Little Green Wall

Where I live, houses don’t have full perimeter fences. Some single-family homes do use them to close off small grassy areas on the side or back for privacy. Condo owners like me, on the other hand, have hip-high front lawn hedgerows meant more for aesthetic value than real privacy. But the porches and entrances to all building types are easily accessible from the sidewalk. We live in an open-plan area meant to foster a sense of community, even if that sense is more visual than actual.

Nevertheless, the relative lack of dividing lines between neighbors feels like an anomaly in an era defined by a single, gutting ideology: you stay on your side and I on mine. As other walls in other spaces have gone up elsewhere in our culture over the last year, I’ve noticed something interesting. The hedgerows growing in front of some condominiums have been developing gaps from dead bushes the HOA has uprooted but not replaced while some older condos have completely lost their original hedge line. This development hasn’t really harmed the aesthetics of the place; if you don’t live here, you likely wouldn’t notice

The first bush in my own “wall” probably died as a result of exposure to Uri, the 2021 ice storm so bad meteorologists gave it a name. Distracted by the rest of my life, I remained half-aware of a gap that slowly developed in my hedgerow. By last March, it got wide enough that I finally reported it to the HOA and asked what could be done. The lack of clear response came without surprise. In the spring of 2023, I’d requested the removal of a dead tree from my front yard, and nothing was done. The tree did eventually grow back from suckers; but HOA groundskeepers mistook the new growth for weeds and kept cutting it down until I put up a small protective fence around the trunk.

The bushes were more decorative than functional. Yet the gap made me feel uncomfortable. Even with all the greenery I’d planted near my house—raised bed gardens, a small pomegranate tree, a dwarf lemon tree and a thriving blackberry bush—I still felt oddly exposed. Looking back, I wonder if the unsettled feeling was due more to a sense that other things, things over which I had even less control, had been breached and weren’t getting repaired. Not in my home, but in the world, society, institutions. The very things I had unquestioningly trusted would remain whole and stable.

Writing this now, I think of the man in Robert Frost’s poem, “Mending Wall” who tells his neighbor that “good fences make good neighbors.” No doubt he loved his privacy, too, though the neighbor is quick to observe that nature has no use for structures like the one he and the man ritually repair together once a year: “something there is that doesn't love a wall, /That wants it down.” The poem is about boundaries and the push and pull between our need to be apart and also together. But in the current context, I read Frost’s words as speaking to the impermanent nature of all things, including and especially those made by human hands. Change is the only constant.

As it happened, the change I was looking for came when I wasn’t looking for it. In the heat of an August afternoon, the solution presented itself to me while I was surveying the overgrown state of my local community garden. Zinnias were growing wild all over the stone pathways. One early August afternoon, I got it into my head to dig up the dozen or so I found before someone else cut them down like the weeds they were not and bring them home to plant in the gap.

A month-and-a-half later, they’ve grown into a small leafy wall bursting with red, pink, orange and lavender blooms. Better still, some flowers have dropped seeds into the earth and begun reproducing themselves, ensuring the walls will grow even thicker and more luxuriant. The feeling of exposure is gone; now look out my windows to a sight the fills my DIY heart with gladness rather than some vague sense of dread.

My experiment in guerilla gardening has been an unqualified success. The small act of rebellion against the institution that failed me—and as I learned later, others—is what I find most meaningful now. Taking matters into my own hands gave me back agency, and with that agency hope. Does what I did make me a hippie, fighting “the power” in my community by filling an empty, unloved space with life? Perhaps.

But in that rebellion was also a small grain of wisdom that transcended the voice of a long-gone generation could offer. Intention is everything where fences are concerned: privacy is one thing, willful division another. And when the institutions that created our homes and fences and hedgerows and everything else fail us—because they are imperfect, because they are inherently impermanent—the burden (and the joy) of rebuilding lies with us.

Night Water

A random internet news headline search two months ago led to an unsettling discovery: the night swim hours for an old haunt of mine, Barton Springs Pool, had narrowly avoided elimination. The last time I’d gone swimming there had been in 2018. The news shouldn’t have mattered to me but it dd. Another of the certainties undergirding my world had almost come undone.

I didn’t read the article that followed the headline until just before I returned to the pool in mid-August. My thought had been that the proposed cut had to do with the drought, which had ended after the floods of May and June. Budgets were being re-evaluated; Austin was chasing pennies. Ending the night swim hours would have forced dismissal of staff—and particularly the lifeguards—who worked at the pool. But citizen complaints prevailed and the city temporarily backed off.

Suddenly it seemed imperative that I not only return to Barton Springs but do it at night night. If I had learned anything during 2025, windows of opportunity seemed smaller now and their closure more imminent. I had loved going to the pool. Yet somehow, I’d never made time for more visits.  Now the planet was burning, storming, flooding or erupting in change. Everything was upside down; former rules no longer applied.

I planned to go an hour or so before Barton Springs officially became free entry at 9PM. That way I would get to see nightfall over a downtown area I don’t visit often and enjoy the pool—which I’d only ever visited during the day—at night. August seemed the best month to go. Austin would feel like hell’s front porch by then and a dip in 68-degree water like a blessed antidote.

Barton Springs itself is a small wonder tucked between green, oak-covered hills that was sold to Austin by the springs’ last owner in 1917. Native people like the Coahuiltecans had known about it for millennia and made it part of their creation myth: to them, Barton Springs was sacred ground. Knowing this, the night I drove in and saw construction and chain-link fencing everywhere, I winced. What would the Natives have thought about all of this and of the pool itself, which had been built around the springs?

I walked to the entrance tent and offered a printed version my ticket to a pool staffer. She looked at it skeptically then tried to turn me away. I’d not activated the ticket online: was I trying to use a single purchase for two visits? Eventually she relented. Pay attention next time. The distrust unsettled me. It felt like yet another disquieting sign of the times.

The pool—all three acres of it—was as I remembered it. But because it was a weekday and because it was early evening, there weren’t quite the numbers of people I’d remembered. Once I’d climbed up a hill and deposited my things in the grass, I ventured into the water and let out a yell. The water shocked my senses awake: I had been there many times before, but hadn’t remembered the cold. Other swimmers grinned at my discomfort and assured me I’d enjoy it once in. And of course, I did.

The contrast between the warm air above my head and the cooler water below became one of the great pleasures of that afternoon. Drifting lazily on the water, I imagined myself at the juncture of heaven and earth and began swimming in large circles that traced the outline of the pool. Patches of underwater grasses made me yelp as I felt them whip around my legs. It’s just the carpet, another swimmer said, laughing. The pool was inviting me to enjoy it as home.

Even as I moved in steady breast-stroke rhythm, time slowed. All that seemed to exist was the darkening fluidity through which my arms and legs moved. Electric pole lights cast reflections that rippled across the face of the water and cast a strange glow on the small groups of bathers clustered on the edge of the pool. They could have come from this time; they could have come from a time 50, 60 or 70 years past.

For a moment, time had lost meaning; and if I could have stayed in that space, I would have. But a tiring body and the placement of hands of a now-dim-faced pool clock broke the spell. Momentarily purged of worry for the things I could not control, I climbed up out of the pool, gathered my things and walked into the waiting embrace of a hot summer night.

Planter Nation

Most afternoons you can find me at the community garden two blocks from my house. You need a code to open the locks on the entry gates and the tool shed which makes perfect sense. But these days locks and access credentials also make me feel uncomfortable, even isolationist. That’s saying a lot when you crave solitude as much as I do.

The five-by-seven plot I rent is no different from most ground-level spaces. But it’s been difficult growing anything not used to the garden environment. Half the seedlings I’ve introduced there from my indoor hydroponic nurseries have died from the heat, the bugs or the shock of trying to root in earth that several rounds of potting soil amendments hasn’t completely tamed.

I still call it a privilege to be part of this tiny, slightly anarchic nation of green-loving solitaries. It took five years of badgering the HOA to get the plot where I now grow corn, eggplant, tomatoes, bell peppers and small herd of rescued zinnias. Even then it took a gardener on the inside speaking on my behalf to finally get access. Like America in 2025, my community garden plot is the problem child I still manage to love.

The hydroponic seedlings I lost would no doubt have had an easier go of things in the raised beds gardens outside my door. The soil there is soft, full of nutrients and less prone to infestations. At the community garden, the soil, though amended, is still harsh. And the pests the inhabit that soil are singularly aggressive. They devoured a small watermelon plant it took me weeks to cultivate in my hydroponic garden in less than an hour and while I was watching.

My plot is also less protected from the elements. A brief but violent May hailstorm that brought too much of everything—wind, rain and hail the size of baseballs—damaged all the plants I put in. The plants at my house fared somewhat better if only because I was able to drag some potted plants in to shelter before they could be destroyed.

And then there were the late June/early July rains. Austin didn’t flood badly though Kerrville, a hundred miles to the west, did. After that it rained for days on end. The excess of water made that made green things grow with abandon also caused rot to set into leaves, branches and roots. The largest of my two tomato plants is still recovering. For a time, it grew outrageously; then septoria fungus began appearing on large sections of hail-damaged branches and leaves. I cut everything back and now what was large, unruly plant is down one healthy branch.

My garden thrivers have been the ones I’ve rehomed from the gravel walkways where they’ve taken root or from abandoned plots. These days I have quite a selection to choose from. Things have gotten so overgrown in spaces near mine that I’ve found myself doing rough trims just to keep mine clear. Many of the walkways, too, have turned into weedy jungles. Sometimes I imagine myself in William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, but the vision isn’t romantic. Central Texas is the hot, dry south of the interior, not the decaying gothic south of Gulf Coast Mississippi. The flood/drought cycle of climate change is real.

Some gardeners haven’t returned since the storms. A young woman and her two small children, a boy and girl, would often come by at about the same time as I did. Through April and May, they dug, planted and pruned with tender determination. I never saw them after the hailstorm, even though their partially damaged garden is still producing vegetables. Another man who replanted his weedy plot after he learned I almost claimed it has since let the weeds take over his garden again. Now his plot is more derelict than when I first found it.

Apart from the gardeners who have left Austin to summer elsewhere, those who stopped likely believed gardening would be easy. A relaxing pastime that might eventually yield a few organic vegetables. It’s not so simple. The rewards are there but not without effort. In the spring, I saw an empty plot with a sign that asked if the space was taken and offered a telephone number. Can someone call me, please? I suspect the person who put it up was an idealistic outsider who managed to find a way in. Now that sign—and the plot—has been almost completely engulfed by grass and weeds.

Those who continue to return know, or at least accept, the risks and rules, spoken and not, of tending gardens here. Your plot is yours for as long as you pay for it. If you choose to work another plot and not tell a (largely disinterested) HOA, you may be forced to give it up to someone gets assigned your adopted space. If you abandon your plot for more than a several months and your garden appears to have plants that are still viable, they and what they produce are up for grabs. I’ve partaken of such abandonments more than once without regret.

The bones of this tiny garden-nation are worn but solid. The wooden railroad ties marking out each plot are in decent condition. So is the shed that still bears the angled streak marks of the hail that hit it. The roof leaks a little, but not enough to endanger the tools inside. The covered sorting tables outside seem sturdy enough, too. But the shed offers better protection from the unexpected deluge as I found out the afternoon I trusted in a partly cloudy sky and didn’t take an umbrella with me.

