her little bum in her tiny pink sleeper, stretching her arms out wide, pursing her sleepy lips.

I watched my daughter stretch and fold her long limbs back in. She turned toward me.

"Hi," she said.

I can't even put into words how I fall in love with my children all over again in these moments. Again and again.

I wanted to tell her how I was feeling, somehow. How in that moment of just watching her stretch I really saw her, the way she has always been exactly herself. I wanted to tell her about the way I used to open the door to her room after her nap, when she was old enough to pull herself up in her crib. The way she would already be standing up, beaming.

Instead I just held out my arms, and she crossed the living and crawled up on the couch with me, folding herself to fit so I could rest my chin on top of her head, and I breathed in her sleepy scent, warm skin and shampoo from last night's shower.

She has always been exactly herself. I have always been this lucky.

*

The quiet doesn't last, of course. Soon my son was bounding into the living room, shouting his good morning, shrieking his silliness, irritating his sister. And I thought, too, of the way he used to thump his fat little legs with joy when he was a baby, when I was changing him, or even just playing with him on the floor. He'd thump his legs and let out these ear-piercing shrieks, his eyes wide and shining, his grin open-mouthed with delight. As soon as he found his voice he used it to scream, and the message was clear: Hey, world! Here I am! I'm a baby! It's awesome to be a baby! He has always seemed so happy to just be. Every single day with him is a gift, a reminder not to take myself too seriously.

*

So here we are, the first weekend in September. School starts tomorrow. My daughter will be in eighth grade, her last year in middle school, a fact I cannot process without my chest seizing a bit for all the uncertainty and fear. Is this what it always feels like? I couldn't sleep the night before she started sixth grade; I crept out to the couch at two o'clock in the morning to read a book, trying to distract myself from the fears I was trying desperately not to project onto my daughter. I spent the entire summer before she started kindergarten in a state of anxiety and nausea. Last week I stopped by the school to drop off a check for Isaac's school supplies -- his school takes care of all of them for a small fee -- and I ran into the kids' kindergarten teacher, who remains one of my favorite humans on the planet. We hugged each other and caught up on summer, and when I told her my girl came back from camp taller than me and did she remember that first day of kindergarten, she said, "Oh, yes. I remember." (Bless all the kindergarten teachers, for caring for our babies and for handling their anxious, wrecked parents with patience and grace. If every child could experience the love and warmth and competence of my kids' kindergarten teacher, we'd solve a lot of the world's problems.)

She was fine. I think she'll be fine in high school, too. But I know that this will be my struggle this year -- knowing that in only a few months, it's something I'll have to think about. This was the comfort of seventh grade, knowing she would be okay at her school and knowing we still had a nice buffer before high school.

I was significantly more relaxed when I left my son on the first day of kindergarten, because I knew, loved, and trusted his kindergarten teacher. This week I will leave him with the teacher who also taught his sister for two years, and I couldn't be happier about that. But there are little reminders that he is growing so fast -- like the fact that he signed up for morning patrol last spring, and Friday afternoon was his "training." He'll help with the drop-off car line in the morning, and after he turns ten in December he can be a crossing guard. I keep thinking of the way he used to grab one of the bright orange flags out of the can taped to the pole at the intersection across from the Elliott Bay Brewery, the way he would clutch it in his chubby fist and wave it as we crossed California Avenue on our way to dinner. On Saturday, we drove to Madison Beach in Seattle to swim in Lake Washington one final time this summer, and as we always do, we stopped at Pagliacci Pizza before heading home. We parked across the street and walked to the crosswalk, and Isaac, always the ham, snatched one of the little orange flags tied to a stick and waved it dramatically, bouncing across the intersection while his sister rolled her eyes. Both of them perfectly and always themselves.

*

So here's where I am this weekend: still feeling unmoored the night before school starts, feeling anxious and unsettled in a way I always have. But I will not wake up tomorrow morning sick to my stomach with nerves, and that's not nothing. More importantly, I've spent the last couple of days soaking up the last days of summer with my family and feeling just leveled with gratitude that this is my life, that the people I spend my days with are the people I want to spend my days with.

My kids might really need to go back to school, yes, and they're driving me a little crazy (and they're driving each other straight to insanity, to the point where I'm sort of worried Isaac will revert to biting and Suzannah will punch him in the nose), but to everyone who rolls their eyes at me and says, "Ah, you have a teenager, lucky you," while looking sort of sorry for me? Don't. I loved having my babies when they were babies, but it's these humans I live with now who remind me exactly what matters, and who are the source of my deepest joy. I would never wish us backwards. I love the now, and I've learned to trust that I will loves what comes. Maybe I've learned to choose to love it.

