A note before we begin: I wrote this in the lead-up to the U.S. midterm elections, jittery about how it would all go and not remotely confident I could take it in stride. By the time you read this, much of it may be known. Uncertainty is nothing new, but times like these concentrate it and demand we notice just how little control we have over what happens next. Right here. Right now. That’s all I’ve got for the time being.

Well, I did it again. Or the universe did it again. Sometimes, it’s hard to say where I end and the rest begins. No sooner had I spent the morning thinking about how much I admire people who are good at challenging assumptions than I was met with a chance to do just that.

Maybe met with isn’t right. I could have waved it away, offered a pat answer, kept moving. Instead, I stuck my foot into the crack in the door and pushed myself right on in.

I see him once a week or so. Our exchanges are cordial, surface level, variations on small town sameness: How are you, beautiful day, town sure is busy today, or the opposite, depending. He might tell me about his latest project, I might tell him I won’t be taking up his parking space for long. This time he says my car needs washing, which is entirely true, the dark exterior spattered with riverbirch sap and bird crap like a Pollock knockoff. If you knew the state of his pickup, you’d know how laughable it is for him to mention it, but I humor him with agreement and explain it was my daughter’s car, that I’d never choose black.

He asks if she is gone again, my daughter. Not a surprising question. His adult children are similar in age, and there is a lot of knowing a little something about people in this place we both call home. What I don’t anticipate is diving headlong into how she is now living in São Paulo with her Brazilian partner, how they’d be in the U.S. except that our country won’t let him in, not even for two weeks as a tourist.

Next, in his unhurried Chesapeake dialect, he’s coaching me about open borders and how the Iranians want us dead, so it’s in our best interest to prevent them from having nuclear weapons. He’s telling me how Somalis are taking over cities and don’t want us in their neighborhoods, and I’m saying we don’t seem to mind when we’re the ones doing the excluding, I’m explaining that I don’t give any politician a full pass, that I think we have issues throughout government, but that this administration is making money off of us, siphoning billions of our hard-earned dollars to put in their own pockets.

He gets a funny kind of smile on his face and says he doesn’t care about that. Why would he not care, I press on, learning that he’s banking on the Book of Revelation, that we’re all going down, and only a few of us are going up, and that it’s all spelled out already. What we really need to do, he says, is be careful of the communists, and I say if he’s worried about communists he might want to pay attention to how our President is befriending Putin.

He never interrupts, never raises his voice. He appreciates knowing where I stand, he says. I thank him for giving me his perspective. I also tell him I think we have to look at our hearts. It seems like we’re getting our news from different stations, but no matter what, I say, we have to decide for ourselves how we’re supposed to treat people.

I hope he understands when I tell him I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to figure out what it means to be Christian, reading the same Bible he’s reading. These days, I say, it all feels like a game of Telephone. Yes, he remembers how somebody whispers a phrase at the start of a line, and by the time it comes out the other end it’s completely different. And as I step into my dirty car, groceries sweating in the back seat, making as polite an exit as I can, I wonder aloud if Jesus would be telling people they don’t measure up because they happened to be born in Iran or Somalia. He says no, with a slight laugh.

I’m a little changed, but I don’t imagine he is, or at least I don’t imagine he’s still thinking about our conversation.

The sun has been brilliant this week, so bright that at times I have to lift my hand to shield my eyes, and it makes the senescing trees look like they’re lit from within. I notice, again, the coexistence of beginning and ending. Disheartened by reality, I cling to hope. Because no matter where things land, next week I’m going to see the same people, and we’re going to know a little something about each other, and the next time I see that man, I wonder if he’ll notice that I got my car washed today.

~Elizabeth

Trying to put the finishing touches on this week’s piece while keeping an eye on election results was about as focused as you’d expect. I’m fairly sure I took the same comma out and put it back in three times. However the counting is going where you are, I wish you grace and patience for the days ahead.

If you feel like weighing in, I’d love to hear from you. Are you more of a talker or a listener? And if you could ask someone one question and be guaranteed an honest, unhurried answer, what would you ask?

I’m always grateful for your contributions here, whether they come in the form of thoughtful comments, paid subscriptions, one-time donations, or post shares. It all matters, so very much, as do you.

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Afterward:
A country is made through this kind of small exchange, and each of us has some say in what they sound like. However the week unfolds, let’s keep showing up for them, raising our voices together and with care, for the kind of place we want to live in.

Try This:
Next time you see someone you only know a little, see if you can learn one new thing about them: their first name, where they grew up, what they’ve got planned for the weekend, or if they caught sight of that amazing red maple on the way out of town. Listen for the answer and see where it takes you.

See you soon!

If you prefer to listen, you’ll find an original audio recording here.👆

Of all the meaningful lessons from my past, I consider the two-finger whistle one of the best. Living on a farm, it was a ready tool for summoning feral children, better even than the brass ship’s bell that hung on the back porch post. My daughters’ backyard was measured in acres. A high-pitched whistle coaxed little sprites away from their woodland reverie, or summoned them from whatever mischief they’d dreamed up at the water’s edge.

Today, that whistle quiets a room full of noisy people, sends a signal of support at a rally, and hails the husband about to drive off without his lunch. I learned how to do it in a much smaller backyard.

We’d been renting a little, two-story cape for just about a year when my parents decided its air conditioning—or lack thereof—was not suitable for a second southern summer, at least not for my hot-blooded father. The house they purchased was a basic brick rancher a short ways across town, not nearly as cute as the one we left behind but much more functional. In keeping with mid-60s suburbia, it featured a wide-open backyard, flat and virtually treeless, where kids could roam. My one brother was finally old enough that he no longer required a fence to keep him contained, but I imagine being able to shoo him outside to “run it off” was an attraction for my parents. On long summer evenings, neighborhood kids converged on our yard for kick ball, kick-the-can, and rollerbat, fueled by cans of Charles Chips.

Rebecca, my closest pal, lived just a few doors down. The year we turned 12, or maybe it was 13 (neither of us can say for sure, and yes, I asked), she learned the exceptional art of a two-finger whistle and, as good friends do, passed the technique on to me. I spent weeks with my fingers in my mouth, blowing and spewing, until I finally nailed it.

