2025 Retrospective

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According to my journal, on the first day of 2025 I did “various tasks,” an appropriate harbinger of a year in which I would continue to be busy and full from one season into the next and the next. More often recently I’ve left out the latchstring on the door of myself, let the thing swing open, allowed the fresh air properly in. 

At the beginning of the year we had a few snow days, I cooked a lot of pot roast, and Katie and I started our early morning class meetings for our London trip, the kids straggling in sleepy-eyed in the half-light. A group of boys took to playing blackjack in my study hall and I wrote a poem about it to make them stop. (It worked.) I gave occasional after school cello lessons to a student who begged for them, and helped the women’s ministry at church put on a small weekend conference. I re-read Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day so I could lead a discussion about it at (one of) my book club(s), and I logged onto Zoom a couple times a month for a residency through Fuller Seminary where I watched eager creative people wrestle gently with their place in the church.

This was a year of travel and not a single trip was by myself (though a few flights were.) The first big one was a midwest road trip with Tze over spring break. We talked about tattoos and decision-making and church, and the morning after we left my old home of Madison, WI, when he pulled over to take pictures of something or other, I sat in the car and cried, because I was only just coming to understand how unhappy I had been in that place and how good it had been to me despite everything. We went through a lot of Air Bnbs and more rental cars than was ideal. We ate at Culver’s and nameless diners and saw Lake Michigan from nearly every angle. 

Back home I wrote the text of a song based on Psalm 2 for a project at church, and played my cello in a chapel program at school. I showed the 2015 Far from the Madding Crowd to my juniors, and they reacted with dramatic indignation. I read Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady for the first time and wept with grief and gladness when Ralph died and Isabel called him ‘brother.’ In May, I flew to Colorado along with parents to see my brother walk across a stage in a tent after years of work for his PhD, then came back to my students making up ‘tier lists’ on my whiteboard of all the books they’d been assigned, ranking them from top to bottom as if literature mattered and their thoughts about it did too.

By early June I was in London with my siblings, beginning my second big trip of the year. George and I climbed Primrose Hill and walked part of the canal while waiting for Mary, and then we all three had dinner at Dishoom and went to see a show. We stayed the next few days in a cottage in the Cotswolds and wandered its environs. Back in London, my students arrived—a moment Katie and I had been planning for two years. I was thrilled, and then our rental house cancelled on us right before check in. We found another place to stay, but I spent the rest of the trip reckoning with my own competency. We took the kids to see Oliver! and to Mary’s church in Southall and out to the countryside and to the Victoria and Albert Museum. They enjoyed so much but it was difficult for me to see this, and I cried on the tube home from the circus.

Back home I spent a week or two recovering then flew west with Stephanie (the third trip). We met Regula and drove her car down the coast, past lighthouses and rocks and trees and speeding tickets and deserts. In Tahoe we cleaned my granddad’s cabin, played in the glittering water at Emerald Bay, and drank Turkish coffee. I got blisters on my feet and the tattoo I’d been thinking about since trip #1. Mary came at the end for a few days, uncertain about her future in London and needing a place to think. We posed for so many photos and made playlists to reflect each other’s personalities. 

Back home, I returned to work in early August. When the kids came back I found my classes both delightful and exhausting. I went on exactly one date to a trivia night at a brewery, flew to Minnesota for the weekend for my cousin’s wedding in the woods, hosted ‘meadhalls’ for my freshmen when they finished Beowulf, and took my AP kids outside to read poetry under the sky. And then my sister moved home, with all of her books and her ten years’ memories of London in tow.

I wrote a paper about teaching that my mom really liked and gave it at a conference in South Carolina. Heather visited from Boston while in town for a diaconate meeting, and I invited my friend Ashley to a Caldwell soccer game, then got so involved in a conversation with her about some big emotion or other that I cried standing on the sidelines. I led a Bible study on Galatians, went off my anti-depressants, and started locking the freshmen out of my classroom at lunchtime so they wouldn’t think it belonged to them.

At thirty-three, I am still trying to learn to shut up and listen, to hear the melody of the Maker’s song. I have heard it better at year’s end. I think the music has crescendoed. Yesterday I read a little morality play by Charles Williams that my mom gave me. Towards the end the protagonist says to the angel Gabriel, “You look grander than you used,” and Gabriel replies, “It is only that you give me more attention.”

