every book i read in 2018

Looking at the list of books I read this year, I can see now that it wasn’t a gangbuster year for reading. I hit a few hard slumps (late spring and early winter both had me spiraling), and a desire to reduce my belongings meant I read a lot of books for the purpose of moving them off my shelves. That, I suppose, is the risk of the unread shelves: some of what we’ve carted with us across home and apartments and stages of our lives may not have been worth the effort or space.

I want to be disappointed in the list, but I’m working to not be. I read, and that’s enough. I read for wisdom, and for comfort, and to pass time, and to wake myself up to the time I’m letting pass. I read mostly women; I read some of the books I was “saving” (for what? that’s the perpetual question; for what am I saving my books?); and as the year wound down, I felt myself falling deeper in love with my books.

So here we go, here’s a snapshot of the good, the bad, the really bad of 2018.

• Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic: Gilbert’s treatise about and love letter to creativity, Big Magic was an important book in my 2018 diet. I read in the weeks after our move to Maryland, a strange, transitory period when I was trying to hook into the reasons we’d moved away. This book isn’t Eat, Pray, Love or what that monolith became, but a playful powerful book is about what’s sacred and what’s not in our artist lives. She brought a lightness and hope, not just to my work, but also to my sad, unbordered days. It was a quick, revelatory read, and now sits close to my writing desk, should I need it.

• Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites: The story of the last Icelandic woman, Agnes Magnúsdóttir, to be executed by the state. Told in the months between her conviction and her execution, Burial Rites is a quiet novel about a a woman facing death, and the few people left in the world assigned to show her compassion. While there’s the tightness in the narrative of a thriller, this book drops all those pretenses as the book unfolds, becoming a haunting exploration of justice and the complexities of love.

• Alice McDermott’s Child of My Heart: This was a beautifully worded novel written about very little. Or rather, it’s a beautiful worded novel that could have been about so much (grief, death, young sexuality, consent and and non-consent), if McDermott’s rendering hadn’t ripped out the story’s teeth. A young girl, a wealthy summer town’s favorite babysitter, spends her summer caring for the toddler of an elderly artist and his young wife, while her favorite cousin, Daisy, spends the summer visiting. It’s a novel of repressed wrongs: Daisy wakes up with strange bruises, the near-feral neighbor children aren’t being parented, a teenage girl finds herself drawn to the elderly father of the child she cares for. McDermott’s writing is lovely, but her story left me wanting more than just a beautiful girl, an old man, and an unspoken sadness.

• Gillian Flynn’s Dark Places: I don’t read many thrillers, because I am almost always disappointed by them, but Dark Places was excellent. I’ve written more elsewhere, so I’ll leave it at this. Dark Places had everything I want in a thriller: a grisly murder, some creepy Satan implications, a satisfying conclusion, and a narrative that doesn’t turn female victims into the unfortunate collateral of a man’s emotional upbringing.

• Mary Sharratt’s Daughters of the Witching Hill: Written about the two families accused of witchcraft in the 1612 Pendle witches trial, this was an intriguing, thoughtful book about friendship, power, and marginalized women. I read several books this year about women accused of (and punished for) awful things, and while there’s brutality in these stories, there’s also a perverse hope. Daughters of the Witching Hill is told entirely through the voices of the women who were fundamentally silenced 400 years ago. It’s a reclaiming act to write their voices back into their stories.

• Felicia C. Sullivan’s Follow Me into the Dark: I read Sullivan’s excellent novel about broken women and the dark ways they seek healing in 2017 as well, and it’s the rare book that sharpens its pleasure in a second read. Sullivan is a complex writer who tears her stories apart to find their guts. Not enough people have read this novel, but more should. It’s one of the few on my heavy shelves that I will return to again, and again, and again.

• Sue Miller’s The Good Mother: In this novel, Miller takes a traditionally feminine plot about a mother’s love for her child, and stripped it of its performance. This book is dated (the novel’s central crisis is both less titillating and more indefensible in 2018 than I think it would have been 1986), it was an unexpectedly complex take on motherhood and womanhood, and the ways the two sometimes contradict each other.