Apart from a few handfuls of cherry tomatoes and some yellow squash from a plant later smashed by hail, I haven’t harvested much here so far; I’m still learning what I can coax from the earth. My stubbornness, in the meantime, has made friends with this place: beyond the weeds and unpredictable weather, there’s still possibility so long as I remain vigilant and willing to adapt.

And for now, that possibility is just enough to keep me coming back.

Kings, Fathers & Coincidence

I debated going to the No Kings rally in downtown Austin every day in June until the day it happened. My first anniversary cancer scans had come back clean the month before, and my energy levels were better than they had been in months. But early on the morning of the 14th, I saw Instagram news posts about the killings in Minnesota: two state representatives and their spouses shot, one representative and her husband dead.

I couldn’t get past those tragedies. They, along with the heat of late spring day in central Texas, were enough to derail any plans-in-formation. Now I just wanted to move in peace away from the chaos and into a more focused space of reflection. The neighborhood pool was the perfect place for me to do that.

It was still early when I arrived around 8AM. Only one or two others were there and all was stillness. Lowering myself into the water, I had a strange sense of déjà-vu, of having done this very thing in another place at the same time. And then it clicked: on Jun 14, 2002, I had done a morning swim also to distance myself from death. I’d just received a phone call my father had passed away and the world had gone out of joint.

I pushed off from the wall and began kicking. For a moment the synchronicity took me aback: swimming had not been an intended act of remembrance. Musing on the strangeness if it, I did my half mile then got out, wrapped a towel around my middle and decided to walk home via the neighborhood community garden. It seemed a practical thing to do: no second trip later in the afternoon just to check on the plot I’d been tending for the last two months.

A sudden, very destructive hailstorm had pounded our small community a few weeks before. The community garden had been decimated, and I wanted to make sure that the plants left on my plot were managing. One cherry tomato plant caged in chicken wire had survived. A small bell pepper plant and a second tomato plant, both of which had been denuded of leaves and branches, had as well. A flowering squash plant hadn’t been so lucky. Hailstones had crushed the stem, leaving the plant to wither away.

I wanted to see more green again. Zinnia sprouts growing up through the gravel walkway caught my eye. Transplanting them would not only mitigate the bareness but also make up for the loss of a zinnia in my home garden that I’d lost to the storm. Grabbing a trowel from the community shed, I dug up a few rogue zinnias—red, pink and orange— and planted them along the edges of my plot. My near-empty garden now looked back at me with a bright, lopsided smile.

Dirt-streaked and sweating, I went home, savoring the tiredness in my body. In the stillness of my house, I could not be bothered to do much more than wash up and work on a poem that had refused to let me finish writing it for more than a week. That poem—which was about my father—seemed more willing to let me write it that day: another strange synchronicity. By evening, the poem was done. When I woke up the next morning, it would be Father’s Day.

On a hunch and just before I shut down my computer for the night, I looked up the symbolic meaning of zinnias and learned they represented all types of meaningful relationships. My thoughts turned once again to my father when I also saw they were symbols of remembrance and of resilience. The wild-growing flowers I had adopted into my garden were nothing if not survivors. One of the plants showed signs of having been battered by hail; yet it had endured and lost nothing of its beauty or robustness. My father, a man who loved flowers, had been a survivor, too. The heart attack that killed him had been the last in a long line he had suffered since his first one at age 42.

It was all so strange, the interrelatedness of these events. Coincidence had bound them together, along with mortality, survival and new beginnings. The only thing that did not seem to “belong” in the narrative was the protest I had not attended, until I realized the connection. My father believed that men led and families followed because fathers were guardians of the castles, kings of their realm. The poem I had written had played with that idea through the metaphor of a rocking chair he loved and that I called his “rocking throne.”

That part of him, the authoritarian, was the part I disliked and at times rebelled against. Yet as autocratic as he could be, my father always gave me a little more leeway than he would others because he and I were more alike than not. Still, he never let me forget that the way I’d fuss in protest when anyone, including him, told me what to do might make my life harder than it had to be. Freedom had its price, he seemed to say. He was right, of course. And of course, I would spend my adult life paying for it.

Now an entire country was learning its cost all over again but rising to the occasion like zinnias that even the most furious storm could neither bend nor break.

Camera Obscura

My new toy TLR. Only the bottom lens is functional: the top one is strictly for decoration.

Retro anything always catches my eye: so, when adverts for a twin-lens reflex (TLR) toy camera turned up on my social media feeds I paid attention. A cranky German-made Rolleicord TLR film camera I bought years ago on eBay from an even crankier 80-something retired professional photographer sits unused in one of my closets. It’s clunky, hard to use and requires film that is as expensive as it is difficult to find. The toy version was all digital and palm sized. The weightiness of steel, history and precision engineering was nowhere to be found with this camera: if anything, the toy TLR felt mischievous, and I liked that.

These days I use an iPhone to take pictures. They’re clean, sleek and have excellent resolution. They can also be manipulated to resemble the faux vintage effects I coveted when I studied art photograph twenty years ago. Nevertheless, the toy TLR beckoned from beyond bounds that screamed waste of money. I made a deal with my own austerity. If I could find one for less than what I saw advertised on the manufacturer’s website, I’d make the allowance. Within a few weeks I scored one for one-third the selling price. My inner child turned cartwheels and cheered.

∞∞∞∞

Camera obscura is a Latin phrase that means darkened chamber. It refers to a device with a small hole that collects light – and an external object(s) on which it shines – from the outside that is then projected on a surface within the chamber. A camera obscura can be as small as a box and as large as a building. The image collected in such a device is upside down because of how light interacts with the opening or aperture. How a camera obscura works creates images is how our eyes work, with the brain turning the image right side up. In modern cameras, lenses do the work of flipping images and returning the upside down to normalcy.  

∞∞∞∞

The focus is inexact, the lens doesn’t pick up color subtleties and the colors sometimes bleed. But many of the images from this toy TLR still manage to please.

It wasn’t so much about having the toy TLR as it was about going back to equipment I loved using before I made a cell phone my primary photographic tool. There was more of course. I had taken up photography during a time when I was recuperating from illness that could have turned life-threatening. There was no illness this time, but I had been set back the better part of a year by a serious condition that if unchecked could also have turned life-threatening. Buying the camera had been an unconscious act of remembering: not so much the illness but recovery from the unthinkable.

As I got to know my new TLR and the quirks of its control system, it came to me that my desire for a camera may also have reflected what I had become in recent months. Without realizing it I had evolved into a human camera obscura taking in, at second hand through social media and international news outlets, more details about the world than ever before. What I had been witnessing, however, didn’t make sense, even after images got flipped right side up and my brain struggled to find reason in the chaos. Everything remained upside down no matter what gymnastics my brain tried to do. It was then I realized that the act of buying this camera had something to do with a longing for communion with tool that at its core was a sense-making instrument.

 ∞∞∞∞

The best phootgraphic tools from the pre-digital age are essentially upgrades of the camera obscura that offer control—or the illuision of it—over shutter speed, aperture and exposure time. Toy cameras, whether analog or digital, have almost no controls. The images they produce are grainy, are under or over-exposed and have poor resolution and give viewers the impression the pictures could have been shot decades before 1991, the year the first commercially available digital camera, a Kodak Professional DCS 100. became available.

When I still worked with film, my favorite camera was a $20 square black plastic box called a Holga that needed electrician’s tape to keep the halves together. It had exactly two controls: a crude shutter and a manual film advance wheel. Like my digital TLR, it took surreal, faux-vintage- style pictures. I never knew what to expect and liked it that way so every visit to the photo processing store became an adventure. Over time the photos became a form of rebellion against digital technology and its obsession with images indistinguishable—or even more perfect than—the real-world subjects they captured.

∞∞∞∞

For certain kinds of photographers, imperfection is also an aesthetic statement that isn’t just about liberation from what has since become techno-autocracy. There is beauty in the inexact, a poetry that celebrates chance distortions. At the same time, those imperfections remind us of times before techno-autocracy, times that seem gentler. Like memories, the vintage-style photographs toy cameras produce seem comfortable because we know them. Because in the end, retro is solace.

Yet the uniqueness of toy camera images are reminders that moments aren’t things to be hoarded like the wealth that creates greed and destroys societies. Each is a record of possibility and infinitesimal change, even in the face of evidence that suggests with a wink, a nod and a con that everything only ever stays the same.

My X-Files Life

The truth is out there.

Fox Mulder of The X-Files made these words his mantra. Yet often he and his FBI investigative partner Dana Scully had to settle for conjecture when rational explanations for the paranormal mysteries they tackled were nowhere to be found. Or when thoughtful inquiry was met with obfuscation and outright lies, sometimes from those they trusted most.

If I think of Mulder and Scully now it’s because so much about the last 12 months has gone beyond my understanding. What was it all supposed to mean? I don’t know and likely never will. All I can do is offer a metaphor to describe events and what they felt like. Last spring, Something stopped the car I was driving, pushed me into the backseat, locked the doors from the inside then took over the steering wheel and forced me on a high-speed detour where all I could do was watch the scenery fly past my eyes.

 A year later, that Something has finally ceded the wheel to me again, though It still rides with me, a possessive entity that won’t let go. But now the terrain has changed; the old road I was traveling is nowhere in sight. Adding to that anxiety are strange new restrictions should I decide to set foot outside this terrain exists. Some rest on legal slippery slopes observed by people who’ve slid down them: slopes like airport customs agents doing social media app checks on electronic devices or asking questions like where did you go and what did you do or what do you think of the current administration. Others have been born out of more practical concerns for safety of the kind that emerged when air traffic controllers were suddenly asked to leave their jobs and airplanes began crashing into runways and each other. Externals notwithstanding, my own life, small in the greater scheme of things, has gone back to a kind of normal in world where the only certainty is uncertainty.

Separating fact from fiction has also become problematic. Watch the news and you’ll get some idea of what’s out there. But key details may be missing. You have only to look at how recent protests involving millions of Americans have been reported. Mainstream media “disappeared” them from their headlines. A few mentioned that what protests there were happened because high profile members of the opposition paid protestors to march. Those same sources also reported that a legal US resident sent without due process to an American-funded prison camp in El Salvador because he was allegedly an ex-gang member. To that I say Auschwitz stood on Polish soil. Years of watching The X-Files wasn’t just simply a way of passing the time. It was an education in the idea that conspiracy theories…may not be theories at all.

 I stopped relying on mainstream American news six months ago, when everything became a barrage of bad. Desperate to know without feeling gutted by the mayhem, I went on YouTube in search of independent journalists and commentators able to offer intelligent insights with a minimum of vitriol. That helped; but the extremes they discussed in uncharted territory and no one could offer ideas what might come next. I wanted truth but also needed to find glimmers of hope in the midst of the irrational and off-the-rails insane. Hesitantly I began tuning in to channels where psychics, tarot card readers and astrologers—empaths, most of them—offered their take on current events. In the midst of the X-Files life into which I’d been abducted, I’d abandoned my Scully-esque rationality to become like Fox Mulder: open to all ways of apprehending truth even if some of the modalities I used were unconventional.

In these days of anything goes, anything is what I’ll do to get behind the mis- and disinformation my inner conspiracy theorist understands gets offered as news. The intuitives I listen to follow the news quite closely and are upfront that what they know is based on what they can sense or interpret rather than empirical fact. Most are also quite clear about their biases. What helps me discern which ones to spend time listening to comes down to perspective. Those who reference the Bible and claim the end is near lose my interest almost as quickly as those who are overly pessimistic (or optimistic, for that matter).

