Oh, so many stories in a single photograph, I could sit here all day, rifling through the memories—those steps in our old house, that sweater I’m wearing, the exposed wiring flailing like tentacles out of the doorway frame, that olive-green paint, why does li’l Gretchy look so calm and collected? But, I’ll reign myself in and tell just one, about the expression on Jill’s face, that reappears more than just occasionally on Otto’s face when we spend a day together.

Otto shows up at my house around 4 on Tuesday afternoons and hangs with me till about 8:45, or whenever Jill and Amelia get back from Ms. A’s tennis lessons in the cities. We cover a lot of ground in that short time together, Ottz and me, literally and figuratively. We usually take a walk shortly after he arrives. Or, as he tells his mom, with that look on his face, “Jenny’ll probably make me walk with her all the way to the dumpster, with a sack of garbage again,” referring to the bag of organics waste that I bring to the recycling site a half a mile or so away. He’s not lying. Last week, we were still stomping on ice along the edges of the streets and sidewalks. This week, the ice is gone, so are most of the puddles, and it’s nice enough to take a spin through Spring Lake Park. We find a big open field, where Otto tosses his football around a while (kid’s got uncle Kurt’s arm), until a remote control drone buzzing and diving overhead nearly drives Rocco over the edge of insanity, so we resume our walk and eventually make our way home.

Otto reads for about 20 minutes while I get dinner ready. I ask him how salmon, broccoli and rice sounds, face-deep in a Minecraft game that’s not his book, he mutters, “yeah, sure.”

“Put the iPad away, you need to read first. Or, we can get takeout from somewhere, if you’d rather,” I offer. He looks up from his game. “No, that’s okay, you can’t ever go wrong with salmon!” he says with a grin, reaching for a book. That he choses a home-cooked meal over pizza or Micky D’s gets me in the feels every time. Salmon it is.
After dinner (he nearly always finishes what I make, with extra helpings of vegetables, if you can believe that), he usually calls a friend and/or his dad right away; last night, he’d brought a book along titled, “Bet You Didn’t Know” or something along that line, and entertained me with trivia tidbits as I scraped plates and loaded the dishwasher. “Bet you didn’t know Ben and Jerry’s employees get to take home THREE FREE pints of ice cream every day,” he tells me. I wonder aloud if B&J’s is hiring and if I can do the job via Zoom.

We’re still working on the shoe tying thing, so before he can call his pal, Lee, I say we have to give it a go a few times, Mom’s orders. The way things have gone the past few weeks, I would be lying if I said I didn’t think he might be destined to a future of velcro tennies, but I also believe in the magic of things like tying tennis shoes and riding bikes and falling in love—no one can explain when or how or why it happens, a cosmic alchemy of so many things, some seen but mostly unseen, coming together at just the right time, usually at that point when we’re about ready to give up and resign ourselves to a reclusive life of laceless shoes and walking, then BAM, the universe shifts ever-so-slightly in our favor. I’m really curious to see if my theory holds true.

Of course, there’s a little dramatic eye rolling and protesting and feet dragging involved, “but I don’t wannnnnnna tie my shooooes…I’m too tiiiiirrrrrreeeeddddd….I can’t doooooo iiiiitttt, Jennnnnnyyyyyy…..”

“I know you can do it,” I say, “maybe not today, maybe not next week, but every time, you get a little better, I just wanna see how things are going this week. Three tries on each foot, then you’re off the hook, k?” We park ourselves in my bedroom, he hunches over his feet and the tying commences. He’s got the first part down, it’s the follow-through that trips him up. His hands are big, like catcher’s mitts, but I know plenty of people with big hands who can tie their shoes, hell even play banjo, thread needles, sketch breathtaking pictures, and type like a mofo. I have faith.
I crouch beside him, coaching him through each step, which is probably more annoying than helpful. His first try is totally half-assed; he’d rather call his friend, I can so tell. He drops the laces in disgust. “Seeeeee?? I told you can’t doooooo ittttttt,’ he whines. Of course, I imitate him, because I’m the adult here. Then I say, “Yessssss you caaaaaan. Imagine that tying your shoes is like that Minecraft game you’re so good at—for every step you complete, you get five points.” He gives me that look. “That’s dumb,” he says, but he’s also intrigued, I can tell. He hunkers down and starts again.

“Look!” I say, “there’s five points already, just for starting! And another five for that first crossover, and another five for that fabulous loop, and another for that second crossover—don’t let go! don’t let go!” I cheer him on, “now, tuck that part in there—don’t let go! don’t let go!—now, pull your fingers out and grab that piece—yes, that one! pull each loop—you’re sooo close, soooooo close— go easy peasy, George and Weezy—”

Otto stops mid-tie and looks up at me with That Look that reminds me so much of Jill in the photograph, it’s uncanny. “I don’t know what that even means—must be a cringy-aunt thing to say,” he says, dead-pan serious. “Excuse me?” I say, falling back onto the bed, laughing, “Did you say ‘cringy aunt thing to say’??!!”

