The Late Arrival

Nearly one year into COVID quarantine, and we’re still in darkness. I still believe hoping in darkness : that unseen good things thrive, grow and bloom in the darkest of places.   Today felt like another dark day in a long stretch of dark days, so I decided to intentionally eat my feelings on days like these as I have done for roughly ten of the eleven months of lockdown.   Pioneer Woman’s BestEver Lasagna fit the bill for the day’s emotional eating. I set out meats for defrosting as my daughter and husband set out for shopping at the local hardware store and Target.   They got back home as the meat sauce simmered; and after settling in with her newfound Target treasures, my daughter offered to pitch in with lasagna assembly.   This, in of itself, is any parent’s reason to rejoice, but when you are the parent of an artistic kid with specific and precise aesthetic expectations, an offer to help with lasagna assembly is less help and more annoyance.   B...

School starts this week. I'm anxious, and at the same, relieved because my daughter's chosen to do a many of her classes virtually. Still, my mind chatters that all it takes is one hour, one moment, one exposure to start a potentially deadly domino fall. There's so much, mom. Like, I don't understand why we need to be face-to-face. Like, why are they forcing this to happen? I went off on a well-informed, frustrated tangent...in my head. She didn't need to hear that, and frankly I didn't need to hear myself say it. So I dug deep into what I believed and what I knew and what I felt. You know what? I'm not gonna lie: I am anxious. Thing is, I honestly believe that God is gonna do something big this school year. Like, beyond what you can even imagine. Seriously . She looked at me like I had grown a third head. No seriously. This school year, this whole situation -- everything is like we're walking into pitch black darkness. We don't know what's in fr...

When I came back from our family trip to Pierce City, Missouri a few years ago, my dear friend wanted to know all the details. We met for lunch and I told her that, yes, my daughter, my husband and I stood at the graveside of my third-great grandmother who was born in 1795. That we even took pi ctures of the expansive greenspace where my second great-grandfather’s house once stood before he and his step-son had a firefight with an angry mob who torched the place with them in it. It’s quiet, pastoral and unassuming. That we stood on the land my ancestors used to own before they were driven from it. And that, yes, we held vigil with a small group from the community on the very ground where an ancestor was lynched that night in 1901. You should really write a book about this , she nudged. Maybe if I can sort it all out in my head. It’s just a lot.   I mean, I wished I had a picture taken of my daughter and I by our maternal ancestor’s grave. I can still feel the rugged rock and rough...

Sometimes, you think you've lost something and it turns up. Such was the case with a post I wrote for another site way back in 2015 around the Michael Brown verdict. I remember the night I wrote it: the split screen of President Obama addressing the nation on one side, while the other side recorded a town on fire. I felt sick in my soul, while my husband didn't feel or understand what I was feeling, and why I was feeling. I sat there on the couch confounded, sad, demoralized, weary and angry. I poured it all out on a national platform, not caring whether my words were measured or light enough to be palatable to the white folks in my life. Months later the post was recognized with an award. We went to New York and everything to receive an award along with a lot of other amazing writers. I thought the post was lost in the takeover of that site, but 2015 me must've been thinking ahead to this day and saved it on a thumb drive way back when. Yesterday, I stumbled upon these wor...

My husband posted a pic collage on social media a few days back to commemorate Loving Day. Admittedly, I was less than enthusiastic considering, uh I don’t know…EVERYTHING. Yay. Loving Day. That’s when Aunt Mag and Uncle John popped up in my memory.  I grew up seeing their portrait on the family’s upright Mason & Hamlin piano; and, in passing at least once, my mom explained: Who Woulda Thought? That's your Aunt Mag and Uncle John. People said he was an old white man, but no one ever really talked about it. I was young enough to remember that and young enough to be puzzled. IT? What was IT, and why was IT a secret? I moved on from my confusion and, I guess innocence, until about FIVE YEARS AGO when I was introduced to Loving Day , and out of nowhere, the light broke like a two-by-four splintering on my head: OMG, nobody talked about Uncle John being white because his marriage to Aunt Mag was ILLEGAL. Aunt Mag was my grandmother’s aunt. Her family – m y family – survived a triple...

It was weeks ago or it ten years ago when I saw a man die. He died on Twitter. He died on Facebook. He died on the nightly news. He died on Instagram. He died again and again and again. I shook my head and sighed deeply in exhaustion. Wasn't it just a few weeks ago that Botham Jean , Freddie Gray , Sandra Bland and Breonna Taylor were killed? A few days ago that Ernest Lacy , Dontre Hamilton , Daniel Bell were killed?  Maybe it was just a few weeks ago and not nearly 120 years ago that my second great grandfather French, his stepson Pete and nephew Will were lynched . Days, months and years blur together while only the names have changed and the only constant is black bodies.  I file the images and the names and the stories safely away from emotion, yet close enough to vibrate into my daily reality. That reality is the one where I want to go out into the our local hinterlands to buy smoke bombs because they bring me joy; but, instead I know that law enforcement is on high a...