Poetics of Travel: Ireland 2022

It was with a certain amount of pandemic-induced trepidation that I packed my 40-liter backpack for 10 days in Ireland the evening of May 27. In the morning, my partner Mick, our friends Mark and Mary, and I boarded a plane to Chicago, landed at O’Hare, boarded another plane to Dublin. We arrived in Dublin at the crack of dawn on a Sunday, then headed north in a rented Opel Crossland with a manual transmission.

I thought there would be more formality as we crossed the border into Northern Ireland. Our first clue that we were now in the United Kingdom was a Union Jack flying in the stiff breeze near a building that my jet-lagged brain filed under petrol station. That may be incorrect. Our second clue was the change in the speed limit number. We had been traveling at 120 kilometers per hour. Suddenly, we were directed to travel at no more than 60 miles per hour. Our rental car’s speedometer showed only kilometers.

Portrush is the town my friend Oonah once lived in as a young adult. I was unprepared for the big Ferris wheel by the beach and the famous royal golf course. In my mind, there had only been the beach at the top of Northern Ireland. Our B&B was run by a couple named Sam and Tim. They were delighted to answer our questions about local attractions.

Portrush was the base from which we saw the otherworldly basalt formations that are the Giant’s Causeway, ordered a flight of whiskey at Bushmills Distillery, strolled among the Dark Hedges, decided not to cross the rope bridge at Carrick-a-Rede, looked down on the remains of Kinbane Castle from a long stair-laden path. We acquainted ourselves with the narrow roads we’d be on for so much of our trip, roads on which a manual transmission was a gift.

Portrush, Northern Ireland
At the Giant’s Causeway
Dark Hedges
Stairs to Kinbane Castle ruins – ruins are visible at the bottom
Flight of whiskey at Bushmills distillery

Our last stop in Northern Ireland was at the Fairy Bridges in County Donegal. No. I’m wrong. County Donegal is not in Northern Ireland. The Fairy Bridges are not in Northern Ireland. We crossed the border at Derry (Londonderry to some). The fairies paid us no mind, but they know that the Fairy Bridges are further north than much of Northern Ireland itself. Borders are slippery, irregular things.

Arriving at the Fairy Bridges
Fairy Bridges

Old cemeteries invite contemplation. Just before we got to Sligo, the four of us stepped delicately around a cemetery outside an abandoned church. The cemetery held a fresh grave in spite of the church’s disuse. A baby kestrel greeted us with rumpled fuzzy feathers and bright eyes as we rounded one side of the church. We looked at headstone after headstone, searching for a surname that was in Mark’s family tree. He found it, took a photo, paused for a moment.

There was no one else in the graveyard until just before we left. A middle-aged woman came through the weathered iron gate, stood with head bowed before a newer grave. We kept our distance.

From there, we drove to W.B. Yeats’ grave. That cemetery was, of course, well-tended for the tourists. I preferred the other one with all its crumbling old stones and weeds. After that, we’d had enough of death and remembrance for one day. On to Sligo, to clean rooms, a pub.

A cemetery just north of Sligo
I loved the simplicity of this site
The church building fallen out of use surrounded by the graveyard
WB Yeats’ grave is quite well-tended
The view from our hotel room in Sligo

There’s an old-school bar-restaurant in downtown Sligo called Walker’s. We found it in the rain on a Tuesday night after the restaurant recommended by our hotel bartender turned out to be closed. It wasn’t too crowded, one of our deciding factors for dinner spots on this whole pandemic-affected trip. In fact, it was perfect. Dark wood, a long bar, small tables. Wood-framed windows looking out on the rain-slicked street. A charcuterie board for the four of us, a shared burger for Mick and me, some wine, some beer. We took our time. There was nowhere else we had to be.

After Sligo, we navigated narrow, shoulderless roads to Connemara National Park. An unconcerned sheep stepped out in front of Mick as he sped along, causing all of us to perk up a little more. We later learned the sheep like to lay in the road because the asphalt is warm.

The park had several walking paths from which to choose, all color-coordinated to indicate level of difficulty: yellow, blue, red. We chose blue, walked beneath great swaths of bright Irish sky, gazed at low mountains, laughed at a playful foal and a fuzzy lamb. We tsked over someone who let their dog run loose in spite of postings not to do so for the sake of the sheep. The park cafe beckoned when our walk was complete.

From there, we drove on to Clifden and Abbyglen Castle, where Mick nearly met a car head-on as it barreled up the skinny driveway toward us. He backed up in a hurry, jamming the transmission into reverse and spitting gravel around a sharp uphill corner, then tried again once the car was gone.

A night in a castle. Throne-like chairs in the entryway for photo ops. A champagne reception in the main floor piano bar/pub. A delicious dinner in the upstairs dining room where we waved away the person who tried to put an American flag on our table; we just wanted to be fellow travelers. A post-dinner stroll into the center of Clifden, a town known for the first transatlantic radio signal transmission and the first successful transatlantic flight landing. That the flight landed in a bog does not diminish its importance. We found a pub and listened to two guys with guitars play popular songs while we sipped our pints. Back at the castle, the piano bar morphed into a late-night disco. We chose the quiet of our rooms, that quiet being relative. Castles, it turns out, aren’t entirely soundproof.

On the door to Abbeyglen Castle
Abbeyglen lobby
The wonderful royal chairs in the entryway at Abbeyglen
Yeats quote inside the entryway
The Abbeyglen pub where we attended a champagne reception
Seen on our stroll into the center of Clifden
All of us walking through Clifden
In Clifden’s harbor

Galway wasn’t far from Clifden. We took our time, bought small gifts in Clifden before we left. Drove the nearby Sky Road, gazed over the sea, found some friendly horses. One of the horses nibbled on Mary’s hand.

The hotel at Galway was huge, a conference center. It was my turn to drive that day. The GPS directed me right past the hotel and into a nearby neighborhood. Once I parked the car in the hotel parking lot, I didn’t drive it again for two days. Taxis were plentiful and it wasn’t that far to just walk into the area near the Spanish Arch in the old part of Galway.

We took a walking tour, one that we thought began at noon. At 11 a.m., we stood in front of the pub where the tour participants were supposed to meet up, discussing whether this was the correct spot when man named Brian came up and asked if we were waiting for the Horrible History Tour. He directed us to a man named Gary by the fountain across the park and said Gary would take us starting in a few minutes. Gary, it turned out, had studied history quite a lot and was willing to talk and talk and talk while we walked. Had we been on time, we would have missed it all.

Galway’s pubs are charming, music-filled places. There were patios situated outside open windows, so we heard musicians without having to stand shoulder-to-shoulder inside the pub. Pre-pandemic, we would have been in the midst of all those shoulders without a second thought.

I’m not sure I’ll ever be ready to be in a crowded place again. But I’m quite sure I’m not the only one.

