Exactly one year ago today I half fulfilled a dream to hike the Smoky Mountain region of the Appalachian Trail. I say half fulfilled because at 36 of the 72 miles in, I was done. It wasn’t the elevation or the distance or the heat or the rain, but from my first step onto that trail, I knew there was something wrong with my body. I’m a runner and I knew it shouldn’t have been that hard. I knew.


I was both profoundly disappointed in myself and too sick to care. Walking the Appalachian trail had long been a bucket list check for me, but it was something more, too. I had chosen this particular section of trail because it was part of my heritage. My grandfather had built roads up into these mountains . . . My great grandfather helped to build the dams . . . as well as the stereotypical culture of backwoods grit. My grandmother claimed Cherokee ancestry from here and she and her sisters carried it prominently in their features. I passed it on to my own daughters. I had imagined this hike as part of a Cheryl Strayed-esque healing journey . . . One carefully stitched together to fit my own particular set of sorrows . . . Pieces of the fabric clumsily thrown together as healing testament to my own fractured soul. In the two years leading up to it, I had separated from my husband and moved from Detroit to the west side of the state, living alone for the first time except for a matched set of sweet and irrepressible Boxers that I couldn’t bear to leave behind. I had removed myself from toxic relationships that demanded too much of me and offered little in return. I had taken up running, changed jobs three times until I found one to wake up for in the morning, changed my name, and eventually found a better home for the Boxers after accepting that they were too much for one person to handle in a small apartment. Every piece was a death and a rebirth. My soul was tired and lonely. I wanted to reconnect with myself, feel my strength resonating up from the ground I walked on, and know deeply that I had had come from someplace beautiful . . . hear from the physically beautiful people who stared out at me in photographs from loving eyes that looked like mine. I wanted to hear whispers of welcome home echo from the ancient forests and the rolling, misty ridges. Mostly, I just heard . . . From my own bones . . . I thought . . . Something. Is. Wrong.

And so I came home and saw a doctor . . . And another . . . And another. There were  cancer surgeries that cut deeply into my body to leave permanent battle scars. Everything I didn't need was removed, and I very often I wonder if then some. There  was chemotherapy that plagued me with strange maladies, and rogue, painful episodes of gallstones between that had nothing to do with cancer, but punctuated the ridiculousness of my situation with random waves of fresh hell. There were post op complications that included a lengthy bout with pneumonia and Covid tests that made me want to fight nurses. There was unprecedented isolation and spiraling loneliness . . . upon isolation . . . that would test even the most extreme introvert. 

Within this same year I divorced and lost my brother to an illness that eerily mirrored my own. He died on December 21, just before Christmas, the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. I picked up his ashes in Detroit between surgeries and gallstone attacks and brought them home with me to West Michigan. There was no urn. They handed him to me in a box, and the irony was not lost on me. Another giant X checking the box on the absurdity of this life . . . my life . . . and mostly his. I brought him home with me and put the box in a corner just beyond my bookshelf . . . where my eyes don’t fall unless I’m vacuuming or dusting, or I needed to pluck my copy of Tolstoy’s War and Peace from a bottom shelf . . . I knew I would never read it. And even though my oldest daughter sent me a marbled blue urn that arrived just days after I told her this sad story, I put the urn on the top center of the bookshelf without ever transferring the ashes. I could look at the blue. It was the electric blue of his eyes that twinkled mischievously in his lucid moments. It was the cerulean glow of our favorite Christmas lights when we were children. It was the aqua expanse of water and sky where he was freest from the torment of mental illness that plagued him all of his adult life. I could look at the empty blue urn . . . I could not open the box.

But as my body has healed over these long months of isolation, so has grown my capacity, my strength for grieving. I walk my own trail, the North Country Trail that winds through Michigan just outside my door and I leak tears of grief and shock and even gratitude for what this past year has brought. I watch the flowers grow to their glory and die and they are replaced by new colors. And I ask my God what is one life to you? What is one death? He answers always: Everything . . . so I keep on living fiercely, intentionally.

Great and terrible things happen to me in the middle of July. But so far, this year, alone in a pandemic, everything is mundane. I’ll just sit with that thought for a moment . . . And wait. Every day I work a little, connect with people behind my screen, walk a little, plunge myself into a blue cool to wash away the dust, and welcome the sunset in a way I never have before. Before . . . sunsets from home were sharp and lonely. I used to expend all my energy trying to outsmart them. Come home late. Come home early. Close the blinds. Stay ahead of the lonely hurt in mindless activity. These days . . . These interminably long and hot summer days of pandemic . . . I turn my face into the sinking ball of light that first illuminates my west facing balcony, and then fades from electric blue into soft and fiery colors. It is a healing gift. I still myself in the call of the cicada that drones and dies. Fireflies signal the twilight, and the strength of starlight points finally send them home. In the predictable patterns of mid summer, there is no tragedy this year . . . No great triumph has happened, I think.

I celebrate July for whatever is to come by hiking my trail. I do my thing . . . with the pool and the dust and the sunset . . . And then, on this night, I stand in front of the bookshelf . . . take down my copy of Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods. I open it to the marked pages of where his journey falls in the exact place on that same stretch of that Appalachian Trail where I walked off exactly a year ago today. I laugh out loud as I read again Bryson describing the misery of his journey with great hilarious gusto and hyperbole, and I imagine my brother’s impossibly blue eyes, in a rare moment of joy, lucid and free, laughing at just the right part of my story. I need the strength of this remembering . . . this imagining . . . this moment . . . to hold power over the intensity of the same blue that implored me in his worst moment . . . Or was it mine? . . . when he said he didn’t want die . . . asked me to help him . . . When I looked away from his agony in horror and anger, sick myself, and thought . . . I can’t . . . anymore . . .

I hold on to the moment . . . and let go . . .

Before I can change my mind, l reach up and take down the urn. I take the urn and the box out to my balcony. I breathe in the balmy, earthy night air and carefully open the bag. I pour what’s left of my brother’s body into the blue and close the lid over it, noticing for the first time that the silver matching bands at the top and the bottom have flowers etched all around. Then I pour myself a glass of chilled Merlot, light some candles, and sit quietly with him for a while.