There’s method in the madness of my choices: of course I’d like to hear that the upside down world I live in will be restored soon and all will be as it was; of course I want to hear there will be world peace, a healed earth and permanent freedom from the Thing that hijacked my life. But I know better because beyond all prediction, there is one truth I know is real. Life is cyclic: after chaos, balance will return, but only after the destruction set into motion has run its course.

What I do know is how much I don’t know. So when some of my YouTube intuitives talk about their ongoing contact with the dead or with extraterrestrials, I listen with interest. For someone raised on Star Trek, Star Wars and novelists like Stephen King, Ray Bradbury and Ursula K. LeGuin, that’s not difficult. These same shows, movies and books prepared me to embrace The X-Files with enthusiasm. There’s freedom—and even joy—in secular imaginings about what’s possible beyond the mundane, especially when that mundane has become so compromised.

 Because in the end, I just want to believe again.

A Tale of Two Gardens

March greens: kale, salad, carrots and tomatoes.

I took to gardening when I moved into my house early during the COVID years.  A 5x11 plot planted with ornamentals I hated but mostly died the first winter after I moved in gave me the space to climb out of small pots and into the planters that now hold my greens, shrubs and trees. In the midst of so much chaos, I found peace in that work and in the solitude of lockdown that has since been hard to come by. It’s the quiet of that time I miss, the quiet beloved by the Trappist monk I imagine myself to have been lifetimes ago.

But if I look more closely, maybe I’m living a version of that old contemplative life in the latest iteration of the upheaval—this time political—that began in 2020. Trappists revere silence and contemplation, but also manual labor and their handiwork as gardeners. For them, working the earth is a spiritual act. The pleasure I took during a pandemic spent apart from the world coaxing life from seeds or from small spouts, like the one that grew the eight-foot tall pomegranate tree shading the smallest of my living room windows—was far more profound from the small satisfactions of keeping an apartment container garden. On my small plot, connection to the earth felt as solid and immediate as soil between my toes.

Most people welcomed the return to public spaces after the pandemic ended. I did not and chafed under directives to return to the cubicle life of a white collar worker.  My place was in the quiet of my home. Any time I could spend in or around my garden became sacred, especially those mornings or evenings when I would sit on my porch and refresh my senses with greenery I had nurtured over two years. Nodding their heads in the wind, those green-headed children of Gaia now brought me back into balance simply by existing.

Normalcy didn’t last; it couldn't. The virus had been a harbinger of change and a warning that old structures were at risk of even more damage from what was to come. Four years after I moved into my small refuge, a much greater threat emerged when political power changed hands and the people who rushed in started smashing whatever they could from the first day. Like everyone I reeled and wobbled until I could stand up straight enough to hold on to whatever my hands could grab. I didn’t want this, neither did most of the people I knew. Yet here we were. More and more I took to standing barefoot in my garden to let the earth steady me. That at least was solid.

Scarcity—or its possibility —was nothing new to me. The year before I’d lost my job and remained without work for almost six months. But what I was seeing felt totally different. Supply chains were at far greater risk of disruption than they had been before. As the people in power continued to destroy the mechanisms that had allowed me to live my old life, they had forced me to rethink how I might one day have to meet needs I never thought could possibly go unmet. Now the luxury of a patch of earth to grow what pleased began to look increasingly like a space of utility. It dawned on me that my skills as a gardener might one day be skills I might need to manage coming instability.

Garage hydroponics

But that patch of earth was small. And Texas summers had grown increasingly unforgiving. The tenderest garden greens would not likely not survive even with daily watering. So in late January, I created a second indoor garden in my garage with two hydroponic units I set up in an old wood planter neighbors had once complained was too ugly for the front yard. Dropping salad, herb and cherry tomato seeds into hydroponic sponge pods, I held my breath and waited. My gesture felt infinitely small against the forces of global bedlam. Some sponges became slick with algae and changing the water could make for slip-sloshy walks to and from the kitchen sink. But the system worked and seedlings soon appeared. There was no spiritual romance of earth and sky here; just the sober practicality of staying prepared for storms I could not yet see but knew were on the horizon.

 The seeds have grown quickly under the light of timed LED lamps. I’ve since planted my outdoor garden with the small cone-shaped plugs where the seeds germinate and even enjoyed a small harvest of arugula. At times I’ve chided myself for being overly reactive. But a few weeks ago I noticed that an entire section of prepackaged romaine salad had vanished. Oh, they just shorted us at the warehouse, a grocer told me. The packages did return in far fewer numbers while in the shade of my garage, my greens kept growing in their tubs of mineral-infused water.

The Farmer’s Almanac says summer 2025 will be hotter and drier than normal on the South Central Plains. Local weather says we may see our first 90-degree day before April. I’ll need to reconsider my outdoor growing strategies sooner rather than later: squash will do well in the heat and so will my tomatoes, but the greens will need to grow indoors. Oddly—or maybe not—I've found that planning out and caring for both my gardens has blotted out some of the overwhelm from externals. The problem has brought forward a solution that helps me move forward; but the truth is that it's bigger than that. A revolution in self-sufficiency and sustainability is coming fast enough that I can no longer dissociate enough to convince myself that gaps in my reality are just tricks of the eye: I could have sworn I saw those salad heads the last time I was here.

The Justice of Rest

In a speech given five days before his 1968 assassination, Martin Luther King repeated words that that toward the end of his life had become a kind of refrain: the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Often blocks stand before us not of our own making and often they are unfair. What moves us forward is less the knowledge that we will see immediate resolution and more faith that at a time we cannot see, justice will prevail.

 My thoughts have returned to King’s idea frequently not just as I think about the current political situation, but also events in my own life. A year ago at this time I stood on a precipice: a routine scan showed signs of something that looked vaguely malignant. After a March biopsy confirmed doctor suspicions, the injustice of it left me feeling outraged. The news felt as senseless and cruel as the job layoff that followed ten days later.

 The scales would rebalance but only after a hard slog through six months of uncertainty. Answers to the conundrum of health complications and unemployment came only I shambled into a make-shift routine, picking up the financial pieces as I could and learning how to deal with brutal medical treatments as I went. Recovery surprised me when it came while friends told me to be grateful I had not lost everything to the disease. Though the losses still angered me, the moral arc had bent my way and the justice of a (new) normality had returned. 

This all happened in the small place of my life and while externals still worked in ways that made sense.  But as I regained my balance last autumn, the world around began a slow descent into chaos. A presidential candidate who loved justice lost an election the legitimacy of which I still question. Talk soon turned to what was next. In the darker corners of the internet and social media, speculation began on all the things Americans stood to lose.

 From one apocalypse I had slid into another; and the internal warning system showed signs of re-awakening. Made sensitive by years of compounded trauma, it had started to go dormant once code red medical and financial stressors had begun to dissipate. Now it was flashing a code yellow PTSD warning. Stay vigilant. Trust no one and nothing. For a time, I stopped sleeping; now the insomnia comes and goes. I am in good company: many Americans now report waking up in the middle of the night and being unable to return to sleep. We are all aware, too aware.

 Then the new year many dreaded began with fire. The Southern California coast between Pacific Palisades and Los Angeles burned like an omen from hell. It looks like a war zone, said a childhood friend who lost the only home he’d ever known. A mirror image of that brutality soon followed when on the other side of the country, new political officials replaced old ones then immediately set about denying funding to people and institutions, cutting jobs to others and threatening higher prices through unnecessary tariffs. The blitzkrieg madness of it all made a few weeks feel like a few years.

 The irony of it all has not escaped me. Just as I was finding balance, an even greater unbalancing had taken place outside my door. Everything was in crisis; where was the justice in that?  Yet as I write this, I am still among the more fortunate. Like the vast majority of Americans, I have no personal fortune to buffer me against internal and external shocks. For now, though, I have enough to keep moving forward and prepare for what may come. It’s a form of resistance, these things I do now: keeping apprised of the contagions—influenza, COVID, measles and bird flu—that surround us like a sickly sea; stocking up as though the next day may bring shortages or disaster or both; protecting personal information compromised by individuals with no interest in keeping the population safe. But all of this has taken its toll.

I’m tired these days. Very tired. Recovery—full recovery, and this just from my disease—can take a year or more. You also cannot expect to go through major medical crisis and the threat of losing everything and not experience fallout at some point. Add to that an external situation that favors no one except a morally bankrupt oligarchic class and the exhaustion only increases. MLK often spoke of weariness, too, though in context of never giving up the struggle. Which makes me wonder: did he ever consider that periods of rest could be as radical—and just—as taking action?  

 Ancient and indigenous cultures practiced restorative justice which focused on reconciliation between the perpetrator of a wrong and the one(s) wronged. There will never be remediation of this kind between those who currently govern and Americans; so as we await the moral arc to bend itself toward justice, perhaps we should interpret this practice literally by engaging in acts that restore us: in other words, by actively seeking the justice of rest where and when we can, even if we must fight for that time. Because now everything is about bleeding urgencies and never-ending demands from all directions.

 And so I say no to external frenzy and yes to time out. I step away from all media to meditate. I take frequent walks on the neighborhood green and tend to my small garden. I bathe to the sounds of raindrops on my white noise machine. I take naps and I don’t apologize. Rest is one of the most radical acts anyone can engage in now. The justice we enact for ourselves will help us move the universal moral arc towards balance once again. Protestors often chant say no peace, no justice. To that I say know peace, know justice. Restoring balance to ourselves first is the new necessity for us all.

To B or Not to B...

In Act 3 Scene 1 of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the title character muses on two equally dark possibilities: committing suicide to escape despair or killing his uncle Claudius for murdering his own brother, Hamlet’s father:

“To be, or not to be, that is the question:/Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer/The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,/Or to take arms against a sea of troubles/And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep,/No more; and by a sleep to say we end/The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks/That flesh is heir to: 'tis a consummation/Devoutly to be wish'd.”

 As a choice, it’s unthinkable and extreme. A conundrum, just like the times in which we now find ourselves living.

I was reminded of this play recently because on November 6 of last year, someone I called in a fit of despair told me, perhaps as a way to show that I was not alone in my upset, about a movement called the 4B’s. That movement had nothing whatsoever to do with Hamlet’s soliloquy. Yet as I thought about it later, the two seemed linked not just by homonymic chance but also in how both represented responses to wrongs committed in the name of power.

The 4B’s emerged in South Korea around the mid-2010s as part of a fourth wave feminist reaction gender injustice and crimes against women. Like the worldwide 2006 #metoo movement, it began on social media and sought to empower women caught in the cross-hairs of the most toxic elements of patriarchy: social inequality on the one hand and harassment/violence on the other. The name—4B’s—derives from four Korean words, each of which start with the negative prefix “bi.” (1) Biyeonae: No dating men. (2) Bihon: No marrying men. (3) Bichulsan: No having children with men. (4) Bisekseu: No having sex with men.

It gained its greatest visibility in the wake of anti-feminist movements that emerged after the 2019 election of Yun Sook Yeul (who, coincidentally, was recently impeached for wrongfully imposing martial law in South Korea on December 3, 2024). Young American women have expressed interest in it since its inception, but especially in the days after the 2024 U.S. election, which occurred almost exactly one month before Yeul’s attempt to undermine South Korean democracy. On social media platforms like TikTok and X, these women encouraged peers to look to the 4B movement for inspiration.

