I told you I was skipping this week, but I lied. A little.

It was a sibling family vacation, see, and my oldest brother showed up with a bag of matching t-shirts. Before handing them out, he made a little speech, warning us that they might be political—or also might not be.

Except for his, every shirt was printed with some version of:

Lake Ontario
Established 1656

His said:
Undiagnosed. But something ain’t right.

Gosh, I feel fortunate to have the family I have.

Folks, get loud if you’re so moved. Or wear t-shirts that make people think. We could use more of both these days.

We approve this message.

See you next week!

~Elizabeth

We are back in time, and the young couple are working to get their wooden boat back in the water so they can sail south. Built just after World War II, the vessel is an old girl worth saving. The husband is experienced, the wife a willing but inept apprentice, and together they lack the bottomless bank account needed for hired help, so they’re doing it themselves. It’s taken longer than expected to get this far, and they are both putting in the hours now, evenings and weekends.

They shimmy along the scaffolding he’s built to bring them eye-level with the paint that needs stripping, and the bungs that need filling, and the seams that need stuffing. Long legs working to her advantage, she determines to hop down from her perch without bothering to use the ladder. Pointing her toes toward the ground like a gymnast, she does not anticipate that her butt will leave the platform before her feet make contact, and she finds herself in a brief, ungraceful free fall. She does not stick the landing.

The wife’s now dented shins having found the cinder block she’d been hoping to use as a step stool, she lets out a howl which is met with an unexpected response:

Husband: “Why didn’t you tell me you needed help?!”

Wife, through gritted teeth: “Because…I didn’t know I was going to fall!”

Thirty years and dozens of mishaps later, it is a moment they still laugh about. She sometimes brings it up in social settings to commiserate with another sorry sod who has lost their footing. Such is the case when she hears about a dog who bolts out the door, its owner in hot pursuit until a cement planter gets in the way, sending the owner ass over teakettle.

And so it is that the original scaffolding story resurfaces, with the wife and the husband going over the familiar details again in the bathroom one morning like old folks do, until he says something he hasn’t said in three decades of marriage.

“I felt like it was my fault. I thought I’d thought of everything to keep you safe. But I didn’t think of that.”

The wife finds this touching and also a little insane, protective instincts gone mad. As far as she knows, the husband has no special arrangement with gravity nor does he control her decisions, so really, there is nothing he could have done. But for all these years he’s thought of it as something he failed to prevent.

Probably there’s some biological hardwiring going on here, men as protectors and all that, though the wife can’t help noting how often they break the rules of that assumption. Regardless, protection and prevention aren’t the same.

Protection is designed to manage risk while prevention is the fantasy that risk can be eliminated altogether. And it’s not just men who are misinterpreting.

Another free-range kid kerfuffle has cropped up, this time for a Virginia mom who allowed a five-year-old son to walk alone in a gated community. A concerned citizen called a security guard, who called the police, who called Child Protective Services. Found guilty of contributing to the delinquency of a minor, the Virginia mother says an appeal is forthcoming.

The wife thinks about the time she called the police, convinced her husband was dead in a ditch. Turns out, he was sequestered as a juror and not allowed to use his phone. She notices that protection in the age of mobile devices can look a lot like panic.

Her neighbors have security cameras. Her phone knows the location of everyone in the family, including her, should anyone spontaneously forget where they are. The label on the coffee cup warns of hot contents, the peanut butter of containing nuts, which is, in fact, nuts.

It’s all intended to protect, but we’ve crossed the wires between managing risk and outlawing it. The woman in Virginia was convicted of permitting the possibility that something terrible might happen. Congratulations! The safety pendulum has now swung itself right off the charts. Somebody give that mother a medal for daring to parent at all.

The husband, for what it’s worth, has spent a lifetime fixing things: boats, furniture, real and imagined problems. But wives don’t respond well to sanding or glue, and they’re decidedly not idiot-proof. And nothing in the whole world can make anyone responsible for gravity.

~Elizabeth

So, I guess love doesn’t require a crystal ball 🔮 just someone who’s willing to share responsibilities and scoop you up when you fall.

• Where do you draw the line between protecting people you love and letting them make their own mistakes?

• Were you a free range child? What about your kids? Grandkids?

• Do you know where your people are?

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Afterward:
Each week I close with something specific to try, because insight without action is just a nice thought. This week’s is a quiet one, just a question to consider.

Try this:
Ask yourself if there’s something you feel responsible for that was never yours to hold, or prevent. You might be surprised by what you’re carrying.

See you soon!

Prefer to listen? You’ll find an original audio recording here. ⬆️

Every now and then, the water goes away. It happens when the wind blows just so and the moon is doing whatever it is the moon does, and a creek that’s usually deep enough to keep its secrets becomes startlingly shallow. The water in these Chesapeake Bay tributaries doesn’t rise and fall with quite the drama of the open coast, so I don’t always notice the tides. But there are times when it all rushes out and the shoreline changes, exposing things that have been hidden beneath it.

There are bottles and shards of pottery, electrical insulators and broken glass worn to translucence by years of tumbling in a wash of sediment, items whose original purposes are sometimes obvious and sometimes not. Every piece I’ve found has been at the water’s edge. I have heard stories of shipwrecks and automobiles, vintage tractors and cow skeletons, each making clear how long people regarded the water as a convenient place to discard anything they no longer wanted to keep. Out of sight, out of mind.

The people who disposed of their belongings this way weren’t thinking about artifacts. They were just living ordinary lives with no reason to imagine someone, generations later, standing on a muddy creek bank trying to figure out what the hell they were thinking, or what they might have once done with the relic now in someone else’s hands.

I have a small bottle old enough to have required a cork stopper. The colorless glass flashes iridescent blues and purples from its place on the kitchen windowsill, a byproduct of the manufacturing process used for clear glass plus years of UV exposure. Other than a tiny, curvy numeral 2 up around the shoulders, there are no markings. Inside are two solid pieces that, when they line up, look like they once conformed to the slightly irregular shape of the bottle bottom. Surprisingly, they float in water.

For the longest time, I thought they were shells, remnants of a living creature who escaped to a larger vessel. More recently, I learned they’re likely just the solidified sediment of a desiccated liquid medicinal treatment. The internet has a propensity for turning a handful of loosely connected clues into a story, and in this case it led me to a supposed pharmacist who filled the bottle with an antacid, sold it to a customer with an unsettled stomach, who eventually tossed it out with the dregs of its original contents still floating around inside.

Or maybe a person who cared for someone with a cranky gut tossed the bottle into the creek, long after their beloved passed the point of needing any medicines at all.

A bottle with two delicate chunks inside is a physical reminder of a life, but it tells me almost nothing of the life itself. I don’t know who bought it, what they were sick with, or whether they were sick at all, whether they were happy, or kind, or difficult, or loved. I don’t know what they believed about the world or what they hoped the future held. From this one artifact, I can construct a thousand possible lives, none of which I can verify. The trouble with looking backward is that we can so easily mistake evidence for understanding.

It feels almost too obvious to say anything about Dolly Parton now. Since her death, there has been such a sweet rising of mourners and memory makers, people surfacing to tell stories about what she meant to them, what she gave them, how her music touched them. Anything I might say has been said already, and better.

She was a force and a unifier, but her life was far from uncomplicated. She made a fortune and unapologetically spent a sizable portion of it on refining her natural appearance. Living with endometriosis meant she was physically unable to have children. Goaded by jealousy over a bank teller’s flirtations with her husband, Dolly wrote the song “Jolene.” Over the years, both her sexual orientation and her marital fidelity were scrutinized.

Dolly understood the machinery of celebrity and used it effectively. She wanted to be successful, she wanted to be beautiful, she wanted to make money, and she wanted to use that money to do good. She believed in herself and seemed genuinely interested in helping other people do the same. She set out for Nashville with a dream and made it happen, becoming tremendously wealthy without letting wealth itself be the point. She was famous without needing everyone else to become less important. She loved her family, loved her work, knew who she was and what she stood for.

I think that may be what so many people appreciated most in her. Wouldn’t we all like to get to the end of our lives having become more ourselves rather than less, having made something from whatever we were given, having loved the people we were given to love, and having done something beneficial along the way? Surely there is a version of the promise we were handed as children that still works: trust in yourself, be diligent, take a chance, and you can make something of your life.

Dolly made that promise look less unlikely.

The day after she died, the order came down to fly flags at half-staff. The one at the school near me was set below the halfway point. I’m sure somebody just lowered it too far, but to me it felt right. The world had lost something more precious than the usual practice could convey. In the aftermath of the loss, we make official gestures, tell stories, write tributes, try to make a record of what someone meant while they were here, but there is always more to the story.

We can’t measure the effect of one life on another. What matters most is the most difficult to preserve, and there is so damn much we don’t know. But we do know that praise can come easily, that kindness compounds. Dolly put the obligation like this: “You just do stuff not realizing…but as soon as you realize that it is a problem, then you should fix it. Don’t be a dumbass. If it’s a problem, fix it. That’s where my heart is. I would never dream of hurting anybody on purpose.”

I wonder what people a hundred years into the future will realize that those of us alive today will never understand. I hope in among all the ridiculousness, they find bits and pieces of the marvelous. I hope they are forgiving enough to recognize that obviousness can be a privilege of hindsight.

Dolly will leave recordings and photographs and books and businesses and buildings and all the other tangible remains of a very large life. Part of her will be here long after everyone who knew her personally is gone. But what I think we feel right now is the absence of someone who made space while also standing her ground, someone who could, in one way or another, tell a person: You get to be here, too.

~Elizabeth

As I was putting the finishing touches on today’s piece, I learned that Wendell Berry had died. Berry and Parton seem like people who could hardly be more different. One spent his life on a Kentucky farm, writing poems and essays about land, limits, community, and the obligations we have to the places we inhabit. The other built an enormous life in music and entertainment, in rhinestones and television and theme parks and songs everybody knows.

But both believed that living a good life was partly a matter of what you do with what has been entrusted to you. A piece of land. A community. A talent. A platform. Other people. Berry spent his life asking us to take care of the ground beneath us. Parton spent hers making room for the people around her. And both were arguing against the idea that we’re here simply to consume what we find.

If you enjoyed what you read today, please leave a heart or a comment behind. Tell me about someone whose absence has made you realize how much room they took up in the world, for better or worse.. And if you’d like to keep these conversations going, come on in as a paid or free subscriber. I’d be deeply grateful.

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Afterward:
Each week, I end with an idea, a concrete way to engage, because I believe in the power of collective action.

Try this:
Think about something you know more about now than you once did—something you said, did, overlooked, didn’t understand. If there’s something to fix, fix it. (My friend and fellow Substacker, , offers a touching example here.) And if there’s someone who deserves a little more room, a little more kindness, or a little more understanding, make room.

See you soon!

~Elizabeth

A clarification, now that you’ve made it all the way through, and because we are wise to not make assumptions these days: I don’t think facts are a scourge. Quite the opposite, actually. It’s called satire, written, in this instance, like an op-ed.

But it’s impossible to not notice how often we treat strong feelings as all that’s needed to settle a debate. I do it, too. It happens with everything from leftover pizza to the size of a crowd at a parade. The scale changes but the instinct is the same. And it’s not a one-sided tendency. The urge to defend a position is human, not partisan. It’s just easier to see when the other guy (or gal) is doing it.

I hope you’ll feel like spending a few minutes with me and others in the comments on this one. Nothing means more to me than getting the chance to learn more about your ideas and ideals while you’re there.

Leave a comment

• What’s the dumbest hill you’ve died on, facts be damned?

• Can you remember a time when facts changed your mind?

• Do you know someone who is especially good at hearing both sides? (Hearing not being the same as agreeing.)

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Afterward:
I like to close with one small idea, because I believe that collective action adds up and just might make a difference. But today, two ideas.

Try this:
If you want a slightly bigger-brained companion to this week’s nonsense, Big Think shared a piece yesterday arguing that our grip on objective truth is tangled up with print literacy, offering that as we drift from reading and writing toward more oral, visual, algorithm-fed culture, our hold on shared facts may be loosening right along with it. Worth a read if you’ve got ten minutes.

I can’t overlook another unintended connection, though, in Dolly Parton’s passing yesterday. Her Imagination Library has mailed free books to kids from birth to age five, in five countries, for decades, one of the better real-world answers to a “print literacy is fading” problem anyone’s come up with. Consider this your nudge to donate, or just go put a good book in a kid’s hands.

See you soon!

Prefer to listen? You’ll find an original audio recording here. ⬆️

I’m thinking about plump and tumbled cherry tomatoes, how they sit within arms reach of my favorite chair. I fill my mouth with round bursts of summer, acid-sweet, half hoping they make up for the water I’m always forgetting to drink.

I’m thinking about freshly harvested potatoes in a basket under the cupboard with the cracked pane of glass, broken the day my husband ferried the newly constructed piece home. Starchy orbs of all sizes, and gritty as the fingernails used for digging.

I bottom-water a potted plant (go ahead, laugh—twelve-year-old me sure is), and am met soon after with two nubby rafts floating across the dish. White, pinhead spheres held together in cottony clusters, all hobnail bedspread and remnants of childhood.

