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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~Elizabeth

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

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

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Chicken Scratch is always free. It’s an act of reciprocity I can offer to the world. If you find value here, a paid subscription is only around a dollar per essay, and that support means more than I can say. One-time donations are also an option. (“Buy me a coffee” doesn’t quite ring true, but you get the idea!) However you choose to show up—a heart, a share, a comment—I’m truly grateful you’re here with me. See you next week.

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

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For those of us who tend toward half full, it can be hard to admit when the glass tips sideways and most everything spills out.

I try to reason things out. Even when it’s not the popular opinion, even when it runs counter to the moral outrage of the moment, I can usually find my way to some compassion for the person who said or did the thing. Raging addiction. Unstable mental health. Traumatic childhood. I am not someone who gives up easily on people.

But when it comes to gross abuses of power, I’m tapped out.

When I read recent stories about online communities that exist solely to provide instruction—and paying audiences—for men inclined to drug and rape their wives, I spent most of that night fighting the demons in my mind. I know it’s not all men. I know it’s not only men. But why is it so many men? And why are so many others complicit in their silence?

My husband told me once about a night from his high school days. A group of guys, a young woman who’d drunk herself into a stupor, a suggestion of what they might do. He protested, told them, in so many words, to get a grip. I love him for that. I also can’t imagine what happens to some men’s brains that makes that idea even remotely attractive.

At least 28 women have accused Donald Trump of sexual misconduct. One has been awarded damages, but the man is still sitting in the country’s highest office. A war in Iran is a useful distraction from evidence that might link him to a sex trafficking ring led by Jeffrey Epstein. Notice what we’re not talking about these days?

I came across a video recently. “Two Female Pilots Tackle the World’s Most Dangerous Approach.” Tell me there are structural biases without telling me there are structural biases. Last week, a workshop on apologizing reminded me how much weight we still place on women saying sorry, and how little consequence there is for men who never do.

I’m tired and angry. Where are the songs, the statements, the male manifestos about how it’s not women’s job to fix the war on women?

April is National Poetry Month, and I’ve been thinking about what the word sorry costs some of us, and that it costs others nothing at all. And so, a poem.

Sorry

I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.

Sorry, you have the wrong number. Sorry, could you say that again?
Sorry, am I talking too much? Sorry, I wasn’t listening.

Sorry, I just thought—

I’m sorry, is this seat taken? I’m sorry, I don’t mean to complain.
I’m sorry, I know you’re busy. I’m sorry, I just need a minute.

I’m sorry I asked.
I’m sorry I cried.

I’m sorry if these actions made anyone feel uncomfortable.

This was locker room talk. It never happened. She’s not my type. I’ve never met this woman. I don’t know who she is. I barely knew him. I may have been there but I don’t recall. I never saw anything inappropriate. Always space for you. Will you be taking Oreo ice cream to Paris? It never happened. And yet I can’t tell a soul. All of these liars will be sued after the election.

To my family, staff, friends, and supporters, I am deeply sorry for mistakes in judgment I’ve made in my past.*

I’m sorry, but we warned you.
I’m sorry you didn’t believe us.
I’m sorry. You should have known.

I’m sorry you let them lie.
I’m sorry you looked away.
Sorry you called it complicated.
Sorry you failed us.

Sorry excuses.
Sorry men in a sorry room.
Craven cowards.

The ones who flew. The ones who knew.
They knew. They always do.

We know, too.

~Elizabeth

*This line and those in the section above are drawn from public record. This one is a statement made by Eric Swalwell upon his resignation from Congress, April 2026.

Afterward:

I include this section as an invitation to turn reflection into action, when the spirit moves you. Our spheres of influence are wider than we sometimes think, and small actions have a way of compounding in ways we don’t always get to see. Each week I share something concrete, something to read or watch or try or support, because that’s what I can do from here, and it’s probably what you can do from there, too.

Try this:

Listen! I don’t pretend to speak Zulu but as I understand it, the words in this song are simple: Malibongwe igama lamakhosikazi (Mah-lee-bong-weh/ee-gah-mah/lah-mah-koh-see-kah-zee) Translated, in context, that means “Praise the name of the women.” The song comes from South African resistance movements. It’s both a tribute and a statement of strength.

If you’d like to go deeper, Jackson Katz has spent decades arguing that this is a men's issue. His new book, Every Man, is a place to start.

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It’s worth noting that I spent time yesterday evening putting seeds into soil as a way of recalibrating and refilling my glass. It helped.

If you’re a woman, you probably need little convincing, but I’d love to know what you’re carrying right now, and where you’re finding solid ground.

If you’re a man reading this—and I hope you are—I’m not here to make you feel bad. I’m here because I think a lot of you are more troubled by all of this than you let on, and more uncertain about what to do than you’d like to admit. A place to start, I think, is in recognizing that uncertainty isn’t the same as weakness. What else stays with you here? What’s one place you’ve felt stuck?

A sentence is plenty. A word is welcome. If something here resonated, a heart or a restack goes a long way. And if you think someone needs to read this today, please pass it on.

My work is always free. If you find value in it, a paid subscription (which comes to a about a dollar per essay) is one of the most direct ways to say so. One-time donations are great for those who prefer that. However you choose to show up, I’m glad you’re here.

See you next week!

Two years ago I wrote a piece about saving ants. I was so moved by my own compassion that I used a Walt Whitman quote.

Not long after, I threw in the towel and resorted to ant bait. For those unfamiliar, the stuff works by giving ants exactly what they want—a delicious food source they carry back to share with everyone they’ve ever loved, taking out the entire colony. I place a few drops on little squares of cardboard, feel the low-grade shame of someone who knows exactly what she’s doing and does it anyway, and then go to bed. For a few days, the activity around that little puddle of poison is mosh pit bonkers, and unnerving in how it makes crystal clear that there are far more of them than us.

I’d like to report that the ants in my house are gone, but you already know the ants are not gone. They’re here in force every spring and with every significant rainfall. This year they’ve been joined by carpenter ants, which are larger and more obtrusive, lumbering through the house with the unhurried authority of inspectors who’ve already found the violations and are just taking notes. I catch their shiny, black bodies in a cup and release them outside, because I need to believe something about myself that the cardboard squares are undermining. I’m sure they’re back inside before I close the door behind me, and they’ve called in reinforcements.

Meanwhile, the neighbor—there’s a whole situation there, best left for a different moment or possibly a therapist—has bees. He’s had bees in the gable end of his house for years, right where the wall meets the roof. Each spring they wake up and get energetic, and each spring he hires someone to deal with them: a man with a can of Raid, a man with a pressure washer, and most recently a two-person crew in proper bee suits with a heavy-duty lift, who spent a full day doing whatever they did while I stayed inside feeling terrible, also not wanting to be seen lurking around my own yard at suspicious angles. I have some dignity. Not much, but some.

I don’t know what they found up there, but I suspect those bees have been in that wall for a very long time, which made me less surprised to read about a cemetery in Ithaca, New York, where scientists just published a study confirming one of the largest recorded aggregations of ground-nesting bees in the world: five and a half million individuals in a single plot, with evidence of the species at that site dating back to the early 1900s.

The discovery started the way the best ones do—a lab technician named Rachel Fordyce was cutting through the cemetery on her daily walk to work when she noticed the bees, gathered some into a jar, and brought them in to show her boss. Just walked in one spring morning with a jar full of bees, the way you do.

The reason the cemetery works so well as habitat, the researchers explained, is that the ground is rarely disturbed. Nobody’s inclined to go digging things up in there. The bees are important pollinators, timed to emerge with the apple bloom each April, and 75% of the world’s bee species nest in the ground the same way, in undisturbed places, doing necessary work that has nothing to do with whether we notice them or not.

Those bees were in that cemetery before anyone currently alive was born, and they’ll be going about their business long after the people currently arguing about everything have joined the people who are done arguing about anything. In fact, cemeteries are a pretty good illustration of what a life cycle actually looks like, and what our place in it is. We get a turn. We make our mark, for better or worse, and then the ground closes over us and, if we’re lucky, something useful moves in. The bees were never waiting for our permission. They’re just doing what they do best in the time they have, which, if you think about it, is the only reasonable response to being alive.

There’s a lot of talk about how humans are destroying the planet, and I believe we are. I recycle and buy less, catch and release insects, invoke Walt Whitman. I also put out ant bait. Buried in that contradiction is the assumption that everything revolves around us—that we’re the main characters and that the bees and ants are a subplot.

The damage is real. Since the winter of 1968, atmospheric carbon dioxide has risen by about a third, global temperatures have risen at an unprecedented rate, forests have been cleared, cities have sprawled, and a sea that existed for millions of years has shrunk to less than a tenth of its former size. Scientists will tell you, carefully, that human activity is responsible for somewhere between ninety and ninety-five percent of that change. The other five to ten percent is the planet doing what planets do, on a timeline that doesn’t consult us. And we didn’t start any of those processes by being the main characters. We started them by forgetting we weren’t.

On Christmas Eve of 1968, when the crew of Apollo 8 came around the far side of the Moon, Bill Anders looked out the window and took a photograph that changed how we saw ourselves: Earth, rising over the lunar surface, a blue, cloud-swirled orb floating in darkness. Nobody had planned it in advance. It was practically an afterthought, yet it altered perceptions across the globe. Frank Borman, the mission commander, said later he couldn’t get over the fact that they’d gone all the way to the Moon and found themselves more interested in looking at the Earth. That photograph galvanized a generation, launched the environmental movement, and led directly to the creation of Earth Day, the first of which was celebrated in 1970.

This month, the Artemis II crew did it again, deliberately this time, photographing the Earth slipping below the lunar horizon. Earthset, they called it, a bookend to the original Earthrise fifty-eight years later, which is barely a breath in geological time, though it hasn’t felt that way from down here.

Apollo 11 launched on July 16, 1969, carrying the crew that would become the first humans to walk on the moon. I turned seven the next day, and my parents gave me a musical jewelry box that I still have and use. It plays Fly Me to the Moon, originally called In Other Words, and once you move past the celestial navigation at its beginning, it turns into a love song.

In other words, hold my hand. In other words, darling kiss me.

I eventually caught the stink bug, after it had flown back in twice, careened off my face on the second pass, invoking some of my most colorful expletives—and I carried it outside to let it go. It didn’t appear to register that anyone had done it a particular favor. It was a stink bug with places to be, and it went to them.

I stood at the door for a moment. Above me, a skyful of shimmering stars, each one as small as an ant. Somewhere in a cemetery in Ithaca, five and a half million bees had emerged, on schedule, as they have every spring for as long as anyone has been keeping records, and longer.

In other words, please be true. In other words, I love you.

~Elizabeth

Afterward:

I include this section as an invitation to turn reflection into action, when the spirit moves you. Our spheres of influence are wider than we sometimes think, and small actions have a way of compounding in ways we don't always get to see. Each week I share something concrete, something to read or watch or try or support, because that's what I can do from here, and it's probably what you can do from there too.

Try this:

My friend Sam Droege is a wildlife biologist who runs the United States Geological Survey Bee Lab with the support of vast numbers of volunteers and collaborators, and what he describes as an honorable fight worth having. The lab's future is currently uncertain in ways that would take more than this space to fully explain, but Sam is keeping people informed and will let his followers know when the moment comes to contact their representatives. In the meantime, finding him on Facebook and following along costs nothing, connects you to some of the most interesting bee science happening anywhere, and means you'll be ready when it's time to act. He’s someone you’ll appreciate knowing.

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That’s it for this week’s Chicken Scratch. Now it’s your turn. Obviously, I’ve been thinking about what we owe the living world and what it asks of us, which seems like less than we think and more than we give. What about you?

Is there a creature that tests your limits?
Are there moments that remind you we’re not running this show?

I’d be thrilled if you’d share some thoughts in the comments. I mean it. Those conversations are the bees knees, and I love what I learn from you all.

If something here resonated today, please like 💚 or restack ♻️ the essay, send it to someone who might need a shift in perspective, or to someone who just really gets the stink bug situation.

Chicken Scratch is always free, a conscious decision. If you’re willing and able to help offset the hours I spend working on it, a paid subscription is how you do that, or a one-time donation. I will be grateful in the way of someone who has just successfully released a stink bug.

However you’re here, thank you for spending part of your Earth Day with me.

See you next week!

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Some time ago, in a rushed attempt to put together a gift for a friend, I took a picture off my wall and repurposed its frame. It had been part of a collection of farm-centric art: a scene my mother painted in a class she took in her late seventies or early eighties, unsigned and undated, which she said she didn’t think was very good but had framed and hung on her wall anyway. Beside it, a scene I painted as a pre-teen in one of many art classes I took from then through college, signed but undated, clearly the product of a tutorial on perspective. I didn’t think it was very good either, but it hung on the wall of my childhood home all the same. The frame I reassigned held a pair of vintage seed packets that fit in well with the rest of it. The gap in the lower row is now entering its third year.

I ordered replacement frames, three of them, not realizing each item was a set of three, so I now have nine of them in storage, enough for all manner of last minute gifts. Don’t judge me if you get a framed photo for your next birthday. What I don’t have is the seed packets. I’ve looked everywhere I can think to look, including inside the four dozen cookbooks on the shelf nearby, because seeds, food, safekeeping—it seemed plausible. The search kept me occupied for a good while.