On the Sky Road
Friendly horse along Sky Road
Part of the Spanish Arch, Galway
Lynch’s Castle, part of our walking tour in Galway
In remembrance of Irish writer Padraic O’Conaire
Galway hooker sculpture in Eire Square. A hooker is a type of fishing boat with sails.

The Cliffs of Moher are among the top attractions in Ireland. We left Galway on a Saturday morning, drove winding roads through The Burren, arrived at the Cliffs early enough that the parking area was not yet filled with tour busses. The wind whipped our clothes and hair, scoured our cheeks. Everywhere we looked, we found photo-worthy views.

The last time I was at the Cliffs was in 2005. The year my father died. My daughter Abby, almost 11 years old at the time, traveled with us. And here I was again, no daughter with me, but a granddaughter back home in Minnesota who is the age Abby was. I wondered how Camille would like this wild beauty that defines the west coast of Ireland. I was surprised to have made it back to see it a second time.

We returned the rental car as soon as we got back to Dublin, found a taxi to our rooms at the Clayton Hotel in the Ballsbridge area. As we approached it, I thought it looked like another castle. It’s what I would call a grand hotel, elegant and stately and old. There were rugby players all over the place; we’d arrived on the day of some important game. The following day there was a women’s half-marathon. It rained. We toured the Guinness Storehouse, stayed relatively dry.

Dublin’s noise and traffic were a bit jarring after the west coast. But we stopped in several pubs, admired the dark wood bars and plank floors they all seemed to have. We went to Trinity College, looked at the Book of Kells, visited the Long Room in the Old Library Building. We wore out the soles of our shoes walking, walking, walking.

And then it was time to go home.

Outside the Guinness Storehouse, Dublin
In the advertising memorabilia area on the Guinness tour
An outdoor exhibit in the Temple Bar area of Dublin
The Clayton Hotel, Dublin
Inside the Long Room, Old Library Building, Trinity College, Dublin
Oscar Wilde monument, Merrion Square, Dublin

I always feel a little thrill when I get my first glimpse of Minnesota from the window of an airplane coming into the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport. This time, my feelings were mixed. Ten days out of the country, with limited attention to US news, was a much-needed tonic. As the plane descended, I thought about what it was that we were returning home to: a violent country with much division, with too many guns and too much money in too few hands.

But my children are here. My grandchildren. My friends. Mick and I have a home here. Much as I would like to live elsewhere, this is where I’m rooted.

Travel is a great teacher. I’ve been shown again and again that there are a lot of ways to live on this earth, a lot of choices we can make for the good of all. Now that I am back home, I’ll see what lessons I can glean from this latest trip, figure out how to apply what I’ve learned, and what bit of Irish beauty I’ve brought back with me.

A Little Irish Magic

Today’s post is on the fly. One Minnesota Crone is on the road.

Spectacular basalt formations at Giant’s Causeway, Northern Ireland

On the blue trail at Connemara National Park, Ireland

Whatever you’re doing as June kicks off, may it be something that opens your eyes.

Our constant reminder that we aren’t at home

Adaptation

The day after Mother’s Day, I decide to putz around in the garden. It’s been a long, cold spring; everything is emerging later than usual. My patience has worn thin, but not with the garden. With people.

This particular Monday is the warmest day of the year so far. A little humid. My ear is plugged thanks to spring allergies. I stopped taking medication for them after the dog died. It’s been more than 20 years since I met a spring without something to stop snot from clogging my head. We’ll see how this goes, but so far it’s not too bad.

There are gigantic dandelions already taking up space in parts of the garden. I decide to remove them since there are some other things blooming now. If there was nothing else, I would leave them for bee food. The ones I remove are snuggled up against emergent daylilies, nettles, Irish moss. The ones in the lawn can stay there. Neither my partner Mick nor I care about having a lawn. That’s probably why little sweat bees have taken up residence out front, their bee nursery evident for the fourth year in a row. We’ve placed a plant stake right by it so we don’t mow over the bee nest. They amuse me so much with their little green faces and the way one bee hangs out just inside a doorway to the nest when one of us walks by.

When I’ve removed enough dandelions and the errant daisies that popped up in the moss garden, I stretch my back, grateful for the respite the garden has given year after year after year. It is my haven, my safe space, the room where I think.

The week before Mother’s Day felt truly awful with the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion on Roe V. Wade. Mick and I had a few discussions about what it really means to have a high court with such unwillingness to interpret law for a twenty-first century population. I vented in a draft essay that I thought I might publish here, but which I then left sitting on my laptop. Venting is what most of the people I know have already been doing. Venting again here won’t help.

I did buy myself a Mother’s Day present: a pin from Dissent Pins that says, “Another grandma for abortion rights.” Half of their proceeds goes to women’s reproductive health care organizations. At least that’s one small thing I can do right now.

I’m worried about my daughter, my granddaughters. I’m worried about the repercussions that will reverberate in other legal matters, other protections and rights that we all thought were settled as we mistakenly assumed we did not still live in the Dark Ages.

My youngest granddaughter Maeve is just about seven months old. She is fascinated with her own hands, holding them in front of her eyes while she sips from her bottle, turning them as if wondering who they belong to. She grabs for everything while we hold her in our arms: glasses, earrings, necklaces, Mick’s beard, my lip. We’ve been teaching her what flowers are. Now that’s another thing she reaches for.

Maeve hangs out at our house a couple of days a week while her parents work. The other weekdays, she stays with her other set of grandparents. All four of us are clear that by providing daycare, we are not just helping with expenses – we are keeping Maeve as safe as we can while the ongoing pandemic shifts and twists all our lives. My son and his wife are both teachers; we won’t do regular daycare over the summer. We’ll pick it up again in the fall and do it for another school year. Then we’ll see how the world looks.

Maeve and her big sister Camille were choices, welcomed into our family fold. They are lucky to have all their grandparents alive, nearby and willing to offer care; my son and his wife know this is not the situation for most people. I’ve thought about how families manage to afford daycare at all, at the same time that I’ve wondered how people who work in daycare settings can afford to pay their own rent. Our daughter Abby worked at a local Kinder Care for a year and the pay for caring for small human beings, being responsible for their safety, wasn’t nearly commensurate with the responsibility.

I think about Maeve’s and Camille’s futures and wonder if any sense of progressive governance will be in place. And I think about getting them passports as one option for their immediate futures. My wish for my granddaughters is that they have access to other cultures, other ideas, other paths toward happy lives. They need to know their options.

It is a grandparent’s privilege and, perhaps, obligation to offer whatever they can to make the world an equitable and reasonable place for future generations. The closer we come to our own ends, the more obvious it is that trying to amass a fortune or keep everything as it was when we were younger because it worked for us (did it? did it really?) is a silly and useless way to inhabit the world.