In this last month or so I’ve gotten a new hot water heater and a new car and walked to see the lights in the very cold. My parents’ Thanksgiving table was full and eclectic, and their Christmas party had more singing than ever before. During exams last week sickness ravaged the student population, and I entertained myself by privately listing every literary figure I’d discussed with my juniors who’d died of tuberculosis: Helen Burns, all four of Charlotte Brontë’s sisters, John Keats himself, and Tiny Tim (in one timeline at least). Then this past Saturday I went to a Christmas brunch at Brooke’s and by the end my temperature was 103°. So I went home and wept. It was all I wanted to do. I felt certain that tears would heal me.

I may have been right, because I am mainly better now, well enough to read Mary’s words in Auden’s Christmas Oratorio, For the Time Being:

My flesh in terror and fire
Rejoices that the Word
Who utters the world out of nothing,
As a pledge of His word to love her
Against her will, and to turn
Her desperate longing to love,
Should ask to wear me,
From now to their wedding day,
For an engagement ring.

Amen and amen.

Farewell, Kia

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Last week my 2008 Kia had an accident—its third—and this one marked the end of its life. It was the first car I ever owned and it’s been a lot of places and done a lot of things. Off the top of my head, I can think of nearly twenty people who have driven it, and at my best count, it’s been to twenty-six states, both coasts, and two Canadian provinces. 

I bought it the summer of 2016 and immediately drove it down to Fort Myers, FL with a former student to see a friend—a week during which I remember both crying a lot and laughing a lot. 2016 and 2017 were difficult, unmooring years and there were many long phone conversations in that car. I played Look Homeward’s “High Tide” on repeat. In 2018, I moved to Vancouver and the car stayed home for a year. My parents appreciated having an extra car to drive and I learned to ride the city bus in a new place. 

Then, in the summer of 2019 my dad and I drove it cross country—stopping along the way to see friends and bison and prairie dogs—and arrived in British Columbia in sparkling mid-summer. Thus began what I consider the glory days of the Kia. It allowed me to take a job at a nursing home that was a bumper-to-bumper but beautiful commute away in West Vancouver—that job would change my life in small but significant ways. Friends and housemates borrowed that car to drive to work, to drive to church, to drive to therapy, to drive to the grocery store. Together we took it to the Okanagan, to the Sunshine Coast, and back across the border to Montana for breaks and get-aways. When the Covid shutdown happened, some of us spent a night joking that we would drive it up to the Yukon and start a new life there. The car was a promise—it held out hope. And it gave a lot of rides, enabled simple generosity.

I drove back into the States for good in June of 2021. When I pulled away from my home of three years in Vancouver, I turned on the radio and Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust” blared out of it. The next day, as I drove through the stunning desolation of Northeastern California, I listened to Anne of Green Gables on audiobook and wept. My brother met up with me in Lake Tahoe and we drove back east—stopping along the way to see family and cities and memories. I got the windshield replaced in Colorado. That fall I took the car with me to Wisconsin, where I learned to shovel a driveway, but got in an accident on an icy road anyway.

I’ve had the Kia back home in North Carolina since 2022, and have tried to tend it gently in its old age. It had an ant problem for a while, the check engine light came on anytime I try to drive through mountains, and the CD player has been jammed since 2020. And now, it has given up a bit earlier than I wanted it to, but still, it has been my friend. 

Someone asked me the other day if I’m a person who names my cars. I think I did pick a name for the Kia when I originally bought it, but then promptly forgot it. So no, clearly I am not. But just because I haven’t been able to properly personify the thing, does not mean it has not been home to me. There is a sticker on its bumper which says that: Home. I can barely recognize my 2016 self, but the Kia can. It has accepted nearly a decade’s worth of my tears and songs with patience. It has carried me through move after move, year after year, and I am grateful.

Fall Things

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I’ve seen many autumns, but this one has managed to surprise me. New green things burst forth tender and young in spring and then come October and November they die and drift to the ground with a gentle, dry clatter. They cover over the street and our walkways and gardens and the windshields of our cars, and we just get used to clearing them all away, these husks of long-ago April’s freshness. They flutter around the tires of our cars as we drive. We mulch them and pile them and jump in them and cart them off. We would miss them if we didn’t have them—these leaves, a manageable reminder of our own mortality.