*

Matt took the kids hiking yesterday so I could get some work done. We have been married nearly seventeen years, together for nearly twenty, and he understands the need for quiet and space the weekend before school starts. He packed lunches and sunscreen and took the kids to Denny Creek while I spread my notebooks and binders and laptop all over the dining room table and worked on my unit plans and curriculum maps. I also took a little time to read through journals from my first years of teaching, which has become another back-to-school ritual. It helps when I'm feeling anxious and overwhelmed, because it will never be harder than my first year of teaching, ever. But I don't only read about my first year; I read through the entries of my first few years. I started to feel like I knew what I was doing after that first year, but I was also always anxious. The year I was privileged to teach my first IB classes I spent my last week of summer with a severe case of Imposter Syndrome. (It is interesting to note that I felt the same way many years later, when I was given my first class of regular freshmen. I've taught "regular" sophomores of all stripes more years than not, but freshmen? They require skills.)

I wrote this, a week before my college graduation, when I was feeling more terrified than excited: Probably when I'm forty I will look wistfully back at this wonderful, exciting time in my 22-year-old life and wish I could be here again. I guess it's all about perspective.

Oh, Sweetheart. I would never, ever wish myself back to my twenties. God. I had so many opinions without the life experience to temper them. And other people's opinions mattered too much. I said yes when I should have said no. I stayed in rooms I didn't want to be in, literally and figuratively, and I don't do that anymore. I was not objectively unhappy, but I am so much happier in my own skin now. Hang in there, Kiddo. It gets so much better.

The cherry blossoms, the air, the music

Less than two months ago, by this time on a Sunday afternoon, the sky would be well on its way to dark. Less than two months ago, I sat at the table where I write now, waiting for snow to fall. Since then, we've had the most snowfall I've seen in western Washington in my entire adult life. We missed five days of school. My daughter sprained her ankle during her first soccer practice of the spring season, which happened on a rather lovely afternoon during the first week of March; the next day the sky began to spit snow again while we waited for X-rays, and she learned how to navigate crutches through freezing slush. Ten days later, the temperatures soared into the seventies, hitting record highs. I love the feel of spring air on bare arms, and the sharp scent of freshly-mown grass, and everyone knows how much I love the first sign of cherry blossoms. But the sudden heat in the wrong season is so unsettling to me, as are the predictions that we're in for a hot and dry summer. That might sound appealing after so much snow, but I know we'll spend August breathing nothing but smoke. Again. And I can't believe there are actual people who continue to deny the effects of climate change.

But still, now, at the end of the slog that is the month of March, I believe in gratitude, in experiencing as much as I can with great joy.

This was my Friday evening: Suzannah ensconced in her room with a book, Matt and Isaac outside playing basketball. I sipped wine and read my own book as a pot of buffalo cauliflower soup simmered on the stove. Everything about that soup was wonderful, especially the fact that Matt prepped all the fresh cauliflower, carrots, onion, and garlic I put in it so it was really easy for me to throw together, and also my son happens to love it. Suzannah tolerates it, barely, and that's fine too. Matt brought home nice bread from Trader Joe's, and Friday is our Family Movie Night, so no one could be too grouchy.

I've felt like garbage for a couple of weeks now, battling the same cold as everyone else in Washington state. So many of my students have been out sick, and let me tell you how thrilled I was when one of them sneezed all over the keyboard of my laptop when they were using it to access a PowerPoint for a presentation. It reminded me of having toddlers and the times when they would sneeze directly into my eyeballs, and then we all had colds for four years with only brief breaks, like maybe a week in May and a week in July? Those weeks when nobody had runny noses were nice. Or maybe we'd just given up and resigned ourselves to enjoying spring afternoons and summer mornings despite the snot. Whatever. I'm recovering.