Many of these cookbooks are gathering dust, the internet having swallowed most of my day-to-day cooking reference needs, and my repertoire having settled into a rotation somewhere between habit and improvisation. But about a third of the books contain that one recipe I return to repeatedly, ignoring everything else the author has to offer: garlicky pasta with tomatoes, white beans and sage; a mushroom curry; pressure cooker potato and leek soup that served us well during the years we lived aboard our sailboat; popovers; a lamb and rice casserole I transcribed by hand from the verbal instructions of a cook at a natural food shop that has since shut down. I stood at the counter to write it while she talked, and it has outlasted both the store and the notebook I pasted it into.

There’s the book I won at a farmers market cook-off, there’s one about canning and preservation, one shared by a group of homeschooling mothers who wanted me to become a more relaxed entertainer. I didn’t. Deborah Madison, Fannie Farmer, Molly Katzen, Marion Cunningham, Julia Child, Rombauer and Becker, Nora Pouillon, Madhur Jaffrey, Anna Tasca Lanza, Craig Claiborne, Oprah Winfrey. I’ve never bothered to look at that last one. Before my mother gave it to me, her dog chewed off a quarter of the cover, and the repair—cardboard and a magazine cutout of the media mogul herself—is frankly an improvement.

Mom also passed along a worn copy of Kitchen Fun: A Cookbook for Children, published in 1952, the year her first child was born. Inside in her practiced cursive, is a purple sticky note. “This old book needs to stay with the new edition, which I hope you still have.” She signed it with a heart wrapped around the letter N, for Nancy. I do still have it, though I don't remember the kids and I trying any of the recipes. Maybe I've just forgotten. At only 26 pages, it doesn't take up much space.

The two editions make an interesting pair. The original Rules for Little Cooks instructs young chefs to “Have mother teach you how to heat the oven.” The 1988 version reads: “Be sure a grownup is nearby to help you.” Grownup, in the name of broader applicability. Several recipes are now removed from the stove rather than the fire, cooled in the refrigerator rather than the icebox. Mammy’s Corn Bread became Southern Corn Bread, a change that is not really about cornbread at all. “Mammy” is a caricature with a well-documented history constructed to make slavery something other than what it was, and kept alive afterward in advertising, entertainment, and the general décor of American domestic life. What a children’s cookbook published in 1988 was admitting is that certain stories are a dangerous kind of fiction. The recipe stayed the same. Whether you call the name change erasure or correction depends on what you think should be remembered, and who gets to decide.

Both editions contain far more sweet recipes than savory ones. The drinks section in each consists only of chocolate milk, hot chocolate, and in both cases, inexplicably, fudge sauce.

My mother hoped, I think, that the book would be special to both of us, and to my kids by association, a through-line, a connection, the pleasure of family, and food, and fudge sauce. In a way she got her wish, though not quite as intended. What I’m drawn to is her handwriting on the sticky note, her small anxiety about whether her legacy had transferred. That turns out to be more intimate than the book itself.

Meaning seems to travel this way—imperfectly, sideways, often without anyone’s explicit consent or intent. I have a lamb and rice casserole recipe because I happened to be standing at a counter when a friendly acquaintance felt like talking. The painting my mother framed without much confidence has been part of my life for decades. The seed packets are somewhere in this house, absorbed into the fabric of accumulated things, and I’ll find them eventually. Or not.

Harder to brush off are the flawed transmissions that aren’t accidental. The meals I ate as a child, in my North Carolina grandmother’s home, were shaped by Black women working in white households, carrying techniques and recipes across generations with no byline and no sticky note. In my case, the cornbread there came from another Nancy—Nancy Boyd—and before her, Lettie. I don’t know what either of them would have called it other than just cornbread.

That knowledge moved through kitchens and hands and was seldom written down, which is one way a history disappears. There are other ways: the gradual mutation of a word here, a name there, until the original contours are hard to make out. And there is the more deliberate kind, where someone with an interest in a particular version of the past decides which parts of it are permitted to come forward. That has happened in every era and is far from finished.

Looking for cornbread recipes, I checked my mother’s collection recently, in the lidded, wooden box that sits next to those four dozen cookbooks. I found an option attributed to her friend Corinne and another for broccoli cornbread, which she made often but not until we were older. I suspect the women who worked for my grandparents would have raised an eyebrow at that one, but I can’t say for certain.

Online, I found a record of Nancy Boyd’s burial in a church cemetery a mile and a half from the 1920s bungalow where my father grew up. They both lived in a town with fewer than 200 people. She was just a few months shy of 90 when she died. The specifics of what she and Lettie made in that kitchen all those years ago are lost to me now.

In the recipe box, I found a card for Mid-East Lamb Casserole, in mom’s familiar cursive, my name tucked in at the very bottom.

~Elizabeth

Afterward:

I’m including this section as a way to turn reflection into action, if you’re so inclined. Each week I share small, concrete ways to make a difference, because our spheres of influence are wider than we sometimes think, and even simple actions have a way of compounding.

Try this:

Share a food memory, one that comes easily, even if it feels small. When you do, name the person it comes from*, the person who cooked it, taught it, or fed it to you. If you’re with others, pause after the name and offer a quiet acknowledgment: “Thank you, Nancy…” or whoever it may be. If you don’t know a name, that’s okay. Name what you do know instead, like the role or the place, your grandmother’s kitchen, the school cafeteria, the neighbor down the street. Food memories are rarely just about food. They come from someone.

* This was a memorable and meaningful exercise I first encountered in a farm conference session led by D’Real Graham. Read more about him here.

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And now…over to you, my friends. I’m excited to spend time with you in the comments. 💬

Does any of this made you think about Kathryn Stockett’s book The Help? That makes two of us! But also, tell me:

• Is there a dish in your life with a complicated history whose origins you know, or wish you did?

• Have you ever been given a memory just in time?

• What’s something you’re carrying forward for someone who never got a byline for it?

If this one resonated, I hope you’ll like 💚 and share it. To me, it feels like the kind of piece that wants to find the right readers, so I’m glad you’re here for it.

Restacking is appreciated, and you can do that with the little recycle button. ♻️ Subscribers get weekly posts in their email inboxes, if they wish. And those who can see their way to a paid subscription or to a one-time tip truly help me keep the Chicken Scratch lights on.

My sincere gratitude to you all, no matter how you choose to show up here. See you next week!

I encountered a new term the other day and let out one of those snort-laughs you have to explain when you’re at a dinner party. Friction maxxing. Best I can tell, this is the practice of deliberately doing things the slow, effortful way, a corrective to a life so streamlined for convenience that it’s forgotten how to tolerate difficulty or finish a thought. Cooking from scratch, hanging the laundry, reading an actual book, gardening, shutting the door in Alexa’s face—which, yes, obviously—most of these things have been part of my life for so long I couldn’t operate otherwise. Look at me being a trendsetter.

But isn’t this a little like coming up with a name for hammering nails? Friction maxxing feels like what happens when hustle culture and chill culture make a baby: a productivity moniker for simply existing as a human being in the physical world. We took that shit for granted, surrendered it in increments, some of us willingly and some of us because the world made other demands, and now we’re gamifying getting it back? God help us.

Still, the maxxers have a point. Earlier this month I tucked into the couch with family to rewatch Wall-E and have spent the days since slipping “Eee-vaah” into conversation whenever possible. If you’ve seen the movie, you know. If you haven’t, it’s an unnervingly precise portrait of where we’re heading, wrapped in a children’s story so nobody panics. It’s about what happens when we engineer all the difficulties out of living, and what that costs us.

A single bedraggled plant travels from a ruined Earth to a luxurious space-liner where humanity has fled its own mess. The little green sprig finally makes its way back home. By the final frames of the film, aided by human effort, the planet begins to re-green.

Everyone I know is a little depressed right now. The future has never been predictable, but it has rarely felt this precarious, at least in our lifetimes, as though the systems and assumptions we rely on are, like many of us, showing their age. Watching this unfold, I notice a less obvious kind of sorting alongside the political divides: the hyper-vigilant and the unplugged. Some cannot look away, tirelessly pushing the rest of us toward action; others preserve their sanity with journaling, baths, and perfectly aligned spice racks. Both are valid ways to respond to unreasonable circumstances.

We are not wrong to fret. Most of what’s happening across the civilized world is being driven by people who are narcissistic, narrow-minded, and impressively incompetent, and that is something to call out. But I keep looking for the mythical middle ground, the place that acknowledges the severity without losing the thread of history, which has always been a pendulum. We have been riding this thing in one direction for a long time. The broken bits that now need fixing were entrenched on the upswing, while fewer of us were paying attention. My stubborn, possibly delusional sense is that we are about to tip back the other way, toward something more focused on cooperation and decency. These arcs take generations, and by the time we’re collectively ready to come back, the whole world has changed, except for the most abiding principles of existence: that things grow, that people need each other, that the work of showing up is never really finished.

I need to remember how to daydream. Not how to think—I am apparently always thinking—but how to let my mind go genuinely loose and unhurried, following a weightless idea until it takes on some kind of shape. So I leave my phone in the house when I go out to garden. Red and silver maples heavy with whirligigs prepare to helicopter their offspring into the human-level world, an ancient attempt to secure the future of their species. The fig tree’s dove-gray branches candle with chartreuse flames, their inverted flowers forming future figs now barely the size of peas. Sugar snap and radish seeds go into soil I’ve loosened and enriched with decayed leaves from the paths. We wait to rake out the flower beds, giving the beneficial insects time to finish percolating below ground. Temperatures will dip below fifty for the next five nights, and somehow, they understand this.

I come back inside to twenty-three text messages in a group chat about dear friends who have pulled up stakes and moved to a homestead in North Carolina, where they grow most of their own food and live close to the earth in a way that the rest of us discuss admiringly while standing in our kitchens with our phones in our hands. I read the messages and laugh, feel something more complicated than laughter, and go back outside.

People who loved me when I was young said I lived to my own schedule, that I lost track of time easily. I’ve never thought of that as marching to the beat of my own drum. There was no pounding rhythm in my orchestra, just the fluidness of reeds and strings. Somewhere along the way I let someone hand me a snare drum and I have been a moderately willing, occasionally resentful participant in keeping up with that particular parade ever since.

Maybe we expect too much. Maybe we know too much. Maybe the mind, left alone for half a day, is still capable of surprising us. Things aren’t okay, but neither are they finished. A small plant becomes a cluster, the wind moves through the branches, I return to the garden with dirt between my toes, remembering what it was I thought I might forget.

~Elizabeth

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Oh, lovely people. What else is there for us to do besides hold each other up? Thank you for spending some time here today. Could we linger a bit longer in the comments?

What’s top of mind for you right now?
If your thoughts had an unstructured hour, where would they go?
What do you do when you’re not trying to accomplish something? Is that the same as trying not to accomplish anything? ☺️
Do you remember watching Wall-E, or will you watch it (again) now?

If you know someone who hasn’t been able to finish a thought lately, this might be the week to pass a bit of Chicken Scratch along.

Three years ago I wrote To This Day a piece I didn’t realize was a prequel to this one until I reread it this week. If you’re new here, it might be worth a few minutes of your time. There’s something about spring!

I write each week to do what I can to shine a little light into the world. It is a tremendous commitment of time and thought-resources. If you want to do more than read and can see your way to becoming a paid subscriber, that is the most direct way to keep this space going. A one-time tip is also a welcome option.

I’m grateful for all the ways you all support this work.

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Afterward:

I include this section as a way to turn reflection into action, if you’re so inclined. Each week I share one small, concrete way to make a difference, because our spheres of influence are wider than we sometimes think, and even simple actions have a way of compounding.

Try this:

Let your mind wander for a bit. Notice ideas drifting in like clouds, overlapping, shape-shifting. Get curious about where they take you when you stop trying to boss them around. You might find questions you forgot you had. It's less about focus or breath and more about setting the mind free.

Enjoy and see you soon!

My husband and I flew across the continent last week to spend five days with our older daughter and her partner in Flagstaff, Arizona. It had been more than a year since we’d seen them. This is what family life looks like when your children grow up and scatter. You pack your signs for the No Kings protest into the bottom of your one checked bag, you fly two thousand miles, you soak up the time together, hug them hard, and then you come home.

I would not trade those five days for anything. I also can’t help noticing what I’m missing, in the larger sense: the proximity, the drop-in culture, the assumption of nearness some families take for granted that we can only approximate with flights and careful scheduling.

The four of us drove back from the Grand Canyon on a two-lane road less suited to those in a hurry, and I was grateful for that. It cut through the southwestern corner of the Navajo Nation, and I found myself pressing my face toward the glass the way I did as a child on long car trips, trying to take it in.

By the metrics we usually apply to landscapes, there isn’t much there. Miles of desert scrub under a sky so unobstructed it’s like driving across Mars; simple wire livestock fences tracing a pencil-thin line between the road and the beyond; modest structures planted on dry soil that look impossibly isolated, save for a few clusters that give the appearance of small neighborhoods; along the roadside, stalls for folks selling native crafts, punctuated by billboards for gun shops.

