Archive

Our last night in Mexico, Declan stayed up way past his bedtime playing Uno with some tipsy Midwestern divorcees... wait, maybe I should start this story a different way.

On Saturday, our hotel was taking part in Earth Hour, a global initiative to, something, to show support for climate change action by turning off lights, I think? There was a note in the Activities Calendar suggesting that everyone turn off their hotel room lights and join the Activities staff (the Fun Team) for some poolside entertainment. The Activities director--his name is Alejandro, not Antonio, I had remembered it wrong in my previous letter. Alejandro, who is lovely and also sort of omnipresent at the resort--he was the iguana guy, he handed out smores kits for beachside smores, he ran the ping-pong tournament--Alejandro came around talking to everyone at the pool Saturday morning to encourage us to attend. "We'll have some casino games for the adults," he said, "and some board games for the kids."

When Saturday night rolled around, Dec and I went to check out Earth Hour at the poolside. We had just wrapped up Mayan Night at the hotel restaurant--as I explained to some coworkers before the trip, we were really going all in on being Hotel Activities People.

Earth Hour was pretty sparsely attended. The casino games ended up being a single blackjack table, and board games just meant Uno. They had a second blackjack table ready, but not enough people to play, so while Luis from the Fun Team dealt blackjack, Alejandro and two other Fun Team guys hung out playing Uno with Declan. The first few hands of blackjack, I kept popping back to ask Dec how he was doing, but he waved me off--he was fine, stop bothering him--so I just focused on my own game.

When the plane started to descend through the clouds, I almost started to laugh--from above they were brilliant white, poofed up like cotton, big pillars stretching upward into the sky. I remember being five or six years old, flying with my mother to visit family in Chicago, staring out the window and when she said we were almost there, all I could see was clouds, and I thought, but where do you put the city in all of these clouds? It felt like that again for a second, unreal.

Also I was just very tired. The week before we left was a nightmare, at work at least, and the anxiety seeped through to everything else, finally latching on to the trip itself, specifically the flight. The night before, I mostly didn't sleep--the weather report showed thunderstorms in Cancun all afternoon, we'd be stuck at JFK, or the flight would be cancelled, something something it all goes horribly wrong. Nothing, as it turned out, went horribly wrong, but I didn't even start to relax until well after we'd checked in.

Two years of Duolingo Spanish have paid off to the point where I can mutter to myself, as I dig around in my totebag in the hallway, "hay dos llaves en mi bolsa y no puedo encontrar nada." Not sure that the "nada" is correct there, though.

So on Sunday I had lunch with an old friend visiting from out of town–we met up at a restaurant in Manhattan, and the whole walk from the subway to the restaurant I kept remembering this band that used to play outside of our apartment in Williamsburg. The last summer in that apartment, this band was out playing on the corner on weekends, sometimes all day. I didn’t mind them, except that they had such a limited set. For the people strolling down Bedford Ave, hearing these guys for five minutes and then moving on, it was pretty pleasant. For the people with the open windows four stories above them, it was rough going with them only having three or four songs. The best song, and the longest, had very long stretches where the lead singer just kept repeating, over and over, “and it’s cold and wet… and it’s cold and wet… AND IT’S COLD AND WET.”

This is obviously a digression.

Anyway, we met up at the restaurant, a quick hug and oh my god how has it been so long, etc. As we sat down I started babbling out some awkwardness–the plan had originally been for Matt and Declan to be with me for lunch, the location chosen because we were triangulating with two of our family holiday traditions (the angel tree at the Met in the morning, Tuba Christmas at Rockefeller Center in the afternoon). I’d emailed that morning, hey change of plans, it’s just going to be me, Declan’s home sick and Matt’s going to stay with him. Hey by the way, I have no symptoms whatsoever and Declan’s tested negative for Covid twice now, but I would totally understand if you wanted to cancel lunch, as they say, an abundance of caution and I’ve got a sick kid in the house. He said no, it’s fine, and so there we were, eating Sichuan on the Upper East Side.

I made a half-hearted joke, as we settled in, about being well past the days where you could give your kid Tylenol and go about your normal day. I couldn’t quite read the expression on his face, so I kept going–we used to do that, you know, and it wasn’t just us, it’s like a running joke with the parents I know, like, can you believe we used to do that. But we did. There were a lot of days when Dec was in daycare where he’d have a fever and we’d just give him some baby Tylenol and pack him up for the day, fingers crossed that he made it through enough of the day that I didn’t have to call out of work again. I never did it if I thought he was, like, sick sick, just when he had some dumb little-kid fever like little kids get. (He ran fevers every time a tooth came in, for instance.) (Also, hi Erica, I’m so sorry.)

We went to see the Rockettes once, when I was little. I forget how old I was exactly, but probably eight or nine? We hardly ever came into New York despite living not very far away at all, so it was a big Special Occasion. I remember that I had a new dress, and my mom did my hair with her big pink rollers, and I had a brand-new patent-leather pocketbook. Because my father hates spending money at theater concessions, my brand-new patent-leather pocketbook was packed absolutely full of candy. (Goldberg’s Peanut Chews. How on earth I can remember that detail with such clarity is beyond me, but there we are. Also I would like to point out that this was the mid-1980s, not the 1950s, and I was a nine year old girl with plastic-roller curls and a patent-leather pocketbook full of Goldberg’s Peanut Chews.)

Oh, boo, I’m too tired to not be boring, and I hate being boring. Extended-family holiday party this weekend, which we haven’t been able to do for several years (Because Pandemic) and it was a pleasure to fall back on old routines. We made the trip to Long Island by train with a tray of brownies on our lap, Declan played foosball with his cousins, the grownups all traded small holiday gifts, and before it was all over we did a giant Twelve Days of Christmas sing-a-long complete with signs that have been in the family for so long that I recognize the old Apple IIe Print Shop font. (I can never remember all the parts of the song, and I am not alone in that, so the signs are good for cueing which are the ladies dancing and which are the lords a-leaping. Also the French Hens are penguins.) It’s kitschy but good, and it feels good to watch my kid take swings at a pinata in the same room where six years ago he stretched out on the floor underfoot and played with hand-me-down toy trucks.

This goes back at least to the summer that Declan turned one. It was my first summer at home with him, and at a loss for what to do with a wiggly baby, I signed him up for baby gymnastics. The only class I could find for kids his age (eleven months, at the start of that summer) was at the Little Gym in Brooklyn Heights. We took the subway down there once or twice a week; class was once a week, but the class registration included free access to “open gym” hours, and since we lived at the time in a one-and-a-half bedroom fourth-floor walkup apartment, “open gym” was a big bonus. To get to class, we took the G to… wow, I don’t even remember. Bergen maybe? When Declan was a few years older, we’d say the names of the stations we passed through, but this first year, he was just a squiggly lump in the baby harness. (Oh god, what are those things even called, the baby carriers that hold them all snugged up against your body? I could obviously just look it up but it’s crazy that I can’t even remember.) Ninety degrees and humid, a New York City summer, I’d bundle him up against my body in the baby carrier and walk to the subway, down the stairs and on the train and up the stairs again, and because I was so worried about being late for class (and so bored, those long summer days with the baby) we would always get there thirty or forty minutes early. If I brought him into the gymnastics place that early, he would lose his goddamn mind about having to stay in the waiting room, so I would walk around the neighborhood with him, but you can only do that for so long.

The good news was, there was a Petco across the street. It is possible, barely, to kill twenty or thirty minutes in a Petco, especially with a small child. Petco stores always have a lot of live animals. It’s like a really low-rent and depressing zoo. “Ooh, look, parakeets! Oh wow, watch the hamster on the little wheel, look at him go! Oh, huh, there are people in New York who are really going to buy rats as pets? That’s amazing.” We clocked a lot of time in the Petco that summer, and we spent most of it in the fish section, dreamily admiring the tanks. And picking up little brochures. And pricing out tank setups.

There was no way we could manage a fishtank in that apartment. The next apartment, in Greenpoint, I had the nagging feeling that we’d need landlord approval. (Our lease in that apartment, the section that specified NO PETS ALLOWED was more detailed and more emphatic than the section that outlined penalties for failure to pay rent. They were, it seemed, Very Serious about NO PETS ALLOWED. One could argue, as I sometimes did inside my head, that fish aren’t really pets. One would then perhaps remember that the lease also had a lengthy and detailed prohibition on water beds, and one would imagine that the landlords would not agree that fish aren’t really pets.) Landlord approval aside, there was still the problem of where you might even possibly put a fishtank. I loved that apartment, it was a good home for us for many years, but there was not an inch of extra space anywhere.

Anyway. The new house, it has plenty of space. It took us a while to get settled, but as we mapped out the space in the main floor, I staked a claim for an aquarium. It was part of the map of the dining room–the table is here, the bookshelf can go here, we’ll put the piano along this wall, and on this side there’s room for a fishtank. Putting all the pieces together in that room took a while, but we all agreed, there’s room for a fishtank. That was the starting point.

