I would choose a close up shot of a pale blue fabric with metallic gold tigers embroidered on it for the cover of this book, if it were up to me.

Over twenty-five years ago while skimming a People magazine in a dentist office waiting room, I first read about Nanci Griffith.  If I had not purchased Lone Star State of Mind on the recommendation of a brief review in that magazine all those years ago, then I might have missed out on more than a few remarkable live concerts and hours of listening to Nanci in my home and on numerous road trips.  All this is to say that, yes, I admit I do occasionally read celebrity magazines and even follow the recommendations in them.  Last month while waiting for my two oldest offspring to donate blood I flipped through Oprah magazine for the first time and read a review of Tigers in Red Weather.  I promptly checked the book out on my next visit to Gordon Avenue Library.  Liza Klaussmann’s first book is a saga set after the war in the mid forties and continues to the late sixties.  Told from the viewpoint of five different characters the story deals with family, romance, loss of innocence, trust and secrets.  I love the descriptions of the life at the shore (both in Florida and New England) during that time period.  One of the best parts about the book is Klaussmann’s ability to construct a suspenseful plot, with some disturbing and unsettling twists, so no more details in an effort not to spoil the experience for others.

Tropical storm Andrea brought lots of rain our way this past week.  I love running in a cool drizzle and spent my days off work trying to build my mileage back up.  Long runs and warm showers were followed by hours of reading, working on samplers, baking these wonderful muffins (link to Lynn) and writing postcards to friends working in North Carolina and Nantucket.

Light thunderstorms make for great running weather but are less than ideal for swim meets, so fingers crossed for clear skies later this week!

pink peonies

One of us has eight and a half days of school left.  That gives us a little over a week, plus a weekend, to bake a batch of cupcakes and make a summer list.  Time to celebrate.

Eliot’s April bled into May this year, leaving us caught in a lurch between seasons.  After several days of rain and cold that felt like the rather cruel perpetuation of a particularly long and drawn out spring, this week brought our first real days of summer.
We have started filling small bowls each day with strawberries from our backyard.  Yesterday, I walked back and forth from the spigot to our garden, filling up the watering can and looking forward to the weeks that will bring us radishes, tomatoes, and cucumbers.  It wasn’t just the weather and taking the time to admire our rose garden, this week has been full of summer: reading Hemingway and Faulkner and Warren, running at dusk and smelling backyard grilled dinners, driving Carson home from work and listening to our favorite Nanci Griffith songs, teaching a sweet and energetic five year old boy how to swim, and sitting on the back porch with Miss F while she paints my nails.

officially over halfway finished

Several nights ago I moved back home and Mom, Miss F, and I took advantage of the new summer dusk to walk through our neighborhood.  In doing so, we stopped by the high school and caught a snippet of the chorus concert, the portion of the evening where the director recognizes the graduating seniors and announces each student’s plans for the coming year.  I don’t think there is any demographic of humans on this planet brighter or shinier or beaming more promise and potential than a collection of high school seniors.  They are emerging from a cocoon of teachers, administrators, and counselors whose sole focus is to build up their students, to encourage them, to teach them, to convince them they are capable of changing this world.  High school seniors possess a new sense of agency now that they have completed our nation’s compulsory education, now that our society has deemed them responsible enough to determine how they will fill their days.

Just a little over three years ago, when we were among the shining seniors poised to collect diplomas and accolades with accomplished smiles and firm handshakes, my friends and I were sifting through opportunities, fearful of choosing the wrong university or career path and accidentally ruining the entire course of our lives.  In the face of these stressful decisions, my mom asked us a question.
“Do you know who will be waiting in your room if you go to [University x] or move to [y city]?” she would ask.
“No,” we said, clearly we didn’t know because if we did, that knowledge would probably bring clarity to our decisions.
“You,” she would reply.  “Wherever you go in life the one person who will always be there is you.”

At the time, her answer was terrifying.  We were ready to shed a layer of ourselves, to evolve into a worldlier, more intelligent, self-sufficient, better version of our childhood self. It seemed like we wouldn’t have a clean slate, that everyone in the world would know that we cried once in our 6th grade math class when we forgot our homework, that we completely forgot the words to the Pledge of Allegiance one morning while leading the student body on school-wide television, that we’d once possessed headgear, heinous haircuts, and Furbies. My mom’s point, that we missed, of course, was that where you go matters much less than what you do and who you are once you get there.  The orchids blooming in our kitchen are just as beautiful and just as fragrant as if they were planted in a rainforest.

But since then, as I’ve traveled new places with friends, strangers, or by myself, I’ve found comfort in that sentiment.  It is often encouraging to know that wherever you go, you will at least know yourself better than anyone else. That just by being yourself, you are capable of making the best of any given place or situation.