To liberal (read: white, middle class, accommodationist second wave) feminists, the movement no doubt smacks of radical feminism, especially the branch of it that supports separatism and has traditionally been identified with lesbians. To me, a third wave “cat lady” who thinks and writes at the intersection of race, class, gender and sexuality, it sounds like an ordinary day in the world of an independent woman who has chosen—and has the luxury to choose—to live life on her own terms.

I see no radicalism here; then again, I observe as one who believes in tolerance. Two millennial/fourth wave friends, both well-educated and in their late thirties, live some version of the 4B “credo.” One has chosen 4B-style independence because she wanted an end to relationship demands on her time and emotional resources. Another has chosen what I call a 2B path that involves childlessness and no marriage. They are not actively resisting tradition just to resist; rather, they are acting in alignment with what they’ve deemed as the most fulfilling way to lead their lives.

By contrast, the South Korean women who identify as 4B see it as necessary resistance against a controlling, misogynist society. Intimate partner violence in their country is real. According to a 2018 study, of those affected, 824 women died by the hand of male partners while 602 lived with a heightened risk of death. In the economic arena, men early 31.2% more than women, who, if married, bear full responsibility for home, family and child-care. And the social pressure on young women to have children is high. So high, in fact, that the government has mapped out the country by the population of women able to bear children. As of 2022, the South Korean birthrate has fallen to below 1 child/woman.

It’s abundantly clear that something is more than rotten in the state of Denmark; and that this rottenness, especially as it affects women, has everything to do with the Claudius-like autocratic lust for power and control blighting the democratic world. Like all minoritized people, women are especially vulnerable to the assaults of this toxicity through harassment, violence and other forms of social and political disempowerment. If South Korean women feel under siege, American women, whose rights to bodily autonomy are under attack, feel they are under increasing threat. As I write this, all of us live in the shadow of laws that, if enacted, would end bodily autonomy while curtailing access to affordable healthcare and the civil rights currently protect them in the workplace. I can’t say with any certainty what will happen. All I know is that we will find ways to resist what tries to hold us down and back, just as every other generation of women before us has.

Some might say that 4B’s is yet another example of the global disunity that has come to be the hallmark of the 2020s. They wouldn’t be wrong, of course. Still I see the hope in division. Yes, Hamlet correctly understood that fraught times offer no guarantees: only difficult choices of ways to engage with dilemma. But his inability to move beyond grief to find the alliances that could have saved him from devastation was his real downfall. Whatever else women do, our ability to seek community among ourselves, both locally and globally, will be what help us weather— and ultimately move beyond—these perilous times.

Dear 2024

Dear 2024,

Tick, tock, tick, tock. Time is running down on you and I am singing: goodbye goodbye and good riddance. What was it Mark Zuckerberg said about things that move fast and break other things? That was you blasting through my life this year, all speed, muscle and wicked surprise. Yes, 2025 will bring a reset, though likely not without wreaking even more havoc than you did. A new pandemic’s coming, says Bill Gates. So is another ‘08-style economic crash, says Warren Buffett. And God help any American not born a straight, white male Christian with regime-approved political and birthplace credentials. Out of the frying pan, into the fire.  

 It was non-stop with you even before you became official last January first. First it was that post-Christmas 2023 call about the abnormal test result that would put my life on hold for the next eight months. A day or two later it was word that the contract you thought would continue uninterrupted until March but that had initially been promised as indefinite hadn’t been signed. Approval would come and the contract would be extended—grudgingly—to March. If 2023 was the warning, you were the fulfillment. By the roll of dice I couldn’t see, you took me past everything certain then set me down on the knife’s edge of my own mortality. Now dance, you said. Dance.  

You were a sly one masquerading first as a drama queen rather than the unforgiving agent of chaos. It took time to see your real face. And when I did, nothing about you or what you sent my way was ever minor, simple or remotely laughable. Drama queens are just lonely hysterics in search of attention; you were an escapee from an institution for the criminally insane. I prefer my dramas singular and straightforward, like a vodka on the rocks with a splash of grapefruit. But you complicated everything, cramming drama after drama down my throat, sometimes all at once.

Thief and plunderer, you robbed me of time and vitality. What remained never seemed to balance out. When I had one, I nothing left of the other. Everything needed new compromises and a willingness to explore new avenues to accomplish a fraction of what I’d intended. But even that seemed to lead to something I never expected: electronic communion with kin-spirit writers who accepted—even celebrated—who I was and the losses I’d survived.

Hardship wasn’t the way I hoped I’d find them; maybe that’s beside the point. Everyone I met had a story much like mine. If it wasn’t just about grief or brokenness, it was about both these things and more. We cared enough to talk to each other. We cared enough to listen and to worry when one among us wasn’t present to speak their art. Because the one unspoken thing we all knew was this: that—as novelist Alice Walker once said about the act of writing—the life we save is our own.

Fortunately, I can speak in past tense about you because your mayhem has passed and I can breathe again. Now comes the cleanup: from the paperwork blizzard that covered every inch of desk space in my house; from the endless storm of breakages, mishaps and malfunctions. Things are better now and I am fixing things or replacing them. But in a strange, dark decade that began with a pandemic no one expected, stability is fragile. I can just look beyond the life I know to the Middle East, Ukraine, South Korea, France. Pick a place, anyplace and it’s crisis, crisis, crisis.

Yet somehow I can still feel a wary gratitude: not necessarily to you, but more to things I cannot see and do not understand. For all your mess and mishigas, so much more could have gone wrong. Like not finding decent health insurance and the right team of doctors to treat a medical problem no one in my family had ever had. Or being forced to raid every last financial resource and go into the kind of debt from which no recovery is possible. Or not landing the job I needed in just the nick of time.

Good things—like my insurance and the job that came only after hundreds of rejections—didn’t just come my way because you felt like giving them to me. I had to push past crippling fear and fight. Hard and sometimes to exhaustion. This may be another of your mercies, especially as I look ahead—with not a few misgivings—to 2025. I have never taken anything for granted. But neither have I been pressed to battle for what I had. My lesson from you? Appreciating what’s been earned is one thing. Defending it with courage I may not feel is another.

Someday I may see past what you brought enough to offer the thanks I cannot give you now. The best I can do is say this: you broke me and in the breaking, allowed me to remake myself. Maybe that acknowledgement, along with a willingness to move forward into the unknown, is all that’s really needed.

Stars in Blackout

This is the essay I did not know I needed to write until I did.

 The first days of November began with me drafting a post about one of my pet interests, the punk movement. It was the militant energy of it that drew me, an energy that matched the rage I felt against my circumstances. I was unemployed; my health was in unexpected jeopardy. Every day felt like barefoot walk on a ledge made of broken glass. The rawness of punk felt good. A reaction to the economic crises and drive toward commercialization that characterized the 1970s, musicians in London and New York transformed their songs into musical fists that hit hard and fast. Aggression was salvation because they were children of the capitalist Cold War apocalypse.

 I wanted to write about this history to understand why I’d felt the need to thrift military fatigues and cherry red Doc Marten combat boots online. Who—or what—was I really at war with? My hardships? The injustice of an appalling year? A suburbanized, aging self? At first I accepted it as a way to indulge my perennial love for youth, rebellion and radical feminism. I was just doing me and externalizing my own inner conflicts as I always had, this time through the lens of nostalgia.

 Then on November 5, America did—or appeared to do—the unthinkable.

 Now, in the painful aftermath of that choice, I wonder whether I’d also been sensing the emergence of another, greater conflict. The country was divided; we all knew that, just as we knew that the race between #45 and Kamala Harris would be close. But most of us believed that justice would prevail and the most reasonable candidate would win. That didn’t happen; or at least, didn’t seem to. By the end of the election night, the American map looked like what one YouTuber, recalling George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones, called a “red wedding.” He was referring to a fictional massacre staged as revenge for a broken marriage pact between two powerful families. By all appearances, #45 had finally gotten the vengeance he had sworn was his.

 The Harris/Walz campaign had been a light in a darkness that had been as much collective as personal. Like so many others, I had been swept up by clear, bright energy of their two-and-a-half month blitzkrieg campaign. Happy warriors, they symbolized the best American ideals—tolerance, generosity, reason, diversity—but also the best of an underestimated—but deeply divided—generation. Screw tech billionaire Xers and their Xer friends on the Supreme Court. Finally we other Xers have a chance to show the world what else we can be.

 Now I sit watching the light fade in the post-election silence that has followed. It’s not a total blackout because votes still need to be certified and the suspicion of fraud continues to grow. But the sense of betrayal remain, less for the “red wedding” results and more for the story they tell about my fellow Americans. If at least half of this country, including women and people of color, did indeed want the apparent president-elect, then who are we as Americans? After centuries of struggle against own demons, are we still capable of vulgarities like the Madison Square Garden rally of October 27?

My shame is immense, not only for what appears to be the current political reality, but also for the role—however small—I played in its manifestation. For years I refused to vote because I didn’t believe in the two-party system. What I could not see was that my participation in the democratic process was what was really at stake. My immigrant parents, both of whom were part of the wave of European immigrants who came to America after WWII, knew better. You’re spoiled and you don’t even know it, my father used to say. Sitting in the confused twilight of this post-election phase, I tell his ghost that he was right. If not for the healthcare legislation passed in the era of my apathy, I would no doubt have been forced into making plans for my own funeral.

 Born under and shaped by a society ruled by Benito Mussolini, my mother left Italy seven years after the end of WWII. My father lived under the Nazi Occupation of Paris and watch his country split into two. Both appreciated everything that mid-twentieth century American seemed to offer them, despite the occasional bigotry they faced as immigrants and—in my mother’s case—the sexism she encountered in her work as a scientific researcher. Both voted, grateful to have a say as naturalized citizens. They believed in the process; they believed they counted.

 Just before she stopped caring about everything including the vote, my mother told me that she had wept the day Kennedy died. She had loved him, his youth and the purity of his faith in America. Though I did not wish to summon her ghost, I remembered her as I cried, wondering if the election was showing me the death of something larger: American democracy and the fragile planet that, like women who lost the right to bodily autonomy, bears the injustice of corporate greed and plutocratic excess.

 Despair is easy now and seems a comfort. Yet in this strange twilight, I am also reminded of what fellow Xer and immigrant daughter told Americans during her concession speech: Only when it’s dark enough can you see the stars. I am—and will remain—a survivor of many battles. And in my second-hand fatigues, I speak my truths like sparks of hope for all who follow me and my generation into a reckoning with the darkness in our collective national soul.

Curmudgeonness

How a good day looks to a curmudgeonness

This month I turn 59. Technically that’s still considered middle-aged but I feel older than time. The one good thing about it is that I’m one year closer to laying claim to the curmudgeonhood I never realized I’d been gunning for my whole life. Age is coming close enough I can see the silvery-white of its hair roots because, dammit, those hair roots are mine.