Today was the kind of day where I woke up tired, creaked around through my morning, bickered with my kid over breakfast,fought with my pants while getting dressed, and had to stop for a rest on the walk in to work. I made a few mistakes with scheduling things at work today, and then picked up two extra periods’ of work to cover coworkers out sick, so I spent my day pinging from meeting to class to phone calls to more meetings, ate lunch at my desk with so many interruptions that I had to re-heat it before I finished eating it. I was a few minutes late picking Dec up at school–not late, actually, but he told me a couple of weeks ago that it makes him really happy when I’m already there and waiting when he comes out at dismissal, so I’ve been trying to be there at three-ten instead of three-fifteen. Anyway it didn’t work today and then I had more meetings and phone calls, shoved a snack in his hand and asked him to do his homework in the conference room.

It’s a perfect day to have committed to writing a newsletter every day for the month of December, is what I’m saying.

Actually it is, because this is just life, right? There are the days where things are smooth and days where they’re bumpy, but sometimes I suspect that adulthood is one long string of days where you’re too tired and you feel like you’re not doing anything right. (I know, I know, it’s not literally like that every day.) Tomorrow I’ll try to be interesting–today I’m just trying to be here.

For so long, gardening meant just trying to coax anything at all to grow. Our backyard in Greenpoint was essentially bare earth when we moved in–when we saw the apartment it had a lawn, but drought and neglect killed most of the grass, and we started with a beautiful empty space. Matt researched shade-friendly grass mixes, we encouraged whatever would grow, I tried every year different plants in big pots and beds, different wildflower mixes on the borders. The fight was just to get things to grow, anything to grow.

Our last year or two in that apartment, things had started to shift. Things grew in our little fairy-garden space, and then too many things grew, and I had to be selective. Mostly I encouraged the volunteer plants, but this one fast-growing leafy thing, if I didn’t cull it back every week or two it would take over entirely, and then nothing else would grow. So I pulled it out, and kept pulling it out, stalk after stalk after stalk. We had a routine–I’d pull it out over and over again all through the spring and summer, and then when school started again in the fall I’d lose track of it, and it would take over the garden through the fall, growing bushy and green just when everything else was dying. In October, when I’d given up on growing things, the whole sea of weedy things would suddenly bloom these pretty little white flowers, one last wave goodbye from the yard before it was time to cut everything back for winter.

And then we moved. This house has so much more of a yard–it’s not, like, suburban-yard big, but it’s extravagantly big for a city yard. And the previous owner clearly loved this yard–someone put a lot of thought into the plantings, and I’m trying to honor that. (As an aside, I just assumed that when we moved out of the Greenpoint apartment our landlords were going to clear the yard back to bare earth. I had good reason to think that–the landlords oversaw maintenance of the yard next door to us, and every time someone came to mow the lawn, they buzzed it all the way down to the ground. At the beginning of the summer, Declan and I were kicking around the old neighborhood running some errands, and I snuck by to spy on the old yard. Our building backed up to a school, and the schoolyard playground was open, and our old yard is visible through the fence. “Let’s just go look,” I told him, “even though it’s going to make me sad that they destroyed all of our plants.” But they hadn’t! It’s all still there! The fairy-garden border beds, the potted azalea and butterfly bush that didn’t move with us, the weird tree-of-heaven sapling along the fence line, it was all still there. And thriving! That was a nice little gift in my summer.)

Anyway, I have at points this summer started to wonder if I’ve gotten in over my head with the new yard. Most of the work this year has just been removing plants. This yard is lovely, and alive, and full of things, and some of the things are things I don’t want in the yard. I spent part of my afternoon today cutting down two big saplings–I looked them up, out of curiosity (PlantNet, which Declan and I refer to as WhatPlant, just like we say WhatBird when we mean Merlin), and they’re black locust trees. We have a gorgeous black locust in the yard, so it must be seeding little babies, an activity I don’t theoretically oppose, but I don’t want trees in that particular location. The mature black locust tree is lovely, but the sapling version is a complete jerk. Very fast-growing, and studded all over with giant sharp thorns. GIANT SHARP THORNS. There’s another place in the yard where a huge bush is growing sort of out of control, and I’m not sure what it is, but it also is a big thorny jerk. (I’d guess rose bush, but it doesn’t bloom? I have no idea. I keep trying to cut it back but it’s exhausting, wrangling all those thorns.)

We’re in the Anandapur Theater, waiting for the bird show. He’s already ridden Everest six times today, and he’s agreed to humor me by watching the bird show. Before we’re done at the park today, he will declare the bird show to be epic, amazing, his favorite non-ride thing in the parks, and we have to see it again. (He’ll also ride Everest four more times.) He doesn’t know that yet, and he’s restless. How many more minutes until it starts? Now how many? When is lunch?

Oh hey, kiddo, I say. It’s the twenty-third! That means that ten years ago today, I was in the hospital.

I was being born?

Not quite yet. I tell him that in the middle of the afternoon, I got scared because I hadn’t felt him move since the morning. I tell him that it turns out that’s normal when a baby is getting ready to be born, but that I thought he wasn’t coming for another month, so I got scared. I called my doctor, who was on call at the hospital, and she said probably everything is fine, drink some orange juice and lie down for half an hour, see if you can feel him. (I don’t tell him how much I cried–sitting on the floor in our old apartment in Williamsburg, sobbing until I couldn’t breathe. This is supposed to be a cute story.) I did the juice and the resting but still didn’t feel anything, so she told me to come in to the hospital and she’d take a look. I called Dad and he wanted to leave work early to meet me there, I tell Declan, but I told him not to, that the doctor said everything is probably fine, I just want to be safe. At the hospital, they looked and said yeah, he’s fine, good heartbeat, everything seems good. They kept me in there for a couple of hours just because I was so worried, I tell him, but then they sent me home. Dad and I had dinner at Red Bowl, and we went to bed that night thinking that we still had another month before the baby was coming.

Memory is always fuzzy: I think I remember this, the details might be wrong. But what I remember is being at WisCon, at a party one night, maybe the same night that Christopher Rowe did his impression of Ben Rosenbaum and Ted Chiang having an email debate? This is well over ten years ago–Declan turns ten this month, and this is a memory from the time before I was a parent. Anyway, it was a party in one of the con suites, and I really feel like Cory Doctorow was in this conversation. What I remember is a bunch of us sitting on the floor in a hotel room at the Madison Concourse, that bright fluorescent lighting, drinks in plastic cups, and Cory was being Cory, all futurism and whatever, holding forth on science fiction as the literature of the post-scarcity economy. The post-scarcity economy was a thing people talked about a lot. And Christopher Rowe interrupted Cory to say that people keep talking about the post-scarcity economy, but that he’s more interested in the post-plenty economy. The technologists and the futurists and the people in the Silicon Valley bubble, they liked to talk about post-scarcity, but they all ignored the other path. What does a post-plenty economy look like?

I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, is what I’m saying.

We go back to school tomorrow–with an extra day at the start and an extra day at the end, this winter break ended up being more like two and a half weeks, and I feel like I don’t even remember where we were before. I spent part of my afternoon going through my notebook from December, making a list of things to take care of at work this week and next, and it feels like a lifetime ago. We’ll have to re-construct our morning routine; given the temperatures we’re facing in the next couple of weeks, I’ll have to re-examine my commitment to walking to school No Matter What. (Our commute is now fifteen minutes, walking, but the walk is straight up a pretty steep hill. Driving would be about five minutes, but with similar hills involved; which is a worse choice if we have a scary-cold freezy-icy morning?)

I never sleep well the night before going back, whether it’s going back after summer vacation or winter break or whatever. So I already know that I’m not going to sleep well tonight. In an exciting twist, I didn’t sleep well last night either! That might have been covid-testing anxiety. Dec and I made our way up the hill this morning for return-to-school “gateway” testing. For the first time, the school is using rapid antigen tests instead of lab-processed PCR tests, probably because PCR tests take so long to return results right now. (Remember back in the day, when we didn’t all have to be public health experts? I miss the time when I didn’t know so much about the different types of covid tests.) We presented ourselves in the lobby at 9am on the dot, filled out some forms, went to a little table and had the nurse walk us through how to take a rapid test. She’s clearly done this a million times– she explained some of the steps as “stirring the pot” and “wringing out the mop.” We left our tests and forms with another nurse who reminded us that if the results are negative we won’t hear anything; if the results are positive, they’ll know in ten or fifteen minutes, and they’ll call us. They wanted to keep everyone moving out of the lobby as fast as possible.

I didn’t expect the tests to come back positive, mostly because neither of us has any symptoms, but you never know. I keep saying “oh, we don’t really leave the house” except we do, we’ve eaten at restaurants a few times lately, we saw family for Christmas, we go to the grocery store and whatnot. (To get ahead of this, the tests did not, in fact, come back positive.) We’re all as vaxxed up as they’ll let us be, we upgraded everyone in the household to better masks recently, and I feel okay about our general risk profile, but you never know. So I figured we’d test negative, and even if we tested positive we’d be unlikely to get really sick, etc etc, whatever, I still didn’t sleep last night.

(Not that sleep always helps, I’ve had such weird and vivid dreams lately. All of them completely stupid. One of the really cool young teachers in the English department was doing a project on Hugo Munsterberg and wanted to read my dissertation; my mother joined a country club and when I went to have lunch with her there some lady told me that people like me don’t belong there, and then I got lost in a hedge maze; dumb stuff. My brain needs new and better inputs before it can give me new and better dreams.)