This has been an especially important bit of wisdom for me to revisit this past semester.  The glittering promise and potential possessed by high school seniors exists on one side of a spectrum.  In the middle of this spectrum are mundane events that we can choose to experience as equally humorous or devastating: contracting lice at age 21, spilling your reheated meal of rice and beans across your newly washed sheets and discovering mold at the bottom of the container, accidentally attaching a personal letter instead of your essay to the email you wrote your professor.  And at the very far end of this spectrum is a mass of negative energy, a cosmic combination of chaos, entropy, tragedy, violence, and evil. Life is hard, really hard, sometimes, just as it is wonderful at others. We will not, and cannot, know everything and achieve all of our goals and see all of our dreams through to fruition. Our governments, our schools, our communities, people we love dearly, will all at some point disappoint us.  For reasons beyond our mere mortal comprehension, other humans, who have surely at one point felt bright and shiny themselves, perhaps on their own graduation day, choose to inflict pain and suffering and heartbreak on those around them.

My mom is right (as she often is), in saying that the place we go does not matter, because there isn’t a place we can go in this world completely devoid of disease, where some group of people isn’t discriminated against or deprived of their rights, where no one we love will die or disappear, where we won’t just want to cry sometimes because of the sheer weight of it all.  And at the same time, the place you go does not matter because everywhere in this world needs a healthy dose of brightness and sparkle retained from the potential your high school English teacher saw in you.

When I returned this semester, I found I possessed very little faith in my surroundings.  It seemed my campus, my city, my state, my national region, even our very nation itself, had been swallowed by a tornado and thrown down onto the precipice of the dark void of that spectrum.  A Gotham without Batman.

But, fortunately, so many people around me hadn’t lost sight of their shine and knew that the best they could do was to continue being better versions of their prior selves.  It meant that when our governor said this, a talented friend of mine replied respectfully.  It meant that when cases of rape and sexual assault on our campus were poorly handled or were covered up, a student journalist focused on integrity and a group of students in pursuit of justice didn’t let it go unnoticed.  It meant that there was sadness and fear and frustration but: miles were conquered, vegetables were devoured, Nabisco started producing birthday cake Oreos, people brought kittens and corgis to play on the quad in the sunshine, class assignments were fascinating, Dolly Parton tweeted a lot of wisdom and inspiration, and those stinking lice were eradicated.

It may not matter where you go when you are first trying to decide, but the places you choose will matter a great deal to you after you’ve been there.  There are places of great sentimental value, places I will always think of fondly: a particular tea field in Kenya, the second platform of the Tottenham Court Road tube station, a hippie cabin in Arkansas, the house and its boxwood hideout by the train tracks in Appomattox, a precious slanted apartment in Brooklyn, a brightly colored house by Wrightsville Beach.  But until recently, there was really only once place I called home.  Somehow though, even as excited as I was to snuggle with Miss F, to rejoin my family for Sunday crosswords and hikes along the Blue Ridge Parkway, to work a job I dearly love, it was much harder for me to leave North Carolina this spring than in previous years.  Chapel Hill has become a home to me not because it is free of strife and home to a perfect university, but because it has proved to be imperfect and yet worthy of admiration all the same.

My friends and I celebrated the end of the semester by going to see some very talented Carolina students perform and this new song of theirs has quickly become one of our favorites.  It speaks to the pull of a place considered home, and I especially like the sentiment that such a place could remind us “how we ought to be.”

view from summit of Turk Mountain

We had a Mother’s Day hike along part of the Appalachian Trail.  It was my first time climbing to the top of Turk Mountain.  Certainly worth the view!

She’s back!

Remember the days when all your belongings fit in one carload?

Hello May!
We’ve got high hopes for you around here.

Last weekend, Natalie, Caroline, and I took a quick 24 hour trip to Wilmington.  We had envisioned a warm and sunny beach getaway before exams.  No sooner were we beach bound when a tornado watch was placed on the state and a heavy storm hit the area.  Kudos to Natalie for navigating flooding conditions on I 40 in her little purple car!

We made it safely to her house and were met with warm hugs and lots of yummy vegetables (ARTICHOKES!) that we don’t always get to eat at school, plus a freshly baked pound cake.  Even though the day we spent in Wilmington was cloudy and overcast, we had more than enough fun snuggling, eating more great food, and introducing Caroline to the cinematic masterpiece that is “Just Go With It.” 

We got to see Natalie’s younger brother (and soon to be Tar Heel!) off to his senior prom before we headed back to Chapel Hill to gear up for exams.