There is much I don’t like about summer, most notably bugs and heat. I don’t like that traffic sounds are louder because I generally have all the doors and windows to my house open. Summer is when every Yahoo in their monster pick-up has their music booming so loudly it’s bothersome even when your windows are up and so are theirs.

Summer is wildfire season, it’s drought season (more drought), it’s the-power-goes-out-because-another-tree-fell-on-the-power-lines season. Summer is lawn mowers, closely followed by weed whackers and blowers. Lordy, how did civilization lurch forward without mowers, weed whackers, and blowers? A mystery for the ages.

And yet… summer is also when the robins sing. They start around 5 am now, when it’s just getting light, and that sound, of birdsong at dawn, is sweeter to my ears than nearly anything save the laughter of children. Summer is when I can hear the cows across the lane munching grass through the long, mild nights. They are beef cows, so the babies stay with their mamas for months, and this occasions some bovine conversation from time to time, and I like that too.

I hear crickets in summer, chirping away, because for them cold weather won’t come around for at least half an eternity. Summer is when I hear the pitter-pitter-thump of kittens playing with each other out on the porch. I hear the skunks who live under the porch arguing with each other, and that is sometimes followed the pungent aroma of a skunk making an emphatic point. I kinda like the smell of skunk, if it’s upwind some.

I love the scent of honeysuckle on the evening breeze, the smell of freshly tedded grass hay, and the flavor of wild raspberries picked at peak ripeness. This too, is summer, and I suspect it all feels more precious now–the crickets and robins and moo cows–because my senses are not as sharp as they used to be. I know the day might come when I can’t hear much of anything, can’t taste much, and have little olfactory perception.

The day might come sooner than I think when my bad back or wobbly balance precludes yanking weeds, much less planting flowers all over the property. Plant ye geraniums, while ye may, Grace Ann.

If that winter should befall me, the memories of what I love about summer are going to matter much more than all the reasons I can think of to grumble about warm weather.  I will need to recall the flowers and forget the weeds, recall the birdies and forget the monster trucks.

What do you love about summer, despite the heat, bugs, and wildfires?

So there I am, tooling past fields of gorgeous first cutting hay, over the creek, around the hedgerow on the way to the therapeutic riding barn. Beautiful day. Warm, sunny, low humidity, great to be alive.

Up yonder I spot a box turtle crossing the road. Shell length is about six or seven inches, so maybe a young adult off on young adult business, but making predictably labored progress across the perilous asphalt. I am slowing my old Prius down, thinking to offer an assist to this worthy wayfarer, when the driver in the opposite lane beats me to it. He stops his white van, hops out, helps our terrapin friend to the culvert they were aiming for, and speeds along his way.

I am happy all the way to the barn (another thirty miles) because of that gesture of good will from one travel to another. The whole incident lasted maybe twenty seconds, but an hour later, I am still full of the goodness of human nature, the magic of life on earth, and a bunch of other fairy dust. I put the Guy In the White Van on my list of gratitudes that night because he did my heart such good.

And then a thought intrudes: So why didn’t you let him know that, Grace Ann? Why not a beep-beep of thanks? A thumbs up out the window? Anything to convey good wishes? Why hoard the fairy dust?

Upon reflection, even writing down gratitudes can be a little hoard-ish. That exercise ensures I end my day on a positive note, with a little inventory of hope and abundance. All to myself. Hmm.

The next day when I went to the barn, I was more on the alert for opportunities to say the words. “Thank you,” to the other volunteers, to the horses, to the lovely grass growing in the pastures, and to the rose bushes which have survived an assault of kudzu and grape vines that would have felled lesser flowers. I challenged myself to speak other words of fairy dust: “That was a big help!” or, “You do that so well.”

My thoughts are often congenial, but I don’t verbalize the warm-heartedness. What am I saving it for? My gratitude list? The first of the month? My death bed? I know some of my reticence is because I feel self-conscientious when people compliment me. I don’t know how to respond. I don’t want to brush off good wishes, but nobody owes me a pat on the back for anything, ever.

Baggage like that aside, I have also simply not made a habit of sharing a happy thought. When I’m teaching in the riding arena, I am trained to spot and affirm what’s going right. Take me out of that milieu, though, and the speak-your-joy mechanism goes silent. Going forward, I hope that, with all my biggity-pants vocabulary, I can make better use of, “Thank you!” “Much appreciated!” or simply, “What you did is wonderful.”

What do you have trouble saying?

PS For the two remaining individuals who might not know it, A Gentleman of Modest Ambitions has published in the web store, in print, and on all the retail sites!