I’ve felt old since at least 20, probably because 21 meant legal, can’t-get-out-of-it adulthood while anything after 25 or 30 seemed unimaginably Jurassic. Had I lived in nineteenth rather than the early twenty-first century, my perception of what constituted the beginning stages of decrepitude would have been more accurate than not: at that time, life expectancy in the U.S. and Europe was only around 40. From where I stand now, the decade of the great 4-0 strikes me as fabulously juvenile, the beginning of everything, minus cribs, playpens and parents. You’re on your own, baby: ready or not, here comes life.

Everything I’ve read online assures me I’ve got until at least 65 until society is allowed to call me old. However temporary, that’s a comfort and I’ll take it in lieu of the plastic surgery that’s turned 66-year-old pop star Madonna into an bona fide Area 51 alien. But some people out there insist on pushing boundaries and getting on my one last nerve, like that nice young hairdresser at the local Great Cuts. I love the cute pixie-punk haircuts she gives me; but the last few times I’ve seen her, she’s also insisted on giving me a senior discount. Because I’m still lucid enough to know that maintaining manners is desirable in a public place, I smile and keep my grumbling—along with the extra five bucks—to myself.

 Yes, I like saving money. Discounts are, in fact, the great promise of the cheerful red AARP card I carried for five years and never used. Now that I’ve dispensed with membership, I have just this to say: keep your discounts to Denny’s, Joe’s Crab Shack and other havens of the white-haired and infirm. Don’t age me into oblivion because I’m quite able to do that for myself, with a little help from the Neptune Society. I don’t know where they got my name; the AARP mailing list is a key suspect. For the last few years, the friendly people at Neptune have been sending me letters detailing the benefits of cremation when I didn’t even fucking ask.

 I suppose I can’t be too hard on AARP. They’ve been lobbying Congress for reforms to help older Americans since the 1960s, so yes, they mean well. It was their monthly magazine that really sent me over the edge (the ugly tote bags they offered with each new subscription didn’t help). Without fail, AARP magazine covers featured fit, good-looking individuals with newly graying hair, airbrushed for maximum presentability. Now to be fair, I’ve been known to use a filter or two on my own pictures. But dammit, where were all the truly old people, the ones with walkers, canes and oxygen machines who are on more meds than they can remember? I’m talking the real real here, not the still-in-middle age people like me. Brooke Shields and George Clooney don’t count.

The companions every curmudgeonness needs

Rather than call myself a curmudgeon, though, I’ve opted for another word: curmudgeonness. It doesn’t exist in any dictionary that I know of which makes it even more delightfully contrarian. A curmudgeon is that old man down the street whose home is more lair than castle. You know the one: the crusty cuss who yells at people to get off his damn lawn and refuses to give out candy on Halloween. From what I’ve been able to gather, the proper term for someone like me who identifies (more or less, depending on the day of the week) as female, is termagant. Since I don’t consider myself a nag, though, curmudgeon is a better fit, especially when tamed and claimed with the feminizing -ess ending.

I do like one of the possible etymologies of termagant, though, which the Google English dictionary suggests is a hybrid word that came from the merging of two Latin ones: tri (three) and vagant (wandering). The GED further speculates that these root words seem to refer to the idea of the moon wandering between heaven, earth and hell under the names of three Classical goddesses associated with it: Selene, Artemis and Persephone. That’s all lovely and poetic until you start wondering what the hell wandering moons have to do with being an unpleasant female. Unless it has to do with ancient taboos against menstruation and Hippocrates’ claim women were the weaker, more hysterical sex because their wombs were prone to wandering. But misogyny is a sneaky thing and anything vaguely associated with female are targets for negative cultural reframings.

 All this is to say that etymologists aren’t sure where termagant came from, any more than they know how curmudgeon—which some believe may partly derive from the Middle English “cur” (dog) came into usage. What is known is that termagant was once a gender neutral term. Linguistic evidence shows that before the 16th century, termagant was used to describe overbearing males. Of course, that doesn’t satisfy me. My dislike of the world termagant has nothing much to do with anything except my own quirks. The word reminds me of “termite,” that nasty little insect with a voracious appetite for wood. Anything that sees my house as its next meal gets no respect from me. I still prefer the anti-social grump down the street who yells at kids and delivery people. At least he’s mostly harmless when left alone in his native habitat.

W.C. Fields

 But can you blame curmudgeons—whatever their gender—for how they are? They’ve seen it all so nothing surprises them anymore. They’re too old to really care what anyone thinks of them or their habits. Curmudgeons may be prisoners of bodies that have seen better days. But they’ve lived through and survived enough that they can say and do what they want. Better still, curmudgeons get their very own holiday on January 29, which happens to be the birthday of W.C. Fields, the great Hollywood Gold Age comedian who allegedly hated dogs and babies. He did occasionally own a canine, enjoyed entertaining his friends’ children and doted on his first grandson. But that’s beside the point. Like all good grumps, he was cynical and proud and not afraid to show the world who he was. “A man’s got to believe in something,” he once quipped. “I believe I’ll have another drink.”

Reading Cards & Stars

I bought the first of many tarot card decks when I was 11. I was a mostly reasonable girl, but the box they came in had tantalized me with promises that the cards could offer glimpses into the future. More than anything I wanted those promises to be true, more than I cared to admit. I’d long harbored a deep fascination with the supernatural, the paranormal and the occult. In a place beyond reason deep in my bones, I knew that life—and life on earth—were things of profound mystery.

What I especially loved about my deck were the illustrations that looked like scenes from a fairy tale. Each of the 72 cards were based on a system created by nineteenth century British academic and spiritualist Arthur Edward Waite and illustrator Pamela Colman Smith. Both were members of the Order of the Golden Dawn, a secret society dedicated to the study of metaphysics and magic. Of course, I didn’t know any of this when I bought the cards; I was just a curious child who hoped her colorful new cards could answer her most burning questions: Will I pass my math test? Does my crush like me back? Will my mother ever stop driving me insane?

At around the time I started learning the meanings of each tarot card image, I found an inordinately beautiful hardback called Astrology sitting on a shelf in my parents’ library. I knew in general that astrology was a divination tool like tarot, but one that “explained” through a system of twelve symbols. As it showed me the influence astrology had on societies through time, the book revealed that the tool I had thought was so simple sought its deeper answers in the mathematical relationship of planets to each other to the constellations through which they moved.

Detail from St. Mark’s Cathedral clock tower - Venice, Italy

 I never found out which of my parents had bought the book though I had my theories. Before I was born, my mother had been a hardcore Catholic with establishment beliefs about divinity. She had venerated Jesus, Mary and Joseph, a few pious saints and all church teachings until everything tied her up in knots she eventually severed like the Gorgon’s heads they’d become. It wasn’t a stretch to imagine her contemplating alternative, non-dogmatic ways of understanding the unknown and unknowable.

Of course, a reasonable girl like me knew that tarot and astrology weren’t to be taken seriously. They were on par with my mother’s Catholicism which seemed like a rarified form of the mythologies she’d read to me in childhood. That didn’t stop me from nurturing my occult interests, talking about astrology and especially the meaning of birth signs (but never tarot, that seemed a witchy bridge too far) with friends. As far as we giggling girls knew, it was just a crazy system developed by even crazier ancients that was mostly wrong but on occasion more correct than we believed was possible.  

Louis MacNeice

It doesn’t surprise me now that I would be drawn to studying the meaning of things and understanding the world through symbols. In college that took the form of a dedicated passion for literature. That led to a surprising discovery that linked back to my occult interests. One day and apropos of nothing, I leaned that the author of my beloved astrology guide, Louis MacNeice, had also been a poet who had versified and published alongside fellow Oxonians W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender, who came to read his work during my first year; and whose words, like those of all the great writers I studied, struck me with the force of falling stars.

What I wouldn’t know for many years was that my interests were more interconnected than I realized. Tarot cards first emerged in fifteenth century Italy, stronghold of the Catholic faith my mother had abandoned. But it was the French who adapted them for fortune-telling purposes in the late eighteenth century, just as the Romantic movement—which celebrated imagination over reason—began taking shape. Astrology originated almost two millennia before tarot in Mesopotamia before spreading to India and Greece, where its western version was born. For ancients, it was inseparable from the science of astronomy.

It was the early Christians (and Jews) who condemned astrology as antithetical to biblical teachings that warned against divination. Later, tarot cards came to be considered in a similar way, especially by fundamentalist groups. As suspect—and even demonic—as some believed these tools to be, they nevertheless inspired many, and especially those who, like MacNeice, centered their lives around imagination and creativity.

Carl Jung

Psychologist Carl Jung was ultimately the one who gave me courage to more openly indulge my eccentricities. I don’t know when I learned that Jung had studied astrology and tarot; and that both had led to his ideas about human archetypes and the collective unconscious. Perhaps it was in the uncertain years after graduate school when I turned to my decks for answers. It was then I told a roommate who studied psychology about how liberating Jung’s esotericism felt to me. We spoke only one about this and never again: with PhD student authority, she told me that mainstream psychologists considered Jung an outlier and a crank.

I could have told her that Sigmund Freud, the founder of her discipline, had based part of his work in  ideas taken from ancient Greek fictions and philosophies; and that his work, which he believed was scientific, was far more anecdotal and theoretical than empirical. But I didn’t and just flashed my never-mind-me-I-just-study-literature smile. Jung’s work was also theoretical. But what made it more suspect than Freud’s was its open, artist-like reliance on intuition and its proximity to the mystical.

Despite my roommate’s cold shower of a response, I’d found my vindication. While I appreciated reason just as much as I appreciated science, neither could satisfy my need for wonder. Or the need to imagine possibilities beyond what I could see. There’s a richness in allowing space for unconventional ways of knowing that stand apart from the kind of dogma that drove my mother away from her faith; a richness I would not trade for all the four-square certainties in the world.

Cat Ladies Strike Back

An out-and-proud childless cat lady, I do not own a pussyhat to prove my allegiance to felines…or to other women. Not that it would be especially advisable to wear one in the Texas summer heat. But the political zeitgeist almost demands that I get one, if only to celebrate Kamala Harris’ brilliant takeover of the political limelight from the unhinged ex-president, current Republican presidential candidate and convicted felon known as #45.

Pussyhats first appeared in all their pink glory at the January 2017 Women’s March on Washington, a mass protest against #45 and everything he stood for including social regressivism and the curtailment of women’s rights. If I think of pussyhats now, it is because I, like millions of other cat ladies, have been hissing and spitting at the remark made by J.D. Vance, #45’s equally mad and unsavory VP pick. His too-loyal wife recently called it a mere “quip” meant to explain a larger point about political inclusion. We cat ladies beg to differ.

In 2021, Vance told former Fox News political commentator Tucker Carlson, that America is run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices they’ve made and '[now want to] make the rest of country miserable, too.” When that comment resurfaced at the end of last month, it unwittingly gave birth to what I call the Great American Cat Lady Moment.

To this particular cat lady, our moment seems an almost inevitable outcome of many things, not the least of which was the 2017 Women’s March on Washington. Not that the people at the March happened to be cat ladies (or even female for that matter). But if they were female, they all had one thing in common: a need to express years— centuries, even—of pent-up rage against continuing patriarchal injustice. The knitted, pointy-eared caps they wore were just a uniting symbol that, along with its feline connotations, also happened to be one that had a long association with femaleness and femininity.