I have, from time to time, gotten all spun up in my head about “begin as you mean to go on” and all that; in that sense, maybe it’s not great that we all stayed in our pajamas today. I have no regrets. (Besides, it was raining basically all day.) I did not eat cookies for breakfast, so that’s a big step towards resetting after winter break.

No really, I made so many cookies; mostly I made four different batches of peanut butter blossoms over the course of a week, some for us and some to give away, but I also tried out some new recipes. The checkerboard cookies from Smitten Kitchen were good but I think not worth the effort. (Also, the dough had two entire sticks of butter for a cup and a half of flour? It felt weird.) The chewy gingerbread cookies from NYT Cooking were absolutely worth the effort, even though I had to brown butter for the first time in my life, but I’m the only person in the house who was interested in them, so I don’t know that they’re going into the regular rotation. The other cookie experiment was orange-cardamom sugar cookies from King Arthur, and I thought the flavor on those was excellent, and they had a spot-on airy-light sugar-cookie texture. (That texture is not my favorite cookie texture? The chewy gingerbread cookies are more my ideal, but the orange cookies really did what they were trying to do, and I respect that.)

Anyway, of all the eight million cookies in our house this winter break (the ones I baked, plus the plate my Aunt Karen sent over, which included pignoli cookies and mini chocolate chip cookies and classic spritz cookies and itsy-bitsy little meringue cookies), Declan will only touch the peanut butter blossoms. That said, he eats them in quantity, as many as we’ll let him eat, so it’s not like my work is totally unappreciated.

I do not think this is what I intended to write about today? But I’m still working on more communication and less self-censorship, so cookie babble is what you get.

This morning, stepping out on to the porch to fill the little birdfeeder, I saw some movement in a tree in the neighbor’s yard. It took a second to see past the camouflaged colors, but then I started shouting for Declan to come look.

“Giant raccoon!”

This has been one of our jokes lately. A few weeks ago I was running in the morning (or, as I like to say, “running”) and I heard a noise in a driveway, looked and saw a dog jumping against the chain-link fence in someone’s yard. That was weird, because there’s not a lot of dogs outside at six in the morning, pre-dawn and forty degrees out, and almost never any dogs unattended. I looked more closely and it wasn’t a dog at all, it was a raccoon, body fully extended in the process of climbing up the fence, frozen still in the hopes that I wouldn’t notice it. In retelling, this has become a Giant Raccoon, Rawr. (I mean, he was pretty fricking big, but I don’t know what’s normal for a raccoon.)

Giant Raccoon was up in the tree in the neighbor’s yard; more accurately, it was trying to get down from the tree. Declan took one look at it, said “oh cool!” He then took another look, said “I’m going to get back inside it case it comes this way,” and disappeared back into the basement. Shortly after Giant Raccoon trundled down behind the neighbor’s garage, I saw a second fat furry body scrambling out of the upper tree branches. Equally Giant Raccoon followed its partner down the tree, utterly lacking in grace or skill at tree-climbing.

"with a fixed gaze and sure footing, you'll be headed toward all you dream of."

---

At some point one has to wonder if there's an irregularity in the card or the shuffle, this card comes up so much. I'm not saying it isn't meaningful right now--it really is. This seems to be a card about forward motion, specifically about keeping moving no matter what. It feels maybe less like riding a horse straight into the future and maybe more like swimming against a current, but here we are.

"aces mark the beginning of exciting new phases .. expect to enter a blissful time of health, joy, and friendship."

---

Today I said goodbye to the apartment in Brooklyn--we moved last week, but we've been shuttling back and forth ever since, dealing with the eight million little things that didn't get packed up in time for the movers. And now it's done; for a few months now I've had a foot in two different homes, I suppose, and now it's down to one.

Before we left, I sat in the backyard one last time and said goodbye. And cried. That apartment was where Declan learned to walk. It was the nest where I recovered after my heart surgery. It saw us through the pandemic lockdowns--we started to treat the yard as an extra room. I worked out there most afternoons, we played board games out there for a whole summer, we ate dinner in the yard well past when the weather was really friendly enough. It was a good place to live for eight years.

"contemplate for a moment the idea of 'being whole' ... close your eyes and envision this radiating energy inside you."

---

I said something the other day about missing the mourning doves. They were the most reliable visitors to our first birdfeeder at the old apartment; Declan and I spent a lot of breakfasts watching them shove each other around for space at the feeder. We've already seen so many birds in the new backyard, cardinals and blue jays and a million sparrows, but I was wondering about mourning doves.

This afternoon, I opened up the back door and the noise must have startled them, because as I did so a huge flock of mourning doves rose up from our grass and flew into the trees, all their little wings squeaking as they went. So we have mourning doves.

"sudden movement or change ... a card of news, change, or clarity in an unresolved situation."

I've had a number of these cards lately--you know, I'm still drawing a card every day, I'm just running out of time and energy to write anything. We moved last Wednesday, and since then three out of my five cards have been about change. (Including the Tower, which this deck represents as a giant tree with its top branches on fire.) The easy reading is that this means the change that's already happened, but every time I see these, I think, no, no more change, this is enough for now. Stay still for ten minutes.

Which is not to say the changes are bad. I love this house so much that I feel enormous guilt over it--like, friends at work ask how it's going, settling in to the new place, and I don't know what to say. "It takes getting used to, having so much space?"

The squirrels in this part of the Bronx are black, at least some of them. I've been seeing them at work for years, and now they're in my yard. One is watching me from the wall as I type. I brought my birdfeeder over from the old apartment, the big one that stands up on a pole, and so far we've seen two cardinals, three blue jays, and about eight million house sparrows. I haven't noticed any finches yet, or mourning doves. The mourning doves were the real mainstays of the old yard.

"the chariot is your confidence, your will, and your inner warrior. At points in your life when you felt the bliss of achievement and triumph, you were riding on his back."

---

Sometimes hurtling down a highway through
the narrow cone of headlights I feel
moments of exaltation, but my night
vision is poor. I pretend at control
as I drive, nervously edging that knowledge
I am not really managing. I am in the hands
of strangers and luck. By flight he meant
flying and I mean being flown, totally
beyond volition, willfully.

(from "Night Flight", Marge Piercy.)

(the world: "it signifies completion, harmony, and contentment. It's rare to experience this energy, as we are usually consumed by wanting, needing, and achieving. So when this card appears, contemplate for a moment the idea of 'being whole'.")

I've been... okay I hesitate to call it running, even though running is involved. I've been going for very brisk walks in the morning before work. I don't want to talk about it. But lately I've been seeing one of my new neighbors--you have to understand, I'm out there at like five thirty, five forty-five in the morning. I see the guys who run the bodegas hanging out and smoking, I see some people heading out to work, I see an old lady a few blocks over who sits on her stoop in a nightgown and never says hello back when I say hello to her.

This new neighbor, she's out there most mornings now, with her cats. She has two of them, smallish tabbies with big startled-looking eyes. She opens the door to the apartment building and sets up a lawn chair on the sidewalk, and she sits in the chair reading a magazine and smoking weed while the cats explore a little bit. Sometimes when I see them the cats are nosing around the plants at the edge of the sidewalk, other times they're standing in the front hall of the building, seemingly uninterested in crossing the threshold.

Declan used to play with the kid next door--through the whole pandemic lockdown, they played together through the fence separating our yards. They passed lego and markers and sticks to each other through the fence, and threw balls at each other over the top, and there were a few months there where Gus was the only kid Declan ever really saw in person. Gus's family moved away about a month ago--the landlord next door is crap and doesn't maintain the building, so the basement was infested with rats, and rats were coming up through their walls. Both of the first-floor apartments, Gus and his parents but also the people on their other side, who had two big dogs and used to have movie nights with a projector in their yard, left because of the rats. The rats don't make it up to the second floor, but the building has been under-maintained for long enough that birds had tunnelled under the shingles and were nesting inside the walls up there. Rumor had it that the third floor had been taken over by squirrels, but those apartments were vacant for a while because, again, the landlord doesn't really care enough to work on it. I'm not sure if the cat lady is on two (sparrows) or three (squirrels), but no one has moved in on the first floor yet. I guess even the crap landlord can't rent the apartment while it has an active rat problem.

"The Chariot is your confidence, your will, and your inner warrior ... Build a relationship with this part of yourself."

What is frustrating me right now, with the new house process, is that there isn't anything I can do to make it go faster. From what I understand, it's moving at a pretty normal pace for this kind of this--it's a big financial transaction, a lot of people are involved and they need everything to be lined up Just So. I was just hoping it could go faster than normal, and instead it's just regular.

But I hate the inbetween-ness. I want to pack for the move, but realistically the move is probably still six weeks away, and we can't live out of boxes for that long. I want to do get-ready-for-winter maintenance on a yard we don't quite own yet. I am compiling a list of tasks that we can't act on. We had to dismantle Declan's flood-soaked bedroom furniture, but we're not going to buy new furniture for a space we're about to move out of, so his mattress is on the floor and his clothes are in bins and when he plays stupid Roblox with his friends he has to set up somewhere other than his bedroom. So right now I'm typing this and he's in the next room shouting about Livetopia and the Illuminati and all I want is for him to have his own space where he can have some privacy to shout at other nine-year-olds.