The Navajo Nation stretches across 27,000 square miles of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah, an area roughly the size of West Virginia, or Scotland, or Tasmania. It is the largest Native American reservation in the United States, and the federal government has spent the better part of two centuries making clear how little that matters.

The numbers, when I looked them up, have the flatness statistics always have. They don’t put human faces behind the one in three homes that lack electricity and running water, or convey that these families drive, sometimes miles, to fill barrels and jugs to haul home. On average, those living on the reservation use roughly seven gallons of water per day, compared to the average American’s eighty to a hundred. There are only around a dozen supermarkets in the entire territory. Unemployment runs as high as 50%.

And yet, despite the poverty and lack of modern services, there is a particular kind of life that comes from being rooted to the land and to each other. A Navajo commenter I came across put it this way:

“The desert and the wildness bring a peace that convenience cannot understand…We've lived here from time immemorial, and our songs and beliefs are tied to the land. So we stay because we want to.”

I catch the vaguest scent of that in the March wind.

Where I live, there are still watermen who work the Chesapeake Bay the way their fathers did. For them the estuary is more livelihood and identity than science, or scenery, or recreation. Belonging to a place and way of life can be a form of wealth.

The essential difference for the Diné—the name the Navajo use for themselves, which translates roughly to The People of the Earth—is the history of trauma layered beneath that belonging. Most people rooted to a place weren't marched off it at gunpoint, or made to win back their homeland from the people who had nearly destroyed them. Their children weren’t stolen and sent to boarding schools with explicit instructions to strip away their language.

In World War II, the Navajo gave their country something only they could give: an unbreakable code built from a language the government had spent decades trying to destroy. That service was classified until 1968. The original Code Talkers did not receive the Congressional Gold Medal until 2001, nearly sixty years after the war ended. And in 2023, the Supreme Court ruled five to four that the federal government has no obligation at all to help the Navajo Nation access water.

I think about what has been taken from the Navajo, and then consider how easy it might be to reach for what numbs the pain. Alcohol and drugs are readily available and fill the voids made by settler hands. The Diné have a genetic predisposition to addiction that compounds generations of damage. Of course they do. We should stop being surprised by what deliberate erasure leaves behind.

But that is not the whole of the story, and it is not where the spirit of these people lives. What I felt driving through the Nation was a sense of the desert as a presence with its own gravitational pull. The Diné concept of hózhó—balance, beauty, harmony—is one that knows hardship intimately and has always found a way to reach across it. Clan connections, reciprocity, devotion to the land and to each other are as vital as breathing.

Now that I'm back on the Bay, the contrast is even more evident. We fly across a continent to hold our family together. The Diné have always understood family as inseparable from place, from the land itself, from the tribal framework that tells them exactly who they are and who they belong to. From the road, to someone like me, it can look like desolation.

But the desert doesn't give itself up that easily. It holds what it holds, and so do the people who call it home.

~Elizabeth

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Resilience is easy to admire from a distance. Harder, and more interesting, is thinking about what it actually costs and what it makes possible. So much of the Diné’s resilience is inseparable from the land itself. Which makes me wonder:

Is there a place you’re rooted to, or wish you were? Somewhere that holds you and tells you who you are?
And how do you hold family together across distance? What are the rituals, the small things that substitute for proximity? I’m always looking for ideas, and honestly, for company in the feeling.

If this resonated, I hope you’ll consider leaving a comment, sharing the post with friends, restacking it (find this button ♻️), or leaving a small tip. It all helps me reach more readers and is a driving force that keeps this space going. And if you’re not yet a subscriber, I’d love to have you join me here.

Afterward:

I'm including this section as a way to turn reflection into action, if you're so inclined. Each week I share small, concrete ways to make a difference, because our spheres of influence are wider than we sometimes think, and even simple actions have a way of compounding.

Try this:

This week, pay attention to your water use. Just notice it, without judgment. And if you find yourself moved to do more, DigDeep works to bring clean running water to communities without it—on the Navajo Nation, in Appalachia, and in communities along the Texas-Mexico border. Even small contributions matter. For readers in other countries, the equivalent search would be for your regional water access or drought relief organizations.

See you next week!

A note: the person at the center of this essay is real. Though I have reached out, I haven't connected with her, and I'm aware her story has already been told in ways she couldn't control. I've tried to approach it with care.

A nurse working at the Irwin County Detention Center in Georgia files a complaint with the Department of Homeland Security alleging that detained immigrant women are subjected to invasive gynecological procedures without informed consent, that COVID protocols are ignored, and that management retaliates against those who speak up. A Senate investigation later confirms that female detainees have been subjected to excessive and often unnecessary medical interventions, and that there have been repeated failures to secure informed consent.

It’s 2020, and the whistleblower’s name is Dawn Wooten, a single mother of five.

She will pay for her courage in ways that are hard to sit with. Despite a nationwide nursing shortage, she spends years afterward unable to find full-time work. Her family receives death threats serious enough to require security guards. She and her children move from hotel to hotel, and some of the media coverage inspired by her complaint is later said to contain false statements, complicating the story further. NBC eventually settles a defamation suit brought by a doctor named in the coverage.

The truth Wooten told was real, as were the consequences of telling it. And the recognition she received was partial, contested, and eventually overshadowed by legal proceedings most people stopped following.

I’ve been thinking about Wooten because I’ve been thinking about sacrifice.

The thoughts arrived, as so many things do, through a piece of writing, in this case an op-ed describing a gathering of purposeful men, debating patriotism and the Iran War while welcoming a “left-center” dissenting voice into their circle. They were modeling the kind of civil discourse we’re told we need more of, and I read with genuine interest, which turned to unease, then to a specific frustration that arrives when I sense that a conversation is being held in a room that wasn’t built for everyone, about questions that affect people who weren’t invited to answer them.

Among the things this contingent of predominantly older, white men agreed on was that people have "become soft" and unwilling to make sacrifices. By people, they specified Americans, and I can’t tell if they meant younger Americans, or that people in general, other than themselves, are less willing to endure hardship for the common good, less capable of sacrifice.

I don’t think the men who made these comments are wrong to care about the future or to want something more from we, the people. Individualism has never been more evident than it is right now, and that’s not necessarily a good thing. But coming to terms with the word sacrifice feels like trying to wrap my hands around a hornet.

As it is most commonly used, sacrifice comes with a recognizable shape, a clear before and after. It asks something enormous of a person in a concentrated moment, and in return it offers recognition, honor, or at least a sense of accomplishment. We build rituals around this kind of sacrifice, name holidays after it, give up our favorite indulgent habits in service to it. We know how to speak about it, and we rarely struggle to agree that it matters.

But there is another offering that doesn’t come with a ceremony or a shared vocabulary and rarely comes up in conversations about whether or what we are still willing to give. This kind of sacrifice looks like the ongoing work of holding things together when the structures around you are unreliable or absent. It looks like the willing reorganization of a life when the needs of another have to take precedence. It looks like navigating systems that weren’t designed with you in mind and spending enormous energy on that navigation, energy that might otherwise have gone somewhere else entirely. It looks like a woman who sees something wrong, reports it, loses her livelihood, moves her children from place to place under threat, and watches the story she told become more complicated than she intended—without anyone calling any of that a sacrifice. It’s a form of giving that is sustained across years without recognition or endpoint.

It’s not that these kinds of sacrifices are less significant, just that they’re harder to see, particularly if you are not the one being asked to make them.

A few days before the op-ed above, another local letter described how the only woman in a county council race was excluded from her own party's event by a loyalty scoring system she'd had no hand in designing. This story is one of the oldest ones around.

I am not interested in assigning blame for this. I am interested in the question underneath it, which is the same one I ask when I hear confident pronouncements about sacrifice and common good and what Americans are no longer willing to give.

Who decides what counts?

Because if sacrifice looks like risk taken in a particularly visible moment, you will find it in certain places and not others. If it is a cost absorbed imperceptibly across a lifetime, you will find it somewhere else entirely. If it is loud and finite and comes with a flag, it’s easy to point out, but if it is cumulative, forbearing, and woven into the texture of ordinary life, it may disappear from view, despite its persistence.

We are in a season, liturgically speaking, that many people associate with the idea of sacrifice. I no longer practice those traditions, but I spent enough years inside them to remember how they felt. What strikes me now, from the outside, is how specific they are: one person, one moment, an audience, a death and a resurrection, and a meaning that radiates outward from that center. It is a powerful story. It has organized enormous amounts of human experience and human history. But it is not the only story about what it means to give something up, and I wonder sometimes how much it has narrowed our ability to see the other ones.

I am not taking a stand on whether we have or haven’t gone soft (as if softness is a weakness in the first place). Before I reach that conclusion, I need to ask, and answer, a harder question, which is whether our definition of sacrifice is constrained by the stories we already know how to see or tell.

There is no reliable recognition for what Dawn Wooten gave up. She stayed true to her convictions anyway, living with the consequences—professional, financial, and personal—long after the news cycle moved on.

If we’re serious about the common good, that’s where the conversation has to start. People are willing to give. They do, every day, in ways we haven’t learned to honor. But we’re overdue for a reckoning with who gets a seat at the table, whose endurance we build rituals around and whose we take for granted. What would it mean to widen the frame enough to see what has always been there?

That feels, to me, like a discussion worth having. In a much bigger room.

~Elizabeth

Afterward:
I include this section as a way to turn reflection into action, if you’re so inclined. Each week I share one small, concrete way to make a difference, because our spheres of influence are wider than we sometimes think, and even simple actions have a way of compounding.

Try this:
This week, spend a few minutes with the portrait of Dawn Wooten, and others, painted by artist Robert Shetterly as part of his Americans Who Tell the Truth series. Take in her story. Support his art. Then, as you’re thinking about voice and how we use it, jump over to , where Don Boivin writes beautifully about what it means to approach others—and ourselves—without the need to prove anything. Both are worth your time.

Shy Guy Meets the Buddha

Respect for the Reader: Writing without Patronizing

🩷 Please note that from now until the end of April, new one-year paid subscriptions and upgrades are 30% off the regular low price. I would be deeply grateful if you would consider becoming a patron supporter of Shy Guy Meets the…

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a month ago · 48 likes · 36 comments · Don Boivin

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Thanks for reading and for thinking alongside me on this one. Do you know that your likes 💚 comments 💬 and restacks ♻️ help more people find their way here, and how genuinely grateful I am for each one? Consider yourself reminded—and appreciated.

A few things I’m curious about, if you’re inclined:

• Is there a form of sacrifice in your own life that you feel goes unnamed or unrecognized?

• And on the other side of it, is there someone in your life whose quiet giving you’ve never quite found the words to honor?

I look forward to meeting you in the comments.

Chicken Scratch is and will remain free, because good things should be accessible to everyone regardless of circumstance. If you're in a position to support the work, a paid subscription or a contribution to the tip jar makes a real difference and is always deeply appreciated.

See you next week.

I record my essays for those who prefer to listen.
You’ll find that here. ⬇️

I’ve been on a cleaning bender lately. Not the seasonal kind, and not especially virtuous. It feels more deliberate than that, more like editing than tidying, an attempt to control something, to understand what I’m leaving behind before someone else has to make sense of it.

My husband and I have reached the age where this feels practical rather than morbid. The harder it is to pretend that someday remains an abstract concept, the more often I find myself seeing our house through other people’s eyes. More specifically, through our children’s eyes as they stand here after we’re gone, holding something inexplicable and wondering why on earth we kept it. A fifty-year-old plastic nail brush from the bottom drawer of the bathroom, for instance.

I know what that feels like from the other side. That nail brush came from my mother’s drawer. Everybody needs a good nail brush, and they don’t make them like they used to. Right? RIGHT?

When my brothers and I cleared out my parents’ townhome a few years ago, I kept asking if they wanted this or that. No. No, and no. I had four days to decide, in real time, what I could afford to let go of.

Why were there remnants of Christmas tucked into drawers all over the house? What possesses a person to keep four bottles of lemon pepper? Was the broken folding chair being saved for someone she hoped would stop visiting?

I had opinions, and no shortage of misgivings. My parents were children of the Great Depression. They kept things because they meant something, or might someday mean something, and because they had lived through a time when there was no guarantee they could replace what was lost. China, clothes, furniture, letters. So many letters.

My mother, Nancy, also kept rugs. Two of them ended up in the farm cottage where we lived for thirteen years, absorbing the wear of children, half-feral cats, a borrowed dog or two, a cockatiel, a wood stove, and more spilled drinks than I could begin to count. By the time we left, they were not fit for reuse. Nancy protested. Surely we could use them somewhere. I said no and threw them out.

I would have bet money on that being the end of it.

Those rugs had already lived one long life before us, wrapped in paper in my parents’ attic for decades after my grandparents died. We brought them down around 1995, put them back into circulation, and used them hard for more than ten years. When we moved from the farm cottage, I told myself their usefulness had run its course.

Apparently, I was wrong. Wrapped now in plastic, they turned up in our own knee wall storage during this most recent excavation. It has been fifteen years. My husband, to his credit, resisted the urge to put them back, though he did suggest they might be “good for something.” They are currently on the floor of a spare bedroom, still in their plastic, having spent as much of their existence in storage as on an actual floor, like the bridesmaids’ dresses we once believed we would wear again.

