Be Honest. Use Humor.

Last week I attended a zoom meet-up with a group of writers who are struggling to write these days. The writer who organized the meet-up invited us to go around the zoom room and share something we felt excited about. Someone said, French soup. Someone said, the art she’s making out of found objects. I said, lettuce.

Someone said she’s retiring, and we all said, Yay! Good for you! But then she went on to talk about how she works at a university, and it’s been wearing her down, trying to respond to all of the directives from the federal government to dismantle diversity and equity and inclusion in her department. We all said, oh. 

The writer running the group said, This is it. We’re all sad. But we’re also capable of finding joy. How do we acknowledge reality and still remember joy? Be honest, she said, and I dutifully wrote that down. Use humor. I wrote that down too. I was looking at the faces of these strangers arrayed in their zoom boxes, so many of us despondent about the state of the world, 

and feeling grateful that I am not alone, 

A few days later, it was “liberation day” as the news was calling it and the stock market tanked and the state of Ohio decided it’s a good idea to cut library funding. I was sitting on the couch with my husband, and I was déjà vu-ing back to March 2020, right at the beginning of the pandemic, when I suddenly realized we only had a couple of rolls of toilet paper in the house. 

My husband tried to order some on Amazon, but everything was out. The next day I braved the supermarket, where it was pandemonium, and managed to make my way to the toilet paper aisle where there were two packages left, and I really really really wanted to grab both, but I only took one. That ranks right up there on the list of hard things I’ve done in my life. The months went by. 

The store put a limit on toilet paper. I bought a pack every week. More months went by. I had a pyramid of toilet paper packs in the basement. I kept buying more. One day out of the blue, we got a box in the mail, and when I opened it, I didn’t understand what I was looking at. It was a very small pack of very small rolls of toilet paper. 

My husband figured out that this must’ve been the order he’d placed back in March. The toilet paper had come from China on a barge and it was just now reaching us. I added it to the pyramid in the basement. But I was starting to have a queasy feeling. 

What the hell was this pyramid anyway, but scarcity and terror. Also, it was absurd. I stopped buying toilet paper. The pile dwindled. Eventually there was only the pack from China left. My husband gave it to our son who was van-life-ing across the country at the time. 

I must’ve memory-holed this whole thing, because there we were back on the couch, and only a few rolls of toilet paper in the house. I could feel the panic rising. I wanted to change out of my pajamas and run right over to Kroger and start building the pyramid again. 

Instead, I went outside and checked on my lettuce, which is growing like crazy. In a few weeks I will be filling up big salad bowls and picking more to give to neighbors and friends. I will be giving away so much lettuce, people will see me coming with my bags of it, and say, please, Jody, we’ve had enough of your lettuce, give it to someone else. 

And I will. 

What If

Every spring I plant lettuce and every spring I worry the lettuce won’t come up. A week goes by from when I first dropped the seeds into the ground, and then it’s ten days, and still no sign of the lettuce. Maybe I didn’t water it enough or maybe the $&$^# squirrels destroyed it with their maniacal hole-digging. 

(A word about the squirrels. A few weeks ago I wrote about the peas I planted, but what I didn’t tell you was that five minutes after I planted them, a squirrel dug them up and scattered the seedlings, and I had to replant everything and block off the garden bed, which was quickly breached by the squirrels with more digging up and more scattering, until I set up a fortress-like fence, which seems to be holding, for now.) 

Meanwhile, the mourning dove mother on her nest on our back porch who has ballooned up to twice her size, patiently plonked over her eggs, keeps blinking at me in mild amusement whenever I tear out the back door to chase off a squirrel. Ten days, two weeks, three, and the bird is still out there and no hatched eggs. Rain, sleet, a freak wind that flipped over the hammock next door, and I am worried

about the mourning dove mother, about the lettuce, about the new law in Ohio that regulates classroom discussion about controversial subjects, controversial apparently referring to talk about “climate change,” “immigration,” and “diversity” among other things, because what in the actual F—

What if the lettuce doesn’t grow this year and what if there are no baby mourning doves? What if the State doesn’t stop at the universities but goes after the public libraries next and who am I kidding, of course, they'll go after the libraries, and what is anyone going to do about it? What am I going to do about it, when I can barely manage the squirrels digging up my pea plants? This is all to say 

that this week, I hit a low point with the whole thing. Still, I wrote every day at the kitchen counter, keeping an eye on the not-growing-lettuce-in-the-garden, the devious squirrels, the dove plopped over her unhatched eggs, 

only half-noticing the orchid plant in its pot on the window ledge, the orchid that hasn’t bloomed in five years and why am I keeping this orchid plant, when it is so obviously played out, long past dormant, fully crossed over into the land of the dead? 

