It’s July, and Saint Joan of Arc is a stucco-clad oven.

Grandma has made us get up early for 8 o’clock mass. It’s cooler in the early morning, she says. But a hot, humid Saturday had baked the old Spanish Mission-style building beneath hours of unrelenting sun. The church had held onto the stifling heat overnight.

I jump up to help Gramps, who is surely already sweating in his emerald green usher’s coat, open the small vents at the bottom of each stained-glass window. Tug a little chain, gently tilt open the vent, attach the chain to a hook. The tall windows depict the Stations of the Cross. As I open each, I recite the stations I’ve learned in catechism:

Jesus is condemned to death.

Jesus takes up his cross.

Jesus falls for the first time.

I wonder why ours is a religion that celebrates anguish.

Life-sized statuary flanks the altar. On the right, Saint Joan of Arc, clad in armor, stands defiantly, her helm in one hand and a flagpole in the other, where a white and gold fleur-de-lis banner waves in a nonexistent breeze. I know Saint Joan was put to death. Images of her being burned at the stake decorate the parish hall and school.

On the left, a gold lamp shines its beatific light down on a portrait of the Virgin Mary holding the infant Jesus, who almost appears to be standing on her lap. The pair stare solemnly out at the congregation from their gilded throne, each head surrounded by a halo. The infant Jesus raises his hand in a gesture resembling a peace sign. But above the altar, not far from that peaceful scene, hangs an enormous cross where Jesus, no longer an infant, hangs. The crown of thorns piercing his head, the spikes puncturing his hands and feet, and the gaping wound in his side all ooze blood.

It seems cruel, I think, to have Mary and baby Jesus in sight of this horrific tableau.

After helping with the windows, I slip back into the pew next to Mom and Grandma. I ask to see the bulletin Grandma is clutching. I don’t want to read it; I already know it’s going to say: pray for So-n-so, give money to the building fund, get the best meats at Pernat’s, bury your dead with Pagenkopf Funeral Home. So I pretend to read it for a moment, then use it to gently fan myself. Mom smiles and gestures that I should send a little breeze her way, and so I do. We giggle when her bangs fly up with each flick of the bulletin, waving like a floppy brown flag in a gentle breeze.

Grandma shoots us a glare. Even though the mass hasn’t begun, we’re supposed to observe silence. People pray before mass, don’t they?

Enter the sanctuary. Greet the ushers. Receive a bulletin. Choose a pew. Genuflect. Sit. Lower the kneeler. Kneel. Make the sign of the cross. Pray. Make the sign of the cross again. Sit quietly while everyone else prays.

Do not rest your butt on the pew while kneeling. This is not proper.

I watch Gramps walk up the side aisle toward the sacristy. Past the Madonna-and-Child. Past the lectern, where Gramps often reads from the Bible in his commanding voice. Past the altar. Into the little room where the priest and altar boys are gathering to don their vestments and prepare for the eucharist. Out the back door to the place that excited me so much when I was very small—the bell.

At every mass, Gramps rings the bell. Twelve chimes for the 12 apostles, he says. Gramps and I both love the bell. It’s second only to the carillon at the Lutheran church in Grandma and Gramps’s neighborhood. That set of bells actually plays songs that ring out across the landscape at 5 o’clock every evening, many of which Gramps loves and hums along to.

Just as I am, without one plea
But that thy blood was shed for me

These songs about blood and dying and sacrifice intensify during Lent. Then, we’ll sing things like, “O sacred head surrounded / By crown of piercing thorns.”

Which is fun for exactly nobody.

When I was smaller, I would pretend to be asleep on Grandma’s nubby salmon pink couch when it was time to leave for mass. If I breathed heavily enough and looked precious enough, Mom might tell Grandma I was so sound asleep that she didn’t want to wake me. She would stay with me, she’d say, and everyone else could go on without her. Then, after everyone was gone, Mom and I would celebrate not having to go to church.

We were subversive like that.

And we got away with it exactly twice before Grandma caught on.

My uncle Richard’s family often comes to visit during the summers. Because they live a couple of hours away in Manitowoc, where my uncle is stationed in the Coast Guard, when they come, they spend the weekend and go to church with us.

Having my cousin Richie in church with me spells trouble. Because there’s no one in the world who can make me laugh more than Richie.

They’ve taken separate cars, of course, but now Uncle Richard, Auntie Linda, and my cousins Richie and Joey, arrive and scooch into the pew beside us. I see Grandma lift her chin with pride—her family now occupies one whole pew.

And Richie is seated beside me.

The little bell beside the sacristy rings and the organ begins to play. We’re not supposed to look back at the organist, but I do. A few weeks ago, Gramps had taken me into the choir loft to meet him. Louis Sticks was a large man with a large laugh and kind, sad eyes. He let me have a seat at the organ—intimidating with its vast span of pedals, two manuals, and multitudes of stops—and invited me to play.

I played the first song that popped into my head: The Entertainer.

Could I play another, Louis asked?

Yes, I could! I played what every kid with access to a piano knows how to play: Heart and Soul. Just the bumpa-dee-dee part. And Louis jumped in with the melody. I was enthralled.

And embarrassed. Why hadn’t I thought of better songs to play? Who plays The Entertainer and Heart and Soul in church?

Heathens, that’s who.

A couple of decades later, I would be sneaking instrumental versions of songs like Erin Shores by The Corrs and God Help the Outcasts from The Hunchback of Notre Dame into my communion interludes as Saint Joan of Arc’s primary organist.

I was subversive like that.

But now, I had to endure sitting beside my cousin, whose sole objective would be to make me laugh. We have Father Konkel presiding today, and as he drones through his soporific homily, Richie imitates his subtle gestures, moving his lips to make it look like he’s the one doing the talking.

It sends me into a fit of giggles I try to hide with my sleeve. Richie snickers and fidgets beside me. And somehow, mass gets just a little less dull. But afterward, the man seated behind us takes us both by the shoulders, painfully grasping the backs of our necks, and lead us into the sacristy to tell Father Konkel of our misdeeds.

Father listens, nods solemnly, and then, when the man who ushered us up to the sacristy is gone, he smiles, pats us, gives a wink, and sends us on our way, telling us to be sure to pay more attention next time.

Years pass. At 15, I become a Saint Joan of Arc organist. Later, I will lead the music ministry for a time. But then, after I serve as organist for 17 years, the pastor will decide the church needs someone with a music degree, a musician whose education is more advanced than someone like me who plays by ear and learned to read music by way of middle school band, EZ-Play songbooks, and cardboard cheaters placed over the keys.

At 15, we also go to visit my cousins, and this time my uncle is stationed in Montauk, on Long Island. Grandma insists we go to mass, but my uncle’s side of the family isn’t really into it and opts to stay home. (“Heathens!” Grandma proclaims.) Scott is 11, and Dustin is five, so they get to stay home, too. But Mom and me? We have to go.

My uncle lives in East Hampton, so we go to the nearest church, Most Holy Trinity. And once again, it’s hot. And once again, the windows don’t open much. So we sit in the back, closest to the open doors where there’s a slight breeze.

By this time, I’m an organist. I have a better sense of the order of worship and how a mass flows together. So I’m not even looking at the missalette when the responsorial psalm begins. It’s a call-and-response—the lector reads the verse, and the parish responds with a brief repeated line. Sometimes the verses are sung by a cantor, but in this case, we’re saying the response together in a cheerless monotone:

“If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.”

But we’re also in New England, surrounded by New Englanders. So the psalm response sounds more like:

“If tahday ya heah his voice, hahden naht ya hahts.”

And it is so ridiculous, so other to our Midwestern ears that Mom and I burst into peals of laughter. We attempt to silence it, but the laughter continues to bubble out. People turn to glare. Hunched, hands covering our embarrassed and still-laughing faces, we tumble out of the dim church and into the light of a bright July day. Grandma, all five-foot-two of her, comes stomping out after us, and her glare is even more severe than the one the Most Holy Trinity parishioners had given us.

“Youse two!” she bellows, in fluent Wisconsinese. “Such foolishness! You’d think you’ve never been in a church before.”

But Mom and I are still laughing. We turn to each other in unison and say, “If tahday ya heah His voice, hahden naht ya hahts!” And then we’re gone, doubled over with laughter.

Many years later, as a young mom myself, locked in a relationship with a troubled man, I will have an awakening. I will realize that my sole reason for embracing religion and Catholicism at all is that it was handed to me: Here, this is what we do. This is what you will believe.

Except that I no longer believed it. I had read the Children’s Bible given to me at my First Communion, and I had played the hymns, and I dutifully responded to the responsorial psalms, eventually learning not to smirk at “If today you hear his voice…” But although the nostalgia, the pageantry, the ritual belonged to me—became part of me—the faith did not. It had never been mine to begin with.

But I have much that I will keep. The memory of opening the vents on those stained glass windows, the statuary, the sacristy that felt like a forbidden place where only the holiest should go, the bell, the organ, the choir, the hymns.

Especially the organ, choir, and hymns.

And I will always be the subversive laughing in church.

The word “anecdote” comes from a Greek word, anekdota, which means “unpublished things.”

Back in the day—way back in 1998—I founded an online writing workshop community called Coffeehouse for Writers. (If you want a laugh, you can still see the site here. But for the love of the gods, don’t click anything. The website’s owner hasn’t touched it in a very long time and it’s been overrun by casino bots.) And when I worked with new writers, I always found myself saying, “What you wrote here is an anecdote, not a story. Stories have more than just a beginning, middle, and end; they have a character arc.”

Then I’d remind them that they wanted to get published, and anekdota literally means “unpublished things.”

But now, here I’ve gone and published an anecdote this week. (What can I say? I’m a rebel like that.) It has no character arc, no redemption, no real plot development. Here it is:

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Not every story needs to become an essay. Sometimes, a silly little tale is just that—a small moment that lives in my head rent-free. I call them “Anecdotes,” because that’s exactly what they are.

It’s high summer. I’m about to enter seventh grade, and my family has temporarily moved into a trailer court, a small clump of aging manufactured homes with the sort of bougie name most such communities have: Breezy Knoll.

I’ll Go First is supported by readers and writers who love to search for meaning in the dusty attics of their personal stories. Join us!

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On our last visit to Grandma’s, we went to Woolworth’s, where Grandma bought Scott and me latch-hook rug kits. Scott’s is an owl, and he’s obsessed with the process, sitting in front of the TV hooking away while we gather to watch Happy Days on the dirty shag carpeting.