The thing is, my husband and I are not extreme about any of this. We are tidy. We try to consume consciously, not performatively. We hesitate to throw away anything that might still serve a purpose, partly because we know it does not actually disappear when we dispose of it. The plastic plant pots, the reused zipper bags, the defunct walkie-talkies are all still out there somewhere, and in here, and everywhere we are.

There is no such thing as gone.

Eventually, though, the balance tips. We grit our teeth, steel ourselves against the guilt, and throw things away. There should be a better penance for the sin of consumerism. For the record, I am not Catholic.

The camcorder stays, along with the box of home videos we can only watch if we finally convert them to digital, which we keep meaning to do. We are very reasonable people, and the logic is airtight, right up until you count the canning jars. All forty-seven of them.

What if we need them someday? Which, I realize, is not so different from four bottles of lemon pepper.

It started with a single drawer and has expanded to closets and knee wall attics, their contents now spread across surfaces and floors. I have a predictable reaction to days like this. I do not want to stop. There is satisfaction in the donation pile, in the cleared spaces, in the wiped-down baseboards. There is also something else: the unexpected finds. Refills for my favorite pen. A recipe from the back of a package. The program from a friend’s memorial service with a poem I had meant to remember.

I am a storyteller. Of course I keep things. Some of it, I am beginning to understand, was always worth keeping.

And some of it is a pair of twenty-five-year-old Crocs, cracked and hideous, that still get the job done. Nancy would understand that completely, which may be its own kind of inheritance.

~Elizabeth

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So. Until we can donate or dumpster them, the rugs are still in the spare bedroom. (Confession: there are more than just the two described here.) The Crocs remain in active rotation. The canning jars are not going anywhere, and I have made a certain peace with all that.

I’d love to know if you see yourself in any of this, or if your version looks completely different from mine. Are you a maximalist or a minimalist?

Drop a comment and tell me about the thing you absolutely cannot bring yourself to throw away, even though you know, you just know, that you should. Bonus points if you can explain the logic. Extra points if the logic is airtight.

If you enjoyed this, please share it with someone who has a spare bedroom full of things that are definitely still good for something. Likes, restacks, and comments all help more than you know.

This newsletter is free to read, but it isn't free to produce. If you've been enjoying Chicken Scratch and can see your way to supporting the work, I'd be grateful if you'd consider upgrading to a paid subscription—or toss something in the tip jar. No matter what, I'm glad you're here.

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Afterward:

I include this section as a way to turn reflection into action, if you’re so inclined. Each week I share one small, concrete way to make a difference, because our spheres of influence are wider than we sometimes think, and even simple actions have a way of compounding.

Try this:

This week, find a few things you’re not making use of anymore and donate them. Or repurpose a formerly loved item instead of buying something new. That exchange is its own small economy of enough.

See you next week.

I record my essays for those who prefer to listen. You’ll find that here. ⬇

Subscribe now

The news arrives like a series of body blows. I absorb some, deflect some, feel myself pinned against the ropes, pummeled and praying my country finds the left hook needed to bring this opponent to the mat for good.

I am a person squinting into the gloom at 6:30 in the morning, thinking about how much brighter the world felt just a few days ago.

Oh, wait. That’s right. It was brighter just a few days ago, before we stole an hour of daylight from the front end of the day, stuck it on the back end, and called it progress.

Future societies will laugh. Out loud.

I recognize the incongruity of a rant on Daylight Saving Time juxtaposed with the severity of everything else that’s happening. But this feels like something that might actually be within reach. The continued existence of Daylight Saving Time is a particular kind of bureaucratic absurdity that has survived on inertia, habit, and the public’s tolerance for feeling like shit twice a year for no reason.

We have bigger problems, yes. We also have this one. And unlike most of the others, the American people have already reached a verdict on this one. They’re just waiting for someone to act on it. Congress could fix it tomorrow. Doing so would cost nothing, harm little, and improve the health and well-being of every person in the country. Given that Congress has fixed nothing lately, I’m thinking this could be a kind of morale-builder, a pilot project to let them know how good it feels to do something right.

Let the record show that I am aware that Americans will register a complaint about anything, and that I am, at this moment, exhibit A. But there’s bellyaching and then there’s bellyaching with peer-reviewed citations. I’d like to think this is the latter.

I am therefore presenting my case in a format that our legislators might find familiar, in the slim but not impossible hope that they will recognize the form and mistake it for something they are supposed to act on.

To the Members of the United States Congress:

I write to you today in a state of profound, well-documented exhaustion, which, as it happens, is your fault. Though the population cannot wrap its weary head around what to call this hateable thing, whether it is a single saving or many, I believe we can agree that dicking around with the clocks every spring and fall is costing us sanity we cannot afford to lose.

RESOLUTION

WHEREAS the practice of setting clocks ahead an hour each spring, colloquially known as Daylight Saving Time, has been inflicted on the American public, in various forms, since 1918, making it a year older than the pop-up toaster, which at least had the decency to improve morning life rather than ruin it;

WHEREAS Daylight Saving Time has approximately nothing to do with farmers, as any sentient person could confirm by talking to one, especially a farmer with livestock, or anybody with a pet dog, or a toddler, for that matter, noting that animals and small children do not observe the Uniform Time Act and must be fed and milked on their own schedules regardless of what the government has decided the hour is;

WHEREAS the actual origins of the practice involve, in no particular order: a British entomologist in New Zealand who wanted more evening hours to collect insects; a British builder who was annoyed about losing daylight on the golf course; and the demands of wartime energy conservation, none of which constitutes a compelling justification for disrupting the sleep of 340 million Americans twice a year, in perpetuity, forever;

WHEREAS both of the aforementioned men were, notably, British, and we’ve had this thing about kings in the past, and yet we have been obediently adjusting our clocks according to the whims of two dead dudes, which suggests the revolution was only partially successful;

WHEREAS the most vocal advocates for Daylight Saving Time are not the farmers you have been picturing, but rather the retail industry, restaurant and tourism groups, outdoor recreation businesses, and the Chamber of Commerce, entities that benefit financially from consumers having extra evening daylight in which to spend money, and which have lobbied accordingly for decades, because nothing says representative democracy like restructuring human biology so that somebody can sell more lawn furniture;

WHEREAS the popular sentiment “just pick one and leave it alone”—while correct in spirit—misses a crucial distinction: the two options are not equivalent, and simply picking the wrong permanent time would be rather like resolving to stop banging your head against the wall by nailing a foot to the floor;

WHEREAS it bears stating plainly that we are not, in fact, creating daylight; that the Earth’s relationship with the sun remains stubbornly unchanged regardless of our administrative preferences; that there are still, as there have always been, approximately 24 hours in a day; and that the daylight we are “saving” is simply stolen from the morning and deposited in the evening like some sort of circadian Ponzi scheme;

WHEREAS enjoying long summer evenings is not wrong, exactly, it ignores what that same arrangement looks like in January with permanent DST, when the pleasant July trade-off becomes darkness at both ends of the day, which is not, one assumes, what anyone has in mind;

WHEREAS the United States attempted permanent Daylight Saving Time in 1974, during the Nixon administration, and this sentence should need no further commentary, but let the record show that the Nixon administration, which had not distinguished itself as a reliable steward of the public good, could not make this work either, and the experiment was abandoned within a year amid public outcry and the specific objection that children were walking to school in complete darkness, which raises a separate and troubling question about why we send children to school so early in the first place, except to prepare them for jobs they will one day resent;

WHEREAS one Marianna Byg, of Columbus, Ohio, observed at the time that the Nixon administration had “not seen the light for so long that it thinks it fitting for the rest of the population to be in the dark at least part of the time,” a remark that, tested against the present moment, holds up disturbingly well;

WHEREAS the scientific and medical community, having spent considerable time and grant money studying what happens to the human body when you jerk its clock around twice a year, would like to report the following: a spike of as much as 24% in heart attacks in the days after the spring shift; increased rates of stroke; a rise in depressive episodes after the autumn transition; more migraines; higher rates of type 2 diabetes; flares of inflammatory bowel conditions; and an increase in fatal car accidents—all in exchange for one additional hour of post-work daylight, during which you are invited to go shopping;

WHEREAS nineteen states are poised to adopt permanent Daylight Saving Time, which requires an act of Congress to implement, and which we have already established is the wrong permanent time to pick, meaning these state legislatures have gone to the trouble of demanding the less healthy option, which is, actually, not at all surprising;

WHEREAS this administration has demonstrated a heretofore unmatched capacity for shockingly harmful disruption, and the elimination of Daylight Saving Time would represent a rare opportunity to disrupt something that actually deserves it, we note only that the chance to do one unambiguously correct thing remains available, unclaimed, just sitting there, like an hour of morning light we keep throwing away;

NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that the United States Congress hereby enact permanent standard time across all states and territories, put the clocks to bed, leave them there, and allow the exhausted body politic to wake up in daylight, wind down after sunset, and stop explaining to their children why the sky is black at breakfast.

You will not do this, of course. But the record should show that someone asked.

~Elizabeth

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I have a daughter in Arizona, where they opted out of this nonsense decades ago and have been sleeping normally ever since. Hawaii figured this out in 1967. The residents of American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands have never once changed a clock and appear to be managing. These are not radical experiments. They are functioning proof that the thing can be done.

Let’s wake up the comments, shall we?

• Tell me how you really feel about the biannual time shift. Take your time. We have 24 hours.

• If you could abolish one other thing that has survived purely on inertia—a habit, a law, a social convention—what would it be?

• Be honest: did you actually change all your clocks this weekend, or are you still getting around to the ones that didn’t do it automatically, like I am in my car?

If this piece made you laugh, made you angry, or made you want to take a nap, please share it, leave a comment, and consider subscribing. The free tier exists. The paid tier keeps this labor of love going. Both are welcome here.

Afterward:

I’m including this section as a way to turn reflection into action, if you want. Each week, I’m sharing one small, concrete way to raise your voice, because sustained, visible engagement is one of the few levers we still have to influence the world around us.

Try this:

This week, ask yourself what you're putting up with, big or small, because it's always been that way. Consider what that might be costing you and whether there’s a way to shift it. Sometimes the most radical act is just deciding a thing no longer deserves your compliance.

Receipts, as promised:

Scientific American / PNAS: Our Body Clock Might Prefer Permanent Standard Time

American Medical Association: AMA calls for permanent standard time

American Academy of Sleep Medicine — New position statement supports permanent standard time

NIH/PMC: Measurable health effects associated with the daylight saving time shift

History.com: 8 things you may not know about daylight saving time

Time Magazine: The U.S. Tried Permanent Daylight Saving Time Before. Here’s What Happened

There is a pair of African violets on my windowsill, both saved from death with two salvaged leaves. One has been tended properly, moved to a larger pot as it grew. The other, less than half the size of its companion, has been left to languish because the person responsible for its care never managed to find another suitably-sized container. The smaller, neglected plant is getting ready to bloom.

This is what some living things do when the walls close in. Plants increase flower and seed production when they sense they’re running out of time, a last push at reproduction, at leaving something behind. It’s called a terminal investment strategy. I love thinking of plants as strategic.

Coyotes and wolves do something similar. When these species are heavily hunted or controlled, more females breed, younger ones reproduce, and litters tend to be larger. Paradoxically, as humans try to suppress them, their populations often rebound quickly, sometimes expanding their range.

Last week, a piece in Knowable Magazine featured a delightful cast of animals—from leaf-nosed bats and sugar gliders, to fat-tailed dunnarts and dwarf lemurs—that can intentionally let their body temperatures drift in response to weather, hunger, or danger. It’s the internal version of pulling up the blankets on a chilly night. This flexible tactic, called heterothermy, lets them pause the relentless need to stay warm, surviving by deliberately conserving resources until conditions improve.

We are not so different from any of them. Our stresses are real, and so is our capacity to respond to them. The question, especially now, when so many of us are standing in front of problems too large to fix, is whether we can stop staring at what we can’t do long enough to see what we can.

I’ve spent the better part of forty years as a non-profit professional in different organizations with different causes. But I kept the same underlying conviction: the work had to matter. I knew this about myself before I applied for my first real job. It’s a particular kind of person who goes that route, and if you’ve done it too, you probably recognize the texture. There’s satisfaction, yes, but there’s also a chronic low-grade frustration over never being able to do enough, the near-constant sense that a better approach exists just beyond your reach, the one that would finally move the needle in a way nothing so far has managed to do.

At my friend Amy’s prompting, I took an Enneagram quiz recently. I’d also done the other ones: StrengthsFinder, Myers-Briggs, an EQ assessment that informed me my emotional intelligence was deficient across all categories, which made me want to fix the test, because of course it did. But I’d missed the Enneagram. Turns out I’m a One, the Reformer, with a strong drive to improve things, and a relentless internal critic, the type that looks at a broken system and thinks: there has to be a better mousetrap. There has to be.

Often, I have no idea what people like me, or you, are supposed to do right now, in a moment when the things that need repairing are so numerous and so fast-moving that even naming them feels insurmountable. Whether I’m following it or not, the news arrives every morning with new emergencies, and so much hand-wringing, which I gather is very on-brand for a One and turns out to be spectacularly useless.