But then yesterday—and I don’t know what it means—nothing, everything, spring, beauty, goodness, love—

the lettuce came up, the eggs hatched, and the orchid plant bloomed. 

A Sign

My husband and I are hooked on this show called Traitors. It's a reality competition where a group of people are sent to a Scottish castle and one by one get booted out, but with a small twist. The first night everyone sits blindfolded around a big table and the host taps three of them on the back, making them the Traitors. Everyone else is called the Faithful. 

The object of the game is for the Faithful to figure out who the Traitors are and vote them out of the Scottish castle. But each night the Traitors meet up and murder someone. (How you murder someone is write one of the Faithful's names on a card and slide it under their bedroom door.)

Anyway, the next morning everyone is paranoid and turning on each other, accusing each other of being Traitors, while the actual Traitors mostly shut up and go along with the mob. What’s funny (actually, it’s not funny) is how easy it is to point the finger at someone. You say something like, Hey, I noticed that you had a weird expression on your face at dinner, and suddenly the spotlight is on that person, and when they try to defend themselves, that's pretty much the end of them because it just makes everyone more suspicious. 

Inevitably, when the person gets voted off and they reveal they were a Faithful all along, everyone is shocked and sad because they just picked off one of their own. Meanwhile, the Traitors keep murdering people and laughing their heads off about it. 

Which has gotten me thinking about the upside-down, funhouse-mirror world we've been living in (I know. What doesn't get me thinking about that? But bear with me). I read the news about how the present administration is crippling the Social Security Department, and it will likely lead to missed payments. 

One of their spokespeople said, basically, Oh well. And then said that anyone who gets mad about missing a check is someone who’s probably defrauding the government, or else, why would they complain? 

This is just like Traitors! I said to my husband. Everyone thinks of themselves as good and decent and kind and deserving, but they can’t seem to imagine those same qualities in others. It’s the oldest trick in the book for evil people. Divide and conquer. 

Now we’re halfway through season two and the good guys are making the same stupid mistakes, but whatever. It’s just a dumb show. I do what I always do when things are getting too much for me. I turn off all the screens and go outside. 

Check on the peas I planted last week. Walk around the neighborhood with the dog. Someone has lost a cat named Walter, and they’ve put up signs everywhere. A few kids have jumped in to help, chalking the sidewalk squares with a description of Walter. Other people are spreading the word to their friends, introducing themselves to strangers, all of us on the lookout. 

Three days, four, five, and no sign of the cat, and maybe we’re all imagining the worst, until one night, after work, I see groups of people gathering, wandering the yards, sharing the news that someone may have seen Walter running this way or that.   

The next morning, a happy sign pinned to a tree, a reminder to any of us about to lose faith. 

 

 

Hope Is a Thing with Peas

I planted peas yesterday even though I had no intention of planting peas. What happened was I saw the seedlings for sale at the farmer’s market, four darling sugar snap pea plants all ready to tuck into a garden bed, and I couldn’t resist. Maybe this time, I was thinking, 

immediately forgetting that only a few hours before I’d had a conversation with my daughter and son-in-law about their new garden, giving them advice about easy plants to grow when you are just starting out gardening (the two live in an apartment in DC, and recently, after several years of being on a waiting list, have been given a plot in the very large community garden in their neighborhood), and I said, You can’t go wrong with herbs and lettuce, 

but forget peas. Peas will break your heart.  

An aside about peas: I had never liked them. My experience with peas was the kind in the can, all mushy and floating in the greenish gray pea water, heated up on the stove, and plopped onto a plate. Or the frozen kind, a slab in a box, clumped together, hardened between ice crystal chunks, thawed in the microwave, dumped next to the mashed potatoes. 