A couple weeks ago I went off my antidepressants. I started taking them in late winter of 2021, when I was living in Wisconsin. I’ve actually been off and on a couple times in the last few years, and had settled in for the last year or two at quite a low dosage. SSRIs can be a helpful tool, keeping your head above the fray. They work (as far as experts can tell) by suppressing your emotions, so you can’t be overwhelmed by sadness or fear. But of course, you’re very unlikely to be overwhelmed by anything else either.

I keep crying—brief tears, happy tears, tears for the sake of others. None of these things have historically been my trademark. It’s as if, in the last few years with all my passion chemically tamped down somewhere inside my chest, my emotional capacity has expanded without my knowledge, gained elasticity like a balloon, and now that I’ve undone the padlock I’d set in place, feelings are just leaking out in every direction, sweet and soft. 

I’m crying at an instagram reel about a teenage boy healing from brain damage, nearly welling up while reading aloud to my students, finding my throat tightening while a friend talks about her kids and their struggle to love each other well. I care more. I like caring. Caring makes good teaching, good relationships, good art, good people. Caring means I find myself thinking about the dead fall leaves day after day while I drive home from work. And while paying attention to the leaves, I am better attuned to notice a very old man who lives down the block guide his trash bin away from the curb, dragging it with unbalanced half-steps as his wife follows nervously behind.

Fall is the season of disrobing, of frailty, of each towering goodness of our lives visible in sharp relief against a grey midday sky. The trees shed all their hard-won covering and then they fall into a kind of dormancy for the winter. They go to sleep. Nature trusts that even while the heart-sap slows their Maker is doing a good work, that some day—there is no need to count the sunrise and sunsets—spring will come again, and they will rise, full of new green.

Poem Triad

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I’m giving you three poems again, because three things laid next to each other are so often more than the sum of their parts. Poems are things that talk to each other, if we allow them to be neighbors. Here’s a favorite Christina Rossetti poem, called “In Progress,” followed by a piece of mine, and a passage from Isaiah 54 that I’ve been reading and re-reading recently.

Ten years ago it seemed impossible
That she should ever grow so calm as this,
With self-remembrance in her warmest kiss
And dim dried eyes like an exhausted well.
Slow-speaking when she had some fact to tell,
Silent with long-unbroken silences,
Centred in self yet not unpleased to please,
Gravely monotonous like a passing bell.
Mindful of drudging daily common things,
Patient at pastime, patient at her work,
Wearied perhaps but strenuous certainly.
Sometimes I fancy we may one day see
Her head shoot forth seven stars from where they lurk
And her eyes lightnings and her shoulders wings.

What makes a thing profound?
Is it Mariana Trench depth? 
A wail of grief pitched perfectly bereft? 
The complexity of kaleidoscope stained-glass 
shot through with new year’s dawn?
Great clouds of witness all making
the same pronouncement in angelic chorus?

Or is it just
a certain sharpness—
some sliver of knowing whittled so fine
that it slices into heart-skin like butter?
Perhaps profound is a needle meant only
to pierce the chest
of one woman
alone on a back deck,
a cigarette hanging between her fingers,
her t-shirt worn soft.

There is sky above her.
She sees it.

“Sing, barren woman,
    you who never bore a child;
burst into song, shout for joy,
    you who were never in labor;
because more are the children of the desolate woman
    than of her who has a husband,”
says the Lord.
“Enlarge the place of your tent,
    stretch your tent curtains wide,
    do not hold back;
lengthen your cords,
    strengthen your stakes.
For you will spread out to the right and to the left;
    your descendants will dispossess nations
    and settle in their desolate cities.”

“Do not be afraid; you will not be put to shame.
    Do not fear disgrace; you will not be humiliated.
You will forget the shame of your youth
    and remember no more the reproach of your widowhood.
For your Maker is your husband—
    the Lord Almighty is his name—
the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer;
    he is called the God of all the earth.
The Lord will call you back
    as if you were a wife deserted and distressed in spirit—
a wife who married young,
    only to be rejected,” says your God.
“For a brief moment I abandoned you,
    but with deep compassion I will bring you back.
In a surge of anger
    I hid my face from you for a moment,
but with everlasting kindness
    I will have compassion on you,”
    says the Lord your Redeemer.