Anyway, today was a good day, I hung out at the park with a friend and my kid successfully rode a bike for the first time, and now I'm going to crochet a while and drink some cinnamon tea while I watch fifth-season Fringe and continue to have many thoughts about Peter Bishop as a character. (Also many thoughts about the costume choices for the Observers but that's a whole other thing.)

The Sun: "Vitality and health abound, while you feel assurance and clarity in all that you do." I would not go quite so far as that, but I do feel better today, like the clouds are lifting a little bit.

It's been a wild few weeks. I went back to work, Declan was in camp, but the work schedule and the camp schedule lined up poorly. Dec and I got into a routine with it, though--I got up at five, yawned and drank some water, went for a "run" and was back around five-thirty. Yawned some more, packed Declan's lunch. While I was in the shower, Matt would wake Declan and get him ready for the day. We were out the door by six-fifteen most days, drive half an hour to the Bronx, pick up coffee (for me) and snacks (for the boy) and bagels (for both of us), get to work and eat breakfast facing each other across my desk. By seven or so, I was starting work and Declan was playing video games. Eight-thirty we leave for camp--twenty-minute drive to the Bronx Zoo, drop off at the employee entrance, twenty minute drive back. Work until two-thirty or so, and work was busy, trying to get ready for another school year. Then back to the Zoo for camp pickup, forty-five minutes drive home, and then Declan would head to his room to play Roblox for an hour or two while I watched television on my laptop and tried to fend off feeling exhausted and hopeless.

One day, putting keys in the front door of the apartment building, I saw the rainbows--do you remember back when, when we put rainbows in windows for kids to see when they went for walks? Declan drew Elephant and Piggie holding hands under a rainbow and we put it next to the front door of our building, and the graphic designer who was subletting apartment 1F also made a rainbow, and the preteen who stays upstairs from us with her dad every-other-weekend made a rainbow too, except hers for some reason is captioned "Poopsie Slime Surprise Says I Love You!" Those rainbows are all still in the window next to the door, frayed at the edges and sun-faded after seventeen months. I see them every day, obviously, but this one day it was like I -saw- them and then it all washed over me and I started crying. I don't know if Declan noticed, he was pretty busy explaining the grand strategy that has made him a camp-group champion in Step On Your Shoe.

So it was, like, fine? This routine? It wouldn't be one I'd keep for the long term, but for two weeks it was working, we were getting everything done. And then there was the rain. I just. Look, here is the thing, it really could have been a lot worse. Some people in our neighborhood had ten, twelve, fourteen inches of water in their basement. Other people in the city died, trapped in rising waters. People lost their lives, lost their homes, or just had thousands and thousands of dollars of damage. So we are fine. We are safe, we are healthy, we didn't lose anything we couldn't afford to lose.

“Completion, celebration … your labors have been steady and strong, and the harvest will be plentiful.” It’s cheating, this was yesterday’s card, today’s is something very grim that feels inappropriate to the day. (Although the day is still young, I suppose I might find occasion later to be wary of my selfishness and need for power leading me to defeat.) In another burst of tarot-sympathy, the day I drew “completion, celebration” was the day that the title report on the new house finally came back! Which was also the day that I learned that when everyone kept saying “all we’re waiting for is the title report” they didn’t mean “and then you’re all set,” they meant “and then we move on to the next six things you need to do.”

In lighter news, I’ve been doing Duolingo Spanish for a few months. I feel way smarter than when I was doing Duolingo Polish, in part because I remember a shocking amount of vocabulary for a language I haven’t studied since I was seventeen years old. Some of the Duolingo exercises are these mini dialogues, where they give you a sentence and you have to choose what the next sentence in the conversation would be. So, like, they give you “My cat lives in Barcelona” and then your choices are “Why? You live in London!” or “I would like sugar in my coffee.” (That’s a fake example, but “My new house has three kitchens” followed by “but it has no refrigerators!” is a real example.)

I love these, in part because they’re easy to get right, and in part because I enjoy imagining the conversation where people are responding with the wrong choice. You’re at a restaurant and you tell the waiter “I would like a salad with chicken but no cheese” and he responds “It’s my birthday and there’s a party tonight!” Or your friend says “My grandmother is very smart and elegant” and you’re all “I think that my kitchen is very modern.”

Okay this is not that funny, but it’s been a long day. It makes me laugh.

The Hierophant: “You’ve come as far as you can on your own … open your heart and your teacher will soon appear.”

So my mom calls, and we talk a little–she was surprised that I was at work yesterday, given the rain, but the roads were fine and the rain mostly cleared up by mid-morning. I ask how she’s doing, and at first she just sighs. “Oh, Susan, you have no idea. I don’t know what to do with Judy anymore.”

Judy and my mom have been friends forever–I lose track of when they met, it wasn’t high school, but it couldn’t have been long after. I was at her house all the time as a kid. She has three kids, the youngest is a girl, Jackie, who was a year behind me in school, close enough in age that we spent a lot of time together. When I was Declan’s age I might have told you that Jackie was my best friend. So many of my childhood memories are from Judy’s house–listening to a Carpenters record on a small purple record player in Jackie’s entirely purple bedroom, ducking under the water in the pool to avoid low-flying dragonflies, drinking a bizarre Coke-and-milk mixture at dinner because that was the only way Jackie would drink milk. (I also remember very vividly the day that Judy drove me home after hanging out at her house, Jackie and I were lolling around in the way-back of the station wagon, smoking candy cigarettes, and my mom lost her goddamn mind when she saw us, because I was NOT ALLOWED to have candy cigarettes. (My mother, watching her own mother slowly dying of smoking-induced emphysema, was not playing around when it came to glamorizing cigarettes.)

Judy’s husband left her when we were in fifth or sixth grade, moved to Boston to start a new life with his secretary. That started a sort of downward spiral for the family, although looking back on it I feel like things were maybe not great in their house even before that? A lot of memories look different several decades later. As Jackie and I got older, we stopped getting along as well; I remember we kept having to spend time together because our moms were hanging out but it got increasingly unpleasant.

I was trying to remember this weekend all of the different times this apartment has taken on water. Regularly through the pump drain in the basement floor, but both toilets have overflowed at different times, the air-conditioning unit used to stream water out one corner, the ceiling over the stairs dripped and gushed for a while, and I think there was a time that water seeped through the wall over the kitchen table. Oh, and the time that the kitchen sink just started fountaining out water–we figured out that it was backing up with water from upstairs apartments, so I went up to the second floor to ask the guy above us to hold off on washing dishes until we got it fixed, and he answered the door wearing nothing but boxer shorts and it felt like I’d momentarily walked into someone else’s movie.

Anyway. Tons of rain in New York this weekend, and much of it came streaming out under the door from our boiler room and turning our basement into a big squishy marsh. I spent a while yesterday wringing out towels and then part of today helping wrestle a giant sodden area rug out the door, and my whole upper body hurts.

The night it flooded, we let Declan sleep in our bed, even though his bedroom wasn’t in any particular danger. It’s such an inbetween age–he wants to be so independent all the time, but he also wants to snuggle up when he sleeps. There are these moments where he’s like a baby still, tangling his legs up and nudging his skull up against my ribs.

No time to write this morning, I’m getting ready for today’s adventure, our final expedition of summer break. I’m attempting to take a nine-year-old to Rockaway Beach by ferry, with only the supplies I can pack into my average-size purse. I’ll report back later.

So yesterday, Wednesday afternoon, my mother called. She doesn’t lead with “hello” or anything normal. Instead, “Noelle is going to have a memorial for Michelle. You should be there. It’s going to be Friday and Saturday, you can all stay over here Friday night.”

“Wait, this Friday?”

“No, no, in October.”

“When in October?”

I am definitely in the “what day is it” stage of summer, also known as the part where I’ve a little bit given up and am just riding it out to the end. It’s certainly a huge irony in my life that I get this five-or-six-week summer break, the kind of unstructured vacation time that many people would desperately want, and I’m not any good at it. Temperamentally I prefer more structure–this was one of the big lessons of grad school, for, me, discovering the extent to which I absolutely do not thrive with a lack of structure and oversight. I like my job. I miss my office. (Are my plants still alive? Hilda in Maintenance usually waters all the office plants over the summer but I thought we were trying to give Maintenance some time off this summer.) (Oh god, the plants. I’ve filled a lot of the space in my office with plants, windowsills and bookshelf tops. It’s a small office but I think I’m up to eight plants. In the spring of 2020, when school closed in early March I wasn’t that worried about the plants, but in April when it became clear we weren’t going back, I wrote to the head of school requesting permission to come to campus to rescue my plants. They gave me a time window to access my office and directions to not enter any other spaces on campus. I loaded the plants into totebags and ferried them all back to my car, filled the backseat with pothos and begonia and snake plants–I don’t even like the snake plant, that one isn’t mine, it was in the office when I moved in, but I felt responsible for it anyway. And then I had to find space for all those plants in our apartment, which was already too full now that no one ever left it.)

My brain is all to-do-lists right now; we never scheduled Declan’s dental checkup, not to mention my own, and he and I both need haircuts before the first day of school. We’re going today for our post-travel Covid tests. My annual physical this week went well but because I am Old they’ve referred me for a bunch of screening tests and I need to figure out the scheduling on those. There are a million house-and-moving tasks that we can’t even really get started on until we have the closing date set, I need to figure out the logistics around dropoff and lunches for Zoo Camp next week, and jesus christ I probably need to buy even more masks for Declan because no matter how much I wash them we always need more, he gets marker stains on them or bites little holes in them like a gerbil. The guidebook says that today’s tarot card, Strength, is about inner strength, mastery of emotions. Still working on that.