I think again, tonight, as I have every evening for the last eight weeks, that my body hurts a little less than yesterday . . . And so does my heart.

Someday l’ll take him back to the top of the mountain with me. I’ll hold handfuls of him tightly in a prayer and let the dust sift through my fingers, let the wind carry his DNA to mingle in the earth with our grandfathers and grandmothers and great grandfathers and great grandmothers. I’ll imagine them welcoming their same strength of his spirit and accepting their same brokenness.

But tonight, this is enough. I look out into the night, just over the blue,  and I know that tomorrow, everything. . . everything . . .  will hurt just a little less than today.

So I was just congratulating myself on my weekend comeback . . .
 
I spent the entire day yesterday watching Lifetime movies (the horrible, kidnappy kind) and waiting for the forecasted late April Michigan snow . . . even though my apartment is falling apart. There’s a sink full of dishes, piles of laundry (I’m not sure what’s clean and what’s dirty), recycling that dates back to January . . . and there’s a smell I can’t locate.
 
I wish I could just give myself a little grace when this happens, as it does every so often. I wish I could enjoy the “power of nothing” just because I can. But I’ve never been good at this. A cloud of self-recrimination hovers over my head just in my peripheral vision . . . and I imagine the word loser at its center in dripping font. Having been through a few things . . . it has never been my goal to survive so much as thrive. And even though I know, on a vague, cerebral level that there is something flawed in my thinking, I must always be doing . . . and not just being . . . I will not be defined. I will not be a victim. I will not make excuses to rest in average. And I will not be human. 

Tell that to my body on a mid-Saturday morning as it’s coming up for air after a twelve-hour-exhaustion-induced-sleep-stupor. And all day Saturday, I couldn’t recover. I did nothing . . . and used up any small fragment of anything I had left hating myself. I would do better tomorrow, I promised myself.
 
So this morning, I congratulated myself on my burst of creative energy. I was hungry and I made myself a crepe. Yes, I know the ability to feed myself sounds less than impressive. But it was beautiful and unprecedented and unplanned, my crepe. I’d never made one before, but I had the memory of one I’d recently shared with my girls in a hidden little bistro in Chicago. It was made with fresh bananas and thick whipped cream and caramel sauce. I had none of these. I made mine from a recipe I’d found on Pinterest. It called for milk and sugar. I was out of those, too. I used heavy cream and powdered sugar, thinned it with some water . . . filled it with cream cheese and strawberry-jalapeno jam. It was beautiful . . . perfectly light and sweet and spicy. In fact, I was so inspired by it, that in my jubilation over it, I flung my entire cup of coffee across my living room. I lifted it happily and with fervor and it clipped the edge of my laptop (always close on stand-by), its contents sailing merrily out into the air and settling neatly down into my purse, my L.L. Bean workbag, several pairs of shoes that I had thrown off throughout the course of the week, all across my carpet, onto the Agricultural Science bunny named Iris that I adopted for the weekend,  and down the wall on the far side of the room.
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I sat there for the space of a second . . . empty plate in one hand . . . empty coffee cup in other, a little shocked and surveying the new mess I had just added to the existing mess. Iris stared at me, dripping coffee . I should have been further discouraged. I should have cried. I should have gone back to bed.
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I laughed. Hard and hysterically.
​
Iris looked at me like I had lost my mind. And suddenly I was energized. I wanted to go for a run . . . drive to the grocery store . . . plan a trip to the mountains . . . pay bills and clean up my apartment. I wanted to wipe down iris. I wanted to feel the joy of the mundane and the unnecessary. Do more and be more . . . forgive myself for being human . . . 
 
My little crepe was all the difference between a mess and a beautiful mess . . . It was borne on a spark that was bringing me back to myself . . . and the law that says that an object in motion stays in motion . . . after a long nap. 

I think Iris forgives me . . . And so  do I.
​

There’s a blue that falls down all around me . . . A holiness sent from the sky . . . A blue that surrounds and becomes me . . . That slices through pain like a knife . . .


It’s the blue where the wind waves the water . . . The blue in the flash of their eyes . . . The blue in the true of a heart-blood to rise above secrets and lies.

There’s a blue in the dawn of a morning that burns off the black of a night . . . the new of a day that compels me to hold up my truth to the light.

There’s a blue that creeps in with the twilight when a longing seeps into my soul . . . And the moon and the stars break through darkness in a sigh of a heavenly glow . . .

In the blue of an evening alone-ness when the shadows have beat down the light . . . Blue whispers the sound of a heart-break should go down on the page in a fight . . .

There’s a rumor that tells of our savior who carried a piece of the sky . . . in a face that should never have held it . . . in the fire-soft glow of His eyes . . .

In His Holy Blue vortex of love-light that goes weaving out edge over edge . . . A Holy Blue-white light of promise keeps me wondering . .

Wandering . . . over the ledge . . .

Into the Holy Blue.

I am afraid . . . Not of being alone . . . But of being still . . . Still enough that the alone might catch up with me . . . Overtake me . . . And paralyze me into a state of alone-ness . . .

Loneliness . . .

So I go . . . I run . . . I drive . . . And I fly . . . Anywhere and everywhere and whenever I can . . . run on country roads and in backwoods until I’m sweaty and drained and exhausted . . . too exhausted to entertain loneliness. . . I come home, chased by the the sunset, and fall into bed.

I drive from my small town hub to the surrounding cities of my people I have moved away from . . . who have moved away from me . . . Detroit and Chicago and Grand Rapids . . . I roll over long stretches of road, always going somewhere to connect and I come home in the dark. . . Because loneliness, when it comes, creeps in with the sunset.

There is something about the sunset . . . A painful yearning that wells up when there’s no one . . So I do my best to cheat it straight into the night. If there’s a gap, I put a glass of wine over the edges. The longest days of summer are brutal. The middle of July makes me weep.

I fly . . . to Colorado and Hawaii and Arizona . . . to look over oceans and mountains and deserts . . . Because God is there and I am never lonely in these places . . .

But the pages stay blank . . . Clean and white and empty.