Eggs, I think, because it’s always eggs, someone ready to hatch out and crawl all over my world, but research proves me wrong. They are a saprophytic fungus, vultures of the plant world, here to make something useful out of what is otherwise finished. Baby mushrooms, more staff than guest, not only do they do no harm, they occupy the intersection between arriving and departing.

I’m thinking of circles and spheres, of roundness and rotation, of how their starting points meet you wherever you are.

No matter where the journey originates, a circle comes around to its own beginning and ending, and I’m thinking about how that makes it feel resolved, no loose ends, complete but not finished. The tomato delivers its seeds from one place to the next, the potato comes from versions of itself, last year’s plants getting ready to be this year’s. The fungi are moments inside a movement, caught mid-sentence and shaped like a collection of periods, but only for now.

A dot is a fixed point; a line moves forward or backward, up or down; an angle is a line that changes its mind; a circle goes somewhere and comes back again. Exist, travel, turn, return. Living is all lines and angles, beings on their paths from birth to death. Life, though, is a circle, a perpetual recycling of energy into energy, of necessary reciprocity. How heartening to remember to see the geometry of being as soft and cyclical, like seasons, like days.

Roundness is comforting. Humans are among many species drawn to it, with explanations ranging from an evolved fondness for the gentle curves of our own offspring to the round shape of our own eyes. The lens through which we view our part of the universe is, itself, circular. Teeth cut, edges constrain. Is it surprising, then, that we find tension in sharp corners, in hard angles? A line asks that we consider an endpoint. A circle invites continuation.

I’m thinking of rounds of drinks and applause, of sunny cheeks and soft bellies, of pillowy breasts and generous bottoms, of melons, and marbles, of peaches, and planets, of timelines and deadlines imposed because they’re better at shaping the stories of what might otherwise be timeless, of atoms, of cells, of seeds, of eggs, of wombs, of moons, of orbits, of galaxies, of love.

~Elizabeth

Now for the best part: I get to turn the thoughts over to you. Thanks for coming along with me today, and I hope you’ll spend some time with others in this fine community by joining in on the comments.

• What’s the roundest thing in your kitchen right now?

• Do you have an uncanny tendency to end up with wonky-wheeled shopping carts? I refuse to believe I’m the only one.

• Ever had an egg situation that got out of hand, like the multitudes of praying mantids that hatched on my kitchen counter one year?

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Afterward:
Systems run on the assumption that every piece is doing its part, a lot of ordinary folks doing the same work, reliably, over and over. Staff, not heroes. I like to end each week with small ideas that I hope bring us closer to thinking collectively and caring deeply.

Try this:
Grab a pen and piece of paper. Without lifting the pen, draw one slow circle in a continuous loop. Take your time. Do it again, and again, ten or twenty times, without trying trying to make one better than the last. You’re not going for perfect circles. All you’re doing is watching the process, seeing your hand come back around, and noticing, when you do, whether it feels like an ending, a beginning, or both.

See you next time around!

My whole adult life, I’ve believed that immigration is everyone’s story. Trace a family back far enough and you’ll find people who left their home with a bundle of hope and not much else. My husband and I have roots in England and Scotland, Ireland and Germany. You’ve likely got your own version of how you came to be where you are. We are, most of us anyway, the residue of others’ enormous leaps of faith.

So when the news overflows with images of people being plucked off streets and out of government offices, people who showed up to routine check-ins, who’d lived here for decades, I ache for them and their families. I write checks, sign petitions, feel the helplessness of seeing horrible injustices unfold but still go to sleep as I do any other night. You might call it privileged awareness.

The deaths force me to reckon with privilege more directly: 31 people died in ICE detention in 2025, the highest number in two decades. One man succumbed to a tooth infection because no one arranged a dentist appointment. Still, it took my daughter’s phone call from the lobby of a consulate office in Perth to make the stakes feel terribly personal.

She had been living in Sydney for a few years when she met and fell in love with a Brazilian man. They moved in together in a matter of weeks, building the life of young people who are far from folks who love them, sustained by each other, optimism, and a tolerance for small apartments. Last September I flew to Australia to see them both. He is warm, and funny, and he looks at my daughter the way any parent hopes a partner will. It was a lovely visit.

For awhile, their plan was to move to the United States when their Australian visas expired. I was thrilled at the prospect of having my baby girl back home. Then in January 2026, the U.S. State Department issued a directive pausing all immigrant visas for nationals of 75 countries, including Brazil. An immigration attorney in Australia confirmed what we feared: a door had closed. So, we shifted to Plan B.

They would both come to Maryland in mid-May for a brief transition visit. He’d shake hands with her father and hug her sister. She’d stay three weeks, he’d stay two, flying ahead to Brazil a week earlier to start getting things set up for their new life there, where his family lives, where he has roots. It seemed like a reasonable second choice.

In preparation, they gathered and organized papers into a color-coded binder, with tabbed sections and sheet protectors. My daughter comes by her organizational tendencies honestly. They included his Brazilian visa, letters of support from parents, their flights into and out of the U.S., his bank statements, and a signed relocation statement from her confirming that she was, in fact, moving to Brazil. Look ma! No surprise American immigrants!

They scheduled the only appointment they could get with a U.S. Consulate before their visas expired. They practiced how he would answer questions in English, and tried to calm their nerves before flying six hours from Sydney to Perth. She was required to wait downstairs while he went up for the interview. His documentation also showed that his father owns a business in Brazil, that his mother and sister are there. He had everything he thought he needed to prove that he had a life waiting for him in Brazil.

The consular officer asked two questions—what was the purpose of his trip to the U.S., and was he married?—before sliding a piece of paper across the desk. Interview over.

The denial letter was in English. He needed my daughter to translate it to fully grasp what had just happened. He was ineligible for a nonimmigrant visa because he had failed to demonstrate sufficient ties outside the United States. Ah, the irony. The officer never looked at a single supporting document.

I will not share here what I said when my daughter called to tell me. It was not my most measured moment, and I regret nothing.

The rejection wasn’t legally required. The immigrant visa pause that closed the door on their moving here explicitly, repeatedly states that it does not apply to tourist visas. The officer made a discretionary decision on the basis of a too-brief inquiry, a glance at the Brazilian passport, and preconceived ideas, or orders, that this 27-year-old was not a suitable candidate.

I’m sulky because not only did I not get my kiddo back for good, she ended up shortening her already short visit home. I’m worked up because our family missed out on meeting a guy who means the world to her. And I’m angry because the decision appeared to be preordained. Why bother with the consulate interview, and in this case the cost and time spent getting there, if the answer was already no?

I had come to terms with the idea of all this being one small story in a large and ongoing injustice, until a friend sent me a New York Times piece that painted an even weirder picture.

The Trump administration is in a diplomatic war with Brazil. In July 2025 it declared the country a national emergency, slapped it with 50% tariffs, and described the Brazilian government, in an executive order, as “an unusual and extraordinary threat…to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.”

This extraordinary threat is one of the largest economies in the Western Hemisphere, and the U.S. has considered it an important partner for decades.

The real grievance at the center of the political tit-for-tat, is that Brazil’s October presidential election pits a leftist incumbent against the son of Jair Bolsonaro, the former president, who was convicted of plotting a coup. The Trump administration wants Flávio Bolsonaro to win, has been sending envoys to meet with the Bolsonaro circle and making its preferences known in ways that the current Brazilian government views as election interference.

Brazil pushed back, and the U.S. upped the ante by canceling the Brazilian ambassador’s visa—a tool, one political scientist in the Times piece notes, the U.S. “normally reserves for unfriendly or authoritarian regimes.”

So, we have an administration already engaged in a geopolitical standoff with Brazil, an executive order that frames that country as a threat to national security, and a consular officer working for that same administration who hands my daughter’s boyfriend a rejection letter without looking at his documents. Correlation is not causation, but there’s a definite hmmmm in the air.

The people in power in the U.S. justify the immigrant visa pause, saying it will remain in effect until the administration can ensure newcomers “will not extract wealth from the American people.” No one has offered proof that the 75 listed countries were doing that. Brazil, for one, is hardly a hotbed of food stamp tourism, especially since visa holders generally have to wait years before they can access public benefits, a restriction federal law has imposed since 1996.

But in the current policy environment, proof is optional.

My daughter and her partner are finding their way, from scratch. They have a cute, 375 square foot apartment in a decent neighborhood in São Paulo. The only readily available hot water is in the shower, which, I’ve learned, is just how things work there, even in modern buildings. The space came with cold water laundry and kitchen sinks and nothing else: no refrigerator, no range, no cabinets, no countertops, no closets.

They got a puppy and named him Max. She is learning Portuguese, which is harder than Spanish, not that she spoke that anyway. So far, Max is speaking English.

The only path forward for them is the K-1 fiancé visa, a narrow gate that remains open for now and might eventually allow him to come here, live here, sit at the table with us every now and then. The timeline is long, the paperwork its own endurance sport, and even if all that were to work out, I feel my breath catch when I think about the continued risks to him and them in a country where having brown skin is treated as probable cause.

My job remains what it’s always been—to support her and stand by—and maybe help people understand that political decisions have tentacles long enough to stretch from executive orders and political quid pro quo all the way to a ground floor lobby in Perth, where a girl stands waiting for the boy she loves to come back with a letter he can’t read.

And as for me and my awareness, let’s just say there is a difference between watching the smoke through a window and having it fill the room.

~Elizabeth

I’ll be honest. I wasn’t sure I was the right person to write this piece, since I’m not an immigration attorney, a policy expert, or a political journalist. But maybe that’s exactly why it seemed important to do it anyway.

I’d love to know where this lands for you. A few questions to get the conversation going:

What do you understand differently these days, and what prompted the shift? Is there a story in your own family’s immigration history, recent or long ago, that you think about differently now than you used to?

Come find me and a community of friends in the comments. I read and appreciate each one.

Leave a comment

Everything at Chicken Scratch is free to read, and with rare exception, there’s always an original audio version to enjoy as well. If personal essays, research rabbit holes, and the occasional puppy update matter to you, paid subscriptions and one-time contributions are what make it possible for me to keep showing up. There are links below if you’d like to join in on that. And if you’re already there, you have my genuine, wholehearted thanks.

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On the subject of species showing up where they're not wanted, this piece on the American bullfrog feels newly relevant. Funny how that works.

Afterward:
I believe in the power of small actions taken by a lot of people, so I close each week with an idea. The way I see it, doing something modest beats the paralysis of feeling like nothing you do could possibly be enough.

Try this:
The Immigrant Legal Resource Center offers a Red Card, a wallet-sized slip of paper explaining the constitutional rights anyone in the U.S. has if approached by immigration enforcement, regardless of status. Ten million cards have been distributed since November 2024, in 59 languages, including Portuguese. Download and print your own for free, order physical cards to share, or donate to keep them in circulation. Putting a reminder like this into someone’s hands, or in a place they might pick one up, is not nothing.

See you soon!

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Sometime in the summer of 1990, still living nearby and in touch with the people who might show up, I decided to attend my 10th high school reunion. I was newly single, having participated in the final dissolution of a six-year relationship just a month or two prior, a partnership that had, if I’m honest, been fading for a long time before it finally let go.

I was headed into a room full of classmates most of whom were already married. My sense was that most also had kids. A lot can happen in ten years. Or six.

In high school I’d been an unremarkable kid, never profoundly good, never profoundly rebellious, not a straight arrow but not exactly living dangerously either, not the most popular, but close enough to spend years thinking I had a shot at the inner circle. What a waste of energy that turned out to be.

I needed to walk into that reunion as a single woman with my head held high, and I decided to make my case with clothing.

Looking back, the outfit wasn’t nearly as bold as it felt that night. By today’s standards, it barely registers, but at the time, it was a declaration: a white leather dress from Hugo Buscati, discovered in the pages of the Victoria’s Secret catalog during the years the brand was building itself into a luxury label. Silk slips, velvet gowns, structured party wear, the works—and more money than I’d ever spent on an article of clothing. With its portrait neckline, hem just above the knee, and close-fitting cut, it was ideal for showing off a tan from a summer’s worth of poolside weekends born of having no other plans.

Lacking the confidence to forge ahead without reassurance, I invited a friend to weigh in, someone I figured would tell me the truth. The dress might be too much, I told her, too attention-grabbing, too suggestive. She squared her shoulders, looked at me sternly, and said, “If you don’t wear that dress, I’ll never speak to you again.”

My date was a British guy I’d only just started seeing. He turned out to be a bit of a killjoy, insisting we leave the event much earlier than I’d planned. He had a great accent, though, and it wasn’t about him anyway.

Minutes after we arrived, the dress earned its keep. A fellow I hadn’t seen in years greeted me, took a step back, and said, “Whoa. You’ve changed.”

These days I might hear those words differently, as if my clothes had given him license to assume something about who I was or wasn’t. But the message I was going for that night was closer to metamorphosis, and I took his reaction as exactly the validation I’d gone looking for.

Seven months later, not for the Brit or the former boyfriend, I walked down a church aisle in the second most memorable dress of my life: a wedding gown with sleeves reminiscent of the ones ballooning off Princess Diana’s arms a decade earlier. Fashion trends apparently take their time reaching the South, or leaving it. I wore my big ‘80s hair quite proudly well into the 90s.