On Friday afternoon, I decided to go for a jog instead of heading straight to the couch, because the cherry trees are blossoming and the air is pleasantly warm and the streets of my neighborhood are so lovely, even on a slightly overcast spring afternoon. And on Friday night I went to bed early and slept deeply -- for the first time in weeks -- without a cough drop gluing my tongue to the roof of my mouth. On Saturday morning the kids let us stay in bed longer than they usually do, and then we all headed out for Suzannah's first soccer game. I do love the first soccer game of spring, that feeling of being back, of moving and playing (even if it's not me on the field; maybe I just mean the feeling of all of us waking up and wanting to be outside). Suzannah's doctor wanted her to wait until next week to return fully to normal activities, so she couldn't play yesterday, but she was there for her team, and the rest of us cheered for these girls we've been cheering for the past three years. The game happened to be at the muddiest field in King County; our first game was there last year, too, in the pouring rain, and Matt and I laughed at the memory of Isaac and the coach's son playing hard anyway until Isaac slipped and fell in the mud and there went our plans to head directly to IKEA afterwards, since he was drenched and angry and covered in wet, sloppy mud from his cheekbones to his toes. But yesterday we sat in the sunshine, in sunglasses and T-shirts. After the game we went out for lunch at 7 Seas, and I ate half of one of my very favorite sandwiches in the entire universe and drank a cold beer with it. We went shopping for my nephew's first birthday. We stopped at a coffee shop we love, and I ordered mine iced. The kids each took a sip and gagged dramatically. Back home, I had just enough time to go for another little jog in the sunshine that just calls me to move and be outside and take a bubble bath before eating a quick dinner (the other half of that fabulous sandwich) before heading to the high school for a Big Band showcase. Suzannah joined jazz band this year, and her band director is really, really good and I am constantly in awe of what he is able to draw from middle schoolers who have only been playing for a year or two. They joined the jazz bands at the high school for this showcase, which mostly featured Jazz I, but absolutely all of it was phenomenal. Full disclosure: I was not really looking forward to spending several hours of my Saturday night at the high school, but when I drove my happy daughter home afterwards, I had absolutely zero regrets. The musicianship was phenomenal, and as someone who had an excellent musical experience throughout high school and college, I have obnoxiously high standards. And I also just really loved watching my daughter enjoy the night with her friends, even if it meant she did not want to sit with me. Also, there was cake and an auction. Look, I don't even go to the auction for my own school, because those kinds of social events are seriously the absolute worst for an introvert like me, like who would I even be cool enough to sit with? But at this auction, all I had to do was sit at a table with my family, eat cake, and enjoy the music. I loved every moment of the performances. Music like that is my thing.

Matt and I figured our little guy would be tired and totally done before the night was actually done, and we weren't wrong, but he actually lasted much longer than we predicted. We kept glancing over to see him grooving. The and took a break near the end to auction off a bunch of things, and at that point, Matt and I looked at each other and said, yeah, our son needs to go to bed. What was funny is that neither one of us really wanted to leave, when I'd assumed that both of us would want to be the parent to head out early and tuck him into bed. In the end, Matt took Isaac home, and I sat alone at our table, just really loving it all -- these high school kids who've worked incredibly hard, their teachers who bring out the best they have to give. Watching my daughter with her friends. Cheering for her after their final combined number and catching a glimpse in that moment of the wonderful person she will become. Is becoming.

I write all this to remember, simply because it's a snapshot, a moment in time in an ordinary month, a long month, and it reminds me of everything I love. It reminds me to stay grateful in these long months. To notice the small things. The cherry blossoms and the really good sandwiches and the sweet moments with our children, who are growing and growing and growing. Spending these gorgeous spring days and these music-filled nights with my family is my thing. I suppose I lead a simple life, but it's mine. It's ours. I never want a single moment to pass without my noticing, because to live in these moments is everything, everything I ever wanted, even before I knew I wanted it.

On Turning 40

I understand why people hate February, deep into the slog of winter. I especially understand the weariness my friends and family in Montana and across the Midwest are feeling after so many (So. Many.) snow days. Admittedly, we were going a little crazy after five, plus a few late starts and early releases. I had to remind myself more than once that this wasn't a thing happening to my precious little self.

Anyway, I don't happen to hate February. First of all, it's my birthday month, and my birthday is at the end of February so I have all month to look forward to it -- and I was lucky enough to be born into a family who has always made me feel loved and celebrated on my birthday. And because I live in the Pacific Northwest, February is the month where spring starts to break through the surface of the mud. I'm also one of those people who enjoys Valentine's Day for purely silly reasons. I like chocolate. I love being a mom of children on Valentine's Day. I love buying cheap, fun Valentine's Day socks. I do not see it as a day for romance or expectation, necessarily, and neither Matt nor I spend much time worrying about what to give each other. Usually we pick up chocolate and share, and I think Matt has brought me flowers every year of our marriage. We exchange cards. Our first year of marriage, we went out to dinner -- along with every other couple declaring their public love for each other, which meant we waited way too long for a table at a mediocre restaurant. The following year, we stayed home and I wore fuzzy gray sweats and we cooked some pasta thing together in the kitchen of our still newish house, and it was so much better. Since then, I've never wanted anything else.

