one little word 2022 wrap-up: true.

My one little word for 2022, as you may remember, was true.

I didn’t write much about it here after that initial post. But it has quietly infused my days, as I run in the mornings and go to work, trade texts and emails and Marco Polos with friends, and talk with my partner about building the life we want to live, together.

For me, this year, being true meant asking myself – and speaking up about – what I wanted, when it made sense to do so (and, once in a while, when it didn’t). It meant having the occasional tough conversation, and putting myself out there to make a few new friends. It meant, sometimes, giving in to joy: dancing with abandon at the ZUMIX Gala, wandering around NYC on a couple of lovely solo weekends. It meant listening to a few inner nudges to do things differently, even if those nudges didn’t always make sense.

I thought a lot, this year, about a Masterpiece podcast episode in which Rachel Shenton, who plays Helen on All Creatures Great and Small, talked about her character needing to “live a more truthful life.” That was one of my aims in choosing this word, and it’s an ongoing challenge: to be honest about what I want, what I need, what I’d like to work toward in my life.

Sometimes that means being honest about grief, when friendships shift or disappear, when plans don’t work out, or when old sadness flares up unexpectedly. Often it means working against my ingrained habit of smoothing things over and being accommodating. Being true, and truthful, can mean admitting the uncomfortable stuff, or disagreeing with the people you love (which is hard for me). And there’s a corollary: once you put the truth out there, you rarely know where it will lead. I can’t control anyone else’s response to my truth, or to my sharing of the bigger truths that are often layered and difficult. That is scary, perhaps. But it’s a more honest way to live.

I’m still carrying true with me as I move into 2023, though I’ve chosen a new word (about which more soon). I’m still humming George Strait’s “True” – it’s a fitting theme song, by a man whose music I have loved all my life. I’m remembering Rachel’s words about Helen, making difficult decisions and staying true to herself in 1930s Yorkshire. And I am trying my best, each day, to be true.

Did you follow a word in 2022? If so, what did it teach you?

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this is thirty-nine

Thirty-nine. Almost 40. I’m still amazed by that reality, especially since I sometimes feel 17 or 22 or eight years old inside. But as I say often (quoting Madeleine L’Engle), I am every age I’ve ever been.

Thirty-nine is getting up and going for a run most mornings, even when I don’t feel like it, because I know I’ll be a better person the rest of the day. Thirty-nine does her best to hydrate, moisturize, make the bed, wash the dishes – all those acts of self-care that sometimes seem boring but are actually so important. Thirty-nine does a fair bit of yoga and walking, eats a ton of yogurt and granola, drinks black tea like it’s my job, indulges in a cider once a week or so.

Thirty-nine moves more cautiously, these days, after some serious shakeups the last few years. Thirty-nine does her best to lean into the present, to be here now, living with heart and commitment, while also realizing that things can change drastically at any moment. Thirty-nine loves her current life and is starting to dream about making some changes. Thirty-nine is grateful – as a teacher of mine once said – that not only have I survived through great upheaval, but I’ve thrived.

Thirty-nine has seen her life and world shift in ways she never imagined a few years back. Some of those changes she chose and orchestrated; some came out of nowhere and left her staggering, for a while. Thirty-nine is still healing, still grieving; learning to name and acknowledge the wounds that linger longer than we think they will, while also making space for new and vivid joys.

Thirty-nine still writes for Shelf Awareness, still texts a few stalwart friends nearly every day, still loves chai from Darwin’s and flowers from Brattle Square, still reads piles of books and still needs a dose of Texas once in a while. Thirty-nine is trying, always, to live with grace and courage and wisdom. Thirty-nine knows it’s important to be both brave and kind.

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Training wheels for being back in the world

Earlier this month, I joined a running club – the newish, informal, neighborhood group that meets at the foot of the Golden Stairs, mere yards from my house. I’d been seeing their posts on Instagram for months now, and seen them running in a pack through the neighborhood – but I’d hesitated to try it out. I usually like to run alone, plus 7 a.m. sounded a wee bit early…plus (and this is the real thing) I hate walking up to groups of strangers. I’ve never enjoyed that moment of being the odd new person, but like so many things, it’s gotten worse with two years of isolation during the pandemic.

But. It’s spring (tipping into summer this weekend, with 90-degree temps on the way). The mornings are lighter; the lilacs are blooming; the azaleas are a blaze of pink and the rhododendrons are right behind them. And in small ways, I can feel myself opening up, too: finally unclenching after months of clinging to all things safe and familiar.