And then comes a day when the running stops and is replaced by a white, hot pain. There are bills to pay mightily and attorney fees. Both will buy my freedom if I can just be still . . . But it still feels like too much to bear and I am blindly tearing into . . . planning for . . . the north coast of a Florida beach . . . until someone angry keys my car . . . Rakes three deep crevices down the side of it . . . Like a claw . . . And I am grounded . . . Resigned to the loneliness that is sure to catch up with me . . . haunted by it.

I still have my legs and they’re free . . . so I run and hope it’s enough. I run through woods, pushing myself over the hills and through the curves . . . Three miles, four, and into five . . . Until my legs and my lungs are screaming . . . Until I can feel the pain draining out of me . . . And I come home and close the curtains against the setting sun . . . And pour myself a glass of wine for good measure . . .

The paper is still blank. I cannot keep running . . . and sleeping between.

I leave the tv off . . . Bring the wine into my office . . . It’s not the Hemingway whiskey, but it’ll do.

My God breathes purpose into me . . . My ancients . . . My people look on from photographs. My head is full of who they need me to be and they take up all the quiet space. My stories light the way and the loneliness can’t get in . . . My soul sits with me . . . Angels bar the door . . .

I write.





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1,000 summer stories . . .
​And this is one of my favorites . . .
​
In all the world of wishing, there is nothing I have ever wanted more (lately)  than to have a sister.

I have friends . . . Beautiful soul women friends . . . True to the end, loyal to the bone, love me when I’m wrong  . . .  move me across the state, travel hours to see me, take me in at a moment's notice . . .  give me their stuff, believe in me,  and risk their reputation for me . . .

Friends. 

Against all odds and the laws of practical life statistics, I have a whole tribe of these. And I don’t take that lightly. There’s not a morning I don’t wake up in wonder and pure gratitude for the knowledge of these extraordinary women who care for me . . . Like in an Anita Diamant Red Tent sort of way . . . But more spread out . . .

A true network.

I like to think that God gave them to me to make up for what I don't have . . . what I feel the deepest absence of . . . Because what most of these women have (in addition to me;) . . . that I don't have . . . are sisters.

Same DNA, raised in the same dysfunction, give me back my sweater or I'll jerk your hair out by the roots and then raise your babies like my own kind of sisters. 

And go figure. Not just one or two, but multiple sisters. Three, four, five . . . I actually have one friend who has seven sisters and a story that one day their mother just gave up and put all theirs socks and underwear into one basket and let them duke it out during morning rush hour . . .

Even both of my childhood best friends were middle sisters . . . Maybe I’m drawn to it . . . Like salt to a wound . . . Like a cat with one of those laser lights . . . I’m never going to catch it, but I just can’t give up on the impossibility. Because, to me, a sister is something you can’t manufacture or throw away. They've been there as long as you can remember, and there’s a permanence there without the typical breaks and shifts that typically go on in female friendships. . . They can't un-choose you . . . And for a person with serious abandonment issues, that is a wonderfully appealing prospect.

Oh, I know about the complexities, the pecking orders, the birth order syndromes . . . I understand the concept that not all siblings would be friends or even like each other if they had been born into other families. But still I want the unconditional. I want the history. I want the shared stories and the memories, the inexorable bonds of growing up in the same house with the same parents - absent or present - and reaching out in the night for the next best - or maybe best - comforting hand. I want to search the feminine face of someone and see myself there . . . In the exotic cheekbones of a mutual grandmother or in the studious lines across the forehead of an erudite aunt  . . . and say, "That's my sister . . . "

Disclaimer: I have brothers. I’m in the middle of two. I’m not discounting these relationships, but brothers are different.  There is a diffidence there when it comes to women's issues and you can't really chuck your bra,  pour yourself a glass of wine, and complain indiscriminately about your misogynistic boss with your brothers at the end of a bad day. That would be awkward. When I was seven and knew I had a sibling coming, I prayed earnestly, fervently for the gift of the brother I have . . . Perhaps without the foresight that I would never have another chance for a sister . . . That a day would come, with good reason, that a sister would be my greatest longing. I have two daughters. Sisters. Two granddaughters. Sisters. One of the greatest joys of my life has been in watching and witnessing those sister relationships play out in all their complex and beautiful glory.

But yet, the beat goes on without me. I can only get close to it. it will never be mine.

Never have I been more conscious of this than over these last several years as I've settled into a life alone. First, I've proudly watched each of my daughters celebrate their own independence through college graduation and then marriage and creating their own families. And then, for the first time in my life, I've stepped into a independence that is fulfilling, but often predictably isolated. It would be nice to have the primary and familial - the entitled relationship  - that sisterhood offers.

I know what you're thinking . . .some of you sister people . . .

"But it's not always like that . . . " or  "My sister and I have never been that close . . . "

A few of you more unfortunate sister people . . . 

"But she slept with my husband!" . . . or  "I wouldn't give her a kidney if I had three!"

Yep. I get it. There are simple differences . . .  and then rivalries gone wrong. Deep hurts and rifts happen between siblings that hold the power and the pain to separate them indefinitely. The fact that the first recorded murder, Biblically, was over a sibling rivalry might be worth noting here.  But still, people are created for human connection, and it seems to me . . . sister-less over here . . . that there is no greater tragedy than to give up on the gift of a lifelong friend that is your birthright. 

Ironically, I have never understood this better than in the example of my mother and her sisters. My mother was - is, I suppose - the middle sister in a family of seven children. Her two sisters are bookends of the septupling, 17 years apart. I have always adored both of my aunts. My mother has not.

The eldest is seven years older than my mother and was an elementary school teacher in two of the schools that I attended growing up. When she received her masters degree, I remember my mother asking out loud and to no one in particular just how educated one person thought they needed to be. Apparently, the implication was lost on me . . . Or perhaps inspiring . . . who knows? My teaching degrees are stuffed casually in desk drawers or maybe still in packing boxes. I visited my aunt a few times over the years where she retired to northern Michigan, but after my grandmother died ten years ago, the rift between her and my mother seemed to widen and everything seemed too heavy and complicated for me in my own grief over my grandmother and life in general. We lost contact. But I never forgot her sending me a card acknowledging her sadness that I had lost my grandmother. It had been her own mother, and I noted what a selfless and transcendent thought that was.