“Don’t worry,” he says, “Gretchy says cringy things, too!” and now we’re both laughing. “Okay, just one more try on each foot, Ottz—you were soooooo close the last time, did you see that?” A little more whining, but he gets down to business, and if I weren’t watching like a hawk and whispering little coaching tidbits the whole time, I might not have believed it myself—the first cross over, the loop, the second cross over, the tuck, the pull and TA-DA—a perfectly tied tennis shoe, by the Amazing Ottz! We both leap from our hunkered down positions, erupt into squeals and let the high-fives fly, which sends Rocco into a barking frenzy not unlike what happened at the park with the drone, so we quickly reign in the celebratory antics to whispers and golf claps. “Rocco’s sure a party pooper, isn’t he?” I have to agree.

It was Otto, not me, who says, “okay, I’m going to do it one more time on each foot, but I don’t want you to say anything, just let me do it, okay?” so I have to sit with my hands clamped over my mouth and simply watch as the cosmic alchemy plays out again before my eyes, once again proving my theory true. Next week, it’s bikes, y’all. xo.

A whole fucking year ago…I don’t think I’ve use the word fuck more than I did in 2020 (which is saying a LOT, because I say it a LOT), though already, we’re only mid-March, and 2021 is a close contender. In my defense, I’d argue that studies prove people who swear are more verbally fluent (fuck yeah!), honest and intelligent than their non-cussing counterparts, but I might be accused of confirmation bias. pfffft. What the eff ever, I say to that.

Swearing nor not, I’d still offer this advice a year later, today, or any day: Get outside, take some deep breaths—exhale as long as you can….Jon Kabat Zinn says “as long as you are breathing, there is more right with you than there is wrong.” I came upon his words months ago, when I was still living in Minneapolis, when the twin cities were still deep in the smoke of riots after George Floyd’s murder, when when breathing, or not being able to, was on everyone’s mind and lips, when I was wakened constantly by throbbing helicopters, wailing sirens, roaring pickup trucks tearing down 24th…I’d go for walks in the neighborhood, to local parks, sometimes drive to William O’Brien or Afton state park, just to feel the ground (not asphalt or sidewalk, but living, breathing earth) underfoot, wrap my arms around trees, glide my hand along rough skin, press my cheek against strong trunks. To feel a tree’s heart beat, when you have nothing or no one else to hold on to, is astonishing and calming, even amidst chaos. It really is.

Who would have thought, a year ago, we’d still be in this strange state a whole year later? Who could’ve possibly imagined the immeasurable devastation contained between last March and now? No one, that’s who. We were all so innocent, so optimistic last March, weren’t we? Well, except maybe the holy genius, Michael Osterholm, who’s probably been wandering around muttering “told you so, told you so, told you so” all day long, for decades. Why he hasn’t just bailed on humanity and our Olympian dedication to willful stupidity long ago speaks to his holiness. Lord knows I would have, which is probably why the lord of such things, if there is such a thing, didn’t put a brain like Michael Osterholm’s inside someone like me, who has zero tolerance for bullshit.

I recently read an interview with a scientist who isn’t Mr. Osterholm, described the impact that the past year has had on our bodies and minds as a “covid concussion.” I like the catchiness of the phrase; as I read through the article, I would be inclined to call this year-long state complex grief, with a heap of trauma thrown onto the steaming pile. Mind-boggling losses, this past year…the similarities between a concussion and the impact of the pandemic on our brain, though, is fascinating to consider.

Maybe thinking like this would help more of us to be kinder and gracious to ourselves in this jacked-up era if we understood the true impact the pandemic is wreaking on our physiology, psychology and dare I say spirituality… maybe instead of beating ourselves up for not doing more with this “gift of time,” we could decide we’re like someone with a concussion in the ICU, who is deserving of the greatest, tender loving care we can administer…maybe it would help knowing that we are still very much in survival mode and our body is doing everything it can to protect us…maybe what we end up doing is not the best thing for us, but maybe it would help to know that there is profound and gentle grace hiding in the doing, that we are doing the very best we can with what we have available, and that if whatever we’re doing isn’t working, at any point we can start over, as many times as we need to, and try something else. Maybe we would drop to our knees in awe, if we knew that our soul loves us so much, it’s using our body to get our attention. Maybe it would help to know it doesn’t have to be a massive overhaul all at once; that every day matters, every single thing carries weight—even the screw ups, especially the screw ups. And even the slightest of shift can offer a blessed reprieve…and slight shifts, as they accumulate, begin to nudge toward change, and it doesn’t take special equipment or a class or guru. It might simply begin with our breath, and as we marvel at our ability to tune into our breath, even if it’s just a short time today, we might begin to see that all along, we’ve been our own guru, patiently waiting to be noticed among the external things we keep turning to… and “dang those Indigo Girls,” you might think, “if only I’d studied Closer to Fine the way others study the Bible, all of this would have come together for me a long time ago…”