It would be a few more years before Diana stepped out in her so-called “revenge dress.” Black where mine was white, but cut from comparable emotional cloth, they were the kind of dress a woman wears when she wants a room to understand something without her having to put it into words.

I understood what I was ready to say at twenty-seven in the leather dress, and again in the wedding gown, for entirely different reasons. It would be a long time before it occurred to me that my mother may have done something similar.

I’ve never seen a photograph of my mother wearing the dress she once told me she wanted to be buried in, a wish she didn’t get. My father, who died first, chose cremation and interment, and she, wanting to rest near him, somewhat grudgingly agreed to do the same. But I’ve yet to part with the dress itself.

I’d always assumed my mother’s dress was wool, or some kind of synthetic blend. I was wrong on both counts. Made in the late 1960s, it is modern cotton barkcloth, a mid-century woven textile that borrowed its name from a much older craft. True barkcloth is made by pounding tree bark into something wearable, a technique still practiced ceremonially in places like Uganda. The modern version is 100% cotton, part of a weaving tradition sometimes called momie cloth, and it’s what gave us the bold tropical prints American servicemen brought home from the Pacific in the 1940s and ‘50s.

There’s an intriguing little echo here: my parents were stationed in Hawaii after the attack at Pearl Harbor, and my oldest sibling was born there in 1952, right in the years this fabric was being shipped home by the crate. I don’t know that my mother ever owned a scrap of it back then, but she was in the right place, at the right time, to have admired it.

From Hawaii, they eventually made their way to High Point, North Carolina, where my father, a furniture salesman, would join a business partner to launch an upholstery fabric company with a singular niche: they were the sole East Coast distributors for Naugahyde. I grew up watching the man run his hands over furniture, dismissing fabrics he didn’t trust to hold up. He knew quality on contact. I imagine the two of them standing over this dress together, agreeing on it, maybe for a winter party, maybe to mark her fortieth birthday, which would have landed in the same season. Adjusted for inflation, its original price of $50 to $90 comes out to something like $450 to $800 today. I found an identical one listed on Etsy for $698.

If it’s not evident already, the dress doesn’t come close to fitting me, and honestly, I have trouble picturing it on my mom. By the time it hit the market she’d already had three children. She came of age in an era of clothing built for a certain kind of shape, and by the time she was in the depths of motherhood in the early 1960s, that shape hadn’t relaxed much.

She’d had rheumatic fever as a child, and doctors warned her against gaining weight through her pregnancies. With her second baby—nine pounds, seven ounces—she gained only about ten pounds total. Still, she spent the rest of her life fretting over a mid-section that wasn’t flat enough. In my mind, she was forever wishing she could lose 10 pounds.

If memory serves me, I wore my leather dress three times, though only one of those times left evidence. There’s no photo of the debut, my friend’s ultimatum, the guy who said I’d changed. A few months later, at a gala with my brother Don, someone pointed a camera at us, and that’s the only image I have.

The last time I recall wearing it was on my honeymoon the following February, where its message went from look what I survived to look who wants me in the space of just a few months. It had done everything I’d ever asked of it.

Then my life turned into something the dress had no idea how to adapt to, from single, suburban, working girl to sailor, then farmer, and eventually mother. My days had almost nothing left in common with a woman who chose white leather to announce herself to a room. It wasn’t only that I stopped fitting into the dress, though that felt true, it was that I stopped needing something external to make that kind of statement on my behalf. The dress languished in my closet for more than a decade until I finally gave it away, with no real regrets.

I don’t know what my mother was declaring in her dress, what room she was walking into, or what she needed the people in that room to understand. I don’t have a photograph to help fill in the missing pieces, and I never thought to ask. All I know is that she held onto it for five decades after she stopped wearing it, and that when she thought about how she wanted to be remembered, those rich colors and sparkly sequins are what she reached for.

I imagine she was influenced by a Depression-era habit of never letting expensive things go. But I also think, knowing her, that she may have felt like her best self in it, a version of her that got to stop second-guessing her shape for an evening and just enjoy herself.

~Elizabeth

I’ve made my peace with most of the things I can’t ask my mom, but a few I really hope to get a shot at someday, somehow.

Tell me in the comments 💬

• Is there a piece of clothing in your life that’s keeping score on who you used to be?

• Have you let go of something lately and felt relief instead of loss?

• What question did you never got around to asking someone?

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Afterward:
Regulars know I like to close with something small and doable, because I think collective action matters.

Try this:
Find something you’re keeping that might not be necessary in your life anymore. You don't have to get rid of it. Just notice whether you're keeping it for you, or for who you used to need to be.

See you soon!

If I had my druthers…

The phrase is part of my lexicon in the same way that y’all, bless your heart, and a hitch in my gitalong spill out of me with ease. Expressions rooted in my Southern heritage, I use them without second thought.

If I had my druthers, all y’all would learn to love y’all. If I had my druthers, more folks would understand the subtle but invaluable difference between a smack down bless your heart and a hype up bless your heart. If I had my druthers, a hitch in the gitalong would be the worst thing that happened to any of us all week.

If I had my druthers, there’d be fewer assholes in the world.

I realized, recently, that I had no idea what my druthers actually were, or are, or ought to be. What the hell is a druther, and how am I supposed to have one if I can’t say what I’m looking for?

I figured druthers was a cousin of chaise lounge, that terrifyingly American mangling of chaise longue, in which we swap unfamiliar French words with a pair of close enough words that kind of make sense, converting a long chair to a lounging chair. The new term gets woven into the vernacular, and sticks. This is how we handle what we don’t fully understand; we reach for the nearest recognizable shape and smoosh the new thing into it.

Druthers, it seems, didn’t come from that kind of reaching at all.

The word has been around since the late 1800s and grew out of a more colloquial mashup. Somebody said I’d rather, and between that person’s mouth and another person’s ears, the sound of the /d/ came loose from I’d and drifted over to rather. So, I’drather, or in some cases, I’druther. You see where this is going.

There’s a wonderful early sighting of the word in Benjamin Shillaber’s 1859 sketches of Mrs. Partington, a fictitious New England widow whose chief comic gifts were distorted common phrases and social blunders. Musing on fate and the futility of wanting things, she moans,

“…however much we may say we’d rather have this and we’d rather have that, we can’t any of us have the druthers we want.”

Shillaber was from New Hampshire and spent his adult life in Boston, which runs counter to the notion that the term is bone-deep Southern. In fact, its earliest paper trail runs straight through New England satire. Mrs. Partington’s malapropisms were popular enough that they helped shape Mark Twain’s Aunt Polly a couple of decades later, so if druthers has a literary grandmother, she talks like a Yankee.

When the seam between words moves, language scholars call it metanalysis, or resegmenting. In this instance, the word on the far side of the swap stopped behaving like a verb and turned into a noun you could have, or want, or lack—plural and countable, like money in the bank. I’druther became druthers, and druthers became something a person could long for.

I’m impressed by how different that is from chaise lounge. In this instance, nobody went mining for a more reasonable or recognizable word. The transformation occurred organically, like when song lyrics morph into what we think we heard.

‘Scuse me while I kiss this guy!

Anyone engaged in a long term relationship, where selective hearing can be passed off as age-induced impairment, understands that there is a veritable jungle between what leaves one person’s face and what enters another person’s head. It’s not about imposing order. Neither individual notices a chance mutation, because the sentence still works both ways.

We’ve all lived through more recent versions of the same shifts. Imma, hafta, kinda, sorta, lemme, gimme. A grammarian might wince at every one of them, and a lot of nonfiction writers keep them out of print entirely, but we understand them instantly, speak them constantly, and text them without confusion. I have to appreciate the generosity in that, and the collective power.

Language is borrowed, not owned. We take in words from other centuries, other cultures. Meanings meander, pronunciations vary, edges smooth imperceptibly, like the wearing down of mountain ranges.

For a long stretch of the nineteenth century, druthers wasn’t a single, settled term. It took several forms at once: druther, ruther, ruthers—all of them living fulfilling lives, none more correct than the others. Correctness wasn’t even a consideration until people who hadn’t been in the room for any of the original back and forth put one version on a page, editors let it stand, and next thing you know druthers landed in the Oxford English Dictionary.

I think a lot of what people want follows a similar trajectory. A person born in a place that’s run out of opportunity, or become lethal, wants to raise a family somewhere with more promise. That desire doesn’t need defending until it runs into terms like asylum or illegal, as though the wanting itself weren’t identical either way. A woman wants to walk a trail through ancient hills without having to calculate which parts are safe and which aren’t. That want is about as plain as a want gets, but it still has to prove itself to people who say what she should have expected, what she shouldn’t have worn, where she shouldn’t have gone alone.

A whole lot of us want fewer assholes in the world and a lot more people waking up to the fact that greed is going to be the thing that finally does us in, but according to some that’s considered naive and unserious. We yearn in the same language, but those with more power hear something different.

Not every want gets discounted so loudly. Some fade the way ruther did, dusty, unattended, nobody troubling to write it down or reflect it back. The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams tells a version of this about actual words, the ones the original OED editors let go because nobody with enough authority thought to safeguard them.

I don’t think that’s so different from wanting mental health to be treated with the same intensity as high cholesterol, wanting to walk into a government office without being treated with indifference, wanting to normalize grace for missing a green light or saying the wrong thing. And gosh, if I had my druthers, I’d want more of us to wait for a real answer when we ask someone how they’re doing.

I like that druthers began as I’d rather. It’s such a tolerant way of stating a preference, one that assumes there’s another alternative worth making space for. A word doesn’t need a dictionary’s consent to keep circulating. I don’t think a want does either. Saying it out loud won’t make it materialize, but it might keep it from disappearing completely.

~Elizabeth

There’s a thread here I opted to not explore, which is that I played the part of Aunt Polly in a seventh grade production of the Tom Sawyer musical. I figure I’ll tell that story another day.

Do you have a druther that’s gone a little dusty from disuse? Is there a want you need to say out loud, or one you’re sick to death of having to defend? The comments are open for your ideas.

If this piece gave you something to chew on, passing it along might do the same for somebody else. A heart 💚 or a restack ♻️ goes a long way toward getting it in front of more people.

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Afterward:
I end each week with a small suggestion, a simple action you can choose to pursue or not. I believe little, deliberate moves matter as much as big realizations, maybe more, since they’re the ones we actually get to do something about before the week is out.

Try this:
Think about something you’ve been treating as just how it is. A rule you follow, a “should,” an assumption. Pick something small enough to actually get your head around this week. Ask yourself where it came from, and whether you ever really had a say in the matter.

See you soon!

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My husband and I book some of our medical appointments together. Back to back, same office, same time, same car. We tell people it’s efficient, and sure there’s the gas-saving aspect. Really, though, it’s because we don’t get out much and a tandem teeth cleaning constitutes a date night at this point in our marriage.

I’m pretty sure we’d stop short of scheduling joint colonoscopies. After all, somebody has to drive home. But I wouldn’t blame you for thinking it.

Anyway. We’ve been doing the dermatologist this way for years, our parallel appointments in separate rooms, each of us half listening to the other’s muffled conversations through the flimsy drywall. We debrief afterward, lately relieved that there have been no new, rogue eruptions needing attention. Our European DNA did not produce skin designed for what we’ve asked of ours over the years.

So when we arrive at the glassed-in counter and the receptionist finalizes all the insurance details, including a $40 co-pay from each of us, and then asks if we want to go back together, we don’t fully understand the question. We agree in the same way we sign off on a new set of terms and conditions, which is to say without any thought at all.

A nurse leads us down the hallway and motions us toward a room on the left. Just the one room. We remark—Oh!—surprised, and she pauses, double-checking whether she actually needs to clear a second room after all. We wave her off. No, no, this is fine, we’re easy.

This will prove to be a slight overstatement.

The room is small, with a built-in work station on one side and an angled examination table in the center, the paper cover reminding me of a church basement potluck. On the one chair, she tosses a single, blue, paper gown—mine, presumably—and says, “Remove everything except your underwear,” before leaving us to our predicament.

There’s a beat where neither of us says anything but then, laughter. This is so weird!

First, there’s a logistics problem: two people, one chair, and a growing pile of clothing. I stack his shirt and shorts on the floor next to the chair, which I’m sure the health department would have opinions about. In fact, I have opinions about it, but I’m not sure what else to do.

We can’t stop laughing.

At home, we think nothing of interacting in various states of undress, but here we are unexpectedly self-conscious, like teenagers in a locker room. Apparently all it takes is fluorescent lighting and an audience to turn the ordinary into awkward.

Soon the door opens again, and it isn’t just the P.A, it’s her and the nurse, both of them walking into a room that now contains four adults, one bed, occupied by a man in his underwear, a chair covered in clothes, a small satellite pile down below, and me standing there in a dehydrated choir robe.

We’re still laughing and flailing at explanations.

The P.A., who we see every year, and who has certainly seen almost everything, wears a smile that hints at sympathy. These people really don’t get out much.

“Some people just do it this way,” she says. “Who wants to go first?”

Decades of marriage, and there’s no established protocol for who volunteers to be examined while the other one looks on, a bystander with a poster about sun damage looming to their left. We just look at each other. He’s already sitting on the potluck table, so he digs in.