Some days, meditation followed by a morning walk is the only thing that gets any lingering anger, fear, and anxiety out of my bones. The older I get, the more I clench my jaw and fists over what our American patriarchy has done to women, children, or anyone without privilege. I watch my adult children struggle to find jobs that pay enough to live on, secure housing, afford health care. I watch the juxtaposition of the desire for a child up against the reality of systems that don’t accommodate families, that don’t give a rat’s ass about parental leave or work-life balance. I shake my head at the women who buy into the system, who don’t stand up for other women, who would refuse the rest of us our choices around how and when to have a child knowing that there’s no mandated support system once a woman decides to carry a baby to term. Knowing that there are plenty of situations in which access to birth control and abortion make the difference between surviving and not in this country.

That there is such a divide between those who understand and oppose the implications of legislating a woman’s body and those who prefer to be Taliban-esque toward women because of some religious belief that should not influence secular law is one of the great failures of the American system. Better nationwide education with hefty curriculum on critical thinking and human rights might help.

But I am not holding my breath.

While I pulled dandelions, I thought of my mother for the umpteenth time in the past few weeks. She’s been on my mind a lot. When I was a kid in the 1970s, while Roe V. Wade was decided, Mom was very clear that abortion was a sin. Our Catholic family was not allowed to support such an idea and a law that legalized it was a terrible thing in her eyes. I believed that for a while.

And then I grew up. I had my own children. I understood the toll parenthood takes on people even as it brings incredible joy. Motherhood is not something to go into lightly, but sometimes it appears on the horizon when we least expect it, even if we’ve tried hard not to get pregnant. And it’s nobody’s business whether we carry a child to term but our own.

My mother would not approve of my current philosophy. That makes me sad, but it will not make me change my mind. I know she was not a woman who was capable of breaking free of the thinking that the Catholic Church insisted upon. She was not able to see religion from a distance, as something one chooses for their private path forward.

I remember how she thought my going to college would ruin my adherence to my religious upbringing. She’d be quite surprised, I think, to know that it wasn’t just college and the critical thinking skills I acquired. It was becoming a mother and watching my kids suffer that really did it. It was the lack of people in power applying all those lessons I learned in catechism about helping the poor, the needy, the bullied, the lonely, and others. It was living life as a woman.

My gardening journal goes back to the year 2000. I began it before my mom died. This was a startling realization as I began writing the section for this year, 2022. My need to document the evolution of our garden is about a lot of things: my growth as a gardener and a steward of this little bit of earth upon which Mick and I live, climate change as it happens right in front of us, changing ideas about what is an acceptable practice for a yard that offers a haven for living things.

It is the haven for living things that I keep coming back to as I think about our country and our courts, about how we care for each other and how we harm each other, and what we depend on laws to do: keep us safe, keep us alive. But there is no consistent haven. There is only each one of us and what we carry, what we plant. There is this world that changes and will continue to change. We must adapt our habits to meet those changes, to mitigate repercussions from the harm we’ve already done, and let go of old systems that no longer serve us. Rigid adherence to old ideas only makes us brittle.

Eventually we break. Our rigid world crumbles with us.

The Creative Self and the Mother Self

Welcome to May!

Here in Roseville, Minnesota, it’s been a long cool journey from winter to this month of flowers popping open, trees in bloom, nesting birds, and Mother’s Day. This year, snow fell here the day after Easter and again some days after that. It was so disappointing, even if it did melt immediately. But May Day is upon us. We are unquestionably on our way to summer. And I’m thinking about motherhood. May does that to me.

Mother’s Day is a day I’m very fond of – as a mother and grandmother, I’m keenly aware of the time and energy parenting requires, of the sacrifices that get made every day, of the fierce connections parents have to their children. When we are in the midst of childrearing years, creative pursuits often get sidelined or enjoyed infrequently as we address more pressing needs. And yet, the importance of honoring our creative selves remains. We store up things for later while supporting the development of another human being, our creativity occasionally peeking through as we find ways to teach our children well.

Those lessons of parenthood – grabbing moments when you have them, shifting gears on the fly, letting go of perfection – stay with us. For me, those lessons nudge me to value this time I have right now, revel in the freedom to pour paint or write essays or travel because these moments won’t come around again. I remember many instances of thinking I’d have time later to [fill in the blank]; that isn’t always true. It’s not just true for pursuing whatever creative projects I wanted to do; it’s also true for saying I love you. Those kids who demand so much of us grow up, move away, and that part of the conversation is over. Our own parents who bugged us about our choices are gone forever.

So, if you’re honoring a mother or you are a mother in need of honoring, have the conversation about what parenthood has required, the sacrifices you’ve made or the ones you recognize as being made for you. Celebrate both. Find the joy that underlies it all. Say I love you.

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I recently had an email conversation with almost-crone Lizzie Bowen (she’ll turn 50 this year) after she contacted me through One Minnesota Crone a couple of months ago. In her initial contact, she wrote of how she, “…had always wanted to be a wildlife biologist, then went on an 18-year-detour of motherhood, and now finally acknowledging that the part of me that wanted to be a biologist was really most interested in the creative and artistic aspect of biology (nature, writing, photography, artwork, interpretation of scientific language to layman’s terms, etc).” Here was another woman who did the hard work of parenting and was now figuring out how to honor her creativity in different ways. During the course of our conversation, I asked a few interview-style questions about what’s next for Lizzie. She agreed to share them for publication here in the hope that other women who are on the brink of their post-childrearing years might recognize something of themselves.

Lizzie lives in North Carolina and runs a blog – Cooped-Up Creativity (https://ultimatecreativity5.wordpress.com/) – where she publishes her own nature photos, sometimes with accompanying writing. My questions to her are in bold print. Lizzie’s answers are unedited.

You run a blog called Cooped-Up Creativity which you started at the beginning of the pandemic to inspire yourself and others. Did your daily posts do what you’d hoped? Did you rediscover your own inspiration and hear from others who also found inspiration there? How did your efforts change over the last two years?

I’ve always enjoyed creative pursuits. At the beginning of the pandemic, everything was canceled. It didn’t feel like much of a loss (I didn’t mind less time in the car!), but rather more time for creativity. Realizing I had a lot more time at home, it seemed like an ideal opportunity to seriously explore my creative side. So yes, I certainly inspired myself!

I have never been a specialist in any one particular artistic flavor. I enjoy drawing, painting, doodling, writing, creative problem solving, making music, gardening, and photography, so during the early days of the pandemic, I tried to do something (anything) creative every day.

No one has told me that I’ve inspired them, but while I’m outside doing sidewalk chalk art, I get a lot of positive feedback from passers by. Basically I enjoy working on my little projects, and if someone else also enjoys the end product, that’s a bonus.

When you contacted me, you mentioned that you’ll turn 50 this year. How do you see this time in your life? What do you find yourself leaning towards?