My youngest aunt is ten years younger than my mother and ten years older than me.  My mother used to babysit for her . . . and then she, in turn, babysat for me.  I remember her long blonde hair, her ineffable beauty, and an aloof dignity that made me feel privileged to step inside her circle, to be that entitled. I suppose that's what it might feel like to have a much older sister. I wonder if she ever felt that way about my mother. But I lost touch with her, too, before I ever thought to ask her . . . when she married and moved to Chicago. I've seen her just once over the last several decades in an event that seemed to bridge the age gap between us. We both brought our baby daughters, born the same year, to a family gathering, and noted the differences between them -- hers had the dark eyes and complexion of her Italian father and mine was a contrast with her white blonde hair and the  ice blue eyes of her own father's Scandinavian heritage. I talked to her a few more times over the years when I answered the phone at my grandmother's, but that was all. 

And then a summer story brought them both back to me full circle . . . and I stumbled into a sisterhood that I think, maybe, I can finally call my own . . . 

Stay with me here . . . this is where it gets good. The magic is in the details.

On Sunday, July 16 (if you know me well, you know that BIG things always happen to me in the middle of July) I rented a house on a lake near Traverse City. On Tuesday, I answered an ad for a vintage yellow Schwinn 5 speed bike. It had screaming brakes, but I bought it anyway, from an elderly couple who lived in the town of Lake Ann, and then, because I was already halfway there, I decided to go into the city. There was nothing there for me that I couldn't find anywhere else except for a specialty shop called Fustini's that sold oils and flavored vinegars to pair. I had a list from a friend and time to spend. So in running clothes and under a purple cap with dark sunglasses, I stepped into the shop on a Monday afternoon in July. And stopped just inside the door to pull up the list. While I was looking over it, someone asked if I needed help. I answered that I knew exactly what I needed from the list, and told it to them. As they gathered the items, I began to look around for myself. Almost right away, a woman stepped up beside me, said the cilantro and onion oil was exactly what she would have chosen and then offered to help me pair it with a vinegar. But first we should find an alternate oil for my friend because the one on her list was from the previous year's discontinued seasonal line. I chose the third one she offered in a miniature plastic cup with just the right amount of robust. And the saleswoman was also just the right amount of unobtrusive because as I began to shop for myself and she began to trail me, I was able to ditch my usual MO for shopping line . . . the one that goes: I'll let you know when I need help. I never had to say it. She was that good. She faded out and then came back in exactly when I needed her . . . 

Stay.

She handed me a cup of vinegar to pair with my cilantro and onion oil  -- mango -- that was just a little too sweet. I told her this, looking full into her face for the first time in the fifteen minutes I had been in the store. She continued talking, selling . . . but her voice had faded for me. I was fixated on her face . . . not sure why . . . something about her cheekbones . . . and the silver-blond of her otherwise youthful, long hair . . . beautiful . . . 

Before I could place it, she walked away again and I thought . . . she is tall . . . 

I was still standing there, perplexed when she came back . . . selling, oblivious . . . and handed me one more little plastic cup . . . 

I took it politely, mechanically . . . stared . . . tipped it back like a shot-glass . . . 

That face . . . looked like my grandmother's  . . . 

And the last puzzle piece . . . that ever present buzz of my working brain that never turns off (blessed, bothersome brain) . . .  telling me to look for the final piece of the puzzle . . .

LOOK . . . yes, she had a nametag . . . and it was the right name.

My brain connected to my heart connected to my soul connected to my mouth and I said these words . . . words that one could never even imagine having occasion to say . . . To tell someone:

She went quiet. Stared incomprehensively. I slowly and deliberately pulled off my dark sunglasses, said her sister's name, and waited for the moment. Her face went soft and her eyes brimmed with tears. There was an palpable energy shift in the room . . . in the store. Where voices and people had been swirling around us, now there was a perceptible quiet, a stillness. People were staring. Maybe they'd heard those strange words and were wondering. We just stood there staring in a what just happened where do we go from here kind of moment . . . Because, you know, after 33 years . . . Life goes on . . .  I'm on vacation and you need to get back to work. At least this is what I was thinking. And remember those abandonment issues that I dropped? Insecurities, uncertainties . . . Maybe this is a huge inconvenience for her at work . . . she's not even close to my mother. Why would she care that I'm standing here in front of her interrupting her work day on a random Tuesday afternoon in the middle of July?

 And then something tangible, something real happened. In a rush . . . a matter of minutes, we learned things about each other . . . found common ground that wouldn't have existed when we used to know each other. She knew that I was vacationing alone on a lake . . . that I was alone . . . had moved from Detroit to west Michigan in the fall. I knew that she had moved to Traverse City five years ago to live with her sister . . . we both were in different stages of the pain of broken relationships . . . That I was in education . . . that she knew a little bit of everything and worked two jobs . . . we longed to be closer to our adult daughters​ . . . I thought I might have seen the same shadow of loneliness in her eyes that often catches up with me just as the last light of the sun fades out.

We exchanged numbers and two nights later we met for dinner. I brought my youngest daughter who came to see me at the lake. She brought my oldest aunt . . . and threw in two uncles just for good measure. I had some trepidation about their estrangement from my mother and I shared it with them. They told me it didn't matter and I chose to believe them in that moment. I felt an easy energy, an unspoken familiarity that reached back over generations, felt the hope of a thousand stories that had yet to be shared. My oldest aunt sat across from me and talked about her teaching days with a sparkle in her eyes that I understood. My youngest daughter, beside me, had the same erudite lines on her forehead and the same aloof dignity as my aunt adjacent to me. But I felt both of their hearts. It felt right to be there, good to be in the middle of something that had gone on before me, would continue after me . . . but could have never happened without me. I had landed directly in the middle of a sisterhood that belonged to me . . . recognized that I had been living that love story of connected heart and soul DNA all my life. 

And the beat goes on.

Sometimes it takes a very long time to be brave in all the ways you need to be in order to heal. And sometimes the world lays a healing brave right at your feet for you  . . . with a message straight from Heaven: Look what I can do. Look what you can do.