But then I ate a pea from a friend’s garden, snapped off a pea pod, peeled it apart, plucked out a single pea, marveling at the heft of it, the sweetness, the crunch. How had the joy of fresh peas been kept from me? How could I recreate this joy for myself? I planted peas the next spring. 

This was seventeen gardens ago, and I had no idea what I was doing. Poked seeds in the ground and up the plants grew, nice solid things with multiple peapods dangling. I ate them right off the vine, digging the peas out or eating the entire pod (you can do that! Who knew? I hadn’t!) congratulating myself on the ease of the process, resolving to grow peas for the rest of my life—

I could never do it again. Each year, I attempted it (was I too early in the season—the mucky dirt, the cold, the too much rain or not enough rain? Or was I too late—the heat, the over watering or drought?) and failed. Maybe I’d manage a few scraggly plants, a handful of shriveled pea pods, the peas inside puckered stones. Last year I said, forget it, vowed that was the last time. 

But this winter was so long, the day-to-day worldly outrages piling up with seemingly no end to them, and how hard it's been to absorb the shocks, the grief, until one day, I find myself mid-March, the season for growing sugar snap peas, a clearing of the weather, momentarily, a hope—silly, probably, but isn’t hope always silly? and since when has that ever stopped me?—

I plant again.  

Time Change

At the library the window behind the train table in the Youth Department frames the gray sky. Someone stabbed a pinwheel into the ground out there and it spins and spins. I gulp down my second cup of coffee. I’ve been up since 4:30 am, and now I’m dragging. Can I have a clue? A preschooler patron asks me. 

He’s doing the Scavenger Hunt and it’s a hard puzzle this month. I point him in the right direction and go back to my coffee, the sky, the pinwheel. I think I figured out the solution to all of our problems, I say to my coworker at the information desk.  

Ooh, what is it, she says. 

It’s called Don’t look at the news. 

She laughs. 

No, I mean it, I say. I refuse to participate anymore. For the past few months, I’ve been vowing to do this, but the world keeps pulling me back in. Every day another round of chaos and absurdity and horror. Nothing makes sense and I NEED IT TO MAKE SENSE, 

but I’m at the point now in the story where I’ve learned that it’s never going to make sense. Or maybe this is me. Did I tell you I’ve been up since four-thirty?

Our preschooler patron is back for another clue, and I send him off toward the early reader corner where the crocodile is hiding. It’s the time change, I say to my co-worker, taking another swig of coffee. I don’t think I ever acclimated to it. When was that, November? And here’s me, still waking up, wide awake before five in the morning and half-conking out on the couch before nine at night. It’s embarrassing. 

Uh oh. Somebody's just peed on the carpet. I’m sorry, says the harried mom. My coworker directs her and the wet child to the restroom while I grab the safety cones, throw down paper towels, stop a nearby toddler from toddling through the puddle. The preschooler patron asks for a final clue. 

It’s the tricky mouse, hiding in plain sight, taped directly on the front of the information desk. There it is, I say brightly. You found it! Now, will you erase your marks on your sheet for the next person? 

Who’s the next person? The preschooler says.  

No one has ever asked me that, and I don’t know how to answer. It’s what we do here, I say, after thinking about it for a minute. So, whoever wants to do the scavenger hunt next has a nice clean sheet, ready to go. 

Okay, he says, erasing his marks, not bothered, apparently, by the idea that other people exist and it’s nice to think about them. I give him a sticker, and he thanks me. The last of my coffee drained, I watch him skip away, avoiding the safety cones and the pee puddle, over toward the train station, the window, 

the whirling pinwheel, the clouds clearing in the sky, a lovely splash of blue, a moment of surprise as I suddenly remember this weekend is the time change, the world catching up with me, finally, 

or am I catching up with it? 

Everything/Nothing Feels Normal

The morning coffee and the Wordle, the nudge of the dog wanting to be let out, the mourning dove on the nest, eyeing me when I open the back door, and then it’s on to work at the library, the checking in and checking out of books, the pleasant banter with the patrons. Isn’t it a beautiful day? Have you read this book? Would you like a sticker?—

but then, a phone call from a patron who sounds panicky about the procedure for getting a passport (the library is a passport agency). She’s read the news and realizes her name on her driver’s license doesn’t match her birth certificate. She’s married. She took her husband’s name. Are they going to take away her right to vote? I don’t know, I tell her, feeling panicky now myself. I check the library calendar for appointments and nothing’s open until the end of April. 