Remembering

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If I’m honest, I have felt still—too still—the last few years. My life has been full of abundance: a job I love, many good friends, settling back into the neighborhood I grew up in, a sweet church full of creative people, so much travel to beautiful and beloved places. Yet I’ve been irked by the sense throughout that I, as a person, am stagnant, that I’ve stopped growing, that I’ll never feel changed or fresh again. In many ways I think this feeling is born out of my loss of desire to write, the fact that ideas no longer seem to come when I want them, or that when they do I don’t find them interesting. This loss makes me afraid.

The best spiritual antidote I have for this is to follow one of the few commands in scripture which I feel I’m naturally good at: I remember. I remember that the Lord led his people like a flock through the parted sea. I remember the woman who touched the edge of his garment. I remember Saul on the road to Damascus and Gladys Aylward on the train to China and Flannery just sitting there writing about her peacocks. I remember these things because I have read them and heard them, but perhaps even more pressingly, I remember the Pieta in St. Peter’s when I was seventeen, and the silent snow in Grove City when I was twenty, and the bursting red tomato on the nearly-dead vine in my parents’ garden when I was twenty-three, and the August smoke in the Vancouver sky when I was twenty-six, and the shared champagne on the beach at Spanish Banks when I was twenty-nine. I remember that I neither expected nor asked for any of these things, but that they came upon me like a warm summer storm. I hope that this can happen again.

But sometimes my remembering is not enough, because the questions nag at me: That is all well and good, but what if it’s all in the past? What if the summer rains are over and what if they never come again? What good does just thinking about them do? And the answer to all the fear at the heart of this is that while my remembering God has value, what has infinitely more value is his remembering me. And he promises that he does. In Matthew, we are told of the attention he pays to the smallest sparrow and to each hair on our heads. And then Jesus says wryly (I love when Jesus is wry), “Do not be afraid. You are worth more than many sparrows.” Because of course all those warm moments I habitually remember which feel like warm thunder in my hands occurred because he remembered me first. He always remembers me first. I am, in fact, always only echoing his remembrance. This practice of remembering between myself and God is not reciprocal—it is wildly imbalanced. He has engraved me on the palms of his hands.

Quick Guide to Success

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Sometimes as I watch my sixteen year old students, I flip back through my own years as if through tinted plastic lenses of twenty different colors, so I can see the world as they do. And probably the singular abstract idea which looks most different to me now than it once did is the idea of success.

When I was young, success was clear and narrow and certain. Success reflected my own abilities and therefore my own worth. But now, in my thirties, I use the word much more liberally. I’m delighted to contemplate its small beauties all around me: a flower succeeds in blooming, ancient walls still succeed in holding up a roof, a baby boy succeeds in drawing his first breath. Success is not just some straight line drawn from desire to achievement. It is, instead, a miracle: an acorn beneath a forgotten mulch of leaves busting open, grasping the earth, then reaching green arms towards sun and rain till one day, unaccountably, it’s an oak.

The place where I feel successful most consistently nowadays is in the classroom. I love seeing students surprised by how much they care about the characters and words in front of them, their sincere engagement with what we discuss. But I can’t get away from the idea that the success in getting these kids to understand the goodness on the page is not mine, but the writers’. I did not dream up Elizabeth Bennet or Huck Finn. I’ve only required my students to introduce themselves to them. The bond that’s formed between the actual soul and the fictional one is a communal achievement—requiring not only the effort of someone a couple hundred years ago ,but my effort, and the kids’, and their parents’ for making them read, and mine, for filling the house with books, all for this one moment of wide-eyed appreciation.

This idea of communal success occurred to me with a vengeance last Sunday when the worship team performed a setting of Psalm 2. I’d written the words, and dreamed up the idea of it sounding a bit Johnny Cash, but my friend Robin had composed the music, and Michael had arranged it, and Griffin sang it, and several other musicians played a part. The isolated way I write often allows me to ignore how creative achievement demands a village in order to come to fruition, but here was an object lesson played out on a literal stage. I just sat still, watching something I had conceived but which a dozen other people had breathed life into—not to mention the original psalmist and the Lord himself. 

These are just passing thoughts, though. Perhaps the most wonderful thing about living an examined life is coming to realize that even if I did not examine it, every goodness I’ve discovered in the world would still exist. These truths don’t rely on my knowledge of them. Regardless of my efforts, we would all still have a thousand threads tying us together in our glories and our failures. We’d still be standing on the shoulders of giants. But sometimes it’s nice to know and to delight.