Across the street from us, there’s a modest rancher where Louise lived for 34 years. We knew her from the pharmacy where she worked. Most of the community knew her. When the hospitalizations got to be too many, her daughter moved her to a nursing home. She didn’t last long after that. Three sets of renters have come and gone in the five years since.

There was the couple with two boys—a man-child one, and one still in single digits—who horsed around outside together in a way that made me optimistic for siblings everywhere. Their mom, who said she hated being inside, talked on the phone into the night, her bare legs propped on the metal patio table in the front yard. I never understood how she tolerated the mosquitoes.

There was the couple with the toddler called Goose, temporarily displaced while they renovated another house a few miles away.

And there was the trucker couple who’d left the city to get her away from the stress that was making her sick.

When, after less than a year, we saw them ferrying armloads across the frozen pavement to the back of their pickup, we had a hunch they were leaving, but it was several weeks before we learned they’d both lost their jobs. Nothing personal—routing changes, efficiencies, logistics. They were heading to North Dakota to live with her mother while they got themselves situated. New work was already lined up. It was going to be okay, they thought.

The leaving didn’t go smoothly. He drove one of the trucks into a snow-filled ditch across the street; the massive rig that lifted it out showed up at 9 PM on a 20-degree night. They hauled their camper to a locksmith after losing the keys in the chaos of packing. The day they finally pulled out, they tucked a small, empty cooler where they could reach it easily.

“That’s for the dog,” she said. “He’s 17. There’s no way I’m leaving him behind if he dies before we get there.”

This is a concatenation of calamities, popularly known as a shitstorm. And yet they made one tender, practical decision, the same one the violet and the coyote make. They worked with what they had.

The scale doesn’t matter as much as the doing. Tending what’s in front of me, feeding what shows up at my door, planning ahead for a loss I can’t prevent: these aren’t consolation prizes for people who can’t manage the bigger things. They are the bigger things, broken into the size of one person’s hands.

An Eastern Towhee visited my feeder recently. In 32 years of living where I do, I’ve never seen one. They’re ground feeders mostly, scratching backwards at leaf litter like a chicken, and you’re more likely to hear one than see one, a catchy drink-your-teeeea from somewhere in the underbrush. That day, the ground was covered in snow again after a short thaw between storms, so up it came.

When I write about the beauty around me, I worry that I’m leaving the harder work to others. But writing is in my specific capacity, the cooler I can put within reach.

So. What else is in my hands? Not what should be there. Not what would be there if things were different. What is actually there, right now, that I can do?

I start with that.

~Elizabeth

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Okay, I’m handing the talking stick over to you now.

What’s coming to mind this week? When the weight of everything feels immovable, what do you find yourself actually doing, what you reach for? Is there something in your hands right now, or something you’d like to pick up, metaphorically or for real?

You can let me know if this landed for you by leaving a comment 💬, hitting the like button 💚, sharing or restacking ♻️ the post for someone else who might enjoy reading it today.

If you're not yet a subscriber, I'd be delighted to have you, and if you’re not a paid subscriber and can see your way to making that shift, that’d be the bee’s knees. 🐝

Afterward:

I’m including this section as a way to turn reflection into action, if you want. Each week, I’m sharing one small, concrete way to raise your voice, because sustained, visible engagement is one of the few levers we still have to influence the world around us.

Try this:

This week, take ten minutes to write down three things you’re actually capable of doing. Not the things you wish you could do, not the things that would matter most if only you had the time or resources. The real things, the ones already in your hands. Pick one and do it before the week is out.

I recently took part in a writing workshop with the centered on a prompt about collaboration, community, and communion. I found myself thinking about something surprisingly ordinary: a sign asking people not to hold the door open during last month’s deep freeze on the East Coast. What that simple memory raised for me about politeness and obligation widened into questions about boundaries, belonging and always—always—who gets to draw the lines.

What came out of it? — poetry.

Communion

The sign says please
don’t hold the door open,
politely requesting
a communal addressing
of winter’s conditions.

Cold air needles
the desk and the ankles,
arthritic reminders
in miserable fingers.
How long

until the shift is done,
until the shit is done,
until a lamp clicks on
in a familiar room
arranged just so.

Inside and out,
Seymour, Boleyn —
How soon an opening
becomes a sword,
our calculus of belonging.

Please don’t.

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Are you a door holder? How many cars get to merge in front of you before you’re done playing nice? When does politeness start feeling more problematic than helpful?

Boundaries are necessary, but they can also feel arbitrary. I’d love to hear what’s percolating for you after reading this. Sharing your thoughts in the comments not only helps me see new perspectives, it also strengthens this community.

If something resonates, please take a moment to interact. If it sparks a memory, a question, or a feeling, let me know. I read and genuinely appreciate every comment. Every like, 💚 share, or restack ♻️ helps reach readers who might enjoy this conversation, and it makes a real difference in keeping this space alive. Chicken Scratch remains intentionally free, powered by community, and given an essential boost by those who choose to support it through paid subscriptions.

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Afterward:

I’m including this section as a way to turn reflection into action, if you want. Each week, I’m sharing one small, concrete way to raise your voice, because sustained, visible engagement is one of the few levers we still have to influence the world around us.

Try this:

This week, consider volunteering with Just Neighbors, which provides legal and community support for immigrants. You don’t need to be bilingual to help with tasks like outreach, events, or admin support. Or get involved with the League of Women Voters to support non-partisan voter education and registration efforts. Even small actions like attending an event or sharing resources can make a meaningful difference in fostering a more inclusive community.

~Elizabeth

I record my essays for those who prefer to listen. You can access that here. ⬆️

Our only appearance in print as a couple sits on page 28 of the August 1991 issue of Town & Country, a 180-year-old glossy magazine promoted as “the trusted source of inside information on access and influence, taste, elegant living, and unpretentious fun.” We could spend all day debating the unpretentious part, but I don’t think it would take us that long.

Along with 29 other newlyweds (yes, I counted), we were featured in the Weddings section, an orderly parade of flowers, frosting, and anticipatory joy. My mother-in-law, a faithful subscriber and our family’s resident stylist, mailed in a candid shot: the two of us mid–cake cutting, hands entwined, wearing expressions suited to the pomp and circumstance of the moment.

For the record, I had insisted on carrot cake. I could not, in good conscience, begin married life by publicly chewing a slab of sweetened shortening, dressed up as tradition.

We were such lovely, earnest nobodies. For another couple of decades, Town & Country continued to feature wedding photos of people without pedigrees or family compounds. But somewhere along the way, perhaps as printing costs burgeoned, the section evolved. The images grew more polished, the surnames acquired gravitas, the venues began to require passports. What is now branded “Very T&C Weddings” lives fully online and, by most accounts, operates as a pay-to-play affair. Matrimony, like everything else, found its luxury tier.

It’s easy to roll one’s eyes at that transition, but magazines are mirrors as much as they are makers. They print what they believe we linger over. If the pages changed, perhaps our gaze changed too.

A recognizable address, a philanthropic board seat, a private space company, anything called Yeezy: money functions as a signal, shorthand for assumed competence and stability. Rationally, we know that wealth cannot prevent divorce, addiction, loneliness, or deeply regrettable home designs. Celebrity headlines remind us daily that coin does not confer immunity to hardship. What it can do is make certain kinds of trouble less frightening. It can pay for lawyers, second chances, personal trainers, spa retreats, shopping sprees, and houses with a guest room, or seven. It reduces some of the fear around the edges of life. Perhaps what draws us is not the promise of bliss but of breathing room and a high-end espresso machine.

In our current gilded age, the spectacle sustains entire industries. I find myself wondering, with more than a tinge of anger, what any of it proves, exactly. Shouldn’t real success also bring satisfaction? If contentment were part of the equation, why the insatiable need for more? More land, more market shares, yachts that require support yachts—it all suggests hunger, the kind of hunger that leaves the all-you-can-eat buffet with a take-out box.

Still, I struggle with the tension of being repulsed and attracted. I can’t stand to look at it, but sometimes I want to know what they serve for brunch.

After I married my handsome sailor and moved away from the region I’d called home for twenty-three years, my mother kept me supplied with clippings from the local paper. Births, often accompanied by baby names she found mystifying (“Braxxton, with two x’s, imagine that!”), newsworthy events, and of course, wedding announcements. Most have vanished from memory, but I held onto one: “Romantic Wedding in Ravello, Italy.”

The write-up began, as all epoch-making events apparently must, with the professional accomplishments and status of both sets of parents, as though the Amalfi Coast had required character references. Readers were informed not simply that the ceremony took place in a thirteenth-century chapel overlooking the sea, but that the chapel overlooked the sea in a way that seemed personally invested in the couple’s future. The musical selections were classical, the garlands streamed the length of the carpet, the Candle of Unity, described as though they were the first to invent the ritual, was lit by both mothers, and the seven-course dinner was recounted “as delightful to the eye as to the palate.”

It all felt like prosperity as performance: parchment menus sealed with wax, a celebration that continued until dawn, an accompanying photograph of the couple on a balcony above the Mediterranean, gazing outward like Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni.

But these were not celebrities. They were simply people whose nuptials were a notch above normal. I was so struck by the grandeur of it all, I wrote a counter-announcement that I passed along in my next letter home.

LACKLUSTER WEDDING IN SMALL-TOWN U.S.A.

On January 12, 1994, Betty Sue Poindexter, who has never left the city limits, was married to Herbert Ephram Potts, near the local Quik Stop.

Called Betty Sue by her friends, the bride once received a gold star from her second grade teacher for good spelling. Her parents, Thelma and Archibald Poindexter, still have the gold star on their bathroom mirror. The groom’s family originates from the southern part of the county, where all 96 of them still live.

The bride wore a dress, the groom wore a new pair of Dickies overalls. The ceremony was held in the parking lot of a church which was not open at the time. As a celebration of their marriage, the couple stomped on a Dr. Pepper can which must have blown over from the Quik Stop.

After a honeymoon drive down Main Street, the couple hopes to live happily ever after.

At twenty-something, I thought this was satire. Now I realize it lampooned circumstance more than extravagance. Privilege is a wily thing, isn’t it?

As a late teen, I was a debutante—all glamour, no grasp. The gown I wore for the final ball was antebellum-adjacent, something I didn’t think to question at the time. My brother served as one of my marshals, a title I accepted without once asking what, precisely, he was meant to be marshalling. Girls in white dresses? My virtue? The shrimp cocktail? He did a good job as a ceremonial escort whose chief duty was to not trip over his own feet, or mine. The whole enterprise felt vaguely like community theater for gentility. Looking back, I’m perplexed, a little embarrassed, and relieved that destiny took me a long way from all that.

Our brush with celebrity is fun to revisit, a small square of gloss among other small squares of gloss. A few days from now will mark thirty-five years since that photograph was taken. What stands out to me is not that we once appeared in a style magazine, but how little that appearance had to do with the life that followed. The marriage was no sturdier on account of the ink.

On Facebook, I found the bride from that Italian wedding. Her profile makes it clear that she’s the proud mother of two daughters, that she enjoys her friends, traveling, and spending time with her aging parents—and that she’s divorced. Gauging from her smiles, she looks happy.

Any inclination I once had to trade my life for someone else’s highlight reel is long gone. I can see grandeur for what it is without mistaking it for serenity, and I can appreciate a sea view from any vantage point, including the cover of a romance novel. Happiness is not a luxury good. It shows up where it is welcomed and well respected, chandeliers or not.

If we were to do it all again, and remarkably we would, I suspect the snapshot would look much the same: two people doing their best to appreciate the moment and marveling at what the world has to offer. The rest of it—the shoes that give us blisters, the arguments about how to salt the food, the private griefs, the stubborn devotion, the ordinary astonishment of sharing so much life with another human—was never going to fit on page 28 anyway. And frankly, thank the stars for that.

~Elizabeth

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Thanks for reading. And now for the best part of all—comments! Do you know how great it is to get to know you a bit through what you choose to share here?

What wedding memory is most vivid for you?
Which celebrity headline made you roll your eyes this week?

And speaking of headlines, Chicken Scratch hit a Substack leaderboard yesterday—#67 Rising in Literature! These celebratory flashes in the pan are fun reminders that someone, somewhere, is enjoying a little Town & Country moment. Your likes 💚 comments, restacks ♻️ and subscriptions are what make that possible, and I’m genuinely grateful.

Remember, the real spectacle is in noticing the small, unphotographed moments—the ordinary gestures that actually hold life together. So when you walk away from this episode, maybe give one of those moments a nod. Or a smile. Or a tiny, quiet celebration of your own.

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AFTERWARD:
I’m including this section as a way to turn reflection into action, if you want. Each week, I’m sharing one small, concrete way to raise your voice, because sustained, visible engagement is one of the few levers we still have to influence the world around us.

TRY THIS:
Write a short note—text, email, or card—to someone whose life doesn’t make headlines but steadies yours. Thank them for something specific and ordinary: how they show up, how they listen, how they salt the food.

After weeks of letting the decision ripen, like stinky cheese, I decided it was time to show them I really meant business, or more precisely, that I really meant no business.