It doesn't hurt that our first Valentine's Day together was spectacular in its own way, though. Matt and I were a long-distance couple that first year; I was a senior in college and he was living in the Twin Cities, working in downtown Minneapolis. The band tour that year took us to places like Nashville and Memphis but we also played a concert in a suburb north of the Cities, and Matt drove an hour to meet the bus that night. He was waiting in front of the school (a high school, maybe? Or was it a church? I don't remember) when the bus pulled up, and our tour manager grudgingly let me vault off the bus and into his arms, and with everyone watching he handed me my Valentine's Day gift: a little bag full of things he knew I liked. A nice pen. A half-pound of good coffee beans. Bubble bath. A book of poetry. Writing all of that out, I would marry that man all over again in a heartbeat -- that and his pecan pie at Thanksgiving. (I also remember our friend Katie, who was his friend first, calling over my shoulder, "Wow. I used to get drunk with that dork.") (Also, Matt just now yelled at me, "You can't use that quote on your blog! My parents read your blog!" Sorry, honey. I love you. It's too cute and it still makes me smile.)

That was eighteen years ago.

I'm still happy to stay home and cook and curl up in sweats with him. And he still knows the little things I love.

I turned forty this week, and last night, curled up with my husband, I said, "I've officially known you for half my life." From now on, every year we're together I'll be able to say, "I've known you for longer than I haven't." And that is one of the great blessings of this life I was lucky enough to land in.

I turned forty this week, and I am nothing but grateful. Growing older, as I posted on Facebook this week, is privilege not all of us get. And I don't feel old, because what does that even mean? I feel like me, which is to say, to echo Madeleine L'Engle, that I am every age I have ever been. I remember reading this when I was fourteen, late at night in my bedroom long after the rest of my house was asleep -- from The Crosswicks Journals, I think? I did a quick Google search:

“I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be... This does not mean that I ought to be trapped or enclosed in any of these ages...the delayed adolescent, the childish adult, but that they are in me to be drawn on; to forget is a form of suicide... Far too many people misunderstand what *putting away childish things* means, and think that forgetting what it is like to think and feel and touch and smell and taste and see and hear like a three-year-old or a thirteen-year-old or a twenty-three-year-old means being grownup. When I'm with these people I, like the kids, feel that if this is what it means to be a grown-up, then I don't ever want to be one. Instead of which, if I can retain a child's awareness and joy, and *be* fifty-one, then I will really learn what it means to be grownup.”

I don't mourn the passing of my childhood, or my twenties, or my thirties. I've learned a lot -- who I am and what I want. And I woke up on my birthday in the very life I realized I'd always wanted for myself. I have so much more work to do, so much more, and there are still things I want. Deeply. There are things I want that I won't ever have, and that's okay; part of the blessing of living forty years is the realization that we won't ever have everything we want, and that it is possible, still, to be happy. Part of the blessing of living forty years is that the pursuit of individual happiness isn't, perhaps, even the point. I am working towards the things I still want, but I'm not sure that my individual happiness is the point there, either. This is the work of a human life.

*

Last weekend I went out to celebrate with Jessica; of all the friends with whom I still keep in touch, I've probably known her the longest. (I still remember the time someone threw up on the back of her dress at our church Christmas program. I'm pretty sure her parents took her home to change and she was back for cookies afterwards.) We've known each other since we were seven. My family moved from Great Falls to Bozeman when I was in the eighth grade, but we still attended each other's confirmations. We went to the same college, had separate friend groups there, but went on the same trip to Europe. We roomed together for the entire month as we traveled through Ireland, England, Wales and France, and she was the one to witness my falling for a boy on that trip, the same one I married a couple of years later. She read at my wedding. I stood on the side of a mountain in Glacier National Park for hers. I had the tremendous privilege of holding her newborn son in the middle of the night while she napped. She had the fucking awful luck of being on the surviving end of "till death do us part" when her husband died of brain cancer last spring.