This week, the dentist gave us separate rooms, thank goodness. The jury is out on whether we will opt into the co-mingled adventure at next year’s skin review. At least it saves exam table paper. But for $80, you’d think they could throw in a second chair.

~Elizabeth

Thank goodness for opportunities to laugh at ourselves, right? It does a body good. And since that was the point of the appointment anyway, we checked all the boxes!

Pull up a virtual chair! Comments 💬 are the lifeblood of this space, and we’re a fun bunch.

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I’ll be back next week with something else entirely, though I make no promises about my ability to be less weird.

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Afterward:

I make a point of ending each week with something small and doable, because we never know how simple actions might help shape a better future.

Try this:

If there’s an appointment you've been putting off—dermatologist, annual physical, a screening you know you're due for, or the acupuncture treatment you’ve been meaning to try—why not book it this week? We only get one body. Best to take good care of it. And if you've got a friend or partner who's also behind on theirs, feel free to bring them along. Just, maybe, ask a few more questions about the room situation first.

And don’t forget to laugh, loud and long! ☺️

See you soon.

A quick note: I wrote this one several weeks ago and then held onto it. The friend here ended up back in the hospital not once but twice. She's home now, doing better, and told me, "Anything to help someone else," when I asked if I could share part of her story. So, later…but with more of a real exhale.

I noticed the tubing first, a line of plastic dangling below the hem of her shirt. We’d been talking for a while by then, about the recent surgery, about being single, and loyal, about how hard it is to be human, how easy to direct our frustrations at the wrong targets, especially lately, about how the week had already been a lot before I even showed up, through the back porch door and across the recently bleached door mat, with a bag of food in my hands. I almost didn’t ask about the tube.

But I did, and that question unspooled into another, into an incision site that was red and hard and swollen, into a blood pressure cuff she keeps on hand, and a reading on it that had no business being that high. She had an appointment with her doctor the next morning at 10:00, she said, suggesting that would be soon enough for further input.

“You have to call now,” I said. “Get a hold of the on-call doctor. Let them decide whether you can wait until morning.”

She called. Before I left, she asked if I could maybe feed her dog later—a sweet, enormous, lump of a possibly-Great-Dane-mix who also happens to be diabetic and needs a twice-daily shot. I jotted some haphazard notes in my phone and said sure, half-laughing at what my day had just turned into.

I’d made a previous stop before I got to her place and had another one planned after, followed by a precious monthly phone call with a college friend whose 91-year-old father is failing and whose family is drowning in impossible decisions about his care. By the end of the afternoon, I told myself I might skip the gathering that evening, the one full of folks I genuinely love, because my introvert was having a tantrum about how peopled the day had been. I went anyway.

I’m not especially good at this. There’s so much I don’t show up for, calls I let go to voicemail, casseroles I never make, cards I used to send that now somehow never rise to the top of the list. Still, I’ve come to believe that a moment of care, even a tired and reluctant one, is rarely wasted. The world doesn’t get easier to live in, but I can’t shake the idea that it gets a little more bearable when someone shows up in it alongside you.

A few hours after I left her house, her sister-in-law drove her fifty miles to the hospital where they said they’d gotten all the cancer just two weeks ago. She was admitted, and the next morning she texted that she still didn’t know much, hadn’t eaten in case there was surgery to come. Someone else fed the dog and handled the shots.

Twenty-four hours later—my husband’s 65th birthday, a mostly ordinary day of doing what felt necessary and right, and also one spent celebrating a man whose favorite thing in the world is coming home at the end of the day to the people he loves—she wrote again:

“You started all of this. But honestly if I didn’t get here when I did, I wouldn’t be anywhere. It’s been a shit show. Looks like I’ll be here until Friday... I wanted to thank you for being right where I needed you... Do you have any idea how blessed we are with groups of women who genuinely care about each other? I really believe and now prove that this is just miraculous. I truly love my life. Even at this time.”

I wouldn’t be anywhere.

I didn’t do anything but show up with some quirky food options and ask a question I almost didn’t ask. It’s such an unsettling, unexpected thing, to find out after the fact that an ordinary errand turned out to be load-bearing. You don’t get a notification for that. No algorithm tells you, in the moment, that this one matters more than it looks like. You just go, or you don’t, and sometimes you get to find out which one it was.

Often, it’s so much easier for me to just stay home, manage the usual, stick to the program, let the quiet and less complicated win. How close I came to skipping that one visit, that one question, that moment of discovery. I’ll never know what might have happened if I hadn’t ventured out.

It was the summer solstice that night, the longest light of the year, the sun reluctant to leave the sky as friends gathered in community to wish it well on its way. We talk about such rituals as though they are a turning point, a hinge the world swings on. But darkness doesn’t wait for an appointed season and lightness doesn’t depend on which way the year is turning. All we can ever do is reach our arms out and up, to catch the falling and honor the rising.

~Elizabeth

The evolving importance of that visit came in short updates, over the days after. A text here, a conversation there. I would never have imagined it unfolding that way.

I’d love to hear about the last time something small you did turned out to be bigger than you knew at the time, for better or worse. Or the reverse: when did you brace for a whole ordeal only to have it resolve without much fuss?

I read every comment and respond to all of them, so don’t be shy about adding yours. A heart 💚 or restack ♻️ is the lowest hanging fruit and helps other readers find my work. Yay!

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I’ll be back next week, same as always, but a little older by then, since my birthday lands this Friday.

This publication runs without ads or pitches. Everyone gets the full thing, free, no locked posts. I want everyone to have access, whether they can afford it or not. If you’ve got room to support Chicken Scratch financially, that helps me sustain the creative energy that goes into it, and I don’t take those contributions for granted. Likewise, one-time donations are easy and so very appreciated.

One-time tip

Afterward:

I like to end with one concrete thing because I think it matters. Most weeks, most of us are working with what’s actually in front of us anyway, so…

Try this:

Think of one person you’ve been meaning to check on and ask them a specific question that they are less likely to answer routinely. How’s the incision healing rather than how are you doing? Did the second interview call ever happen instead of how’s the job search going? Is your mom still refusing the walker instead of how’s your mom? You never know what channel the question might help open up.

See you soon!

In a matter of hours, our latest heatwave will turn the air into something closer to molten, but it is still early in the morning and comparatively cool when I take myself to the community garden to water my two beds and toss a little fish emulsion at the cucumbers, whose yellowing leaves tell me they’re hungry for something.

I see that the rabbits, undaunted by the bricks I positioned to keep them from climbing under a loose edge, have chewed a hole in the new fencing, helping themselves to a third planting of beans. Most tomato plants are doing well, but several are dwarfed and misshapen.

The lettuce plants, now three feet tall and given over to reproduction, provide a tower of flowers for bees of all sizes. If I leave them in place long enough, seeds will form, then scatter and germinate without much extra effort from me. This is the point. I am a gardener taking full advantage of an opportunistic kind of sowing, though it looks for all the world like I don’t know what I’m doing.

I am about to head home, to breakfast, and my husband, and the one unhurried morning we have together most weeks, when a toad leaps into the spray of the hose and stops, blinking. I see her throat pulsing and realize she’s having a drink.

It takes some looking, once I am home, to learn it is a Fowler’s toad. Commonly mistaken for American toads, the difference comes down to the number of warts clustered in each dark spot on their backs. More than one or two, it’s the former, according to every source I find except one herpetologist in Virginia who’s convinced it’s not that simple. He’s not wrong. He maintains that wart count is a symptom of the difference and not the difference itself, or something like that. The two species hybridize often enough that a given toad might sit anywhere on a spectrum rather than cleanly on one side of it.

It’s the patronizing, mansplainy certainty he wears while making his case that puts me off. At one point, he goes so far as to tell his readers to calm down, a directive made safer, I’d guess, by the fact that his comments section is disabled. I can’t remember the last time, or any time, I calmed down after being told to do so. It occurs to me he might be a toad who only recently got his kiss, new enough to being noticed that he hasn’t learned how to do it without insisting on it.

The actual toad is named for Samuel Page Fowler, a nineteenth-century man from Danvers, Massachusetts, who joined every cause his town had to offer: overseer of the poor, selectman, delegate to the state’s constitutional convention, first deacon of his church, trustee of the local bank and library, a fire warden, a historian of his own town’s witch trials. It’s a strange thing, learning that a damp, warty creature carries the name of someone who appears to have spent his entire life indoors, building institutions out of other people’s attention. Nothing suggests he ever once waded into a garden bed to watch a toad drink, but it’s possible he did that off the record.

The toad, for her part, wants only the water. Captivated by her bumpy unbotheredness, I find myself murmuring, in the cadence of William Carlos Williams, an apology to my husband, whom I assured, upon leaving the house, would see me soon.

I have lingered
in the garden
to shower
with a toad

though you
were probably hoping
I’d be home
by now.

Forgive me.
She was
so alive
and so thirsty.

She didn’t answer, of course, just turned her face back toward the wooden frame of the bed, then walked backward into the soaking mulch until the crown of her head, like a stone, was all that showed.

Thousands of miles from my garden, male Asian common toads are usually a dull, unremarkable brown. But when the first monsoon rains fall across their part of the world, the males flush a sudden, startling yellow, a color that lasts only about two days before fading back to brown for another year. Researchers recently confirmed why: in the crush of the breeding pool, with hundreds of toads scrambling at once, the vibrant alternative makes it easier for a male to tell, quickly, which shape nearby is actually a female.

Without it, urgency wins out over accuracy, and the male toads grab at almost anything within reach—other males, nuts, fish. Scientists set out doppelgangers, painted decoys, some yellow, some brown, among the chaos of these breeding toads. The real males ignored the yellow replicas almost entirely, mounting brown ones far more often.

I recognize that scrabble, minus the canary-colored exuberance. We have a limited number of days in which to make our presence on the planet matter. As humans, we can’t know what it’s like to be an amphibian among many, or whether there is any similarity in our urges. But we are all driven by our own desires. I get the sense that what we’re reaching for isn’t really the object nabbed in the crush of the pool. It’s connection, acknowledgment, some proof that another creature can tell we’re right for them. Maybe that’s what sent Samuel Page Fowler into every institution his town would let him join, longing dressed up as usefulness. It could also be what compels a man in Virginia to assert his authority like a rooster at 4 a.m.. If you’ve gone unrecognized for a day, or a year, or a lifetime, you might seize onto something adjacent instead.

Gathering my basket of tools and watering can, my now empty jug of fish fertilizer, I think about how far my husband and I are from our own version of these seasons of consequence—the drink in a heatwave, the raving toad orgy—when a missed opportunity might have cost us more than we could afford to lose. Potable water flows from a filtered tap at our kitchen sink. We share our discoveries and frustrations, we repeat our stories. We’ve been together a long time now and know how to identify each other.

On a Sunday morning, chores mingling with conversation, our love is made tenderly and in no particular hurry, two people who have the luxury of quenching our stubborn thirst.

~Elizabeth

Afterward:

If you’ve been here for a bit, you’ll know that I like to end with small and actionable ideas, to give us all something to swim toward. I’m convinced it matters.

Try this:

Find your toad. Outside in the yard, in the sidewalk crack, in the office parking lot (it all counts) find one overlooked living thing and give it a drink of your full attention for a few minutes. No phone, no multitasking, just you and whatever’s there for you to have a conversation with. Who knows? It might inspire a poem.

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I stand by the toad. I will always stand by the toad.

Now, dear readers, allow me to bring you a glass of lemonade and a comfortable chair over in the comments. It’s such an inviting space!

• Is there someone in your life who is really good at recognizing the color of you?

• Have you grabbed at something recently that turned out to be the wrong shape entirely?

• What are you thirstiest for these days?

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See you soon!

A quick note for those who were waiting with me and holding good thoughts last week: my new friend is home from the hospital and making progress. The piece I mentioned will find its moment when the time is right.

1. Begin with a week’s worth of very ripe news, or stale grievances, the artisanal dread that has been sitting in your stomach since the phone rang. At first, you’ll want to peel back the outer layers to be sure your selections are dark and pungent all the way through. With practice, you’ll learn to assess quality with a quick glance.

2. Pour the rankest of these into your being. You’re aiming for complete saturation. You’ll know you’re getting close when the metallic taste on your tongue mirrors the sinking feeling in your soul.

3. Continue stuffing yourself until the mixture begins to back up into your mouth and eyes.

4. Feel the bloated sickness, like something might spew forth any minute without warning. Notice how, when you lie down, it gets worse.

5. Pace the floor like a confined animal, remembering the time you ate too many pot brownies and made promises to god that if you lived, you’d exercise more self restraint in the future. Remember how you broke those promises.

6. Go somewhere, anywhere but where you are. Walk to the woods. Walk to the sea, to the park, to the shower, to the car. Take yourself to a place where you can sing with abandon.

7. Sing with abandon! The singing may sound like screaming. That is normal. Sing until your tears loosen. Let them rise, rise, rise until they fall out of your face, or seep through your toes, or mingle in the notes coming from your throat.

8. After the tears, and the singing, and the screaming have reduced by half, the concentrated remains of you will be too hot to touch. Let yourself cool.

