I know a lady who has a one month old daughter and an eighteen month old son. She has her groceries delivered, though it costs a little more. No meltdowns in the produce section, no fussing with car seats in the pouring down rain. No having to pull over and produce a bottle or two lest the heavens be sundered by audible evidence of infantile hunger pangs.

Another friend reads a lot of library books but hasn’t been inside the actual library building since “before the pandemic.”

As a warp nine introvert, I need a lot of solitude. Being around people, even my favorite people in the whole world, saps my energy. And yet, solitude can become isolation, and that–for me–has downsides. When I don’t have to make small talk at the post office, when I no longer know the check-out staff at my fave grocery store by name, when the simple courtesy of holding the door for somebody carrying packages isn’t part of my day… I lose both a sense of connection to my local community and opportunities to casually accommodate that community.

If the postal clerk speaks with an accent, I have to exert myself to listen more carefully. If the checkout lady wants to maunder on about her son in Alaska, I expect myself to offer some empathy for a parent whose only child is so far away. If I let the door slam on somebody carrying too many packages, I will feel remorse for my obliviousness to a stranger’s situation. I must, in other words, accommodate agendas other than my own, and  do so as graciously as possible, because I need those people to be gracious toward me as well.

To the extent screens preserve us from the inconvenience of in-person encounters in our various village squares, screens might also be making it easier for us to dehumanize, ignore, and resent one another. Screen addiction might make it very easy to divide us from people with whom we really have much in common. This has been one of my pet theories, at least, when confronted with one of my siblings foghorning about how technology keeps us all so wonderfully connected.

I read this issue of Dense Discovery and got some insight into how my sibling and I might both be right. The jist of the newsletter and the article it cites is: Screens make it possible to stay in touch with the people we’re already close to–friends and family–and to feel connected to genuine strangers (Taylor Swift, Benedict Cumberbatch), but screens cut out that middle orbital of neighbors, casual acquaintances, and “repetitive strangers,” like the checkout ladies and Tuesday morning library patrons.

That middle band of acquaintance is where we learn tolerance, and where we get a sense of belonging not to a family or a gym, but to a society. It’s where we turn for our next good friends, and where we sometimes must turn in emergencies. The middle ground matters, in other words, and we might well be losing it to screens.

So this is me, thinking about ways to put down the screens and go for a walk, shop in person, or visit the actual, wonderful library. Are there activities you could do on a screen but prefer to handle in person? Activities you will NEVER allow into the virtual realm?

PS: For those out weeding the geraniums, enjoying the fresh air, or planning that summer vacay… Lord Julian’s ninth mystery, A Gentleman of Questionable Judgment, has officially hit the shelves!

As I was growing up, my family did not take vacations. Logistics were an issue. How do you get nine people and all their luggage into one car? How do you stop World War III from breaking out in the way-back of the station wagon? Once the big kids peeled out of formation, we did spend some summers in San Diego while my dad took sabbatical leave at UCSD or Scripps.

Those excursions were my idea of purgatory. I suspect my sainted mother would echo my sentiment. You try driving for five days each way with all those kids….

My parents did not go out on date nights either. They entertained plenty, and accepted reciprocal invitations, but the idea of indulging in personal wish list activities for a few hours with a spouse… nah. And babysitting was not an issue by the time I came along. The older kids got stuck with that chore.

Why is this on my mind? Because I am happy to report that Lord Julian’s tenth tale, A Gentleman in Possession of Secrets, is complete in draft. Yay, yippee, yahoo, and gaudeamus igitur! This moment in the writing process, when the manuscript is complete in draft, is nonetheless always a little fraught for me. On the one hand, I feel great relief. I know once I have the first draft, I can make a book out of it. Phew!

But on the other hand… now what I am supposed to write? I am not an author who has stories ideas coming out my ears. Every time I stare at a blank screen, I fret that I’ve written my last book, and the house is not paid off. (I also want to see Alaska.) I need to come up with a really juicy premise immediately so I can get back to work!

That maybe, for a couple of weeks or so, I am NOT supposed to write, strikes me as preposterous. Writing is what I do. I am a writer. I love to write. The idea that I will create better books if I focus instead on my flower beds right now feels like blasphemy and darned risky. To suggest that I will come up with a really interesting pair of protagonists if I test ride some lease horses. (Did I just write that!?) feels absurd.

What is really absurd is not knowing how to take a break, Grace Ann.