I came across a recent article in the Washington Post about the benefits of talking to strangers (paywalled) that cited Nicholas Epley’s book, A Little More Social. When we make small talk at the bus stop or lament the lack of cambozola cheese with a fellow shopper in the dairy aisle, we end up feeling more connected to our community, safer, less stressed, more confident, and better able to tolerate uncertainty.

Even exchanging smiles or merely making eye contact can carry many of the same benefits.

My next thought was about all the ways I used to encounter strangers that are no longer part of my life: checking out books at the library, buying books, buying clothing, going out to watch a movie, banking, attending writers’ conferences, sitting in the courthouse hallway between cases… Some of the changes have to do with shifts in my life, but most are attributable to the internet.

I bank, shop for clothes, buy books, watch movies (albeit very rarely), manage continuing professional education, and check books out of the library online. This raises the possibility that it’s not just staring at screens per se that makes them problematic, and it’s not entirely the addictive and toxic design behind a lot of screen environments that causes harm, but rather, the whole issue is compounded by the sheer isolation we’ve traded for all this online “convenience.” (And doom scrolling on social is sold to us as “connection,” of course.)

I could and have shopped the rummage stores for the items on my Lord Julian covers, or I can cruise Etsy. I could go to the local library branch and browse the physical volumes, or I can just pull up Libby. I still do go to the bank to deposit checks, because I refuse to put a banking app on my phone (“Apps are spyware,” she mutters, glancing furtively to the right and left.) I avoid self-check out like it’s eight hours of elbow-grease housework, and I always chat up my checker.

The biggest way that I’ve put strangers in my life, though, is by volunteering. The cast at the therapeutic riding barn changes daily, and I might see some of the other volunteers once a month or even less frequently. They are “safe strangers,” like the checker at the grocery store, the librarian, and the bank teller. In each case, and especially at the barn, I have a place to start.

The grocery store looks busy, the bank has new flowers out front, the oldest pony in the barn has a birthday coming up. If all else fails there’s the weather. Maybe living alone has made me particularly aware of whether I’m interacting with a human or a keypad, but I think it’s pretty important for me to keep the casual, fleeting, exchanges in my life as long as I’m able to.

Do you talk to strangers? Does the lady at the coffee kiosk sometimes hear your troubles? Do you nod to the other regulars on your walking circuit? Where are the strangers in your life?

I noted elsewhere in this space that I went on weight loss drugs mostly because I  wanted to give eighty-year-old me the best shot at life and good health possible. Another decade of obesity was counter that agenda. Eighty-year-old me sometimes chimes in on my financial decisions, too. She will often tell me, “I am glad you put that money in an interest bearing account, kiddo. Inflation is a thing, and I will still need some good chocolate on my grocery list!” She also reminds me, “You can’t take it with you, and that is a worthy cause. Pony up and be grateful you can help.” The old girl speaks her mind.

Six-year-old me has different wisdom to offer. I was still wetting my bed at that age, much to my horror, but six-year-old me soldiered on any way, and learned to run a load of wash in the middle of the night. She knows what it’s like when the body just Does Things–gets morning sick for eight straight months, has migraines, loses hair, gets wrinkly–and she tells me that it’s just part of being human, and not the sum of me as a person. Cope as best you can, and keep moving forward. What a comforting view of matters.

Sixteen-year-old me goes more in the bad example column. She made stupid romantic choices, and stuck by them with ferocious stubbornness. Not to be outdone, twenty-eight-year-old me made even dumber wrong turns. I feel compassion for the loneliness and invisibility that drove my decisions at those ages, and I am also still carrying the regrets those choices inspired. Sixteen- and twenty-eight year old me have to occasionally whop me upside the head with a stout, “Don’t be like us. LEARN from your mistakes.” Tough love, I suppose.

Fifty-year-old me is agog at having signed her first publishing contract–at fifty! She wanders around grinning and telling me, “The best is yet to be!” Sometimes, I want to smack her, but her joy is so real and she just might be right. The party is far from over.

I could go on. Fifteen-year-old me was pretty selfish, and thirty-four-year-old me was seriously down. She got the notion to get her backside on a horse, and lo, that medicine still helps me keep life in a gentler perspective.

All of these incarnations of Grace are still very much with me, and I have learned from each of them. Maybe this Ages of Me view of myself is part of why I seldom feel lonely. We are busy, us girls, living life and trying to make sense of it, and that’s a team effort!

Do your previous selves and future selves ever pipe up in your life? Do they inspire, guide, or make you wince?

PS: The print version of A Gentleman of Modest Ambitions is available from Amazon, and the first batch of ebook ARCs has gone out. If you’d like an ARC file, please email me at [email protected].