The catastrophic losses we’ve sustained continue to accumulate, on personal and communal and global levels. A year of extreme contradictions, incongruence, disruptions, chaos, violence of epic proportions, there’s barely enough time to catch our breath before the next wave crashes in—I’d argue that the hardest, most damaging element of this year has been the things that aren’t visible, touchable, breathable—the severing of relationships and connections to those so vital to our existence. A tragic version of Opposite Day, where staying apart became the deepest expression of love and care, and being together has the capacity to kill—I don’t know if our hearts will ever be able to reconcile such incongruence in our lives or the fallout…it will stain our hearts and brains to varying degrees, forever…but I also know that our world is filled with breathtaking stories of resilience and survival, and these stories are not fairytales or the Hollywood movie version, they’re often teeming with fuckups without a happy ending, or they’re quietly happening without fanfare or headlines, and not even realized as powerful survival stories until long after the tragedy has subsided.

A year ago, I lost all three sources of my income in one fell swoop; it took months to get on the state’s emergency unemployment program because my work is a strange hybrid that fell through the cracks (my deepest gratitude to my dear, wise friend Marty Bragg, for showing me through that quagmire). My loved ones were suddenly, jarringly inaccessible. A year ago, an all too-familiar anxious, incessant buzzing settled into my cells and followed me wherever I went, even to sleep (did I even sleep last summer? I sometimes wonder). This everpresent panic mode felt alarmingly familiar, echoing what I experienced when my husband was diagnosed with cancer and our life was thrown into a blender set on puree, the same alarm that resettled into my cells after the 2016 election and never went away.

A year ago, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor were murdered, George Floyd’s murder would soon follow, the names on the list continues to grow… a president and his administration blatantly denying the global crisis that landed on our soil, refusing to do anything to mitigate the swiftly growing catastrophe or to help the average and disadadvantaged, our nation floundered, states left to their own devices, we in the midwest watched in horror as each coast was rapidly invaded by the virus, how long it would take to reach us. A year ago, I was in the Loft Literary Center’s Mentor Series program, which like everything, transitioned to the abnormal godsend/curse of Zoom. Even in two dimensions, our pained, bewildered state was so palpable, our ability to concentrate, shredded; my cohorts and I gave online readings instead of in-person, we had no idea if anyone was even out there listening to the stories and essays and poems we’d cobbled together in crisis. A year ago, we were thrust ass-over-teakettle into an epic tragedy, and our options for support suddenly, severely shunted…we were forced to become resourceful, or desperate, or despondent, whatever it took, to get through…

What was different about this crisis than others I’ve been in, is that a little over a year ago, I quit drinking; it was only meant to be a 30 day experiment, but at the end of January, I decided to commit to another 30 days, then another…my life was pretty ho-hum then; I wondered aloud, could I handle a crisis without any alcohol? Hell, what about a concert? A friendly gathering? Can I even dance without a couple glasses of wine? My sister blames me for the pandemic.

About a year ago, I wrote in my journal: “March 31, 2020. 91 days Alcohol Free As F*ck. Smack dab in the middle of a goddamned global pandemic, no less (is “global pandemic” redundant? does the goddamned make it not?). A wise person once said, ‘Life is what happens when you make other plans.’ To say that no one saw this pandemic coming, much less was prepared for it, is the understatement of the century. I sure as hell didn’t plan to be sober during a worldwide crisis—that’s not my usual crisis strategy. But I sure as hell plan to stay that way while riding this changing-by-the-minute-crawling-out-of-my-skin-waking-up-in-a-full-blown-heart-racing-mind-on-warp-speed-panic-attack-every-night-i-don’t-have-a-job-and-am-so-alone-and-my-god-all-the-people-getting-sick-and-dying-when-will-the-shit-hit-full-force-here-and-uncomfortable-doesn’t-even-begin-to-describe-these-excriciating-debilitating-waves-of-uncertainty-and-fear-I-think-I-might-vomit—which sounds an awful lot like a hangover, except it’s not. Believe me when I say it’s a million and one times better to wake up feeling like that without an actual hangover slathered on top. I think…talk to me in an hour, when the next crisis drops…