The living room is Mom and Dad’s bedroom by night because, correctly believing a bookish preteen girl needs her privacy, Mom has assigned me the tiny primary bedroom. When we moved in, mushrooms were growing out of the carpet. The kitchen was filled with cockroaches, prompting my terrified and grossed-out mother to buy a dozen Roach Motels—“Roaches check in, but they don’t check out!”

On the day in question—probably day 36 of our confinement at Breezy Knoll—the sun is shining, and the sky is brilliant blue, dotted with fluffy white cumulus clouds rolling slowly across it. Everyone at Breezy Knoll is outside. They’re washing cars, watching kids play in plastic kiddie pools, mowing their quilt-scrap-sized lawns, grilling hot dogs.

Dad is heading uptown, probably to hang out with his friends at the bar.

And Scott has lost the hook for his latch-hook rug.

As Dad climbs into his pale blue International Harvester Scout—the one we have to jump-start at the solenoid with a screwdriver whenever it rains—Scott comes sailing out of the house, flailing his arms wildly.

“Daddy, are you going into town?” he cries.

“Yep,” Dad replies, climbing into the Scout. He’s trying to get away before Scott insists on going with him.

But Scott doesn’t want to leave the house today; he’s too engrossed with his latch-hook rug. So, instead of begging to go along—in front of the neighbors, God, and everybody—my little brother bawls:

“Bring me back a hooker!”

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John and I have just left the Spiritual Living Center in downtown Tacoma, a quaint, musty Craftsman building that hosts Film Club’s monthly meetings. In the dim sanctuary, we’d settled into old wooden pews to watch Harold and Maude with a delightful group of film buffs, then gathered for a rousing discussion.

Now John and I will debrief as we head out in his RAV4. It’s what we do. We talk about the film, and we talk lovingly about the Film Club members.

We don’t talk shit. Everything comes from a place of curiosity and affection. These are our people, even though a few of them know more about cinema than curious newbies like us ever will.

“Sandy was rocking the fuchsia hair tonight!” I say.

John utters his signature chuckle, a soft “heh heh heh” that conveys genuine amusement. “It’s a good one on her,” he says. “Better than that blue-green.”

“Teal, my love,” I say with a wink in my voice. “Precision matters.”

“I stand corrected! Fuchsia is better than teal. Maybe a better choice for someone pushing 90., too”

I laugh. “Ageism! Let’s not gatekeep teal.”

He gives a sage nod. “Yes, indeed. I stand corrected. Again.”

John reaches for my hand. He’s driving, and although it makes me uneasy when he has just one hand on the wheel in the city—less because I’m naturally nervous and more because John’s driving is suspect—I crave his warm steadiness. There’s a transfer happening here: his calm, easygoing energy traded for my ADHD-fueled excitement.

We’re new at this—less than a year into a relationship that will transform both our lives. And that newness fills the cabin of John’s car as we talk.

“The thing about that movie,” John says, “is how it just works.”

I agree. In the movie, a twentysomething man and a woman in her late seventies find one another and forge an intimate, even sexual, bond. And it never gets weird. In fact, it’s whimsical, subversive, tender.

“I’m not sure why it works, though,” John continues. His world is full of questions. It’s one of our strongest connectors—we are both endlessly fascinated by the world, by living.

I give John’s hand a squeeze. We’re both quiet for a moment. Then John purses his lips.

“That boy,” he says. “The funerals, the whole suicide thing…”

Yes. Harold is obsessed with death. He’s a rich kid who attends strangers’ funerals and drives a hearse. He stages fake suicides—hanging, immolation, you name it—for his socialite mother, who responds with weary, eye-rolling indifference.

“It’s like, ‘I’m Harold! Death is my hobby,’” I say. “But Maude—”

John chuckles again. “What a woman!” he declares.

At almost 80, Maude is a quirky force of nature—an impulsive, chaotic anarchist who steals cars, although she considers it “borrowing,” and crashes funerals for fun. She poses nude for sculptors and even frees a tree from a sidewalk so it can go live happily in a forest.

“It’s pretty trite, but… she really does live every day like it’s her last,” I say.

“You never know when it might be,” John says.

I feel myself flinch—not outwardly, but internally. There are things I don’t say. Can’t say. When Ra, my daughter, described John as “elderly,” I’d felt the same flinch and reacted with indignation.

“He’s not elderly,” I’d insisted. “Sixty-eight isn’t old! Your great-grandma was 94 when she died.”

But I wasn’t stupid. I could do the math.

John was vital, full of life, a seeker who roamed the world, staying impossibly busy with yoga, tai chi, mornings at the Plum Street YMCA, evenings at a favorite restaurant. He knew everyone, and everyone loved him.

But before we connected, I saw a man, surrounded by people, who seemed utterly alone.

“I think Harold had given up on living,” I say. “Until Maude came along.”

“I do believe you’re right,” John says, with put-on formality.

I thought of something John had told me not long ago. He’d fixed me with a deep, concentrated gaze, all of his energy focused on my eyes as he said, with gravity, “You saved my life.”

I was stunned. I asked him how. How had I saved him? He had survived childhood trauma, Vietnam, the invasion of Panama, PTSD. He did not seem like a man who needed saving.

“Some things,” John had said, “are mine to hold.”

We’ve left downtown Tacoma now, and we’re climbing a hill through a residential neighborhood. Below, I see I-5 shimmering with headlights, taillights, brake lights—a moving mechanical sea. In the darkness, Puget Sound itself has become invisible, but the lights on the Tacoma Harbor cranes blink steadily, a reminder that industry is merely sleeping.

John releases my hand to shake out his own, then rests it on my leg. Its presence feels natural, as though he has always belonged with me, and yet somehow we’d been separated until just this year, when we met, fell in love, and John looked at me with wonder and said, “I’ve known you all my life!”

How strange to feel that you’ve known someone forever.

From the moment we met, we knew just how to be with one another. It was as though we had somehow existed for each other long before we met, and the eighteen years and thousands of miles separating us were nothing more than a cosmic clerical error.

Always.

I could overlook the arithmetic because it had nothing to do with us.

Right?

John had told me a story about his uncle Isaiah, who’d solemnly informed him of a conversation he’d had with God about his lifespan: “I have requested 110.”

I told John he would have to live to 111, just to beat his uncle’s record. We laughed because it was funny, but I believed it because I had to.

I look around, trying to determine where John is taking us. His navigation isn’t exactly aimless, but I can tell he has no real clue where he is. I also know he’s a man on a mission.

He’s looking for a place to park.

John responds aloud to my thought. “I want a spot overlooking the city so we have a view while I maul on you.”

I grin at the playfulness in his voice. To be “mauled” by John is to be loved intuitively, intimately, physically, breathlessly. It’s a ridiculous, beautiful word for a ridiculous, beautiful connection.

And so we’re a couple of teenagers looking for a place to park where the cops aren’t likely to cite us for indecency.

We’ve tried the parking lot next to Duke’s Seafood, right on the Sound. The idea of being caught thrilled us, but when our temporarily teenage brains slipped back into adult reality, we remembered that being caught had consequences.

What would Maude do?

She would laugh, dance, play music, sing, steal a car or two. She would crash a funeral to remind herself that life is fleeting and meant to be lived fully, robustly, honestly. She would say that life begins when you stop worrying about how you’re perceived and start being you.

And that safe feeling that shows up quietly, almost secretly, when you no longer have to put on a face is not just love. It’s life. It’s a paradox—both peaceful and challenging. Because even when you’re free to be exactly who you are, you still can’t voice the things you hide from yourself.

John puts the RAV4 in park. The city glimmers below us. He turns to me, takes my face in his hands, and kisses me. When the sensations are just right, we murmur to one another:

“Mm-hmm…”

Yes. Yes, this.

This feeling is life.

And I know, even then, in the smallest, most obscure corner of my mind, that one of us will someday have to live without the other.

I know it the way I know the Sound below us is dark and vast and leads to places no one has ever gone. I know it the way Maude knows she will bring her life to a conclusion on her own terms by taking an overdose of sleeping pills on her eightieth birthday.

In the final scene of Harold and Maude, Harold drives his hearse off a cliff. But he walks away, his obsession with death sailing over the cliff with the hearse.

Tonight, John is warm beneath my hands. And when we’ve finished, he turns to me. His eyes meet mine in the dimness and lock on, their corners crinkled, emanating warmth and profound love.

“Hi,” he says.

Has someone ever pulled you back into your own life just by loving you? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

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In my story this week, I wrote about my instinct to check the weather where my son, Ian, lives. I live in the relatively placid Pacific Northwest, and he lives in the turbulent Upper Midwest, where thunderstorms and even tornados roam the atmosphere.

My story was ultimately about a parent’s terror over not knowing whether their child was safe, and then finding out that same child was truly in harm’s way. If you missed it, you can catch up here:

But I’m not going to ask you to write about tornados and terror this week. Instead, we’ll peer into what it means to have people you love far away.

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The text from my brother sends an electric jolt through my core.

Dustin, 11:36 a.m.
Hey, I was out chasing… Ian OK? Appleton got hit

Such a casual question from my amateur storm-chaser brother: “Ian OK?” Like something you’d ask a bummed-out friend, not a parent whose son might be in harm’s way. I Google “Appleton tornado today,” and images of devastation fill my screen: homes destroyed, trees and power lines down, cars crushed, semis overturned.

Ian. My boy.

When Ian was a teenager, we were waiting at the Walgreens pharmacy counter. He wandered off to look for something, and a two-year-old boy—secured in a shopping cart while his mom spoke with the pharmacist—blinked at me quizzically and asked, “Where’s your boy?”

The words became part of our family’s lexicon. Whenever Ian was nowhere to be found, someone would ask, “Where’s your boy?”

I make a frantic phone call and get no answer, so I leave a voicemail: “Hey, buddy. I heard about the Appleton tornado. I don’t know how close it was to you. I’m worried and I just want to know you’re OK. Please call me as soon as you can.”

I want to sound confident and unbothered—to be the mom my kids can depend on, not someone who needs constant reassurance. But I can’t hide the fear in my voice.

Where’s your boy?

* * * *

The night before.

I lie in bed reading, as I usually do until well after midnight. Something light and funny after a couple of heavy novels. But something taps at the corners of my mind. I raise my shoulders against it, but the unease won’t let go.

Ian.

I pick up my phone and open my weather app, where I’ve saved Ian’s location so I can occasionally peer into his atmosphere from 2,000 miles away. There’s a storm cell on the radar, with a good bit of lightning, but it’s south of Appleton and doesn’t look severe. No warnings. No other storm cells lurking. I set the phone down and exhale.