I’m pretty good a micro-indulgences, like the perfect cup of tea, a bouquet of yard flowers, or  good book, but I have fallen out of the habit of travel to Scotland or Ireland, big writing retreats, or transcontinental road trips. The pandemic has something to do with my narrowed appetite for rejuvenation, but looking at my parents, I suspect the Depression, the Potato Famine and even the Siege of Derry (1689) might figure into the mix too. (Uncle Henry was a royalist.)

So I went flower shopping, and tonight I put in my whole bed of impatiens. It’s a start. The next big idea hasn’t come to me yet, but I still have the blue salvia, perennial lavender, rosemary, and sunflowers to go.

Who showed you that it’s good to take breaks, to go on the occasional frolic, to have fun on purpose? Or is the value of goofing off a premise you’re still testing?

I thought the songbirds were swerving my property because I have a lot of cats. Or maybe bird flu got here a while ago and we’re only just noticing it. Maybe I stopped hearing the birdies first thing in the day because migration patterns are changing due to light pollution and loss of habitat.

But this week, I got a pair of hearing aids, and… the birds are still here! They are still singing, they are still out in the trees by the stream, greeting the day. I cried about halfway to the barn ,just because I could once again hear the birdies, and because they never left me after all. Their little arias are so good for my mood, and such an affirmation that we haven’t screwed up the planet beyond all recall just yet. What do you know, there are birdies singing at the horse barn too. I never knew…

The hearing aids are an adjustment–they make my own voice louder, so I’m tending to speak too softly. I’ll get over that, and I’ll learn which settings work best for which environments. They are uncomfortable, but I’m assured the discomfort fades with regular use. I might need child-sized devices, which we can sort out if necessary.

My hearing loss is following the most common pattern–the higher frequencies and the speech frequencies are hit the worst. I can still hear the washer and dryer, can still hear all the lawn mowers, even at a great distance (just my luck). I no longer detect the stream babbling when I sit on my porch in the evening. I cannot distinguish conversational speech clearly against a noisy background either, and that’s a life skill I still need. I also need to be able to think, and there is a scary-straight line correlation between loss of hearing and cognitive decline.

Recent studies posit that up to 32% of dementia cases could be prevented if those of us with poor hearing had the devices we needed to address the problem.

Untreated hearing loss means we lose the link between a sound and its meaning. In the nanoseconds while we’re sorting possibilities (“Did she say death and taxes or debt and taxes?”) we miss what else is being said, as well as context for what has been said already. Then we stop going out to lunch with friends, because we get tired of having to say, “I didn’t catch that. I’m sorry, could you repeat that? I missed what you said about your dog…” So we isolate ourselves socially, and cognition takes yet another hit. Untreated hearing loss is also linked to a much higher risk of depression, and you can just imagine your brain cells moaning over that news…

I need every possible neuron on the job at full strength for as long as possible, so I betook myself to the audiologist.

I bash for-greed medicine all the time, and these hearing aids were very, very expensive. But they work reasonably well, they are not obvious to the casual observer, and they gave me back the time of the singing birds and the music of my little rural stream. I am beyond grateful that I could afford them (for now), and every time I step outside–to take out the trash, to fetch the groceries from the car–I hear the birds singing, and I have a reason to stop and simply rejoice.

In the midst of these trying days, what gives you even the smallest reason to rejoice?

PS: I sent out the first batch of Advanced Reader Copies for A Gentleman of Questionable Judgment. I still have some open slots, so if you’d like an ARC file, just email me at [email protected] and let me know what device you read on.

As an undergraduate at Penn State, I became involved with the campus newspaper, The Daily Collegian. Our newsroom was housed in the Carnegie Building, a venerable old relic from the early 1900s. I never gave much thought to the building’s name, figured it had something to do with Andrew Carnegie, who was a Rich Guy who lived Back When.

I did know that Carnegie Building had been the university’s first free-standing library building, and it seemed appropriate that the School of Communications should inherit Carnegie Building (the largest school of communications in the country, who knew?).

Fast forward a few decades and I’ve just finished a biography of Andrew Carnegie, who was, in his day… the richest man in the world, richer by far than the oligarchs we have underfoot these days. He was the son of a Scottish weaver put out of work by technical advances in loom design. The family emigrated to Pittsburgh in 1848, where they had friends and relatives already established in the United States.