For vacation, I downloaded a set of books that I wasn’t sure I was going to like. There’s this romance author, Sarina Bowen, whose books I often like, even though a lot of them are about hockey and I really have no interest at all in hockey. (I like her books enough that I’ve forgiven her for the genuinely embarrassingly bad book covers.) She recently started a publishing line where she’s publishing books by other authors set in the same world as her books. I respect the level of hustle involved, but never was that interested in the books, but I thought I’d give them a try and grabbed three or four of the “World of True North” books.

Y’all. These were not that good. They weren’t actively bad, it’s not like I regret reading them or anything, but they were not that good. Despite all my years with fiction editing, I don’t quite have the editorial vocabulary to explain what was wrong, but these books felt stiff and over-explained; the presence of characters from Bowen’s series was I think supposed to make it all feel like a unified setting but really just read like fanfic. (Which is not to say fanfic is necessarily bad, I’ve read some brilliant fanfic, it’s just, I don’t know. This didn’t work.)

Anyway. One of the books, one of the main characters is a floppy-haired aw-shucks Vermont hippie, raised by his Wicca-practicing Vermont-hippie grandma, and one of his Vermont-hippie character quirks is that he draws two Tarot cards every morning to start his day, and part of how we’re supposed to believe that he and the other main character are TRUE LOVE is that he keeps drawing the same love-themed cards every day, despite, I don’t know, shuffling a lot and covering his deck with cleansing crystals or something. This was a lot. And it was discussed at least once a chapter. And it has nearly put me off the tarot practice entirely.

That said, today’s card is one that’s come up at least once before this summer. A time to harvest the bountiful results of past actions, and/or to be grateful for good fortune received. I have been so full of gratitude lately that it scares me–acknowledging good fortune will bring down bad luck, or something. One part of my anxiety, I think, has been waiting for the other shoe to drop, or something. It’s that state of mind where happiness feels like walking a tightrope.

The first card I drew today looked very sad–it’s a drooping rose dropping petals–and I thought, no, don’t want that. So I put it back and drew another, the Mother of Pentacles. A devoted and patient mother, maybe a little too wrapped up in her children. But I went back and looked at the original card, the drooping flower, it’s the Five of Pentacles and the guidebook says it represents illness and sadness, but mostly unproductive anxiety. Worry that takes over and becomes more of a problem than the thing you’re worrying about. These two cards in combination do a pretty decent job of describing what it felt like travelling with a young child in the late summer of 2021, so yeah, I’ll take it.

In any event, being back from a trip is disorienting in a different way. We have to unpack the suitcases but we’ve also started packing up the apartment for the move, so it’s all chaos and obstacle courses in the apartment, more than usual. We have no food in the house–Matt had suggested that we plan for a grocery delivery for the morning after we got back, which would have been smart, but I was so convinced that something would go wrong with our flight home, delays or cancellations or whatever. In the end, our flight home was exactly on time, no schedule dramas, etc. (This is a marked difference from our flight out last weekend, though, which was cancelled three hours before it was supposed to depart. That was a hell of a schedule drama.)

It’s hard getting back in the flow, but we’ll figure it out.

Today’s card: Strength, described as “focus, compassion, self-control” and “mastery of emotions.” Well played, tarot deck, well played.

There’s a sort of background level of anxiety that happens to me sometimes–it feels like a humming throughout my body, almost–and it’s often totally impervious to reality. Like, things are objectively going quite well in my life right now, why do I feel this way? I suppose the answer is “brain chemistry” but I don’t like it. I’ve found a million ways in my adult life to manage this. Sometimes the anxiety is relieved through data. In the spring of 2020, I bought a pulse oximeter, and checking my blood oxygen levels served as a kind of tiny pressure-release valve. (At my cardiologist checkup this spring, I mentioned to her that I’d bought a pulse oximeter and she responded “didn’t everyone?” Not sarcastically, either.) When Declan was younger, I was in and out of his room a lot at night, reassuring myself that he was still there and still breathing. (That’s normal parent stuff, though, isn’t it?) Lately I can’t pin down anything that will help this feel better, so I’m soothing it with a lot of dumb television and a lot of even dumber tablet games. (Like, I am actually ashamed of how much color-by-number stuff I’m doing, but the repetition and the completion make a kind of white noise.)

Anyway, in the realm of “things that might cause some anxiety in the year 2021,” we’re going to be vacationing with family for the next week. I know. I know! The world is on fire and Covid is spiking and I’m taking my unvaccinated nine-year-old out in public, I know. In any event, with everything else going on, I’m putting the newsletter on vacation too. See you in a week!

Continuing what still feels like a statistically-improbable run of major arcana cards, today’s card is The Hierophant.

One way to read it: the picture is a black bird sitting on a key, and we’re going back to the lake with my parents today, where my mother routinely feels menaced by a large black bird. I mean, there is a large black bird there, she’s not imagining it. It hops around on the picnic tables and occasionally raids unattended food. We saw it steal chips out of a totebag once. What my mother is projecting on to the bird is the personal nature of its interest; she sees it as a malign presence when really it’s just, like, a bird looking for food.

Large birds aside, the posted meaning of the card has to do with a teacher or a mentor, hitting a place in your life where you need outside guidance or additional support. Again, there are a number of ways this could be relevant to my life right now. One comes to mind: I’m working through some scheduling logistics with the major paper I want to assign in my elective class next year, and I reached out last week to several colleagues, all of whom were incredibly gracious in offering to find time during summer break to talk the problem through with me. And then I completely dropped the ball on following through with any of them. That is sort of the stage of summer break that I’m in right now, the stage where I’m actively thinking about course prep but unable to follow through. This is also the part of the summer where I start to feel the “oh, all these things we didn’t get a chance to do” pressure. It’s fine. We’re having a good summer, there’s more summer still ahead, and things don’t have to be perfect anyway.

The picture on the card today is a baby bird perched on a budding branch. The Fool is about beginning, launching out into the world with naive optimism and enthusiasm. It’s been very easy this summer to see all of my readings in terms of the new house and the upcoming move, and this one is no exception. A new house, a new yard, a new neighborhood. Last weekend we drove up and parked near the house and then walked around the neighborhood, had lunch, explored a little. There’s a lot to get to know. I’m excited about this. I’m in the habit of downplaying things, talking more about the difficulties and the sadness of leaving Brooklyn, but that hides how much I’m looking forward to getting to know the new house and the new neighborhood.

Today got away from me–for something that’s supposed to be a morning routine, I’m here finishing this as we watch Olympics coverage after dinner. Try again tomorrow.

For Christmas, my mom bought my dad a book about Mob history. He’s been reading it a little bit at a time, a chapter here and there. Most recently he read a whole section on Lucky Luciano, and he wanted to tell me and Declan all about it. Lucky Luciano was apparently in prison for seven years and spent the whole time reading books on military history and strategy. My dad is very impressed with this. In the middle of the story, he’s all, you know, he knew my cousin. Apparently my dad’s uncle, my grandpa’s brother who I think might have been estranged from him? Or some other relative, I had trouble following this story. Someone in my dad’s family, he lived in central New Jersey and was involved with the local Boys Club, and then Lucky Luciano was his son’s godfather.

When I was a year or two out of college, there was this one night when my phone rang late at night, it was like two in the morning or something, and it was one of my ex-boyfriends who lived in California, where it was not quite so late at night. He’d just started watching The Sopranos (and in context I think he might also have been high but I can’t confirm that) and he was calling me in this near-panic because he was quite sure that my father was in the mob and that I either didn’t know or was in denial. And I was all, okay calm down, it only seems that way to you because my father is the only Italian man from New Jersey who you’ve ever met. And he said yeah, but what does he do for work, are you sure it’s not a cover story? I mean, my father was a defense contractor. I’d been to his office. He lived in Oregon for ten years, the company threw a big party to celebrate some new product launch, my dad flew me and my mom out for the party and we ate boring catered food and got a special tour of the clean room where they produced the LCD screens, I’m quite sure my dad’s job was actually his job and not a cover for organized crime. That said, it wouldn’t shock me if it turned out my dad’s social circle was mob-adjacent; there was a lot of that going around. This Lucky Luciano story doesn’t help.

The drawing on today’s tarot card is a spider at the center of a large web. Craftsmanship, skill, attention to detail leading to accomplishment. I feel like my week is more about “things I should do” and less about “things I am doing” but I appreciate the sentiment.

Another very brief one today–my sleep is still sort of off, my shoulder is still sort of strained, and I have to pack up stuff for yet another overnight visit with my parents because that’s always super fun.

The white cat is back in our backyard. In the spring of 2020, first phase of lockdown, we all started noticing so much more in our backyard. In particular, the cats. We had very frequent visits from a couple of neighborhood cats, and we got pretty attached to them. Declan and I gave them names–the grey one was Clementine, the white one was Snowy, and the orangey one was Tiger, although Tiger never came around nearly as often as the other two. Clem was our favorite. She very aggressively stalked the birdfeeder on the apartment window, so much that she’d often just hang out on the narrow window-ledge underneath. When I was working in the backyard, she would sometimes come right up and let me pet her. After a while she started jumping up in our laps if we were outside. We made a cat toy for her, I threw together a little yarn pompom and we tied it to a stick. She seemed to like it okay, although Declan never really got the hang of using the cat toy, he bounced it around a little too much.