I live in a rural area where several of the few retail options are on the conscientious shopper’s shit list. I dislike crowds, distrust consumer excess, and I have never possessed the stamina required to drive from store to store in search of one specific lightbulb. So I justified my occasional use of Amazon Prime the way people justify little lapses in judgment: as a temporary deviation from the path that did not disqualify me from the journey. You will stray, I told myself, but you are still headed in the right direction.

Recently, though, the company’s relationship with ICE and the broader surveillance apparatus tipped me from discomfort into something closer to indignation. I would cancel Prime. I would withdraw my dollars, make a small stand of conscience.

When I logged in, I was greeted with a full-page invitation to join Prime for a free 30-day trial. Assuming it was a generic ad, I navigated to the cancellation page, where I was informed that no subscription could be found. After more clicking, I located the record of a past membership that had expired in 2015.

2015. That was right around the time we thought hoverboards were a good idea and before a global pandemic turned breathing into a tribunal. According to Amazon, I had not been a Prime member for eleven years.

For the next hour I conducted an investigation worthy of a true crime podcast. I texted my kids, reviewed past orders, scoured bank statements. Nothing. No annual renewals, no shared household accounts. The most plausible explanation, courtesy of a Reddit thread, was a glitch. Somewhere along the line I had slipped through a digital crack and continued receiving Prime benefits long after the billing had stopped. The system, eventually, corrected itself and the mirage evaporated in a puff of irony.

I’d been gearing up for a clean act of resistance, only to discover there was nothing to push against. The moral arc of my universe had fallen asleep on the couch.

It would be satisfying to end the story there, triumphant or chastened. But what struck me most wasn’t that I’d accidentally gamed the system. It was how ready I’d been for the pleasure of contempt. I was primed for the easy glow of righteousness, prepared to declare myself separate from the machine. Instead, I was confronted with how symbolic the gesture would have been and how little it would have required of me.

It’s easier to tear something down than to build it, easier to narrate myself as the last ethical shopper in Babylon than to ask what my participation actually creates. We are living in a moment that offers daily invitations to feel superior and vindicated in our disdain. I don’t want to confuse that posture with the harder work of staying engaged.

There is real damage being done in this country by elected officials, tech billionaires, and media empires that thrive on division. Policies are crippling vulnerable communities, and power is being wielded with breathtaking indifference. None of that is abstract. But I can oppose policies without pretending I stand outside the systems that produce them. If my fight is fueled by the same scorn I claim to despise, I shouldn’t be surprised when it reproduces the very atmosphere I want to resist.

The residents of Minneapolis continue to fill the streets, organize, attend meetings, and demand accountability long after the cameras are switched off. The Texas monks have walked daily for nearly four months in every kind of weather. Friends are rallying behind level-headed candidates for the local school board, taking pre-dawn shifts to make sure kids can get to school safely, launching new groups to inspire collective action.

After months of denial and despondence, I sense a quickening in the wider body of us. I’m reluctant to give it the enthusiasm of hope, and I hesitate to call it defiance, which carries an oppositional energy that can burn itself out. It is a renewed recognition that democracy, like any living system, thrives in repeated acts of engagement rather than periodic bursts of reaction.

We are in the most intense stretch of labor, when everything presses in and the path forward feels titanic, but the shape of what we are working toward is moving into position.

Whether or not I’m spending money with a corporation whose values trouble me, the dollars still go somewhere. Money, like attention, is rarely neutral; it either concentrates power or distributes it. Redirecting even a modest portion toward local businesses, independent journalism, mutual aid networks, or candidates committed to shared governance won’t topple empires, but it does align my participation with the world I claim to want. Maybe instead of just pricking the skin of a giant I can also nourish something emergent and alive.

I’m steeped in doubt and keenly aware that evidence runs counter to optimism. Still, when we confront uncertainty head-on rather than suppress it, our commitment can deepen. Questioning the narrative that says “this is futile” may anchor us more firmly to the work at hand, a reminder that persistence matters more than clarity.

The tomorrow of my imagination is defined by more than the absence of villains. It includes reciprocal joy, collaboration, and care. That kind of future will not materialize through one-click cancellations or perfectly worded condemnations. It will take participation, sustained though often unspectacular. To refuse the pleasure of contempt is not to excuse injury—it is to decline the addictive clarity of hatred. To participate in what we want to exist is to invest time, money, attention, and labor in the institutions, communities, and alliances that embody our values, even when the returns are slow.

When the Walk for Peace monks finally reached Washington D.C. yesterday, they wrote about the beauty of seeing strangers gathered together across differences, of recognizing in one another a shared longing for peace. Their pilgrimage didn’t promote division, it embodied an alternative to it.

I do not know how long this political chapter will last or how much further damage will be done before it closes. I do know that I would rather expend my energy helping construct the world I hope for than rehearsing my disgust at the one I oppose.

Driving home from the grocery store this week, I watched a current of birds moving toward their communal roost. For more than a mile they stippled the cool, crystalline sky, each singular, black shape part of a coordinated whole. Soon enough they will break into breeding pairs, competing for resources and nesting sites, settling into the urgencies of spring. But for now they gather in these dense winter flocks, where they are less vulnerable to predators, more efficient in finding food, quicker to learn, warmer through the night.

~Elizabeth

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There are so many ways people are finding positivity and connection these days. In Melbourne, Australia, an ecology team assigned email addresses to 70,000 urban trees so people could report problems—but instead, many have started sending the trees fan mail.

I’m curious what’s tugging at you for attention most strongly right now. What’s the decision or commitment you’re moving toward?

If today’s words resonated, please join me and others in the comments, click like, or give this a restack so more people can find it. Every action—on the page or in the world—has the potential to make someone’s day!

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Afterward:

I’m including this section as a way to turn reflection into action, if you want. Each week, I’m sharing one small, concrete way to raise your voice, because sustained, visible engagement is one of the few levers we still have to influence the world around us.

Try this:

Choose a local organization or initiative that’s committed to your community’s wellbeing—possibly one that’s new to you—and give them some attention. That could mean signing up for a volunteer shift, making a donation, sharing their work with friends, or simply attending an upcoming meeting or event. The goal isn’t to fix everything at once; it’s to invest time, energy, or resources into something that’s already doing good work.

Or this:

Join the Walk for Peace monks and thousands of others for a global meditation February 11, 2026, starting at 4:30 PM ET.

Or this, from the talented :

I had a very basic plan: show up, then show up again. The commitment was as much about managing my own tendencies as anything else. I can’t count how many brilliant ideas have lived and died in the span of an hour in my head. Given the right moon phase or sun sign, and a prickling in the part of my brain that hates feeling overwhelmed, I could talk myself out of a winning lottery ticket even while holding it.

But here we are, four years from the launch of this publication and still moving along.

For more than 200 weeks, that’s mostly meant crafting essays. Words are my love language, after all. Getting them down gives me a chance to notice things, worry over them, figure out how they make me think or feel in the moment, then offer them up in case they might resonate more broadly.

Occasionally, it’s meant something else—a photograph, a playlist, a poem—because those were the honest shape of the week. I’ve learned to trust that those count, too. Not that anyone’s keeping score.

What surprises me more than maintaining the writing ritual is that so many of you have joined me along the way, and stay with me still. You’ve trusted me with your attention, your time, a slice of your very full lives. I don’t ever take that for granted.

It feels right to mark this moment by naming some of what stands out about the process, some of the observations I’ve gathered along the way, bits and pieces of what I’ve learned:

• Consistency is more about design than willpower. I know this isn’t true for everyone, but for me, habit makes it less likely I’ll bail. I do the same thing with exercise, dragging my reluctant butt to the Y for a predictable suite of classes each week. Without the schedule, I’m left to negotiate with myself, and I am a very persuasive opponent.

• Doubt is part of the routine, not a sign I’m doing it wrong. It shows up faithfully, like a dog at the dinner bowl, peaking right as I click “send.” I’ve learned to stop waiting for it to go away.

• Humor can create a bridge to hard truths. When things feel heavy personally, politically, or collectively—which is basically always now—laughter changes the air by cracking the door open for hope.

• Community eases the burden. Writing into the void is one thing. Writing with the knowledge that someone else out there is thinking, feeling, nodding along is a game changer. And this is where I’ll wave my pompoms for those of you who are willing to turn up visibly. I get that this isn’t for everyone either, and I’m not asking anyone to change. But I do need to acknowledge the lift this provides for me, one I try to consistently pay forward.

• Attention is an act of care. Noticing what’s painful, infuriating, and bleak, or tender, funny, and exhilarating is a way of staying connected to the full spectrum of life as one of billions sharing an existence here on Earth. And when I’m attentive, I’m more likely to see what needs more care.

We are all holding a lot right now, some of us more than others. Most weeks I wonder whether anything small or reflective belongs alongside everything else clamoring for urgency. What I tell myself is that it’s okay that my part looks different than others’. Chicken Scratch offers the option to remember who I am, expand a little, touch the breadth of what has always mattered, what still matters, what can matter.

So this is my time to say thank you. Thank you for reading and listening, for responding and sharing, for supporting this work in the ways that you do. Thank you for trusting me with your energy, your imagination, and your willingness to explore. For me, this practice and this community are a way to return to dreams I hope we never lose sight of, giving them a place to call home.

I’m glad we’re here together. And while I will almost certainly try to talk myself out of next week’s post, I’m pretty sure I’ll show up anyway.

With real gratitude,

Elizabeth

AFTERWARD:
I’m including this section as a way to turn reflection into action, if you want. Each week, I’m sharing one small, concrete way to raise your voice, because sustained, visible engagement is one of the few levers we still have to influence the world around us.

TRY THIS:
Make something nourishing—soup, stew, or bread—and bring it to a neighbor, friend, or someone who could use it. Care is contagious, and showing up with a little sustenance is one of the simplest ways to make a real difference.

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As a practice, I remember the birthdays of those I’ve loved and lost rather than the deathdays, and I’m disinclined to punctuate the departures with sentiments like, “I miss her every day.” Rarely a day passes when I don’t think about my mother, given the many reminders in my life: clothing, jewelry, pictures, furniture, my image in the mirror. But it’s fullness I feel, not absence, when faced with such memories. It has been five years since she died, and time has not thinned her presence in the ways I once assumed it would.

After turning 93, she lived just over a month. Though she never put quite so fine a point on it, I’m sure when the time came, she was ready to go. She’d been comparatively well for most of her years, or at least more well than not. But after surviving a heart attack and a stroke in COVID-driven isolation, she returned home changed. The physical and cognitive limitations exhausted her, and living in that depleted state sapped her will to carry on.

When I visited for her birthday a few weeks before she died, she cried every day. Cried about the caregivers now offering round the clock support and about the fistful of pills she was meant to swallow with her breakfast. Cried when the words she sought wouldn’t come. Cried every morning, I would swear, when she discovered herself awake and still alive. As daybreak slipped between the heavy curtains in what had been my father’s room 12 years earlier, I’d hear the weeping coming over the baby monitor.

I’m crying most days now, too. Even if my reasons are different, the root of my sadness is still tied to being reminded, in so many ways, that love exacts a cost, and opting out isn’t actually an option. I’m doing what’s needed to maintain function. I’m damn lucky to be in a bright, beautiful relationship, to have family and friends who keep me from unraveling, to work with smart, sensitive colleagues. But my heart aches at the pain we people are capable of inflicting on each other and on this place we call home.

What brings me to tears, though, isn’t malevolence, it’s tenderness. Bearing witness to human and environmental destruction makes me angry. Self-sacrifice cracks me open with the merciful sound of someone setting down what they need to be sure someone else can keep going.

Ninety-four days ago, a group of Buddhist monks set out on foot from Fort Worth, Texas, bound for Washington, D.C. Pressing on through bitter cold and snow, they’ve passed through five states and are now entering Virginia. Alongside the promotion of compassion and non-violence, their aim is to ask that the Buddha’s birthday be recognized as a federal holiday. They travel with little more than their robes, their vows, and a rescue dog named Aloka.

Peace walks are not new, but this one is taking place in a different landscape than those in the past, amassing followers online and inspiring people to line the roads for miles to offer hats or flowers, to hold their hands in prayer, to shed tears. One of the monks, whose leg was amputated after he was struck by a vehicle, views the loss of his limb as an offering to the cause of peace.

All of this is unfolding as the country feels increasingly unrecognizable to me—violence justified by authority, a democracy splintering under pressure, and a resistance growing louder and more willing to risk itself.

Some have expressed a willingness to die for this cause, a fact I hold carefully, unsure how to both admire the devotion and grieve the necessity.

My mother’s life was as extraordinary as an ordinary life can be, composed of practiced gestures repeated until they became a kind of mastery, and her death, by most standards, was remarkable.

I’d had the pleasure of a video call just a few hours earlier, beaming myself into her family room two states away. It was my brother, his wife, and their then 17-year-old son who were by her side at the end.

As with most Sunday nights, they brought her over for dinner, this time plates of homemade lasagna, arugula salad, and crusty bread. For dessert, my brother offered her favorite flavor of ice cream. “I don’t believe I’ll have any tonight,” she said.

Minutes later, she was gone. Or at least her body was emptied of what we’d come to know as her.