Rebecca and I talked recently about how her grandfather and my father could make the same sound without the two-finger assist. Despite our own skills, we have no idea how that’s physically possible.

As regular whistlers go, my dad was terrific. He could tootle out a tune quite reliably, though keeping his singing voice on key was unpredictable. By contrast, my mother used her unwavering alto voice in the church choir, but I can’t remember ever hearing her whistle, odd for a woman as musical as she was.

Like a kid out daydreaming in a big backyard, I conjure popular songs with whistling in the mix. Otis Redding’s “Dock of the Bay” is a song I will forever associate with the magical time I met my sailor husband. Its whistled section is memorable for most, as are the ones in Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” and Billy Joel’s “The Stranger.” And speaking of strange, we can’t forget the seven dwarfs who whistled on their way to work. They function well enough to run a synchronized mining operation but lose the ability to care for themselves the moment a runaway teenage princess moves in. Heigh-ho, that tracks.

I note that every one of these whistlers is male and settle in for a second brainstorming session, this time focusing on women.

I come up with The Bangles’ “Walk Like an Egyptian,” Pat Benatar’s “Love Is a Battlefield,” Beyoncé’s “Texas Hold ‘Em,” and “Can I Get It,” a newer Adele song. Of these, the only one I can confirm whistled her own part is Pat Benatar, and that because her husband and guitarist, Neil Giraldo, talked her into it, citing Otis Redding as precedent.

What’s the deal? This feels like more than a coincidence. Next thing I know, I’ve stumbled into a tangled web of predictably infuriating history.

Did you know that “A whistling woman and a crowing hen are neither fit for God nor men?” This is an English proverb, with variations that claim the Devil himself would show up for the persecution. In some Christian folklore, a woman’s whistling made the Virgin Mary’s heart bleed. One legend blames a woman who stood by whistling while the nails for the cross were forged, which is a lot of weight to hang on a tune.

In 1883, Popular Science Monthly published an account of the prejudice against women whistling, the writer noting that women were widely discouraged from doing it, despite being perfectly capable of it. The author theorized that women self-policed because whistling distorts their features.

Hold up. For whose benefit, exactly, were we scrutinizing our faces?

At sea, where whistling was already considered capable of calling up a gale, a woman made matters that much worse. In fact, her mere presence was bad luck, whether or not she brought any notes forth from her pursed lips. A captain in Scarborough, so the story goes, once refused to let a young woman board because she whistled; the ship was lost on its next voyage, which spared her the blame she would have received had she been aboard.

Women were thought to anger the seas unless their breasts were exposed, as in the figureheads that graced the bow of many a ship. Sailors, it seems, could be flexible in how they elected to appease the gods.

I’d like to say it’s reassuring to know I’m not the only one to notice the gender disparity here, and I’d also like to say I’m surprised. Women have threatened civilization since the dawn of man, after all. I can’t prove that old taboos explain the musical imbalance. Plenty of things shape who ends up whistling on a record, starting with who gets studio time, but I’d love to hear a better theory.

Notice, too, who gets the publicity: the whistling man is the cowboy ambling into town, the loverboy beneath the window, the singer who makes it look effortless, while the whistling woman is ill-omened.

A long time ago, my husband and I established our own quiet whistle code. We use it to find each other when we’re separated in public spaces. It’s remarkable how a two-note tune rises above the din of a department store. In our recent reminiscence about our summer-found skill, Rebecca and I agreed that our spouses seem rather proud to be partnered with women who whistle like they mean it.

We’re proud of ourselves, too. Whistling with two fingers is like driving a stick shift with your face. It takes determination and a lot of practice. Most people never get it in gear. But it can occasionally get you out of a dodgy situation. I’m not opposed to teaching an army of women how to get a little louder. All you need are a pair of fingers and a working set of lungs.

~Elizabeth

Sheesh! Some rules need to be broken, right? If it’s not already dead, I hope this one is on its last legs. On a more upbeat note:

• Is there a skill are you eager to pass on to someone you know?

• Do you have a signal, a word, or a whistle, that only a few people understand?

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And if you enjoy wandering through the hidden corners of everyday life like this, paid subscriptions are what keep me going. If you’ve been waiting to join in as a free or paid subscriber, I hope today’s the day. To those who already do, thank you, truly. Not ready for a paid subscription? You can “buy me a coffee” with a one-time tip.

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To everyone who spends time with me at Chicken Scratch, my sincere gratitude. You’re part of the soundtrack of my life, and I appreciate you.

Afterward:
If you’ve been with me for a little while, you know I typically close with a call for collective action. The biggest one I’ve got right now is encouraging people to vote. Maybe offer to bring a friend or neighbor along. In the spirit of collaboration, consider this: Someone showed you something once that you now take for granted. Think of who it was and then figure out who’s waiting for you to do the same.

Try this: (A Learn How Video)
The best two finger whistle tutorial I could find (I spent a stupid amount of time looking) is on a site called The Art of Manliness. I’m just going to let that detail land with no further comment. Watch it, learn it, and then be the female instructor the internet couldn’t find for me.

Oh, one final bit: I use whichever fingers are free and clean, usually just my two index fingers, sometimes pinkies. Middle fingers work, too, but you might want to reserve those for other responsibilities.

See you soon!

If you prefer to listen, you’ll find an original audio recording here.👆

For a little more than a decade I sold specialty produce at a small, rural farmers market. I offered seasonal salad mix before it came in sink-sized plastic tubs at every grocery store. I sold edamame before the fuzzy, salt-covered pods turned up in the freezer section at Walmart. Fava beans, shallots, fresh figs, cut flowers, and the most gorgeous eggs from the happiest chickens, all carefully tended and much anticipated. For a while I believed the farm work was the hardest part.

I was wrong about that; it was certain customers. And it has taken me twenty years to better understand what to do about that.

One Saturday, a woman wearing a fine linen summer ensemble and an “aren’t you quaint” smile asked if I would take a dollar off a five-dollar bouquet, because one stem was broken. I don’t know if I’d had an especially trying week, if the kids had been snot-nosed, the chickens had pasty butts, or an outsized credit card bill had come calling. Whatever the reason, her question rankled like a rooster in a churchyard, so I asked what she did for a living. “I’m a financial planner,” she said.