I feel like a kid when someone asks, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

I’m all grown up now, but still trying to figure out what I want to “be.” I see this time as an opportunity for exploring my interests. Some part of me has always wanted to “be” an artist, but I didn’t think I could earn a living as an artist (haha, so I chose wildlife biology instead, which wasn’t any more lucrative than being an artist). One life goal I have is to write and illustrate a children’s book. I have several ideas for this, and a couple of started projects, which I hope someday to finish. In the meantime, doing the UltimateCreativity blog allows me to get in touch with my artist side.

Is there any grief with your transition to a new phase of life? Talk about that a little bit.

I can’t say I feel grief. Every phase of life is simply another phase. We’re always in some sort of transition from one phase to the next. It just keeps us wondering, “What’s next?”

Shifting gears a little bit, what parts of your younger self that you gave up because life demanded it do you want to reclaim now?

Interesting question. For the past 18 years, I have been in Mom Mode. It has been a most amazing adventure raising kids, who are now teens. When they are off living independently in the world, I will feel a great sense of accomplishment. Then I look forward to autonomy. It feels selfish to say, but I look forward to a day when I can do what I want, when I want, just because I want to. This doesn’t have to be complicated, but if I want to spend the day outside working in my garden, then maybe I can do that. Or if I want to take a spontaneous day trip to hike in the mountains, then maybe I can do that too.

What makes you feel powerful?

Powerful? I am not sure I’ve ever felt powerful. Perhaps when I feel self-confident, confident in my abilities and confident in my knowledge, like when I have successfully tackled a challenging project.

What brings you joy?

A hike in the woods

Playing mandolin

Sharing a laugh with a friend

Finishing a project

Having a good conversation with my kids

Being outdoors

Feeling a sense of connection

What are you going to do just for yourself today?

Go for a walk with my camera.

Finally, what do you want to offer the world in this moment, especially other women heading into their wise years?

Have fun getting to know yourself. My favorite quote that I saw recently says it pretty well, “Life isn’t about finding yourself, it’s about creating yourself.” (George Bernard Shaw)

Self-portrait courtesy of Lizzie Bowen 2022

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Here’s to all the fierce, beautiful and creative mothers out there, who work hard every moment, who are both anxious about and look forward to the day when they have more time for themselves.

A Conversation with Poet Joanne Durham

Just in time for National Poetry Month, poet Joanne Durham’s new book, To Drink from a Wider Bowl, is a generous, life-spanning collection of work that invites readers to drink in the world. Today, I’m offering readers an interview with Joanne that I hope will shed light on the poet behind the work. Questions from One Minnesota Crone are in bold print.

Author’s bio:

Joanne Durham is the author of To Drink from a Wider Bowl, winner of the 2021 Sinclair Poetry Prize (Evening Street Press, April 1, 2022). Joanne is a retired educator living on the North Carolina coast. She draws on the rich experiences of seven decades of life to write poems that have been published or are forthcoming in Poetry East, Calyx, One Art, Gyroscope Review, Kosmos Quarterly, Quartet, Rise-Up Review, Juniper, and many other journals. Learn more about her background, publications, and awards at https://www.joannedurham.com/

What do you want people coming to your poetry for the first time to know about you?

First of all, how happy it makes me that they have come to my poetry! Poetry has enriched my life so much, and I want it to do the same for others. I’ve had a number of friends tell me that they never liked poetry, so they were surprised that they liked my poems. I think school ruined it for them, so I try to make up for some of that. When I was a teacher, I would never assign my kids to put, say, two metaphors in a poem. I would tell them instead, try to write a poem where you can’t quite bring out the joy or anger or sadness you felt unless you compare it to something else. I want people to know that I try, through my poetry, to bring something we need to live our lives more fully and richly – something we can’t quite express just in passing conversation.

A lot of us had poor experiences with the way poetry was taught to us. Your example of how you taught metaphor to kids is a lovely approach, clear and concrete. And offering poetry as a way to live more fully and richly feels like a spiritual approach, drawing from the very core of who you are. Which brings me to this: To Drink from a Wider Bowl strikes me as a Zen-like title. What philosophies feed your work?

The title is from the last two lines of the prologue poem of the book, “Old Folks”: “We are thirsty still/but drink from a wider bowl.” It’s interesting, your blog epigraph says pretty much the same thing: “Older women don’t disappear; they branch out.” Either of us could have written a long explanation, but we’re poets, so we choose to leave the reader a place to enter into the thought, to make it their own, to ponder what wasn’t said as well as what was, and to gain a deep satisfaction through metaphor and language attentive to the moment. I guess you could call that kind of Zen.

To Drink from a Wider Bowl is a kind of memoir in poetry, although I take a lot of poetic license with the facts. The poems flow from my ancestors through childhood, adolescence, loves and losses, work, progressive activism, and winding up full of the wonders of grandkids and more concerned than ever about the world I will leave to them. There’s a prose poem early in the book called “Carpool Politics, 1966” where, as a teenager, “I think for the first time that the world is a giant jigsaw puzzle and someone has hidden the picture on the cover of the box so nobody can agree on where to put the pieces…” My book is about a lifetime of trying to fit the pieces together.

Are you saying, then, that the philosophy that feeds your work is to invite contemplation of the larger world? Is there a little more to it?

If there is a theme that runs throughout my book, it’s “connections.” I believe we are all fundamentally connected to each other and to the natural world. The moments when I sense those connections most intensely are the seeds of most of my poems. We live in a society that values individualism and competition over community and collaboration. So our connections are constantly obscured, and poetry is one way to rediscover and nourish them. Reaching deeply into ourselves, connecting deeply with others, and trying together to change the circumstances that keep us in a world of conflict instead of unity – those are all connected too.

At what point did you realize that To Drink from a Wider Bowl would take the form of poetic memoir that encompassed your entire life? Was there a particular poem from the book that tipped you toward that scope versus a tighter focus?

I’ve been writing poetry all my life, but never tried to publish anything except a few poems that came out in teaching journals. But I kept all my folders and notebooks. When I retired, I decided I was going to give poetry its due. So long before I even thought about writing a book, when I was just testing the waters to see if my poetry would interest anyone besides me, I wound up writing about all these memories I had jotted down over the years. There are a couple of poems in my book that I actually wrote 30-40 years ago. There are other poems that I totally rewrote, but the original poem allowed me to keep some of the immediacy of the experience. In “Carpool Politics,” which I referred to earlier, the quote from the men in the carpool is verbatim what they said fifty years ago! After a lot of my poems got accepted in journals, I realized that I more or less had a book that traced my life over time. It was a very satisfying feeling, to think I could make this mosaic of my experiences and there was something universal in them as well.

