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Not to mention the ghosts and witches and undead beings floating about on All Hallow’s Eve! Is it any wonder that some parents opt out of celebrating this holiday altogether?

Despite my faith, and all of these myriad concerns, I think that Halloween is worthwhile, mostly because it is one of our most neighborly holidays.

Neighborhoods come alive on Halloween night, and there’s a sense of communal care. There are families sitting out by driveway bonfires, praising creative costumes and offering weary tagalong parents a break. You chat with neighbors you’ve never met, friends you didn’t expect to see. You see two little Captain Americas or Buzz Lightyears running around together and you share a giggle with a new friend - little boy interests are predictable. Oh, and here’s a princess or a queen, a fairy and a ballerina - little girls who want nothing more than the admiration and wonder of the adults putting candy in their bags.

Strangers have offered me hot apple cider on Halloween night, or even a glass of wine or a beer, a chair to sit in or a minute to warm up by the fire. There’s a sense of shared experience. It’s a gift to sit outside all evening by a giant pumpkin or blow-up cartoon character in order to spoil kids with candy. It brings out the host in all of us, and encourages us to be generous.

No one needs this. Our kids don’t need bags of sugar and we don’t need to spend time and money on costumes for one night of spooky fun. But the silliness of it, the lack of necessity, is part of what makes it so magical.

When my youngest was a just-walking toddler, he didn’t understand that the point of trick-or-treating was the candy and the spooky decorations - he thought that Halloween was a grown-up-endorsed dog tour. Every house we walked up to, he peered inside, still unsteady on chubby toddler legs, to see if there was a dog to pet. Because this is Central Oregon, more often than not he was rewarded with a Very Good Boy or Girl, eager to get the clumsy pats of a sticky toddler hand on their forehead or back, all wagging tails and delighted to be included in the fun. It’s one of my most treasured memories, seeing his delight at the big, little and in-between kindly dogs, all eager to be petted by a tiny person dressed as Paddington Bear.

Halloween may have its origins in the summoning of the underworld. (Although, despite the legends of druids and witches, and the ancient belief that turning seasonal change brings spirits in close, the Gaelic phrase “Oíche Shamhna” [ee-ha how-na] i.e. “Halloween” literally means “night of summer’s end”.)

There might be some occasional over-zealous decor which scares your littles, and not all kids can be trusted to stay safe while roaming the neighborhood at night. But I encourage you - enjoy this Halloween, in whatever way you can. Turn on your porch light and hand out some treats. Build a bonfire in your driveway and warm up a tired mom or dad. Oooh and ahhh over the heroes, villains, ghosts, princesses and animals that array themselves all over town, for one night only. Let your kids eat too much candy, and steal a sticky-faced kiss while you can. Bring your dog out for the pets which only excited young people can offer.

We only have so many opportunities to embrace delight and pet every dog in the neighborhood, after all. If you’re worried about the darkness of Halloween’s origins, as I once was, remind yourself that there is no dark that cannot be pierced by a little light; and no light greater than the joy of a child.

Happy Halloween everyone.

A shooting?

A gunman?

It sounds pretty bad.

Our school is on lockdown.

Are the kids safe????

You can imagine how I scanned these messages in a panic, feeling the air start to push forcefully out of my chest, as if an elephant was using it as a recliner.

Then an official text from school:

We’re following police protocol.

As I drove toward the gym where Jesse, my four-year-old, was playing with a friend, my horse client called me. She is a bright-eyed, idealistic teenager: smiley and chatty, sincere and sweet.

Her voice was not bright or cheerful, but ragged, breathless, afraid. “Where do your kids go to school? I’m getting texts…”

“We’re OK,” I assured her. “They’re OK. I don’t think it’s at their school. My phone is blowing up too. I’m going to get them.”

As I said it, in a flash, I decided: I was, in fact, going to get them. I pulled up to school and called the office, my kids came out of the locked doors, bewildered, a little frustrated that their day was cut short. I hustled them in the car and we hurried to get Jesse.

Once all the kids were in the car, I finally cried, hands shaking, heart racing, adrenaline wooshing out of my body.

We came home and I made comfort food and baked cookies. We played with the dogs, we watched the Muppets. I thought that maybe Addy’s volleyball game might still happen but as the hours went by, more and more things got canceled. Games. Practices. School. What had been busy late nights and vibrant sporting events became silence, interrupted only by the ding of texts and emails - more cancellations, more worried friends, more bad news.