Travels with Friends

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Late on Sunday I got back from a trip to the West Coast, my first significant one since I moved back to the States four years ago. Stephanie and I flew to Seattle and met Regula, then over two and half days the three of us drove down the splendidly grey and green Oregon coast, through the severe desert hills of northern California and Reno, over Spooner Pass, and into the Lake Tahoe Basin. We stayed there, two blocks from the blue of the water, for a little over a week.

We laughed when things went wrong, made lists like our lives depended on it, hiked up and down, cooked and cleaned, lay on golden beaches, read aloud, took so many photos, and dressed up and took a sunset cruise on a boat called the Tahoe Gal. It was all very good.

In the last few years as I’ve settled into my contented adult life, I’ve not been able to shake the nagging feeling that I’m not as good at joy as I used to be. I’ve become placid. There are worse things, but I miss the child self who I suspect knew without being told how to carry herself into excitement, how to look forward to a thing, how to fall speechless from delight, how to feel beauty for what it is. Now it seems I require teaching.

I took this trip with friends, though, and I think they helped me remember.

Really, I’ve taken three big trips in the last few months, all of them very much with others, so the lesson has been knitting up its little threads inside me the whole time. These last two weeks were just a sunny culmination. The thing which I am coming to understand is this: there are nearly as many good ways of responding to beauty as there are people. It is possible to arrive at the Pacific Ocean or St Paul’s Cathedral or New River Gorge, to climb a stile in the Cotswolds, watch a 92-year-old blow out his birthday candles, see an Amish farmer plow his fields, and respond with a gasp, with a question, with quiet, with laughter, with the urge to create, or the urge to weep. I know this because I’ve experienced all of these things on my recent travels and I’ve had people beside me. I’ve seen their faces.

Sure, I had eighteen expressive and impressionable teenagers with me in London, but as dear as they are, I’m not talking about them. I mean the adults. If it were only the kids who knew how to immerse themselves, that would just support my earlier dreary hypothesis that only children know joy. It was the people who are thirty and up from whom I was seeing these reactions. Sometimes they were picking up a camera, sometimes they were spinning in circles, sometimes they were examining, discussing, and sometimes they were just saying, “Look at that—Oh, look at that!” But all of them were waist-deep in delight.

So all is not lost. In fact, not only is Lake Tahoe still very blue and the water at Emerald Bay still full of something that shimmers, but in southern Oregon on highway 97 there is a remote old gas station where they’ll tell you the pumps only work on one side. On that one side, the front cover is off as you pump your gas in the July heat, and you can see the gears and belts and clanking things whir furiously at their task, inches from your kneecap, while your tank fills at a glacial pace. On Saturday afternoon, I pointed and laughed to see this absurdity. My friends were, understandably, too tired and hot to care much, but in a good and precious rush, I felt joy.

Travel-Around-London Vignettes

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I ride the Northern Line with my sister from Hampstead to Tottenham Court Road. Across from us sits a young man. He is probably in his mid-twenties with curly hair, fashionable slacks, a button down and dress shoes, and he is drinking a can of Foster’s lager. He is alone. There are delicate pink bruises beneath each eye, maybe self inflicted by lack of sleep. He carries a crumpled canvas duffle and as the car fills he moves it to make way for an older woman to sit next to him. The train jolts and an empty can rolls out of his bag, and, pinker than before, he hurries to retrieve it from the floor by someone else’s feet and tucks it, crumbled neatly, into an outer pocket. By the time he exits at Euston, two other empties have joined it. I suspect there is nothing else in the bag. Some small part of me travels with him as he—I know—boards an escalator which carries him up into hot, fresh summer.

The River Frome

Our walking guidebook is old.
Its clear posts and gates and stiles 
have stuttered into decades, disappeared,
But streams and woods abide
Forward on and on.

The River Frome on and on,
Undisturbed by its own minitude
Sings along through the Golden Valley
Softening all that could be hard
As it has for on and on in time.

This two-steps-width of river formed
This rumpled nape of the earth’s neck,
Carved it out of years with a gentleness 
unworried and absolute, on and on.

I stayed for nine nights in a house in northeast London with three of my coworkers and eighteen of my teenage students. We had three bathrooms between us and one singular front door key. We threw open windows and cried and cooked and laughed. Sometimes we slept. This past Tuesday, we went to the Victoria and Albert Museum and I went up as many stairs as I could until I arrived somewhere I’d never been before, where the whole fourth floor was rooms and rooms of ceramics. They were organized by year and by country and they went on and on through time and place: flowering plates and teapots shaped like camels and ornate bowls the size of bathtubs and figurines of eighteenth century politicians. Room after room after room of bone china labored over with stamp and glaze and heel of hand by people who believed that beauty mattered but had no idea that what they made could last.