Carnegie rose to great wealth through a combination of luck (tons and tons of luck), charm, genuine business smarts, and sheer ruthlessness. His schtick was making steel, and he happened into that business at a time when America was building infrastructure at a phenomenal rate. Railways, bridges, skyscrapers, military vessels… all required tons and tons of steel, and Carnegie cornered the market, largely because eastern European immigrants were willing to work under hideous conditions rather than starve. Then too, he benefited enormously from protectionist tariffs levied to keep the American steel industry from having to compete with established suppliers overseas.

The Sherman Anti-trust Act owes much to men like Carnegie who colluded endlessly to enrich themselves and one another at the expense of their employees and customers.

But at the age of thirty-seven, Carnegie stepped away from active business. He turned over his companies to managers, he started looking for a buyer for what would become his U.S. Steel stock (John Pierpont Morgan took the bait many years later), and he began giving away enormous sums of money. He made it his public mission to give away staggering sums, funding all manner of public and academic libraries, technical schools, university posts, museums, and “Hero Funds,” to support the survivors of those who’d lost their lives trying to save others.

He also became an outspoken and tireless advocate for peace, using his social stature to presume on six different presidents more or less at will. He became an object of ridicule in old age, because men like Teddy Roosevelt regarded peace advocacy as so much impractical ranting from clueless dreamers. This did not stop Roosevelt from asking Carnegie for huge sums to fund a year long big game “research” hunt, and Carnegie came through.

This book did not sit well with me, in part because Carnegie was so contradictory. Maybe fiction writing and reading–or the news trying to impersonate entertainment?– has conditioned me to look for characters who fit into simple functional roles–protagonist, sidekick, mentor, antagonist. But I was also struck by the fact that this one small man (5 foot 3) was worth much more than any of our present day oligarchs in constant dollars, and he chose to use his wealth to found more than 1700 libraries in North America alone. One of his charitable foundations was responsible for the grant that resulted in Sesame Street and the Children’s Television Workshop.

His influence is nigh incalculable, as both a philanthropist, and as an example of a capitalist who could justify taking lives (ten workers were killed when strikebreakers were brought in to the Homestead Mill) for the sake of… money?

In any case, I found Carnegie’s tale important both for the good he did and the evil he perpetrated, but his story isn’t well known. If we included his Gospel of Wealth in our economics curricula (essentially, Rabbie Burns socialism under the guise of noblesse oblige), would we be where we are? Would we be in a worse place yet?

The book made me think and question some of my assumptions, and that’s a good thing. What important life stories have you come across that either inspired or troubled you?

PS: Look who finally got a cover!

I have plowed my way into what I call a compression phase, when the to-do’s pile up, the unforeseen must-do’s crowd in, and it’s an especially good idea (and hard) to stay organized. I knew I was ramping up efforts in the certified therapeutic riding instructor direction, and I knew I had teaching-how-to-write gigs in early April and late May. (I am not at all sure how I ended up with book releases back to back in April and May, though. Very puzzling.)

I did not know yard guy and I would part ways, and that I’d have to acquire, learn how to wrangle, and build into the schedule use of, a riding mower, blower, and weed whacker (all electric because I said so). This will doubtless change how I look at my flower gardening this year (perennials, here I come), but the weeds will come along in fine style no matter what I do. I own a very fertile two acres.

And then allergy season turned into, “Caught you a virus, sister,” season. Then the internet service provider (the one available where I live) crapped out and we have no word when service will be restored. Thank the heavenly powers for the ability to hotspot from my iPhone.

All of which is to say, things are busy, and except for the bug I caught, busy in a pretty good way. I’m doing the stuff I love to do (writing first thing most days; the occasional lunch with writing, horsing, or life buddies; ending each day with good reading). The yard work is something I used to do and can enjoy again, now that I have the right tools. The instructor certification process has taught me a lot and put me in the company of wonderful horses and great people.

BUT as I make my to-do lists every night, I’m feeling a little daunted. Those lists are long, and they are getting that hyper-detailed, don’t-forget-anything quality that suggests anxiety and overwhelm. Boo, hiss, wurra, wurra on anxiety and overwhelm. Those monsters tend to be very bad for the writing, I must not let them rule the day.

So I started making another list, and in the grand tradition this one has five things on it. This is my “For You,” list. I put on it small gestures and moments I can build into the day that send the message: You’re fine. There’s time for you to take care of yourself. No need to push any harder.