In the summer of 1985, I was newly married and five months pregnant with my first daughter. I was traveling out west to Colorado for the first time with my husband and my father. The circumstances of that trip are another story for another time, but the actual trip itself, a twenty hour car ride through six states was a defining and ultimately paradoxical signpost towards my journey of brave. It was a journey that would take over three decades before I would reroute myself . . . right myself . . . into who I needed to be.

​Traveling in my father's car  that summer was predictably miserable in the leather seated August heat and his insistence that we drive straight through . . . which would have been okay if three of us were actually driving. But he decided from the word go, in his typical misogyny, that an eighteen year old pregnant girl couldn't be counted on as a driver. And then there were two. Except that after the first eight hours, he reclined in the front passenger seat, turned his head towards the window, and refused to move again for the next twelve hours. In two words, my father was a bully and an ass. By contrast, my husband was deferential . . . observant, but silent . . . intelligent and analytical, but shy . . . and in his defense, young and caught by surprise in the chaos of  extreme dysfunction I had learned to survive in. Looking back now, I can almost feel sorrier for him than me . . . but I was angry.

Caught between my new husband's passive disenfranchisement from the world and my father's toxic and aggressive narcissism . . . I fought back  . . . for the life of my child . . . and perhaps from the first vague realization that my semi-conscious choice of someone polar opposite from my father had only decreased my power base. If you weren't fighting for me, you were fighting against me . . . and mine.

It was two to one now. I fought them both.

I pleaded. I rationalized. I insisted on driving. I demanded the car be pulled over. I spewed invective. I talked incessantly to keep one or both of them awake. One was stoically silent behind heavy eyelids. The other fought back harder with sarcasm, returning my invective . . . shutting me down and shutting me out with his eyes stubbornly closed. Both seemed blithely unconcerned for my distress. All of this I remember. But mostly I remember the final minutes in bearing down on our destination of Colorado Springs, and the incidental passing of Castle Rock  - - like a moment just between time and space with an illusion of normalcy. . . or maybe a welcome distraction in my exhausted futility.

It was a strange volcanic formation perched high upon the top of a mountain and visible from the highway. I was fascinated, perhaps feeling like the danger had passed, compartmentalizing -- an expert skill for victims of prolonged trauma -- and curious about the world passing me. "Is that a natural formation?" I half-asked out loud. "Well, nobody PUT IT up there." My father shot back derisively, condescending, laughing at me. In the larger scheme of things, there were much worse things he had said to me . . . had done to me . . . In a normal situation, I might have laughed at myself, shaken it off. But I was stung; he made me feel small and stupid, dismissed and unimportant. Maybe I remember this mostly because it was a culmination of a lifetime of this dynamic. I needed it to stop. There was someone else now that I needed to fight for. I would stop the cycle of powerless-ness . . . someday.

​Life had the funniest way of coming full circle. If you wait for it, search for it, pray for it . . . need it badly enough to heal, you will find your power in the world in the most serendipitous ways.

​*      *      *

​In 2009, my oldest daughter lived in Chicago with her husband and baby daughter. Brittany and Jeremy had both graduated from Moody Bible Institute on LaSalle. Jeremy had begun working at a Starbucks in the city while he was in school for Christian Counseling, first as a barista, and then working himself up into management. By the time he finished school, the salary he was making for a 22 year old graduate was nearly enough to make him complacent in his passion for the hearts of people. Brittany wisely recognized the peril in the demise of his dream and pushed him to apply for Denver Seminary. It was a fight . . .  a partnership . . . and a win . . . that I had the deepest admiration for.  In the spring of 2010, they moved to an apartment in Littleton, Colorado. They bought a house in Englewood, and had a son. And then another daughter. And then in 2017, they bought a bigger house . . . In Castle Rock, Colorado.

​Oh, Life!

​That same summer of 2017, my husband and I separated after 32 years of marriage, and I went to Castle Rock to visit, just a few weeks after the break and the move. The strange rock for which the town was named was familiarly visible above the highway that wound into their new mountain community. It loomed menacingly beautiful and I couldn't articulate. The children were brilliant and busy and consuming . . . and there was a new blue-eyed baby to rock and comfort and to grow . . . a home to come together . . .

​and one that had fallen apart. 

​​Oh, the glory of finding a mountain that overlooked an ocean on an island that day! How often do so many metaphors present themselves all at once?. . . And finding the brave to walk out on the ledge of it all! . . . . It's a badass moment that just won't leave me alone.
Don't look down and don't look back . . .
the mantra that moved me to the edge . . . has the power to carry me for a lifetime . . . or for a season . . . 

​Even so, these pinnacles of hope . . . these moments of triumph . . . one fades into the next that we chase. I hold a generous handful in my heart and file them away in my soul for the hurting days. 

​Because these badass moments won't leave me alone. 

​Almost a year ago to the day from my island mountain,  there was an epic ski-fall down a different mountain that has carried me from one winter to the next of now. I wasn't alone on that mountain. It was the end of December and I imagined a very different new year than the one that stretched out before me. I didn't expect that just as the snow began to melt, that I would find myself, quite suddenly, alone. And by fall . . . very alone in a new apartment and with a new job across the state. The summer was a blur.

​It must have taken a monumental amount of effort to find a new job and move to a new apartment . . . to plan for all the details of dismantling a whole life and transplanting it somewhere else. But I don't remember much of it  . . . the hard parts, anyway . . the painful stretches of faith I know must have happened . . . the giant leap to bridge the gaps of sameness between the years of pain and disappointment . . . to make different decisions than the ones that never brought about any real change or healing . . . I don't remember much of it . . . I only remember that I never felt alone. 

​You can do this. You're not alone.
​Don't look down and don't look back.

​Most days this place where I've landed still feels bewildering . . . Sometimes, in moments and in longer stretches of darker days, the silence and shame of a broken life . . . the alone-ness of it . . . the fear of  just me . . . paralyzes.  And then I remember the details of the beautiful detours over the past year . . . the places I went alone . . . with perfect clarity . . . and . . . well, then I remember. It was in the places I went alone that I have felt the most connected . . .  have felt the healing and the mystical, magnetic energy that will always draw me back to my people. . . and back to my most authentic self. This is when I know I am living in the right decision . . . for the now . . . And I understand, truly, that I am not alone here . . . That God's plan for me has always been for human angels to stand in the gap . . . to send hope from the shadows . . . to wait on the shores . . . to drive the getaway car . . . 