I am not one to give up on a book I’m reading, but I recently set aside a biography of Frederick Douglass. It was well written, wonderfully researched, compelling, fascinating, and really, really sad. That guy struggled his whole life for a just cause–struggled to the very limits of his human endurance–and saw only inadequate progress, all but thrown away almost as soon as it was won, and now we’re backsliding on that progress again at warp speed. For my nighty-nighty reading, I am not up to the challenge of absorbing that content.

The material is important, and I will finish the book, but it cannot be my bedtime reading.

Bedtime reading, from the time I was in grade school, has been for detaching from the day, going to a place where justice triumphs, truth and courage carry the day, and love conquers all (by the end of the book). It takes about twenty minutes for a good story to reduce our stress by nearly two thirds, improve our sleep quality, enhance our vocabulary, broaden our capacity for empathy, and fortify the neural wiring that supports our capacity for critical thinking.

I need that kind of bed time reading. I also need to get my hands in the dirt. We are one third of the way through May, and I am way behind with my annuals. Playing catch up will be excellent stress reduction, and when I see the dahlias, impatiens, and geraniums all over the property, I will be very glad I spent that time out in the fresh air and sunshine. I might even bust over and get some hanging baskets.

I need to walk where it’s green and growing, in nature, such as old farmland still makes that claim. I found a woods to walk in near the horse barn, and I will be making time to stop there again as the need for shady paths grows in the coming weeks.

I need to be around animals. Domestic animals, especially, and I like seeing wild animals going about their business too. My particular friends are cats and horses, but I am very fond of dogs, bunnies, birds in the wild, and cows. (Raccoons, not so much.)

As a therapist once said to me, “If you need it to be happy, you need it.” These are elements of my life I need to be functional and happy–good bed time reading, flower gardening, walks in nature, beasts. And how wonderful for me, I can have them all right now, and that has made much of the present tumult bearable.

What simple, available measures are helping you keep your balance these days?

PS: A print version of A Gentleman of Modest Ambitions is available from Amazon. I will do the Ingram Spark print version too, but that takes a few weeks to process, and is always more expensive than the Amazon edition (blast, darn, and phooey).

I was at the horse barn this week, taking a mighty steed to his stall after a lesson, and one of the other volunteers mentioned that she was looking for a paying horse barn job. She is mid-twenties, and new to the equine scene, but a quick and enthusiastic learner who has a natural aptitude for working with horses. She was convinced that lack of experience was going to doom her ambitions.

“Don’t sell yourself short. Experience can be a real liability. For some people, experience can result in close-mindedness, an unwillingness to learn, and a tendency to cling to out-of-date practices. Give me somebody willing to work hard and learn over somebody who knew it all ten years ago. Besides, you truly love horses, and that’s worth any number of years simply making a living off them.”

She just stared at me, and then started to tear up. She’s college-educated but going through that, “Maybe my ladder has been leaning against the wrong building this whole time,” questioning which seems to accompany the quarter-life crisis

I conclude that my perspective–inexperience can be a tremendous asset–was the first encouraging word she’d had.  I could only speak from that viewpoint because I recall how easy it was to come up with a plot a hundred books ago. The ideas fell in a gentle shower, and characters whispered to me of all manner of compelling flaws and wounds. Writing life was sweet, and I had no idea what a gift my inexperience was at the time.

As I was driving home, it occurred to me that my exchange with my barn buddy was a micro-example of qualities I love about my season in life. In earlier years, I might not have been aware enough to realize my fellow volunteer was asking for reassurance in the first place. In the second, I would not have had a ready argument against experience as the sine qua non. Of course, the ideal employee will have some experience, and also an open mind and a willingness to work hard, in addition to a heart for horses, but that wasn’t the point to make at the time.

I have made good hires and bad, I have been a good hire and a poor fit. I have needed encouragement, and been given some when I didn’t expect it. I’ve also been dismissed, ignored, and told my dreams were ridiculous. I hope all this living has made me a kinder, less self-centered person. If nothing else, all this living has made me want to be a kinder, less self-centered person, and I will never be too old to strive in that direction.

What do you like about your current season in life?

If you want to see me shoot around the room backward with flames pouring out of my nose, just tell me, “We are each responsible for our own happiness.” I’m not sure why I get all riled up at this phrase, but I suspect it has something to do with representing myriad foster children who went from lousy homes to lousy foster homes (maltreatment in foster homes is estimated conservatively at 25% of placements), while being told they should be grateful to have any roof over their heads.

Or it has to do with rampaging cow elephant menstrual cramps for which no medication was supposedly effective until I was well into adulthood and then it was available only with a prescription. I am talking “pass out from the pain” cramps. Every month from age twelve.