My theory was that Clem and Snowy lived in the same house. They had similar collars, they showed up with new collars at the same time, and sometimes they showed up in the yard at the same time. At the end of the summer, they both stopped coming around. We went well over a month without seeing either of them and I thought, well that’s it, they’ve moved away. And then in the fall they appeared again, hunting birds and squirrels like nothing had changed.

Snowy still comes around a lot, but we haven’t seen Clemmie in a really long time, so I’m worried that something has happened to her. It’s such a weird thing, though, to get attached to pets that aren’t ours.

The Magician again: action action action, bodies in motion, etc. I don’t know if it suits my day, in which I’m taking Dec for a swimming day with grandparents, much more of a leisure-type day. It might suit the week, though. We have a lot of house/moving things to prep–we don’t have a set date yet for the move but it’s probably not until October. That said, I go back to work in three weeks and it’s nearly impossible to do anything else when school’s in session, so I want to stage as much as I can while it’s still summer. (I’m also not the most resilient right now? We discovered over the weekend that our storage unit, which is a closet under the stairs in our building, took on water at some point. Most things in there are in plastic bins, for just this kind of situation, so it doesn’t seem like anything was permanently damaged, but it’s a lot of water in a space that’s a serious pain to clean out, and I just kind of gave up for the rest of the afternoon.)

This morning, though, the only big tasks are “find the bathing suits” and “do we have enough sunscreen” and “refresh the podcast playlist for the car.” For the last few years, Declan and I have had these long commutes together, and we settled into a routine where it’s my music in the morning and his podcasts in the afternoon. Every few months I toss something new into the podcast rotation to see if it sticks. (It doesn’t always–I liked Eleanor Amplified but Declan thought it was boring, same with Circle Round.) We listen to a lot of Car Talk, and Dec is vocally unhappy every year when the Puzzler goes on summer vacation. We have in the past listened to a lot of Wow in the World but I’ve been pushing them to the bottom of the priority list because they’re getting on my nerves lately. It’s mostly kid-focused stuff (Brains On, But Why, Smash Boom Best) but we do some non-kid-oriented science and science-adjacent podcasts too, like Short Wave and Every Little Thing and Science Versus. (I have to edit those playlists sometimes–I’m okay with the occasional bad word or adult reference, but I didn’t need to sit with my third-grader through a whole episode on the science of orgasms, for instance. I also dropped a lot of the Covid coverage in the last year–both Short Wave and Brains On have had excellent explainer episodes but I was just so exhausted from thinking about Covid the whole rest of my day, I wanted a break.)

Off to find the bathing suits and assess the sunscreen supply.

(Today’s card is very gloomy and no match for my mood, so I’m ignoring it. Instead, Sunday rambling.)

Now that I am forty-five years old and thus An Old Lady, or at least A Middle-Aged Lady, I feel more pressure to take care of myself, so I’m making an effort to add some exercise into my daily routine. This morning, changing into exercise pants (because I don’t want to exercise in my pajamas), I strained a muscle in my back. Putting on pants. So that’s how forty-five is going so far.

I’ve started watching Fringe, for some reason. I mean, I’m enjoying it a lot except for the really extravagantly gross special effects. I watched when it was first on television but didn’t get very far, and I’ve always sort of wanted to pick it back up. I just finished the first season, and a lot of it was filmed in my neighborhood. Like, two episodes in a row did a lot of exterior scenes in the two blocks next to where I live. It was fascinating seeing the same stretch of block turned into four or five different locations by crossing the street or moving ten feet down to where the fences look different. One episode has a scene of a scary monster hiding in a playground, and it’s our playground! (They used the actual playground, too–I’ve seen film crews working in our neighborhood park who built a whole fake playground next to the actual playground.) This is on top of seeing someone I knew on Agents of SHIELD when I watched that in the spring–I’m just watching my dumb television show and suddenly realize someone looks familiar, oh hey, Chronicom Hunter Malachi is actually Chris from the playground, whose daughter was in pre-K with Declan. That was fun.

I told Declan about the squirrels eating the mushrooms yesterday and his first reaction was to wonder if the squirrels were okay, since some mushrooms are poisonous. That had been my first question too. (The answer: they’re probably fine, but there’s nothing we can do about it if they’re not, and I guess we’ll find out.)

He starts fourth grade in about a month. I keep rolling that around in my head–fourth grade. That feels big, I think because my memories of fourth grade feel more like a person and less like a little kid. In fourth grade, we had a poker game going during indoor recess. (What did we use for betting? I can almost see it but not quite–something from the classroom, not real money.) In fourth grade, I finally mustered up the courage to learn to ride my bike, mostly because I had a big crush on Mike K and he was really into bikes (like, BMX trick biking or whatever) and I was embarrassed that I couldn’t ride. (Fourth grade is also where I overheard my mom talking about how Mike had been offered a place in some prestigious children’s choir boarding school or something, and I also pulled together a lot of courage to write him a little note saying that I hoped he stayed because I would miss him if he left. He never responded to the note, but he also didn’t go to children’s choir boarding school. He’s a professional drummer and drum teacher now, irrelevant to this story but still interesting I think.) I remember doing a science lab about magnets, and memorizing a Robert Frost poem. I think my point here is that there’s some qualitative difference to my memories of fourth grade, relative to earlier grades–I also really clearly remember some extravagantly complicated playground games in second grade, for instance, but that memory feels like little-kid stuff in a way that the fourth-grade poker games don’t.

It’s all layers, then, looking at my own tiny human and coming to terms with the fact that he’s not actually tiny. Right now, he and I are so much in each other’s pockets, but that’s going to change, and fast.

Twice so far this morning, I’ve seen squirrels in the yard with what seemed like big chunks of food. One ran past the window with something in his mouth that looked to be the size of a wine-bottle cork, which was probably not an accurate impression, but still. A few minutes later I saw a squirrel standing on the fence holding something with both paws. It’s a little backyard mystery. On the one hand, it doesn’t matter all that much; on the other hand, I’m a curious bird. Figuring out small anomalies gives me something to do with my day.

If we rewind this story just about exactly one year, we get to Hurricane Isaias, which brought some pretty wild wind to our part of the country. (Declan and I were actually at the beach–Matt had to work and couldn’t come with us, but I had hit a peak of can’t-deal-with-pandemic-lockdown and rented a tiny vacation apartment in Connecticut on the Long Island Sound for three days. We had an amazing day and a half of tidal-beach exploration and Entemann’s Donuts, and we weathered the storm with board games and more Entemann’s, but the beach cottage lost power and we came home early.) The park near our house lost a few trees, but more relevantly to the squirrel story, the tree in our neighbor’s backyard dropped a really large branch into our yard. Under normal circumstances, we’d have asked the landlord to remove the branch. We planned to do that, but then Declan seemed to enjoy having it around to play with, and we just never got around to having it removed. For the last few months, the branch has been leaning against the fence between yards. It’s cool looking and not in anyone’s way, and a pretty impressive mushroom colony has started growing around the top end.

That turns out to be the answer to the squirrel food question. They’re breaking off big chunks of mushroom from the top of the branch–I watched one shimmy his fat squirrel body up the branch and harvest some mushroom. Nature, my friends, finds a way.

The picture on today’s card is berries glowing on the branches of a leafy plant–apparently it signifies a bountiful harvest, long efforts bearing fruit, and a reminder to face this time of plenty with a spirit of generosity. It’s too much of a stretch, even for me, to draw some connection about generosity towards the squirrels.

In other news, I slept really well last night, and I feel like a person again, so that’s good.

Today’s card doesn’t feel particularly useful as a writing prompt–in this exercise as well as in actual readings, I just never know what to do with court cards. The Father of Cups is a patron of the arts, dignified and supportive, but harboring vast and unpredictable insecurities. Good for him I guess?

I was telling Matt yesterday that one of my goals for the summer is to not feel, at the point where I go back to work, like I wasted the whole summer. I think I’m largely successful on that front so far, even if there are days like today, which looks like it might be sort of meh. I’d thought that we might do the American Museum of Natural History today–I have such a conflicted relationship with AMNH. It should be amazing and it’s often not? The special exhibits are always excellent, and they’re the main reason we’re still carrying a family membership. The dinosaur galleries are very beautifully constructed, but my child has weirdly never been that in to them, even when he was more into dinosaurs. Vast amounts of space in the museum are given over to the really old-fashioned stuff like the Hall of African Mammals, big glass displays with taxidermied animals, which seem to exist largely to spur nostalgia among big-money donors. And then there are the weird forgotten parts of the museum–the various “anthropology” halls are frankly embarrassing, and I swear to god there are places in the third and fourth floor of the museum where you can go down the wrong hallway and come face to face with a science-fair-style posterboard of dead seagulls or squirrels.

