First Day of School Fears

I still have fears of being late and unprepped to my classes, being unable to manage pick up times for my babies, anxiety about wanting a great school year where all of us--teachers, students, kids, parents will grow, make friends, learn...

I'm not special in this. The incredible cruelty of ICE raids on the FIRST day of school in Mississippi--I cannot begin to fathom... According to several accounts,

With parents no longer able to pick their children up from school, students in towns like Jackson, where children had their first day of school, according to school board calendars, were left distraught as they learned that their moms and dads had been detained.

I am so sad, and so mad, and beginning to feel a sort of hopelessness. Where do we go from here?

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Broad Smiles

Nu's friend since kindergarten, K, spent a couple of days here, and that gave us a chance to focus on fun for a while and do touristy things.

I love how Nu and K have always ended up with similar hair and clothes even when they don't  coordinate it and even way back from when they were dependent on parents to keep in touch.

And I loved how the kids loved hearing about Zaha Hadid.

#MSU #MSU-BROAD


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Fresh start

Trying to start this week over, I booked an early morning run with my favorite marathoner. We
talked more than we ran... and it was what I needed.









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Danusha Laméris: Small Kindnesses

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk 

down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs 

to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you” 

when someone sneezes, a leftover 

from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying. 

And sometimes, when you spill lemons 

from your grocery bag, someone else will help you 

pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.

We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot, 

and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile 

at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress 

to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder, 

and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.

We have so little of each other, now. So far 

from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange. 

What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these 

fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,

have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”

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Must Wake Up!

Dinner last night was to the breaking details of the El Paso shooting over the radio and today we're waking up to news of the Dayton shooting overnight. DAYTON. Dayton.

Checking on all my Yellow Springs people, but ten people have died, 26 are wounded--whether I personally knew them or not--there are grieving friends and family in a place I called home. Big A would have been taking care of them at Miami Valley Hospital if we still lived in YS.

Gun violence keeps getting closer. Every day feels like the beginning of a nightmare precipice...

#MSU #YesterdayThisSeemedFunny

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:P kinda day

Bitter to Sweet

Big A lovingly linked me to that lovely Washington Post article about the horrific child labor in the chocolate industry globally, and killed my lifelong devotion to drugstore chocolate. The Cadbury's, Hershey's, Mars I grew up eating, the chocolate in my office, at home, everywhere I spent more than an hour...

It was easy to swear off those products of pain and child slavery. But none of the Fairtrade chocolate bars I began buying were to my taste. I mean I still like sweet and fat in my chocolate. I began melting down all the too-bitter bars and adding coconut oil and sugar.





But it still tasted pretty nope.

Then out of a grocery store that's not our regular place, some sweet news: The Green and Black and Divine MILK chocolates work!








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