I trust my kids to be smart and safe. Still, I tuck this twinge of anxiety into my pocket. It doesn’t want to go away yet; it only wants to stay hidden. So I hold it in the clenching of my jaw, the tightening of my shoulders.

You look into their eyes the moment they’re born, don’t you? And you realize with a fierce ache in your chest that they must outlive you.

I spent my first forty-nine years in the turbulent Upper Midwest. I’d taken storm-spotter training several times and even called in reports that resulted in tornado warnings. I knew the language the National Weather Service used when a confirmed tornado was especially dangerous:

THIS IS A LIFE-THREATENING SITUATION.

Flying debris may be deadly. Mobile homes will be destroyed. Complete destruction is possible.

Complete destruction is possible.

But not tonight. Despite my niggling sense of dread, Wisconsin looks relatively calm. The thunderstorm that rolled past my son’s apartment was likely the kind I’d grown up loving—neither severe nor damaging, just a reminder that nature has a voice.

I am a little envious. I miss thunderstorms.

But I’m also still on edge.

* * * *

I clutch my phone and wrestle with two opposing forces: the need to know and the need to remain ignorant for as long as I can. I scroll news posts. Information is thin so far, but the images are horrifying. This was not what we weather nerds would call “a little spin-up.”

Suddenly, Ian’s face flashes on my screen, and the phone rings. I answer, breathless.

“I’m OK, Mom,” my boy says. (A man, but always my boy.)

But I quickly learn that Ian was almost very much not OK. I can barely parse the fragments arriving in his steady voice:

They were driving Ian’s friend Olivia to the airport when the tornado hit. There’s something about having been trapped on a bridge. Semis overturned in front of them. Alex, the driver, stayed calm. She did everything right. All of them kept their heads. A whole pack of humans with ADHD, trapped in a car during a tornado, doing what neurodivergent people do—going into crisis mode and managing chaos like it’s just another Monday.

“Alex deserves the credit,” Ian tells me. “She stayed calm and drove us through it until we could find a place to shelter. We ended up with some other people behind a Kwik Trip, but by then I think the worst of it had passed.”

I silently thank Alex. And Olivia, and Kelsie. Ian’s chosen family—the one he stayed in the Upper Midwest for, even after I chose Washington as home. I’ve always understood how important Ian’s friends are to him, but I’ve never been as grateful for them as I am now.

When I hang up, Ra is waiting for me to fill them in. Suddenly, I see both my kids as children again: a lightning bolt exploding outside, Ra frozen in the hallway, Ian calmly placing his hands on their shoulders and steering them into the windowless bathroom.

I try to be the strong one I always am. I can’t. I look up at Ra and fold forward, covering my face as sobs overwhelm me.

“Don’t you ever let anything happen to you!” I wail. “Don’t you ever. If anything happens to either of you… I won’t survive it.”

“Oh, Mama! It’s OK. We won’t.”

But I know they can’t promise that. I know our chaotic, random universe could divide my life into a horrific “before” and “after” at any moment. People who refer to such things as “unimaginable” aren’t speaking as parents. We can imagine all too well.

I know Ian is safe now. I know where my boy is and that he’s surrounded by friends who went through this together, who experienced firsthand a truth I’ve preached to my kids, hoping to instill the proper respect: “Nature doesn’t fuck around.”

I go to physical therapy, still recovering from a broken fibula and only cautiously back on two legs. For the first time, I have to ask Christine for water and a place to sit. When I explain, she tells me she’d rather have me express my needs than faint from an adrenaline overload.

When I get home, I can’t help it: I look for videos of the storm, maybe to reassure myself that everyone survived. The National Weather Service rated the tornado a powerful EF3 with winds of 140 mph. Given the destruction, the absence of fatalities or life-threatening injuries is remarkable.

Ian and his friends had stayed safe inside a car—something secure yet frighteningly vulnerable. I think of Tim Samaras, the cautious tornado researcher I’d long admired, who was killed alongside his son and colleague when the El Reno tornado overtook their chase vehicle.

Then there’s Reed Timmer: scientist, cowboy, screamer, and driver of the Dominator, a tornado-interception vehicle resembling a Sherman tank crossed with a Cybertruck—long before Cybertrucks became an unfortunate reality.

I find a video of Timmer intercepting the Appleton tornado and watch in horror as he and his crew become trapped on a bridge. The tornado is what chasers and meteorologists call “rain-wrapped”—churning up destruction while hidden by low clouds and heavy rain.

I’m on the verge of tears again. There is no obvious funnel in Timmer’s video. To an untrained eye, the tornado is nearly invisible.

They wouldn’t have seen it coming.

I press my cool hands against my forehead and cheeks. On the TV, Timmer is screaming—his signature move—that he sees debris, proof that the circulation has reached the ground.

Except YouTube’s captions hear something else. They say:

“TORNADO ON THE GROUND! WE’VE GOT DEBBIE ON THE LEFT! MAJOR DEBBIE!”

In a flood of absurd relief, I begin to laugh. I salute the TV and Reed Timmer, nodding respectfully as I say, “Major Debbie.”

And I know that once again, for now, tenuously—always tenuously—we are all somehow OK.

The view from inside Alex’s car in the aftermath. Photos by Olivia Baker, used with permission.

Back in March, I shared a story about how I found my musical voice again… by writing a song for just one person and then sharing it with many. It culminated in a 100-voice choir debuting the song in 2018.

The essay is free for anyone to read here:

Today, I’m sharing something new for my paid subscribers: an audio narration, read by me, accompanied by a recording of the choir’s debut performance of “One Lone Voice.”

This is my first time producing audio narration, and I’m especially glad I began with this story. One Lone Voice has always been about what can happen when we risk making a little noise and letting ourselves be heard.

If you’re a free subscriber who claimed a free post, consider upgrading to receive monthly narrations of my stories as well as a weekly writing prompt—an invitation to join in the reflective, revealing, rebellious act of truth-telling.

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This week, a told you a story that left barely a trace in my family’s lore. If I brought it up now, someone might say, “Oh, yeah! I remember that!” But more likely, they’d make that thinking face (you know the one), ponder for a moment, and admit they don’t recall the time a strange man lay dead, sprawled in the dim stairwell leading to an apartment on our farmhouse.

No one would doubt it happened, of course. It’s too one-the-nose for our family to be made up. Still, it saddens me. I’m probably the only one alive who remembers seeing a man, freshly showered, shoes scattered beside him, lying on those stairs completely devoid of life.

I never learned his name. And somehow, all these years later, I’ve become the keeper of this significant piece of his story, its end. No lights and sirens. No fanfare. No medical drama at all, Just a quiet reminder that everything’s finite.

If you missed this week’s story, you can catch up here:

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Mom walks up and leans in the passenger-side window. Her tone is calm, her register low, as she nearly whispers to me, “Keep the kids in the car a sec. I think there’s a dead guy on the stairs.”

She’s already hurrying away before I can say, in my own conspiratorial below-child-hearing tone: “The fuck?”

Mom provides daycare for my kids, and she’s just brought us all home after picking me up from work. Peter’s car was in the shop, so he’d borrowed mine to get to his own job. Our plan had been to have dinner at the farm with my parents.

My family’s farmhouse is a behemoth. Built in the late 1800s, it has a fieldstone foundation, a basement cistern, and a Cream City brick facade. I grew up listening to Mom wonder about houses we drove past, pondering whether old farmhouses amidst modern homes were “the original farmhouse” before development moved in.

Now, she lived in “the original farmhouse.” And there was, apparently, a dead guy on the stairs.

I watch my mom scurry from the staircase that leads to two upstairs apartments, across the little vestibule, and into her front door. Through the windows, I can see her on the phone, likely calling the police.

“Why aren’t we going with Grandma?” Four-year-old Ian twitches in the backseat, ready to get out of his booster. After me, his grandmother is his favorite person in the world.

“Grandma needs us to wait here for a second,” I say.

“Why?”

It’s complicated. I believe in honesty, even when it comes to four-year-old kids, but I also don’t want to give my child nightmares, so I soften things just a little. “Somebody might’ve gotten hurt, and Grandma needs to help him.”

“Can’t we help?”

Ah, buddy, I think that ship might have sailed. “It’s nice of you to ask, but Grandma said we’re helping just by staying here in the car.”

One-year-old Shayla whimpers, “Gamma…”

I’m about to have a coup on my hands.

But my head is swirling with thoughts. A “dead guy”? It couldn’t be anyone we know—Mom would’ve said so. And how very Lunde this whole thing seems! Found a dead man on the property? Yep! Just another Friday. Just last week, Mom was hanging off a 15-foot-high steel greenhouse frame screaming for help because Dad insisted on installing poly sheeting on a windy day.

Finally, just before the kids begin to riot, Mom comes back.

“OK!” she says cheerfully, “We’re going inside!”

She opens the back car door, unbuckles Ian, and whisks him up into her arms. I’m still reeling from the “dead guy” news, but I calmly follow suit, freeing Shayla from her carseat. She clings to me like a baby monkey.

“Keep them occupied as we walk in,” Mom whispers into my ear. So we talk cheerily to the kids, pointing out things—”Do you see that pretty red bird?”—that are nowhere in the vicinity of the apartment staircase.

As we enter the vestibule, I glance over toward the staircase, and it’s then that I see him. He’s face-down, wearing jeans. The top of his buttocks is showing, but it’s somehow not undignified. He wears no shoes, but a pair of sneakers lie on the stairs beside him. His hair is damp, shoulder-length, lightly curled. He looks freshly washed.

From just that brief glance, I can see in an instant that he’s dead. It’s as if someone had dropped a very realistic wax figure on the apartment stairs. Whatever once animated the man is truly gone.

In the kitchen, Mom and I prepare a snack for the kids. We wait for the police to arrive, and despite Mom’s everything’s-fine performance, I see her hand tremble as she sets a plate of Teddy Grahams on the table.

“Who do you think he is?” I ask.

“I’ve never seen him before,” Mom says. “But he looks… freshly clean. I wonder if he snuck in to use the shower or something.”

If you’d been dropped on my parents’ farm without context, you’d think you were in deeply rural Wisconsin. But the farm is on the edge of Oconomowoc, a bougie little hamlet. Although I no longer live in my family home, I’ve never seen a transient or unhoused person on our country road.

Something occurs to me then: “But he’s facing like he was walking up the stairs.”