The poem that glued it all together was “Old Folks.” I had been thinking about writing a poem about getting older for a while. I felt a lot of gratitude for getting older and annoyance at how old people are viewed in our society, and I wanted to celebrate cronedom! Then in a workshop I was introduced to the technique of taking 10-15 random words out of a poetry anthology and using as many of them as possible in a poem. I did that and wrote “Old Folks.” I never would have come up with “time stretches/like an accordion” or “we are thirsty still/but drink from a wider bowl” if “accordion” and “thirst” and “bowl” weren’t in my word list! But once I had written that poem, I knew it would anchor the book. I could say right up front how I felt about being older, and then travel back and trace how I got there through the sections of the book, each section titled with a phrase from that first poem. Once I had that general approach, I played around with the sections and wrote some new poems to fill out parts that seemed thin.

What does your creative process look like?

I usually write whatever comes into my head and come back to it days or weeks later and see if there’s a nugget of something there to turn into a poem. I keep coming back to see what else it needs, until I’ve gotten as far as I can. Then I take the poem to one or more of my critique groups to find out how it sits with other readers. I sift through their perceptive comments and almost always revise some more. A few poems were “gifts” – they rolled around in my head and came out pretty much fully formed. But that’s rare.

What is the greatest thing about being a poet at this stage of your life?

Time! I have time to really study craft. For years I thought you’d lose the inspiration and emotion of a poem if you tried to revise it! It was a huge moment for me when I realized the difference between writing to release something you need for yourself, which of course is totally fine, and writing to connect with readers. Craft to me is how to make that connection happen, and I can’t get enough of absorbing it from poets I admire. Another great thing is that I have a lot more experiences to write about than I did at twenty. And I’ve been able to connect with wonderful poets all over the country – some in other parts of the world. I get to be immersed in poetry, something I’ve loved all my life, but always put on the back burner. Now it’s right up front!

Which poets or artists have been the most influential in your writing life? Do you have a favorite?

In high school I fell in love with Walt Whitman’s poetry. I still have my hardbound copy of Leaves of Grass even though my dog ate half the cover. As a young woman I discovered the poetry of Adrienne Rich, Marge Piercy, Judy Grahn, Denise Levertov, Audrey Lorde – women poets who spoke directly to me. As a teacher I found Naomi Shihab Nye, first through her poetry for kids and then for everyone, and I always go back to her when I need to reaffirm what I find essential in poetry – a light that shines with compassion into both our inner and outer worlds. There are many contemporary poets I’ve discovered over the past few years, famous and not famous at all, whose poems continually inspire me.

I adore Naomi Shihab Nye. I took a workshop with her in Minneapolis several years ago and have heard her read a couple of times. And there are so many poets who offer work that resonates for all kinds of reasons, it’s hard to choose a favorite. And I find that poetry is a great springboard for other kinds of art. Do you create any other forms of art besides poetry? Are there forms you’d like to try?

I liked to draw as a kid but never pursued it and don’t think I will. I write lots of books for my grandkids, but they often turn out as poetry. I think I’m stuck with poetry.

Lucky grandkids! Do you have any other work forthcoming?

Yes, I have a chapbook, On Shifting Shoals, being published by Kelsay Books, probably at the end of this year. It’s about the southern beach town where I’ve lived for the past ten years. It’s part eco-poetry, part observations about the people who live at or visit the beach, part astonishment at the daily beauty of the ocean I’m so lucky to have as my backyard. I’m always writing and sending poems off to the myriad of journals, online and in print, that allow me to connect with readers and other poets all the time.

Where can people get a copy of To Drink from a Wider Bowl?

They can order it from Evening Street Press, https://eveningstreetpress.com/book-author/joanne-durham/. It’s also available through Amazon, and if people want a signed copy (and live in the US) they can contact me through my website, https://www.joannedurham.com/. Feedback and connections are always welcome too!

Thank you so very much for sharing a bit of yourself.

Two poems from To Drink from a Wider Bowl:

Old Folks

weather things. We hold our tongues
when young women bemoan their first
gray hairs. We doze off to dream
mid-afternoons on worn, cushioned couches, 
then lie with unclosed eyes through the deep holes
of night. There's a haze that hovers above
dates, faces, places -- when was the summer
of the beach house in Ocracoke? Which snow rose
over the sills? Memory no longer chirrs
like an eager bird easing into morning wings, sipping
on rain that drips from every rafter. Time stretches
like an accordion, stores lullabies, love songs 
and funeral chords between its folds. We are
thirsty still, but drink from a wider bowl.

Maps

Every home
needs a map of the world.
Hang it by the entrance.
Bless it as you might
a cross or a mezuzah
when you come and go.
Trace your finger across continents
not your own.
Say names of countries whose sounds
tickle your throat and move your lips
differently from your own language.
Be curious about who lives there,
sharing seas and stars.
Hope to meet them,
fellow earth-dwellers,
all calling this planet
home.

National Poetry Month is Upon Us

Do you read poetry? If so, this is the month for you. There is poetry to suit every sensibility and reading level. My preference is for contemporary work, especially that of women poets. I have a few suggestions for you.

My friends over at Gyroscope Review, a quarterly contemporary poetry journal that I co-founded with current editor Constance Brewer, released their spring issue today and I’m thrilled that one of my paintings is on the cover. Constance also used some of my photos inside the issue. Click on the cover below to see a list of the many fine poets published in this issue and to get a copy of your own.

I’m also celebrating the one-year anniversary of the publication of my chapbook, How We Learned to Shut Our Own Mouths (Gyroscope Press 2021). My son’s artwork graces its cover. The book was, in part, a response to the emotional upheaval of the pandemic. The poems are grounded in family and the Minnesota landscape, contemporary in tone and form. You can get a copy by clicking on the cover below.

Recently, I was contacted by poet Joanne Durham regarding her new book out today: To Drink from a Wider Bowl (Evening Street Press 2022). The poems encompass a lifetime of connections with family and the world, covering the phases so many of us move through with rich layers of attention and love. I’m really pleased that Joanne agreed to an interview about her work and to celebrate her publication which will appear on One Minnesota Crone on April 15. In the meantime, click on the cover below to get a copy of To Drink from a Wider Bowl.

I know there’s plenty of other work to celebrate, but we can start right here. That said, I’ll leave you with a poem that I particularly like by Naomi Shihab Nye. Her work always gets my attention for the sense of kindness that runs through all of it, so, of course, I thought I would share her poem titled, “Kindness.” The link for the poem below will take you to the American Academy of Poets website, Poets.org. Enjoy.

Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye

Room to Make Art

This week’s writing happened in my makeshift art studio. The space is a piece of our laundry room into which I’ve wheeled a stainless steel table with painting supplies on the bottom shelf and where I’ve commandeered a wide windowsill for holding drying racks and a mason jar full of paint brushes. There are two windows in this room – one facing north and one facing east – for some pretty nice natural light. There’s a massively bright shop light that I’ve screwed into the light fixture; it has three paddle-shaped LED lights that tilt to make them as efficient as possible for whatever task is at hand. I learned right after I installed it late last year that if one of the paddles is tilted so it shines out the window, anyone looking in risks getting blinded. The laundry sink is perfect for washing out silicon paint cups and stirrers and palette knives.

