When Your People are OK

My daughter flew to Montana to visit her grandmother over the weekend, and my phone filled with smiling selfies—some capturing the two of them together, mirror images of joy across generations; others featuring curious deer pausing mid-browse; many showcasing mountains ablaze with golden larches in the autumn light. Two of my favorite women and kindred spirits, they baked cookies and chocolate chip pumpkin bread, excavated the pantry's archaeological layers (unearthing pasta dated 2003), made pilgrimages to the Clavadetscher family's beloved gluten-free haunts, and caught up on everything from national headlines to personal histories. Their gathering warmed my heart with a heat that surprised me—until Aden told me about visiting Papa's grave and leaving him with a flag for Veteran's Day, when unexpected tears welled up and spilled over.

My emotions, never particularly hidden even in the best of times, currently roil just beneath a thin veneer of middle-aged composure. During Friday's therapeutic yet uncomfortable deep tissue massage, my tormentor-slash-masseuse mentioned that his daughter was expecting her third baby any day. Without warning, I launched into the story of Aden's birth—how my parents were present in the room, how the midwife struggled to stop my bleeding and called for medicine that wasn't there, how my non-medical father went sprinting down the hospital corridor to find someone, anyone, who could help "his baby." The memory cascaded forward: Aden now with my mom, the profound absence of my dad, and suddenly tears were rolling from the corners of my eyes, streaming down my cheeks in a slow, steady fountain to the pillow below. Trapped on the massage table with no arms free to wipe them away and no means of retreat to pull myself together, I felt uncomfortably exposed. Yet I remain grateful for the memories and the feelings—proof that love persists even when loved ones are gone, that the body remembers what the heart cannot forget.

Aden's home now, and William returns from New York a week from Friday—God willing and the airports cooperating. We'll gather with dear friends for Thanksgiving, and I find myself counting down the days with almost childlike anticipation. In this fractured world spinning faster than feels manageable, what ultimately matters reduces to something elegantly simple: "your people are OK," as a coaching coworker reminded me on Sunday. As of November 2026, many families and communities are not OK: are not paid, insured, or even fed. I think of how to help those without a safety net, how important it is to keep those members of our communities also in my mind.

Our relationships with friends and family and coworkers, the deliberate work we do to nurture and maintain these connections—these bonds are sacred, the only wealth that counts. I feel fortunate that my parents taught me about the strength and vital importance of family, the sustaining power of community. Even more grateful that our children understand the same truth, carrying it forward into their own lives like a torch passed from one generation to the next, its flame steady despite the wind.

Election Day 2025

 "Voting is the expression of our commitment to ourselves, one another, this country and this world."         -Sharon Salzberg

"Elections belong to the people. It's their decision. If they decide to turn their back on the fire and burn their behinds, then they will just have to sit on their blisters."  - Abraham Lincoln

Election day dawned in Colorado with autumn sunshine peeking through the blinds amidst the promise of another unseasonably warm day. My household has already dropped off all ballots and what remains is a long wait for the clear choices of the voting public and the garbled confusion of different interpretations of those same results.

My wish for us is short: make your voice heard. Men and women have died for the privilege of democracy - both at home and abroad - and that sacrifice can't be taken lightly. The pundits say that this is an "off" year because Congress and the President are not on the ballot. I believe they are incorrect in that assessment - our leaders are always on the ballot and we can express our disapproval or satisfaction in the down-ballot issues they support or repress.

Let's use our voices and make our selections count while we can. The people and the statues on the ballot render decisions that guide the minutiae of our lives and we should not surrender that guidance to others. 

Bearing the Beams of Love

 Those Questions

Warm enough in October to sit / outside without a jacket, barefoot / The seasons broken.

A mourning dove calls: Why / do you grieve? This world, / I answer. And what makes you

rejoice? This world, I answer. / Always those same questions, / that same response.

- Rebecca Baggett in The Sun Magazine October 2025, Issue 598.

Throughout 2025, small explosions of feeling detonate routinely in my chest, each blast triggering varied aftershocks—laughter that doubles me over, tears that arrive without warning, temper tantrums I'm not proud of, or wholesale retreat from the world's demands. Moving our son across the country, navigating the emotional minefields of working with teenagers, rising each morning to a contradictory cocktail of gratitude for continued existence and anticipatory dread of the day's headlines—all register as seismic events. The year has proven so disorienting that I titled my current playlist "Adventure 2026"—failing to notice my temporal error until my husband pointed it out - in August. Wishful fast-forwarding? Denial masquerading as optimism? Menopausal brain fog? Perhaps all three.

Being human requires stamina—deep, seemingly bottomless reserves of it across physical, emotional, and mental capacities. Yet even the deepest well runs dry occasionally, and I find myself turning to books, relationships, music, and movement to replenish what the world depletes. I seek out poems like those by Rebecca Baggett that make me feel understood, one voice among many rather than a lone boat tossed on indifferent waves. I devour books like the wonderful Sandwich by Catherine Newman that articulate the exquisite agonies and unexpected joys of motherhood with such precision they feel like testimony. Center quotes William Blake in her novel: "And we are put on earth a little space, that we may learn to bear the beams of love." That distillation captures everything. 