I inquired, out loud, yes I did, whether she ever discounted her fees. This made her sputter and produce a half-cocked answer about her benevolence. I held firm on the price, and she walked away empty-handed.

I now understand that she wasn’t just a woman haggling over a dollar. She was a specimen, and I had been given a rare, close look at her in her natural habitat. She was operating according to what I have come to call the Inconvenience Principle: When we are inconvenienced, it is an injustice; when someone else is—tough luck. By that logic, any imperfection in the world, however small or unrelated to us, can be turned into a debt owed to whoever noticed it.

She hadn’t broken the stem. I hadn’t broken the stem. It was broken by wind, or an act of God, or the drive from farm to market at sunup, and the swirling cosmos was now in arrears to her by exactly one dollar. Note that she did not take up her problem with the wind or God. Unlike me, neither had a booth at the market.

I’ve come to realize that a grievance with no paperwork is just chaos, so I’ve drafted some forms for today’s market farmers.

When a customer notices an imperfection, she will be handed Form 5-BS: Request for Reparations Due to Minor Inconvenience. She will itemize her psychological distress, estimate her lost opportunity, and attach a recent pay stub so the hourly value of her time can be properly honored. A panel will review the claim. The typical payout will be a coupon for $.37, valid on alternate Saturdays and only if she doesn’t mention it again.

The Inconvenience Principle has corollaries. Another Saturday, a woman’s darling doodle wove itself into a tight space and flattened an entire table of my goods: broken blossoms, far-flung figs, water-soaked, hand-lettered signage. She apologized, and I accepted, then stood there like a fool waiting for something else to happen. But in her accounting, the matter was settled. I was out around $60, and she was out of regret, so in her mind, we were even. The dog had the decency to look embarrassed. He was usually so good, she told me, as though his track record was a line of credit.

When a dog flips a table, the owner will receive a Certificate of Performative Apology, pre-filled with “I’m so sorry.” Beneath that, a line item that reads: “What you would be paying if there were consequences.” The owner will be assessed the cost of the damaged goods plus a modest fee for the assumption that an apology is all that’s needed. Payment is due within 30 days.

At every stall, we can post a price list:

What intrigues me about the Inconvenience Principle is its range of application. It thrives well beyond the farmers market. Consider the driver of the tank-like Suburban who, upon finding the parking spaces drawn for smaller vehicles, concludes that the fault lies with the lines. So he takes up two spots. Consider the man at the return counter with an empty can of paint, because the color looked different on the wall. Or think of the shopper who leaves her cart across the supermarket aisle while comparing yogurt labels, then looks insulted when someone asks to get past.

None of these people is making a big request. They are merely collecting on a small debt owed by a world that perpetually fails to arrange itself for them.

At the far end of the spectrum, the specimen undergoes a metamorphosis. The minor grievance becomes an appetite, and the appetite becomes a right. The creature is no longer merely inconvenienced. It has been handed nearly everything and regards the missing remainder as a personal affront, convinced that whatever someone else has must have been withheld from him.

Given the scope of the issue and reports of increasing populations, I propose the Fund for the Disgruntled, a foundation to ease the daily indignities suffered by anyone who has ever been told to “suck it up buttercup.” It will be financed by a universal grievance levy, with additional assessments for repeat claims, demands to speak to a manager, and appeals filed after an unfavorable ruling. Processing fees will apply at every stage. The Fund’s administrative costs are expected to consume most of its revenue, but this will be regarded as a necessary expense by the people who run it.

I’ll confess, I’m not immune to the Principle. While waiting on the phone for a customer service rep, certain that the world owed me an apology for a shoddy product, I felt it rise in me like a warm bath: righteousness, and a clear sense that someone should be made to fix this. It felt wonderful. There is such pleasure in believing that a minor wrong has revealed something profound about the responsible party, and that we have been chosen to set things right.

I’ve found there’s only one reliable cure, and it comes from an old slogan I like to rework: Better Living Through Lowered Expectations. My blood pressure is grateful.

To the woman in the linen, wherever you are, please accept my formal Certificate of Performative Apology. I’m so sorry you felt inconvenienced by the price of flowers.

For the record, I retired from the farm and the market years ago. This summer I grew potatoes again, and unlike my last attempt, which yielded four, this one produced a dinner or three.

Potatoes have never asked me whether this was my best price. They don’t mind a few blemishes, and they have no opinion about my unpredictable watering. They are either edible or not, and nobody is owed an adjustment, not even for a harvest that fell short of expectations. Small potatoes, as it were.

~Elizabeth

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Thank you for reading, or for listening, if you’re someone who believes, as I do, in multitasking. A few things I’m curious about, if you feel like weighing in:

• What would you add to the price list? Every vendor I’ve ever known has one they keep in their heads. Let’s give them some new fodder.

• And since I confessed to my warm bath of righteousness, I’d love to hear yours. What’s the smallest thing you’ve ever felt the world owed you an apology for? Bonus points if you were right.

The comments are open, and I read them all. If you haven’t already, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The space is free for everyone, and if you choose to support the work, you’re joining a generous and thoughtful flock. I’m glad you’re part of it.

In the meantime, may your stems arrive unbroken, and may you be the kind of person who offers to pay for the topple tables.

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Afterward:
Entitlement spreads by example, and so does restraint. We can’t do much about the far end of the scale, but we can decide what happens at the checkout, the market stall, and the other end of the customer service line. Little decisions add up to a local culture, and that’s worth defending.

Try this:
This week, or the next time you’re inconvenienced by something, pause for three seconds and ask: who is actually paying for this? If it’s a person, let it go. If you caused the damage, offer to cover it before you’re asked. Lifetime discounts are still pending.

See you soon!

If you prefer to listen, you’ll find an original audio recording here.👆

I come to fall as a pilgrim at the end of a journey, sinewy and efficient, senses attuned, soles thinned, the dust of summer in my dreams. I am ready to be set down.

What else is there to do when the well is thick with the leaves of living, the water stained with what has let go? The bucket brings up the season’s decay, and the ladle at my lips no longer touches thirst.

Fallen leaves stipple the air, the landscape, the doormat. They cling to my shoes and join me as I move from house to car to memories of loss.