I’m trying to stop calling this studio a makeshift space. It’s the space that was available, the space where I could both make a mess and clean stuff up. It beats being in the garage, where I started out two years ago. I can daydream by looking out the window, which consumed a bit of my time as I wrote this piece. I have a shop stool that is comfortable in the way a bar stool is comfortable – plop down, put my feet on the foot rail, belly up to the table.

But it isn’t just the appropriation of laundry room space that nudges me to qualify how I refer to this art-making space. It’s the matter of getting used to saying out loud that I make art sometimes even though I’m not formally trained as a visual artist. It’s a matter of me not wanting to sound like I’m more than I am, yet still honoring the part of me that loves to spill paint onto surfaces and manipulate it until it delights me and maybe someone else.

I have artists in my family. I’m keenly aware of the huge amount of hours they spent learning their skills, understanding color and light and assorted materials. It’s very similar to the amount of time writers spend honing their skills. My son is an artist. Watching him move from skateboarding teenager who doodled on any available surface to a respected co-founder of a Minneapolis art collective and high school art teacher has inspired me in all kinds of creative endeavors. We’ve had the best discussions about how creative process is alike across disciplines – writing, painting, other forms of art – which helped me decide to move beyond creative writing and into paint pouring. Yes, I picked a form of painting that would let me in without knowing how to draw. There’s that.

But there’s more to it. I’m feeling an endless urge to do something creative coupled with a growing fatigue with putting down words on a page. Maybe that’s partly due to all the angry words flung around every second that don’t make the world a better place, words that add to the drumbeat of war or the chasm between haves and have-nots. It feels like nothing I can say will make anything better right now. And I sure as hell am not one to offer a useless gesture of thoughts and prayers. Those are just more words to get us off the hook.

Pouring paint is active. Movement. Light. It doesn’t always require an explanation, a meter, word substitution. It does offer space to think about other actions while offering some beauty on a primal sort of level.

While I wish it hadn’t taken me quite this long to come to making visual art, I am clear that there is no such thing as too late. I’m learning new skills, thinking about light, looking for metaphors that I can carry out into the world. This is what art offers us. This is part of what makes it sacred.

Okay, I do have to stop saying this is a makeshift studio space. It’s become much more than that over the past two years.

Welcome to my studio.

What kind of wordless beauty would you like to offer the world? Where would you like to create your offerings? Chime in with a comment.

One of my paintings will be featured on the cover of the spring 2022 issue of Gyroscope Review, due out in April.

Featured images by KCMickelson 2022.

Dear Diary, You’ve Gotten Dusty

Feb. 18, 2022 – Friday – Mick’s last day as a professor in the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Minnesota. Tomorrow, he will be known as professor emeritus. Yesterday, we cleaned out the last bits of stuff from his office. He’s been tossing out stuff for weeks, so there were only a few boxes’ worth of things to load into his car. It didn’t take long and there was no one around that we saw. In, out, gone. When I thought about how Mick and I met near the doorway to that very office, back in the 1990s when I was a University employee, single parent, and part-time college student, I got tears in my eyes. End of an era. Damn.

At least tonight, our kids will be over and we’ll all be together.

Feb. 19, 2022 – Saturday – Mick has his first nap by 9:30 a.m. There was much debate last night about how many naps a day Mick will take now that he’s retired. I sent a quick picture of him snoozing to my son Shawn, told him he should get credit for guessing more naps than Mick admitted to.

Friends over for the evening. Thank god. We laughed our asses off.

Feb. 20, 2022 – Sunday – Up at 5:30, out the door around 6:30, up north to see if we could see owls. Nope. Lots of other birds. Lots of snow. Into the ditch at one point; snowy roads, slick surfaces. Tow truck guy was very nice and the car was fine, so we continued on. Still no owls.

Feb. 22, 2022 – 2/22/22 – Twosday – Sitting at my desk on a snowy Tuesday. First week of Mick’s retirement.

Emotional morning. Watched a video compilation from all kinds of people with whom Mick worked, supervised, mentored, collaborated. Messages poured in from all over the world. By the end, we were both choked up. While Mick continued in a Google Meet with colleagues who put the video together, I came upstairs and cried.

The weekend was great, though. Family. Friends. A drive up north. Laughter. Love. Pie.

When did we get to be old? There’s still too much to do. Even two years ago, this moment seemed very far away. Yet here we are.

I don’t write in my private journal much anymore. There was a time when I did so nearly every day; it was what kept me sane when I had kids at home, was in grad school, trying to write, and was often unsuccessful at balancing everything. Later, I switched to a gratitude journal; this taught me to look at the world for what went right rather than what went wrong. I’m still working on that one, but the shift in my outlook is significant. Anyway, today I feel like both journals might be useful right about now as Mick and I navigate a life in which huge daily connections and responsibilities are now gone. It is Mick’s retirement from work, yes, but it flows into what is us, our conversations, our time management as a couple, our travel, happy hours, sharing of stresses. Often, we talk about the overlap of creativity and science, ways that the writing we each do – or did – is similar and how it is different. I’m a little startled at how intertwined I feel as Mick separates himself from University teaching and research.

Having been home together most of the time since the pandemic shut everything down has made our transition very different from that of our parents or others retirees we know. We’ve already figured out how to do our own things within this space and not get in each other’s way. And maybe some of that intertwined feeling I’m having is because now we’ve seen, up close, details about how we each do our work, details that used to be contained in Mick’s office on campus while mine were done in a home office in an empty house. I’ve heard enough lab remote meeting snippets to know that Mick is a kind, caring colleague who will be missed. I like his colleagues. Having them all appear on a screen in our living room most weekday mornings has made for a comfortable virtual community. It reminded me that I liked having my own colleagues around in other jobs I held long ago.

I’m grateful that Mick is going to attend Tuesday morning remote lab meetings for a while, keeping up on student progress, on grant progress, whatever else those meetings involve. I can’t imagine a world without these carefully tended connections, without this community of people who are doing good work.

That said, there are other kinds of community, some we already have and some we’ve yet to discover. And the whole world is shifting as I write this, war erupting in Ukraine, forcing us to look once again beyond our own small lives. Retirement may not look anything like we thought it might even last week. These communities we’ve held close, built up, are more fragile than we usually admit. I wasn’t going to talk about the beginnings of a war here, in this space that is a refuge, but knew I couldn’t leave it unacknowledged.

My drawer of blank journals is waiting for me to open it, choose a new journal just for this moment. Another kind of refuge. Another space to imagine how I want to be in this world. Another opportunity for figuring out how to do more good than bad.

Speaking of Doing Good Work….