Let none of us complain about growing older.

She was determined to celebrate. Last week she reminded her friends of the importance of celebrating birthdays, "not with more fanfare, but just with more emphasis, more care. We each have one day a year to celebrate our existence." And it reminded me of the time I said to Matt, years ago, that maybe he should throw me a big party. For my thirtieth. Or my thirty-fifth. Or something.

"Do you...actually want that?" he asked.

He knew I didn't. Instead, five years ago, I started taking my birthday off without apology. I gave myself the gift of a day to do exactly what I would ever do with the gift of a day, an afternoon, free of obligation or responsibility. I took myself out for a really good birthday latte. I sat at a wide wooden table in a coffee shop and wrote. I read a book, and not one I was teaching or going to teach. I took myself out for lunch, where I read some more and sipped a glass of wine. I walked around the streets of a neighborhood I love with a gorgeous view of Puget Sound. I went for a run in the almost-spring air. I soaked in a bubble bath before picking up my kids and heading to Seattle to meet Matt, who entertained them while I shopped for new books, and then we all went to dinner together. It was my perfect day. It still is.

In warmer years, I might see the first buds of cherry blossoms as early as February 26th. Not this year. That's okay. They'll be bursting into bloom soon enough.

*

I was raised to celebrate birthdays. It wasn't that we always needed huge parties, but attention was paid. I remember birthday parties at my grandmother's house -- coffee and cookies for her, or her friends, and probably cake. It's where I learned to sneak sips of watery black coffee. For the first fifteen years of my life I shared a birthday with my great-grandmother. I remember her 100th birthday at her church, shared with my 15th. It's the last picture of us together.

I remember waking up on my 10th birthday to find a pink clock and a note from my mother -- she had received it as a birthday gift when she was a girl, and she was passing it on to me. I woke up early, as I always did. My room was still dark, and everything was in the wrong place. The door was to my left. The window was on the wall opposite my bed, instead of directly above my head. I sat up and remembered that yesterday my mother helped me rearrange my bedroom, something I was allowed to do a few times a year. My room was just large enough to accommodate a few different set-ups, and simply moving my bed to a different wall made me feel like I had an entirely new room. I am orderly by nature, but the momentary disorientation always made me smile. I had chosen this.

A line of light shone beneath my door. My mother was already up, moving around in the kitchen. And then I saw it -- the clock.

I recognized it right away -- the pink plastic rectangular clock with the dancing ballerina. For years it perched atop the headboard in my mother’s old bedroom at the farm, the room I slept in when we visited my grandmother. My parents slept in the bed, and I slept in my Strawberry Shortcake sleeping bag on the floor along the wall. Sometimes I took the clock down and wound it, fascinated by the delicate sound of the wheels inside, the mechanisms turning. When I released the little key, the ballerina turned to the sound of “Oh, what a beautiful morning.” The clock was decades old, but it kept perfect time.

And on the morning of my tenth birthday, I found it on my nightstand. My mother left a note: Dear Shari, this clock was given to me by my grandmother on my eighth birthday, and now I am giving it to you. Happy Birthday to my beautiful girl.

My mother would have turned eight in 1960. Even at ten I possessed an uncanny memory for dates and a deep yearning to know my family’s stories. I remembered that my great-grandfather died the day after my mother’s eighth birthday. His wife -- her grandmother, my great-grandmother -- would have given this clock to her only the day before. I was born on my great-grandmother’s eighty-fifth birthday. She turned ninety-five on my tenth birthday, and two days later I joined her for our family birthday dinner. I’m not sure if this was the reason I felt the clock was weighted with more than my mother’s love for me, but I picked it up with nothing short of reverence.

*

I am every age I've ever been.

The following winter, I could have had a new clock radio. My church youth group was selling meat and cheese trays that year—maybe mixed nuts, too. Christmas-themed snacks. And I was tempted, because my best friend had a clock radio that played top-40 songs when it went off in the mornings. What I really wanted from that fundraiser, though, was the phone—it was just a simple white plastic touch-tone, but it would go in my bedroom. I wouldn’t get my own line—ever, my parents emphasized—but if I sold enough beef sticks and cheese balls, I would be allowed to keep it in my room. There would be limits, but I would be allowed to call Julia and speak in relative privacy, rather than in the middle of the kitchen. And anyway, I loved my little pink ballerina clock. It only played one song, but I loved the physical motion of winding it each day, loved the sound of those intricate little gears and the way I could set the time so the ballerina would begin to dance each morning. I loved the click, the momentary grinding before the plinking music began.