Mom shrugs and looks dazed. The kids tuck into their Teddy Grahams, apple slices, and juice boxes. Not much later, the police arrive. No lights, no sirens, just two squad cars and three officers who descend on my parents’ dilapidated kitchen.

Although they question Mom and me separately, the questions are the same: Had we seen this man before? (No.) Did we have any guesses as to his identity? (Also no.) Could he be someone my dad knew? (Possibly. Maybe even probably. Dad was into what Mom called “picking up strays.”) Did we attempt to move him or check on him? (I hadn’t. I assumed Mom hadn’t either, since he was so obviously deceased.)

Peter arrived for dinner, and the cops quickly blindsided him with questions. What did he know? Had he ever seen the man before? Was the deceased a friend of his? Peter’s responses were basically: Nothing. What man? Deceased?!

Needless to say, once the police cleared us to leave, we opted not to stick around for dinner. And—fair enough!—I’m pretty sure Mom opted to order out for her and Dad.

That night, I couldn’t get the dead man out of my head. His rigid, waxy body. His clean, still-damp hair. His jeans that had slid down, exposing him. The way he lay there on those wooden stairs, almost peaceful, as though he might be taking a nap in a most uncomfortable place.

It didn’t seem right that we didn’t know who he was. Or why he’d been there in the first place. From the shape of him, and his healthy head of brown hair, he seemed like he might be in his 40s or early 50s. Not all that much older than my 32 years. And yet, his life had ended.

Within a week or two, I would learn the man’s story, if not his identity. Mom had little interest in talking about him; I sensed it unnerved her.

He hadn’t snuck into my parents’ farmhouse—he’d been invited.

The man had indeed been unhoused. Dad met him at one of his favorite watering holes and learned the man had been sleeping in his van. He was having trouble finding a place to park overnight where the police wouldn’t hassle him. Dad offered to let him park at the back of the property, out of sight. He never told Mom about the deal.

A year or so earlier, Dad had taken on the care of a beloved local orchard. The elderly owner had died, and his widow couldn’t manage the property alone. I’m not sure I ever got the full story, but somehow Dad’s work with the orchard brought Apple Bob into my family’s circle. He was an intellectually disabled man who’d been living in a tiny shack, without running water, on the orchard property. Dad invited him to stay in an apartment on the farm.

He’d sent the man on the stairs to Apple Bob’s apartment so he could take a warm shower. The medical examiner later revealed that he’d died of an aneurysm.

Even now, I keep flashing back to the man’s shoes. He’d been facing as though he were heading upstairs, but his hair was freshly washed. And the shoes. Why had his shoes been beside him and not on his feet?

I imagine him removing his shoes so he wouldn’t track dirt into Apple Bob’s abode. I can’t explain exactly why he was facing up the stairs with his freshly washed hair and his sneakers beside him, but I’ve always believed the shoes told me something about him. Although I’ll never know who he was, I see him as thoughtful.

For all the strange circumstances surrounding his death, the death itself was terribly ordinary. A blood vessel ruptured. A body failed. One moment he was climbing a staircase with clean hair and his shoes in his hand. The next, he was gone.

This week, I sat down and watched an ABC After School Special.

No, that’s not still a thing. And no, it’s not making a comeback. Kids don’t come home and turn on the TV these days; they pick up their phone, an iPad, a video game controller.

But back in 1977, it was all about graham crackers, frosting, and an hour spent with teen star Kristy McNichol.

If you’re really curious, you can watch The Pinballs on YouTube. Although I’ll warn you, it’s very much a product of the 70s, from the cheesy opening music to the saccharine representation of life with a foster family.

But it still made a deep impression on 11-year-old me. I absolutely believed Kristy McNichols character, Carlie, was a role model. She was tough, sarcastic, spoke her mind. She allowed herself to be angry. No people-pleasing in sight!

But what I hadn’t realized at age 11 was glaringly apparent to me as an adult. Carlie wasn’t a scrappy little smartass because she was cool. Carlie was who she was because she was protecting herself, taking aim at others before they could take aim at her. Bristling so nobody would get too close.

You can read the story here if you missed it.

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I sit cross-legged in front of the TV. Mom bought some Betty Crocker frosting, so I’ve whipped up my favorite snack—a paper plate laden with chocolate-frosted graham crackers. It’s time for the ABC Afterschool Special.

Amazingly, I’ve got the living room to myself. Dustin, the baby, is asleep. Scott and Dad walked down to the lake. Mom’s starting dinner. Finally, I’ll be able to concentrate on the show.

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On the screen, a huge green car pulls up in front of a house, and Kristy McNichol climbs out the passenger side. She’s my favorite! She plays Buddy on Family, and now she’s starring in this new Afterschool Special episode, The Pinballs.

I’m rapt as Kristy, who plays a girl named Carlie, enters her new foster home and immediately starts being a total jerk. She’s sarcastic to the core, and she doesn’t seem to care what anyone thinks. She quickly scouts out her foster family’s TV and settles in for a soap opera.

Kristy McNichol’s Carlie is the coolest girl I’ve ever seen. She doesn’t hold things back like I do—when people are acting up (and even when they aren’t), she lets them have it. What would it be like to just speak your mind like that, to not quietly hold every feeling inside, to be unafraid of how people would react?

What would it even feel like to be angry and just let people know about it? I could never be like Carlie, but I desperately wish I could. I try practicing a few times. Once, when my little brother Scott is teasing me relentlessly, I even lose my temper. I put a hand on each of his shoulders and bring my knee firmly up into his groin. He doubles over in pain.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” I cry, and I run away. I carry the fresh memory of what I’ve done for months, riddled with guilt.

* * * *

Peter stands before me in our bedroom, hands on his hips, red-faced and leaning in toward me menacingly. This used to intimidate me, but now I’m reminded of the nature documentary I’ve just watched with the kids, where a tiny jumping spider reared up and waved its front legs like it was about to throw down. The kids and I laughed at the tiny creature: “Ooooo! Scaaaawy!”

I put my hands on my hips, too, and I don’t flinch. My husband has, inexplicably, found a gold cufflink shaped like a treble clef on the floor of our bedroom. And I can honestly say I have no clue where it’s from or how it got there. So, of course, my husband is convinced I must be having an affair with the director of the community choir I belong to. Especially now that I’m secretary of the board and we meet at Sherman’s house monthly.

“You mean to tell me this just showed up, Karen?” He wields my name like it’s a weapon. (And this is long before the name Karen became a social media phenomenon.)

“Yes, that’s exactly what I mean to tell you.”

He leans in, sneering in my face. “Why should I believe you?”

I’m done with this. I’m done defending myself, because there’s nothing to defend against.

“You know what?” I say. “I’m not pulling my punches anymore.”

“Oh, really? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You want a reason to believe me? Let’s start here: I’m not trying to sleep with every man I meet. But I can absolutely see why you’d think I would, because hey, it’s what you’d do, right?”

Peter glares. And I know this look; it’s the one that might precede shouting, shoving, backing me into a corner, preventing me from leaving the room. But Peter’s less fit than ever, our kids are almost grown, and I’ve got nothing left to lose. So when Peter snarls that I’m pushing my luck, I don’t back down. I double down.

“Patty, Virginia, Patricia the Second, Victoria, Susan…”

Peter dramatically clutches his chest with each name, as though I’m stabbing him through the heart.

“How could you say those names?” he gasps. “Are you trying to hurt me?”

A dry, sardonic laugh escapes me. “Do you even hear yourself? You’ve become ridiculous.”

“Ridiculous?!” His face registers cartoonish levels of outrage.

I shrug, shaking my head as I walk away. Unlike in years past, Peter doesn’t try to block the door. He doesn’t grab my arm, leaving a hand-shaped bruise. Instead, he lets me go. I feel a newfound power surge through me, one I’ve exercised for the very first time. After years of fooling myself into believing I could save him from himself, I’ve come to accept that Peter is exactly who he is, and nothing I can do will ever change that.

And I’ve started to realize that I can no longer accept Peter.

Months later, when my grandmother succumbs to pancreatic cancer at 94, I ask Peter to read a eulogy I’ve written at her funeral. I was close with Little Grandma, and we’d even lived with her for a time after Gramps died. I know I won’t be able to contain my emotions if I read the eulogy myself, but Peter is a skilled orator, so I’ve asked him.

I’m emotional as I make dinner the night before the funeral. I snap at Peter and, inevitably, we get into a fight over something small that gets blown so far out of proportion that suddenly we’re in the kitchen shouting at one another.

If my anger is an ember quietly glowing, what Peter says next is the iron poker that prods the log and causes it to flare into a roaring flame:

“You can get someone else to read for your grandma’s funeral, bitch!”

I’m standing over the sink straining spaghetti when he says it. Without a word, I pick up the plastic spaghetti spoon and hurl it at his head. Like George W. Bush famously dodging a shoe, my husband also has surprisingly good reflexes. The spoon clatters to the floor. Peter stares at me, mute, his mouth open.

There is no question I mean what I say next. The voice I summon rises from low in my chest, rumbling out:

“Get the fuck out of my house!”

And because I own the house on a land contract, because it’s my name on the deed and Peter has no legal right to it, that’s exactly what he does.

* * * *

I sit with my leg elevated, still recovering from a broken fibula. Though the cast is off, the leg aches, reminding me I’m alive.

I’m bored by the inactivity, but my curiosity is piqued. I naturally lean toward curiosity, and for reasons I can’t even trace, suddenly I’m tugging at a long-lost thread and searching for The Pinballs. It’s something I carry a strong memory of from childhood. It must mean something, right?

I’ve forgotten much of what the story was about. I remember cool Kristy McNichol, of course, and how much I admired Carlie. I remember the story is about a mismatched group of kids in a foster home. Beyond that? I’ll be seeing it with fresh eyes.

Carlie and a CPS agent (who’s never actually called that, but as an adult I get the gist) pull up in a 1970s sedan the size of a yacht. The earnest agent introduces Carlie to her new foster mom. Carlie immediately starts in with the witty repartee.

“And this must be Carlie!” says the sugar-sweet foster mom.

“Well, it’s not exactly Helen of Troy,” quips Carlie.

The two women smile and nod at each other with raised eyebrows. Oh, that irrepressible little rascal, Carlie!

But nearly 50 years later, I can see what I missed when I first watched The Pinballs and chose Carlie as my hero.

Carlie wasn’t fearless. She wasn’t even being herself. The sarcasm I’d thought was so impressive and honest as a child was nothing more than a mask protecting a frightened girl who’d learned to fire shots at people before they could take aim at her.