January 20, 2018 - Downtown Austin

My first personal encounter with pussyhats came a year after they first appeared. On January 20, 2018, demonstrators in Austin staged a protest—one of many that had continued to take place all over the United States and world—against #45 and the ever-changing cast of shady characters that constituted his administration. Perhaps I had heard about the Austin protest; I don’t remember. What I do recall was that it was a Saturday, that I had errands to run and that when I got off the bus to do them, I was immediately caught in a massive swirl of people, noise and energy.

At the time and despite my profound distaste for #45, I still dared to call myself mostly apolitical. His female opponent, Hillary Clinton, had also alienated me. Yes, she was a woman and a feminist. But I wasn’t automatically with HER just because of these things. I well knew she had done more in her fifteen years as a politician than her (mostly male) colleagues had done in a lifetime. But a troubling trail of scandals dogged her, made me feel I just couldn’t trust HER enough to exercise my nineteenth amendment voting rights. The same ones I took for granted enough to ignore out of disgust with a two-party system that didn’t offer much beyond empty promises for working people and the middle class, political gridlock and entrenched neo-liberal corruption.

January 20, 2018 - Downtown Austin

But something in my attitude began to change that day. The people-swirl eventually pushed me toward large contingent of pussyhatted women carrying signs with slogans like stop regulating my body and women pay the price for decisions made by men. Suddenly, my errands—whatever they may have been—didn’t matter. An election had been stolen; rights were in jeopardy. Mesmerized by the colorful anarchy I saw around me and the unabashed fierceness of the female protestors, I cast off my complacency and followed the crowd from the 3rd Street bus stop to down to the waterfront, where I watched marchers make their towards Congress Street then up to the green mall of the Texas State Capitol.

Eventually the demonstrations stopped, not just in Austin, but around the country. Pussyhats got put away (though the anger festered) and a good, decent man defeated #45. But what the decent man couldn’t undo was the damage #45 had done to things like the Supreme Court, which eventually did the unthinkable and overturned more than 50 years of progress in laws protecting civil and reproductive freedoms. And damage to an already broken political system and to #45’s own party, which he transformed into a bastion of white supremacist, christo-fascist cult that deified him and worshipped the capitalist excesses he represented.

January 20, 2018 - Downtown Austin

Even now, as a presidential nominee, #45 continues his reign of chaos alongside a running mate who spews as much hateful and ill-considered rhetoric as he does. Where women are concerned, both seem unaware that women—and cat ladies—have long memories. And they will always find ways—like the pussyhat—to communicate their displeasure. The brainchild of two California women, pussyhats began as a project that was both practical and political. The pair wanted to help keep heads warm during the notorious cold of January inauguration. But they also wanted to use a traditional—and maligned—“feminine” color (pink) along with “feminine” crafts (knitting and crocheting) to make a statement about the power of collective female action.  

They were, in other words, doing far more than cat lady cos-play. Pussyhat protestors were putting the Usurper-in -Chief on cheerful pink notice: we know who you are, we know what you’ve done, and we won’t let you forget. The hats—which were as unique and individual as the thousands of women who made them—transformed them into avengers of female sexuality, while transforming the pussies #45 had once gloated were his to grab-because he was rich, because he was famous, because he was a man—into sites of public contestation.

It was a contemporary version of an old fight. Fifty years before, second wave feminists had done something similar when they followed the advice of the groundbreaking 1972 Boston Women’s Health Book Collective guide, Our Bodies, Ourselves, and used mirrors to inspect their own vulvas. If the book reminded women that you are your body and you are not obscene, pussyhats reminded the world them that female bodies deserved respect.

As hand-made symbols of women’s autonomy, pussyhats also served a secondary purpose of critiquing the hypermasculinist homogeneity implied by mass-produced MAGA hats. The pink of compassion contrasted with the red of violence, as much a component of the MAGA brand as post-truth lunatic idiocy. And the crude triangular ears of every pussyhat remembered cats, and whether consciously or not, the long history that bound women and felines together in companionship and even magic.

I like to think that pussyhats, though apparently “tame” in looks, also quietly channel an energy that is less domesticated cat and more untamed puma or panther. Millennial pop icon Taylor Swift, who was recently drawn into the cat lady controversy by virtue of being a single, cat-owning female and self-made billionaire, exemplifies that powerful independence. In 2023, and as Time magazine’s person of the year, she posed for a cover-shoot that featured her and one of her beloved felines. By celebrating who she was, she was also suggesting, through her black leotard and tights and a hand curved into something like a cat’s claw, that she was powerful. A cat lady who remembered the indomitable Cat Woman, a single female who owned and wielded her sexuality without fear or shame. And without apology for not choosing to have children.

Taylor Swift certainly does not exemplify any kind of “cat lady misery” that I can see. As an entertainer, she brings joy and optimism to a young global audience burdened by more than its fair share of pessimism about everything from politics and the economy to climate change. She has freely chosen and embraced her path as a single, childless person as have countless other females. Regardless of whether or not we have cats.

But if we do, so much the better. Felines tie us to so much, like memories of resistance and the magic collective action can spark. Unlike Taylor Swift, we cat ladies may be mostly invisible. But we are legion and wield far more influence on the collective female psyche than people realize. Uninformed—and frankly misbegotten—public figures may imply that our choices leave us without a stake in America’s future. What they forget that we have do have a stake. And that together, we have the power to drive that stake straight through the twisted hearts of those who try to oppress us. Because we have claws and we have teeth.

And we grab back.

The Serendipity of Sarah McLachlan

My immersion in Sarah McLachlan’s music began with her 1993 album, Fumbling Towards Ecstasy. I don’t remember anymore exactly when I bought the CD; only that it was sometime the late 1990s and probably around 1998. I was still young then and living on the West Coast, fumbling towards wherever I was supposed to be— whenever that was supposed to happen.

When I went to the record store, I only knew Sarah McLachlan’s name, likely because I’d heard the hit “Adia” and gotten obsessed with it, clueless that the song came from her 1997 album, Surfacing. The first thing I did was ask the record store clerk where I could find all the Sarah McLachlan albums. He immediately told me about Fumbling Towards Ecstasy and that this was the record you bought if you really wanted to get to know Sarah McLachlan. I took his advice and a week later, after looping the album on endless repeat, I’d memorized all thirteen songs. Her soprano voice—clear, powerful and true—had become my new favorite high.

Not long afterwards, I learned that Fumbling was her third record and the one that brought her fame outside her native Canada, where she had been part of the music scene since 1988. But it wouldn’t be until days before her July 2024 Austin concert that I’d discover that my twenty-five-year-old musical obsession marked me as a “fumbler”: a hardcore fan of an album that stayed in the American top 50 for just one week in 1994 (Surfacing would remain in the top 50 for 86 weeks). Nevertheless, it would go on to become her best-loved work. I had been the Gen X rough draft of a Swiftie and never known it.

And really, what was there not to love, especially for a literati like me? Moody and lyrical, the album had a title that came straight from the lines of WWI poet Wilfred Owen’s  “Dulce et Decorum Est”: Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling/Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,/But someone still was yelling out and stumbling/And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime. The singer had taken the theme of war and woven it into songs about losses on the battlefield of love. No romantic, I was still mesmerized by the album’s super-charged depth of feeling. Fumbling sounded like melancholy and I was hooked. Melancholy was what fueled me then, because I was a 30-something on the cusp of things I couldn’t yet see.

The serendipity that led me to her so many years ago led me to her again last March. Somewhere online and exactly when I wasn’t looking for her, I saw that Sarah McLachlan was coming to town. The very woman who pulled me inside emotion like the moon drawing tides to shore. No longer the young melancholic, I was navigating adult uncertainties that had come about through a forced reckoning with the unexpected. When I bought the ticket to see her show I was still reeling from the news I needed a painfully invasive biopsy and one week away from getting a life-complicating diagnosis.

In the consultations that followed, doctors only told me what to expect over the short-term because they needed tests and labs to make recommendations. I guessed I’d be post-operative by the concert because doctors don’t wait around to get people with diagnoses like mine on the table. What I didn’t know was where I’d be with the preventive treatment they would give me afterward. Or how I would respond or even if I’d have the energy to see Sarah McLachlan, the woman whose songs I’d been singing and loving for most of my adult life.

A hairdresser I used to see told me last fall that her musician husband, a man with a diagnosis similar to mine, was in surgery days before a concert he had to see. A magnificent concert, as it would turn out, because I had been there to see it, too. The hairdresser bought her husband a cane because he could barely walk without falling. She’d also called friends who were going and asked them to watch over him. The man was still medicated and in pain the night of the concert; but leaning on his cane and his friends, he’d seen the show he absolutely could not miss.

Imagining the man fumbling for balance in my mind’s eye kept me from selling my ticket and staying home. Sarah’s concert wasn’t just about 90s nostalgia: now, it was about pushing back against fear and what I couldn’t control and taking chances. Thinking of the people that had helped this hairdresser’s husband, I went online to a forum for the people who live in my neighborhood. There were a few thousand people in it; maybe someone else was going, someone I could go with, someone who might be there if I was unable to help myself.

That night on the forum I got lucky. Within an hour of my post, someone who didn’t have a photo to identify her, said she’d come along. She’d wanted to go, she’d thought about it. But she hadn’t bought the ticket. I did not know this person, but I accepted this chance act of generosity and trusted. She sent me a picture of the ticket she bought and said to keep in touch. She would be there, she would help. I didn’t think to ask why; I was just glad to have found someone who would help me see Sarah. I finally saw her face—pretty and kind, framed by a sweep of wavy silver hair—the night of the concert.

I lucked out again at the end of June, my doctors told me they wanted to start treatment the Monday after July 4th, which was also the Monday after the Fumbling Towards Ecstasy concert. Not only would have a concert companion who had sung Sarah McLachlan songs a cappella in college and dedicated “Hold On” —a song about love and illness from Fumbling—to a hospitalized friend. I would also have enough energy to see the concert itself, unimpeded by treatment side effects. I wouldn’t even need my hairdresser’s cane, which she had offered to me if I needed it. The night of the concert I left my back row seat and drifted as close as I dared to the stage where for almost an hour, I stood in stunned, wet-eyed gratitude.

On the drive home, chatting with my companion, I thought about how both of us had come to Fumbling as younger people: she in her 20s, I in my early 30s. Sarah McLachlan had been just 25 when the album first came out; and at the concert, she had called it the album of her youth, the one that had come before everything else: marriage in 1997, her mother’s death and first daughter’s birth four years later; the birth of her second child in 2007 and divorce in 2008; then her father’s death in 2010. In a 2023 CBC interview, she would also say this: [t]here’s a lot of emotional energy attached to this record for a lot of people. Fumbling had been about transitions from innocence to experience and about opening up to beginnings and endings on the journey forward.

There was more. In the days before the concert, I learned that both of Sarah’s parents had died of the same disease that had found me; and that the singer had cared for her father from his diagnosis to his death; and that she’d performed at benefits  to raise awareness and money for the disease. My companion did not know this either. But when she had accepted to come to see Sarah with me, she had done not only because she wanted to see the concert but also because she understood my predicament. Her father had gone through the same treatment I was about to undergo. He was well now, despite the fatigue and malaise, and she was happy he was well. One day you’ll get there, too. And when I did, I would marvel, more than I do now, at the people and things that had led me to the other side.