When my grandmother moved into the nursing home a year later, we still slept at the farm and my parents still slept in my mother’s old bedroom. I was the one who slept in my grandmother’s bed, alone on the main floor. I packed the little pink clock into my suitcase each time we visited.

My grandmother died -- too young -- from Scleroderma on a Tuesday morning in November. My mother was younger than I am now. My parents needed to make arrangements so I spent the night at Julia’s house, unrolling my sleeping bag against the wall of her basement bedroom. We went to school together the next morning as if everything was normal, and then my dad drove my brother and me north to the farm where we would stay for the rest of the week.

My friend’s bedroom was almost as familiar as my own, but that night I was as disoriented as I was when I rearranged my own furniture. None of it was my own choosing. She set the alarm on her clock radio a little early so we both had time to shower before school, but before I went to sleep I pulled out the pink ballerina clock and wound that, too.

I am every age I've ever been.

Let none of us complain about growing older.

*

I turned forty this week. My parents flew in for just a few hours, trying to return to their snowy home after a few days in Phoenix. Suzannah had a band concert, and my mother had a gift for me -- a mug I gave her when I was Suzannah's age, when she turned forty. Twenty-seven years ago. 40 is not the end of the world! But you can see it from there.

I laughed hard, and after sipping my morning coffee from that mug all week, I realize I love it at least as much as I love that pink ballerina clock. This is what it means to celebrate a birthday with care. This is a gift my mother gave me, and it transcends any thing on this earth.

I turned forty this week. I woke up in a life I love. I am lucky to love so many people.

It was a perfect day. I sipped coffee from my new twenty-seven-year-old mug. I jogged around my neighborhood in the bitingly cold and beautiful sunshine, the snow barely melted, Puget Sound a brilliant blue just down the hill from my house. I walked down to the edge of the water to catch my breath. I stood in a hot shower. I took myself to lunch. I read a book I'm loving, ate something that made me feel amazing, sipped a cold glass of white wine at noon. I lingered over a latte at a coffee shop I don't get to often. I came home and curled up on the couch for a nap, the sun streaming through the glass doors in the dining room. In the early evening, we all went to the Elliott Bay Book Company, and I picked up just a few things I may have missed at Powell's, and we went out for a cozy dinner. It is everything I could have wanted from this day, from any day. To feel the sun on my skin, to taste good coffee, to hug my children, to curl up in bed with the one who's known me, really known me, for my entire adult life.

I found this in a journal I kept a decade ago, from an entry I wrote late in February. It seems fitting to rediscover now:

The air is sweet with the first breath of spring. I never feel the need to crawl up, crawl out from winter's quiet depths until I smell it, that singing fresh scent under the mud, under the earth and the grass. It's almost painful, that first gasp of sharp sweet air, like a birth, like a death.

We find ourselves so fumblingly human together. My head meets your shoulder, your hand finds mine. We seek out that touch, your lips against my hair, my breath against your neck, my hip bumping yours, our hands across a table, our knees underneath. And all of these accidental collisions of skin, proof of life, proof that we are still alive, proof that we still are breathing and moving. My sigh against your chest, my tear against your hand, my hope against your life. Our eyes meet. We are not meant to go it alone.

We drove to Discovery Park this afternoon. We left it in late October, our feet treading upon the sweet damp mulch of fallen leaves. All that sweet rot. We returned today in the sunshine, cool air knifing my lungs. Wake up. I know this scent. It is buried deeper in the landscapes of my youth, under snowfall and dirt, deep, dark in the earth. It emerges earlier here, washing down the streets in the rain, rising to the surface of the earth in the sunlight, in the breeze.

We hiked to the bluffs overlooking Puget Sound. You are the rock against my wave; we are the rocks against each other's waves; we are the waves together, crashing against grief, against joy, the terrible swelling, the ebb and flow, the rise, the breaking.

I thought about grief, about joy, about all the ways we find and lose each other on ordinary days, on the breath of the first day of spring. About how it comes from the same place, about how the source of joy can be so dark and deep, how grief can be surprisingly light.