Stuff like: Linger in the shower for an extra couple minutes. Pick a bouquet of yard flowers for the bathroom. Have one of those cups of tea just sitting on the porch steps talking to the cats. Stop at the battlefield overlook on your way home from lunch and just breathe for a few minutes. Post something that encourages another writer (because when we are kind, WE feel empowered, and well we should).

I might not hit everything on the For You list, but even looking for the places in my day where I can pull over and pause makes the rest of my activity feel less like an obstacle course to be completed, day after day.

What are a few little moments you could add to your day if it feels like the to-do list is stealing your confidence and peace?

To earn the therapeutic riding instructor certification I’m pursuing takes a lot of steps. One requirement is for volunteer hours at a certified therapeutic riding facility, another is student teaching hours. You must also spend time demonstrating your knowledge of horse care for both well and unwell horses. A first aid certification figures early in the process as does a test of professional standards applicable to the discipline.

The list is long and complicated, and one of the items near the end is a video of you “demonstration teaching” a particular riding pattern.

In the twenty minutes allotted for this exercise, you as the instructor are supposed to hit about a 100 points of riding pedagogy. How exactly do we cue the horse to shift from standing still to walking? Walking to trotting? Trotting back to walking?

Blah, blah, blah, and the video cannot be edited in any manner. You either nail this video, or you are denied permission to take the final tests. No pressure.

I am very fortunate that another barn friend is working toward certification at the same time I am. We were airing our frustrations recently–this process is demanding–and he asked me, “So what will you get our demonstration rider by way of a thank you gift?”

Huh? “Erm… I’ll have to give that some thought.” [Our demonstration rider deserves the very best Gran Prix jumper on the planet.)

My friend went off on a flight about gift baskets, gift certificates, maybe both, and of course the videographer deserves a thank you too. For her he had another bushel of keen thank you ideas.

I felt kinda slapped up side the head. He was thinking of thank yous, I was thinking of my next heartfelt bellyache. At another point in our discussions, he mentioned that he’d bought a bottle of champagne to open when he completed all of his pre-final test requirements.

Not for when he earned the certification, which he will do, but for when he was staring down the barrel of the final exam.

“What if you flunk?” I asked, because about a third of the people taking the test do flunk, and every one of those good souls completed all the preliminary rigamarole I’m still grinding away at.

“I’ve flunked so many tests in my life. I’ll take the stinkin’ thing again if I have to. They let you do that.”

My friend has cultivated something beyond a growth mindset. He has that, certainly, but he’s also looking for opportunities to be appreciative and grateful, looking for reasons to celebrate. Looking for solutions rather than focusing on problems and decks that feel stacked.

He has been an inspiration to me, in that we are both trying to solve a problem–how do I get this certification?–but his process is more joyous, grateful, and optimistic than mine. That might be partly personality, but it’s also an attitude that can be cultivated.

This is me, going shopping for some bubbly!

Have you ever been honkin’ along, just doing your usual, when somebody brings you up short with the example they set or the outlook they adopt?

PS: The (formerly) Elusive Earl is now available in print, from the web store, and from the usual retail suspects!

I forget where I came across this idea, but it has been on my mind lately: We are wired to value what we suffer for. This aspect of human psychology is at least in part behind hazing, boot camp, most fitness programs, freshman weeder courses, and the practice of sending young people on evangelical missions. If you spend 18-24 months having doors slammed in your face, living on a shoestring, homesick, and subjected to rigid social strictures, you are set up to conclude that the inspiration for all those miseries must be a pretty worthy part of life.

A pernicious corollary is the notion of no pain/no gain.

In my life, I can certainly see the “if I’m suffering for this cause, it must be worthy” mechanism at work in parenting. Nothing wrung me out emotionally, physically, or financially, like being a single mom. I don’t think I have another slog like that in me, not for any motivation on this earth… except maybe my grand kids? I got caught up in the same rip tide, though, with child welfare lawyering.

That is largely miserable work. An occasional child would be adopted into a good situation where even the birth parents regarded the outcome as optimal all concerned, but the opposite scenario–abuse in foster homes, children’s lives ending tragically, social workers betraying trust, judges making stupid decisions for stupid reasons–was too often the case. But I stayed at my oar for 25 years, thinking that it was “important” work, and I knew how to do it, so I should spare others from having to take it on.