9. When you are safe to handle, notice where you are. What is nearby? For the first time in a very long time, see what surrounds you. Take it in. See yourself in your space. See your fingers and wrists, arms and abdomen, the blurred tip of your nose, the color of the walls, the sky, your skin.

10. Train your attention on your hands. Steady your gaze until you begin to detect the faintest emission, the slightest glow. Keep watching. Experience it as part of you, the rhythm in your veins, the warming of your chest, a composition of electrical conversations beneath your skin.

11. Close your eyes. There it is again, the same silver shimmer suspended just beneath the membrane that separates you from the world. Your brain will insist this is an artifact, an afterimage, a trick assembled from expectation and retinal fatigue. Do not interrupt the observation. There is no rule that says the deepest light must always be visible from the outside.

12. Repeat as needed. This light will keep itself lit indefinitely.

~Elizabeth

I wrote the bones of this in fifteen minutes with a timer running and a virtual room full of folks I didn’t know doing the same thing. The prompt on making light came from a write-in with . The rest arrived later, slowly, when I sat down to ask myself what the procedure was actually for.

What’s your version of step one right now—something public, or a more private concern that you can’t name? Have you ever caught yourself in a step eleven moment, noticing something still lit in you after a stretch that should have put it out? The comments are a good place to explore both, and I read and reply to every one.

A heart 💚 or a restack ♻️ is the simplest way to elevate this work and it’s how more readers find their way here, which is a really big deal for me. You’ll find those buttons at the top and/or bottom of the page. I’m grateful every single time you take the time!

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The point is, it all matters, and I couldn’t be more appreciative for all the ways you support this work.

Afterward:

I close each week with something you can actually do. Small actions certainly can’t fix everything, but motion beats paralysis every time, and I believe you’re more capable than you think.

Try This:

Schedule your step six before you need it. Right now, before you close this tab or turn off the audio, put something on the calendar. A walk, a long shower, a drive with the windows up, or the windows down, and the music on at a volume that sends energy into your core. Do this as preventive maintenance, the way you’d change the oil before the engine starts knocking. The place matters less than making the commitment while you still feel like you have a choice about it.

Thanks for being here. See you soon!

*Odilon Redon (1840–1916) was a French Symbolist painter who described his intention as placing "the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible." Reflection dates to 1900–1905 and is in private collection.

If listening is best for you, I offer an audio version here. ⤵️

I had something else ready for today about an unexpected Sunday, a new friend, and how some of the smallest things we do turn out to matter more than we know. But it involves someone who’s currently in the hospital, and I don’t yet know how she’s doing. I’m not willing to put that story into the world before I know she’s okay. So it’ll keep, and I’ll share it when I can do that without holding my breath.

In the meantime, waiting…

For weeks, the forecast taunted us, systems building on the radar, dark and promising, that split apart before they reached us, pulled north or south to someone else’s space. The soil went to powder, the moss to a shrunken olive-brown, thirsty squirrels shredding plants they’ve never bothered in the past.

Two weeks ago, a shower, barely enough to wet the surface, the story of water more than water itself. It wasn’t enough. It was a messenger, summoning four box turtles from the dry leaf litter. I suppose they understood, alert to some frequency the rest of us have forgotten how to hear, armored, patient, primordial.

Two days ago the real storm arrived: three and a half inches in barely an hour, like standing at the bottom of a waterfall. The sky went dense, laden, gunmetal and velvet. Streets flooded. And finally, finally, the air smelled like rain.

~Elizabeth

Thank you for your patience today, and for being here. If this one found you at the right moment, a like or a share, a comment or a restack, is always, always a refreshing gesture and a real way to help me build my audience.

See you soon!

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If you prefer listening, I offer an audio version here. ⤵️

I wonder if you’re like me. When I pull into a parking lot I visit often, I aim for the same few spaces. When one of them is available, I feel a small flicker of satisfaction, the pleasant click of a puzzle piece dropping into place.

The lot could have plenty of perfectly acceptable spaces. If my preferred spot is occupied, I park somewhere else and carry on with my day without a nanosecond of additional thought. It may also be obvious here that I do not live in a big city. Still, there’s this thing about favorites.

I’m not alone. A friend of mine gravitates toward a different cluster of spaces, but gravitate she does. My perfect parking spot involves a left turn; hers is to the right. Someone else drives a memorable orange Chevy that I’ve come to expect in routine spaces every time I see it. Same with the enormous blue Ford F-150 and the sporty black Mazda Miata that I always mistake for an empty place until I get past the SUV parked next to it.

Not long after recognizing this quirk, I stumbled across an article about the “explore-exploit problem,” sometimes called the optimal stopping problem, and occasionally attributed to Richard Feynman and his famously calculated approach to restaurant menus. It sounds like the kind of thing that would require a whiteboard and multi-colored dry erase markers until someone removes all the math and just hands you the idea, like a ham sandwich when you’re famished.

Every four to six weeks, my husband and I order Chinese food takeout. We rarely vary what we order. Once in a blue moon, I’ll get egg foo young in place of my Singapore mei fun, and then spend the whole meal pretending I don’t miss the mei fun. But it has never once occurred to me to consider this culinary lack of adventure against how much time I have left to find a new selection.

That is more or less what Feynman figured out. At some point, people decide whether to keep searching for a better option or commit to one that already works. The math suggests there is actually a prime moment to stop exploring and settle, but most of us never consciously figure that out. We just stop looking, behaving as though we have solved the formulas. We find our mei fun and exploit the rewards. The egg foo young is a regrettable foray back into exploration. The familiar wins whether we chose it mindfully or not. That is true when placing a restaurant order, mapping a route home, finding a partner, or, apparently, parking a car.

Once I started looking for examples, they popped up like dandelions. The parking space was a seed, and when I watered it, other things began to grow.

I work in agriculture, and there is not much that stumps a room full of well-meaning outsiders in comfortable shoes more than why farmers are so reluctant to try something new. At this point in the environmental movement, farmers are used to being thought of as both stubborn and callous, but those are lazy descriptors.

Farmers operate in a world of narrow margins, expensive equipment, fickle weather, volatile markets, rising input costs, and a thousand variables that can turn a promising season into a punishing one. Every decision sits atop a stack of risks, the way my husband balances full glasses of wine on top of a slippery stack of magazines. When somebody arrives with a shiny new practice, a novel crop, or a different way of managing the land, the farmer is not simply concerned about whether it might work. She is worried about what happens if it doesn’t, and that is an entirely different problem.

Chemically intensive, single-crop production systems didn’t catch on because generations of farm families woke up one morning and decided they wanted degraded soil, resistant weeds, and dependence on expensive inputs. They adopted those systems because they promised stability and productivity, and for the most part, those systems have delivered.

If you want anyone to try something different, you don’t begin by telling them how wrong they were. You lower the risk. You provide funding, offer training, create demonstration plots, and help them run experiments on ten acres before they bet the farm on it. You make exploration safer.

That is what good agricultural support work often accomplishes. It creates conditions under which curiosity can survive in the same room as uncertainty. Human beings make countless risk calculations every day, sometimes consciously, often not. Their lives have taught them that stability has value, that uncertainty carries a cost, and that familiar solutions are, well, familiar.

Working in agriculture long enough, you start seeing the same pattern everywhere. Politics included. I am convinced we misunderstand political persuasion in much the same way we misunderstand agricultural change. People talk to and about voters as though they are computers waiting patiently for the next data upload. If only the correct statistic, chart, argument, or slogan could be delivered with sufficient force, the scales would finally fall from their eyes. Presumably, people would then apologize, update their priors, and go back to being reasonable. Any day now.

Opinions do not work that way.

A person who has supported the same party for twenty years is not making choices in a vacuum. They have relationships, loyalties, habits, memories, values, and stories about how the world operates. Their political identity is woven through their decision-making like telephone wires. When strategists consider how to persuade such a person, I wonder whether they spend as much time thinking about the message as about the perceived risk of acting on it.

Political campaigns tell people they are voting against their own interests, implying that their families, friends, civic groups, and water cooler companions are fools. Identity-threatening conclusions are proffered like those guys selling surplus meat out of the back of an open pickup truck, and then the seller acts surprised when the door is slammed in their face.

If somebody believes, as I do, that concentrated wealth and the associated corruption is harming the country more than the two-party system, the challenge is not merely proving that point. It’s helping people explore that possibility without feeling as though they are being asked to surrender their sense of self and community, or to let go of their life’s story. The same principle applies across the political spectrum. Everyone is operating from a set of assumptions that have worked well enough to get them this far. We are all, in our own ways, parking in familiar spaces. A meaningful campaign starts with establishing that we’re not asking you to upend your life. We’re asking if you want to try the menu special.

I can imagine what some of you are thinking right now. Yes, the political moment feels like it blew through the five-alarm fire back in 2016. Most of what is happening defies ordinary explanation or justification. But if you have ever tried to out-holler a hound who has decided it is time to go, you already understand the limits of volume as a persuasion strategy. Screaming that the sky is blue does not change the vision of someone who believes it is purple. It just makes you hoarse.

Allow me to create a little scenario to help bring all this to life: Consider what happens when you suggest someone switch the sports team they support. I don’t mean develop a passing appreciation for another franchise, or agree that their stadium is quite nice. I mean actually switch.

“I’ve been thinking,” you say, as you take in the latest match at the bar down the block you both enjoy, “and I really feel like you’d be happier supporting a different country.”

Your English friend looks at you the way you’d look at someone who just suggested taking in a bagpipe concert.

“We invented this sport,” she says.

“No you didn’t.”

“We absolutely did.”

“The Chinese were kicking a ball around in 200 BC.”

“That was a different thing.”

“The Greeks——”

“Also a different thing.”

“The Aztecs——”

“All completely different things.” She straightens slightly. “We codified it. Which is basically the same as inventing it, and I will not be taking questions.”

“Right. Well, 1966 was a long time ago. That’s the last time England won the World Cup.” You lean in slightly. “I’d love to hear more about how your life has improved because of your allegiance to this team.”

She takes a long sip of the Pliny the Elder she orders every time you meet up at this place. “It was only sixty years ago,” she says. “We’re due. Any tournament now.”

You have presented your findings, and they have been escorted out. Nobody here is being stupid. They are being human, which is actually considerably harder to work with.

So, what helps?

If I could crack that code I might have a future in political marketing, which, for the record, sounds worse than a bagpipe concert. But I took a shot at some campaign slogans that might be worth a bumper sticker, a meme, or a brief pause for station identification.

I still park in the same spots, if you’re curious. My preferred space is not objectively better than dozens of others, but it is a known quantity in a world crowded with decisions. I have explored enough to feel settled, until the world parks something in my way, and I find, after a little circling, that there are other spots available.

The more I think about it, the more I suspect that a surprising amount of human behavior begins right there.

~Elizabeth

I still don’t know exactly where all of this leaves us, except maybe a little more curious about why we do what we do, and a little more aware of why some people may be driving around somewhere so very different from us.

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Comments are open, and I read every one. I’d love to know if you have favorite parking spots, or take-out selections, or soccer teams. What are you curious about this week? It doesn’t have to be political. It can be as small as the egg foo young.

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Afterward:

Each week I close with something specific to do, because I believe we can make a difference when enough of us show up. Our spheres of influence are bigger than we think, and doing something modest beats standing still while waiting for something enormous.

Try This:

The next time you find yourself in a conversation with someone parked somewhere different than you, skip the argument and look for the overlap. What do you both want for your kids, your community, your country? Start there. You might not end up agreeing on much, but you might be surprised how close you both are to the same starting point.

See you soon!

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I always tell myself I’m not going to cry, but I always cry. It is the ritual of this departure.

Every exchange takes on a certain kind of importance. When I realize we’ve run out of time for this or that plan, when our comfortable patterns dwindle down to just a couple more sleeps, and melancholy stops by several times a day, even though I keep telling her she’s too early, I tell myself I’m not going to cry. But I always cry when they leave.

After we’ve pulled apart the boxes of books held in limbo since reading was a shared activity, untangled the costume jewelry from the one gold necklace that’s worth saving, discarded the body care products pregnant with fragrance left languishing at the back of the bathroom cabinet, rifled through belongings still in storage since the earliest departures, the ones from when they had barely fledged, after we’ve had most of the conversations, but not all the conversations, because we never get to have them all, after we’ve managed the logistics, and I say 'we' just to honor the habit, because the truth is they've long since learned to manage without me, and made the meals, and enjoyed the party, and played the music, and filled the bird feeder, and packed the bags, and stuffed the belongings into the trunk of the car, and tucked all that tenderness into the empty places inside, and headed back out the door again one more time, I always cry.

I’m not sad that my routines will go back to normal. I’m not sad that my children are fully capable beings, living full lives in beautiful places with beautiful partners. I’m not pining for a life that no longer exists. I’m remembering, once again, what it feels like when your heart splits open and stars, bright-shining and brilliant, spill out across the land.

~Elizabeth

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Most of us have stood in a departure lane or a driveway watching someone we love head back out into the world, feeling all the feelings. For me, it’s a rich mix of gratitude and reluctance, and I know that makes me a very lucky mom. Never mind that this particular parting involved one Metro, two airports, two cars, one of them threatening to overheat, and roughly 250 pounds of luggage.