For all its flaws, AMNH is a good place to spend a few hours, most of the time, and since it’s supposed to rain for large parts of the day, I thought that might be our plan for today. But you can’t eat lunch at the museum anymore, the cafeteria is still closed as a covid precaution. The last time we went, we popped out of the museum for lunch, ate Shake Shack chicken fingers while sitting on a bench in Central Park, and then went back in to the museum to see the planetarium show. Today, with the possible rain, outdoor lunch seems like less of an option, and I don’t want to eat indoors, and and and. (It’s so stupid to think this, because the pandemic has had such real and serious impacts on so many people’s lives, but sometimes in the day-to-day I resent most the way it’s stolen the easiness out of daily life.) If we can’t eat lunch there, then we’re really only talking about an hour and a half or two hours at the museum, and if I’m going to haul myself all the way up to Central Park West I want to not feel like I’m on a countdown timer.

The description for today’s card is very direct: it basically says that my life is very good but I don’t see it that way, and that I should stop taking my situation for granted, and that I should appreciate the people who support me. This is a very pointed message at this particular moment in my life; the pointy end of the message is emphasized by the picture on the card, a rat running over four cups. I can’t get into details because it’s not my story to share, but yesterday I heard a story involving rats in someone’s apartment, and I can’t stop thinking about it.

I also slept very poorly last night, so I’m all off-kilter this morning. V short newsletter as a result.

I swept all the little flowers off the patio and paths yesterday, which I think doesn’t reduce the number of bees, it just displaces them. (Relatedly, I noticed last night that the big birdfeeder in the backyard is swarmed with bumblebees. The birdfeeder is empty and has been for a couple of weeks, because of recommendations to take down feeders in order to slow the spread of some sort of songbird disease. I was going to start re-filling it, because what I’ve been reading suggests that the threat to birds is down, but now I’m hesitant because, you know, bees. Why are there bees in my empty birdfeeder?) So the drunk bees are relocated to the grass, and everything is fine, except that when I walk in the grass with shoes on it’s death to the snails. If I step barefoot on a snail, I can usually react in time to not squish it, but I know I took out two snails yesterday while wearing sandals and oh, the drama.

Today’s card is the Ace of Cups, which the book says represents “the beginning of exciting new phases” and a “whole new start” that can “revitalize your spirit.” Which all sounds lovely. One piece of the “oh I’m so old” mopey feeling has been the sense that the future isn’t a set of branching paths anymore–the person I am right now is the person I am, and while I’m very happy with the person I am, I’m sort of out of chances to be someone different. I’m a high school teacher and administrator, and I’m never going to be a wildlife photographer or a travel writer or a marathon runner. Saying this out loud, it starts to feel ridiculous–of course people can, and do, start new hobbies or new jobs or new lifestyles even when they’re much older than I am now. So this feeling is a lie, but it’s still there. It’s not so much about the specifics as about the hazy possibilities–that sense I had fifteen or twenty years ago, that someday I might be a person who was different. (calmer? more interesting? more creative? a better friend?)

It’s Drunk Bee Season in the backyard. There’s a tree in the neighbor’s yard that drops these little yellow-green flowers. It drops a million of them–in the neighbor’s yard, you practically can’t see the ground. It looks like it’s snowing when the wind blows. We’re not carpeted to the same extent, but it’s a lot of little flowers. When they’re on the ground, we get a lot of bees–a wide range of bees! Big fat bumblebees, regular sting-y looking yellow bees, yesterday I saw some giant kind of bee like I’d never seen before. The bees come, they bop around on the ground sticking their little bee faces into these fallen flowers, and then the bees stay, rolling drunkenly around on the ground. I don’t know what these flowers are or why they affect the bees so much. (Some googling suggests that it might be a linden tree? But it might not.) I do know that we have a week or so every year where you can’t go barefoot in the backyard, and you can’t go out at all unless you’ve been sweeping up the flowers. Yesterday we counted well over twenty bees rolling around on the ground just on patio area right outside the door.

Drunk Bee Season is annoying, what with the danger of getting stung, but it’s also kind of hilarious. This year it’s also a little wistful, since it’s our last Drunk Bee Season in this apartment. After fourteen years in north Brooklyn, we’re moving to the Bronx later this fall–Dec and I will be able to walk to school. We don’t have a closing date or a moving date yet, that’s all in process still, but papers have been signed and money has changed hands and I can finally stop feeling all in-betweeny and tentative.

Today’s card is relevant in its own way–the guide says the Four of Pentacles is material success and stability, but with a warning to not become possessive or controlling. The picture on the card is things wrapped up with strings, things tied together. I have so many feelings all tied up together about this move. Mostly I’m very excited, I love the house, but we’re tangled up in our current neighborhood and it’s going to hurt to disentangle ourselves. I mean, we’re just moving to another part of the same city, it’s not like we can’t ever come back, but it’s a big city and it’s a big change. (How many times, over the eight years we’ve been in this current apartment, I’ve sat in the backyard and thought, this is good.)

“The Magician is a card of boundless, expansive energy … this card is all about action, action, action.” It’s been inaction on my mind lately, though–this summer-mode not-working thing is strange. I do, in fact, have a lot of things to do but I’m a little stuck. (Course planning isn’t going to plan itself, but I’d made these great calendar pages for my class and then I left them in the office, and while they were literally just sharpied boxes on sheets of paper, they’ve become my excuse to not think about my class right now. All the digital tools in the world and I like to plan my course with post-its on calendar grids.)

Here, this started as another long parenthetical but I’ll promote it to a full idea rather than an aside: my class for next year is a source of some concern! Since I’m also an administrator, I only teach the one class, and the class I’m teaching is an elective for juniors and seniors. Last year was the first year I taught the class, and the kids in last year’s class gave me some really good feedback about course pacing. The course has three major units, and they all thought the last unit of the year was by far the most interesting, but it was also very rushed. I agree on both counts, but I’m not sure how to buy more time for that last unit. Warning: history-teacher thinking-out-loud here, this might be boring. The course is History of the Silk Roads, and the three units cover three different time periods, but they also have different pedagogical objectives. The first unit is about the Roman and Han empires and their trade connections and influences. At my school, we have pretty high academic expectations in the electives, but a lot of students have trouble with the transition to the work in the elective classes, and this course isn’t an honors course, so most of my students are kids who might not be great at history class but who need to fill a graduation requirement. So the first unit of the year starts off with a very traditional kind of structure. It’s the only part of the course where we use a textbook, and the supplemental readings are all very straightforward. By the end of the unit it’s gotten a little complicated, we read a chapter from Mary Beard, we use some archaeological resources to understand smaller cultures on the edges of the empires, we look at some art, etc. But it’s a transition unit. The second part of the course is about the Mongols, and we do this almost entirely with primary sources, and the sources are really not straightforward. The material is more challenging but the content is pretty interesting so that keeps them engaged, mostly. And then the final unit of the course is modern economic development in Central and East Asia, and it’s a lot of journalism and current events rather than historical analysis. It’s more fun (the sources are easier and more narrative, the class discussions are more lively) and it comes at a point in the year when they’re in the final stages of a huge independent research project.

The point is, I can’t really cut from the earlier units of the class, because there are teaching objectives to all of the work we’re doing in the first two units. And yet the material in the third unit really does need more time and more context, so I need to find time for it somewhere.

So this is how it goes, I guess–I’m handed the keyword “action” and I can generate a to-do list in an instant. But I’m also working on relax-and-recharge; I spent part of yesterday afternoon sitting out in the sun and slowly working my way through the first two chapters of William James’s “Pragmatism” because I’ve basically read nothing but romance novels for months and months and I wanted to try shifting gears. (And then after two chapters I went back to romance novels.)

Drawing a single tarot card a day is an interesting exercise; drawing a single tarot card on my birthday feels like it’s supposed to Mean Something. We are setting intentions for the whole year here! I mean, we don’t have to be, this is my game and I make the rules. (But it does feel that way–it’s not breakfast, it’s Birthday Breakfast! Which seems like a lot to ask of a breakfast.)

Today’s card is The Moon, continuing my statistically unlikely streak of major arcana cards. The guidebook says it’s about vivid dreams and vivid fears, the dark unknowns that can tip to either fear or discovery. I think it might be a good card for the year ahead–there’s a lot that we’re shaking up in the next year, big changes ahead, and I could do worse than to embrace the idea of the unknown as a place of possibility.

Anyway, that’s it for today, we’ve got a cake to frost.

The whole morning routine was disrupted today by the Olympics opening ceremonies, and then there’s this cake. There is a reason I prefer to make chocolate cake–I mean, a few reasons, the first being that I have a really straightforward chocolate cake recipe that is amazingly delicious, no one has ever had a complaint about that chocolate cake. But also it’s not that hard! It’s an easy cake recipe! But when my kid requests strawberry cake for his ninth birthday, and I have a good strawberry cake recipe, I mean, I’d feel like a jerk saying no.

So that’s how I ended up microwaving frozen strawberries and then mashing their gooey pulpy bodies through a mesh strainer with a wooden spoon before boiling it all down into a syrupy mess. Which I then I had to whisk milk into. And then six (SIX!) egg whites. That’s before we get to the part where I’m scooping tablespoons of flour out of a measured cup so that I can replace them with tablespoons of cornstarch, because our local grocery store no longer carries cake flour, and I don’t keep cake flour around because who on earth has the time or energy for a recipe that can’t be executed with all-purpose flour? (Me, apparently. Matt walked by as I was muttering at the cake-flour substitution and said something like “you know that they make cake mixes” and I was all “you know, I have basically a single parenting affectation and it’s that I’m making a goddamn homemade cake for his birthday.”)