But Carlie had also given 11-year-old me a gift. She’d shown me that buried beneath all that snarky meanness was something I’d needed: permission to be angry. Permission to stop smiling through my pain, cushioning every blow by simply absorbing it. Permission to stop making myself easier for people and start being someone who demands to be seen.

Carlie wasn’t exactly free—she was still a teenager living with a foster family, still the survivor of an impossible childhood. But she’d shown me the shape freedom could take. She’d shown me the difference between letting anger build another kind of cage and finding the freedom that lies in truly becoming yourself.

Dearest Gentle Readers,

Occasionally, I take a little side trip away from my usual format—I tell you a story from my life that I hope you’ll find things to relate to in, and then I hand you a metaphorical pen and say “Go forth and write!” (I’d love it if you shared more of what you wrote with me, but we’ll get to that eventually, I’m sure. We’re still getting to know one another.)

I decided to call my little side trips “Detours.” So, whenever you see that tag here on I’ll Go First, you’ll know we’re on a side quest.

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I've been thinking about how to thank the people who financially support I'll Go First. I don't want to put my stories behind a paywall—that's never felt right to me. But I'd like to occasionally create something extra for the lovely people whose paid subscriptions make that possible. So, I wonder:

Would some of you enjoy hearing the stories in my own voice?

It would be less of a podcast and more like sitting across the table from me while I tell you a little tale. (And of course I’ll make sure it sounds good. I’ve worked in podcasting. I was a managing editor, not a producer, but I learned enough by osmosis to not assault your ears with terrible audio quality.)

Here’s how it would work: Every now and then, I’d record myself reading one of my essays aloud, along with a few thoughts that didn’t make it into the published piece. Not every week; more like once a month to start.

Before I go impulsively charging ahead like the chaotic, ADHD-addled gremlin that I am, I’m curious...

Would you ever listen to something like that? Feel free to vote even if you’re not a paid subscriber! I’d love to know what you’d enjoy.

Peace and love,

Karen

“There’s one!”

We’re lying on the cool grass in our backyard staring up at the stars. It’s late summer, and the trilling insect chorus nearly drowns out Mom’s excited voice. In the darkness, I follow where her finger points and, sure enough, there’s a tiny white light speeding across the sky, like some sort of star racing across the universe.

“How many is that for you?”

“Three!” she says with childlike excitement. “I’m winning!”

“No, Mom,” my brother Scott says. “Jon’s got five.”

Mom hmphs. “He’s cheating. He has binoculars.”

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Jon, our neighbor, is five years my senior and heading off to UW-Madison in the fall. I like his quiet, thoughtful, scientific mind. Of the chaotic men and boys in his large family, Jon’s the black sheep. And that makes me think he’s the good one.

“I hate to break this to you,” Jon says, “But it’s actually harder to see satellites with binoculars. The ones I spotted were all with the naked eye.”

“Spoilsport,” Mom pouts. “I thought I was actually winning for a change.”

I reach over and clasp Mom’s hand in mine. “Three is really good,” I say. “I’ve only spotted one so far.”

Mom feels a little fragile these days. Just a couple of weeks ago, as I was returning from a walk down to the lake with my little brother Dustin, I heard shouting coming from our house. My parents didn’t get into loud squabbles often, but I knew what I had to do. I stopped in my tracks, placing a hand against my four-year-old brother’s chest and saying, “Let’s not go in yet, OK?”

We walked back down the road. “To check on the fish!” I’d said, making it seem like an adventure. But as we walked, I heard my Dad’s reedy tenor voice wailing, “You’re never home, Kathy! All my friends think you’re shacking up with some guy every weekend!”

We spent every weekend at my grandparent’s house, an hour away from our home by the lake, because Mom hated Cambridge. It was “cliquey” she said, and no matter how hard she tried to fit in, she never seemed to. So when the weekend came, we went back to her safe place, the place she’d always called home. There, Mom would make herself useful mowing the lawn with the big green John Deere, tackling Grandma’s little household projects, cleaning the garage.

And yes, sometimes flirting with the neighbor guy, Frank, whose own wife was a bit of a recluse and also named Kathy. Small world.

When we went to Grandma’s, sometimes we’d go to Oconomowoc for groceries and Mom would say, “Let’s go cruisin’.” We’d take the long way, around Oconomowoc Lake. As we drove, Mom would look up at the huge houses. One of her favorites was a mansion with a porte-cochère (although I wouldn’t learn that term until I was much older; I simply thought of it as a “carriage driveway”).

Mom seem to love imagining she lived somewhere else. Anywhere else. Every time we drove past the mansion—and it must’ve been hundreds of times—she would slow the car to a crawl and gaze across its expansive lawn. I could almost feel her imaging herself standing on its second story veranda in a gauzy sundress, one hand shading her eyes as she gazed out at the sunlight glimmering on the lake.

“Can you imagine?” she’d say with awe. “Can you even imagine living like that?”

But didn’t we sort of live like that? Our house is just up the road from Lake Ripley, and we can walk down and use the community pier whenever we want. Mom loves the lake. She waterskis behind our old boat, the one with the gold sparkles. We swim nearly every day in the summer.

Isn’t Mom happy with our boat, our house, our life in Cambridge?

* * * *

Ra and I roll up to the estate sale and they grab their UV light from the glove compartment. We have a couple of objectives. First, we’re going to look for antique uranium glass, which Ra has started collecting. Second, we get to snoop around what looks like a really cool old house.

The house is the draw for me. It always is. Part of it is my fascination with imagining the lives that went on in that place. I wander through, looking at the remnants of things someone gathered, possibly treasured.

I peer into a bedroom and see a story. A walker in the corner. An ancient bed with a metal spring and one of those nubby bedspreads. Paintings of ships and seascapes. A cross hung on the wall with a rosary draped over it.

“Catholic pirate,” I murmur.

Ra laughs. “But a walker? What’s wrong with a peg leg?”

I spot a photo of a German Shepherd in a little frame on the dresser. “Dog chewed it up,” I say, and we burst into irreverent laughter.

Then I pick up a pair of binoculars. Sturdy and black. Surprisingly heavy, as the good pairs always seem to be. I put them to my eyes and look out the window toward the lake, and suddenly I’m in our backyard in Cambridge counting satellites with Mom, Jon, and Scott.

Mom eventually found something resembling contentment.

By the time I’d left home, my family had moved back to Oconomowoc. It always seemed to me like the one place Mom considered home. Life certainly hadn’t been without its challenges, but as my parents grew older, they found themselves settled in a house Mom loved, a little Cape Cod. The house had been in the way of a freeway bypass, and my enterprising dad figured out a way to buy it and have it moved. There was great celebration after the house was set, unscathed, on its new foundation on my parents’ farm.

Mom had a house she was proud of. She decorated, painted, wrangled Dad into putting in new flooring, which always looked as if it had been installed by someone who really didn’t know how to install flooring. She went with me to nurseries and adopted my obsession with plants and growing things.

Mom spent a decade or so making that humble little house her home. Settling in. Feeling pride when people came to visit.

Having her Happy Place didn’t stop her from driving around the lake, though. She’d roll down the windows, inhale deeply, and say, “Smell the lake!” She’d always reminisce about Great-Grandma’s lake house, the one shed grown up visiting, and the one we’d lived in when I was small. We’d moved away from the lake when I was about 10, but I remembered watching fishing boats leaving the channel, the scent of the lake mingled with the pungent tang of boat fuel, the ping-ping-ping of a motor boat pulling a skier over the choppy waves.

As I set down the estate sale binoculars, I remember Mom coveting Jon’s, certain he had the satellite-hunting advantage even after he patiently explained that no pair of binoculars was going to help track a satellite screaming overhead at seventeen thousand miles an hour.

It occurs to me that I’m not all that different.

Here I am, wandering through a beautiful old house, admiring the soaring ceilings, the conversation pit, the orange shag carpeting wrapped around a cone-shaped Malm fireplace. I’ve already mentally moved in, and I’m playing the grand piano sitting beside floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking a patch of woods.

“There were absolutely sex parties here,” I say.

Ra doesn’t hesitate. “Oh, a hundred percent.”

“The kinky swingers kind.”

“Definitely.”

“Chips, dips, chains, whips...”

They look at me blankly.

“You’ve never seen Weird Science?“

“I don’t think so.”

I sigh. “Well, I’ve failed as a mother.” They roll their eyes, smirking. They can quote The Princess Bride and So, I Married an Axe Murderer like a champ. They love Bill Joel and Fleetwood Mac. They know I raised them right.

As we wander from room to room, I notice something. I’m not imagining my furniture in these spaces, wondering what it would feel like to wake up and drink coffee on the deck, or imagining hosting Thanksgiving in the dining room.

I’m wondering who has. The walker tucked beside the bed. The rosary draped over the cross. The photo of the German Shepherd. Who laughed here? Who cried? Who sat awake at three in the morning wondering what came next? Who stood at these windows watching winter storms roll across the lake?

On the drive home, I catch myself looking at another house I’ve admired for years. An old Craftsman tucked beneath enormous oak trees, its yard delightfully, intentionally unruly. Through the front windows I catch a glimpse of warm light, rich woodwork, books, plants. For a split second I want to peek inside. But I don’t want the house so much as the story.

And that’s when I realize I’ve inherited something from my mom. She spent years imagining herself inside other people’s lives. The mansion on Oconomowoc Lake. The veranda. The view. The life she thought might make her happy.

I inherited the imagining, just not the longing. Instead of imagining my own life between those walls, I wonder what life was like for the people who reside there, or who once did.

Although, I wouldn’t resist a lovely Craftsman of my own if I had the means to get one.

These days, I live in a humble manufactured home on almost an acre in western Washington. It’s hardly the mansion Mom dreamed about when we cruised around Oconomowoc Lake. But when I watch birds on the back porch as Dodger, my scruffy muppet of a dog, tears around the yard menacing squirrels and rabbits, I feel I’ve arrived at a place where I belong. I don’t find myself wishing I were somewhere else.

Maybe Jon was right all along: The trick wasn’t having a badass pair of binoculars, it was simply learning where to look.

When I started writing my latest post, “All Come to Look for America,” I didn’t know quite what I was writing about. I knew I wanted to talk about the difference between America’s bicentennial in 1976, the year my baby brother was born, and contrast it with the semiquincentennial this year. But the piece I ended up with was both unexpected and exactly the one I needed to write.