Bearing and hopefully sharing the beams of love—even when those beams feel too bright to hold, too heavy to carry alone—becomes the quiet work of our days. This is what it means to recognize we're all on "team human," fumbling forward together through uncertainty. We find our footing in rituals both grand and humble, in the presence of our loved ones, in the stubborn decision to trust the journey even as the road buckles beneath us with fresh potholes and sudden mudslides. The light grows bearable only when we stand shoulder to shoulder, reflecting it back and forth between us until it becomes something that illuminates rather than blinds, warms rather than burns.

Re-post: For love of a burning bush

 Autumn winds throw heaps of pine needles on our semi-landscaped lawn and gold leaves flutter into the team's outdoor swimming pool by the bushels. My favorite scarlet burning bush drops leaves reluctantly onto the porch and I'm reminded of this post I wrote in the year of my recovery from auto-immune illness. I decided to re-post it, remembering both the long recovery from my illness and also laughing at the hype over missing Boy Scout badges. If only life in 2025 was so simple . . .

From 2012

There's a burning bush outside the dining room / office window and the crimson color reflects early morning sunlight so vividly that the kitchen ceiling turns pink each day after the kids go to school. The autumnal fireworks are stellar in Colorado this year, and they keep my mood from turning dark on mornings like this when digestive hemmings and hawings produced another restless night, and William's vital Webelo badges turned up missing on the morn of a big Pack Meeting.

I just went to the basement in a desperate attempt to find the Wolf Badge and the wreckage downstairs drove me screaming from the arena. If we just dragged all of the toys and props and scraps into a gigantic trash heap would the children ever miss them? I feel a strong desire to toss it all, to winnow our lives down to the things that have meaning, just as the my life has been whittled down to the basic activities that feed me and my family and keep our little house running.

If the burning bush on my right suddenly spoke and revealed truth to me, what would it say? Make the most of what you have today and be positive! Never give up, never ever give up! Be humble and accept the gift of suffering and knowledge of your limitations!  The Boy Scout badges are in the lower left hand drawer in the new cabinet (I wish)!

I've learned a few truths in the time of the burning bush for myself: we may never find the badges and pins but my husband and I made a good team in looking for them, neither assigning blame and both equally concerned for our son. That I am lucky to be out in the autumnal splendor and I can witness and give thanks for the brilliant trees and leaves much better at a walking pace than at a run. That time passes and progress occurs at slow rates but yet great gobbles of days pass by and somehow things are better.

Three Days of Cake

The Missoula airport has served as backdrop for countless emotional family reunions and goodbyes since my parents moved to Polson in 2001. This past weekend proved no exception as my sister Karen and I converged at the terminal, ready to drive north for a visit with Mom to celebrate Karen's milestone birthday. We launched into conversation immediately after I snapped her picture with the lobby's resident moose, and the words tumbled forth uninterrupted for the entire seventy-five-minute drive. Karen had endured two connecting flights to reach Missoula, but she declared the journey worthwhile for that single conversation—the kind of deep, rambling talk that only sisters can share.

Our darling mother stationed herself in the driveway, keeping eagle-eyed vigil on the road and checking her watch obsessively. Thank goodness the warm autumn sun blessed her with its golden rays—though knowing Mom, she would have maintained her post even through a deluge. After a joyful collision of hugs and the awkward choreography of dragging luggage while attempting simultaneous embraces, we settled into easy chairs for tea and conversation, activities that would occupy the heart of our weekend.

What a profound blessing to share unguarded emotions, genuine concerns, and unvarnished joys with people who know you at your core—to confess foibles they've already catalogued with affection, to dissolve into laughter over inside jokes that have weathered decades of repetition. I gathered updates on my other siblings and their families, caught up on the new season of The Great British Baking Show, and settled in for a marathon of football games tracking our family's beloved teams: CU, Illinois, Ohio State, Oregon, Montana. The throwback Montana uniforms struck me as remarkably candy corn-like—all orange and yellow patterns that seemed perfectly calibrated for autumn.

During a solo afternoon walk, my eyes hungrily devoured Montana's fall splendors. Tundra swans drifted across the lake's mirror surface like white brushstrokes on blue canvas. Heavy purplish crab apples weighed down tree limbs until they bowed like supplicants. A fox capered across the golf course, its russet coat blazing against the manicured green. I found the familiar yellowing cottonwoods that populate Colorado's landscape, but Montana offered her own autumn poetry—flames of maple leaves scattered across lawns and caught in purple sage, white berries clustering on buck brush, deer materializing to drift soundlessly across the grass.

Being on the same wavelength, we indulged in Karen's chocolate birthday cake crowned with melting ice cream three evenings in a row—a delicious ritual. The final day brought a symphony of raindrops drumming against the skylights, the storm graciously offering the briefest window of opportunity to collect vibrant autumn leaves for Karen's fourth-grade class back in southern California. Between the carefully pressed leaves and new pj's from mom, my sister joked that her luggage wouldn't fit back on the plane.

What a blessing to carve out these stolen weekends from our overscheduled lives, to weave new memories with the people who knew us when we were young and still choose to love us now. The cake was delicious, but the real sweetness lay in being together—in that particular alchemy that happens when family gathers, when laughter flows as freely as conversation, when three days feel simultaneously endless and far too brief.