The right mug for phases of life where your travel is largely limited to books.

There are the places that embed themselves in your soul, that carve a space that exists only in a specific light, in a specific scent, in a specific taste of that one dish in that one city that you can never, ever replicate. A piece of chocolate cake or a bite of falafel or, in my case, homemade tzatziki sauce on a deconstructed gyro with the mountainous Turkish countryside out the screen-less, open window. I have not eaten meat in more than 10 years, and I still think about that gyro.

And then there are the places in books that also embed themselves in your soul, the places that become characters themselves, that morph and grow alongside their humans, making them who they are, who they’ve always been somewhere deep down.

Since I became a parent, I have spent a lot of time in the latter: in books where the place is just as much a character, a protagonist, as the person or people. I come back to Mostly Dead Things by Kristen Arnett and Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden. In both books, one a novel and one a memoir, the State of Florida feels as alive as any other character, imbuing every scene with richness and particularity. And, like any other character, Florida exhibits different sides of itself as the human characters change and grow, propelled by a place that is replete both with wild, natural beauty and with manufactured, commercial, branded extravagance. Florida, at its core.

In early motherhood, a phase that makes it especially difficult to travel, either far away or for very long, books have transported me. I know this is not a new concept, but the centrality of being home most if not all the time when I am not at work, is at least somewhat new to me, and different from the relative ease and simplicity of traveling before my son’s birth. Continue reading →

The baby’s first flight was, fittingly, to Iowa, where I’m from.

Much of writing, at least the writing I like to read, is about that which changes you. As a longtime autobiography and memoir reader, the range of the genre is wide, but change underlies nearly every title within its grasp.

Which is perhaps why I felt it odd that upon becoming a first-time parent, I had nothing to write, of this Earth-moving, body-morphing, all-consuming experience and new identity. Recently I started reading Splinters, Leslie Jamison’s new memoir about motherhood and her divorce from her daughter’s father shortly thereafter. Twenty-four pages into the book, she somehow managed to capture the sentiment I felt, a sentiment that evaded my repeated quests to describe it, to make that which is intangible more tangible: “Those early days with my daughter felt like excess and hallucination. It was all too much, but when I tried to find language for it, it was nothing at all: milk and diapers, milk and diapers, milk and diapers.”

When I was on maternity leave by myself with my small son after my husband returned to work, I told him when he got home from the office one day that I felt like I did nothing and everything at the same time. Time ceased to exist in any kind of linear fashion. It really was milk and diapers, milk and diapers, milk and diapers, but it was also so much more. Continue reading →

A moth hums in the screen door, either trapped or chasing the light from the lamp beneath which I am reading, light it will (hopefully) never reach. I am not sure which is better. But alas, I am not a moth, so I cannot say for certain.

It took me a long time to get to this point, that point being reading for fun, for leisure. Reading without constantly checking how many pages I have left, how much time has passed, how much longer the library is open.

At first, I had to set timers. 15 minutes to start. I would read for 15 minutes, without underlining, tabbing, or taking notes. Reading just to read. Not to memorize or test or ingrain.

Reading like I used to, before law school ruined it, ruined a lot of things, at least for three years, anyway. Continue reading →

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about things that seem like magic, even though I objectively know they are not.

The steam rising off my skin in the bath.

The sound of crunchy autumn leaves falling from the trees in our backyard. I like to picture the leaves hyping each other up, saying “Let’s go together!” to any leaf friends who are holding onto the final wisps of fall. To be fair, I do the same thing, clinging to sweaters and flannels for dear life, refusing to admit that it’s cold enough for a coat.

Every Sunday evening, I take a hot bath, as if the steam and warm water can somehow shield me from the inevitable reality of my busiest day of court, Monday. I rest my arm on the edge of the tub, pulling the shower curtain back just enough to let the light in. It feels like a hidden superpower as I watch the steam rise from my skin, droplets hanging in the air. I move my arm in a little circle, just to see the steam swirl and take on whatever shape I choose. Continue reading →

Vehicle safety is for houseplants, too.