Sensing what’s coming, and needing what there’s less of now, the bees are restless and a little desperate, crowding around the market baker’s stand, exploring the fruity scent of my hair, revisiting the same flowers again and again, monks to prayers. I hover nearby, hoping to save the scene with the click of a button, but I cannot keep the gracious aroma of the holy basil, the soft nap of the bumblebee, the emerald iridescence of the sweat bee.

The fig tree and the okra are still giving, only slower now that the nights are cool. I go out with my basket anyway and take what there is. I need an extra blanket on the bed.

I am oversensitive and prone to tears, unsure how or whether I have anything left to offer. Last night I dreamed I drove to a stranger’s house and let him drive me home, never thinking until I watched him leaving the driveway that he was in my car, the old silver stick shift, rusty in spots but going strong, the one my daughters learned to drive when they were 15. I couldn’t remember his name or where we’d met, what I needed from him or whether he provided it. I careened through rooms in search of a record, a phone number, an excuse, a way to fix my stupidity, and no one seemed nearly as frantic as me, not even my long-dead parents.

Near the end, one of my kin was stumbling along in cowboy boots, which she never wears, and I offered to help steady her. What works best, I asked. A hand to hold, a lifted arm, one tucked around your waist? They all help, she said, smiling.

~Elizabeth

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As we settle into new seasons, I’m curious what that looks like for you. Are you making room for anything in particular? In the midst of everything that feels overwhelming or uncertain, how are you finding your footing?

I’d love to hear what’s on your mind, whether it grows from this week’s piece or from something else entirely. Maybe you’d like to leave a touch of wisdom here. I’ll take all of it I can find!

Thank you for being you, for reading, for sharing these words with others, and for helping make this a place where it’s okay to focus attention on what matters. I’m so glad we’re here together.

Your support is such a gift.

Afterward:

I believe small acts of care make a difference, especially when we practice them together. Taking care of the places and creatures we share is one way we make room for goodness to grow.

Try This:

Find a native plant nursery near you, and choose something to plant for the bees. Spring and fall are the best times! Not sure where to start? Explore the Global Pollinator Directory for resources in your part of the world. Then offer your support to someone else.

See you soon!

If you prefer listening, there’s an original audio recording here. 👆

Some routes to weighty destinations are direct, but mine rarely are. This one runs from a napkin full of Chex Mix, through a room full of good-hearted women, me among them, to rape culture. So, take care. I’ll move carefully and begin with myself. Before I do, I should explain why a story about hair and clothes ends up somewhere so consequential.

I spend most of my writing life (indeed the rest of my life, too) seeing both sides. On topics that divide us, I can usually find something in an opposing argument that overlaps with my own. For that reason, I rarely take someone to the mat over an opinion. Sexual abuse and rape are not opinions. There is no gray there, and I’d rather be clear about that now than tiptoe toward it.

This journey begins with a good friend who asks if I’ll join a fashion show. She is a dear soul who has offered her support and hospitality freely over the years, which makes it harder to say no. Volunteers are fewer and farther between these days, and at 5’7” I can wear pants that would drag the floor for others. Sure, I need my weekends for writing and recharging. That and a vague reluctance about having to peel myself out of my comfort zone almost keeps me home. But I figure a Sunday among new acquaintances could be a kind of inoculant against my shrinking tolerance for society in general.

At the appointed hour, I arrive to a dressing room teeming with activity. It’s blowing a gale outside, so our plan has shifted to an indoor set-up. Four other fashionistas are packed into a narrow space that must moonlight as a storage closet. An old couch with room for two takes up most of a wall. In a single chair, at the midway point of two folding tables, a woman is applying eyeliner and talking up a storm. A volunteer stylist refreshes the hair of another woman by the opposite wall. Cardboard boxes and plastic totes envelop us, yard signs lean precariously and spill onto the floor, name tags and ribbons are scattered about. Somebody tosses Chex Mix onto a napkin and cracks open a bottle of prosecco. It is not quite noon and we’re slated to appear at 1:00. Various people, mostly men, wander in searching for this or that, so we lock the door and have to unlock it whenever a new someone needs to find something new.

It is conceivable that a group of women in their fifth and sixth decades, sequestered for ninety minutes, could cover serious conversational ground. This crew sticks to relevant topics: fashion, hair loss, back pain, aging skin, and red light therapy. I’ve never heard of such treatment, but one woman says she wraps a device around her neck for “the wattles,” and I’m astonished because she has nothing of the kind. (As a former chicken tender, I’ve seen my share of wattles.) She knows it works because the hair at the back of her neck has grown like crazy. Someone else has bought a half-price light to use on her head.

There is show-and-tell for a hat that went for upwards of $500, appreciation for a faux-alligator belt said to be the most expensive in the room, and talk of gifts they buy themselves that cost more than a little, but whatever, they have a birthday coming up, or one just passed.

My shoes are probably in their second decade. Since I bought them at a consignment shop I can’t be sure. My earrings, though, are solidly in their third because I wore them the weekend I got married. I understand the argument that we work hard and deserve nice things, that the finery shows off our faces and our curves, and that somebody has to support the small businesses that sell it. The voice in my head and I go around on that several times that afternoon, and neither of us ever wins.

Unexpectedly, there is time for me in the stylist’s chair after all. She asks whether I want to keep my side ponytail, and I say yes. We agree, vaguely, that she’ll help the curls along. I’ve watched her adding soft spirals to other heads. My hair coils of its own accord, so I’m unaccustomed to the brush running across my scalp, the hot wand near my right ear, the tightness of the elastic band meant to hold it all in check. Somewhere around the second pass of the iron, I understand we pictured different things but say nothing. When she finishes, my bouncy springs have become wide, draping tresses that more or less match everyone else’s, kept in place by a styling product so thorough that I can’t get my own fingers through it. I say thank you, and mean it, position a badass black hat on my head, and see in the mirror a woman who could pass for any of the others—refined, elegant, and, dare I say, predictable.

I struggle to find a reason for the whole experience feeling a little off, and my internal monologue will not shut up about it. The women are funny, warm, generous, and I like them. Nobody pressures me to spend money or tells me that any part of my ensemble is inadequate. I am along for the ride, but the backseat makes me feel a little queasy.