Or it has do with South Sudan, Gaza, on and on and on.

I do believe that I am responsible for accepting and managing my feelings. I am responsible for my actions. I am responsible, if I’m miserable, for trying to change that. I type those words, though, from a place of enormous, multi-faceted privilege. I am relatively healthy, I am solvent (finally, for now), I am white, I am single, I am dwelling where the air and water are pretty clean, I was taught to read and write… all good things, but even somebody with all those high cards can get wrapped into an abusive relationship, poverty, disease, or all three at once.

To me, telling that unfortunate person that they are sad, overwhelmed, anxious, and cynical because they just “choose” to focus on the negative is hubris beyond description. It’s a variety of victim shaming and blaming masquerading as a truism, and one that excuses abusers, wealth hoarders, and snake oil salesmen from the consequences of their actions.

So, this is me with my nose aflame. I’ve posted a similar rant about “Ma’am, just calm down.” (Flames out my ears). I am also no great fan of, “What do you learn on your good days?” though that one (of which my mother was fond) doesn’t quite rise to the level of flames. Can’t we just have a bad day from which no Calvinistic sermon must be wrung? And I give, “No job worth doing is easy,” a side-eye, mostly because my mom used that to describe parenting me.

Lots of jobs worth doing are delightful–arranging flowers to take to a friend, baking brownies for the office, walking the dog, sending a get well card… even writing ranty-blog posts can be a pure joy, especially the part about looking for pet pictures to go with the words.

What received wisdom grates on you? What aphorism do you hear with an inward side-eye? “That which does not kill me, makes me stronger”? “If at first you don’t succeed…?”

Photo Credit: Ridin’ Buddy extraordinaire, Alison Duvall

There sure are a lot of people making money off the non-profit sector!

This revelation has dawned as I’ve begun researching how I can raise money for my therapeutic riding barn. As sure as tech loves algorithms, if I’m nosing around the topic, “Grant funding for…” then I am besieged by a bazillion newsletters, workshops, webinars, and free!!! downloads, all purporting to make fundraising so much easier.

I was particularly intrigued by one shop that was featuring a presentation on The Trust Equation, put forth in The Trusted Advisor by David H. Maister, Charles H. Green, and Robert M. Galford. This 25-year-old book (with updated anniversary edition) is posting on Amazon as I write this as the No. 1 bestseller in the consulting category.

The residual message is as follows: Trust is comprised of four factors: Credibility (do you have the skills and standing you claim you do?) Reliability (do you keep your word?) Intimacy (can you appropriately handle sensitive personal information?). As I read that list, I’m nodding along. If a doc is going to prescribe treatment for me, I want all three of those factors in place, but the critical factor is apparently number four.

In whose interests are you acting? If you have all the creds, you always show up and follow through, and you treat sensitive information respectfully, you can still blow the trust test by being blatantly self-interested. The doc who prescribes a course of treatment for me that just happens to occur over the next twelve months in their office, at the low, low price of half my retirement because insurance just doesn’t take snake oil and raspberry ketones seriously… I’ll get a second opinion.

If self-interest is a trust killer, I wonder how we are to navigate, in a society that keeps so many of us in scarcity situations, and saturates media and culture with scarcity messages, and exempts next to nothing (including very especially health care and higher/applied education) from profit motives.

The logical end point of a society focused on greed and scarcity is that neither people nor institutions can be trusted. Everybody–docs, teachers, lawyers, journalists, farmers, dog walkers, day care providers, architects, CPAs–has loans or credit cards to pay off, and if we don’t have loans breathing down our necks we have the prospect of an impecunious old age staring us in the face.

Even if people are motivated by genuine altruism, in an environment where greed is normalized and even applauded, we don’t trust altruism and good moral health when we run smack into them.

This is all very bleak, and yet, I still believe most people are honest most of the time, and there’s science to back me up on that. Especially if we’ve had a solid primary school education, we tend to have active shoulder angels and a sense of empathy for others.

And yet, I’ve been schnookered, by bosses, boyfriends, clients, even family members. My trust radar has let me down in some pretty serious ways. How do you know whom to trust? Does it matter who trusts you?

PS: Pre-order links are up for An Heir of Possibilities!

Mom and I in Ireland ca 1981.

My mother was an aggressively competent housekeeper and cook. She mitered the corners of our bed sheets, ironed our pillowcases (in a precise sequence of folds so the pillowcase only had to be turned over once), and had dinner on the table every night at 6 pm, for a household that for years included at least nine people.