Writing helps me make sense of the world. And in workshops I’ve taught, I’ve connected people with writing as a way to find meaning in the chaos life throws at us. That’s exactly what happened when I started writing about my middle brother, Scott. I realized we hadn’t just grown apart over time, we’d grown into people so completely foreign to each other that we just couldn’t communicate anymore.

Through writing, I realized I wasn’t angry or disappointed; not anymore. I was just… deeply sad.

And I realized that so many people are in the same place—their ideological differences with a family member or friend feel insurmountable. They’ve lost people not to death but to differences.

It feels bewildering. Lonely. Hopeless.

If you haven’t read “All Come to Look for America” yet, I hope you’ll take a moment. It’s one of the most difficult pieces I’ve written, but it also says exactly what I want it to say.

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Family portrait. July 3, 1976.

Mom stands bracing herself against the door frame with one outstretched arm. She leans halfway between the garage and the Bar Room, hunched protectively over her big, basketball belly as she calls out, “Doug! Come on!”

Mom’s baby is coming. And by the way she’s panting, tears in her eyes, it seems the baby doesn’t want to wait.

Dad comes rushing into the room carrying a paper grocery bag, one of Mom’s shirts poking out the top. He’s grabbed a long-sleeve shirt. She’ll hate that. I run to Mom and Dad’s room and grab one of her wispy, cool summer tops. I stuff it into the bag and Dad shoots me a quick nod of acknowledgement.

Dad gets mom situated in his El Camino and they hurry out of the driveway, tires spewing bits of gravel across the asphalt. I stare out the huge picture windows into the bright July day and wonder if all the commotion has woken Scott. But I peer into his room and find him still asleep, one arm flung over the blue teddy bear Gramps got him at the church bazaar. I have a matching pink one.

Will we have need for another pink bear, or will it be a blue one? I’m hoping for a sister, but I suppose another brother is OK, too.

I pace around the Bar Room for a moment. The space that serves as our family room has an enormous bar along the north wall that we never use. Sometimes, Scott and I sit on the swivel stools, spin until we’re dizzy, then try to walk across the room without careening into the furniture.

I go to the phone hanging by the bar. My mission: call Grandma. I dial the number I’ve known by heart since I was five. Grandma and Gramps live just 10 minutes away.

Gramps answers. I breathlessly tell him my news, and I hear him call, “Sylvia, the baby!” Scott and I pack our things, and before we’re even finished Gramps drops Grandma off. For some reason, she’s been tasked with driving Mom’s Chevy Vega to the hospital. As an adult, I’ll wonder whether that was so Dad didn’t have to concern himself with driving my Mom and the baby home.

When Grandma attempts to back out of our garage, she forgets to close her door. It catches on the garage frame and tears part of the molding away. The car door is bent too far forward, but Grandma manages to close it while muttering, “Shoot! Gosh darn it anyway!” It will creak loudly and never close right again.

That night, Mom will stand at the third floor hospital window alone, holding our new baby brother, Dustin, watching fireworks. Normally, we’d be seated in a blanket on the grass beside her while she whooped and cheered, the reflections of colored sparks glimmering in her eyes.

But on this July 4th, when America turns 200, Mom is in the hospital and can’t be part of the celebration. So Gramps takes us to the bicentennial parade downtown. He stands erect, his barrel-shaped chest puffed with pride, saluting the flag as the color guard passes. He cheers at the high school band and tells me they get better every year, although I can’t hear a difference.

I gaze up at Gramps, my favorite person in the world besides Mom. His delight at watching this grand parade makes me delighted, too. I reach for his hand, and he smiles down at me. On Gramps’s other side, Scott fidgets and slurps a Bomb Pop, the red and blue dye painting his lips and chin. He stares, smiling and rapt, at the passing band, waving a little American flag on a stick.

* * * *

Family portrait. Friday, June 26, 2026.

I sit in the recliner with a knee scooter beside me and my casted right leg elevated, five weeks along in my recovery with a broken fibula and high ankle sprain.

Blam!

The sound comes from just outside the open window. I jump. Dodger, my scruffy black cattle dog mix, jumps too, then looks at me with ears pinned back, concerned eyes seeking my own: What was that?

“Idiots,” I mutter. “It’s all good, Dodge.”

My dog lies back on his bed, releasing the kind of groan only a canine who lives in a comfortable space with daily meal service, but pays no rent, can utter. Meanwhile, I wonder whether I should give him some trazodone to curb his anxiety in case the neighbors really decide to light things up.

Each year, my neighborhood sounds like a war zone. This year, the guys up the street—who seem to compete annually for Supreme Amateur Pyrotechnician of the Year—are apparently starting early to get a jump on the nation’s 250th anniversary celebration.

I can’t feel joy over any of it.

Once, I thrilled to fireworks displays with Mom at my side. Now, Mom’s been gone for 13 years already. I glare at the window wondering when the next blast will startle me and my dog and potentially spark a grass fire. Or worse.

From in their room, my daughter texts me:

The neighbors are getting an early start

We’re both fed up with fireworks. Not only do they annoy us and scare the dogs, but they don’t exactly feel earned these days.

I sit in the recliner. No place else to go. I’m braced for another explosion, so I try to relax my shoulders, if only to keep Dodger from noticing how tense I am.

Blam! Boom!

Really? What are they celebrating? It’s not even July yet. And even if it were…

Much has changed since that day we watched the July 4th parade with Gramps.

Scott moved to Colorado as a young adult. We led separate lives and connected rarely. Even when Scott came home for visits, he spent most of his time with friends rather than family. Once we were separated by our grandfather, standing on either side of him as we watched a patriotic display. Now, we’re separated not only by miles but by ideologies.

I awkwardly reposition my casted leg. I’m beyond mourning the beautiful summer days I’m missing in this damn thing, but that doesn’t mean I’m comfortable. I think back to that day in September when everything went wrong.

Charlie Kirk had been assassinated. Stacy, Scott’s wife, who always referred to me as “lovely Karen,” was outraged. I commented on her Facebook post, urging people to wait for facts before feeding the flames.

It wasn’t what she needed.

In the present, another firework explodes, this one more distant as other neighborhoods join this Friday night precursor to the July 4th weekend. A 50 pound cryptid of a dog climbs into my lap, eyes wary.

I realize the mistake I made with Stacy. She didn’t want to be preached to; she wanted to be angry. Had a political figure I cared about been assassinated, I would have been angry, too.

Maybe I could have prevented what happened next. Or maybe it was always inevitable.

Scott texted, telling me to leave Stacy alone, to stop posting on her Facebook timeline. A cold, wormy knot unspooled in my stomach. Scott and I spoke only on birthdays and holidays, and now he was texting me out of the blue to admonish me?

I answered that I’d been encouraging people to wait for more information, to resist the urge to add to the turmoil. It was nothing personal, just a wish for calmer heads to prevail.

I always blamed the other side, my brother said. And now I was implying that his wife was a bad person. But that couldn’t be right—I loved Stacy! And if Scott knew me at all, he’d have known I wasn’t loyal to parties, just principles.

I closed my eyes to compose myself. I thought of my big-hearted daughter, Ra, trying to bond with her uncle over their shared love of archery but eventually giving up, convinced Scott’s unenthusiastic response meant he didn’t care.

“It’s not that he doesn’t like you,” I’d said. “He’s your uncle. He just doesn’t get you.”

My child. Why couldn’t Scott see what I saw?

It was time to tell the truth I’d been holding close for decades.

I texted back that I couldn’t understand Scott’s support for leaders who opposed everything my daughter represented. How could he champion political figures who wanted to take rights away from LGBTQ people?

Scott insisted that all Kirk ever did was welcome debate.

My fingers flew across the phone keyboard, hands trembling:

“I’m asking whether you believe in human rights because your political beliefs suggest otherwise. Answer this: Is it OK to assume that some people don’t deserve the same rights you do?”

Scott immediately answered that, technically, by asking about rights, I was saying what happened to Kirk was OK.

We ended the exchange in agreement: We no longer had anything to say to one another.

* * * *

I decide to drown out the continuing sporadic fireworks with music. Music always soothes. I get into bed and lie in the dark, headphones on, staring at the ceiling with my broken ankle elevated above my heart.

I think of Scott standing on that sidewalk in 1976, happy, sticky, waving his little American flag.

I think of us riding bikes together. Building blanket forts. Scouring the forest floor for animal tracks, pretending we knew what each one was.

I remember Scott’s 18th birthday party. I worked in a music store and hired my coworker’s band to play a barn party. Someone brought a keg. Then another. My parents’ farm flooded with partygoers, many of them underage. Legend has it that the cops showed up, surveyed the chaos, and then returned when they were off duty to join in.

I didn’t drink. Hated beer. Wasn’t much for parties, either. But I’d wanted to give my brother a big celebration for his 18th. Because I could.

But now, I can’t keep making room in my life for someone who couldn’t answer the simplest, cleanest question I knew how to ask. Something I’d believed we couldn’t possibly disagree on.

My playlist scrolls to the next song, and Paul Simon’s plaintive voice fills my ears:

Let us be lovers, we’ll marry our futures together

The music soothes as Kathy identifies the man in the gabardine suit as a spy, and later drifts off to sleep. Paul confesses to his sleeping travel companion, “I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why.”

The moon rises over an open field.

Empty and aching. Lost. I close my eyes as the verse continues, then the chorus swells:

All come to look for America…

The line repeats with growing urgency, strings soaring, cymbals crashing, until the organ waltzes us into reverie, a quiet longing for what used to be, or what never really was.

I used to say my late friend Dena had a “cultivated image.” She was a free-spirited, eclectic, artsy eccentric, and it was important that everyone see her just that way. And for a minute during our friendship, that’s exactly what I saw.

But only for a minute.

Dena was desperately in love with a married man named Robert. They’d been having an affair for over twenty years. She’d moved about an hour away from him in hopes of making the affair easier to end, but she was still hooked, and things were still messy.

We’d gather in Dena’s quaint kitchen, with its antique stove and its walls papered with old cookbook recipes, and I would listen to her endless litanies of Robert’s misdeeds. It got to a point where I no longer knew what to say, so I started answering with a shrug and a joking, “I think we should have him killed.”

One day, frustrated with my auto-response, Dena scowled at me. “Are you totally over my drama?”

I was. So I told the truth.

Read more

I’ve spent most of my life believing I’m not pretty.

If there was a singular moment when I realized it, I was too young to log it to memory. My understanding is the culmination of a lifetime of jabs, like my mom’s reminders that I had to “work harder” to look presentable, or my German great-grandmother’s penchant for poking my muffin top and saying, in her slight accent, “You must reduce!” or my grandmother’s constant observation, “Your hair is so stringy.”