Recently, a woman reached out to me through the contact form at One Minnesota Crone, asking about collaborating on something to-be-determined. She shared she’ll be turning 50 soon. I was pleased to see her email, but unsure how to proceed. This was someone I’d never met, never corresponded with, so saying yes to a collaboration was not going to happen on my end just yet. After much thought, I decided interviewing her felt right. That way, both of us could get a feel for how we each work and I could promote her photography website, which I like quite a lot, at the same time. I also got clear in my own mind that I’m not interested in on-going collaborations, but one-time collaborations could work well.

How do those of you out there who collaborate choose those with whom you work? What sorts of one-time collaborations have you done that surprised you? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

And, if you are interested in contacting me for a potential interview about your own creative work in a future One Minnesota Crone post, please contact me HERE.

Firsts, Lasts, What-ifs

These past few months have been wistful, sometimes sad, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes a bit nerve-wracking with all the changes happening at our house. My partner Mick is retiring after 40 years at the University of Minnesota’s College of Veterinary Medicine, first as a post-doc, then assistant professor, then associate professor, tenure achieved, then full professor. There were grants and publications and lectures, there were grad students and lab assistants and conferences all over the world. There were the celebrations of discoveries to benefit both animals and people.

And now Mick’s moving into a different way of being. It’s odd for me to think of him as not doing professor-ish things every day, although he’s been awarded the title of emeritus professor which will remain his forever. Recently, as I watched him scribble a few words to say at what would be his last faculty meeting, it really hit me that so much of our lives are now behind us instead of in front of us.

The day Mick was scribbling those words was also the day I dumped over ten years’ worth of old One Minnesota Writer posts into the trash, by which I mean digital trash and who knows where that goes exactly. But I, too, was in the process of letting go of things, saying goodbye to the old site I ran for over a decade, plucking out only 12 posts to save and offer here at One Minnesota Crone. I guess they’re some sort of proof of what I’ve been doing with my writing life besides editing other people’s poems, something I retired from during this pandemic. I firmly believe that there’s more writing to come, that I don’t have to hold onto everything I’ve ever written. Editing work, although rewarding in so many ways, takes a lot out of me and often stops me from making my own work. Sometimes a clearing of space is just the thing, including the mental space that gets stuffed with too many projects to which I’ve said yes.

Can we clear too much space? Not sure. But sometimes I do clear off my own decks with a huge sweep, perhaps creating a bit of discomfort for those who wanted me to be somewhere with them. I’m not sure where I got that undeniable urge that pops up every few years to reset everything. It happens when I start counting how many projects are going on at once and realize that I am not meant to multitask. I’d rather do one really good thing than a bunch of half-assed things.

Time does feel like it’s closing in, like we can’t waste a single day doing anything that doesn’t matter. That said, sometimes what matters is silence, quiet expansion of our own awareness, a clear look at what is here in front of us. To wit: a pandemic, angry and divided Americans, our children and their children, a climate begging us to do better by it. What a time to be retiring – which can be a great statement of anticipation if we spin it just right.

We do have things lined up: helping care for our baby granddaughter, time with people about whom we care, Mick’s saxophone playing, my painting and writing, travel when it’s safe to do so, hiking, exercise. It’s the letting go of other daily routines that feels daunting. It’s the necessity of paying enough attention that we don’t slide into days that all look the same. One of the saddest things I ever heard was an old friend who said, “We’re retired. Weekends don’t matter. All the days are the same.” Mick and I never want to be of that mindset. Ever. The possibility of awe will not disappear unless we let it. We’re not going to let it.

So, this season of lasts needs to be flipped around to a season of firsts. First weeks of a new phase. First Monday we go hiking instead of drinking coffee before Mick’s first Zoom of the day. First day we take granddaughter Maeve out in a stroller in our neighborhood. First weekday drive to an Airbnb up north just because we can. First night spent next to Lake Superior since the pandemic began. First volunteer gig we agree on.

I nearly forgot to schedule my annual mammogram amidst all the other stuff going on. After a reminder from my doctor, I scheduled an appointment at the end of the first week in February. I opted for the 3D kind based on past recommendations. All seemed to be going well, although one breast needed a second squeeze in the machine. Since it was done on a Friday, I didn’t expect to see any results in My Chart – the online medical results service – until Monday.

I got a phone call instead. That’s never a good thing. I had to schedule an ultrasound because something showed up on the mammogram. Writing about this still puts a pit in my stomach, makes my throat close a little. Other women old enough for mammograms, who’ve been called back for more, know what I mean.

I’ve been called back before. This is a common enough occurrence. But the fear this strikes in any of us who’ve experienced it is also common. The what-if thought spigot turns on full-blast and even if I succeed in turning it off, there’s still a nagging drip-drip-drip, a dribble of anger that the possibility of illness shows up right now, when life is shifting in so many other ways. And a quiet voice in my head that says, well, why not now? And why not me? My partner’s looming retirement celebration is not a magic veil that will protect me from bad things.

The two days between the phone call and the ultrasound felt shadowed. I didn’t tell my kids. There was nothing to tell yet, except that I was worried and Mick was worried. I breathed through morning meditation with Mick, settled into my body, asked it if there’s really something manifesting inside me that will change everything so quickly. There was only silence.

I tried to remain calm.

Life is full of what-ifs. What if I don’t wake up early enough? What if I don’t stay patient enough? What if I don’t love others enough? What if I don’t realize what I can do better before I’m no longer here to fix it?

Those are all great questions. All I – all we – can do is practice.

The morning of my ultrasound, Mick and I decided I would post his donation page at the JDRF One Walk we are participating in on April 30 and call it a retirement gift to him. He isn’t on Facebook. I opened my laptop and made the post, crossed my fingers. Since the pandemic has caused us to postpone any retirement celebrations except for having our kids over, this felt like a nice gesture.

And then it was time for me to go.

The Breast Health Center at Regions Hospital in St. Paul, Minnesota, is a revelation in how to deliver medical care to women. Soft lighting. Kind people. Gowns that are warm, like bathrobes, that snap in the front instead of the thin tie-around-you gowns at a typical mammogram appointment. The room where ultrasounds are done is also softly lit, with calm music playing in the background. The gel for the ultrasound procedure is warmed, like a little spa treatment on my breast.

When I’m told that the image from the mammogram is nothing more than a simple benign cyst, I cry. The ultrasound tech understands completely.

When I text Mick, he immediately responds with a message beginning in capital letters: OMG. Thank you.

The day I began this essay, Mick saw a great horned owl in the tree behind our house. He was silhouetted against the barest glimmer of dawn, everything below him in shadow. Mick almost always gets up earlier than I do, his inability to sleep past 6 a.m. most days legendary. He thought about waking me, then didn’t as the owl flew away within 15 seconds of Mick seeing him.