Soon after, my young nephew would write of his profound experience:

While I sat in the dining room in disbelief, I remembered one of Tutu’s favorite things. [T]hough I’ve never taken a piano lesson…I moved to the next room and began to play the best that I knew how. A newfound talent fled into me at that moment. I plucked a made-up tune and let my downcast emotions speak through the notes on the piano.

To hear his parents tell it, what came out of his fingers that night, and persisted in the days to come, was an intensified ability to compose complex songs by ear. My mother spent the better part of her life at the piano, playing with skill, technical precision, and joy but never created original pieces.

January 26 was the birthday of a friend who died by suicide at the age of 38.

Renee Good would have turned 38 on April 2, Alex Pretti on November 9.

My mother would be 99 this December.

My nephew will be 23 in October.

I don’t want to presume what we’re meant to do for one another, or how much is too much to ask. I haven’t lived a life that has asked me for deep sacrifices. I only know that offerings beyond my comprehension are already being made and that I’m certain I can do more.

Peace is constructed from what we are willing to give, how we bear what is taken, and the refusal to bargain away our integrity at the table. If it’s built at all, the work is done by people who are ready to act and willing to go the distance without the comfort of certainty.

~Elizabeth

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Thanks for reading. I’d love to learn more about how you remember the lives of people you love, or those you’ve lost. What anniversaries carry special meaning?

If this piece brought someone to mind, or if you’re wrestling with what it means to give more than you planned, bring it into the comments. This is a warm community, and it means so much to meet you there.

I’m also linking here to another piece about my mom, my inaugural Substack essay posted on 2/2/22. You might’ve noticed we called her “Tutu,” and that her birthday was December 22. The twenty-twos run deep in my family. But that’s another story.

Afterward:

I’m including this section as a way to turn reflection into action, if you want. Each week, I’m sharing one small, concrete way to raise your voice, because sustained, visible engagement is one of the few levers we still have to influence the world around us.

Try this:

Make at least one call to an elected official about an issue you care about this week. If you’re in the U.S., use a tool like 5Calls to find your representative and a suggested script. Volume counts more than eloquence, one call can ripple into many, and it absolutely makes a difference!

If you prefer listening, you can do that here. But do let me know you stopped by. ⬇️

Many years ago, a man twice my age, of whom I have since lost track, made a remark I’ve never forgotten. If we were pioneers headed west together in a prairie schooner, he said he would want me driving the wagon. I do not think of myself as especially bold or particularly brave, but I am someone who tries to pay attention even when I am not sure what to do with what I see.

Lately that has felt harder. There is a lot of pressure to speak with authority, to have a take that cuts through the noise, to offer leadership or solutions, an exacting analysis or the right kind of outrage, and the truth is that I do not have much of that in me right now. What I have instead is a strong resistance to pretending I do.

This past weekend I attended the inaugural Wham Bam Thank You Slam, a live, virtual storytelling event hosted by and , two people I deeply admire. Ten feminist Substack writers told honest, witty, wonderful stories that polished up parts of me that had gone a little dull. With votes from the audience, one writer was chosen as the winner.

A day later the hosts came back to say they’d changed their minds. They didn’t like the competition, didn’t like the isolation of it, or the way it pitted people against one another. They wanted something more communal and connective. They are keeping the slam but ditching the voting, because when everyone shows up with something true, winning starts to feel beside the point. Especially now.

For the record, I am not a “participation award” evangelist. In fact, I think teaching kids—and their parents—that awards come easily is counterproductive. The world is not short on ways to measure, rank, and reward. It hands out plenty of gold stars and occasionally, Nobel Peace Prizes, but it does not offer much recognition for showing up with a willingness to see yourself honestly. That part is mostly on us to recognize.

I’ve known for a long time that I am not competitive. But the truer truth is that I do not seek out spaces likely to erode my confidence. I’ve worked a lifetime to build it, and I’m still not done; I’m of no mind to offer any of it up for sport now.

I think a lot of us are confusing courage with performance. We talk about bravery as if it always has to look like charging forward or proving something, but there is a steadier, less assertive kind of courage that looks like examining your own privilege, checking on your neighbor, joining a sledding event while ICE occupies your city, telling your own story and making room for others’ voices—in spite of it all.

My recent sleep-dreams have been unusually vivid. I’ve been moving too much too fast, veering off course, flung airborne above open fields and dense forests, forced to prepare for a deadly crash. Instead, using skills I did not know I had, I’ve managed to land, controlled and intact. I don’t take that as prophecy or symbolism so much as reassurance. We are learning as we go even when it doesn’t register as progress.

The poem that follows came out of all of this, a set of instructions I needed right now: sit, read, notice, and share; apply pressure where needed; be generous; do not go alone.

We don’t have to be fearless or exceptional to trust that every time we keep ourselves and others from crashing, it is a way of carrying the torch.

Pull up the chair

Pull up the chair to write the words
Even if you’re sure they’ve stopped working.

Sit with the words to witness the feeling
Of placing your hands on the pain.

Let them caress the wounds of corruption
Add pressure to stop the bleeding.

Boundless darkness stippled with stars
The work is in the carrying.

Sit in the circle to share the stories
Ancient wisdom is speaking.

Then lock arms and expand into the night
Listening and listening for dawn.

~Elizabeth

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And now, I’m excited to read your thoughts. I keep thinking about the difference between crashing and carrying — about how much of life happens in that middle space where nothing is especially triumphant.

If you’re inclined to comment, I’m curious:

Where are you applying pressure right now, and where are you letting something rest?

What are you carrying that doesn’t look like much from the outside but matters to you?

What’s one small way you’ve not crashed this week?

A sentence is plenty. A fragment is welcome. Pull up the chair. Nobody’s grammar checking here, and there are no winners or losers. Also no gold stars for participation, but I will happily give out gratitude.

Or you can just sit with it. No matter what, I’m super glad we’re in this together.

If you prefer to listen, you’ll find an audio version, read by me, here. ⬇️

“I’m going to have to deal with some of these guys soon,” my husband says after a cadre of squirrels makes quick work of the chicken wire I’ve secured over my potted kale plants. I grow hardy greens in these pots every winter, but this year the fuzz-tailed Houdinis are decimating them before my eyes. It feels like a losing proposition.

I live in a small, rural town where critters with abundant food supplies flourish in the absence of natural predators. The more prolific they become, the more damage they do, ravaging gardens, stripping bark from young trees, chewing table legs. My husband is inclined to control them precisely, reducing the population until we reach a better balance.

The first few times he mentions it, I mutter and make disagreeable faces. Eventually, he’s winning me over. “Only if we can find someone who’ll take them for food,” I say, because I hate the idea of killing something just to kill it. I spend a few minutes browsing recipes for traditional Brunswick stew but can’t quite justify learning how to clean squirrels given how little there is to work with.

Later, prefacing her comment with sufficient sensitivity, one of my kids notes that they’ll be food for something whether we eat them or not.

I am thirteen, and my family has just moved into a new house on a wooded lot in suburban North Carolina. My mother, only forty-seven, has lost both of her parents just three weeks apart. She uses the inheritance to build what she thinks will be her forever home. Creating something lasting from that kind of loss serves as a stand-in for the therapy she never seeks.

The house itself seems to understand this, not dominating the land so much as settling into it. One tree in particular, a substantial hickory, stands exactly where the deck is meant to go. Instead of cutting it down, they build around it.

I can still conjure the sound of the squirrel dropping onto the deck with a sickening thud.

To my young self, this feels logical—obviously the tree should be saved. Only later do I realize how rarely people opt into that kind of accommodation. Every fall, in its wide, waving arms that arch above the deck, the hickory produces an abundance of nuts, and every fall, the squirrels cut them into sharp shards that wedge between boards. My parents spend untold hours on their hands and knees, using table knives to pry them out one by one. It is tedious, physical, deeply unglamorous work that is never quite finished.

At some point, my father decides there is a better solution.

He frames his assault on the resident rodents as a necessity and takes up a post inside the barely-open sliding door, a few feet away from that stately tree. My tender heart and I wander into the kitchen just as he fires a shot, and I can still conjure the sound of a squirrel dropping onto the deck with a sickening thud. My protests annoy my father who tells me to take myself to another part of the house.

Dad is an avid waterfowl hunter and sometimes travels west to hunt larger game. Guns are familiar to me, insofar as I am accustomed to their polished, upright presence in the glass-front cabinet in the basement. I think nothing of eating what my mother prepares from the spoils of his outings: tiny quail smothered in mushroom gravy, hearty roasted duck or goose glazed with sweet fruit, moose burgers, elk steaks.

What’s unfamiliar is witnessing the moment when an animal goes from living to dead. There is no discussion, no acknowledgment that something irreversible has happened. The squirrel is a problem; the problem is addressed, and my unease is treated as an inconvenience, leaving a persistent impression that I won’t understand for a very long time.

My husband and I consider ourselves fortunate to raise our children on a farm. We live there for thirteen years, long enough for the rhythms of tending and loss to become intuitive. He is busy running a furniture-making business, so the garden and the flock of laying hens are mostly mine to manage. Death is everywhere—chickens sick beyond saving, chickens beheaded or carried off by predators, reptiles, insects, garden plants, weeds, and every kind of creature our part-feral cat takes pleasure in offing. When you are that close to it, life is always brushing up against its end, and stewardship requires constant acknowledgment of what is fragile and finite.

I never love any part of it. I don’t even like it, but I do it with honor for the life being given and the sustenance it allows.

When the hens grow too old to lay productively, we cull them ourselves, with a small group of helpers. Once a year, fifty birds in a single day are then sold as stewing hens to our devoted market customers. It is nothing compared to what many farmers do, but it feels like plenty to me. I don’t sleep for days beforehand as I rehearse the reasoning over and over again: this is part of eating; this is part of care; everything we consume involves the death of something.

I tell myself that if I am going to eat meat, I must be willing to kill it, and that there is something dishonest about outsourcing the violence while enjoying the benefits. I think I’ll learn how to do it quickly, cleanly, with as little suffering as possible, but I only use the knife on a chicken’s throat once. It takes me two tries, and I feel horrible for the bird. From then on, I maintain other positions on the processing line, leaving the sticking, as we call it, to those more confident.

I never love any part of it. I don’t even like it, but I do it with honor for the life being given and the sustenance it allows. After several seasons of second guessing my hesitations and wondering why this continues to weigh on me, I realize that complete acceptance would dull the gravity of the sacrifice. I don’t want that. I want the act to stay difficult, weighty, acknowledged.

Though I can’t identify it the day he decides to take charge of the squirrels, what I feel in the gruff exchange with my father is a tension between his need to solve problems and my own need to appreciate life. His irritation with me is human, shaped by the expectations of his generation and gender—the demand to act decisively, without visible emotion—but it unsettles me with how it pushes past the caregiving I so desperately want to preserve. It’s not malice, only a difference in how we approach what we owe to living beings, a distinction in moral awareness that has been alive in me for as long as I can remember.

In our backyards, squirrels can be treated as problems to be managed—aggravating, low-stakes.

Beyond the property line, that same lack of regard can be catastrophic.

Renee Nicole Good, a mother of three, a wife, a friend and neighbor, someone with a whole life, loved ones, and dreams, is shot at close range, in broad daylight, by a man authorized to carry a gun in the name of the state. She is neither verbally aggressive nor armed. I read account after account of how she is killed. I don’t watch the videos, because I already understand the magnitude of a life ended, and I want to keep my attention on what it takes to bear that responsibility.

I do not know if respect—for life, for the inherent worth of a human being—can ever be fully restored once it has been discarded

Around the world, and with horrifying frequency in this country, lives are taken with guns backed by authority, and the deaths are folded into policy debates before grief has even begun. Renee’s is one such life among many. I do not know if respect—for life, for the inherent worth of a human being—can ever be fully restored once it has been discarded, once someone sees it as expendable.

What I do know is that the work of bearing witness to what unfolds when care is abandoned, of acting with integrity and attention, is ours to do, even when it is exhausting, even when what we are able to do feels impossibly small. I know that when we go looking for leaders the criteria for selection should extend far beyond political affiliations and what we want to believe. The capacity to lead should be measured by moral courage, by a willingness to not just acknowledge harm but also take responsibility for it rather than deflect or deny it.

So many of us are out of balance, teetering between paralysis and rage, undone by what’s been lost. We can’t do much, but we are doing what we can. Is it enough—to notice, to care, to tend what remains worthy, to honor the goodness that persists despite it all? In the face of so much destruction and suffering at the hands of those in power, I’m not sure. But I am certain that if we look for them, opportunities to act with respect, even reverence, are never hard to find. And, in the absence of the tectonic shifts we hope for, they become everything.

~Elizabeth

Life is full of times that catch us off guard—reminders of fragility, the sudden clarity of what it means to care. If this essay nudged you to notice anything in particular, I’d be honored to read about that in the comments.

For a companion reflection on care and persistence, you might also read Every Afternoon at Five O’Clock, among my most popular essays, where a daily call to my mother and the rescue of a baby squirrel became lessons in attentive tenderness.

If you found something here worth remembering, I hope you’ll pass it along to someone who might feel the same.

My essays are always free to read, and I consider it a privilege to share them with readers who bring thoughtfulness and heart to this space. To those who choose to support my work, thank you: your paid subscriptions are truly a gift, but your encouragement alone helps me keep writing with the care and attention these subjects deserve.