Right now, being AF feels like the only super power I have to help me navigate life on a planet that’s staging a mutiny-without-end against the collective transgression its inhabitants have inflicted upon it (I’m 100% convinced that’s what’s happening). Scared shitless, I feel like Signourney Weaver, Linda Hamilton and that little redhead girl from Brave, all bundled up into one, and I’m going to protect this superpower like it’s the last roll of TP on earth. I know too well what alcohol does to me in crisis. Kicks my fears, anxiety and worst-case-scenarioitis into hyper-drive sending me into a downward spiral of depression, paralysis, brain fog, shame, self-loathing, guilt. Pour, swig, sweat, repeat. Why has it taken me so long to come to this truth? My god, the timing…

I’ve quit drinking countless times in the past. Nothing to it. After 30 days, I check the “not an alcoholic!” box and head on my merry way, to celebrate with a bottle of wine…there’s a huge difference, I’m learning, between “quitting drinking” and digging-deep-and-do-the-hard-ugly-absolutely-worth-it-work-to-figure-out-why-I-drink-in-the-first-place, and spoiler alert: it goes back to childhood. Always does, doesn’t it. God, who wants to go back there? No one, that’s who, but another spoiler alert: it’s where real healing begins. I’m not gonna lie—I adore a good, hoppy IPA any time of the year, a robust red in the fall, a refreshing gin and tonic in the summer, it makes this introvert feel more at ease in an extrovert-intense world. But, I’m also not gonna lie—alcohol was an insidious intruder in my life, seeping in and slowly stealing my joy. Sure, drinking took a spike when Bob got sick, but out of the gate, it’s been a dysfunctional thing in my life. It’s the ultimate anesthetic—yes, it does a bang-up job of blurring sharp edges, dulling the sting of great loss and other life hardships, but it also cuts my creativity off at the knees, it disconnects me from others, except on a most unsatisfying, superficial level, most importantly, from myself. It numbs all the feels, not just the hard, but all the really good stuff, too, to the point where not much else exists in a body except dread and anxiety and looping thoughts of doom and failure. Do that long enough and you’ll begin to feel like you’re dying from the inside out…it’s funny, how few people even catch on…But, here’s an interesting discovery—I can do most every single thing I used to do when I drank, WITHOUT DRINKING. Most things, even better….WHO EVER EVEN KNEW??!!

How does it happen, that alcohol becomes so deeply engrained into every facet of our lives, we get to a point that we’re convinced we cannot do a thing without it? It’s hard to resist slipping in a “Don’t get me wrong—I wasn’t THAT bad!” disclaimer (the fine line between “not that bad” and “that bad” is often a crisis, say a pandemic, or plain and simple dumb luck—DUI, or…point is, it doesn’t have to take a tragedy, quantity or degrees of “that bad” don’t matter, there’s an insidious danger to that mindset, I speak from experience—you will do nothing for far longer than necessary, at your heart’s expense); at the same time, it’s horrifyingly nauseating, to reveal myself as someone who was not a superstar-caregiver-advocate but someone who was losing her shit behind the keyboard while her husband was dying (it never occurred to me until just recently, that I could be both—a deeply loving, competent caregiver and a brokenhearted, traumatized wife—such contradictions/truths can equally exist in the same body at the same time, we are divinely complex creatures like that)…who, even alcohol free, is as freaked out as the rest of the world is right now in a pandemic, maybe even more so, because I’m not resorting to my usual emotion-numbing strategy… I’m curious to know what it’s like to take on a crisis or hell, just day to day life, head on, with real, not liquid, courage. Do I even have it? Can I even do it?

The fact that I haven’t gone more than 90 days without alcohol for as long as I’ve been drinking, is a sobering thought, to use the AF world’s most over-used pun…I want to see with my own clear eyes and fog-free mind, how this shit show’s gonna go down. We’re living in terrifying, severely disconnected, maybe end-of-world times, and I can use all the help I can get, especially now that my usual reserves aren’t available…). I’m more alone than I’ve ever been in my life, and I know too well where isolation leads me when left unchecked…”

A whole fucking year ago, I wrote all that…which is NOT to say I’ve handled the past year like a boss because I’m not drinking. I often think I should be doing more, accomplishing more, embracing more, NAILING this pandemic, now that I’m of unadulterated mind…I still hate most things about it. I hate masks, I hate distancing, for someone who’s a self-proclaimed not-a-hugger, I miss hugging most of all. I still overall despise teaching restorative movement and Pilates online—I did not ever plan on teaching online (though a curious, unexpected side effect is that the clients I am working with are progressing at a rate like I’ve never seen in a studio setting. I am convinced that it’s because they cannot rely on me to “do” their work for them; the weird environment has made me a better teacher because I have to be more creative with modifications and progressions, more observant, among other reasons.)