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Hours before I had jokingly complained to a friend about our busy weekend. “Of course my husband is out of town for all this: two volleyball games and a musical event at school and a soccer game.” I chuckled about it, because it always seems to be the way that everything happens when you’re down a parent.

But now, it was silent. Eerily so. What I wouldn’t give for the frazzled fun of a busy week and weekend instead of this loaded quiet.

Practices and games canceled. Roads empty. Moms and dads shell-shocked, scrolling their phones for the latest update, hearing news with pits in our stomachs. One of the hazards of living in a small town is that you know everyone, which means, when there’s a casualty list: you know everyone.

It was hard to know what to tell the kids. “You’re safe, the grownups have it under control, we’ll be OK,” is pretty hard to swallow when the usually bustling soccer field is a blank slate of silent green, the volleyball gym is locked, the parking lot is empty. Even preschool closed, and Jesse asked in his four-year-old way if the bad guy had come to his school, and was his teacher OK?

I did my best, as mom, to lighten the mood at home for those quiet days, in-between the texts and calls and watching press conferences. We played cards, we listened to Disney music, we chopped some firewood, we did some chores. We went out for a couple of meals, so many Bend businesses are supporting families with free or reduced-price kids’ meals, a rare treat for our hungry herd of five.

My 3rd grader, who is currently frontier-obsessed, asked if Davey Crockett could’ve taken out an active shooter. I assured him that, yes, he could’ve, and that lots of other heroes, just like Davey Crockett and ilk, are standing up to bad people all the time. Every day, in schools just like his. He seemed satisfied with that answer, although I cannot think of his innocent question without choking up.

Our kids are too young to feel this pain, they are too innocent for active shooter drills and memorials for the fallen. But here we are, in the silence of a community rocked by this shattering of our small-town innocence.

This week schools will slowly start again. Sports fields will once again ring out with the cheers of enthusiastic grandparents and the whistles of volunteer coaches. We will return, we will not quit, we will not hide forever, as tempting as it might be to shield our kids from the world indefinitely, as the brave teachers of Silver Rail Elementary did with their own bodies.

But for now, it’s OK to sit with the silence. Let the soccer ball sit quiet on an empty field, let the school doors be locked, let the carseats sit cold and empty for a few days. For most of us, this short hiatus is all the silence we’ll endure, a brief stint in the land of grief and loss. For others, the silence will last a lifetime. There are families who lost precious souls, not here anymore to giggle and squirm and be too loud in quiet places. Incomprehensibly, there are individual voices which won’t be heard again, there are carseats which will remain unfilled, and sports uniforms hung up forever.

When we do talk, we’ll probably disagree about the solutions and the way forward. I’ve already seen some too-soon hot takes and politicalizations of this tragedy. It’s tempting to have answers, but worth the discomfort to instead sit in quiet together, united in our grief for innocence lost and life cut short.

In silence, our hearts cry out as one.

When I feel uneasy and stretched thin, the temptation is to rev up the ol’-brain-pan. What the world needs from me is a monologue on the value of children and the sanctity of human life! Aha! What I should do is a find an unsuspecting friend and rant for a while about the meaningless of the term “late-stage capitalism”! Perhaps I should burden someone with my hot takes and force them to feign amazement/agreement with what I perceive to be my own wit and wisdom!

Of course, this is not what the world needs. When God came to Earth in human form, he didn’t start a college or a newspaper, (alas: two of my favorite things;) he made friends and worked with his hands.

My friend told me recently about what she considers the most life-affirming places in her neighborhood, and it made me think - what do I see around me that makes me glad to be here, grateful to have children in an albeit broken and off-kilter world, living fully into life now and not a nostalgic myth or a future utopia? It seems to me that finding such places, and being the kind of person who sees life instead of death, is more redeeming than a hundred hot takes. At least I hope so.

So here is my non-exhaustive list of life-affirming places in my world. (Admittedly this list is autumn-forward as we are in the throes of cozy vibes and back-to-school chaos. Perhaps I should do another one in the next season?) I would love to hear yours, so please leave a comment if you’re so inclined.