I don’t know whether anyone else in that room was having second thoughts. It seems likely that a few of us were running over the same ground, though none of us said a word, myself included. My older daughter tells me that in the aerial silks studio where she trains, posters on the wall ask for no negative body talk, and the regulars will gently correct you if you slip. I could have used a poster like that in the closet, and I would have loved to be the one to say so. Someone has to go first, and in that room, nobody did.

The beauty section at my Target takes up countless aisles, and I have stood in the middle of it staring vacantly at items different only in price and packaging. The shelves are organized by what's wrong with us: circles, spots, dullness, thinning. The labels speak the language of repair, with goods that firm, lift, plump, correct, reverse. Shoppers like me are just trying to finish our errands, but what we absorb subconsciously is the notion of women as projects, permanently in need of improvement and priced accordingly. In my lifetime I've watched the shelves multiply, along with the ads that support the products on them.

The executives with the spreadsheets and the stock shares know that abundance passes for choice; it works on me like it works on anybody. They’re selling a promise: We can gain or retain beauty, desirability, youth, and acceptance. All we have to do is spend money to get there. The logic follows us from the skincare aisle to the clothing rack. Our heels, hemlines, serums and salves are funneled to us by an industry that decides what’s wrong with us and then plies us with the fix. Underneath it all is the implication that we have to be beautified to be worthy.

Women’s clothing has long been entangled with power. Who gets to decide what a woman should look like, what her appearance says about her status or respectability, and what happens when she refuses to obey the rules? Some restrictions were once imposed openly by families, communities and governments. Today, many masquerade as personal choice.

Fashion is not, in and of itself, oppressive, and women who enjoy it have not necessarily been duped. A corset, high heels, lipstick or cosmetic procedures can be restrictive, expressive, pleasurable, empowering, or some combination of all four. But what social systems make these choices desirable? Who benefits from the expectation? And how much freedom do we actually have to say no?

Women have more formal liberty than they did in earlier eras, but that can coexist with pressure, and pressure can feel normal if it’s been in place long enough. Nobody would have stopped me if I had kept my curls for the fashion show, but in the moment, a cultural expectation did a bang-up job of feeling like my own preference. At what point do we become so accustomed to the standard that we no longer question it?

The same appeal reaches men by dangling different carrots: the right car, the right watch, the right body, and the implication that if they use them to demonstrate achievement then respect, status, security, and sexual or romantic success will follow. The sales pitch is different, but it belongs to the same economy of worth.

Set the two pitches side by side and you get women who are encouraged to become desirable, while men are encouraged to become the sort of men who deserve desirable things. Advertising rarely says the quiet part out loud. It doesn’t have to. A system can be practiced by people who have never consciously agreed to it.

The fashion show was a lighthearted event run by kind people. But the trace of an outline was there. I was, for one afternoon, a mannequin with opinions. We wore the clothes so that other people could picture themselves in them. The stylist matched our hair so the outfits could do the talking, which made us part of the display. Nobody who took part in the show designed the system. We were all just standing inside it.

Marketing explains a lot about what we buy and what we believe, and it excuses nothing. No man gets to blame a watch commercial for what he does to another person. My bathroom is full of potions, and I sat quietly for the brush and the curling iron. I wanted to be agreeable and was trying to be a good sport. I could have spoken up for my natural hair, but I didn’t. Had I told the stylist I liked my curls, she would have set down her tool, and I would have walked the floor with a fluffier ponytail under my hat.

Here I want to be careful, because I know a curling iron and a rape are not cousins. In the dressing room, a “no” would have been heard. My stylist was doing roughly what I had agreed to, and the decision remained mine. There was no violation in that room. There was only a familiar lesson about how quickly we trade what we want for being acceptable.

Rape is something else entirely. At its center is a person whose autonomy has ceased to matter to someone else, whose “no” was ignored or silenced. The danger comes when that disregard is treated as normal, when the people around a man decide that his reputation matters more than a woman’s account, or when the social cost of stopping him outweighs the cost of letting him continue. That is where individual violations becomes larger than the individual, because the culture can make it easier for him to do it, harder for someone to stop him, and harder for the people around him to see what they are seeing.

Rape culture is the name for the habits that protect that behavior: excusing him, doubting her, minimizing what happened, treating coercion as a misunderstanding, and debating who owed what to whom.

Which brings me to the recent Cornell case. Jane Doe has filed a civil lawsuit alleging that she was drugged and raped by seven men at a fraternity house in 2024, and that the university failed to protect her. The Tompkins County district attorney initially brought no charges, then reopened the investigation in September after the lawsuit and the resulting public outcry. On October 1, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul appointed Attorney General Letitia James as special prosecutor, saying she had lost confidence in the county district attorney’s ability to oversee the case. James has said her office will investigate fully and fairly, and Hochul said it would present evidence to a grand jury if warranted.

At least three of the accused, through their lawyers, have denied criminal wrongdoing. The rest haven't spoken publicly, and the allegations remain allegations. The original investigation and the reasons no charges were brought are disputed, and those questions will have to be resolved through the legal process. I don’t intend to decide them here, but this is a tragedy whatever the outcome.

What I can’t unsee is the fraternity group chat, allegedly showing one member advertising “free” sexual access to a woman upstairs. Other members replied, one chiming in later to ask whether the “shop” was still open. The response: “Yeah” with a devil emoji.

That language is repulsive no matter what the court decides. A woman became merchandise, her body an item to which other people could be directed, like a product on a shelf.

These stories never stop coming. The CDC’s most recent national survey found that 21 percent of women reported completed or attempted rape in their lifetimes, and about 20 percent reported sexual coercion. Do the arithmetic on any room full of women, including a storage closet jammed with hats and prosecco, and the numbers remind us that survivors are not some distant population. They are among us. They are us. We are Jane Doe.

What is wrong with men?!

There is a premise held and acted on by some that a woman’s body is a purchasable asset, something they can rent, trade, and advertise. My older daughter had a word for all this when I went shrieking to her: patriarchy.

