:: gestures widely :: there's also all of this

Running lines and launching balls and rehearsing vocals and plucking strings, there's so much music and art and science and church.

I like collecting it here in one place because the {times in which we live?} require tremendous levels of lemonading. 

The news cycle feels like a tornado right now. 

The Wizard of Oz performs this weekend, and we've been warned we'll see "some wacky choices" on stage. I heard the tornado ensemble will twirl around in garbage bags, covered with trash. Sounds legit.

It's easy to feel confused and bamboozled and immobilized... but there's still poetry and painting and teamwork and imagination, if you need some.

Tickets to Wizard of Oz March 6-8: https://ghschools.hometownticketing.com/embed/all

{may books always be there for us}

Part escape, part instruction, stories make life navigable, survivable.

heart factory

 I'm realizing heartbreak and awe have a very large overlap in the venn diagram.

the F

May the F in February stand for finally, I mean, for family. 

And for fish pie from our favorite neighbor, for forty seven and for air trajectory failures, for a first time adjudicated solo, for forest initiatives and father/son duets, for fine art and field trips and time with friends.

still January

The boys have turned our dining room into a basketball court. A couple weeks ago, after the tree came down, a hoop went up. And I don't know if it's a testament to desperation or DGAFs, if it's a result of the climate, the bitter cold and the brutally cruel politics, but it is what it is.

And I'm just trying to be okay.

I've been texting with a couple favorite cousins, talking about the books our kids are reading and the cologne our kids are wearing. These are the cousins I used to ride to Blockbuster with, ready to duke it out over which video to rent and passing the same soda flavored Lip Smacker around, oblivious to the peace of being backseat passengers, watching our favorite raindrop slide down the window to win the race to the bottom.

Now I'm suddenly never not nervous.

These are hard days to own a human head and heart. Like I'm wondering if it's possible die from losing respect for too many people at once? I don't know how to speak to Celia's goneness or the president's hereness. I do know our family is full of experts in finding joy in the stories we might rather get rid of. But it's exhausting.

And I need it to stop being January.

I've been alternating between noticing things here and far away, going back and forth between the very close up happenings in our house and the very distant atrocities on the internet. I don't even know how to describe the a-lot-of-it all, the underlying sense that life has become impossible for everybody.

What does mercy even mean?