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• The entrance to our school, which is usually manned either by our incredibly good-humored principal or one of the cheery religious sisters, who grin at each kid as though they have never seen a child so spectacular in all their lives. Our principal used to high-five every kid on their way in, but was diagnosed with aggressive cancer this summer. So now he stands at the entrance in a mask and elbow-bumps every student. This is precious, especially when I see Isaiah and his little-boy cohort getting more and more intense, jumping and bumping to rile their principal up. There is no circumstance, diagnosis, or state of mind so serious that a little boy cannot bounce you out of it.

• Any restaurant at which the server has the patience to wait for the shyest and least-coherent child of the group to order.

• A barn with cats in it. They wink at you from their perch on the hay and come up for ear-scratches, all the while pretending to be lay-about-good-for-nothings. But, the keen observer knows: they are all the while keeping their eyes and ears open for unwanted varmints, and will spring into action at the lightest scuffle.

• Downtown on a bright fall day. The tourists have mostly gone and locals are shopping for birthday gifts or clearance rack sales, decked out in PNW plaid and chunky beanies, saying good morning and waving at your kid and tying their dog up outside the rare store they cannot come into. There is nothing more life-giving than being a local - wherever that may be.

• An open field over which the Canada geese fly, honking and whistling and bringing the wings of change with them.

• A winery/wine bar/vineyard/wine shop. There are lots of jokes about the snobbishness of wine people and how anyone who works at a wine shop just wants to judge your tastes. But I find that is rarely the case. In fact, I argue there are few things more fun than a long talk with a wine person. Really. They tend to be fascinated by both human beings and growing things, seasons and change, taste and smell. They can’t wait to share something you will love. They want you to squeal with delight and high-five them in ecstasy.

• By a fast-moving creek, as it rushes by and gives bright leaves a ride and laughs and claps its hands, reminding you that you are not alone.

• The vet’s office. Recently we had two dogs and a horse (plus three kids!) at the vet. Do you want that circumstance? I can tell you that your bank account does not, Will it restore your belief in the kindness and care of your fellow man? By all means.

• An (outdoor in particular) kids’ sports game. Again, a place the online memosphere loves to lampoon, but hear me out, this is the scene: laughing with mom-friends on the sidelines, in which you interrupt yourself occasionally by yelling, YOU GOT THIS! C’MON [your kid, your friend’s kid, kid who’s not on the field but is on your mind and so gets a mention}! LET’S GOOOOOOOOO! The kids who are not currently playing walk over to the park with friends. Someone brings a puppy. All the moms share snacks and therefore children, as they circle our totes like hungry vultures. You run into nine other families you know while hiking back to the car, some of whom ask if you’ve seen one of their kids, like we’re all living on a soccer-field-shaped, 90s-era-parenting commune, which I guess we are. This isn’t outdoors, but last night we had a volleyball game for middle-school girls and my friend and I both got teary and laughed about our teariness - but HONESTLY. The high-fives? The team telling each other “you got this”? YOUR VERY OWN KID MAKING AN ACE? Yes that was mine I promise I’m not obnoxious about it in real life. Wow. Just wow. How lucky are we to have such a place, with such people as these miracles.

• A thrift store/dollar section/ garage sale at which your children can pick an item and carry it up to the checkout with all the pride of a successful hunter.

• A book event/reading/signing. Do you want to hear dorks who really wish they still had papers to write ask existential questions? Do you want to sigh over stories? Do you want to debate whether the book or the movie was better? Well, you’re in luck because your local bookstore wants you to come to their event and buy a coffee, and let’s be honest, you want that, too.

• At the loading bay of the feedstore, all heavy bags and light banter.

• In the working kitchen of a home, in which a pot is bubbling and the oven is baking and you keep wondering if you’ll manage to wash dishes before they are consumed by their own grime, or feed everyone before they gnaw the legs off the dining room table - and somehow, miraculously, you do.

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Anyway, we recently got a seven-month-old 70-lb King Shepherd from a local family who couldn’t keep him, and he’s a joy. A fence-jumping, large-pooping, needed-to-be-fixed joy, but a joy nonetheless. He’s actually amazingly good for an oversized puppy. He comes when he’s called, he’s mostly learned not to bark at horses and cats, and we are working on not chasing the chickens. The big thing now is to teach him to bark at strangers and cars coming up the road, since we live in the country and I like to give a little scare to the roof salesmen and Jehovah’s Witnesses now and then.