His mercies never come to an end. Each morning they are made new—dear and fresh.

An Ode to Airport Living

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This will be a summer of travel for me—spring already has been. Throughout June and July I’ll be more out of town than in it. This has me thinking about airports—those odd liminal spaces consisting of high ceilings, endless grey-green carpets, exorbitantly-priced food, ambient intercom announcements, beeping carts, chirring suitcase wheels.

I never think I like an airport. There are restrictions and lines and unspecified waiting times. Sometimes they yell at you to take your shoes off and sometimes they yell at you to keep them on. When you are late for a flight there are always unintentional herds of people directly in your path who are gazing up at departure screens with tired eyes. Also, luggage gets lost.

And yet, in an airport I am nearly always content. Most of the flights I’ve taken in my adult life have been alone. And while this has the downside of not having someone to watch your bags for you, it comes with its own special flavor of autonomy. You are caught in an uncomfortable limbo—Concourse A, perhaps—but there you are utterly free. Free to walk, free to talk on the phone to every friend you can think of, free to treat yourself to a sit-down dinner no matter the hour, free to go in search of the interfaith chapel, free to curl up on the carpet at an empty gate for a nap, free to listen to three hours of an audiobook, free to be either under or overwhelmed by the in-terminal art exhibits, free to have a cleansing cry. 

Those are the things the people around you are doing too. Wherever you settle yourself, you can look across the way and you will see other another human being wearing a neck pillow like an accessorie, waiting to fly away from home or back to it, expectations, hopes, and fears for the destination piled round their feet like so much luggage as they drink a smoothie and watch distant figures on the tarmack wave neon batons this way and that. There is nothing so universally relatable as one solitary person’s very particular experience.

The plane is a different beast altogether. It’s an uncomfortable cocoon in which the only people-watching you can do is out of your literal peripheral vision. But an airport, oh an airport is all cinnamon-pretzel-smelling and full of unguarded faces which bare gut-deep anxiety, boredom, potential. In a few hours we’ll be scattered round the country, round the whole globe, but in this moment we are all in this place, waiting together. Oh, an airport is living.

For Love of America

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Over spring break a friend and I went on a road trip through the American midwest and my mom gave me a portable sundial to take along. This country has a huge number of paths and byways—roads and porches and on-ramps and off-ramps and faces peering through windows. It was nine days and eight nights of good weather and three different rental cars and many different friendly faces and nine different states. The first evening we ate a Hawaiian pizza off the hood of a flashy white Genesis in a parking lot in Atchison, Kansas, the origin point for the Santa Fe railroad line and stayed the night in Leavenworth, down the road from a clean, symmetrical Neoclassical federal prison. 

The next morning I sat on that Kansas balcony just past dawn and thought about spring—the cruel aching of its becoming. The day before we had seen fields and fields of purple where later in the year, wheat will grow. At first I thought it was clover, but a little research let me know that it was a lowly little weed called henbit. The midwest has been lodged somewhere beneath my breastbone since birth, but I’ve rarely—if ever—seen it in the springtime, so the unexpectedness of that constant purple in my periphery gave me fresh eyes for everything.

My main quiet goal of the Missouri day was to see the house that used to be my grandparents’ and to go by their graves. In my eagerness to get there, I kept trying to turn off of US-35 too early and having to embarrassingly reverse course. Everything looked like Highway F to me, like the road that would take me home, but eventually, as always happens, the right road was the right road. We saw the lake, which had risen all the way to the top of the spillway, and then we walked up to the cemetery on a hill.

Car trouble sent us out of our way to St Louis and we eventually crossed the Mississippi at eleven pm near Alton, Illinois, north of the city. The river was only a yawning black expanse at that hour, but we wound along beside it for a while anyway. And there was good morning light the next day at our AirBnB in the heartland of Illinois for writing and for filming (though I found myself baffled by the sundial, for the time being.)

And then Chicago was a quick succession of glassy, shining Navy Pier, families of Hasidic Jews lining up to ride the ferris wheel, turning in a lost iphone found mysteriously on the ground, and then Lou Malnati’s for dinner. The next morning I bathed in a family friend’s apartment in her deep, square bathtub with water the psychedelic color of ancient minerals. Chicago runs its roots deep.