Don’t get me wrong: I still need lots of nights on my couch with a book, or morning runs by myself with the Wailin’ Jennys or Martina McBride in my ears. But some things feel more possible, less scary, than they did a year ago. I’m seeing it all around me: people are traveling again, eating in restaurants and gathering with friends. I went to the movies last night for the first time in a year. It all feels like training wheels for being back in the world, a chance to try out – in a safe context – the things we used to do and the things we want to do, and decide which (if any) we’d like to keep.

Long before the pandemic, I was telling myself a story about meeting people in Boston: that it’s hard and scary and they probably won’t welcome me anyway. This was true at my first workplace here, and I’ve carried it with me, like a stone in my chest, for a decade. It has taken years to untangle that story, and the fear still rises up every so often. But the other week, I set my alarm for 6:15, ate some granola and drank a cup of tea, grabbed my keys and headed down the stairs. Just try it, I told myself. If you hate it, you never have to go back again.

Well. I didn’t hate it – as evidenced by the fact that I got up early this morning for the third Friday in a row. I ran a 5K last weekend in the sweaty, steamy heat with some of these people – and I didn’t even mind that much when I came in dead last. I’ve run into a couple folks already in the neighborhood. And most weeks, we walk to the new cafe afterward to grab coffee and chat.

It feels like community, like connection, like finding a new way to be in this neighborhood where I’ve spent three joyful and also difficult years. It feels like pushing off with those training wheels, learning to balance again. It feels – in a sneaky, surprising way – like joy.

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The women of country

Happy July, y’all. I can’t believe we’re here. We always seem to wait forever for summer in New England (certainly this spring dragged, for several reasons), and then when it’s here, it feels rich and fleeting. The trees are lush, the roses and daylilies are showing off, and I’m cranking up the country music on my morning runs. Though, really, I’ve been doing that for months.

I was raised on country music, as you may know (or assume) if you know that I grew up in West Texas. My hometown had a half-dozen country radio stations, and my parents had a stack of George Strait cassettes that we nearly wore out on our long summer road trips. (I shocked a colleague at Harvard, years later, by telling him – and I am still confident in this assertion – that I could probably sing, on demand, at least 50 of George’s 60 number one hits.)

George was and is the king of country as far as my family is concerned, and I love a lot of his male compatriots: Alan Jackson, Brooks and Dunn, Randy Travis, the guys who sang in Alabama and Diamond Rio. I have a soft spot for Brad Paisley (especially “She’s Everything”) and I still adore Garth Brooks. But this year, I’ve been spending my miles mostly listening to the women of country music.

I loved them all as a child and teenager: Reba, Martina, Trisha, Shania, the women of the Dixie Chicks (now the Chicks) and SheDAISY. I marveled at LeAnn Rimes (what a prodigy!) and based my high school graduation speech around Lee Ann Womack’s “I Hope You Dance.” I can still sing you most of Faith Hill’s hits from that era, and Deana Carter’s dreamy debut album takes me right back to middle school.

I’ve never stopped loving country music, but I did stop listening to it for a while. I grew older, my tastes expanded to include folk music and Broadway show tunes and so much Christian pop music (bless it), as well as jazz and big band and the classical stuff we sang in choir. I left Texas, stopped driving to work (and thus listening to the radio as often), and married a fellow Texan who was a real snob about country music.

With all that, I’ve been on hiatus from these ladies for a decade or so. But I’ve been tiptoeing back: I heard the Highwomen at Newport Folk 2019 and fell completely in love. Last spring, I loved Mary Chapin Carpenter’s “Songs from Home” on Instagram during quarantine, and a few weeks in, I went down a Jo Dee Messina rabbit hole. This winter, in the depths of job-hunt woes and loneliness, I rediscovered Martina McBride. And since then, I have been pounding down the harbor walk singing along to classics like “Heads Carolina, Tails California” and “Take Me As I Am” and “She’s in Love with the Boy” and “Independence Day.”

These songs are a particular brand of badass feminism: it wears mascara and uses (a lot) of hairspray, and it doesn’t let a man (or anyone else) tell it what to do. It celebrates grit (“I’m a Survivor”) and individuality (“Wild One”), and it champions both true romance (“Perfect Love,” “We Danced Anyway,” “Wild Angels”) and the need to leave sometimes (“Ready to Run,” “Consider Me Gone”). There are power ballads and tender love songs; there are girl-power anthems and some good old-fashioned honky-tonk. These songs reconnect me to the teenager I was, but they are helping me shape and discover the woman I am now.

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Poetry Friday: Gaby Comprés

oh, heart,
remember that being brave
is not
that you are not afraid.
it is to choose to sing with a trembling voice,
to walk with one foot in front of the other
& to hold on to a hand as you do so.
it is to live,
to truly live
& to share your life,
to listen to the voice of fear
& to sing louder.
to be brave is to be here
despite it all,
despite the voices that tell you that you
do not belong.
to be brave is to look at injustice in the eye
& to still, somehow, have hope,
to dream of tomorrow & all that it holds.
oh, heart.
to be brave is to be you.