When Guinness, our first farm dog, was a puppy (you can read about her at the end of this piece, don’t worry she’s still going strong), I remember being driven to distraction at the dog park. Some of it was her - she was a stubborn gal and not too keen on coming when called - but most of it was me. Back then I always felt I had somewhere else to be. I felt late to everything, behind on life, striving and scraping for every bit of success I could find, looking for someone outside of myself to validate me, tell me I was doing “it” right, whatever “it” was. So I felt beleaguered by the dog park, like a bad owner hollering at my bad dog, I felt like I shouldn’t be standing in a green field on a Monday morning, I should be writing the Great American Novel! I should be marketing a company! I should be climbing a ladder of corporate despair!

Now, all these years later, after many turns around many different styles of working for everyone else, I’m back to Gig Life. I teach horsemanship, I coach writers, I write my own work, I edit, I freelance. And I don’t feel bad at all about taking my dog to the dog park of a Monday morning.

Jesse wanted to climb the boulders at the dog park. Sure! I said. Rocky made lots of friends because all my boys are all the same, they make friends everywhere they go. Jesse asked lots of people about their dogs names and breeds, and carefully said, “Can I pet your dog?” a question which he has earnestly lisped to every person with a four-legged friend since he first started talking.

It was a wonderful morning. I realized that I (finally!) don’t feel bad about taking it slow.

At most of my horse lessons, I have to remind my riders to slow down. Horses, as I have told hundreds of daredevil kids of every stripe for years, are not dirt bikes. You can’t just jump on and blaze off - you can hurt them, you can hurt yourself. You have to ride with intention. Notice what your horse is telling you, help them put their bodies together in the right ways, help them move well. Build a relationship on trust and kindness and then your horse will run with you to the ends of the earth if you want him to, he will blaze any trail you ask for any reason if it’s YOU asking, because that friendship, that partnership is the point. Slow down. Listen. Watch. Feel. You are not late, you are not behind, you have nothing to prove.

Standing on the edge of a green field while Jesse chatted with the owner of two prancing greyhounds and Rocky sprinted about with his giant tongue hanging out like the advertising tail behind a biplane, I realized that this is what I was always trying to achieve. This, right here. This happy kid and good dog, a home with dinner in the crockpot and a day-full of clients to see later. Work that matters, and the family I am working to provide for. After years of effort, after believing the critics more than the cheerleaders, after believing that I was the problem and after missing the morning because I was so worried about the afternoon, I finally stopped running and put myself together instead, just as I tell my horse students to do.

It’s a work in progress. I am certainly not immune to the frantic elements of our breakneck culture, the sneaky way that jealousy and scarcity team up to make us all ungrateful, stressed-out shells instead of warm-blooded humans. But it helps to remember where we’ve come from, and how long I have been holding the hands of little people and whistling at my dog and petting the foreheads of my horses and feeling the warm hand of my husband on my knee in the evening. I’m not late to my own life, as I don’t have anywhere else to be.

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• May your sandwich be satisfying, may Mom remember the condiment you like. (Is it mayo this week? Sometimes you need to try it and find out.)

• May your friends be kind, may you learn to sniff out kindness and cultivate it well.

• May your classes challenge you.

• May your classes not challenge so much that you become discouraged.

• May you never quit.

• May your school shoes squeak satisfactorily in the hallways.

• May your sweater be the correct weight for the weather.

• May the books you love be available at the library.

• May the math problems be understandable, may the simplicity of right and wrong answers help you make sense of the world.

• May your handwriting be legible.

• May your ideas, your communication and your imagination be clear and vibrant.

• May the science lab fizz and pucker and bubble with expectation.

• May music sound like possibility and creativity, like rules meant to be explored, like melodies meant to be expressed.

• May art burst with color and life and healthy messes.

• May P.E. make you laugh, may you rejoice in movement.

• May sports teach you teamwork, perseverance and above all, grace, for yourself and others.

• May geography remind you that the world is not as big as you fear but not as small as you might believe.

• May history and social studies give you perspective for your days, a broad spectrum of understanding for how the world is, how it should be.

• May faith follow your steps, may you lean on ancient wisdom when confronted with your own youth.

• May you be celebrated for your strengths.