Give Me Everything

“Here is all I ask of a book- give me everything. Everything, and don't leave out a single word.”
― Pat Conroy, My Reading Life

I don't really understand people who don't read books, or who don't, at all times, have a reading list -- fluid, ever-growing, ever-changing. I'm so excited about my list for 2019 that I'm writing about part of it before I read everything on it, and about ten months before my end-of-the-year book review. And it's not just the books on my personal reading list; I have the extreme privilege to teach literature in an IB school. About every seven years, each subject area goes through curriculum review and program changes, and the changes coming for literature starting next year are pretty exciting to me.

What I'm telling you is that my work wife and I armed ourselves with with index cards, stickers, and markers (all in different colors) and met at Starbucks on our day off to start working on our vision board. I have never made a real vision board in my life, but I am joyfully and unironically making one now. We are that excited. Today I skipped around my classroom singing softly about changing the world through literature. I don't think my students noticed anything out of the ordinary.

*

Last weekend I made my annual/semi-annual pilgrimage to Powell's Books in Portland. We plan a family trip there every winter, because I like to have something to look forward to in the slog of January and February. We work in activities for everyone, it's not just books -- folks want to eat and things, I guess. So we do that too. But this trip, I explained to my students this week, is really a spiritual experience for me. I work in at least two visits to The Bookstore in a 24-hour period (but I've been known to squeeze in more).

The first time, I take my list. We drive down sometime during the afternoon, check into our hotel, and head downtown. I have an agenda for that visit. At some point, Matt and the kids will wander across the street to put in our name for dinner at Deschutes Public House; the wait on a Saturday night is always long, so I can linger at the bookstore for anywhere from forty minutes to an hour.

(I should point out how absolutely wonderful it is to have children who a.) love to read and b.) are old enough for me to deposit in the enormous Children's/Young Adult section and leave them while I browse. These trips were more challenging when they required direct supervision, or carrying, and I will forever love my husband for taking on a great deal of this responsibility when they were little.)

On the second day, we do a Family Activity (OMSI, the zoo, etc.), followed by lunch at Laughing Planet, and then we return to the bookstore, and this is when I allow myself to wander through the stacks and let the books call to me. I don't know how else to describe it. Sometimes I discover books I didn't know I needed. Or I find a beautiful signed hardcover first edition of a book I've wanted for a long time at an absurdly cheap price. Often my family grows restless, so Matt takes them to a nearby park. He takes them to another brewery he wants to try, and the kids eat pretzels and drink root beer while he orders a beer sampler. They collect me in the late afternoon before we eat an early dinner and begin the drive home.

*

During our Portland trip three years ago, I learned that my very favorite writer, Pat Conroy, had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. I wrote about it here, even:

Dear Internet: I do not know how to express my actual, real-life devastation. Pat Conroy changed my life. I never met him, but I fully intended to. I thought I would fly to Minneapolis if I had to the next time he went on tour (his tour for The Death of Santini didn't bring him to Seattle but it did take him to St. Paul) and I would tell him this. And then I would have him sign a book to one of my truest and dearest friends, a coach, because Pat Conroy made the word Coach so beautiful to me...

...but that day I handled the news by hunkering down in a coffee shop and writing him a letter while Matt took the kids to the park. I'm thirty-seven years old, yes, and I am writing a love letter to a man I will likely never meet. I sat in a coffee shop and wrote and wrote and wrote, sipping my little almond milk latte. I didn't pause until a young woman sitting near me said, "Excuse me, but do you mind if I ask what you've been writing?" And that little exchange launched an entire conversation about literature and death and philosophy. It turns out this woman was a former IB student from Quebec who is currently studying in Ontario. We talked about writers and exchanged book lists. She left a note in my journal.

I thought of her last weekend. I walked by that coffee shop, even, but I didn't take the time to stop.

I wish I would have. I had things to write about in the journal I always carry with me.

*

I bought eight books last weekend. At least one of them I won't read right away. I am slowly collecting every single book Brian Doyle wrote; he is my second favorite author, after Pat Conroy, and he died of brain cancer a little over a year after Conroy died and almost exactly a year before my oldest friend's husband died of brain cancer, and seriously, just fuck all of that cancer. I will ultimately read all of Brian Doyle's work, but I can't bear to read it too quickly.