April? Will that be too late? 

I don’t know, I say again. But maybe you could try the post office?

The post office!

I can hear the relief in the woman’s voice, and I tell her good luck and have a good rest of her day, not thinking until after I’ve hung up that the present administration wants to defund the post office and anyway, after all of the firings, who knows who’ll be left to process the passport applications. 

I go back to checking in books and passing out stickers, except my head won’t stop spinning. How do other people do this, act like everything is normal? Drink your morning coffee, punch out guesses on the Wordle, pat the dog’s head when you let her out. Oh, that mourning dove, how glassy and black her eyes are when she blinks at you. 

Another day, another day. 

At the library the books pass through your fingers, the comforting hum of silence, and into the Youth Department, quiet now because most of the little patrons have gone home for naps, for lunch, and only one family remaining over by the chalkboard wall, the mother cross-legged on the ABC rug, reading to the kids, the father drawing, swoops of color across the board, chalk dust on his hands. 

(Artwork graciously shared by Terrence Hinkle Jr.) 

Weekend Trip

Yesterday I went zip-lining. 

My husband and I had met up with good friends over the weekend to celebrate a milestone birthday. The friends had a day planned at a wilderness park that featured activities like rope climbing and Walking on Rickety Bridges and Dropping 100 Feet from a Tower. Doesn’t that sound like fun? said the friends. 

Not really, was what I was thinking. But what I said was, Yes! Let’s do it! The park was in its off season and we had the place mostly to ourselves, which was good, because each activity took a lot of gearing up—physically, with actual gear that had to be put on and looped and belted and tightened, and mentally, with internal pep-talks and mindful breathing and additional pep-talks, where I literally had to talk myself off a ledge. 

The ledge. Picture a very slim platform twenty feet in the air. The thinnest of thin wires shooting across. A wall of mesh on one side. On the other side: the air, the forest, an earnest park worker named Frank, who is looking up at me and telling me I can do it. “It” is walk across the wire. But how, Frank? I call down. I study the wire. It’s impossible. I know this with every fiber of my being. Meanwhile, the rest of the group is bunching up behind me on the platform. We’re all clamped in on the same rope, so if I chicken out, everyone has to turn back. 

I examine the wire again. I imagine myself swinging one leg around and setting a foot on it. I imagine myself falling and crushing Frank. You’re not going to fall, Frank says, reading my mind. You can do it, my husband says. But I can’t, I tell him. And then I don’t know what comes over me, but I do it. I inch across the wire. I make it to the other side, adrenaline surging through me so hard that I complete the remainder of the course in record time, the swingy bridges, the floating steps, some kind of vertical mesh thing? Until I’m on the ground, heart banging, breathless, laughing, laughing louder when Frank tells me that this was the easy course. Good Lord, Frank, what is the difficult course? 

And then it was on to zip-lining, which, let me tell you, was an absolute piece of cake after the insane wire walking. Before each activity Frank or one of the other earnest darling safety conscious workers takes us through the checklist, the harness tightening, the clamping of clamps, a reminder to tilt your head to the side when you reach the brake at the end of the zip-line. I nod along obediently, but then, the last time on the zip-line, flying, yoo-hoo-ing, enjoying the blur of the trees, the sky, and BAM 

my helmet hits the rope, but there’s Frank pulling me in, telling me I did great, despite the helmet-rim-sized indentation on my forehead. (Ah ha, so this is why you’re supposed to tilt your head.)

Confession: I hadn’t wanted to go on this trip. I don’t know why. Something to do with my usual anxiety, the dread before any trip, and new worries (what if the airplane flips over?), the packing and rearranging of schedules, the securing of the dog sitter. Add to that my general despair over the world, a dose of guilt about my good fortune—that I can go on a trip like this, that I can step away for a minute from the craziness. Maybe there’s a part of me too that feels I don’t deserve a break, that it’s wrong somehow to have joy, fun. Love. Friendship. 

But this can’t be true. Can this be true?  

We spend the entire day at the park, culminating in all of us watching the friend with the milestone birthday climb the 100-foot tower. We watch him step off. We cheer as he flies.