What has been puzzling me lately is that this dynamic–if I’m suffering for it, it must be a worthy relationship/institution/cause–typically pops up in precisely the areas where maintaining some objective judgment, or keeping a healthy boundary, is particularly important. We suffer for family, for the company that employs us, for the church that never seems to have enough volunteers or money, no matter what its bank balance is or how many seemingly not-so-busy people attend services.

On the one hand, I can see where this retrofitting of meaning onto suffering saves us from feeling stupid and betrayed, but on the other hand, when we are being foolish and being betrayed, we need to see pointless or unjust suffering for exactly what it is.

Have you ever talked yourself into sticking with a painful situation because “the work/relationship/cause is important,” only to heave yourself free eventually, and realize you should have walked much sooner?

I’ve sent out my ARCs for The Elusive Earl, and he’s already on sale in the web store  and in print (Friday he’ll be available from the retail sites), but give me a couple weeks, and I’ll be putting together the ARC file for A Gentleman of Questionable Judgment!

I know the pandemic is truly in the rear view mirror because writers are starting to get together for conferences again. Not the monster cons of yore, which only about twenty venues in the whole country could accommodate, but nice little get togethers at the retreat or single-hotel level.

I agreed to participate in one of those gatherings near my home (DC and Baltimore are both handy), and arrived the night before I was supposed to present. I needed the time to get back in conference mode, where reading name tags without appearing to and listening over a lot of conversations in noise-bouncing rooms are mandatory skills. I also did not want to leave the venue to find dinner, which would have necessitated driving in suburban DC. That activity belongs on my un-bucket list, so I just invited another name-tag-wearing writer to join me at the hotel restaurant.

I did not in fact catch her name, She’s of mature years, a doctor on hiatus from the chaos of American medicine, originally from West Virginia, and very interested in Regency history. We talked and talked, about the parallels between the Regency’s notorious Six Acts and the current sitch. About older women being pushed out and taking healthy organizational culture with them. About too many older men facing a bleak terrain (partly of their own making) after retirement.

I came away from dinner having been pushed to listen reflectively rather than defensively, having been challenged to look for areas of common perspective and areas where my perspective was too narrow. I felt heard at times, and once I even laughed out loud. My conference skills are rusty. I can’t read people all that well, I’m not as schmoove with my small talk as I wish I were, but I was reminded at the dinner table that it’s good for me to sit down with strangers from time to time. Really good.

Of course, a conference is an ideal place to do that. I’m guaranteed some mutual topics of interest, my usual obligations are for the most part parked at home, and I’m safely in public the whole time. I was struck though, by how few places in my life, and in American life in general, are good places to pass the time with strangers. Six days a week, most of us either work or worship with the same people. Americans also don’t have a “local,” a watering hole that’s part club part hideout.

Why build a society like that, where it’s hard to find new connections, or is this a personal problem, that I can solve by joining a reading group or hanging out at the library? Hanging out at the basketball court in the park? Where do we have fertile ground for new connections that are safe enough to be inviting and novel enough to be interesting? Where do I find such settings–if anywhere–in my books?

Thus am I inspired to ask new questions and investigate new answers, because I had a lovely dinner with a stranger. When was the last time an encounter with a stranger brightened your day? Have you been the day-brightening stranger?

PS: I’ve already sent out the first batch of Advanced Reader Files for The Elusive Earl, book three in the Bad Heir Day Tales series, and the print version has gone live as well. If you’d like an ARC file, please let me know at [email protected]. I do have an ARC limit, but we’re not quite there yet!

I was well into adulthood before I understood how much my mother used movement, activity, doing stuff, to manage her emotions. Rage, anxiety, frustration, love… for Mom, all of it was expressed in action. She was infamous for visiting her adult children and re-arranging entire rooms of furniture without a nod in the direction of asking permission.

She cooked as if the Foreign Legion were in town and short of rations, and her house was always tidy. In later life–I mean her mid-80’s–when she had only one house and my dad to look after, she took three and four mile walks six days a week, and those routes had a lot of hills.

Welp, I did not get those energizer bunny genes. I (and I alone in my family) got the genes that make me a champion sitter-downer. Younger authors ask me the secret to my productivity and I want to say to them, “I have a natural capacity for physical sloth.” It helps that I like words too, though truly, my mother could not have endured the amount of sitting I do to get a book written.

But I know the road to senility is paved with comfy chairs, so I do try to get in a certain number of steps every day, and I do try to sit on a horse occasionally. I look after my flowers and so forth. But even the piddly little exertions I achieve are no fun (with the exception of horseback riding) and never get any easier.