• May you be encouraged in your weaknesses.

• May you know, no matter where you go in the world or what you do, no matter how many more years you open a packed lunch from your Mom’s kitchen, that you are loved. Every swirl of mayonnaise on bread is a prayer for you. Carry it with you, may it feed you well. When you come back, may the empty lunchbox remind you that there is always more love where that came from; that you can eat and be satisfied and it will not stay hollow, but will be filled again, that you are never too far from home.

It is this late-summer funk in which you find me, crushed but not destroyed, choosing to be grateful and choosing life over death, joy over pain. This piece is one of the first I wrote for Substack, and because motherhood turns a person over and over like the never-ending tumble of laundry in my machine, it’s still true now.

I hope you enjoy this essay, and please share it with a mother who needs to know that she is not alone.

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Today I screamed at my kids. The window broke in my aged Ford Explorer because my three-year-old played with it, my kids had asked one thousand times for snacks even though we’d already eaten the equivalent of a 7-11 end-cap in junk food, which of course I feel guilty about. So I yelled at them, STOP! They stopped and then we all cried.

Actually - “cried” is too gentle. I sobbed until my throat hurt.

I’m not really mad because my kids are, wonder of wonders, kids. They’ll break stuff, they’ll eat too much junk food, they’ll talk loudly about poop in the middle of a conference call. What makes me sob until I can sob no more is the feeling that every time I fail, I don’t deserve them; I haven’t arrived as a mother and I never will.

As an adoptive mom I’m keenly aware of how hard my husband and I worked to have kids. It feels like there’s not a bureaucratic form we haven’t filled out or a lawyer’s office we haven’t paid our life savings to. I worked really hard for the title of “mom”; I waited a very long time for this.

This was no quickie in the backseat or, alternatively, long-stemmed rose romance and hotel room and well, you know the end of that story. This was interviews and savings and home studies and paperwork and more interviews and lots of hope that failed and hope that finally succeeded.

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So how can I possibly lose my cool at these walking miracles? How can I tell them to stop and make them cry, how can I ever get tired of being called “mom” when that was all I wanted for so long?

I feel that I don’t deserve them. I see myself as though from a great height and I shake my head in disapproval even as the self I am watching has a face red with frustration. What a disappointment, I cluck. What a sad place you’ve arrived to, when you hoped to arrive at glowing, patient, life-giving motherhood.

My five-year-old daughter is wearing a fluffy mint green sweatshirt with a sequined unicorn on the front today - her outfit is the outward expression of her inner life. She has no such thoughts about arrival. The only place she wants to be is snuggled next to me on the couch on this blustery day, reading a book about princesses.

I have scared her with my outburst, she looks at me with trepidation in her big brown eyes. This is where I realize it, as though a cartoon anvil has thunked me on my thick head. I have arrived. This is motherhood. Whether I deserve it or not, I have the heart and trust of these precious kids. I am their mother, they don’t mind that our skin colors are different, they are unconcerned with DNA. They want me to be safe and kind, to apologize and give kisses when I forget how to keep my cool. They want me to be generous with my time and myself, they want to make mistakes in the safety of my nest.

Today I screamed at my kids. Today I apologized for screaming. I told them I was sorry, that I love them dearly, that mommies get frustrated too. I did not tell them that this is the dream of motherhood which has finally borne out long past hope, past fluffy sheep toys and lullabies. I did not tell them that motherhood is the story of endless failures and constant pressure, that I will fail, but I will never abandon them and I will never stop trying. I did not tell them that I have arrived, that motherhood is lurking here in the heartbreak and the mistakes and the making-up.

I did not say this to my kids. I just said I was sorry and they gave me sticky kisses and patted me on the head and asked me to read The Five Little Monkeys which I gladly did. But I thought it: I’ve arrived at the most beautiful place I could ever be, may I never take it for granted.

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1. Salt it. The water, the veggies, the starch. Salt it all. (Hint: the reason why you crave restaurant food is because they use way more salt than most home-cooks. Use a little more salt, and you’ll save money at home and still not use as much as most restaurants do.)

2. Buy cool stuff and use it. I love seasoning blends and sauces and have lots of obscure ones that I pick up on clearance all over the place. (One of my favorite places for sauce sourcing is, weirdly enough, TJ Maxx.) The other night my inspiration started because I needed to use some old zucchini - add pasta, feta, ground pork and that weird jar of Moroccan Tan-Tan and you have a smoky, salty, summery pasta dish.