I have to remind myself that feeling all the feels is insanely intense, even day-to-day life without a crisis layered heavily on top, and that is life. It’s hard, period. Makes it glaringly apparent why I’d drink in crisis in the first place. Intense emotions can be immobilizing, even the good ones. As a culture, we’re not particularly adept at handling them. Our first inclination is to somehow try to alter them—either enhance or subdue—so we don’t have to deal head-on (spoiler alert: they’ll still be there, patiently awaiting our attention…). There are as many ways to numb as there are stars in the sky. Alcohol is just one of endless coping strategies. Which also means, there are as many ways to begin returning to our precious selves as there are stars. Begin with the closest, simplest act: breathe. Then, take it to the woods, and give those trees a big hug. xo.

If there’s one thing we all can agree upon, it’s that Trump has always been, is, and will always be transparent. Living proof that all the money in the world can’t buy depth or brains or class or self awareness, or kindness or empathy or compassion or a heart. Even before his disgraceful term in the WH, he’s never hidden the fact that he’s a petulant, vindictive, thin-skinned, privileged, corrupt, criminal piece of shit who will shit on anyone and anything to get what he wants. His history is one big shitsmear of evidence. 

Still. In spite of the indelible stain he leaves on everything he touches, Republicans, from top officials down to individual voters, blatantly, willfully ignored all that, and chose him as their candidate, then pulled all stops to make him their president, then catered to his self-serving agenda (or their self-serving agenda, is probably more accurate), encouraged him, pandered to him, coddled him, excused him, justified him, apologized for him, saying shit like, “he’s better than the alternative,” and “oh my god I could never vote for Killary!!!’ or “we can’t have a SOCIALIST running the show,” or “well, I don’t really agree with his policies but I really like his tell-it-like-it-is personality!” admired and envied him, and probably hoped a little of his shit would rub off on them, if they got close enough. What happened last night, what has happened over the past 4 years—let’s be real, what’s been happening for far longer—speaks more about Republicans, as individuals, than anything. They have shown the world exactly what they’re made of. Shit. And got exactly what the bargained for—a shitshow of epic proportions. 

I am so filled with rage and hate and disgust and fear and a damned lot of cuss words right now, tinted with a mild bit of amusement—what the even hell were some of those bizarre costumes? A Renaissance festival gone horribly awry? Were the Patriots playing? A Furry convention? A historical reenactment? NO. It was a failed couindignant, wronged white supremacist terrorist insurgents thinly disguised as patriots, attempting a hostile takeover of our nation’s capitol. Because they are “sick of it, and we’re not going to take it anymore!” but when pressed, couldn’t (or don’t want to, on camera) define what “it” is. I’m going to guess “it” is the very things the people in Georgia fought so hard to gain. GA’s first ever Black Senator, without a doubt, has something to do with the terrorists’ unnamed “it.”

I used to tell my sisters that the first and only question they ever needed to ask a potential suitor was, ‘Who did you vote for in 2016?” because the answer will tell them everything they needed to know. Now, it feels like an applicable, necessary question to ask anyone we meet, from here on out. But a lot have already outed themselves with their MAGA hats and banners and yard signs and bumper stickers, and social media posts, and right now, I’m wondering how do we ever move forward and begin healing as a nation? Will we ever? Maybe not, but we can’t ever stop trying…tonight, every. single. thing. feels daunting…futile…impossible…imperative…

As I sat in my living room last night, and again, this morning, listening to the coverage of the terroristic shitshow in our capitol, I had to do something to dispel some of that toxic waste surging through me…I kept going back to stories about Georgia, and reveled in the contrast of the two events playing out at the same time. I know these feelings are going to surge and recede, swell and release, ebb and flow. breathe… my anger today is huge and centered around Republicans, it’s an easy target, their transgressions are huge and violent and so damaging, but I know the answers that matter lie deeper…answers to the question: how am I connected to these events unfolding? That’s the harder piece to decipher, to confront…

I was compelled to break out my sketch pad and pastels, which I’ve dragged from move to move over the past 25 years, but haven’t used in almost as long, and began drawing the monster trees in my neighborhood from memory, which moved me into a meditative mind…the ragged old souls I’m in love with, that I hug every chance I get, gentle giants clustered in parks like gangs of Shel Silverstein sketches come alive. 

I often wrap my arms tight around these monsters’ waists and press my ear against their chest, to hear their heart beat and the hum of their cells, and run my hands along deeply cracked, rough skin. Sometimes I sit at their feet with my back pressed against theirs, especially at night, and look up into their charcoal limbs exploding against the blue black sky, and breath in deep cold air, and I believe that trees are always in communication with the world, which includes us, and it doesn’t take much to stop and feel what they have to say. It really doesn’t.

I learned last night that I can invoke this energy by drawing them, too, as my hand swept across the paper, I felt the trees’ energy seep from the air to the page to the crayon to my hand and into my veins and my breath, swirling in with the hate and rage and disgust and slowly began to take the shape of something new…all of this is to say, it’s more than okay to be enraged and disgusted and yes even hate what’s going on right now, but it’s also imperative to do something productive with all that, whatever it means to you, or it’ll eat you alive. I suspect I’m going to be drawing giant cottonwoods for a long time to come. xo.