So I have to be cagey about coaxing myself out of my writing chair. “C’mon, Grace. You just wrote a great rough draft of a scene. Lunch time has come and gone. Time to go for a toddle!”

I don’t wanna go for a toddle.

“Now, now. You don’t want to go to the home for feeble-minded authors any sooner than you have to, so up and at ’em Gracey-poo.”

I went for a danged toddle yesterday, and don’t call me Gracey-poo, Sister Mary Grace.

This goes on nigh daily, but of late, after a very sedentary winter, I scrounge up the self-regard to go for a walk, provided that me, my inner cranky toddler, and I agree that it’s to be a short walk. This is when the real strategy kicks in. I get started, and it’s not awful to walk my neighborhood, in fact it’s very pretty and peaceful. Long about when I can see the agreed-upon turn around point (a mere one thousand steps from my mailbox), the dialogue resumes.

“You did it. You got up and boogied, and this is wonderful of you. But you know, it’s only a couple more telephone poles to the bottom of the hill, and it is downhill, and there’s no headwind. Why not just do a couple more telephone poles?”

I walk to the bottom of the hill, and then the next two telephone poles are a level stretch, so why not do that too, and then it’s only two more telephone poles to the cross-roads…

By keeping my initial expectations very low, and jollying myself along by inches, I get in at least a thirty-minute walk, including some hills. If I said to myself, “You will walk two miles after the daily writing session. Three, two, one…” No walk would happen. Ask me how I know that.

Do you resort to self-management strategies? Offer yourself rewards or make bargains with your inner I-don’t-wanna? Do tell!

My property is bounded on two sides by good old farm country hedgerows. These innocuous looking strips of trees and bushes want you to think they will mind their own business, century after century, but that’s a flaming falsehood. Hedgerows are after world domination. Just leave one unattended for two years, and you’ll see the evidence.

So when I fenced the barn-side of my property, I knew enough to leave a wide strip of grass between the fence and the hedgerow. Mowing is the first defense against relentless encroachment. Very wise of me, except that when my old yard guy retired, and the new guy took over, I did not specifically inspect his work on that side of the pasture. He didn’t bother mowing the strip, and the hedgerow soon ate up the grass.

Several years pass, and I point out to yard guy that it’s time to get the hedgerow in hand. Too many dead trees ready to clobber the fence, too many saplings growing up through the fence boards, and yikes, the poison ivy is having a such a good time…

Yard guy quotes me big thousands to a) remove 270 feet of still-functional three-board oak fence and haul it away, b) bring in huge tree-eating equipment and reduce all unwanted specimens to sawdust (while alas, also killing my two baby apple trees), and c) rebuilding the fence with new materials.

I am furious. His neglect of a job competently done is why the hedgerow has become a menace, though granted, I did not inspect what I expected, because any damned fool knows… I thank him for the quote, tell him it’s out of my range, have a nice day. See you in the spring.

I fumed, I walked up and down that fence line. I said bad words aloud. Went into the hardware store, asked the nice man for the sissy-est electric power saw in the store. The puniest, littlest, most ridiculous excuse for a power saw, and he set me up with a pee-wee glorified hedge trimmer.

Here’s the thing: I am afraid of power tools. They are loud, sharp, and dangerous, and where I live, I could bleed out before anybody besides the turkey buzzards noticed a body by the road (writer’s imagination strikes again). But I was not going to pay that guy thousands of books worth of revenue to vastly over-do what amounted to a day’s clean up job.

I read the power saw manual (with a magnifying glass), fired up the saw, and got to work. Within about twenty minutes, I was thinking maybe I could manage a larger saw. I have repulsed the invading saplings, cut the poison ivy off at that roots, freed the fence of dropped branches, and generally given the hedgerow’s nefarious aspirations a middle finger. And when a tree dropped on the fence this week, I called the guy who tills my garden, and he knew a guy who knew a guy, and the mess was cleaned up for a modest price the next afternoon.

The punchline to this story was that when I got angry enough, when I felt sufficiently disrespected, I took a small step outside my comfort zone, and got a boost in self-respect (and arm muscles) to show for it. I problem-solved in addition to seething, and that felt and feels good.

The hedgerow still has plenty of dead trees to drop on the fence, and I am still scared of power tools, but if I’ve made my point to one over-quoting yard guy, then I am content.

When did you get mad enough to walk away? Mad enough to take scary steps? Mad enough to say the scary words?