3. Speaking of feta, wander through the store, buy things that call to you, and trust yourself to use them. I bought a block of feta at Grocery Outlet because it was two dollars. I didn’t have a recipe in mind or a plan, but feta shouldn’t be left to fend for itself so I selflessly stepped up. It perfectly topped-off the Moroccan pasta.

4. Don’t forget the golden rules of cooking: salt, fat, acid, heat. (You can add sweet and umami here if you must quibble.) If your dish is well-seasoned, if there is a slight slide of fat on the tongue, if you have an acid-tang in the aftertaste and a little heat, either because the dish is cooked properly or because you gave it a quick chop of a pepper or a palm-full of curry powder - it’s quite hard to mess it up.

   

5. If it grows together it goes together: Olives and soft cheese, zucchini and tomatoes, rangey red wine and beef, bright white wine and clams, potatoes and garlic, citrus and seafood, peppers and onions. If you’re trying to cook something on the fly, just ask yourself - could these things thrive in similar climates? If the answer is yes - go for it.

6. Commit to a flavor profile and go big. Many home-cooks are afraid of over-powering flavors and so shy away, making the home version boring and forgettable. If you want to eat a curried sweet potato or a Thai noodle dish or a sizzling slab of Carne Asada - make it at home! But do it right. Use more seasoning than you think you need, taste again and again, and make sure that anyone who tries the dish can pick up the flavor, because that’s what brings joy to food. Around the world, we’re all working with the same stuff: a starch, a protein, a vegetable. The herbs, spices and configurations are what make a Turkish kebab and a Mexican fajita two very different experiences.

7. Wander. Wander through the grocery store. Wander through the farmer’s market. Wander through the cooking section of a big-box or discount store. Order a weird dish you’ve never heard of from a food truck. Wandering is a luxury, but even if you only make time for it occasionally, your kitchen and palate will thank you.

8. See your cooking as creativity. Sure, you can meal-plan, but don’t let practicality steal your zest. Sure, you can google a recipe and follow it, but you could also get inspired by a cookbook and then wing it. Let creativity and cravings guide you and you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

9. Fill your freezer. We raise our own beef, Adam frequently brings home fish (for a while we had tons of wild Alaskan halibut and salmon, what a treat!) and we buy pork and chicken from local producers in bulk when we can. Having protein in the freezer means we eat everything - from oxtail to stew meat to sirloin steak - and has taught me how important the seasonings, sides and sauces truly are. Even the most humble cuts can be elevated with the right blend of spice and style, and as a result of eating this way, we not only cut down on food waste, but we teach our kids to eat well at any price point.

10. Cook and eat with gusto. Make the chorizo, fry the tortillas, use fresh cilantro. Make a kofta patty, stew your oxtails the Jamaican way, add the extra splash of cream to the potatoes. Cook and eat like your life depends on it - because it does. Without food we die, without joy we wither. Step away from the frozen entree and instead, make yourself a spicy, sloppy, umami-drenched homemade bowl of ramen noodles in the same amount of time. Slurp it into your mouth because why not? Every meal should be treated like a kiss.

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Because of this, I decided it’s high time I ask Buzz to stand still as I mount up. It’s not a hard thing to train a horse to do. I’ve done it dozens of times. If I’m honest, I’ve just been lazy with my personal horse on this particular behavior. If I’m mounting from a fence or rock, he’ll stand until I’m mostly over him before he moves, and even then it’s a half-hearted scoot forward, nothing scary. But it’s enough to make me want a more steady mount. It’s long past time I made him stand still, anyway.

So the other day we started working on it. It was a windy afternoon …

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My daughter (11) is the perfect age for The Descendants, but I love it too. It’s over-the-top, primary-colored fun, with sweet, barely-even-kissing teenage romance. Because I’m in my 40s, it reminds me of High School Musical, although sharing that anecdote about the Days of Yore invoked a sigh from Addy.