December 21, 2020…

I took a road trip to my home town of Mountain Lake yesterday, to visit the sites of places I lived long ago and collect inspiration for a few essays that I’m writing. My sweet 15 yr. old niece, Amelia, accompanied me for the ride. Lucky me, to have such a divine traveling companion. 

Mountain Lake is a small town scratched into the topsoil of southern Minnesota, population, about 2100. If you’re at all familiar with the area, you’d be correct to guess there’s not a mountain in sight for hundreds of miles. The namesake “mountain” is a large hill south of town that once made its living as an island in the middle of the namesake lake that is no longer, because it was drained for farmland around 1905. The ghost of the lake is visible in aerial photographs, an apparition outlined in trees. 

My mission would be quick—drive to the addresses where I used to live, snap a few photos, then a meandering drive through town to wax nostalgic and show Amelia the sights, which would take all of fifteen minutes, even if I drove the speed of molasses in January, to use my father’s likely only g-rated quip. We’d go by the school, the park, the lake that isn’t the namesake, on the northwest end of town. 

In case you’re confused about the lake thing, let me clarify: Mountain Lake’s “mountain” had a former life as an island in the middle of a lake south of town for which the town was named, which was drained for farmland in 1905. (An aside: in 1976, an archeological dig on the mountain-nee-island revealed evidence of an ancient native dwelling, carbon-dated to be about 2100 years old, the oldest dwelling found in MN thus far.) The lake that now exists in the city limits, is a manmade WPA project of the 1930’s. This lake has what we always called the “island”—even a campground near the lake, Island View Campground, says so. Except it’s not really an island, but more a peninsula. So much more could be said about all this, but I’m going to contain myself, because I need to get to bed soon.

The first home I lived in, on 9th Avenue, no longer exists. I suspected this, but wanted to confirm it. It was the home my parents brought me to after I was born, where my two brothers were anxiously awaiting my arrival, I can only guess. I shocked my mom one day when I as older, when I told her I remember this house. “How can that be? You were just a baby when we lived there,” she asked. I proceeded to draw the floor plans of my memory, telling in great detail each room looked like, how the furniture was laid out, of things I remember happening. She stared at me, shaking her head at the accuracy of my memories. “Good lord. I’m not surprised. You were a weird kid. Still are,” she laughed.

My sister, Jill, came along two years later. Our growing family was busting out of the seams in this little home; when I was nearly three, we moved to 538 6th Avenue. This house sat on an extraordinarily huge city lot on the edge of Mountain Lake. My parents purchased, contract-for-deed, the plain white three bedroom, one bath clapboard from the original owner who had raised eight kids here. The house came with a two-acre plot of land, though it might be more accurate to say that the two-acre plot of land came with a house.

The house itself was a rather dilapidated mess of peeling paint, crumbling foundation and windows in mismatched frames. The lean-to kitchen looked like an afterthought, hanging off the back of the house by threads. That didn’t matter to three-year old me. I wandered the expansive lot with my mom, awash in awe: all of this belongs to us? This tulip garden bursting in pastels? Those lilac trees with their heady, enveloping perfume? The strawberry patch at the bottom of the hill, spread out like a blanket next to the apple and plum trees, with a fringe of currant bushes? And the sea of tall grass beyond the patchwork of fruit trees, with that little shed poking through? And this massive silver maple next to the kitchen, with a canopy of leaves spread wide like a parachute and arms are begging for a treehouse to hold up to the sky? All this? Ours? I thought we’d won the fairytale lottery and had moved to our very own land of make-believe. 

It came like a punch in the gut, one day in fifth grade when a couple of classmates announced that they had compiled a list of richest to poorest kids in class, and declared my family the third poorest. What? By what authority were they able to decide this? I recall asking, though likely not as articulate. Because of your house, and the clothes you wear, I was told. Did I burst into tears upon hearing this news? Did I lash out? I don’t remember, but it might have been then that I became acutely aware of things that matter to the rest of the world. An extraordinary fairytale of a backyard isn’t one of those things. A ramshackle house is.

This house, too, only exists in my memories; it was razed years ago. Still, I had to drive by and check on our tree. I barely recognized the property—the house and garage is gone, so are the lilac bushes, the fruit trees. The pasture is neatly mowed and the maple tree is a hacked-in-half version of its former parachute self. My heart was so startled to see so much of it missing, my eyes tried to trace the space in the sky that those branches used to occupy. Had lightning struck it? High winds? I don’t know, but still, in its wounded state, its massive trunk beckoned me. 