Anatomy Lessons

Two female doctors remade my breasts—both of them—at the end of May; it was my first time attended by two surgeons but my second time on the operating table in six months. The first time was for elective surgery in November, four months after a dermatologist had identified the lump under my left shoulder blade as a benign fatty tissue growth. I’d felt its gradual spread with curious fingers, occasionally despairing at what the mirror showed me: a small, uncomfortable hill of flesh that made me feel like Quasimodo.

The second time was to remove a cancer tumor lodged north of my right nipple, a growth so small it had yet to make its presence known as a lump. The surgeon went over the procedure with me. One breast would be opened and cleared and the other reduced to match the mate that radiation would shrink. The result may not be exact, but we do our best. Then, on a diagram of the female torso, she showed me exactly where she and her colleague would make their incisions. Her pen traced an upside-down question mark on the right nipple that ended a short way up my chest and then a round keyhole attached via a thin curved line to an under-breast anchor on the left.

Later, on the day of surgery, she took a black marker and ruler and draw lines and circles on my chest that she would use to guide her, just as surgeon who removed the lipoma had taken his pen and gathered the tumor on my shoulder within the boundaries of a single oval I could not see.

Twice my body had been cut open, twice my flesh had temporarily become the canvas for a surgeon’s marker and knife. Back side first then front, the geometry of surgeons. In the span of six months, two separate pathologies had transformed my body into a living art project.

∞∞∞∞

The Broken Column (1944)

Painter Frida Kahlo knew what it was like to live in a healthy body until she contracted polio at age six. She recovered after spending almost one year in bed. But one leg, the right one, became thinner and shorter than the left and would cause her pain—and not a little embarrassment—for the rest of her life. Kahlo learned to hide the deformity under the long dresses and eventually, the colorful skirts that became her trademark.

Twelve years later, when Kahlo was 18 and preparing to study medicine, a trolley car rammed into the bus she was riding. A steel handrail impaled her through her hip, piercing her uterus and fracturing her spine and pelvis. Multiple surgeries followed; after that, Kahlo was forced to wear plaster corsets to support her back and keep her body straight for the rest of her life. She turned to drawing—an activity she had always loved— for solace and for a brief time considered becoming a medical illustrator.

Until she realized that art could help her express her feelings about the beautiful, broken body that surgeons would remake over and over again for the next thirty years.

∞∞∞∞

Health did not become a focus for me until a faulty endocrine system I’d tried to mask with hormone-balancing pills through part of my 20s and most of my 30s rejected them not once, but twice, the second time causing a clot in my right leg. The clot resolved in five months because I was young and otherwise healthy. But it took more than a decade for my swollen right leg to look more or less like the left and the pain to ease and sometimes, on good days, disappear long enough to temporarily forget any of that—the hospital visits, the blood thinners, the weekly blood draws—ever happened to me.

I could never take those pills again. When doctors told me five years later that the raging menstrual cycles the pills had once controlled had made me dangerously anemic, I had no choice but to go under the knife. This was my first surgery and one that would not leave scars. Not at first, anyway.

After midlife weight temporarily rounded out my belly, keloid tendrils, pink and unruly, blossomed out of my navel, surprising me. I tightened up my diet, lost most of the weight and the tendrils retreated but only a little. I asked a dermatologist to inject what remained with silicone to shrink the keloids and flatten them until they turned silvery-white.

They are fading, slowly, the scars. But sometimes, in full rebellion against ugliness, I contemplate getting a tattoo around my navel. Something elegant, floral and baroque.

∞∞∞∞

Flowers meant the world to Kahlo. Behind the walls of her Casa Azul studio in Mexico City, she grew all kinds: roses, marigolds, fuchsias, oleanders and more. Bougainvilleas were among her favorites. Very often, she created elaborate headpieces that, like her skirts, became a personal trademark. She did this not just because she loved flowers, bright colors and her Mexican heritage. But also because flowers represented the fertility a random accident had stolen from her. She wanted children; but she miscarried them or was forced to abort the embryos that could not grow inside a destroyed uterus. If she could not give birth, she would wear living things on her body, transforming grief into an occasion for the joy she refused to surrender to misfortune.

∞∞∞∞

Sometimes, my right leg still aches. When I am able to swim at our neighborhood pools or go long-distance bicycling or hiking, endorphins and the rush of moving blood through leg veins that have lost elasticity from clot damage make the pain disappear. These days I feel the ache more because I cannot swim, cannot sweat too hard from bicycling and hiking. Not with an upper body still tender from surgery.

Looking into a mirror, I see my silhouette is slimmer now, almost adolescent, as though the weight of adult womanhood has been lifted from me along with the cancer. There’s nothing maternal in those breasts. No roundness, no softness. Now they pair well with the empty space between my ovaries, created by the surgeon who put scar-flowers in my navel. When I am cleared to don my neon-colored sports clothes to swim and bike and hike and sweat again, I will feel a new lightness. Not quite a bird, I will glide through my days with fewer of the things that marked my body—my beautiful, imperfect body—as female.

∞∞∞∞

A failed bone graft surgery meant to correct spine issues caused gangrene to settled in Kahlo’s shorter, much-weakened right leg. Doctors amputated it and Kahlo wore a prosthetic leg she dressed in an embroidered red boot she designed herself. Kahlo died of a morphine overdose six months after this last surgery. But not before she made a pen-and-ink sketch of that lost leg and signed the image with words every bit as defiant as her red boot.

“Pies para qué los quiero si tengo alas para volar - Feet, why would I want them when I have wings to fly.”

Sketch (1953)

A View from the Edge

Simply put, cancer is chaos.

There’s the havoc it wreaks in the days and weeks after diagnosis as your oncologists—because now you have to work with specialists rather than a PCP—scramble to get a full picture of what you have and what needs to be done. Then there’s the loss of control you feel as you watch your calendar fill up with appointments for difficult conversations, more examinations (some of them damned uncomfortable) and more tests. Get through that and the shock, the outrage and despair and one day, quite suddenly, you’ll surrender out of sheer exhaustion. And in that surrender you begin to accept—uneasily—that you’ve moved from the upheaval of ground zero to the relative quiet of the edge where you can observe. Because until that nasty inconvenience in your body is removed, your focus must be on fighting the disease and not yourself.

Some days will pass more easily than others. That’s the way of all journeys, though, including this strange one your disease has compelled you to take. There are days that feel like a slip-and-slide; there are others that feel like a forced march. Gradually the fear lessens when it becomes clear that the cancer in your body is slow-growing, low-grade and contained. But there’s the fear you get from others when you tell them what you have, which makes you mindful of how you speak about your condition if you speak about it at all. You realize it’s the randomness of the disease that frightens them the way it frightened you.

But there’s more to it than that. No matter how mainstream cancer and cancer-awareness have become, it’s still a disease that triggers primal—even irrational—responses in people you know. You, and in particular, what is in your body, represent the mortality they refuse believe is coming for them. Not me. Never me. You can’t really blame them because once you were just as immersed in and blinded by the mundane dramas of your own life. Still, it’s hard when those people, who know your diagnosis quietly dismiss themselves from your life as if what you have is something they could catch like some new strain of COVID.

Living things die and are reborn, microscopically and every day, through cellular death and regeneration. With cancer, that process gets disrupted when the DNA commands that regulate cellular activity becomes unintelligible to a cell. This happens when genetic codes stored inside the DNA helix develop defects, as can happen when (for example) those codes get exposed to toxic levels of substances like nicotine, pesticides and hormones. By the time cancer develops, the cells carrying the disease have gone rogue. Rather than move through the normal process of maturation and death, “outlaw” cells mutate and overproduce themselves. And do what cancers do best: spread, blindly, randomly.

Looking at your own diagnosis, you see that the complications don’t stop with DNA malfunction. The tumor in your body, at just 8 millimeters, is actually comprised of two cancers. One, a ductal carcinoma in situ, is a pre-cancer; the other, an invasive carcinoma, is newly-formed enough that it is still be confined to one location. This is one of the many reasons your disease is so frightening, though the doctor tells you that your cancer will only require a short course of radiation after it has been removed. Part of a tumor may respond to one treatment while another part may not respond at all and require other forms of therapy.

You begin to understand the war metaphors associated with your disease. You don’t simply have it like you have the flu; you battle it. Cancer is the enemy: wily, unrelenting, unpredictable. In stealth it gathers strength then emerges out of nowhere, with the terrifying ability to replicate and mutate and the power to not only ravage but completely annihilate entire systems. In this war, you and your doctors are soldiers. But there’s no equality here. They are the generals who give the orders while you, the patient, are the butt-kicked boot camp private masquerading as the down-for-anything kick-ass warrior.

Still, your oncologists are encouraging. You’re lucky, you know. Very lucky. One in particular, the surgeon who will cut the tiny cancer cluster out of your body, called the tumor well-behaved. That almost sounds affectionate, like something you might say about a cat or a dog, though you know better than to call your disease a pet. It’s far too destructive for that, enough so that you resist the temptation to name it. Instead you think of it as a slow and patient thing that you’ve carried with you like a secret and that you now purge like darkness for light.

Sisterhood of the Titanium Breast Clip

I am a marked woman. Inside my right breast is a titanium clip the size of a sesame seed that doctors deposited after a recent biopsy. It’s there to show doctors what area was tested after a mammogram came back showing a tiny speck that shouldn’t have been there. But I like to think of it as what links me to the many other women—and we are legion—who have had to go through the same procedure.

My body dislikes the clip. I am sensitive enough to feel something foreign and inorganic is there, taking up space, irritating soft tissue and causing phantom pain all around the breast and even into my armpit. And because it’s close to the surface, my fingertips can just detect it. But one day soon that clip will be removed along with the abnormality and the strange itchiness I feel will cease.

Then I will join another group of women who identify themselves with banners, badges, t-shirts and ribbons done in a color I detest almost as much as the clip. It’s one that reminds me of the impossibly proportioned Barbie and her disease-immune, nipple-free hard plastic breast cones rather than the power of collective female strength. Contrarian to the core, I am and will always be the big-boned blue-green girl, but one grateful to join forces with that sisterhood regardless of how it identifies itself.

The diagnosis I received that gained me entry into that group is one I never expected. I am a vegetarian who exercises regularly, doesn’t smoke, rarely drinks and goes to bed early as a monk. I’m prone to stress, but even that is something I constantly work to mitigate on a daily basis with meditation, occasional yoga and very physical activities like swimming, biking or hiking. Indeed, there’s no history of any other such diagnosis in my family: I am the unicorn.

What I do know I’ve always had—an eternal issue with estrogen dominance—is perhaps what caused the abnormality. Too much estrogen has caused other conditions, like the severe endometriosis that plagued me through most of my reproductive years. But I don’t think too much about that these days. A fellow sister of the Barbiehood warned me to not go tearing down rabbit holes for answers I’d never find. What I have can happen randomly. Which is part of why the condition in general causes so much fear. Unless there is a definite genetic connection—and in my case there was not— there will never be complete certainty why abnormalities happen, especially in otherwise healthy people.

There’s one small speculation I do allow myself. if I had not been as careful as I am, had not avoided processed foods and drinks, had not rid my diet of excess sugar a year-and-a-half ago—would the tiny bloom doctors saw on my mammograms have turned into something more insidious than the tiny in situ thing that it is? My suspicion is yes: the sugar I love but no longer eat in quantities larger than a few teaspoonfuls a day and only in its most natural forms, produces fat cells…which produce estrogen.