​From winter to winter in this journey I have been sheltered in love. And this is what I remember the most . . . 

​The in between of places and people . . . of rolling miles over highways and skies and seasons with time for deep introspection . . . Feeling the snow move beneath my feet . . . and moving my feet over the warming earth until my soul was cleansed and my body produced a high that no drug can match. The solitude of a paddleboard gliding over diamond sunlight paths on sleepy country lakes . . . and being carried dangerously alone out over the waves to a mighty blue ocean . . . Standing high on borrowed balconies over electric cities and eclectic towns in the solitude of twilit nights . . .  and sun-stretched in the cool of borrowed backyard pools . . . losing myself in silence and drowsy joy. . .

​Standing in the arch of rainbows in the day and watching the stars fall down around me at night . . . Staring into a the flames of a dozen backyard, midnight fires  . . . sipping Merlot and watching the sun disappear into the moon . . . hanging my most fervent prayers on the Eastern star of Sirius while the world slept and a crystal lake lapped at my feet . . . close encounters with mythic and whimsical creatures . . . dolphins and whales, turtles big and small, and fantasmically colored fish . . .  drawn from the depths just for me . . .  a single deer that stood rooted outside my back door watching me in the dark fog of an autumn morning . . . the wonder of soaring eagles crossing my sky path exactly when I needed to feel their freedom . . . and the stark red of cardinals against white falling snow exactly when I need to see colors.  

​And this  

. . . On the loneliest afternoons . . . and darkest just before dawn mornings . . . lifting my hands and listening for the small, still, mighty voice that tells me:

It is in these highest, loneliest places, that you are never alone. It is in these broken places of prayer and praise and gratitude . . . and in the intercession of others . . . that my plans will come together for you. It is on the jagged edges of fear and uncertainty and anxiety when you come to me that I will lift you up.

In all of this . . . in all of my loneliest places . . .  someone watched for . . .  waited for . . . prayed for me. 

​Mercifully, these are the moments I remember the most. To be sure, there has been devastating pain . . . anguished broken-ness.  But I don't remember falling . . . so much a being caught . . . in this earth-splitting, soul-shattering year . . . 

​And that at the end of it, I summoned the courage to walk out on the edge of it . . . alone . . . because there are some places in life that we can only go by ourselves. True badass is, of its very nature, all by yourself.

​ In the dawning hours of this new year, 3500 feet above the ocean on a mystical island in the middle of the Pacific, I hiked out three miles on a mother-tough trail with my brothers. There was sticky, sucking mud and twisty tree roots, narrow paths taunted by steep-drop ledges, and tunnels of foliage so thick that they blocked out the light. We took turns catching our breath and taking the lead in variations . . . three beside, two beside and one ahead . . . one behind . . . climbing, crawling . . . always playing catch up, but always together. At the end, we blinked into the blue wonder . . . looked up, down, and all around . . . then looked to our left and beheld a rebel mountain ridge path that stretched forward on its own about fifty yards . . .  narrow and precarious and shaped by a thousand years of strong winds that might blow us over the edge. And I had to do it. I had to go with it. Some crazy metaphorical, storytelling streak of insanity that I might have inherited compelled me forward.

​You can't do that. 
​Yes, I can. And you're going to take pictures.
​Don't look down and don't look back.

​And I went out alone. Step by careful step, crawling, grasping, eyes closed, heart racing, too late to turn back . . . Hands raised to Heaven and trusting because it was just me and Him.

 ​

​
I've been mourning (at least the temporary) loss of a dream . . . of a place for myself in the world. And in that holy, sacred space of mourning -- just a simple sunrise prayer corner  where I lift my hands and my heart to God -- I have wondered in the waiting. So He has taught me to see . . . to come alive . . . in the sacred spaces of the seemingly ordinary . . .

A rocking chair at 3am. . . A simple farmhouse quietly disguised among untold riches . . . An airplane window seat over a St. Louis sunset . . . 

​






​A meandering river with time to remember . . .

And the finest line between holy daring and lunatic crazy  . . . 

​That holy place just between dawn and daybreak . . . in thankful November . . . 



​             
​                           And a warm place to grow . . .

The sweetest dream that I've ever held in my heart is to have a home. Not just as a place to live . . . but as an anchor for my soul. It would come complete with memories, history, comforting familiarity . . . even long after the people were gone . . . and I would be the benevolent gatekeeper for new people. No matter how far away I went, it would be there waiting for me -- and everyone I loved -- with flaming sunsets and narrowed roads leading to it . . . with secure walls and painted doors to close behind us when the weight of the world became too heavy. 

​Isn't this the real American dream . . . the human dream . . . behind the square footage and the status address? Beyond the gated communities and the homeowner's associations? We all want a safe place to belong forever . . . It's such a completely normal thing, I think.

​But maybe I want it just a little bit more than the average person because it's been so particularly elusive for me . . .

​There's a scene in the iconic movie Forrest Gump that is a painful reminder that not all of us are born into that God breathed place of insulated love and protection. Forrest and his childhood friend are strolling through the congenial, southern countryside adjoining his own regal antebellum home when they come upon a sorry shack on the other side of an old cornfield. She seems to catch her breath for a moment before regaining her composure, and then in a fit of rage-filled resolve, she begins to hurl rocks at the house where she grew up until she falls to the ground emotionally and physically expended, at which point Forrest delivers the classic line, "I guess sometimes there just aren't enough rocks." 

​The truth is that some of us are haunted by houses rather than comforted . . . and the desire for a safe place becomes the most important thing  . . . For me, that desire . . . that dream bordering on a obsession . . . has been deferred by equally normal circumstances over the years . . . military life for ten years where houses were provided . . . followed by a church parsonage of sorts . . . and then some plain old poor financial decisions have delayed my dream of owning my own home . . . for over thirty years. 

​I've feel like I've been throwing rocks for a lifetime. To have my own home was a dream borne in childhood . . . one of hope and better things.