The Descendants story centers around the offspring of fairy tales we know and love. We meet Prince Ben, the so-perfect-he-seems-unreal son of Beauty and the Beast, Audrey, the pretty pink-and-blue-haired daughter of Aurora and Prince Phillip, and even a son of one of Snow White’s dwarfs. It’s campy and silly and very musical-theater, the sets are honest-to-goodness sets for the first three movies, as tho…

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Of course the trevails and trials of parenthood come up. We’ve all had the kid who will eat nothing but vanilla yogurt for several days or hates socks. But, “Life would be meaningless without our kids,” my husband said. I’ll note that this is one of the hottest things any man can say, but especially the man with whom you have chosen to parent these rascals.

We nodded along. We all agree: our kids give us perspective, wonder, joy, deep wells of love and purpose.

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But is that a good enough reason to have them? Even more troubling - are we just selfishly demanding that these tiny beings complete us?

I’ve been reading a lot about the fertility crisis, in the West generally and in America in particular. One thing that stands out to me is the way that we are now questioning something that used to be commonplace assumption. Broadly speaking, we used to b…

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Just as the writing expands our hearts, the rejections can do the opposite if we aren’t careful. But I got the nicest rejection letter of my life the other day and have been dining out on it ever since, I’m just so tickled by its kindness, even if it did end with the “it’s not you, it’s me” of publishing. It is wonderful to have even a few people reading this little story of mine and thinking it worth a reply of any kind - I’m not sure I’ll ever get over that thrill. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this piece, either for the first time or revisiting, and please send your prayers/thoughts/hopes/caffeine my way as I continue to pursue representation/publication for my fiction.

My chatty four-year-old and I were leaving Whole Foods with a full shopping cart. I’m a bargain-hunter by nature, but now and then we venture into the sunlit uplands of $7 gourmet cereals for a few specific items.

Anyway, those few items had turned into a few more (Unique beer! Baby bok choy! Designer gelato!) and I had my hands full with bags of groceries and my pint-sized commentary machine (I saw a firetruck mama! Where was it going mama? It’s sunny today mama! What’s that guy doing mama? What’s that for mama? I saw a birdie mama!)

As Isaiah climbed into the car and I loaded up our purchases, I noticed a blond-haired woman about my age, sitting outside the store at a wooden picnic table, which was fitted with a Whole-Foods-green umbrella. She had a brown paper take-out container, and she sat before it with such desolation on her face that I looked again. She wasn’t crying, or holding her head in her hands, or doing any of the things that we associate with heartbreak, but heartbreak was present all the same. Whole Foods is close to the hospital - I imagined maybe she came from seeing a loved one, perhaps she’d just had a scary appointment - in a split-second I wondered if there was a way to help, or if perhaps she simply wanted to sit in the sunshine, in which case my presence would only interfere. All these things were running through my mind as I loaded my frivolous groceries in the car; in her presence I felt a little embarrassed by my $8 locally-grown clamshell of butter lettuce, self-conscious in my excesses.

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Isaiah had buckled in when a man in a fleece and running shoes came by. “Have a nice day,” he said quickly, and as if embarrassed by his own gesture, he dropped a vibrant bunch of sunflowers on the table in front of her and hurried away.

The sunflowers glowed in the spring morning, glorious and exuberant. The woman’s face changed, it went from contained sadness to utter desolation, and she wept outright. I cried too, watching compassion unfold through the windshield with my little boy humming in the backseat, coloring in his superhero coloring book.

I’ve been working on a little fiction project, not because I think I can write fiction but because my real life has felt like one long DMV line lately and no one wants to hear about that, including myself.

But the act of writing fiction (which of course, has caused me to read more fiction, as I really don’t know how it works) has lead me to think about compassion. Because creativity, imagination - they are the ultimate act of compassion. They dare us to put ourselves in another’s shoes, to engage in the radical act of putting ourselves (and our opinions!) to the side.

Like the North-Face-wearing young man who saw a sad stranger as worthy of his attention and kindness, like the flight attendants who gave us a free lunch in the back of the plane when they realized we were flying home with a three-week-old adopted baby, like the elderly rancher who stopped on the side of the road when he saw my mom-bus pulled over in Eastern Oregon cow country: “You OK ma’am?”

Fiction is compassion. It is putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes. It is daring to believe that our way is not the only way. Through telling stories we broaden the breadth and scope of humanity, we imagine ourselves the shoes of someone older, younger, happier, sadder, less privileged or more intelligent, less able or more kind.