Months ago, a friend pointed me to Gaby on Instagram, where she shares a lot of her poetry. She’s a Dominican poet and educator, and her words are brave and whimsical and lovely.

April is National Poetry Month, and I am sharing poetry here on Fridays this month, as I do every year. 

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one little word 2019: thrive.

My one little word for 2019 is thrive.

I was pretty sure it would be my word back in January, when I was wrapping up my reflections on grit, my word for 2018, and wondering what was next. I kept coming up to thrive and backing away from it. I was – I am – scared of what it might mean, the choices and changes it might require of me. But it dug in, quiet but insistent, and it wouldn’t leave me alone.

In the wake of a year that required so much grit, I wanted something more vibrant, more exciting – and thrive means, variously, to grow vigorously. To flourish. To walk forward unafraid. It’s tied to courage, as most of my words seem to be, but it also speaks of growth, of new possibilities, even of joy.

This has been a year of enormous challenge and change, and it’s not nearly over. There is a lot of grief and pain, a lot of asking questions and admitting hard truths. I started seeing a therapist in March, and I’ve been writing and running and talking with my people about all those things. I’ve generally had the sense that I need to reckon with what has been before (or at least while) beginning to ask what might be next. What it might mean to thrive, in this next chapter of my life.

I finally ordered a thrive talisman heart from Liz Lamoreux in early May, and it has sat on my bedside table (in three different apartments) ever since, a gentle reminder of what I’m hoping for. Thrive lived deep under the surface for a while this year, but like the plants I love so well, it is pushing up through the soil, coming up into the light.

As you know if you’ve spent much time here, I’ve been following a word each year since 2010, starting with brave, which took me on all sorts of journeys, including a cross-country move from Texas to Boston. I’m interested to see where thrive takes me, through the rest of this year and possibly beyond.

Are you following a word this year? If so, what is it teaching you?

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wearing my own ring

Three summers ago, in the wake of a stressful move, I hopped a train to New York City for a solo weekend getaway. It was August – and hot – but I stayed at the cute, cozy Larchmont Hotel (now defunct, sadly) and spent all weekend wandering the Village and drinking gallons of hibiscus iced tea.

My travels led me at some point to Bleecker Street, where I bought a gorgeous green malachite ring from a friendly Turkish man selling jewelry from an open stall. I wore it almost every day for months, until it got accidentally crushed under the wheel of my car.

I tried to tell myself it didn’t matter that much, but I was sad about it for weeks. That ring felt like a talisman, a bit of beauty I had chosen for myself, in the midst of a long, chaotic season crowded with lots of other changes that I did not choose.

I ended up back in NYC last December, staying at the Jane and soaking in the city I love, dressed in its sparkling holiday cheer. I wandered back down to that stretch of Bleecker one day, after brunch at the Cornelia Street Cafe (best eggs Florentine I’ve ever had). My Turkish friend was there again, the last in a line of white-peaked stalls, open for one of the last times before winter. I spent some time chatting with him, and picked out a beautiful garnet ring this time.

Recently, that ring has migrated from my right hand to my left: a tangible reminder of bigger things that are shifting in my life. My address has recently changed, too: this past weekend, I moved to East Boston, to a little studio right around the corner from where I dog-sat this spring. For so long, the rhythms of my life have been shaped by my marriage, and that, too, is changing. It’s hard and painful, even though it’s the right thing.

In the midst of all this (further) change, wearing my own ring feels like a small but vital act of self-care: a visible reminder that I am acting for myself in this season. (The tank top in the first photo – a PEI find from Kim Roach a few years ago – doesn’t hurt, either.)

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Fear’s only a choice

Last week, I saw an Instagram post from a local friend about a folk concert happening that night in Cambridge. An hour later, my husband called: “Want to go?”

I’d usually say no to anything that started at 9:30 on a Tuesday night (and oh, was I exhausted the next day). But I said yes, and we went. The Arcadian Wild puts on a good show, but the music wasn’t even my favorite part: it was the serendipity.

My friend who invited us knows the two guys in the band from way back: her husband worked with both of them during his youth-minister days in Florida. But it also turns out that Lincoln, the mandolinist, is the son of a couple who are close to some other friends of mine. I texted my friend Frankie to let her know where we were, and whom we were hearing. (She responded with delight.)

As the evening went on, I realized something else: the photo above, which I snapped during a visit to Frankie’s house in West Texas months ago, is a lyric from their song “Rain Clouds.” (I’d been struck by the words, but forgot to ask her about their origin.)