I've imagined it a thousand times . . . a house built over the slant of a hill . . . and tall windows with a view of a winter expanse (there is nothing like winter to call me home). There is soup on the stove and something baking in the oven. And as I move back and forth between the kitchen and my office to write, I can see my children playing with my grandchildren . . . hear their laughter as they sled down that hill. There is a blazing fire in a family room behind me to warm them when they come inside. It's not a huge house . . . but there's enough room to grow . . . and a safe place for everyone.

In my  profound disappointment in the waiting, the sweetness of my dream has turned somewhat toxic and misguided, and compounded by my desire to have provided something different for my children and my grandchildren . . . a "festering sore of resentment' for anyone or anything that gets in the way of this dream deferred (Hughes, 1951). The truth, I know, is that kind of  generational inheritance of a home is a rare thing, even for Americans anymore . . . childhood homes are sold . . .  grown children are moving farther away and are increasingly choosing something different . . . sometimes people  can't . . . or simply don't go home again . . . and must take the best parts of where they have been with them. In all this, there is a simple truth . . . 

​It's not about the walls and the roof or where we live that makes us who we are  . . . it's about what we make the place that we live . . . and more importantly, it's about the people . . . about the safe relationships we build . . . about the love and the memories we make along the way no matter where we lay our heads . . . 

​It's been a tumultuously painful and alternately joyful year for me . . . the best kind for growing. 

​My year began in a house on a mountain with the family I built. My oldest daughter, very pregnant with her third child in Denver, couldn't travel for the holidays, so my brother rented a rambling lodge in the Colorado Rockies, and we brought Christmas there from Michigan . . . from Chicago . . . and all of that safe love of family -- my husband and our two daughters, their husbands, my grandchildren, my brother . . . came together under one roof to celebrate the ultimate sacrifice of the world . . . the ultimate joy. I was home . . . high on that mountain all the way across the country.

​That same brother lives in a condo in a trendy Chicago neighborhood and he travels a lot for work . . . but several times over the course of the year, he and his partner have made time for me. Every other month or so I make the trip into the city and they celebrate my very presence. They invite all their friends through formal invitation: Jayson's sister is in town . . . We cook in the kitchen and linger over the island and wine into the midnight hours, go to breakfast the next morning, run the Lakefront Trail along Lake Michigan. Recently, they were out of town when I was attending a writing conference downtown, but they gave me a key, and I felt safe in their guestroom . . . but not really like a guest at all. 

​One of my dearest friends is between homes, having a condo renovated in west Michigan and alternately staying in a camper on a lake in the little farming community where she grew up. Several times over this summer, she has honored me with an invitation into the rustic beauty of her charming little -- and alternately expansive -- world. We've paddle boarded a misty lake, run back country roads, traversed ancient cemeteries, rowed a boat at twilight, and watched the stars falling down around us by the light of a fire. I can close my eyes right now and be there. It feels like home under that open dome of her sky, and in the very shadow of that little camper that sits between an overgrown garden and sun-spattered water.

​Most recently, my daughter asked me to come to Colorado again . . . this time to help settle her -- my --  growing family into a new house. In their lovely new tri-level home, they gave me a slant-ceilinged suite at the top of the stairs. A desk near a window looked out over the neighborhood into the mountains. As I wrote at that desk and gazed over the shadowy peaks, I listened to the sounds of the house . . . the children playing and the baby waking from her nap . . . the dog barking in the backyard and the clicking of my keyboard . . . My daughter between in the kitchen . . . We were a family and I was home. 

​There are a half dozen more people . . . friends I can think of who would not and do not hesitate to welcome me into their homes. I have open invitations, codes to garages, and access to pools, guest rooms, and breakfast tables. These relationships -- not so much the spaces -- have built us over the years. Even so, I'm looking forward to sharing my own space . . . giving back. Until then, I am learning to be at home in the world . . . when I am running through the woods . . . along a lake . . . the trees are mine . . . the water is mine . . . God put the clouds, the setting sun, and the rising moon out there just for me. ​

​When I think of my brother and me in that little house that broke us when we were children . . . We couldn't save ourselves, or each other then . . . but we're doing it now . . . Life doesn't begin and end with fulfilled or crushed dreams . . . it's the journey in getting there . . . or maybe the letting go . . . that will either break us or build us . . . or both. 

​This past year has taught me that until I get to where I'm going . . . wherever I go . . . wherever I am, I am home.

For over ten years now, two or three evenings a week -- sometimes more, sometimes less -- I've had a glass of wine or two. Once a month, if it's been one of those days, I might exchange the wine for vodka with a splash of cranberry and a pretty green lime wedge. I call it a "vodka kind of night" and usually refill my glass . . . once . . . or twice if it's not a work night. Okay, sometimes it is. And sometimes it's more than once a month.

You know the kind of day . . . You splash coffee on the perfect shirt as you're running out the door late. You trip over the dog who has thrown up on the rug . . . and you step in it. Your highway entrance is closed, your technology fails during THE presentation, and you find out your debit card has been compromised . . . but not before you're standing at the grocery check-out with a full cart and a gum-popping cashier with a nose ring announces "declined" without an ounce of adolescent compassion for your grown-up dilemmas. 

​Right about now, if you're still reading, you can probably relate on some level. And based on the title of this blog, you might be rolling your eyes in mock terror of the lecture that is sure to come. I promise I'm not going in that direction. I'm not the alcohol police. Hell, I'll even sit and share a bottle of wine with you and listen to your story if we're still friends after this. Or we can just laugh at the absurdities of life, because . . .  let's be honest . . . the scenarios above are just a day in the life. I didn't even touch on the real heartache, the tragedy, the true broken-ness . . . the things we  try to hide that keep us standing in the wine aisle every other night perusing and pretending it's the quirky labels that we love . . . the things that can drive us to the bottom of that rose colored bottle. So I'm also going to be painfully honest with you about my own story . . .

I've had countless days that fit that description . . . and none of that is why I drink.

A little over a decade ago . . . I didn't drink at all. It wasn't that I had any strong convictions against it. As a matter of fact, I interpret the Bible, which is my guidebook for life, to offer up wine as a balm for the spirit . . . to lighten the heart when it's heavy (Ps.104:14-15). But all those years ago, alcohol wasn't even on my radar. I was chasing babies, chasing a career, chasing an unmerciful clock. I was working and raising children, putting them through private schools even as I was still cracking my own textbooks and cranking out theses into the midnight hours. I was exhausted, and sleep was my only respite, my only vice. I had no time, nor the inclination or money to drink at the end of a day. And I certainly had no time for sorrow. 