Men who rape are responsible for raping, full stop. No makeup, clothing, advertising campaign, fraternity, watch commercial, childhood lesson or cultural norm gets to absorb that responsibility on behalf of the person who committed the crime.

But I can’t get past the feeling that the beauty industry and a culture that permits sexual entitlement are based on the distorted assumption that a woman’s worth is something other people get to assess, and that our bodies are objects to be graded, improved, displayed, desired, or acquired. An industry that profits from teaching women to see themselves as unfinished does not cause men to rape. A culture that teaches men that status, achievement and sexual success are measures of their worth does not cause men to rape. But when those messages meet, they can create a particularly dangerous bargain: women learn to expect evaluation, while men learn to mistake their standing for a claim on someone else.

What is wrong with men? The question is broader than fashion, and bigger than any one man. They don’t invent their ideas about masculinity in isolation any more than women invent theirs about beauty. We inherit them, reinforce them, sell them, reward them, and even resist them, mostly without noticing. That doesn’t absolve anyone. Quite the opposite. If the culture around us helps shape what we expect from one another, then we all have some responsibility for what we reinforce, for noticing when something we have always considered normal is actually serving a hierarchy we would never consciously condone.

The good news, if there is good news, is that systems, which are made of people, are not the laws of physics; they can change. History gives us plenty of evidence that they do. The record is full of people living inside systems and refusing to behave as expected. But a system is hard to see because we are all swimming in it. When you’re a fish living in water, you don’t spend much time wondering what water is. Patriarchy is extraordinarily good at making itself look like ordinary life.

In Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, the late bell hooks described men’s side of the bargain this way:

Most men find it difficult to be patriarchs. Most men are disturbed by hatred and fear of women, by male violence against women, even the men who perpetuate this violence. But they fear letting go of the benefits. They are not certain what will happen to the world they know most intimately if patriarchy changes.

I don’t know exactly what change involves. We can’t change what we can’t see, and we can’t see what we don’t talk about, so it starts with conversations that do more than tell women to be careful and men to behave. I kept my monologue to myself in that dressing room. For my two daughters, and for everyone’s sons and daughters, I’m starting by bringing it here, to you.

~Elizabeth

Afterward:

If you or someone you know needs support, RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Hotline is free and open 24/7 at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673), or online at rainn.org.

Thank you for staying with me for this one, for showing up and standing up. You are how change gets started. You read carefully, you think things through, and you keep asking how we get from noticing to doing. That’s the conversation I hope we keep having. Your support is everything.

Thank you in advance for letting me know I’m not shouting into the void.

(This is where you get the opportunity to do that…)

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Original voiceover coming soon! 😅

I stayed up half the night trying to coax a new, weighty piece into shape, but it’s just not ready. It needed a touch more light. My hat is off to folks like who consistently manage to dig deep while also leaving us with reasons to be hopeful.

In the meantime, here’s a piece shared previously about words and why I fuss over them. That feels fitting with the week I had.

It also comes with a fresh anchor. My husband recently came across the word “bafflegab” in a news article and couldn’t resist leaving it on a handwritten note for me to contemplate when I returned home that morning. (For the uninitiated, it means language so wordy, vague, or jargon-heavy that it confuses more than it explains.) I consider it a sign.

Enjoy!

I am a fool for a good word. In conversation, it’s not uncommon for me to pause mid-sentence and search audibly. “What’s the word?” I don’t always find what I’m looking for, my brain less brisk than I wish, but the instinct abides. 

I admire those who choose words meticulously, and I imagine most writers do, though I’ve seen examples to suggest otherwise. Poets are the bomb squad of wordsmiths, every decision tactical, while politicians are magicians, crafting marvelous illusions. And teenagers? They’re wayfarers, blazing trails to unexplored linguistic destinations that distinguish them from others.

Words create worlds. Words shape identities and outcomes. And sometimes a single word can make all the difference.

Like the time a guy went on about a new enzyme diet, which foods had the right sort, which the wrong sort, and how he wanted to maximize his well-being with all the best choices. Even if he had to go out of his way to find them, he was dedicated to the method.

When asked where he’d learned about the program, he offered the example of another man whose health was imperiled following a motorcycle accident. He’d been terribly compromised, failing to thrive. 

“I mean, this guy was EMANCIPATED!” my acquaintance emphasized. 

He was sick. But free! And…enzymes.

Words are hard. 

Sometimes, it’s not that we can’t find the right word. It’s that the one we need doesn’t exist, as anyone multilingual can attest. What applies in this language might not apply in that one.

Take French, for example, the study of which once absorbed great hunks my life, fat lot of good that did me. Even a common word like voilà, literally “see there,” is too complex for a simple translation. Used to present, introduce, draw attention, note accomplishment, convey agreement, or end a conversation, it’s far easier for us English speakers to just rip off the whole word, merci bein. Et voilà.

I asked my nephew’s mother-in-law for input. and her husband, both originally from New York City, have lived in rural Japan since 1975, raising four children there. An award winning writer, coach, and columnist, I assumed she could readily name countless kotoba with no English counterparts. I thought she might choose a term in the vein of those we Americans co-opt in our westernized pursuit of mindfulness and meaningful living: shinrinyoku (forest bathing), ikigai (living with purpose), or wabi-sabi (the beauty of imperfection and impermanence). She didn’t.

“Wow,” she said, “there are so many words. Off the top of my head, I'd say: chotto. [It] can be translated as: a little, slightly, just a little, for a moment, briefly, wait a minute—even, I don't want to talk about it now. And it can be used to stop a conversation, or inquiry, in its tracks.”

Chotto. Like voilà, only better. Who hasn’t longed for a more diplomatic way to tell someone to buzz off? I’m reminded of a Mennonite farmer I worked with who never participated in meetings. Instead of admitting he wouldn’t attend, which might be rude, or that he couldn't attend, which would be untrue, he'd say, "I don't believe I'll be there." I think chotto is the word he needed. So versatile.

Broad and contextual works well in some circumstances, but there are times you want specificity, something that takes out all the guesswork. I was introduced years ago, by my friend Carita, to the delightful utility of Swedish grandparent names: mormor (mother’s mother), morfar (mother’s father), farfar (father’s father), farmor (father’s mother). It’s a wonderfully efficient system.