• What’s the ritual of departure in your family, the thing that always happens, whether you plan it or not?

• Is there someone in your life whose leaving hits you differently than others, and do you know why?

As always, if this piece meant something to you, please share ⬆️ it with someone else who might enjoy it, or restack it 🔄 to help me connect with new readers. The heart button 💟 tells me you stopped by, and I’m always so delighted when you do. Subscriptions, free or paid are what help keep the lights on here…and help me buy new boxes of tissues.

See you next week.

If you prefer to listen, I offer an audio recording here. ⤵️

This week, I have both of my daughters under my roof at the same time for the first time since 2024. These reunions feel increasingly precious as the years go on. One is home from four years in Australia, just passing through before she moves to Brazil. The other, who I see a couple times a year at best, arrived yesterday. For the next seven days, I intend to be as present as I possibly can.

I suspect you’ll recognize the feeling, whether or not you have kids of your own. Loving someone, really loving them, will fill you with awe at who they’re becoming, and then send you spiraling at the thought of everything they’ll have to navigate to get through life. The world I describe in this letter is the world my girls move through every day, on multiple continents, largely without me. That’s the terrifying part. The miraculous part is that they do it so beautifully.

So, it seemed like a good time to revisit something I wrote not long before we were last together, when I was equal parts furious and heartbroken about the state of things.

I’ll let the letter speak for itself from here.

Take them out at the knees

Dear Joy,

I owe you an apology. You’ve been on my mind for a while now, but I’ve not made time to reach out, and your daily communications and recent gifts have been marvelously supportive all the while. I still believe in the value of a thank-you note, though texting is better than nothing, and I failed on both counts. You are a faithful correspondent who seems to know just what I need most, and when. The last thing I’d want to do is jeopardize our relationship by being out of touch. I’m sure I’ve said this before, and I can imagine you laughing as you read this, but I will try to do better. Again. I promise.

Life is full, my friend, so very full. No one knows that better than you, and yet you always find a way to rise above the noise. I’m not there yet. The world gets under my skin, and at present, I find my allergy to men has flared up again.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right. There are exceptions to every sweeping generalization. As a matter of fact, the exceptions are the inspiration behind this letter—the exceptions and you, that is. I’ll circle back to that in a minute.

First, I need to air a few grievances. Something about getting them out of my head makes it easier to take them out at the knees.

Remember when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade? Speaking of buckled knees! That one left every American hobbled, whether or not everyone was willing to admit it.

You came through for me back then, and you’ve done it again, whether you realize it or not.

This time, it started with political mudslinging. I know you don’t waste your energy on that sort of thing, but mere mortals like me have a hard time steering clear of it. It’s not new, of course. The Founding Fathers provided the original guidebook, and I still haven’t learned to look past it completely. The similarity to the verbal abuse served up in middle school cafeterias is astonishing. Middle school. Gah! I can’t think of a time in my own or my kids’ lives that I want to revisit any less, yet here we are doing it adult-style.

Surprisingly, it’s not the idiotic barbs that get to me most. “Nasty, low-IQ, crooked…” What a bunch of nonsense! What irks me more is that the men mouthing off do it in the context of an opponent’s femaleness. These intrepid leaders, despite all their accomplishments and all the barriers they’ve overcome to get where they are, aren’t just politicians, they’re women politicians. They’re women politicians who are crazy. Or they’re women politicians who are incapable. Or they’re women politicians who are attractive and therefore deserve to be manhandled.

Maybe you’ve heard about the “childless cat ladies,” a remark made three years ago by a current political candidate through which he asserted that leaders without children have less stake in the future of the country than those with families. The comment screams gender bias. (Hello? Notice how he specifically targets ladies?) It also suggests that a woman’s purpose is primarily reproductive. I think my Roe v. Wade wound is bleeding again.

Recently, I read essays from women not too different in age from me who recounted stories related to sexual assault. As in my own case, one was lucky that the guy took “NO!” for an answer. The other was not.

This is how it goes for all women everywhere, some of us realizing how close we came to disaster, others walking away horrified, humiliated, and forever changed.

This is why my frustration—or more honestly, my anger—resurfaces time and again. Women are tired of having our lives controlled by people who don’t live them. We’re tired of trying to explain to doctors that our pain is real, tired of fighting our employers for equitable pay, tired of being extra alert in the parking garage, at the club, on the trail, in our homes, tired of having to work harder to prove our worth to ourselves and others.

Everywhere I look, I see men in charge, and also a lot of destruction and corruption in their wake. Yet somehow it’s implied that women don’t have the chops to lead. What is it, exactly, that we’re likely to ruin when we finally get the power we deserve? From where we sit, the system looks like it could only benefit from our help.

I know I’m preaching to the choir here, and I know you understand. Which brings me back to those exceptions I mentioned early on. Thanks for your patience. See, I’m capable of keeping some promises!

Before you drag me off my soapbox by the ankles, please know that I know women are also full of imperfections. There are women who name-call and stereotype, women who act like asses. There are misguided women, arrogant women, violent women. And yes, of course, there are men of deep integrity and humility, men who know how to be respectful and collaborative, men who make good partners. I live with one.

This is where you come in again, Joy, because right around the time I was stewing in all of this, I came across a story to remind me that all is not lost. Here’s a guy who has looked genuine darkness in the face, and who is still out there thinking, reaching, making the effort to improve things, noticing where help is needed, knowing when to step back and when to step up. If I can stumble over an example like that in my most cynical moments, I have to believe there are hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of others out there who are similar.

He brought me back to you, and I can’t tell you how much I needed that.

I’m sure you’re as busy as ever, but I do have a small favor to ask: could you send a little boost his way? An unsolicited compliment, maybe, or just a day that feels unusually open and full of possibility, the kind that reminds a person how singular and worthwhile they are. I think it would be a good investment on your part, and I think he’s earned it.

I’ll wrap up with one final observation, something I’ve noticed in just the last week or so. I’m hearing your name everywhere! I don’t know how you manage to move in so many directions at once, but I see you out there, and I’m grateful. We all are!

Take care of yourself, Joy. I don’t know what I’d do without you. I look forward to hearing from you again soon.

With love,
Elizabeth

These are the pieces I was carrying when I wrote this letter. I think they're worth your time.

Eileen: I wanted to scream but I didn’t. I didn’t get how he could be turned on by a drunken, disheveled fifteen year old, but I suppose he assumed I came there to have sex with anyone who was interested. I didn’t, but I thought it was my punishment for being somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be.

You're Right, I Do Look Tired

Quest To Be Cool

TW: sexual assault…

Read more

2 years ago · 28 likes · 5 comments · Eileen Dougharty

Prue: ‘Excuse me,’ she said, her heart pounding, ‘but how did you get in?’

He held up a master key, his handsome face broken by dazzling white teeth.

‘I beg your pardon!’ She could not disguise her horror.

‘You know why I am here?’

Knots in the String

Sorrento...

Sorrento…

Read more

2 years ago · 20 likes · 35 comments · prue batten

Switter: “...give a little whisper of thanksgiving when you switch on a light, access the internet, enjoy a hot shower, turn on the heating or air conditioner, wear new, clean clothes, travel anywhere in the world by plane, train, automobile, ship, bicycle, or foot, eat food only kings enjoyed in past generations, sleep in comfort, and live without constant threat or fear. But most of all, do not keep your privilege to yourself. Share it freely and without expectations of repayment.

Switter’s World

If You Are Reading This. . .

If you are reading this…

Read more

2 years ago · 34 likes · 17 comments · Switter’s World

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There’s a lot going on, much of it so disheartening. How is joy showing up for you these days? Is there someone who seems to know just what you need when you need it? I’d love to hear about that in the comments. Or if something in this letter stirred up your own grievances, those are welcome too.

If this essay found you at the right moment, passing it along might do the same for someone else. A heart 💚 or a restack ♻️ helps more people find their way here. Much as I don’t love algorithms, I do love the idea that this essay might bring just the right kind of support to a friend I’ve never had the chance to meet.

I show up here week after week because you matter to me, and because you show up, free or paid. If today’s the day you become a paid subscriber (only about $1 per essay) or offer a one-time tip (any amount is appreciated), I’d be honored. Every bit of support keeps this space going and means more than you might realize. I’m grateful for you, always.

See you soon.

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There are household projects we put off because they are expensive, or complicated, or require specialized knowledge, like rewiring something that could accidentally kill you. And then there are the projects that stick around because the human brain is capable of adapting to almost anything if exposed to it long enough, including a bedroom the color of Pixar fever dream.

When my daughters were teenagers, we painted their rooms Evil Minion purple and Grinch green, choices that made perfect sense at the time because they were seventeen and fifteen, respectively. Adolescence is a period during which strong preferences are confused with a timeless aesthetic vision, which is also the entire theory of the tattoo industry.

One daughter left for a job in the Southwest in 2018, the other completed her exit in installments, a little more gone each year, before finally moving to Australia in 2022. Two months later, we painted over her green room. I say “we,” but all I did was cheerlead and document.

Trimming days of work down to 25 seconds makes it look so easy!

The whole project took longer than planned, like they always do. The purple room could wait for us to gather up a new head of steam.

Now, before anyone turns this into some poignant metaphor about motherhood and the passage of time, let me clarify: I was not sitting outside the room weeping softly into a basket of cherished preschool artwork, though I admit to having said artwork. The room stayed purple because every time we considered painting it, the world produced another fresh hell.

There were the first Trump years, and then Covid, and I feel compelled to mention that we were working the whole damn time, because the cultural memory of the Before Times has become heavily curated by people who apparently spent eighteen months gestating sourdough starters and developing meaningful relationships with their herb gardens. But some of us were still getting up every morning, doing our jobs and wiping down groceries like raccoons with OCD. Putting the fun in functional, I’m telling you.

So the purple room remained purple through all of it: the elections, the pandemic, the endless screaming vortex of American public life, and a modern era during which the news cycle oscillates between constitutional collapse and Katy Perry shooting across the sky.

The pre-purchased paint was called "Raindrops on…" and that's as far as the label got once time and closet humidity took over. Reminded me of the inscription on the cave wall in Monty Python’s Holy Grail: "He who is valiant and pure of spirit may find the Holy Grail in the Castle of…aughhh!"

The room looked increasingly ridiculous. We had, at best, a concept of a plan.

This spring we finally hired someone to do the work. Four days and a lot of furniture shuffling later, the room is now a soft pale pink that reads calm and restorative, although there may be narrow window around 4:30 p.m. when it takes on the ambiance of an upscale tuberculosis sanatorium. Still, I love it! At this point in history, if a paint color doesn’t raise my blood pressure, that is money well spent.

At roughly the same moment we were painting the room, the imperious Donald Trump unveiled the architectural renderings for the triumphal arch he plans to build at the end of Arlington National Cemetery in Washington D.C, an arch that would tower over the Lincoln Memorial by 100 feet. Nothing says stable civilization like monumental vanity. Triumph arches were apparently irresistible to rulers with highly developed interests in grandeur, permanence, and themselves: Caesar had arches, Napoleon had arches, Kim Il-sung had arches. I look at giant symbolic structures like that and immediately think, “Ah, yes. A restrained and emotionally healthy society.”

Recently, I’ve been feeling an irrepressible urge to deal with some of the crap that has piled up around here in the 15 years since we moved in (and let our kids pick their room colors). I knew at the start that it was more than spring cleaning and have since realized that it’s about controlling my surroundings in response to the chaos around me. It’s also about doing what I can to not put any more weight on the shoulders of my offspring when the time comes for me and their dad to make a full exit. I hope this isn’t some prescient foreshadowing of a near-term departure for us, but if that turns out to be the case—well kids, just know it could’ve been worse.

The room is done. The closets are getting there. The plan for a gigantic arch is still being pushed forward by people who have never once stood staring at paint swatches wondering if “Raindrops on…(aughhh)” was going to be too pink.

A daughter arrives this week after a long time gone and a long journey home. She’ll sleep in the room she still considers hers. She’s calmed down a lot since the green years. Maybe the paint was part of the energy back then? The purple room, freshly raindropped, will be ready for whoever needs it next.

Out in the world, the arch nemesis waits, enormous and certain of itself in a way that has historically not ended well for arches or the men who commissioned them.

I’m going to go see if the linen cabinet sparks joy.

~Elizabeth

Afterward:

Each week I close with something small and doable, because I believe in the power of tiny actions taken by a lot of people. Our spheres of influence are bigger than we give ourselves credit for, and doing something, however modest, beats the paralysis of feeling like nothing is enough.

Try This:

The triumphal arch at Arlington requires congressional approval and federal funding. Which means you can weigh in. For this and many of the most pressing issues of the moment, 5calls.org—and the free 5 Calls app—gives you your representatives’ names, numbers, and a ready-made script. You don’t need a speech. “I oppose federal funding for a triumphal arch at Arlington National Cemetery” is a complete sentence and a legitimate communication to an elected official. They work for you, and you can always call after hours and leave a voicemail.

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The linen cupboard, for the record, did not spark joy. But it did spark a fairly satisfying garbage bag.

What’s your version of the purple room right now, literal or otherwise? And on the flip side: what’s the thing you finally dealt with that surprised you with how good it felt? The comments are a good place for all of it; I read every one. And—chime in if I’m right about this—lots of readers also read the comments, so it’s a fun place to share your ideas.