I thought she was a little nuts. Ironing pillow cases? If you make your bed without a lot of frills nobody sees that pillowcase, and if it stays on the bed for more than one night, it gets all wrinkly. Why in the world…? She tried to show me how to miter corners on sheets, and I asked her why bother doing it that way?

Her answer: If you’re ever in the army you’ll have to know how to do it exactly like this.
Me to myself: Welp, guess I won’t be enlisting, will I?

Mom and Dad in retirement

As I grew older (and less snarky?), I realized how very, very little agency my mother had compared to me. She was a registered nurse, but “had” to quit nursing when she got married, because nurses were not allowed to be married. Huh? She could only use credit cards in my dad’s name. She never learned how to figure a 15% tip, she ran the household on the budget my dad allotted to her. She had no checking or savings account in her own name. She was so painfully Catholic that the only birth control she’d use was rhythm, and that was apparently ineffective.

All she had was that house and that kitchen, so she made the tastiest, most comfy, inviting lemonade she could out of it. I have been thinking about Mom (and all the moms) this week, as I have felt overwhelmed by world events. Her generation dealt with the aftermath of WWI, the Great Depression, WWII, Korea, McCarthyism… they sent grown children off to Vietnam, endured the assassinations and violence of the 60s, watched Watergate unfold… How often did Mom feel as if she was powerless to do a stinkin’ thing about a world run amok?’

But she put together great meals, was the surrogate mom to the grad students far from home, always had time to visit with the neighbors, and was always willing to get up and dance for joy. Maybe she was a little nuts, but she was also resilient, resourceful, and for the most part, lots of fun.

Her example inspires me. I am no sort of cook and my house is a roofed campsite. What I can do is go on walks, where I express thanks for the birds, flowers, clean air, bugs (even the bugs), the sound of water in the stream, the scent of mowed grass, the quiet, the freedom to walk at mid-afternoon, the ability to walk…

The world does not suddenly right itself if I go on a thank-you-birds walk, or if I bring cookies to the barn, or plant a flat of pansies by the mailboxes, but I am a little righted, and that is an excellent place to start.

Mom ironed pillowcases, I plant pansies that won’t last but a few weeks. How are you keeping your balance these days?

PS: Final cover for A Gentleman of Modest Ambitions!

For the past couple weeks I have been bottle feeding a kitten. I came home one night, saw that the corner of the porch where the mama had made her nest was empty. I figured mama cat had moved the nest, as mama cats will do. Well… nope. I walked into the house, and there was this one little gray scrap of feline yelling her fuzzy head off about knowing her rights and this is an outrage and bring me a flagon of ale, wench!

The particular mama cat making free with the porch was feral. Had never been in the house to my knowledge. How the kitten got into the house will forever remain a mystery. Her eyes weren’t open yet, so that’s a nope.

Anyhoo, she’s driving me nuts. Getting her to take a bottle was easy, but wee little kittens should be offered six to eight feedings a day, preferably on a strict schedule. There goes my REM sleep. The little darlings are prone to diarrhea and dehydration even when being fed the fancy milk replacer that I happen to keep on hand. My kitten forgot to read the part about the strict schedule. Some days she’s a bottomless hog, other days she is morally opposed to eating.

On those days, I fret and worry and offer the bottle every hour, often to no avail. I hate the dragging anxiety, the dragging spirits, the sense of being unequal to the challenge of getting this kitten safely past infancy.

In other words, I feel with this kitten a ghost of what befell me when I was the single working mom of a new baby. Beloved Offspring did not sleep through the night for THREE YEARS (yes, I tried everything that was legal), but who could blame her when the person who brought her into the world was gone eleven or twelve hours a day? If she wanted to spend time with me, 3 am was always wide open.

In her first four years of life, I bought my first and only house, and was promptly laid off. Found a job, got laid off again. Money was a constant issue (no child support). Her health was a constant source of anxiety. I was not a big sister to any babies for whom I had any responsibility, I never babysat infants. The internet hadn’t been invented yet, and ye gods… That feeling when you know something is wrong with your child, but they can’t tell you what, or if it’s serious or just gas again…

When I look back on that season of my life, it was hell. I was alone, exhausted, bewildered, and scared, with no end in sight. People would say to me, “Enjoy these years when she’s little. They go by so quickly!”

They did not go by quickly at all, which probably explains why, now that I have two grandchildren, I am pretty happy to admire them for the most part from afar. I am snakebit when it comes to infants. I forget just how I came to be that way, but the kitten is providing an vivid reminder. She is emphatically renewing my compassion for the parents of infants, and also my compassion for a younger me.

I tried so hard, I was so overwhelmed, and I felt so inadequate.

When you look back, are there, “I don’t know how I did that” times in your life? Is there a period about which hindsight has become kind sight?