I told him to go ahead and wake me when he sees owls. Wake me when he sees something that fills him with awe, even if I don’t get there in time. I will do the same for him. We can’t know unless we try. We’re moving forward together, awake, ready for the next thing. And the thing after that.

We don’t have time to miss any of it.

One Minnesota Crone

Older women don't disappear. They branch out.

A Winter Morning Story: What Parents of Adult Children Think About

January is the worst time for car trouble. Cars never fail us when convenient or when the weather is nice. So, when my daughter-in-law Beka called me one recent evening to ask if I could help her get her car to the garage for repair early the next morning, I said yes without hesitation.

Beka had dropped my granddaughter Camille off at her elementary school in Richfield that morning, no problem. She went home with baby Maeve, who is three months old, and settled in at the dining room table to work remotely. Their dog, Martin, a lab mix who can easily intimidate those who don’t know him, slept on the couch in front of the living room window. Beka’s Hyundai was resting comfortably on the street in front of the house.

Late in the day, around 5:00 p.m., Beka and Camille headed out for Camille’s Monday night swim club. Beka started up her car, startled to hear it roar to life at the decibel level of a cargo plane landing in their front yard. My son Shawn ran from the house to see what happened.

“Catalytic converter?” he asked.

Beka told me her eyes must have been very large as she looked at Shawn and nodded.

When I showed up the next morning to follow Beka to the garage, hot coffee in my travel mug at the ready, it was eleven degrees below zero. Shawn had already left for his teaching job at an alternative high school that is not doing distance learning. I took Maeve in my nice warm car and followed Beka’s rumbling, roaring Hyundai south on Nicollet Avenue to 77th Street, turned right, then left into the Honda dealership where she bought the vehicle used less than a year ago. Maeve was completely unperturbed, snug in her car seat. I almost forgot she was there.

Beka hoped that maybe it was really a broken muffler. She hoped that maybe someone didn’t steal the catalytic converter. But the mechanic quickly dismissed that idea with a peek under her car. Nope, he said, it’s gone. They got you. She handed her car keys to the mechanic, came outside and plopped into the passenger seat in my car, and said she feels like she just can’t have nice things.

Damn thieves.

I drove Beka and Maeve back to their house, so Beka could settle in and do some work while Maeve explored her own fingers and toes. I went on my way back to my own house carefully, aware that black ice on these subzero Minnesota winter days is a dangerous thing. The local radio station I keep on in my car gave frequent reports of spinouts and crashes littering the Twin Cities freeways as the black ice built up from rush hour car exhaust.

While I crept home, I thought about how glad I was that I can help when something like this happens. That I’m available. That being a grandmother, mother, and mother-in-law means there are people who depend on me sometimes, just as I depend on them sometimes. We are there for one another on any given day.

When I had my first apartment without a roommate, my father would show up unannounced every chance he got. He invented assorted reasons to be there: paper towels were on sale so he figured I could use some, that coupon for tacos was going to expire and it was lunchtime, and just when was the last time I changed my oil. I was the youngest kid in the family, the one whose absence ushered in the era in which my parents lived alone. They had no one in-house to care for but themselves.

Many parents live for that moment when they get their house to themselves and they can stop scheduling stuff around their kids. Not my dad. He genuinely missed us – me, my sisters, my brother. He loved rushing to the scene if one of our cars broke down or the furnace broke or we ran out of toilet paper and had no more money until payday. He relished using his senior discount at the nearest fast food place to buy us lunch, or a stop at the liquor store for some Blatz Cream Ale that he could share with us on a hot day.

After my mother died, my father had the worst time staying home by himself. He wanted to be with us, or at least talk to us, daily.

I still regret that I wasn’t the same kind of cavalry for my father that he was for me. As a parent with a teenage boy and a young daughter whose type 1 diabetes kept me from sleeping through the night for years, I often didn’t have enough to go around. Those daily phone calls sometimes made me cranky. But I did show up often enough that those fast food menus my father loved remained something I knew by heart.

My son Shawn calls me every week or so just to chat; if more than a week goes by, I’ll call him. We each pour ourselves a beer or a whiskey in our own respective kitchens and chat about nothing in particular. We pick apart politics, news, swap what we know about the rest of the family. I listen while Shawn talks about his job, how rough it is for teachers right now in this pandemic moment. He is exhausted. Camille is on the brink of her teenage years, while baby Maeve is still working on holding up her head. Shawn and Beka want to buy a house, something they’ve been waiting ten years to do while they launched careers, climbed out of debt, became parents.

I’m so glad they have each other.

I’m so glad Shawn talks to me.

Shawn cares deeply about his students, his artwork (he teaches art and creates his own), his family. He cares about doing the right thing. Somehow, I have a son who sees the big picture and understands how important it is to contribute to it.

I used to chat with my dad this same way. We talked about politics, too, and my dad once told me that the University people I hung around with (my husband is a professor in the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Minnesota) intimidated him. I couldn’t understand why; my father could hold his own with anyone.

He didn’t agree. But I’m quite sure I was right about that. And I can see him in Shawn.

My daughter Abby is thirteen years younger than Shawn. She is married to Joe, without children, still in her twenties, still launching her career path. We don’t talk as frequently as I would like, but our last couple of conversations have been wonderfully free of the subtle tension mother-daughter conversations often contain. This is something I’ve been waiting for as Abby moves further away from her teenage years. I’m delighted that it seems to be happening.

I have been Abby’s cavalry from time to time: when her car wouldn’t start one subzero day after work, when moving into a new house felt overwhelming, when she needed a ride to the emergency room. And I’ve been there in little ways: when she wanted Christmas lights and I knew she had no extra money, when she mentioned she missed my raspberry muffins so I surprised her with a batch. I’ve been working hard to be kind, be generous, and zip it if she chooses a path I would not. I can feel deep inside myself now what Dad was doing when he showed up at my door with the paper towels: if you have a concrete reason to be there beyond your simple desire to just lay eyes on your kid, then someone has to open the door. And you do that kind of thing, being generous, bringing something thoughtful over – paper towels, muffins, a ride somewhere – until the door opens no matter what. Until you don’t need a reason other than love.

Maybe my dad didn’t need me to be his cavalry. He was teaching me to be one to my own kids. He was telling me to pay it forward before it was a fashionable thing to say.

Back to Beka. Those damn thieves. Yes, I said that earlier and I’m saying it again because they took more than a catalytic converter. They were being selfish, thoughtless, unable to see who they hurt with their crime. I’ll bet they have no one who comes to help them. Why else would stealing be part of how they survive? Those of us who have a family, a community, a support system are able to get what we need to make it through the winter. Through the pandemic. Through life.

There are those who think we can’t change the world or change other people, but I disagree. Give others a chance to change and then believe it when they do. If we can see changes in ourselves and our kids, we can see changes in others, too. It starts with just showing up. Maybe with muffins. Maybe with a warm car.

Maybe with nothing but a full heart.