If today’s piece sparked anything for you, passing it along costs nothing and means a lot. A heart 💚 or a restack ♻️ helps me reach more readers which just makes it that much livelier around here.

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If you’ve been meaning to make the switch, or want to offer a one-time contribution, this is your nudge. I don’t fill these pages with ads, or outrage (well, sometimes) or a weekly helping of anxiety. Each essay is carefully crafted and delivered on time, a small, considered alternative to doomscrolling. I’d be so very grateful for your support.

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If you prefer listening, I offer an audio version here. ⤵️

There is a plant threading through my yard that has been in North America longer than the United States has existed. I crouch down to look at it on the way back from hanging a load of wash and find a stem no thicker than a piece of string, paired leaves that I imagine as a ladder for a tiny beetle, and a flower so small I have to bring it inside and grab my magnifying glass to see it properly. Four petals, white shading into pale blue, with violet veins converging at the center like tributaries feeding a sunlit lake.

Identifying it as a type of speedwell was easy, but it took much longer to home in on which one. Some are native, some naturalized, some hybridized. I pored through the details of two wrong guesses before landing on Veronica serpyllifolia, thyme-leaved speedwell, a plant that arrived on this continent with the earliest European settlers, almost certainly on purpose. It was used for respiratory ailments, for skin conditions, as a tonic for the general difficulties of being alive in a harsh new place. Someone packed it deliberately, having learned through long experience that it was worth having nearby. Four centuries later, it has naturalized so thoroughly that it’s now thought of as a weed, which says more about our appetite for monocultures and control than it does about the plant’s value. As it turns out, a native speedwell also grows nearby, the two of them winding through the yard together, unbothered by the question of who got here first.

The name speedwell is thought to come from an old farewell blessing, speed thee well, associated with safe travel and quick healing. The plant was embroidered on handkerchiefs, pinned onto lapels, tucked into pockets. It was the kind of thing a person carried because they understood that protection arrived in many forms, and that you could not always predict in advance which ones you would need.

Scientists have a name for what those settlers understood instinctively. It’s called the Insurance Hypothesis, and it holds that biodiversity functions the way a well-designed insurance policy does: its value isn’t obvious until something goes wrong. A diverse ecosystem has what ecologists call functional redundancy, meaning multiple species perform overlapping roles, so that when one is stressed or lost, others absorb the work. The system doesn’t unravel because no single thread is responsible for holding everything together. The biologist E.O. Wilson, in his 1992 book The Diversity of Life, wrote that biodiversity "has eaten the storms, folded them into its genes, and created the world that created us. It holds the world steady."

The Insurance Hypothesis is a story about what holds up when things go wrong. It is less interested in what was happening before the crisis, in all the unremarkable daily exchanges that made the system worth saving. The diminutive sweat bees and flies visiting those violet-veined flowers—veins that turn out to be landing guides, the flower’s way of saying here, here!—aren’t providing a service to the plant in any transactional sense. They are participating in something ancient and interwoven. The plant, and the bee, and the soil, and the rain, and the human crouching down to look aren’t separate things that occasionally interact; they are a system that cannot be understood by only examining the parts.

A monoculture is what happens when we decide, or allow systems to decide for us, that only certain species belong. In agriculture, the familiar consequences are thousands of acres given over to corn, or wheat, or broccoli and a resulting catastrophic vulnerability. Every one of those plants shares the same genetic weaknesses, and a single blight or pest can take them all down. And monoculture logic doesn’t stay in the field. It moves into yards, into policy, into the stories a culture tells itself about which things are essential and which are expendable, about which presences are load-bearing and which ones the system can do without. The problem is that no one really knows which is which. The species doing nothing visible in an ordinary year may be the one the whole system is waiting on when something goes wrong—a yeast no one is tracking turns out to be the only organism capable of scrubbing mercury from a Pennsylvania watershed. Subtle is not the same as without function.

Most people aren’t making conscious decisions against biodiversity. They’re participating in systems designed to make ecological consequence invisible, to push it to the microscopic, the distant, the delayed, the someone else’s problem. Industrial agriculture, suburban lawn culture, the supply chains behind every flat of annuals at the garden center in May (and I am no stranger to that seasonal tendency) function best when you can’t see what they’re costing. Efficiency and health aren’t the same thing, as fifty years of ecosystem research makes clear.

Recently I visited Melody, a woman I’ve come to know through my writing here, whose yard is a designated Bay Wise property. She has committed to managing it in ways that support the health of the Chesapeake Bay watershed, a region so networked with waterways that nearly every resident lives within a half-mile of a tributary. I brought her two plants from my yard; she had collected four or five species in nine or ten pots for me. Standing in her garden felt like standing in the middle of a demonstration against the idea that any one thing is dispensable. There was no lecture or virtue signaling. She was just tending what she felt belonged there and passing pieces of it on, which is how this has always worked—when it worked.

Among the containers we nestled into my trunk that afternoon were a pair of giant purple hyssop plants, one significantly larger than the other. I decided to put the smaller of the two in the ground just as our long, cool spring suddenly turned the corner into summer. The heat came on fast, but the plant looked like it would pull through until a rabbit, which I watched from my kitchen window, stood on its hind legs and methodically chewed off all the leaves.

In a frustrated search for novel deterrent ideas, I came across something I hadn’t considered before: transplants are especially vulnerable not because they lack defenses, but because they are still re-establishing the resources that make those defenses effective. A plant that has been in place long enough has rebuilt its underground network, its water balance, and its capacity to recover quickly from damage. A new transplant has all the same mechanisms but lacks the reserves to sustain them once challenged. It needs time in the ground before it can defend itself, and it needs external support in the meantime.

My yard is less of a lawn than it is an experiment. Except for potted plants, what grows here is what shows up every spring, as nature designs. I do what I can to pay attention, to ask questions, to listen and learn. When conditions grow too harsh, I offer a hand, just as I’d want someone to do for me. We are travelers among travelers, threading our way across disturbed ground, the visible edge of a vast and breathtaking network. Speed thee well.

~Elizabeth

Afterward:

Each week I close with something small and doable, because I believe in the power of tiny actions taken by a lot of people. Our spheres of influence are bigger than we give ourselves credit for, and doing something, however modest, beats the paralysis of feeling like nothing is enough.

Try this:

Next time you’re outside, crouch down and look at something growing that you didn’t plant. Take a photo of it. Download the iNaturalist app (free, iOS and Android) or visit inaturalist.org for help identifying almost anything you point it at. Then, if you want to go further, find someone nearby who grows native plants and ask if they have anything to spare. The exchange itself is the point.

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I have to tell you that when my husband came home and found me lying face down on the grass, he wasn’t at all sure what to make of it. The things we do for love, right?

What’s growing near you that has a great story? Do you have a Melody in your life? Is there a place where you’ve watched the logic of “weed management” do its damage, or somewhere you’ve seen the opposite—where diversity is holding something together that might otherwise have fallen apart? The comments are a good place for all of it, and I truly appreciate every one.

If this essay found you at the right moment, passing it along might do the same for someone else. A heart 💚 or a restack ♻️ helps more people find their way here.

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A few weeks ago I read an essay called Fuck Farming. There was no asterisk. Out of habit, and a certain fear of my Puritan ancestors, I started to soften it here, then thought better of it.

The essay was written by a farmer trying to explain the economic realities of sustainable agriculture for people without inherited land or family money, and it ran through Substack like a shit through a goose. The writer was thoughtful, sharp, and deeply frustrated, but what interested me almost as much as the argument was his chosen title—that one word. Before I clicked, it had already established that this would be a tell-it-like-it-is exposé. It promised exhaustion, anger, and most importantly, honesty.

My expectation says something about the strange cultural journey of the f-word and its cousins. Somewhere along the way, profanity stopped functioning primarily as profanity and started functioning as a marker of authenticity. These days, when a writer drops an f-bomb (and from here on I’m spelling it out, because this essay has no business hiding behind an asterisk), it tells me that the speaker has stopped performing, that things are so bad he no longer needs to be polite. Fuck right there in the title says: I am too tired, too exasperated, too cornered, too fed up with reality to package this gently for your comfort.

Historically, this is a remarkable transformation. My parents, born in the 1920s, would have regarded such a title as evidence of moral decline. In their world, the word belonged to drunks, soldiers, sailors, and men working loading docks. It was not language for educated people, and certainly not language for book covers. Mom was a Gone With the Wind devotee and thought Clark Gable’s “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” was about as far as a civilized person needed to go. The film’s producers famously agreed to pay a $5,000 fine rather than cut the expletive from the final scene.

Picture my mother dropping a dish, watching it smash to pieces on the kitchen floor. Now see her stamping one foot and shooting out an emphatic dammit!. That was the extent of it. My father, being a father, had a wider repertoire, but certain words never crossed his lips in front of us kids.

I was similar if slightly less diligent with my own children and lucky that I happened to have a cat named Puck on whom I could blame any slips of the tongue.

One of my favorite creative non-fiction writers here, Ramona Grigg, announced not long ago that she blocks commenters immediately if they use either the f- or the c-word on her page. Her decision wasn’t framed as prudishness; it was about maintaining an old standard, a line others, including me, have wandered across without much ceremony.

The word has become so commercially successful it practically qualifies as its own literary genre. There are enough profanity-titled self-help books to stock an entire airport kiosk. Notably, all have an asterisk in the title: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Unf*ck Your Brain, Calm the F*ck Down, Buy Yourself the F*cking Lilies, F*ck Feelings, Tired as F*ck. There are profanity-forward coloring books, gratitude journals, and cross-stitch pattern collections. The word now appears in pastel fonts beside watercolor flowers. We have thoroughly domesticated the beast and put it on a tote bag.

The modern publishing moment seems to begin in 2011 with Adam Mansbach’s Go the F*ck to Sleep. Mansbach, wrecked by a toddler who refused to go to bed, posted on Facebook about writing a children’s book with that title. Friends told him he had to. The joke became a manuscript, the manuscript leaked online before publication, and the book became a phenomenon to the tune of millions of copies, forty languages, and Samuel L. Jackson narrating the audiobook with the gravitas the subject deserved.

What made it work wasn’t shock value. Every exhausted parent immediately recognized the emotional truth behind it, the gap between the tender performance of bedtime parenting and the private mental state underneath. Rather than feeling vulgar, the book felt like finally being told the truth.

Research has since caught up with what readers already sensed. A study titled, and I am not making this up, “Frankly, We Do Give a Damn,” found a consistent positive relationship between swearing and honesty, though subsequent researchers have argued about what that actually means in practice. What nobody disputes is the perception: people associate profanity with authenticity, interpreting strong language as evidence of genuine feeling rather than polished persuasion. Whether swearers are actually telling you the truth may be an open question. That we read them that way is not. In other words, fuck now functions as proof that someone means it. (Dammit!)

Which brings me to a complication, and what it does to everything else.

The trouble is that every successful rhetorical strategy eventually gets absorbed into marketing and then leaks back out into ordinary speech. Authenticity becomes aestheticized, rebellion becomes branding, and instead of lighting up the sky in moments of genuine trouble, our heftiest expletive flares now sit in gift shops next to scented candles. When every emotion is delivered at maximum volume—a delayed flight, and a failed marriage, and a disappointing latte all arrive calibrated to roughly the same pitch of intolerable—the volume stops meaning anything.

What people are hungry for is the feeling that a writer is telling them the truth. Profanity became the fastest available shortcut for signaling it. The pointing is the point.

My mother and Ramona Grigg would say the word is simply vulgar, that they were taught to think of it as beneath a certain kind of person. They’re right that it costs something to say it, but I think the cost is no longer moral. Now, it’s more like currency: spend it everywhere and it buys you nothing.

This past weekend I hauled a hose across my yard to add some much-needed moisture to my vegetable garden. The whole state is under a drought warning, and our two bird baths get as much use as drinking sources as for splashing. As I directed a steady spray onto peas and potatoes, a female ruby-throated hummingbird shimmied at the edge long enough for me to have a little conversation with her. Hello, friend. It’s good to see you again. How can I help? Are you thirsty?

She hovered, slid sideways and back again, considered, and left.

On the way to a recent farm meeting, at a school bus stop on the far side of town, I watched scores of children from different families and different backgrounds make their way toward the curb. A ball-capped man in a Vans t-shirt stood in the street to make sure the kids on the opposite side crossed safely. More than a dozen children were headed to a school where teachers will do their considerable best to help them learn in a system that does not, if we’re being truthful, especially prioritize them.

Soon after, I sat in conversation with farmers, all women, growing vegetables and flowers, raising chickens and pigs, women with families, with and without spouses, with and without land they own, who sell at farmers markets and restaurants around the region and who work, I would say with confidence, harder than everyone I know. Food farming requires the stamina of an athlete, the patience of a saint, and the ability to solve problems continuously while running on too little sleep and entirely too much coffee. It is one of the only professions where your entire year’s success can be undone by a late frost, followed immediately by someone asking why strawberries are so expensive.