I come from a long line of critical women—three generations of them. They’re all gone now, but their judgments remain. As does their love, which is no small thing. Paradoxically, I never had one without the other.

As a child, on the playground, I collected every cruel taunt like discarded shotgun shells on a shooting range. “Fatty, fatty, two-by-four!” Pick it up, hold it close, pretend it didn’t hurt because it didn’t kill you. The insults I heard, coupled with the criticism at home, slowly began to mold me into a young woman who knew she would never be good enough. Not because they were valid, but because I believed them.

I married Peter, a man who, at least for a brief, shimmering time early in our relationship, made me believe he thought I was gorgeous and sexy. I almost felt pretty when I was with him. But eventually, I realized he’d been one of those angler fish lurking at the bottom of the sea with his physical compliments like a tiny bioluminescent light dangling before his toothy maw, a lure I’d followed readily.

I stayed with Mr. Angler Fish long after the glow of his “angle” faded. It didn’t take long before a wicked combination of stress, cortisol, and sleeping too much—a coping mechanism I’d begun using to escape my volatile marriage—caused my weight to balloon. And that’s when Peter started taking shots, too. “Even your mom says she’s never seen you this big,” he told me. Peter, who weighed over 300 pounds and had type 2 diabetes, never seemed to find the irony.

I just accepted the reality of who I’d come to believe I was: a woman past her prime who’d never truly had a prime to begin with.

I was forty-nine when the next blow landed with a cruelty only nature can heap on a woman who already knows she’ll never be conventionally attractive. It arrived the way these things always seem to: while I was standing in front of a mirror.

I was gingerly brushing my teeth when I felt something odd and lumpy on my tongue. I spit into the sink and yelped when I saw my front tooth lying there among the toothpaste foam. I plucked it out and rinsed my mouth. Then I grimaced at myself in the mirror, tears streaming down my face, as I stared at the gaping hole in what should have been my smile. I wrapped the tooth in toilet paper and flushed it, as though hiding the evidence would somehow make the horror go away.

How could this happen? I remembered that, while pulling up the covers the night before, my hand had slipped and I’d comically punched myself in the mouth. I’d laughed at my foolishness and then gone to sleep. Maybe that punch was the reason the tooth was gone now. How silly, I could tell that to the dentist when I made an emergency appointment. Surely, he’d get me a new tooth right away.

But the dentist was not kind. In fact, he acted almost hostile as he poked around in my mouth muttering to his assistant, “All of her teeth are mobile!”

“I can’t do anything about this,” he finally said. “You need dentures.”

“But I’m not even fifty!”

“Well, maybe you lost the genetic lottery. Some people have lower resistance to infections like gingivitis. But it looks like you haven’t had very good dental care.”

He wasn’t wrong. Before the catastrophe that sent me to the dentist, I’d been fretting over my front tooth. It felt loose and wiggly, a sensation I hadn’t experienced since losing my baby teeth as a child. But this time I wasn’t excited by a childhood right of passage. I was afraid to smile, and horrified by the prospect of going to the dentist. I ignored the problem, hoping, with the futility of the fearful, that it would just go away if I brushed even more often and used an anti-bacterial mouthwash.

But of course, it didn’t.

My mother had instilled the fear of dentists in me at a young age. She was terrified of the men with the whirring drills, and so I only saw a dentist twice before I reached adulthood. He was a pediatric dentist named Doctor Bittner who held me still by drilling his knee into my chest, pinning me to the chair while he scolded me for squirming. When he finally let me up, he scowled and said I’d been bad. His assistant talked him into grudgingly allowing me to pick a cheap plastic toy out of the cheap plastic treasure chest he kept in his exam room for “good kids only.”

I have a family history of autoimmune disorders. Later, kinder dentists would tell me that autoimmune issues and a lack of dental care had probably played a significant role in the state of my mouth. But, at that time, I was certain it was all my fault and I was destined to become a toothless hag. People would look at me and judge — drug user, hick, white trash.

The dentist did not simply pop in a new tooth, as I’d foolishly hoped. He gave me a pamphlet about dentures, told me they were expensive, and suggested I call him back when I was ready to invest.

But at that time, I was far from financially stable enough to pay for extensive dental work. I’d summoned the courage to leave Peter and was living on my own. I didn’t have thousands of dollars to spend on what the brochures advertised as: “A new smile, a new you!” I was barely scraping by, keeping the kids and I fed and housed.

As teeth tend to do, mine shifted and moved closer together and eventually almost filled in the gap. By the time I lost the next front tooth, the one that had been adjacent to the first one to jump ship, I was living in Washington state, two-thousand miles away from my ancestral home.

* * * *

“Smile for me,” Mark said. I grinned toothily while looking at myself in a handheld mirror. “You look beautiful!” he enthused. “That’s a Hollywood smile!”

Mark was my denturist. He’d created a new set of teeth for me so I wouldn’t have to be humiliated by my gap-toothed smile any longer. I could smile with confidence. Mark put a hand on my shoulder and asked, “What do you think?”

“Dey wook gweat,” I mumbled. My mouth was packed with gauze around and beneath the new dentures. But my smile did look “gweat” nonetheless.

After recovering from the anesthesia and pain medication, I would find myself standing in front of my bathroom mirror smiling. Something I’d never experienced before was happening—I actually liked my smile. It was the kind of smile that could finally reflect the growing love I had for Washington and the new friends I was beginning to make. A smile I actually wanted to greet people with.

By the following week, I was back to singing with my choir. Choral singing, and music in general, has always brought me peace and contentment. It was only after I separated from Peter and began reinventing myself that I found music again.

Although I was worried that my choir friends would notice the sudden change in my appearance, no one said a word, and soon I was smiling confidently and singing with a joy I hadn’t been able to experience when I felt compelled to hide my failing teeth.

I found my tribe in the Pacific Northwest, an enclave of liberal hippies like me. They are artists, poets, dancers, and musicians. Earth mothers and moon dogs. I discovered people to love, and people who love me.

And in my new home, I also met the love of my life, John.

One night, John and I were curled up together watching a movie in which the main character attended a formal dance. John asked if I’d ever experienced a formal.

“Oh, that’s for pretty people,” I answered, half joking. “I’m not pretty.”

John didn’t appreciate my self-deprecating joke. He turned to me, his eyes narrowed, and said, “Who told you that?”

I took a beat. It was the first time anyone had ever challenged the story instead of either dismissing it or agreeing with it.

“I … lots of people,” I said.

“Yourself? Did you tell yourself that?”

John seemed angry. Not with me, but with the voices in my head. I’d rarely seen him this fierce.

“Maybe,” I admitted.

“Don’t believe it,” he commanded, as if his directive was the final word.

I let John’s words settle over me, and something began to shift. “Not pretty” was a tale I’d told myself since childhood. But much like a fairytale, myth, or urban legend, just because the tale endured didn’t make it true.

Yes, society has some standards I don’t meet. By society’s standards, it’s possible that I am not pretty, and I never will be.

But I am strong. And I’m so much wiser than I was when I listened to the voices of my matriarchs, peers, and ex-husband, letting their criticisms become my story. Today, I have a different story to tell.

Now that I’ve found my place in life, I understand that I’m enough. I’ve opened myself to people and found that I am welcomed, appreciated, and respected.

Most of all, I’m not valuable because someone chose me; I’m valuable because I am me.

It’s Juneteenth, and for my late partner, it was a day of contradictions. John used to get contemplative on Juneteenth: Is it a happy celebration? Can you really be happy about enslaved people finally being freed over two years after the Emancipation Proclamation?

It’s a fair question. But when John asked it of a vendor at a Juneteenth celebration, things didn’t quite go as planned. And I’d argue that John knew they wouldn’t, which was part of what enticed him to engage. You can read more about it here:

Read more

For the happiest six years of my life, I was a white woman named Karen in love with a Black Vietnam Veteran named John.

We laughed at the same obscure references, knew all of the same obscure songs, loved adventuring together and discovering new places to eat where we could have a drink, share a plate of food, and then fight over who got the biggest “half” of our shared dessert.

We sang together. Always. All I’d have to do was kickstart John with a bar or two of any song, and we’d be off, harmonizing and grinning.

Also, we were both smart asses of the highest order.

I used my wit to laser-focus on people’s human foibles and gently tease them. Never in a hurtful way  (I hope)  but in a way that said, “Hey, I see you. We’re both flawed individuals here. Isn’t it great?”

John, on the other hand, used his powers of observation to quiz people, sometimes accidentally trodding on their tender spots. Not often, but whenever he felt especially mischievous, he’d push things a little further than strictly necessary. Like me, he wasn’t aiming to hurt anyone, either. Ultimately, his was a ploy to get people to loosen up a little. A ploy that rarely worked.

And sometimes John exploited someone’s tender spot and put me on the spot in the process.

Juneteenth at Jimi Hendrix Park

Washington isn’t the whitest state in the U.S. (that’s Maine), but it’s not especially diverse, either. I’m a Washington transplant by way of Wisconsin, which is whiter still. So, the Juneteenth celebration at Jimi Hendrix Park was one of the few times in my life I’d found myself in the distinct minority.

The event had music, food, and booths run by artisans selling handcrafted goods. (It was also hotter than Hades. Why does Jimi Hendrix Park have no trees or shade, Seattle? Do better.) John and I were strolling from booth to booth, checking out carved wooden masks, paintings, t-shirts, and African-inspired clothing.

We came upon a woman selling soap. The heat found her fanning herself with a flyer folded like an accordion, scowling out at the people browsing surrounding booths. As we approached, she looked me up and down with disdain.

John noticed. Because John noticed everything.

“How are you today?” he crowed cheerfully.

“Hot,” the vendor answered. “Yourself?”

Himself was comfortable, but perhaps a tad warm.

“So, Juneteenth,” he mused. “Tell me: Do you consider it a happy celebration? Or is it more of a somber one?” John loved thought-provoking conversation starters, but I sensed he was looking for an angle.

The vendor sneered. “What’re you talking about?”

“Well, those people in Texas back then,” John said. “Slavery’d already been abolished, but they were still slaves.”

“Well, they were freed either way” the vendor said, cocking one eyebrow at him. “You’ve got some strange ways of thinking.”

Oh, no. She was misreading John. She was getting him all wrong.