I pulled over and to Amelia’s horror, I told her I needed to go and give our tree a hug. She cringed and shrunk low in her seat, “Oh God, Jen—there’s people over there! You’re going to get arrested for trespassing!” I couldn’t help but laugh, which softened the lump that had caught in my throat. “This is Mountain Lake, that won’t happen. I don’t think so anyway,” I said as I hopped out and ran across the lawn to give my old friend a hug.

I have been writing a lot, about hard things lately, diving deep into my history (and by “a lot,” I mean hundreds of pages in a really short time, and by “history,” I mean deep, sad, excruciating, exhilarating, shocking, enlightening, staggering, funny, infuriating, the-adjectives-never-end shit). As if I haven’t done enough of that over the past ten years. But, for all the writing of my past decade, so much has been superficial, a one-dimensional reportage about what I observed my husband enduring when he was battered by cancer. Not what I, personally went through, felt, thought, endured, came through, fell back into, again and again as a result…”jesus, who needs that story?” I told myself. “Tell the good stuff—the survival story (but the short version, please!)—a little gore in to appease the masses, the polished yet edgy, MFA-worthy stuff…” Turns out, that material has a pretty short life expectancy when one’s heart is missing. As my dad used to say, “Either shit or get off the pot, Jen.” He may not have been an eloquent man, but he knew how to call it when he saw it.

This current writing began benignly enough, an homage to my twenty-five years in the Twin Cities.

Back in October, before I moved to Mankato, I drove around and took photos of all the places I’ve lived in in the cities, with the simple idea of writing a few lines of memories about each home, conveniently forgetting that 25 years is a damned long time to live anywhere. A few lines begat a few more and before I knew it, I was writing long, meandering essays about each home. As I wrote, forgotten memories resurfaced, patterns began to emerge, themes of running, hiding, numbing, camouflaging fears and anxieties, surviving, adapting, moving forward, falling back, birth stories and death stories…the more I wrote, the more curious I became and I began to interrogate further—where do these stories contained within these photos really take root?

When I got to Mankato, I drove around and took more photos of all the places I’d lived while I went to college here, from 1987 to 1992. More memories, more stories, more patterns shimmered to the surface. More dots to connect, more truths emerge, more questions to answer, more roots unearthed…more pages to write. What have I done, I wondered, when will this end?

It can be exhausting and heartbreaking, to examine a life like this. No wonder most of us don’t do it. What becomes of this exercise in torture, except torture? The truths uncovered may be startling, not at all like the family lore we might have been told and held tightly to all these years, and how is that reconciled? We can get trapped in the past if we’re not careful, or run screaming from it, if we don’t like what we find. Coming back a space that feels calm between the two is essential and a skill that takes time to develop. (That would have been helpful know ten years ago…) then, the uncovered truths become guides, converging stars, gravitational pulls that entwine past to present, present to movement forward, and suddenly, that abhorrent adage, “everything happens for a reason,” makes blinding sense. Except I’ll still bitch-slap anyone into next month who tells me my husband had to die an excruciating death for me to learn this truth, because so much god-awful work has gone into shaping this truth, it’s so much bigger than a lame adage or I can ever contain.

One enormous truth that has emerged with my current writing, concerns the birth stories of each kid in my family. It was a tradition for my mom to call me on my birthday and share the details of my day of birth—she did this with all five of us kids. I loved these calls because my mom was such a gifted storyteller—the call alone was the best birthday gift. Even though I’d heard my birth story a million times before, every year, she’d tie a new thread to my tapestry in the form of a new detail, a new memory recalled, every year, the fabric of my story grew.

I was born the day after Thanksgiving in 1967, in Mountain Lake, MN, around 6:30 am—”The only time in your life you were ever early, Jen,” she’d laugh. This was in a time where mothers stayed in the hospital for days after giving birth; my mom said every meal she had was a derivative of the turkey dinner that had been served on the holiday—turkey sandwich, turkey casserole, turkey noodle soup…she told me about the little old man in a room down the hall, who would sneak out of his room, his bare backside flashing through the split in his gown as he shuffled down to the nursery to gaze at the little redhead baby that he was determined to steal for his own…that my grandmother showed up with an armload of frilly dresses that she hung on the curtains of my mom’s room, and that my mom felt that maybe she had finally done something right in her mom’s eyes—giving her a granddaughter who might make up for the transgressions she had inflicted upon her parents. Already, my young, tender mom—she was just 19, with two other babies at home (three, if you count my dad, which I sometimes do)—was absorbing far too much blame, shame, unwarranted guilt into her body, that she would carry with her for the rest of her life.