I try not to speculate. It’s much easier to just work on preparing my body for the journey ahead. Fortunately, there won’t be too many lifestyle changes I’ll have to make apart from those that are necessary for treatment…which, much as I don’t want it to, will simply take up time: first to heal from surgery, then to rest from any prophylactic therapy I receive. But from here forward, I’ll not have the luxury of thinking that 2 + 2 always equals 4 just because it always has.

The body has its own rhythms, its own logic, its own reasons. It will do as it will, even when we believe we are giving it the best care. Besides which my particular body is older. The vitality and vigor are still there most of the time. But this vessel of mine has long passed the age when I can simply leave it to its own devices and expect all will function well and without occasional intervention. Many—if not most—women who actually get the disease are over 55 and/or post-menopausal. Check and check.

A clean family medical history had lulled me into complacency. I almost decided to skip the mammogram that caught the abnormality, especially since my blood panel had come back cleaner than it had in years. I hated all the tests and wanted to run screaming from the radiologist after the biopsy. I am very wary of doctors and the medical profession in general, both of which tend to treat symptoms (the more drugs the merrier) rather than try holistic approaches (which take more time) first.

Sometimes, though…sometimes they actually get it right. And sometimes, they actually do care. When I didn’t immediately respond to the request for a follow-up—the denial was intense, this can’t be real, surely there must be some mistake—the radiology lab tracked me down like a target. With phone calls first, then letters. There was wrongness in my mammogram, a wrongness that took me almost two months and a distance of an out-of-town trip to finally acknowledge.

They saved me, not from the dark bloom in my breast but from my own damn self with the hard medicine of truth I didn’t want to swallow. Early detection means less demanding and life-disruptive treatments. I was marked, yes, and by a tiny dot of the unthinkable. But I will be able to get back to normal sooner and with less worry of recurrence than might otherwise have been the case…and live to tell the tale.

Mile High & Away

Bridal Veil Falls, Yosemite, 1988

When I was still in college, a friend took me to Yosemite, a place he called "the cathedral.” He was an atheist so the phrase was an odd one for him to use. Yet seeing the park—the tall green conifers, cedars and sequoias, the rushing waterfalls and majestic granite cliffs—and walking some of its trails quickly made me realize why. The infinite and eternal had conspired to create Yosemite, endowing it with sacredness; and though I considered myself an atheist-leaning agnostic, the park still made me want to offer thanks at every turn to the forces that had created it, forces that I refused to equate with the God of organized religion for fear of tainting the cosmic immediacy of my experience.

My beliefs have not changed since then. I still go into nature to feel connected to something greater than myself and escape the chaos of the world. One recent getaway took me to Boulder, Colorado, my wishes were much simpler: what I wanted was to see snow. Not the accidental kind that sometimes falls in central Texas. But real high country snow that chilled your lungs, fogged your breath and made your muscles work and burn with every step you took.

View from the Bluebell-Baird Trail, Boulder, 2024

I’d never much cared for snow; yet the desire was powerful enough to upend plans for a spring trip. Maybe it was talk about an overheating planet with melting polar icecaps that compelled me to go in the dead of winter. Perhaps there would come a time when the kind of snow I wanted to see wouldn’t be there the way I wanted it: in soft heavy blankets that covered everything in glittering whiteness. Snow felt…precious. Necessary, somehow, even urgent.

I did not think to understand what else snow could actually mean: purification, a cleansing of soul and self: all things I knew at some level were as necessary as the physicality I craved to make up for hours of sitting cramped and colorless office cubicle. I wanted to go for long forest walks, breathe fresh air, test my strength against the bigness of the mountains, feel my body work against the resistance of snow.

I told friends that Colorado was my getaway, my escape. It was easier than telling them what it really represented: a spiritual retreat that I did not know would start with an act of grace. A snowstorm had settled over Denver by the time I left Austin: that was the risk you took flying into the Rockies during the winter. For almost two hours, my plane circled the city in the clear blue space above black storm clouds before air traffic control at Denver International cleared us to land. My Airbnb hosts, two hippie elders who’d found their way to Boulder from other places before finding each other in their late 60s, later remarked that I had been lucky. Hundreds of other flights had been cancelled or re-routed.

My hippie hosts lived in a home in the rural north of the city. They deliberately kept it unlocked because they were trusting and because they wanted nothing to do with the fear that characterized the locked-door lifestyles to which urbanites like me were accustomed. Their only demand was that I did not wear shoes inside their house. Designed and built to resemble a two-story ship, the house felt like a sanctuary and a metaphor. I was the voyager and Boulder the end and the beginning of a winter pilgrimage.

Off the Flatiron Vista Trail, Boulder, 2024

For the next three days, I did nothing else but wander the mesas, hills and mountains around the city in hiking boots I’d fitted with new steel ice cleats. My skull throbbed with an on-again, off-again altitude headache. When that dissipated, I found that higher elevation trails that took me into less oxygenated zones at times left me with the split-second feeling that my head had separated from a body I could not control.

No day was the same as the next. And though I’d determined in advance exactly which trails I would hike, nothing went to plan. The first day out, I took a Lyft to the to the easy-walking Marshall Mesa Trail and discovered the trailhead gate was locked. Not knowing that trail closures were routine after snowstorms, I asked the driver to take me to the nearby Flatiron Vista Trail. That too, was closed.

Frustrated, I hopped over the log fence behind the empty ranger’s shack and started hiking up a snow- and deer track-covered hill. The peace astonished me enough to dispense with the music headphones I used to help me forget the headache that raged in my skull. For a moment I imagined I’d come to the ends of the earth and that I was the last human alive. I only came back to reality at the Airbnb where I learned from Internet research—and with some satisfaction—that had my adventures on closed trails could have landed me in jail and left me one thousand dollars poorer.

My hosts delighted in the story of my law-breaking escapade and told me they would have gladly fed me during my days of incarceration. Nevertheless, they still suggested I try trails they knew were officially open. Try the one at Wonderland Lake—it’s just a mile from where we live. The next day I did exactly that. Though mostly flat, one section of the trail took hikers to increasingly higher elevations in lazy switchbacks that ended at a paragliding platform near the top. Snow still clung to the land, but only in patches. The higher I climbed, the browner and scrubbier the landscape became. My hosts had told me that this was the way of snow in the Rockies, that it vanished quickly in the warmth of sun that shown 300 days a year.

View from the Bluebell-Baird Trail, Boulder, 2024

The final day, I found myself chasing snow straight up shaded canyon trails that took me near the summits of Flatiron One/Two on Green Mountain. Everything was melting; I had barely begun to enjoy the snow I’d come to see. Some climbers I passed came dressed in parkas and winter leggings. But others, like the high school students who joked with each other about falling down icy slopes, had come in shorts and sneakers.

Cautiously tapping my way up icy trails and in ice cleats that sometimes gripped more mud than snow, I heard the students laugh. See you at the top, they said scrambling past me. Stopping, I remembered my collegiate self. The one who’d hiked Yosemite in old jeans and worn out tennis shoes with no tread and looked at safety warning signs posted on steep trails and also laughed. Listening to the chatter of the students, I smiled while my head lifted off my shoulders like a balloon. Snowstorms, snow melts, closures, headaches, changes of plan and all, my imperfect days of repose had been pure divinity.

Tempus Fugit

In April 2018, I made a video of myself reciting e. e. cummings’ “somewhere I have never travelled,gladly beyond” that looks (and sounds) like the awkward offspring of a dramatic performance and an academic lecture. Yet for all the imperfections—or perhaps because of them—I refuse to delete it. And so it has accompanied me for the last six years, a capsule of time that contains one minute and forty-three seconds of my past.

Looking at it now, I want to say to my younger self for God’s sake, woman, get a comb and do something with that rat’s nest on your head. Not that she would have paid attention: the more punk-looking and unruly, the better. My hair was a statement of defiance, not just against gender norms that invalidated non-binary forms of self-presentation but also against the inconvenient encroachments of middle age. If e. e. cummings could flout conventions of form and grammar in his poetry, I could do the same with the elements of my own life.

I could get away with a hair rebellion because the silver wasn’t coming in as fast as it is now and the lines have begun to score my face had not yet surfaced on skin that was still as oily as a teenager’s. Hair that had barely begun to gray and occasional bouts of acne were enough to convince me that I could still pass for much younger than 52. That youthfulness is only heightened by the old hoodie I’m wearing and the place I’m standing: a tiny 600 square-foot studio apartment that I’d called home for five years.

Most of my neighbors were students or young people just starting their working lives. For a long time that didn’t bother me. I was a teacher and scholar, a faithful acolyte to the gods of literature who cared little for material things. But in much the same way I swing the camera to and fro as I speak, change had begun to swirl around my life. The college where I was teaching had announced plans to downsize the following fall; and adjuncts like me used to living on three-course contracts per term were no longer guaranteed even one class. If I didn’t leave, I would become as extinct as my adjunct professorship.

The imperative to evolve (or die) felt almost Darwinian. My income could not keep pace with the increasing cost of living in Austin. And the noisiness of both my neighbors and the heavily trafficked street nearby threatened my sanity. I could have ignored those signs; but the one thing I could not ignore was the older woman with dyed hair and shapeless bus driver clothes who moved into a studio cater-corner from mine.

I guessed she was sixty or more—unimaginably ancient to someone who half-believed she was still a student. Just before or after I made the video, I reported her to apartment managers for letting the dog she rarely walked use her patio as a bathroom. The poetry of my scholar’s solitude felt threatened, and not just by the odor that occasionally wafted through my kitchen window. I had words that helped me find solace in beauty; but the woman, who never received visitors, had nothing but a dog that pooped all over a (very public) veranda she never cleaned. What else had loneliness done to her?

Perhaps that’s part of the reason I made this video; as a memento mori to the life I knew I had to leave behind. Three months later, I was in a real-world job that forced me out of suspended animation. Another six months and I was in a one-bedroom apartment; two years after that, I was in a house of my own. I’d grown up, reluctantly. The new life that felt like an ending was really a beginning. Perhaps that why I come back to it now, as I move from one life I thought had finally taken root to another that will not (yet) allow me to discern its shape.

Past is prologue because everything about us, from our bodies to our lives, is cyclical. Our lives only appear to move in straight lines when the reality is that they move in cycles that incidentally exist on the continuum of time. Much as I did in my adjunct days and for the better part of one year, I have lived from contract to contract. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, living in the untethered way I thought I left behind with the students, the noise and the hapless patio-shitting dog. Yet oddly, it makes a kind of sense, especially when I look at things through the lens of cummings’ poem.

In completing another cycle of seasons, I have returned to the edge of a new spring, of the kind suggested by the flower imagery cummings uses. Something larger and greater has brought me here; and I understand that something even less than the speaker understands the beloved “you” he addresses in the poem. The speaker is in love and I am not. Yet both of us have become subject to the will (or force) of something greater than ourselves. With small hands, the speaker’s lover transforms him just as life “opens” me with its “hands,” changing me not because I wanted it to be that way. But because life exists in time which in its relentless movement forward, brings—or forces—change.

The speaker travels into the unknown with gladness while I travel into my unknown with doubt, of the kind that assailed me six years ago. Perhaps that is why I chose this poem then and why I return to it now. Like the video on my iPhone, it remains an unchanging comfort that eases passage into the unknown of “beyond” with, if not gladness, then something like acceptance.