There are no small lives. There is no small sadness or small joy. Every human life has value and every story matters. Thank you, as always, for reading mine.

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Our neighbor turned off the irrigation ditch this year. The water is technically his, ours comes from another source, but it runs through our land and others, an object lesson in collective consequences. So the ditch sits, taking up…

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No, you are asking for teamwork, for grace and give. You want their ear turned toward you, their eye softened on you. You want the hind end to propel the front, to gather itself and grant that extra bit of oomph, noticeable even at a slow speed but much easier to see and ask for once a horse gets going. You are looking for a graceful, bent barrel, a suppleness to the work which tells you the horse is ready, engaged, perhaps even enjoying himself. No one wants to run in a circle indefinitely, but a few minutes of long-line communication, while feeling the earth roll beneath your feet and the easy rhythmic cadence of horse hooves and horse breath tendered into partnership and grace? That’s pretty awesome, both for the horse and for the human.

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I lunged my horses for the first time ye…

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Stick with me here. When I teach writing classes at the community college and library, it’s around a style of writing, such as kids books or Substack or westerns or food writing, which gives a hook of interest and a focal point for my students.

Typically, my students register to learn about the how: the buttons on Substack or the methods for childrens’ book publishing or landing a gig as a restaurant reviewer.

Spoiler alert: the more important question is always the why and the what.

If you don’t know why you’re writing, or what you want to write about, you can have every piece of the how figured out, and still not be successful.

So, how do we figure out the what and the why?

I think it’s like sorting silverware.

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In your imaginary brain-drawer, you have spoons for soup and forks for pasta and knives for the soft sides of pears and the spreading of butter on crusty bread. We might find a few memories in there too: baby spoons you can’t seem t…

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Please “enjoy” this little satire and remind yourself, as I am trying to do: the answer to ‘who do you think you are?’ is more powerful, and yes, dangerous to a certain kind of darkness, than you can imagine. If you want to read his previous advice to Snakeguts, click here. )

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To this day, that’s still what I want, but it’s a bit harder with a passel of kids who aren’t satisfied with a couple of silver-dollar pancakes at a shaded table. Now, that chubby curly-headed baby is a long-legged soon-to-be middle-schooler, who has opinions on lotion, pierced ears and a tiny dog obsession. We’ve also added two boys to the mix, one 2nd-grader who’s favorite activity is riding bikes and “inventing” things (code name for taping trash together in creative ways) and a three-year-old who eats more than the other two combined and has mastered the side-eye. It’s an expensive crew to take out to eat, and we make an entrance. But they’re mine, mine to mother and be proud of, and I want to feel celebra…

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Dakota was Adam’s horse through and through. I have seldom seen a horse choose a person like that, but he walked right up to Adam on their first meeting and announced that they were meant for each other. He was right, as horses usually are about this kind of thing. He was a Tennessee Walking Horse, and big, almost 17 hands, long-legged like his human. He was a contradiction, kind but pushy, laid-back but way too fast for most riders, a natural leader and soft-hearted teacher who intimidated many riders because of his speed and size.

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This strange holiday made me think of this piece, which I wrote during COVID and is also about displacement, the odd sensation of the world looking different than you thought it was. I hope you enjoy this little essay, and send me all your entertainment and pain management recommendations as I get back on my feet.

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I saw an old town car going slowly by, its speed and sound and style all the same sensible beige color. I looked down at the sidewalk, but then quickly up as I heard it: the loud sound of a crash, the immediate splintering, crunching of a bumper and a fender, the skid and scrape of demolition derby. It’s unmistakable, you know the sound of a car crash anywhere. I ran over. The sedan was lightly smoking, the elderly couple inside shaken, the wife at the wheel. “I never drive!” She was on the verge of tears, shaking, tiny wrinkled hands in the air in…

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Which is probably always the case, there are usually more happy coincidences than we realize - but still. It was a wonderful trip at a time when I’m reminded to feel especially grateful for wonderful things.

Addy is at a very sparkly age for a big adventure, she’s not too old for FAO Schwartz but not too young for Hamilton. My friend Holli and I have traveled all over for years and are compatible travel buddies (museums, coffee shops, champagne, shopping, walking) as well as dear friends. We can pick up where we left off at any time, anywhere in the world and start talking about books and food and fai…

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