Sometimes I find myself thinking about all the things my houseplants have witnessed in their silent—but I maintain—supportive, way. There is something to be said for another living being, even if it is an unruly fern or a homely cactus, being a party to all the pain, hope, love, excitement, anxiety, and so on, in life. Perhaps this is why I can’t seem to stop buying plants. Why every little blank space I see, on our bookshelf, on the filing cabinet at work, on the corner of the TV stand, is a plant spot just waiting to be occupied.

I think about my cactus Lorenzo in particular. He was my first houseplant, and I got him when I was 22, shortly after I moved out of my college apartment into my first real apartment, a studio in downtown Des Moines where I hung a shower curtain (to be fair, it was cute and floral) to separate the “bedroom” from the living room. It was the kind of apartment you’re in awe of at that age, one that caught the reflecting light and harsh angles of the towering bank across the street in the mornings, tossing straight-line shadows across the floor and walls, bending its orderly façade into new shapes. Lorenzo is derpy at best. You can see the rough edges of the places where he has simply lost an arm once it got too heavy. And where new arms have grown in downright disorderly ways. Still, seven years later, Lorenzo keeps growing and thriving, in his own weird way. Continue reading →

I often think about all the different iterations of me that have existed in each of the places I have lived: nine cities in four states, by my count. We all carry every place we have ever inhabited in our bones, in my opinion.

Those four instinctual turns to the grocery store, street names, intersections and GPS directions quickly replaced by that specific dip in the road, the one that signals a left, the tree that got struck by lighting two summers ago. That one’s a right turn.

I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to write about Wausau, to “wrap up” what can only be described as a year with some of the highest highs and the lowest lows.

But I also believe it would do a disservice to the past year, and maybe to my own mental health, not to at least try to ruminate on it and capture it, at least a little.

Continue reading →

Time has taken on a strange, shifting shape over the past year, I think. For a lot of us. Time gained, in some senses—in commutes that were suddenly no longer, in evenings once spent at happy hours or the movies or any other number of events from the Before Times. Time lost, as well. It seems to take me longer to get going for the day when I work from home, as I watch Schitt’s Creek and drink my tea, lumbering from task to task until I finally sit down at my kitchen table or couch to work.

Law school gives you so little time to deal with, well, anything beyond school itself. When I went through a breakup and the death of a family member within a span of a few weeks in law school, I just buried all that hurt and sadness and moved through the semester completely numb. It was the unhappiest I have ever been.

The opposite was the case this fall, both due to the pandemic and to my move to a new state, to a small city I had never heard of. In the aftermath of a breakup, especially, the dichotomy between the exciting, terrifying, dizzying pace of a new job and career—only to come home to my giant empty apartment and sit alone with Netflix and my feelings for hours—felt jarring at best, and completely crushing at its worst. Continue reading →

10/10 would recommend buying yourself pretty cards just because.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about something a coworker said to me the day after my breakup. “I promise you will like your life, too.” It is hopeful but realistic; I don’t know that any of us go around loving our lives. After all, there are doctor’s appointments and bad hair days and bills to pay and that one ex who still texts you “Hey stranger” even though you never respond.

In 2019 I learned that not only could I like my life but that I deserved to like it. I was fresh off a breakup and a death in the family when the worst semester of my academic career began, catapulting me into a routine of sobbing in a heap on my couch nearly every day after school, unable to deal with anything in a meaningful way because there were cases to read and papers to write and jobs to look for. I learned that I could like my life that summer as I wandered around Kansas City on the weekends (convinced as ever that anything is walking distance if you simply believe in yourself), did legal work at my dream nonprofit organization, sang karaoke and made new friends while reconnecting with an old friend, too.

Yet again, I have been thinking about what it means to like your own life in the aftermath of a devastating breakup I didn’t see coming. As Hanif Abdurraqib so gorgeously explores in his column “On Breakups” about HAIM’s “I Want You Back,” “The thing I never learned to understand about breakups is that, even at their largest, the moment of the break itself might not be the hardest part. If you have no children together, or no assets worth squabbling over, or no other reason to hover in each other’s lives, the breaking itself can be sudden, with an entire world of grief to stumble into after.”

The breakup came in the form of a two-minute phone call I didn’t see coming on a random Wednesday night. It’s hard to even know how to begin putting yourself back together in that situation. This particular ending had at no point seemed like an even remote possibility to me. Continue reading →