John had a habit of continuing conversations out loud that he’d started in his head, leaving them utterly devoid of context. Since I was his person, and he mine, I’d sort of made myself his de facto interpreter when others didn’t have a clue as to what he was referencing. John didn’t need me to interpret for him, and he never asked me to, but he didn’t judge me for it, either. I’m otherwise a bit shy with new people, but John knew my interjections were meant to keep the conversation flowing.

“He’s saying those people stayed enslaved for a couple of years after slavery officially ended,” I explained. “They needed troops to show up and enforce their freedom. So, I guess that could feel solemn instead of happy?”

Looking back, I see my mistake. Even though I ended with a non-confrontational, submissive little question mark.

The vendor didn’t know I had a habit of tying up the loose ends John left dangling. All she saw was some Karen (actually named Karen —the irony!) stepping in to explain what a Black man meant.

She glared at me, looking me up and down, and then narrowed her eyes at John and grumbled, “This your wife?”

The window of opportunity was open. John didn’t miss a beat.

“Nope,” he said. “My girlfriend.”

He gave the vendor a moment to mutter a disapproving, eye-rolling “Huh.” Then he delivered the second half of his one-two punch with a sly grin:

“Wife’s at home.”

If the vendor had been simmering before, now she’d completely boiled over. She launched herself up out of her lawn chair and leaned across the table, bellowing into John’s face: “You gonna buy something or what?”

John smiled beatifically, tipped an imaginary hat, and said, “We were just leaving.”

There’s no moral to this story. It’s an anecdote I share because … well, just because, I guess. Because it’s funny. Because it’s mortifying. Because fucking up is human, and some days I’m more human than I’d like to be. Because life is short and ridiculous and we take it far too seriously sometimes.

And also because, when John died in 2022, he left me with all of these stories, and the stories preserve who he was: A bard, a mischief maker, a healer, and an agitator (within reason).

He wasn’t above making a hot day ten degrees hotter.

In fact, I don’t even believe in them, at least not in the Ghost Busters sense.

I don’t believe the dead wander old houses knocking stuff off shelves just to freak us out. (Cats, maybe, but not dead people.) I don’t think every cold spot is evidence of a spirit. And despite what cable television has spent the last two decades trying to convince us of, an EMF detector or a “Spirit Box” has never once persuaded me that the ghost of a Civil War soldier is lurking in the pantry.

But I’ve seen some weird shit.

Enough weird shit that I’ve become deeply suspicious of anyone who claims to have all the answers. The older I get, the more comfortable I am living in the deep gray space between certainty and possibility.

Which is fortunate, because I’ve got some stories.

There’s a windstorm happening.

It’s something meteorologists call a “bombogenesis” — an explosive cyclone that rapidly intensifies around a dramatic drop in atmospheric pressure. I’m a trained Midwest storm spotter, so I understand the gist of it: low pressure, big wind.

I’ve just arrived home after dropping my kids off at school. I’m recovering from a cold, so I opt to crawl back into bed. My 1880s farmhouse rattles around its hinges. The attic door, which is in my bedroom, clatters as gusts seep in around the old window panes. Outside, golden pillars of maple leaves sail up, up into the sky, swirling into colorful chaos against a steely backdrop.

Despite the noise and energy of this storm, I manage to drift off, warm beneath my comforter.

But then I hear the door to my bedroom creak open. Footfalls from hard-soled shoes tap in measured strides across the floor. Peter must be sick, too, I think. Great He’ll blame me for getting him sick and forcing him to come home from work early.

I open my eyes, expecting to see my husband. Instead, I see a shadowy figure bending over the bedside table, as though it’s inspecting something. It has a human shape, but it’s like a vapor or storm cloud, a dark mass I can see through.

“Go away! You’re scaring me!” I yelp, coming fully awake.

And just like that, it dissipates. I go back to sleeping, relatively unperturbed by what was, undeniably, an event that ranks pretty high on the weird-o-meter.

It seems odd that I went back to sleep so easily after such an uncanny happening, so I begin telling myself I probably dreamed it. The next day, I tell my kids about my dream as I’m driving them to school.

My son Ian, then a high school senior, gets quiet. Finally he says, “I’d agree that you probably dreamed it.”

I nod. Yep, that makes sense. All a freaky dream brought on by some freaky weather. And Ian is my mini-me, so of course he’s a skeptic.

“But it’s weird,” Ian continues. “Two different people told me similar stories yesterday. Like, individually — neither one of them had heard the other person’s story. Both of them saw shadowy people as they were getting ready for school.”

* * * *

I’m a newly minted graduate of cosmetology school in the 1980s. (A terrible career choice, but that’s a story for another time.) I work at a salon, and because I’m the new kid, I get a lot of late shifts. For the last hour or two before closing, I’m usually holding down the fort alone. Most nights, that means washing and folding towels and babysitting the tanning bed.

It’s about a half hour before closing time, and I’m eager to get out of the empty salon. That’s when things get weird.

I look up from a stack of towels toward the front desk. A wicker display shelf filled with styling products partially blocks my view, but through the slats I can see a woman seated behind the counter, bent over the appointment book. I can’t make out much, but I can tell she’s wearing a floppy-brimmed blue hat.

There shouldn’t be anyone in the salon.

I stand and call out, “Can I help you?”

The woman is gone.

Then I hear an electronic hum.

A glow suddenly appears beneath the tanning room door.

How the hell did she get from the front desk to the tanning room without me seeing her?

I cross the salon and knock.

No answer.

“Ma’am?” I call through the door. “Do you have an appointment?”

Nothing.

Carefully, I crack the door open, hoping I’m not about to startle some poor naked—or nearly naked—woman.

The room is empty.

A few weeks later, I mention the experience to a coworker. She tells Linda, the salon owner, who promptly loses her little mind. That’s when I learn a few things.

First, Linda has been carrying on a long-term affair with Joe, the man who owns the building. Second, Joe’s wife recently died of cancer. Third, Joe and Linda have been arguing ever since because Joe refuses to take down a portrait hanging in his apartment above the salon.

The portrait is of his late wife. And in it, she’s wearing a floppy-brimmed blue hat.

* * * *

I’ve had other experiences. I frequently saw what I thought looked like a little boy in Victorian-era clothing in my apartment when I was in my mid-twenties and worked at a dog boarding kennel. I later learned the kennel was supposedly home to a child ghost named Joshua (according to a psychic who’d done a seance), and the common wisdom was that Joshua had “followed me home.”

After my brother’s high school best friend died in a horrific car crash while racing on a rural backroad, I swore I saw him stroll under the glow of our farm’s mercury vapor light, wave at me cheerily, and then vanish into the dark.

And still, I don’t believe in ghosts.

I’m 100% OK with the possibility that my brain made up the creepy stuff I experienced.

Maybe something environmental played a role. Buildings that are reportedly haunted have roughly five to six times more mold spores floating around, for instance. Researchers have discovered that mold exposure is associated with neurological symptoms.

But what about things I’ve seen outdoors, like my brother’s dead friend? Atmospheric changes and infrasound can cause anxiety and even hallucinations. The U.S. Air Force experimented with 15 human volunteers and learned that the resonant frequency of our eyeballs is about 19 Hz. The researchers suggested that sounds matching that frequency could cause people to see things in their periphery that they perceive as paranormal.

Ghost hunters often talk about ghosts as “energy.” But that’s a distortion of Einstein’s law of the conservation of energy and mass. Einstein proved that all energy in the universe is constant — neither created nor destroyed, only changed. Ghost aficionados would have you believe that because our energy isn’t destroyed, that means it’s hanging around, conscious and hellbent on taking human form.

It’s a fun idea, but it’s not scientifically sound.

I may not believe in ghosts, but I do believe in possibilities.

I’m not a scientist, but I have a mind naturally wired for two things — a sense of wonder and a healthy skepticism.

I see death as a natural and inevitable process, as much a part of life as birth. When we die, the organic structures that form our bodies begin to break down and energy is directed into a simple metabolic process — decomposition. In the absence of interference with that process (such as embalming, coffin burials, and cremation), we quickly become food for other organisms and could even contribute to the food ecosystem as organic compost.

But we humans naturally wonder about the consciousness that animates us. After all, we’re not just our bodies, we’re our minds. Everything we love (or don’t love) about the people we share our word with stems from how those people think and behave, not just how we interact with their physical bodies.

The morning after the love of my life died in late 2022…

I found myself standing in my bathroom, of all places, dripping after a shower. Grief overwhelmed me. I stood there wrapped in a towel, sobbing. My path forward had always included John, but now the entire landscape had shifted before me into something barren and alien.

That’s when I felt it.

I can only describe the feeling as being wrapped in an energy embrace. It wasn’t a physical touch so much as a full-body feeling of being held in some sort of protective stasis, if only for a moment. And it felt undeniably like John’s hug. I have never doubted for a moment that he somehow found a way to say goodbye to me that morning.

Might there be scientific explanations for what I felt? Of course. But my explanation gives me comfort, and it’s what I’ve chosen to believe.

I won’t ask you to believe it. After all, I can’t prove that the happening truly was a hug from beyond.

Maybe ghosts are worlds colliding.

I love to entertain the Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI) when I think of what we commonly perceive as ghosts.

To massively simplify what I don’t truly understand (because I’m not a quantum physicist), the MWI theorizes that every time a particle makes a “decision” or can exist in different states, the universe splits into different versions for each possible outcome.

Imagine you flip a coin. In one world, the coin lands heads, and in another world, it lands tails. Both of these worlds exist at the same time, but we only experience one version. According to the MWI, every possible outcome of an event causes a new version of our universe to spring to life in which one of those outcomes happened.

So in other universes, John didn’t die. And maybe that version of John was able to break through and give me an energy hug somehow. How would he have experienced me on the “other side”? Maybe to him, I was the ghost, inexplicably grieving.

Or maybe, when conditions are just right — like when there’s a massive windstorm caused by rapidly lowering barometric pressure — we get a glimpse across the threshold into other universes. Maybe the shadowy figure I saw by my bedside table years ago was a glimmer from another plane of existence that, just for a moment, found a way to intersect our own.

You can come along with me and speculate. Or not. I’m not here to convert you because I don’t hold any firm beliefs, just a collection of possibilities.

I won’t insist that the numbers you see on an EMF detector mean a ghost is nearby. I won’t try to convince you that the bump you heard in the night was Brigit the housemaid, murdered on this property in the 1800s. I won’t even claim that the weird stuff I saw in my twenties was paranormal.

I didn’t go to MSU. I don’t Make Shit Up.

But I do like the sound of “maybe.” I like the idea of “possible.” And I’m keeping my mind wide open.