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It’s already been a busy year for my nervous system, what with the churn of headlines, conflicts framed as necessities, actual necessities cast off like the latest public health guidance, and the deleterious effects of being in a country run by an oil-igarchy. At this point, I’m so jaded it’s hard to be sure if the recent supermoon was spiritually significant or just a moon with better PR.

New Year’s resolutions are in full bloom, evidenced by the doubled numbers at my morning gym classes. As if muscle tone could stand in for sanity. Also, after a $250K win eight years ago, a man in my state won $50,000 in the lottery again this week. Sure, he could just be luckier than Jack Sparrow, but it’s more likely he’s deeply embedded in a lottery-fixing cabal.

On the bright side, I can say that the entire last decade has been an opportunity for growth, and that every day since November 2024 has brought unparalleled motivation to sharpen my worrying techniques. Though I come from a long line of fretsperts, this is a craft that requires discipline. Where once I might have waited to panic until after three or four people told me “It’ll be fine,” now I’m there before the sentence is finished.

I bet some of you are gnawing off the last of your fingernails right now, so I’ll waste no more time. Here to support your next meltdown are my tips for those ready to train seriously—welcome to Worry Warriorhood!

Anticipation

To be a dedicated handwringer you must master the art of anticipation. While waiting for bad things to happen, go ahead and let yourself experience the distress, feel into the turmoil, be with it, let it move through you, like a colonoscopy prep. This is called endurance training. If nothing terrible occurs, this simply confirms that your angst paid off.

Scale

Next, scale matters. Local anxiety is for underachievers. Serious worry is global. Why stress about one problem when you can agonize about all of them simultaneously? The trick is to sustain a persistent low-grade alarm, noticeable enough to wreck your sleep, not so obvious that anyone notices you’re not okay.

Language

I also find that language helps, especially using phrases like “I just have a bad feeling,” or “this can’t end well,” which allows me to catastrophize without committing to specifics. Specifics invite solutions, and solutions are antithetical to the worry warrior’s way of life. They are, in fact, a known gateway drug to optimism. It’s important to be informed, never soothed, to read just enough to confirm that your trepidation is reasonable. But you’ll want to avoid any article that includes the word “hope.” Hope leads to emotional whiplash, which is hard on the joints.

Inertia

If you feel compelled to take action, redirect that energy toward watching reruns of The Twilight Zone. And whatever you do, don’t take a walk. Walking invites perspective, and perspective has a way of interrupting a perfectly good spiral.

Cosmology

Astrology can be useful here. When the moon does something dramatic, or there’s any sort of planetary fuckery, you can add a cosmic explanation to that relentless sense of foreboding while also keeping one eye out for an alien invasion. The level of devastation that could fall out of the sky is vast, unknowable, and completely out of your control, which is exactly the kind of overwhelm the seasoned worrier is meant to cultivate.

Self-regulation

At some point, someone will suggest breathing exercises, community connection, or touching grass. They’ll mean well, of course, but now is not the time for calm. Our nervous systems are in tactical mode, scouting for horrors on the verge of existence. There will be time for calm later, if there is a later.

Discipline

Finally, exceptional worry demands restraint. I find it best to not burden others with the full scope of my imaginings. I share only the socially acceptable version, the dry, ironic, or lightly humorous. Trading jokes with an acquaintance about the AI apocalypse, climate destruction or the end of democracy while you shop for bird seed is existential dread that’s learned how to behave in public. It’s so cute.

Above all, remember this: worrying is not weakness. It’s caring in advance. It’s meeting our fears before they materialize, paying interest on debts we don’t owe. And if you ever find yourself feeling lighter, calmer, or briefly at peace, don’t be dismayed. Even the most committed fretter occasionally slips, distracted by a puppy or the unexpected kindness of strangers. When that happens, don’t worry about it. The world will give you another reason to brood soon enough.

~Elizabeth

This piece started with me staring into a backyard fire, thinking about what I might like to bring into my life this year, and what I’d like to release. Anticipatory trauma came to mind—which is kind of like a hobby for me, really—and, well, this essay is the result. Thanks for coming along!

Now I get to hand the mic over to you. What’s your top-tier, professional-level worry? Any catastrophic scenarios you’ve been training for? Let’s keep the satire alive in the comments. Bonus points if it involves planetary alignment, alien invasions, or an imploding lottery system.

If this essay scratched an itch—or added one—consider supporting my work with a $5/month subscription or a one-time Ko-Fi donation. No guilt required. Likes 💚shares, restacks ♻️ or existential validation all help keep the fire stoked.

Until next time, take good care.

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If listening works best for you today, please enjoy my audio voiceover above. 👆

We leave home intentionally early, the way you do the day before a holiday, when everyone is either determined to be together or determined to escape, and especially when traffic where you’re headed can be terrible even on an ordinary day.

We don’t make it an hour.

As a guy who learned to drive in New York, my hubby knows something about making your move in traffic. But he cuts a turn a little too sharply and feeds one of our tires to the ragged jaws of the roadside. It’s a very specific sound and sensation, one that makes you suck in air through your teeth, and exhale “Shit,” even though the baby Jesus is so close to being born he can hear you.

Sure enough, we’re instantly disabled on a major road, the driver’s side tire showing zero pressure, traffic whizzing past at speed. We pull as far as we dare onto the shoulder, given the soggy surrounds, our fully packed vehicle wobbling like a newborn lamb as cars scream past. I feel my body tighten into that peculiar mix of alertness and helplessness and wonder if this is a sign from the universe that we should have stayed home.

I don’t want to call attention to either my privilege or my profound ineptitude when it comes to auto mechanics, but I need to acknowledge that the money we spend on our yearly AAA membership pays for itself many times over. Locked out of a car because the battery’s dead? Call them. Stranded on I-95 on a broiling Virginia summer day? Call them. Christmas Eve? Definitely call them.

Even the automated operators there talk slowly, presumably in an effort to project calm. “Are you somewhere safe?” asks Heather. Or Charlotte. Or Miranda, who also wants to know if the respondent can change the tire safely when they arrive. I tell her no. She says she’ll send a tow truck, that it will take forty-five minutes, and asks where we’d like the car taken.

Half the town we just left is already closed for the holiday. She explains, deliberately, that only one of us can ride with the driver and asks if we’d like a $20 Lyft coupon for the other person? I imagine all one of the Lyft drivers in the area sipping eggnog on his couch, in pajamas, phone on silent. I thank her and explain, less than slowly, that we’ll call back.

While I start dialing tire places—most unanswered—Jim shoves the contents of our trunk into the back seat. What won’t fit flaps aimlessly in the stiff wind on the side of the road. Suitcases, bags, the detritus of a pending holiday visit.

He unearths the donut spare, says the jack is missing, checks the manual, finds the jack but discovers that the lever needed to actually operate it is missing. This is the car our daughter left behind when she moved abroad, leaving us to wander the foreign lands of a vehicle we never really got to know.

Praise be, he’s brought his trusty tool bag and has pliers!

But when he kneels beside the car, his shoe hangs over the white line of the shoulder, and I protest. Traffic is unrelenting. He claims he’s ducking off the road as needed, only resuming efforts when there’s a break in the flow. He doesn’t mean to lie. How do you actually change a tire in 20 second spurts?

At a certain point, I station myself behind the back bumper, gray hair blowing in the breeze, a sexagenarian flare. Most drivers are kind and move over. A few dudes in pickup trucks stay their course, a nod to the size of their own…tires. No one stops to ask how we’re doing, and I’m just glad we’re in this together.

Leaving the skin of a few knuckles behind, Jim finishes swapping out the tire and stuffs everything back in the car as I connect with another calming representative to cancel the tow.

I still haven’t found a service center that can help us. One guy, who sounds young enough to be my grandson (if I had one), tells me he has no idea why they’re even open on Christmas Eve and that he’s outta there as soon as possible. But before hanging up, he offers to come help us once he’s off at noon. With a smile that’s trying hard to turn into tears, I decline.

A few yards along, we regroup in the small, gravel parking lot of a long-defunct cat hospital. That’s when the tow driver, who’s spotted us from the road, turns up anyway, adds air to the spare, and tells us about a warehouse in Delaware that might have what we need. The man’s face is familiar, surely someone who has bailed us out of a car situation in the past. We press on.

A guy at Tire Rack tells me they have the model we need at a reasonable price, though I’d probably have paid whatever he asked at that point. Before I can seal the deal, the call drops.

Next, I get Felix, whose delivery, while not as measured as the folks at AAA, is even more calming. He explains that he and the previous rep are in Indiana, confirms that the tire we need is in stock, makes a joke about the weather. The call drops again.

This time Felix rings me back, offering his direct extension. I give him my credit card number, and the sale is final.

For a fleeting moment I marvel at going sixty miles an hour down a road in Maryland, on a donut spare, with a man who can MacGyver a jack lever with pliers, talking wirelessly to someone named Felix in South Bend, whose inventory system assures him that the tire we need—the one nobody else has—is available one state away, and that I can pay for it by reading some numbers aloud.

But there’s a hitch. Every good car story insists on one.

It’s 11:00 am, and the warehouse in Delaware closes at noon. We are at least an hour away. “They have things they have to do after 12:00,” Felix says with confidence. He suggests I call them when I’m about five minutes out. Before bidding goodbye, we wish each other a Merry Christmas, and I tell him how grateful I am for his help, a compliment he waves off as if it’s all in a day’s work.

A few minutes later, I see a missed call and a voicemail.

“Hey Elizabeth. I just got word—this is Felix at Tire Rack, by the way—I just got an email back from the guys at the warehouse who said, ‘Copy that.’ They’ll wait until you get there. So get there safe, more than fast. They’ll wait. I just wanted you to know that. Have a happy holiday. Take care!”

We arrive at 12:10 to a man ready with the tire, which he crams into the back seat, handing us a list of places nearby that can put it on for us. We try the closest one, practically across the street, and for $30, they install and balance the tire, wish us well and send us on our way. In the 40 minutes we’re there, we are their only customer.

When we finally get underway again, we’ve lost three hours. As anticipated, traffic in New York is terrible, and a trip that should have taken less than five hours takes nine.

It turns out to be worth it.

We were traveling toward people we love—one who hadn’t spoken to us in five years. There was history there and so much uncertainty, and for that part of the journey, we had no spare tire. All morning, as things went wrong and then right and then wrong again, I questioned our decision to go at all. Surely we were misreading something.

The thing about signs is that they mostly make sense in hindsight and not always reliably, given how prone we are to seeing what we want to see.

The reunion, when it came, was unremarkable in the best possible way. No drama. No reckoning. Just happy people in a room, good food on plates, time passing, hugs exchanged. No one involved had any idea what might be unfolding. They were just willing to do what they could with what they had to offer, and that was enough to get us where we were meant to go.

~Elizabeth

This piece ends up being about what happens when people decide to lean in, even when they don’t have to, even when it’s inconvenient. Though I don’t envision Chicken Scratch as a diary, this story felt too germane to this time in history to pass over.

I hope the year ahead brings us together in a movement of moments like this. I hope all the helpers show up and link arms—and I hope to meet you there.

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If this piece sparked anything at all for you, I’d love to know that. You can like, share, or restack it (look for versions of these buttons: 💚 ♻️ 💬) — and I’d be so happy to meet you in the comments, especially if you’ve got a helper story to share, whether you were at the receiving or the giving end.

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Happy New Year! Thank you for all the ways you make this community of friends what it is. I’ll see you on the other side.

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The piece linked just below was written many seasons ago as a holiday letter to family and friends. I’ve shared it here before, and at a reader’s suggestion, it seems I’m turning it into an annual practice. I do love me a tradition.

The words are the same; we are not. If you enjoyed it in the past, I hope it meets you where you are now. If it’s new to you, I hope you’ll find it to be good company for a few minutes. If you’ve time for one more, “Lift Up Your Heads,” ’s recent reflection on Handel’s Messiah, feels like a kindred offering. It sent me hurrying back to the music itself, and I found inspiration there.

And if Christmas feels like a lot this year—or never felt like your holiday in the first place—I give you the ass with the eye roll. Part of a vintage Italian nativity set I inherited when my parents upgraded to a loftier display, the donkey has clearly formed an opinion about the whole affair. After 63 Christmases together, I just noticed his expression this week. That feels…perfect.

I’m so thankful for your presence, for your attention, and for the human urge to gather meaning at the closing of the year; for the words, the singing, and the traditions we uphold; for our stupid imperfections, for our ability to continue to care, and for all the ways we allow ourselves to believe that the ordinary might yet become extraordinary.

Peace,
~Elizabeth

To add just a touch more sparkle to your season, I’m offering two more songs. Because SINGING! First, a brand new Pogues cover from Brandi Carlile and crew. To quote one of the comments: “An absolutely riotous masterpiece of love. Period.”

And this one, not new at all yet still so very relatable, from Australia’s Tim Minchin.

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The most precious gift for independent writers like me is knowing this work has found a friend. Your reading is the heart of it, your comments the soul. Chicken Scratch is always free, because I want it to be accessible to everyone, no matter their means. Anything else you are able to offer is a kindness for which I can’t ever express enough gratitude. See you in the New Year!