The Late Arrival

  After fourteen months of working from home, I’m convinced that the biggest perk is the view.   My “office” is situated on a hill, so I can see everything and everyone,  but they can’t see me see them . Remember Gladys Kravits, the nosy neighbor on Bewitched who made it her business to surveil everything that everyone was doing from her front window? Thanks to COVID and working from home, I am Gladys Kravitz now. As the Neighborhood Gladys, I’ve seen things. Things I would’ve missed on my way hurrying out the door in a game of beat the clock. Things I would’ve missed at the office. Like, The Squirrel Community. Yeah, they’re all adorable, but the let me tell you: the Squirrel Community is rife with inequity and bullying. Ever hear a squirrel growl? I have. It happened during that little chase game you might’ve seen and liltingly laughed at.   But it’s no game, it is WAR. Bully Squirrel (that’s what I call him) chases and growls at little guys daily. He ...

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...

The test said I was pregnant. Undoubtedly. Indubitably. Pregnant. The shock of it all drove me to the vodka I brought home as a souvenir from our recent cruise, and to the precipice of stress smoking. You know, the kind of smoking where you can hear the inhale followed by a 30-second whrhhhhhhh of an exhale that obliterates an entire cigarette. But then I remembered, no that can’t be a thing because this little person inside of me will also be drinking whatever I drink and can’t even roll down a window for air when I whrhhhhhhh . That person arrived a day early. A couple days later, I wrapped her up to go home with us. All I could think was a WHOLE NEW PERSON IS COMING HOME TO LIVE WITH US FOREVER .  Then she did this: Oh precious little girl, we have NO idea what we're doing! I burst out in tears. I mean, I just wasn’t prepared and I knew it. We brought her home anyway. She was funny, smart (way smarter than me and I knew that when she was three-years-old and called ...

A true story. They always seem to come without warning out of the clear blue with some deep truth that's eluded me for most of my adult life. This was one of those times. I was feeling all high and mighty for encouraging my kiddo's discipline throughout the stay at home order (like that's not part of the parenting gig, but whatever). Well...what was I supposed to say? Seriously, what is it like to be a teen right now, nonetheless a teen who's busting her butt academically, much less one whose school year was shut down in the blink of an eye? But to hear her articulate MOM. I'M BLACK. THIS IS WHAT WE DO. And yes, she's white and black, but she's realized in her whole short seventeen years, she is perceived as black, so she embraces it. But still... THIS IS WHAT WE DO. I've always taken the THIS IS WHAT WE DO as a given. She's well aware of my family being at the center of a triple lynching and then starting a new life here in M...

Fresh bread, still warm from the oven, freshly fried chicken and perhaps a cooled peach cobbler went into the picnic basket, gently and carefully covered with a red and white checkered cloth. Kids were packed up and toted down to the battlefield for the day's festivities. After all, it wasn't a Civil War back in the early days, it was just a skirmish that'd be over in a few months. The "skirmish" would end up ricocheting States' Rights from one century into the next. Its fruit would blossom into today's racial disparities ranging from prison populations, to history curricula, to economic and housing disparities and... . ..health disparities. (see Covid-19 )   Zoom Meetings weren't a thing back then, so... . I'm a history buff, and in my early fangirling days of Civil War history and all things Lincoln, I remember thinking about families packing up picnic baskets to watch skirmishes as if they were tennis matches and marveling ho...

Almost every tchotchke in my house has a story. Here is one of those tchotckes and this is its story. We were out shopping in a pseudo-fancy store selecting fancy cheeses, meats, crackers and fruit for a New Year's charcuterie board. I grabbed some kind of goat cheese in the round and clumsily bumped the one next to it. It rolled and rolled. I laughed and a told my daughter to catch it before it got too far away, even as a another customer nearly crossed its path. I kept laughing as my eyes met with his. His gaze had an icy, somber and hostile demeanor that told me I, nor my daughter didn't belong at the pseudo-fancy discount store. I steeled myself and kept laughing almost out of spite as much as I laughed at the site of my kid racing the cheese wheel. She caught it and returned it to its place. That was 2016. A little over a month after the election. My daughter knew something was off, so realizing she'd follow my lead, I suppressed my eye-roll and shrugged...