They’re in the oven right now. (That’s a plural because there are two layers, we’re fancy like that. THIS IS TOO MUCH CAKE. We’re not even having grandparents over for a cake party this year. I also bought fresh strawberries to slice up between the layers.) The birthday isn’t until tomorrow, but I’m making the cake layers today, because tomorrow is also my birthday and life is too short to spend part of your own birthday microwaving frozen strawberries and mashing them through a strainer. (There will be chocolate frosting. We’ll make that tomorrow, because making cake frosting is basically like doing magic, plus you get to snack on it.)

Today’s card is The Lovers, illustrated with Canada geese because apparently they mate for life? I’m drawing a statistically improbable number of major arcana cards lately.

I swear to you I shuffled this deck. I started to shuffle, then realized a few shuffles in that I was distracted thinking about birthday cake. I’ve always made chocolate cake for Declan’s birthday but last year he requested strawberry, so we made two cakes. He asked for strawberry again this year. There’s no point in two cakes this year, I’m not sure even how we’re going to eat one whole cake, but I like making the chocolate cake. (Maybe the chocolate cake is just for me? It’s still too much cake.) So I’m trying to remember where I put the cookbook with the strawberry cake recipe, and planning out maybe we do a strawberry cake with a chocolate frosting, and then I realize that I’m still shuffling and that technically what I’m supposed to be doing while shuffling tarot cards is calming down my mind and focusing on an intention for the day.

So I put the cards down and take a deep breath, pick them up and try again, calm mind and inner focus, but I can’t quite do it–instead of thinking about the cake I’m thinking about an important email I’m waiting for, and I start to feel this sort of adrenaline-tension thing that happens when I’m very stressed, like my whole body is about to float away, and that’s not the right state of mind for this either. Shuffle shuffle cut, and it’s the same card as yesterday. I don’t know.

I like shuffling cards, though. My grandma taught me when I was little. Grandma Blanche, the nice one, my dad’s mother. She made me a card holder out of tupperware lids so that I could play gin rummy without needing to spread my hand all over the floor, and she taught me to bridge the shuffle so that the cards don’t get bent, and she brought me along to poker night once where all the old ladies in the retirement village played these crazy poker variations–the one I remember most was called “midnight baseball” and I’m pretty sure it was seven-card stud but played entirely blind, every single card face-down, you just bet blind every card. When I was twenty-three and going to poker night with a bunch of software engineers in Mountain View (all of them stupid rich with google money now, I think) I told them this story and they said I had to be remembering wrong, no one would play that way. But theirs was the kind of poker night where everyone was very mathematical about things, and it was in the poker-tournaments-on-television era where it’s all Texas Hold’em or you aren’t serious.

The ladies at poker night with Grandma Blanche, they weren’t trying to be serious. I mean, they took it seriously, they bet with real money and they paid attention when they played. But they were there to have fun. (I’ve been staring at this paragraph for several minutes now, trying to figure out how to say a thing, and that’s not in the spirit of this newsletter experiment. This isn’t the first time I’ve told this same story about Grandma Blanche and her poker night, but just now while writing this it occurred to me, another difference between the poker ladies in Boynton Beach and the software engineers in Mountain View is that Grandma and her friends were all old enough to be past that event horizon where you stop caring whether other people think you’re smart enough or serious enough or whatever enough. There’s nothing to prove, you just go have some fun, play all the crazy variations with the wild cards and weird rules, do what makes you happy.)

Today’s card looks like a tree on fire, red-tinged in the night. The guidebook says it represents either an actual maternal relationship or “the side of yourself that wants to love more.” It also is apparently about connecting with nature. I feel like my summer goals are always about connecting with nature–yesterday we spent almost six hours at a lake up in Putnam County, in the middle of a state park. The beach rings one corner of the lake and the rest is woods. We did some swimming and some digging in the sand, bought some ice cream from the concession stand, but we also saw a deer grazing on the far shore and a giant snapping turtle swimming in the shallow water. Some kid with a net and a bucket caught a bunch of baby frogs, only half-transformed from being tadpoles, and showed them off to the other kids on the beach.

Back In The Day, in this case meaning when I was like twenty-two and living in Somerville, I spent a while really interested in that Artist’s Way book. Just out of college, in a job that was perfectly fine but not what I wanted to do with my life, with this thing in the back of my head saying that I could be a writer if only. If only what, I don’t know, but if only something. So I did the Artist’s Way stuff, trying to find the problem so I could fix it. I loved doing the morning pages–just write three pages of anything at all, just clear out the static in your brain. After two weeks I realized that my morning pages were all about wanting and never about doing. I wanted things to be different, in eight million unspecified ways, “wanting it to be different” radiating out like spokes on a wheel or like poison gas. Having seen that, I couldn’t un-see it, and I started trying to make things different. (Writing still never happened, not in a sustained way, that’s a story for another day. But the push-push-push to do the things, that’s how I got the grad school applications in, that’s how I moved to California, that’s how I gained all the good things in my life that came after but also how I lost all the things I hadn’t appreciated enough when I was twenty-two and living in Somerville.)

Anyway my point was, there’s value in seeing the patterns. Whenever I’m in a loop of talking too much about “maternal relationships” it’s because I’m putting off a phone call.

I am not sure how it happens, but I’m sitting here at six-thirty on a Tuesday morning, middle of the summer, my only real responsibility today is to go to the lake with my adorable child, and somehow I’m feeling time-pressure anxiety. Like, honest to god, I opened this page and thought, I don’t have time for this today. My brain, not helpful.

Today’s card is the Father of Swords. The guidebook describes him as fair, analytical, able to remove his emotions from a situation and see it objectively. “He’s a responsible man with deep ties to his family.” The card depicts him as an owl holding a rainbow sword. I like the owl.

We had a tragic owl death in last night’s bedtime reading. We’ve been reading the Redwall books to Declan at bedtime for, god, years at this point. There are an infinite number of Redwall books. (For those who are unfamiliar, as I was before we started doing these at bedtime: it’s a fantasy series about talking woodland creatures. Heroic adventures, good fighting evil, and victories are always celebrated with lavish feasts.) The current one has some definite late-book-in-a-long-series problems; a major plot point involved trying to rescue a bratty mousebaby named Dwopple, and Matt and I both agreed that the Redwallers would be well served by letting the bad guys keep their hostage. More to the point, the plots are starting to recycle. “Rescue of a bratty mousebabe” happened a few books ago, and while the bratty mousebabe in that sequence grew up to be a Warrior of Redwall, I doubt that a mouse named Dwopple is destined for greatness in the same way. I also reset having to keep saying Dwopple.

Dwopple Dwopple Dwopple.

The guidebook says that the nine of pentacles represents a “happy, healthy home” and the result of loyal hard work and dedication. Worked at that, haven’t we? I was talking about this with a friend a week or two ago, how sometimes it feels like the great work of adulthood is learning to live differently from how you were raised. I think about this often–my mother’s narrative is one of fear, which manifests as anger or anxiety or any number of things. With my own child, I hear that voice so often. He comes and sits next to me at the playground, leans against my side or flops across my lap, and I put an arm across him while the voice in my head says, oh, I would die if anything happened to you. But I don’t say it out loud. Growing up with my mother meant growing up listening to a stream-of-consciousness narration of all the things that could go wrong. So I live with that narrator whispering in my head, but I’m not putting that voice in his head. It’s all I can do.

(Declan thinks it’s funny. She says we can’t leave his toys in the yard because someone will know a child lives here and they’ll come kidnap him, and he laughs. She says he can’t sleep near the window in case he falls out. Of a closed bedroom window. He thinks that’s hilarious. It’s not that my child has no fears and anxieties, he just doesn’t have my mother’s.)

On a more prosaic note, the “expedition every day” model for the summer doesn’t leave a lot of time for the boring necessities, so today is just “let’s do a lot of errands” day. Dragging Declan along, maybe we’ll try to make it a train day, ride a few extra subway lines just for fun, find somewhere fun to eat lunch. (If we’re venturing out into Manhattan at all, I often want to eat at Pret, but then Declan just ends up doing a “fruit cup and chips” lunch again, which is not exactly a-plus parenting. We make compromises.)

The Hermit, again! As befits my total inability to engage with other human beings. The struggle right now is Declan’s birthday, all of his friends are out of town (some for the whole summer, some for a week, but this is a popular time to skip town apparently) and I’m at a loss for how to make his birthday feel special.

The kid actually requested a Zoom birthday party. I mean. Kids are infinitely adaptable. In the first few months of the pandemic, they did a lot of Zoom playdates, and listening to the kids on Zoom was crazy. It felt like zoo animals exploring a new habitat. They tested all the filters and features, they made everyone in the meeting a co-host and took turns booting people out to the waiting room. Once, Dec was doing a Zoom playdate with three friends, and when he suddenly got very quiet I went in to see if everything was okay. It turned out that they’d set up individual breakout rooms and were hanging out, alone, in separate breakout rooms. So now he wants a Zoom birthday party, I think in part because his best friends aren’t available for in-person birthday festivities, and in part because he’s drunk on the power of being the meeting host.