At midday we left and drove up to Madison where my insides turned all to mush. That year I lived there was hard and I was unhappy, but the place itself—the people and Dunn’s Marsh and even the strange traffic patterns to merge onto the beltline—were all kind to me, soft when I was not always able to be. This was my first time back since I moved away, and I missed my client Bonnie who died in spring of 2023. She was Madison to me—she was its parks, its newspapers, its hospitals, its markets, its lakes—and now she is gone. The city itself misses her, even in spring.

The next morning we left before eight and drove north, slowly, through country, to a two-day-a-week mechanic and lawnmower shop and along two lane roads where Amish buggies occasionally rattled past us, then up further north of that, where most of the signs advertised upcoming shops with the simple statement, “CHEESE.”

The Upper Peninsula reaching out over Lake Michigan was grey and open and quiet, as if it knew it was April, but wasn’t ready to talk about it just yet. Shunted backward in time and season, we wandered on a beach in the chill. I flew for a moment on a metal swingset that sang shrilly in the wind and followed two geese out across the sandbar. Spring had arrived on other shores, full of blooms and thawing laughter, but not here, not yet. The only thing that place could do was trust the earth in its turning. That night we stayed in a warm cabin with a Mennonite family down the way. The garbage man waved to me in the morning.

Good Friday brought us to Detroit where my uncle’s tenant let us into his house and we loaded up my grandma’s big table from which I ate so many summer Sunday dinners growing up, and then I sat on the dining room floor and crumpled old Parade magazines to pack bubble glass into boxes. I wrote about Detroit here almost a decade ago and the city has sat up and stuck its chin out since I was there last. It’s dusted off its shoulders and smiled and you can feel it. I stayed in that evening, but Tze went into the city and made friends every which way—on parking decks and sidewalks and in restaurant kitchens. The next morning, Saturday, his friend and her husband walked us through the open air Eastern Market with its thick carpets of flowers laid out in plastic flats, waiting to be planted in earth.

At midday we drove down through the plains to Defiance, Ohio and Abby met us there to putter around a Goodwill. She and I looked for sparkling things, like shoes and dresses, and also for tops because I was running out of clothes. From there we headed straight on to my friend Laura’s family outside Cleveland, and when her six-year-old shrewdly asked me if this was our “first stop with kids” I realized that it sure enough was. So there were books to read aloud and treasure discovered in the backyard dirt pile to admire, because children bring spring in with them from the outdoors. 

And then came Easter Sunday morning, so we drove though idyllic green valleys, where the homes nodded politely to each other all interspersed with churches, to hear a sermon about John chapter twenty, when Mary doesn’t recognize her risen Lord until he speaks her name. He knows her, and through his knowing she knows him: “Rabboni!” she says. After cinnamon rolls and omelets and watching blonde children chase down plastic eggs we drove south through wavering, warming hills on roads nestled into their sides, and found the World’s Largest Cuckoo Clock in a very quiet Sunday town.

Our last night we stayed on Main Street in Charleston, West Virginia. At fifty thousand people, it’s the biggest city in an achingly mountainous and forested and impoverished state. The porches on those neighborhood blocks were full of people who glanced at us with quiet suspicion—girls still in their Easter dresses and boys lingering barefoot along the curbs and folks crouched on stoops and a big sign on a bedsheet that said, “Welcome Home, Old Man!”

On our last day, just south of Charleston, our route crossed New River Gorge again and again. It’s a huge, old seam in the earth’s crust that busted open so many eons ago and has managed, with time, to heal itself over with spit and sweat and gumption and growing things, into a great, green scar. As we wound down through the mountains of Virginia towards Greensboro, I thought of resurrection and again, of Christ stepping out of his tomb, and then, merely by speaking her name, calling Mary out of hers.

All these places we had passed through in this shaken, stubborn country I had been before, and yet seeing them in their states of spring—expecting and tender and face-up-to-the-light and Hopkins’ “dearest freshness deep down things”—I understood how much I did not know about hope.  I see it running in veins through the treetops and the concrete and the backs of people’s hands. There is a mystery that abides. We will not know, not really know, the glory of the resurrected Son until he calls us by name, face to face. Until then, like Mary, we usually only see a gardener and a garden. That will have to do for now.