​So when all of a sudden I felt the crush of a life betrayal so deeply that, when the fortress I had built around that single trust broke, the colossal tide of emotion that swept over me was frightening . . . especially frightening because I did something I rarely ever do in my pragmatic existence.

I cried.

In the middle of one summer, I went off the clock, and I cried . . . like all the demons of Hell had been loosed on my soul. Under a July moon, something  just surged up into my throat out of my belly and I began to howl like a wounded animal.  It was like someone else had taken over my body and my soul and it was beyond my control. My husband tried to stop it. He frantically tried to hush me by waving his arms and beseeching me: the neighbors would hear . . . I would scare our daughters . . . I was scaring HIM. But it kept coming over me. That gut-wrenching wail followed me driving to the grocery store . . . took me over in hotel rooms and church parking lots. I cried in the shower and I wept over dinner in the kitchen. One evening, as I lay in bed, my body began to tremble again with that haunted, moaning wail, and my youngest daughter heard. She came to me and held me until I could finally manage to stifle that strange, foreign emotion . . . that ululating, keening wail that I could not recognize as grief. But I remember thinking that I. Must. Stop. This. I can't do this to my child, my daughter. She was a compassionate young adult in college, but that reversal of roles just felt wrong and imposing to me. That was the last time I cried that summer.

​And then I began to drink.

​A lot at first, admittedly. It was summer break and the days were long. I could stave of the sadness by pretending to be busy in the garden, running, cleaning . . . but every night as the sun began to set and the first shadows were cast, a shadow cast over my spirit, too . . . and I poured myself into a sweet melancholy. The number of days and the amount tapered off, but it had become routine. I mostly settled into a rich, burgundy Merlot or a bubbly amber Riesling. It was the prettiest lie I could find to hide my grown-up problems.

​I've been drinking for over ten years now, and I will tell you I'm not an alcoholic. I don't drink before 5:00pm. I don't get drunk. I've never lost a job. Indeed, I've earned a few more degrees and a few more promotions over these years. I've never driven under the influence of alcohol. Too many glasses of wine have never driven me to bad decisions or regrets or words I can't take back. I mostly drink alone. I will tell you . . . I would have told you . . . up until three weeks ago . . . that alcohol is not a problem for me. I would have told you there is a window of time in the evenings when the business of the day . . . the busyness . . . is done. Dinner is over and it's too early for bed . . . and a glass or two of wine "takes the edge off." I can feel it coming and I want to catch it before it can surface . . . that edge of hurt or sorrow or loneliness . . . an often undefined sadness that wells up in the quiet of the night. Something compels me to catch it and subdue it before it overtakes me. And for all this I  have justified just one more glass of wine . . . 

​But truth has a way of catching up with you. It won't leave you alone. And there is truth in pain that you can't ignore. Conversely, alcohol numbs and it paralyzes. When truth is saying "move away from the pain" or "transcend it to something better or even beautiful" or "find your purpose in this pain" alcohol is saying "No worries . . . I've got this. I can stop the pain. Don't move" or "If today's a little rough for you, I'll be here when you get home." Truth is steadfast, though . . . always waiting in the haze . . . ready to do battle . . . 

​July, historically, is always unpredictable for me . . . full of ironies and paradoxes . . . rolling hills of angst and alternate, sudden joy. This summer has been no exception. Pain came calling again, and I met it with my typical stoicism and a bottle of Merlot at sunset. And then, at the beginning of August, I was smack in the middle of deep, beseeching prayer -- it was well before 5:00pm -- on my knees with hands raised to Heaven when God and pain said, "Remember this?" And I began to cry again . . . over ten years later. . . like I'd picked up right where I left off. Deep, shuddering sobs bubbled from beneath my heart that was breaking all over again . . . had never really stopped breaking . . . I had just stopped feeling it. A few days later it happened again during prayer. And I let it. There was no one around to stop me . . . no one around to care or scare. I let it go. I wailed like  a banshee. And it began to feel different . . . like little pieces of tar black sadness were breaking loose from my soul and rising to the surface. It felt good and cleansing. It felt like healing.

Little by little this summer, I've been healing, giving my pain up to God instead of shutting it down, giving myself up to the hard work and courage of accepting my sorrows instead of trying to drown them.  This means looking with clear eyes at some sad realities. It means a brutally honest backtrack of wrong turns and dead ends. It means embracing rock-bottom, personal responsibility, and renewed faith as a starting point for change. 

​Taking the edge off of an honest work-hard week on a Friday night with a friend or two is one thing. . . It might even qualify as a healthy decision, along with sleeping in on Saturday, lingering over coffee, and then lacing up your running shoes. Sitting in the dark alone, clutching a wine glass of regret three nights a week and ticking off the minutes until bedtime is something altogether different.

And I wonder now what would have happened if I had felt every bit of it then . . . what I might  have done with the sadness and the sorrow . . .  Isn't the reason for pain to let you know there's something wrong? And what if taking off the edge too many time equated to losing my edge . . . sacrificing parts of myself and who I might have been  . . . could still be? What if all those suppressed tears . . . all those missed opportunities to cry out to God . . . . to seek His will in my pain . . . cost me some quicker answers . . . some firm convictions  that might have sliced through my fears and uncertainties . . . through the inertia that would have propelled me forward?

​And here is some beauty for a quick answer . . . that God promises to give us beauty for ashes (Isaiah 61:3), that He can restore lost years (Joel 2:25) . . . and that when we place our trust in Him, He can leave us with "immeasurably more than we could ever ask or imagine (Ephesians 3:20).

​I've cried a lot over these last few weeks, but between tears I've experienced more joy and beauty than I could have ever imagined in the place that I'm in. So I'm hanging on to these promises for a summer that's not yet over. I'm not vowing to put down my glass . . . but I'll put it firmly in its place behind my tears and my raised hands . . . and look for answers somewhere else. And I won't be drinking alone anymore . . . I'll raise my glass to another only to celebrate the joy and yes, soften the sorrow . . . both gifts from God.