But when I asked her recently about Swedish words that have no English equivalent she sailed right past those options into the sort of language I’d thought might turn up in Japanese, even offering a stunning companion photo, taken from her kayak in late July.

She wrote, “Mångata (moon road) is what Swedes call the light of the moon on the water, in a path like this. Kind of a stairway to heaven word…”

‘Cause you know sometimes words have two meanings.

Similarly rich and descriptive are Arabic expressions of endearment. Noha Beshir, who writes offered two:

“…I'll give you a couple,” she begins. “They seem all wrong in English, like they're flattened, like their depth disappears.

"Ya 'uyoony - this literally translates to ‘oh my eyes.’ What it's really about is expressing your love for someone. So if you're calling out to someone you love, and you call them, ‘my eyes,’ you're expressing the depth of your love for them. People could use this to refer to their romantic love, or to family members, or to dear, dear friends.

“Another one is Ya rohy - this one is ‘oh, my soul’ - you'd use it the same way as ya 'uyoony. So again, to express your love to someone in pet name or endearment format.

“The soul is referred to frequently in Arabic, separate from the heart, separate from the mind. I'm not sure if this is because, through the lens of Islamic spirituality, these are seen as three separate components of a person's being.”

Fascinating. And she’s right, of course. Sorry, kids, but bae and pookie don’t have quite the same level of sophistication.

When I asked about untranslatable word ideas from a friend who spent his career as an international aid worker (find him at ) he offered some lighthearted gems picked up during his many assignments. 

“I immediately thought of a chiChewa word, katundu, Switter explains, “which is kind of like baggage but not. It’s more like all the junk we haul around in the back of our pickup. It is used in Malawi.

“They also have a much better word for mosquito than we do: udzuzu, which sounds like a mosquito when you say it.”

I live in a place where there are a lot of pickups and recall a fellow who had so much katundu that a tree sprouted in the bed of his truck and grew to be about four feet tall. Judging from the fact that he didn’t remove it, it seemed to bring him some pleasure, unlike udzuzu. 

We could easily flip this discussion to focus on a collection of English terms that don't easily translate, words like awkward, serendipity, and nice (a story unto itself, in my head anyway). Instead, I’ll highlight just one: spam.

The word we use today to describe anything unwanted and ubiquitous, particularly electronic communication, got its start as a canned meat product back in the late 1930s. Spam was the winning contest name for a repackaged combination of spiced, cured pork and ham. As an edible product (hold forth on the translation of edible if you wish), it exists in at least 40 countries. But to refer to junk email, most countries just borrow our word, spam. 

Given the changeable nature of language, and the rate at which new words find their way into the lexicon, I’m thinking of campaigning for a few additions to the modern dictionary. Tell me these wouldn’t come in handy:

• Reirritate: Repeating the advice you weren’t asked to give the first time.

• Whichth: Used when you don’t know which number you want, for example: This is our whichth anniversary? 

• Horridge: A hot breakfast cereal that can also be used as brick mortar.

• Esthole: The assiest of asses, the superlative hole.

Also, I’m taking suggestions for a word we can employ when we’ve only half-listened to a partner’s riveting tale about enzyme diets but suddenly realize they’re looking at us in anticipation of a response. “I’m sorry…what?” we blink, admitting we’ve heard a mere fraction of the story but with no indication as to which portion we need repeated.

Collectively, I’m sure we can come up with something better than “what.”

And when we do, we will save relationships, mark my words.

~Elizabeth

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Words and how we use them are recurring themes for me. For more like this, delve into the nuances of Making Love or check out I Give You My Word.

What’s missing from your vocabulary? Which terms found their way there on a trip abroad or from your teenager? Do you have any hacks for remembering new words? Let’s talk about it in the comments.

Your conversations, post likes, restacks and shares help me reach other readeres like you, so thanks in advance for taking a few extra moments to dial up that mojo. (Look for these buttons at the start and end of the essay!)

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Sitting on the attic floor, my lanky teenage legs stretched out alongside the paper-wrapped cylinder, I could peel back enough of the covering to see just the first few inches of the quilt. Marveling at its rich colors and textures, its delicate needlework and diverse motifs, I loved the tiny spectacles most of all.

The house of my youth suffered from no lack of storage space; my mother manifested it as she worked with the architect on its design. Closets, cabinets, built-in pantries and china cupboards, a roughly finished basement and an attic with enough head room for an adult to stand upright. For her, everything had its place, even if she was the only one who fully understood what that meant. The home was her territory.

The lower level was where my father kept his desk, hunting gear, and guns. It’s where the upright freezer held the spoils of his outings in plastic wrap and white butcher paper. The basement was for vintage train sets, rowdy grandchildren, Little Tykes rides, Legos and Lincoln Logs. The attic held seasonal decorations, retired dishware, and keepsakes that were too precious to discard but had no place to land in the rest of the house.

I am the namesake of my great-great-grandmother, Elizabeth Doran Essex Wright, affectionately known as “Elizza” and the fourth in line to inherit a crazy quilt that spent a quarter of my life in my parents’ attic. Fitting together whose handiwork might be represented in its careful stitching is like sewing together a quilt of my own, a piece of history here, a splash of color there, and creative adornments throughout. I like to imagine her sitting with her mother and two sisters, working in the interstices, between chores and childcare, by daylight or lamplight.

Quilts like these are documented in the U.S. as early as 1870, but it was the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia—better known as the first World’s Fair—and its introduction to American people of Japanese-inspired concepts like asymmetry and cracked-ice designs that catalyzed the “crazies” craze.

Women across the nation, from a spectrum of wealth and religious backgrounds, stitched remnants of silk, velvet, and ribbon into deliciously irregular works of art. A crazy quilt might preserve a piece of a formal dress, an everyday garment, a man’s vest pocket or necktie, a family memory or a political moment—so becoming a kind of scrapbook. The results could be extravagant or restrained, fashionable or frugal, showcasing embroidery skills and providing an outlet for personal expression not readily available to Victorian women.

Sewn into my great-great-grandmother’s quilt and adorned with embroidered laurel-like sprigs in threads of blue and bronze, is a small silk ribbon bearing a portrait of President James A. Garfield, the words “Hiram Memorial,” and a date: September 25th.