I’ve been gone from Abilene, where I spent my undergraduate (and several more) years, for a while now. But I still go through there at least once a year, and keep in regular touch with many friends from that community. So many of my stories, even now, begin or end in Abilene. And this one struck me as especially sweet: that a line about courage and fear, in the middle of a song about love and friendship, was the latest thread connecting my two lives.

Not surprisingly, I’ve been humming that song ever since.

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Give me the tulips

Give me a garden full of strong, healthy creatures, able to stand roughness and cold without dismally giving in and dying. I never could see that delicacy of constitution is pretty, either in plants or women.

—Elizabeth von Arnim, Elizabeth and Her German Garden

I was searching last week for that von Arnim quote on tulips, because it is tulip season in the Public Garden and I agree with von Arnim: they are my favorite. While double-checking that quote, I came across these lines, and was immediately struck by them: yes.

I love looking at the graceful potted orchids at my florist’s shop, but as Anne Shirley has said, I want flowers I can live with. Instead of sensitive hothouse orchids, give me this:

Give me the crocuses, pushing their purple and golden spears up through the snow at the end of winter. Give me the daffodils, slender but steely, dollops of bright gold against crusted snowbanks and worn-out winter dirt. Give me the lipstick-pink tulip magnolias, petals winging their way off the ends of their branches like butterflies, and the blush-pink apple and cherry blossoms, ruffled and gorgeous even in the rain.

Give me the tulips, holding up their vivid cups to sun, rain, brisk spring winds or anything else nature might throw at them. Give me the lilacs, budding even now as the nights persist chilly, and the shock of yellow forsythia, and the shy, trailing hellebores in cream and mauve and green. Give me the blue scilla dotting the ground, the blaze of azaleas and rhododendrons, the wild violets showing their faces here and there along the river trail.

Give me, too, friends of stalwart courage and fighter hearts, those who don’t run away when life gets messy or tough or complicated. Give me a band of strong women who will bolster me up, and accept my help when it’s my turn to do the same. And give me a lion heart so I don’t fail those same friends, a fierce resolve and bold kindness to stand with them and for them, and for myself, when I need it.

Amen.

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April reading roundup #1

A Walking Life: Reclaiming Our Health and Our Freedom, One Step at a Time, Antonia Malchik
Walking is a fundamentally human activity. But worldwide, humans – especially those living in cities – are losing the access and ability to walk. Malchik delves into the dangers of a non-walking life and explores the social, political, physical and spiritual implications of reclaiming walking. Well-researched and engaging – and as a walker/runner, of course I loved it. To review for Shelf Awareness (out May 7).

The Precious One, Marisa de los Santos
I adore de los Santos’ novels, and I loved diving back into this one: the story of Taisy and Willow, estranged half sisters who gradually, grudgingly become friends in spite of their (shared) tyrannical father. So much wisdom here about love and family and courage.

When the Men Were Gone, Marjorie Herrera Lewis
This was a total impulse buy at B&N: an engaging novel about a female high school football coach in Brownwood, Texas, during WWII. I grew up not far from (and went to college even closer to) Brownwood, and I spent many Friday nights in the stands with the marching band. I loved the story of Tylene Wilson and how she stepped up to coach the Brownwood Lions.

Brave, Not Perfect: Fear Less, Fail More, and Live Bolder, Reshma Saujani
Saujani is the founder of Girls Who Code (and an alumna of my former workplace, HKS). This book delves into the conditioning women receive to be perfect and pleasing, and how we can change that wiring to be brave. I loved – and related to – so much of what she wrote about. Worth reading and revisiting. (Found at the wonderful Book Catapult in San Diego.)

The Stationery Shop, Marjan Kamali
Tehran, 1953: Bahman and Roya, two teenagers who both frequent Mr. Fakhri’s stationery shop fall in love among the stacks, and plan to get married. But then Bahman disappears, and their lives take entirely different trajectories. Decades later, they cross paths again near Boston, and must unravel the truth of that long-ago missed meeting. Powerful and well written; Kamali’s descriptions of Persian food are mouthwatering and her characters are flawed and real. I loved (and reviewed) Kamali’s first novel, Together Tea, which is sweet and engaging, but this one is on another level. To review for Shelf Awareness (out June 18).

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl: 2 Fuzzy, 2 Furious, Shannon Hale and Dean Hale
Doreen Green – aka Squirrel Girl – is back, trying to fight crime in the neighborhood and survive middle school. This second novel wasn’t as strong as the first, but I like Doreen and her friend Ana Sofia. The group texts with the Avengers are the best part.

Most links (not affiliate links) are to my favorite local bookstore, Brookline Booksmith.

What are you reading?

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