I don't buy an obscene amount of books, ever. And I don't have books piled in corners all over my house. I do own a lot of books, and I think I reread books more than most folks, and sometimes even when I don't reread an entire book there are books I need to keep because sometimes I need to reach for them and swim in their sentences. I need to immerse myself in the "texture and cadence of the language" (as I tell my students). But I don't hang on to books I don't love or won't return to. I have a lot of credit built up at Pegasus Book Exchange in West Seattle. I've also worn the same pair of shoes for the past, like, hundred years, because I don't care about shoes. (And if I don't need to own a book but still want to read it, I use libraries. I almost always have something on hold there.) That's my answer to the "How do you keep up with/how do you afford" folks. I buy books and I read them because it matters to me, a lot. It's what I do.

Anyway, whatever, I bought eight.

I absolutely knew I wanted these:

An Orchestra of Minorities, by Chigozie Obioma: I read Obioma's first novel The Fishermen a few years ago and it was absolutely stunning, and the reviews for his new novel suggest that this one absolutely measures up to that expectation.

Lost Children Archive, by Valeria Luiselli: After I read Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions, an essay structured around the forty questions asked of migrant children facing deportation, I'd follow Luiselli anywhere.

All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cancer and Cooking, by Karen Babine: Fun fact -- I graduated from Concordia with the author, which has nothing to do with anything except that I was lucky enough to attend a college that fostered and produced (produces) some great writing and an enduring love and appreciation for stories and language. Anyway. The only reason I didn't read this book in a single night is because I picked it up at nine o'clock on a school night, after my children were in bed, and I finished it the next day. It's SO good. It's a book that will resonate deeply with anyone who has a strong sense of place, of family, for anyone who understands how both food and language have the power to heal and connect us. It's beautiful. This is a book that will likely be categorized in the health/wellness/illness section of the bookstores, depending on which bookstore you're in, but that's a mistake. It should be front and center with any other memoir, because what she writes about is human experience and human love. And she does it in absolutely gorgeous sentences. I couldn't put it down.

Shameless: A Sexual Reformation, by Nadia Bolz-Weber: I'll read every book she publishes, because I love her, but I am all about dismantling conservative Christians' toxic obsession with sex and sexuality. (And I hope everyone who mailed her their purity rings has experienced some sort of healing.)

Black Leopard, Red Wolf, by Marlon James: I'm admittedly not a devoted reader of fantasy, but I am a devoted reader of Marlon James, and I am so here for this book, described as a sort of "African Game of Thrones." (I am 100% willing to bet it's better.) I still think it's tragically unfair that Marlon James was in Portland when I was in Seattle and Seattle when I was in Portland.

The next day, after much wandering, after much carrying books around the store to see how they felt after an hour, after much deliberation, I settled on these:

Days Without End, by Sebastian Barry: This made the longlist for the Man Booker Prize in 2017 (a year which yielded a really spectacular list in general, in my opinion), and it also comes highly recommended by some folks whose literary opinions I deeply respect. I found a beautiful used hardcover in impeccable condition, so it felt like a sign.

Parkland: Birth of a Movement, by Dave Cullen: I read Cullen's book on Columbine several years ago, and it was truly excellent. I absolutely trust him with this subject matter. If he'd chosen to write about Sandy Hook, I might have given it a pass -- I still can't read a complete account of that day, however condensed, without a stab of panic and grief threatening to choke me. Sandy Hook destroyed me in ways I still can't write about, because I identify too much with the mothers. Parkland destroys me in a different way, but as a high school teacher, and as a passionate advocate for AT THE VERY FUCKING LEAST sensible gun legislation, and as a person deeply privileged to work with passionate teenagers, I think this is one I need to read immediately.

The Adventures of John Carson in Several Quarters of the World: A Novel of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Brian Doyle: Because this is the last of Brian Doyle's novels published before his death in 2017. Because every sentence he writes is magic. Because. I won't read this one right away. I have collections of his essays, prose poems, and stories that I also dip into here and there, slowly. I can't bear the thought of reading the last of his words, knowing there will never be any more. It's also hard to come to terms with the knowledge that at some point, I will have bought them all. So I collect them slowly. Powell's is a good place for this; he was an Oregon writer, and they loved him well.

*

I carried some books that ultimately went back on the shelves, as I always do. But I need to save something for my birthday next week. All I ever want for my birthday is this: a day to write and drink coffee by myself in the morning, to take myself to lunch and read and sip a glass of wine on a weekday at noon, to take a walk through a certain neighborhood with the trees I know are about to burst with spring cherry blossoms, to look out across Puget Sound, and to go book-shopping and out to dinner with my family at night. It's my perfect day, always, and it's more than enough.