After two excruciating months fighting infection from an assassin’s gunshot wound, Garfield had passed away six days earlier, on September 19, 1881. The funeral procession drew mourners from Washington, D.C. to his birthplace in Ohio. When his body arrived on September 24th, crowds gathered to pay their last respects, townspeople lined the railroad tracks, bells tolled, and buildings were draped in black mourning cloth. Hiram College (then Western Reserve Eclectic Institute), the small school where Garfield had studied, taught, met his wife, Lucretia, and served as principal, held its own memorial service that Sunday, a day before he would be buried in Cleveland.

Sixteen years earlier, near the end of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln had been murdered. Peace in the country was still tenuous. The Reconstruction had collapsed, and the South was reasserting the white supremacy the era was supposed to end. The spoils system, which rewarded party loyalty over merit, had turned the federal government into a patronage machine corrupt enough that a disgruntled lawyer named Charles Guiteau shot Garfield over a position he felt he deserved.

The week the funeral train made its way to Ohio, the nation mourned together while bearing witness to Lucretia “Crete” Garfield’s immense loss. Her marriage to James had been rocky early on, owing to his extended absences and infidelity, but after the death of their first child in 1863, the pair became devoted partners.

After the shooting, Lucretia, who had then lost two of her seven children and was prone to illness herself, stayed at her husband’s bedside though she was still weak from a bout with malaria that spring.

Crete was her husband’s confidant and moral compass, expressing support and determination in the thousands of letters they exchanged. Though she tempered them publicly, she held strong views on women’s rights, penning them into letters to her husband:

“It is horrible to be a man. But the grinding misery of being a woman between the upper and nether millstone of household cares and training children is almost as bad. To be half civilized with some aspirations for enlightenment, and obliged to spend the largest part of the time the victim of young barbarians keeps one in a perpetual ferment.”

In the year following James’s death, at the family home in Ohio, the widowed Mrs. Garfield oversaw the construction of what would become the first presidential library. She went on to maintain a vast collection of books and presidential papers for the remaining thirty-two years of her life.

Married to Joseph Thomas Wright at nineteen, the census lists my great-great-grandmother’s occupation as house keeper and his as farm hand, eventually farmer. The eldest of her four children would become my great grandfather. She died in 1889 at thirty-eight. Though it appears they all reached adulthood, her parents buried three of their six children and they outlived Elizza by a decade.

How the Hiram Memorial ribbon reached a woman in rural Kentucky who, according to the 1860 census, could neither read nor write, I don’t know. It’s possible, though improbable, that someone from the family took the 24-hour train ride to Ohio to pay respects in person to the slain president. More likely, the ribbon was shared by a neighbor, a church, or perhaps it was a treasure that turned up in a bag of scraps promoted by silk manufacturers and available for purchase at local stores. Whatever its provenance, its inclusion in the quilt tells me much about how the tragedy affected the family.

Elizza and Crete lived different lives. One had a nation’s sympathy, money, and an archive. The other had a census line. But both were charged with holding things together: households, then grief, then legacy. One built a library of books and letters. The other made a quilt.

Consider what was on offer: A Kentucky farm woman in 1881 could work alongside her husband, keep house, raise children, and bury them. She could sew or teach if she were educated and a job existed. Her legal identity was folded into her husband’s. Politics, wages, and public speech were mostly closed to her. Needlework was among her few forms of expression, and it could carry ambition, feeling, even civic pride. A women’s group in Hiram made a flag of fifteen by twenty-six feet for Garfield’s 1880 presidential nomination, and it was displayed again after his assassination. Women stitched public memory.

Did my female kin cry and laugh together, telling stories with their hands and voices, skeins of silk thread and sharp needles nearby? Did Elizza D. imagine that the quilt would last through five more generations? I don’t know. She left no letters and probably couldn’t write them. I could tell you she made the quilt hoping to say something important about her time on the planet, and that would be a story I made up.

I can’t know what she thought about the country. I can’t know what she thought about its leaders or what she said when the news came. But she saved the ribbon.

~Elizabeth

They say history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. September 19, 2026 marked the 145th anniversary of Garfield’s death, amid a political climate still echoing today. Here, I set out to consider an heirloom from a woman I never met, someone who lived with a lot of turmoil and tragedy. I don’t think you can write honestly about grief and division in the past without the present pulling up a chair beside you.

Elizza left no letters. Lucretia left something in the realm of 55,000 documents. Most of us land somewhere in between, hoping whoever comes after knows what to do with what’s left.

I wonder…

• What skill ran in your family that was never written down?

• If a stranger inherited something from you, what would they get right about you, and what might they get completely wrong?

I read every comment, and treasure the opportunity to get to know each of you more completely. The community of readers there is just wonderful!

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And if this kind of rummaging through the scraps and archives of life is something you look forward to, paid subscriptions are what keep the creative energy flowing. If you’ve been waiting to join in, I hope today might be the day. To those who already do, thank you, truly. Tapped out on paid subscriptions but still feel moved to acknowledge the experience today? You can “buy me a coffee” with a one-time contribution.

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To everyone who spends time with me at Chicken Scratch, I extend my sincere gratitude. You are part of the tapestry of my life, and I appreciate you. 🧵🪡 💚

Resources:

American Patchwork and Quilting
A Fairyland of Fabrics
Fueled by Silk: Victorian Crazy Quilt Mania
First Ladies: Influence & Image
National Park Service: Country Mourns as President is Laid to Rest
UVA Miller Center: Lucretia Garfield

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?

If you stopped in to read today, please let me know by clicking the heart 💚restacking ♻️ or both. If the piece felt meaningful, I’d love to connect with you in the comments. Such a fabulous community there!

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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

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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!

Share

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?

Thank you for joining me today. For those who’ve newly subscribed, I’m thrilled you’re here! While my essays are freely available, those who are able to offer paid subscriptions are a backbone of support for work it takes to keep Chicken Scratch going. If the thought of one more subscription is bringing you down, one-time tips do the job too. I respect and appreciate the many ways readers show up here in support of these weekly essays. I’m glad you do, and I hope you’ll invite others to join you by sharing and restacking ♻️ these musings.

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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?

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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.

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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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