Driving home, I thought: If anything deserves the word it’s this. The hummingbird making her case at the edge of the spray, the people at the bus stop, the women who go out in the dark to check on the chickens, who watch the sky the way the rest of us check our phones, all matter as much as the guy who’s fed up with farming. It’s hard to tell those stories in ways that cut through the fuck-it-all noise. They’re not packaged for outrage but they are as real and honest as anything gets.

The farming essay earned its title because the exhaustion was visible in every paragraph, not just the headline. The word was a symptom of the argument, not a substitute for it.

But what if it works the other way too? Look at this fucking hummingbird! Look at this fucking man standing in the street in his Vans t-shirt! Look at these fucking farmers who do what they do so the rest of us can eat!

I’m not sure the word has ever been asked to carry that kind of freight, but I think it can. I think it should. If we’re going to market it to death anyway, why not give honest beauty at least as much air time as honest fury?

My mother would have hated this essay. Ramona Grigg may never speak to me again. I’ll admit, it even scared me a little to write it—which, after everything I just argued, is either deeply ironic or exactly the point. Probably both.

So, did you read this?

~Elizabeth

Afterward:

Each week I close with something small and doable, because I believe in the power of tiny actions taken by a lot of people. Our spheres of influence are bigger than we give ourselves credit for, and doing something, however modest, beats the paralysis of feeling like nothing is enough.

Try this:

Pay attention to the words you reach for when something matters to you, good or bad. Notice when you’re amplifying, when you’re understating, and whether either one is actually telling the truth about what you feel. Then find one thing, just one, that deserves more of your honest attention than it’s been getting. It doesn’t have to be grand. It might be a person, a place, a problem, or tiny bird at the edge of a garden. Acknowledge it, even just to yourself, with the awareness it deserves.

Well. We made it to the other side of that together, Puritan ancestors and all.

I’d love to know what you think, and I mean that more than usual this week. What word has lost its power for you through overuse? What do you wish people would do with their strongest language? The comments are open and I’m eager to meet you there.

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If you prefer to listen to today’s story,
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I want to tell you about a man I didn’t know well—or not well enough, it turns out. We met the way people do in a small town, and I’ve spent the better part of a year working toward telling this story. It’s one of the hardest things I’ve written. I think it may also be one of the most important. I’m sharing it today, a few days ahead of my usual schedule, in his honor.

A note before you read: This story addresses end-of-life decision-making and assisted dying.

The date is April 30, 2026, a Thursday. Robert Steven Blizzard has just turned 71.

He wasn’t in the Yorkshire Dales, where he once delivered handcrafted ale in a 1926 Model T Ford and believed, deeply, that small communities were worth preserving. He wasn’t in Hendersonville, the small North Carolina mountain town where he rebuilt his life after a stroke nearly took it. He wasn’t on the Chesapeake Bay, where he spent a few years with his dream dog, Ranger. He was in Switzerland, and it was the last day of his life.*

Steve chose this. He chose the country, the organization, and the process, which required persistence, documentation, psychiatric evaluation and the kind of bureaucratic patience that seems almost cruel to ask of a man like Steve Blizzard. He did not choose the date. It came to him, offered by a Swiss organization called Pegasus that didn’t know, when they assigned it, that they were handing the man a birthday gift.

Were I a frequent-flyer like my husband, I’d have met Steve at Blue Heron Coffee, where he, too, was a regular. I seldom drink coffee, so for the longest time, I knew him only vicariously, knew about his stroke, about his dog, how he’d moved here recently. Before meeting him at a holiday gathering hosted by our sailing friend Michael Keene, who shared Steve’s love of the water and became one of the anchors of his St. Michaels life, I didn’t know how little I knew about Steve.

I don’t recall much of our first conversation that night at the party, only that I noticed the brightness of his blue eyes when he shook my hand and that at some point I asked him if he’d ever tried using a speech device. His “no” seemed less like an answer to my question and more like the story of all the things he’d tried that hadn’t worked out after all. I remember thinking I had no idea what it must feel like to be him.

I’d like you to know a little something more about Steve Blizzard—father, businessman, adventurer, brewer, and a man who suffered a massive stroke at the age of 58. He was not expected to survive, but he overcame the odds and has spent the last 13 years living his life.

This is not a story about assisted dying. It’s the story of a man whose days were defined by knowing who he was, going after what he wanted, and moving on when something was done. This decision was the last expression of that same character.

Steve was born in Des Moines, Iowa, a detail that might sound like a small beginning except that it wasn’t. His father was a pioneering physician who did groundbreaking research on growth hormones. Steve grew up, as he once joked, in a house full of people who were either four-foot-one or seven feet tall. He left Iowa for undergraduate and graduate school at the University of Virginia, tried Wall Street for six days—six days—and walked away. He became a map-maker, then stood waist-deep in a Rhode Island snowdrift one day and reconsidered. He went back to school for business, came out a banker, and proceeded to spend the next several decades doing exactly what he loved: growing things. Like an architect with the blueprint of a dream, he had a gift for seeing what didn't exist yet and building toward it.

Steve supported the expansion of companies and institutions, and, later, he helped people found banks. He saw the Skipton Building Society’s Homeloan Management division from two staff members to one of the most significant financial institutions in northern England, an entity that eventually managed more assets than the society itself. He logged two million air miles. In a single week, he was in Lisbon, Los Angeles, Amsterdam, and Hawaii. The pace had consequences; his marriage didn’t survive it. He told a Yorkshire news reporter that all the traveling had eventually become a terrible bore, and he meant it.

What Steve Blizzard actually loved was going deep. In 1988, he moved to England and fell hard for the pubs, the tight-knit communities of the Yorkshire Dales, and for English beer. He learned the rhythms of a place and let them become his own.

When he’d finally had enough of the consultant’s life, he might have retired. Instead, with help from a neighbor, he converted an old barn between the villages of Hetton and Cracoe into Wharfedale Brewery. The first beer was called Folly Bitter after the small stone building where he’d taught himself to brew as a hobby. Steve arranged for local buses to carry the slogan Drinking is Folly, which ruffled a few feathers, then donated two pence from every pint to local charities. People from the community were brought in as employees because, as Steve said at the time, “Anything we can do to create more work for ordinary folk will help to keep these small communities together. Now that is something worth working for.”**

Steve used his Model T Ford as a brewery dray. That right there tells you much of what you need to know about the man, except you’d be missing that he taught himself Chinese and Dutch, that he spoke four languages, performed in pantomimes, restored antique vehicles, and that he played mandolin, banjo and piano.

In January of 2013, five minutes before boarding a flight to Sicily, Steve had a massive stroke at Washington Dulles International Airport.

A clot had formed on an aortic valve he’d had since he was 40. In a skull that was already narrow for the size of his brain, the swelling that followed made survival unlikely. When he made it through the first 24 hours, he was told he wouldn’t walk again.

His friend, Virginia, was with him at the airport and kept vigil for three and a half weeks in a neurological ICU in northern Virginia, then six more weeks at a rehabilitation center in Asheville. Both facilities recommended long-term nursing care, but those who knew him best knew that would be his downfall.

Instead, Steve went to Hendersonville, a town he’d loved since childhood summers at nearby Camp Mondamin, and he fought to get his life back with the same focused intensity he’d applied to everything else.

By 2016, three years after the stroke, he was walking Main Street on his own, living independently, working out daily, swimming laps by flipping fully onto his back to breathe, because turning his head was still too difficult. With only two percent grip strength in his right hand, Steve learned to kayak by taping the paddle to his hand, a support he was eventually able to stop using. His trainer said: “Every little step of the way, he wants to do more… I can’t foresee him not having an active lifestyle now.”

There were still so many plans: Drive the Blue Ridge Parkway and old Route 66 in the Model T with his son Jack, the photographer. Visit his son Morgan, the ophthalmologist, in England. One by one, Steve checked them all off the list.

A few years before I met him, Steve moved to St. Michaels, Maryland, with Ranger, a Chesapeake Bay Retriever. Friends worried he’d injure himself tripping over a dog, but the pair thrived together. Steve became a museum volunteer and joined the local yacht club. He and Ranger spent time on the water with friends in his magnificently restored 1947 Ventnor, once breaking down in a shipping channel after dark with Michael; Steve still being Steve. He had three luminous years in the small town.

What the stroke took and never gave back was language. The expressive aphasia was severe. Though he could read, follow conversation, and navigate the world, Steve’s words had no clear route out, a composition without musicians to play it. He fine-tuned his drawing skills, regained the ability to write, and with effort, to speak in fragments. But for a man who had once enlivened rooms and mastered languages, this was an alienating new reality.

When my husband returned from the coffee shop with news of Steve’s plans to go to Switzerland, I immediately felt the pull of trying to write his story, and it was an honor when he agreed. To work within the limits of what the stroke had taken from his speech, I put together a questionnaire and met with him several times at his home in St. Michaels. The rooms were modest, immaculate, and filled with memories. A substantial desk anchored the living area, art and awards colored the walls. Steve, weeping and smiling in equal measure, called my attention to dozens of major and minor league baseball caps lining the perimeter of a bedroom, from his cross-country stadium trips. He posed for a picture with the mirrored “Beer of the Festival” award and pointed to the cased musical instruments leaning against the wall.

Two virtual conversations with Denise Layfield filled in what I couldn’t reach on my own.

A speech-language pathologist who started as one of Steve’s therapists and became one of his closest allies and staunchest defenders, Denise praised his tenacity.

“Steve does the work,” she said. “He’s a man of vast curiosity–from boats, to Civil War battlefields, to antique cars and motorcycles. He remembers the birthdays of those close to him. He’s still the captain of his ship.”

She also said, plainly, “I don’t think people understand how isolating this severe expressive aphasia is. When you have a mind like Steve’s, full of complexity and interest, to be limited to a few words…” She didn’t finish the sentence.

Steve’s response was just, “Thank you.”

The work between them has been a decade in the making. When they first started, Steve was still unable to read. Denise would order two copies of a book, one for each of them, reading aloud while he followed along. If something confused him, they’d stop, discuss, and reread. Across a couple of years, they worked through at least six substantial books until, eventually, Steve was reading on his own again. He never gave up working on his ability to communicate without words.

Those caps he’d shown me? Each one marked a stop on a pair of solo cross-country train trips to ballparks across America. With limited speech to ask for help, and no easy explanations if something went wrong, the journey required meticulous advance planning. Denise was available by phone at every turn as Steve navigated train schedules, hotels, stadiums and game times in cities he’d never visited before. His friends thought it was a terrible idea. He went twice.

Early in 2025, Steve made up his mind, and his conviction was as solid as it had been with every bold move in his past. That summer, he found Ranger a new home, a family with land and plenty of love to give. He cried every time the subject came up. The stories that emerged in our conversations, tales of his life and memories, were both joyful and poignant. And each time we returned to the topic of Switzerland, I watched Steve straighten his posture, lift his head, pop his left thumb in the air and say, “Yes!”

The questionnaire asked what he doesn’t want people to assume: That he’s depressed or that he regrets his life.

“I feel like I have lived a full life,” he wrote. “I feel well traveled and well experienced.”

I offered several choices for phrases that might describe him: He saw the world differently. He was always searching. He had his reasons. He was hard to sum up. The answer Steve selected was that he didn’t make small decisions.

About his feelings around this choice: Peace. About his state of mind: Calm.

Applying for assisted death in Switzerland took Steve through two organizations and across 18 months. He was asked, initially, to undergo a psychiatric evaluation to assess his capacity for self-determination, a process that proved nearly impossible to complete. There was no question about Steve’s mental clarity, but getting an appointment with a psychiatrist in the American healthcare system is its own particular ordeal. After months of delays, the process collapsed.

Research pointed to another organization with different requirements. Pegasus, in Basel Switzerland, made their own determination about Steve’s capacity. He was accepted.

His plan was to fly to England in mid-April, spend two weeks with Morgan and Jack in the same Yorkshire community that had once claimed him as a Dalesman, and then carry on to Switzerland.

Steve returned to his friends in Hendersonville for the weeks before England. They visited him every day, played backgammon, took him up into the national forest. The daffodils were blooming. It was 70 degrees.

Not everyone who cared for Steve was at peace with his decision. That’s what love looks like sometimes.

Before he left St. Michaels for the last time, there was a planned gathering at Blue Heron where he spent so many mornings, where my husband came to know him over the years, one conversation at a time, the way you do in a small town. Instead, a blizzard preempted that plan. Some folks never got the chance to say goodbye—not Heather and Jay, whose coffee shop served as a daily gathering place for him and Ranger, not Maura and Will, who cheered the day he finally took his lovingly restored 1955 Panther motorcycle and specially fabricated Watsonian sidecar out on the road for the first time.

Mike and I caught up with Steve at home a couple of hours before he left town. His packed bags upright, like sleeping soldiers near the door, the house still furnished but emptier than it had been on my first visit. I gave him a small stone shaped like a heart. He had it with him on our last video call, and he held it up to the camera with a big, blue-eyed smile.

~Elizabeth

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In my experience, dying and death are not topics we lean into readily, despite the fact that none of us will get out of here alive. Steve knew exactly who he was and exactly what he wanted, right up until the end. That kind of clarity is both admirable and humbling.

I’d truly love to know your thoughts, if you’re willing to share. Few topics feel more personal or more difficult to voice. And few, I’d argue, matter more.

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