My sister Jill, recently gave me another thread to my birth stories, one that I didn’t know, or maybe had forgotten (the ways my mom’s voice continues talking to us after death is astounding). On Thanksgiving day, the day before my birth, my mom sat at the table of her family’s holiday dinner. Only my dad and my mom’s sister, my Auntie Pat, knew she was pregnant. At one point, my grandma (in other words, my mom’s very own mother) whispered to Pat, “I think Kathy’s pregnant again.” And then, the next day, I was born, like a holiday miracle, except nothing at all like a holiday miracle—that my mom had carried me to term, like a regular human birth, yet her own mother only vaguely guessed at the possibility the day before I was born is unfathomable. This single incident speaks volumes of my mom’s life, how, even in the midst of family, alone she was, so estranged from her now mother that asking for help was never an option, that keeping secrets was the family way. Maybe the miracle is that she learned to adapt, in spite of these family flaws.

Adapting does not always mean an improvement; sometimes it’s simply a means to survive, and sometimes those adaptations are things children inherit and continue to pass on down the line, repeating the cycle, until someone finally says, okay, I’m done with this shit. I’m going in deep, diving into the shit, to see if there’s anything else is hiding in there. And maybe begin shifting, if even ever so slightly, from the family narrative that’s been in control for too long, and adapting has probably been happening since the beginning of time.

For the past ten years, I’ve tried my hand at deep shit-diving, but I did’t have the right tools to help keep me steady or safe as I went in. It’s exhausting, excruciating territory, and if you don’t have some badass self-care tactics in place, the dive will wreck you, and not in a good way. In my past, this act of shit-diving ripped open wounds again and again until they became infected and began spreading to other parts of me. It felt like repeated failed exorcism—for all the writing I was doing, the ghosts not only remained, unfazed by my efforts, they invited all their rowdy friends in, too. I employed all kinds of means to anesthetize the wounds, so I could present myself to the world not as a woman covered with battle scars, but as something less true, more neat and tidy and admirable to the world.

A month or so before my mom died, I sat in her living room and said, “Mom, I think my drinking is becoming a problem.” She looked at me sharply and said, “You? Have a drinking problem? Well, if that’s the case, Jen, then everyone I know has a drinking problem.” How it felt like to be split in two by her words: at once, immeasurably relieved. If my own mom, who knew me better than anyone in the world, does’t think I have a problem, then there’s no problem! At the same time, indescribably devastated. If my own mom, who knew me better than anyone in the world, doesn’t think I have a problem, then there’s a problem. Of course, I went with Door Number 1, the don’t do anything about the problem option, because the familiar is far easier than the unknown, no matter how fucked up it is. And I wondered why the exorcism wasn’t working.

It took another few years to finally decide to stop the insanity, and I stopped drinking almost a year ago, January 1. It was only meant to be an experiment—30 days, alcohol free. Then assess the situation, and see how I feel. 30 days turned into 60, then 90, then six months, then…and suddenly, almost like magic (okay nothing like magic, because this too, was excruciating, this process of actually feeling all the feels, instead of numbing from them, but I’ll tell you a little secret—that pain is where the magic of healing begins), I began to like myself. A lot. Maybe for the first time in a very long time. Maybe ever. And then my writing took off. And then a fucking pandemic began. And I had no one to share this immense transformation with. But I kept at it. I kept writing, and collecting bits of insight and beauty in the midst of the shitshow. And I am learning that people will still do and say things to try to sabotage my hard work, like “Oh that’s right, you don’t drink anymore,” as though the not drinking part is the problem.

I don’t know if this is forever—another magic secret: nothing is forever. Literally nothing. but the magic truth to that is, would we really want it to? I mean, really? For now, this not drinking thing is working a helluva lot better than the alternative, especially as I navigate blindly in unchartered pandemic territory. And because I actually really like liking myself, and I no longer fear writing, but instead, see it as an exploration into new lands, I’ll stick with it for a while. Except if that mofo in the WH keeps up his toddler antics—then my resolve for all the things might soon come to a grinding halt.

All this diving made me pause in my thoughts, as I realized that each of my siblings has an equally heartbreaking story to tell about a profound event in our lives—our birth—that typically is anticipated, celebrated, rejoiced. The heaviness of the truths are layered deep inside of us. Each of us kids have absorbed this legacy, in our profoundly unique ways. But I’ve heard stories of grace appearing in the most unexpected sources, like finding a diamond ring deep in the lines of a clogged sewer, and I’ve known my own stories of grace, like sending a message to a friend that turns into a three-hour solve-the-worlds-problems kind of night…or just going down into the basement, alone, and living in my body in ways that I don’t know I ever have, in all the 53 years of my life. I mean, the movements might look exactly the same from the outside, but the way I feel inside is another-planet different. Like my inside and the outside are moving closer to one another, an inner-body reflection of the outer-body Saturn-Jupiter thing going up in the heavens.

Happy almost winter solstice, everyone. Feel the transforming energy around. It’s everywhere, even in the middle of a never-ending shitshow. xo