• Amy Thielen’s Give a Girl a Knife: Give a Minnesota girl a book about another Minnesota girl, and she’ll devour its pages. Former New York linecook and backcountry Minnesota farmer, the way Thielen writes about how food shapes us was a revelation to me. From the ice cream pail casseroles of her childhood potlucks (I recognize these) and the heirloom zucchinis in her forager-garden, to the neon sauces of her tasting menus and the way a chef’s mother whipped potatoes at a Michelin starred restaurant deep in the French countryside, she gives reverence to food like I’ve never experienced before. It wasn’t the best written or the most interesting book I read in 2018, but as a meditation on food and home, it stayed with me.

• JK Rowling’s Harry Potter 1-7: Books are a salve, and I started this year’s re-read the first day we were alone in Maryland. Just like I did the year my grandmother died and I didn’t understand what that meant, just like I did when anxiety and depression were tearing my world apart at the seams, just like I did when I found myself mired in a life of growing hopelessness, I read these books for comfort and strength.

• J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis: I think this book was of its moment, and by the time I got to it, its moment had passed. In the weeks before and after the 2016 election, Vance was positioned as the voice of the disenfranchised white working class who’d voted the Trump-Pence ticket (though he made it clear he voted third party). Despite its billing, this book isn’t a guide to understanding American class divides or the left-behind anger of a forgotten working class. It is a sad, arresting, darkly hopeful memoir about a family that has intersected neatly with multiple contemporary narratives, including rural poverty, intergenerational poverty, opoid addiction, education breakdown, and white working class fear. Read it as a memoir, not a blueprint to understand broken American.

• Ruth Ware’s In a Dark, Dark Wood: One of several disappointing thrillers I read in 2018. Ultimately, I felt this novel, Ware’s first, demeaned its readers. Thrillers need hooks, yes, but she wrote this like an infomercial. Every paragraph, every chapter ended with an overwrought question mark. Suspense writers have to maintain a delicate balance between giving enough, without giving away, and Ware didn’t have it down here. Aside from pacing issues, I was also disappointed by the reveal. Without spoilers, I’ll say that when the cards were finally on the table, I just didn’t buy it. Too much risk, not enough reward, and not nearly enough character development to justify the red-handed motives.

• Diane Guerrero’s In the Country We Love: My Family Divided: I began reading this book days before the news broke about the United States government separating refugee-seeking parents from their children, and it intensified this reading. Halfway through high school, Guerrero’s parents are deported, and she, an American child of immigrant parents, is left, quasi-orphaned to navigate her adolescence and early adulthood without a floor to stand on. Cards on the table, this book isn’t written well. She had a co-writer on this memoir, but the language is poppy and riddled with slang. But the point of this book isn’t the writing or her tenure on Orange is the New Black, but about the centuries old cruelty encoded in America’s immigration policies. Guerrero’s story reduces the politics and bureaucracy to the personal. A teenager came home, and her parents were gone.

• Paula Hawkins’s Into the Water: If a woman’s going to be killed for a man’s emotional growth, let that injustice be the center of the story. I’m tired of novel that position women as the unfortunate collateral for a man’s inability to name a feeling. What I wanted out of this novel was a good murder mystery. What I got was a mess of narrators and half-revealed traumas, and a female writer who made her female victims the bad guys. (Didn’t help my rage that I read this during the Dr. Blasey Ford testimony).

• Allen Esken’s The Life We Bury: I love reading Minnesota writers, because there’s always that shot of hope that maybe this Minnesota writer will see her name in print someday too. Esken’s debut thriller is about a college student who, to fulfill his writing gen-ed, interviews a recently pardoned, actively dying convicted killer. As the story unspools, he calls into question the original conviction, the system that cost one man his entire adult life, and the system that may have allowed a murderer to go free. I read it fast, and while I felt like some of the pieces fell too tidily together, it was a generally enjoyable, late-Autumn read.

• Olivia Liang’s The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone: The best book I read this year, bar none. I read it on our summer trip, most of it, in New York. As much memoir as monograph, Liang provides readers with an unbroken look at loneliness, a state, she describes not as “a city, perhaps at dusk, when everyone turns homeward and the neon flickers to life.” She catalogs her own experience of paralyzing loneliness, and places into conversation with artists whose work provided her solace. It’s about the total body experience of loneliness and about loneliness as a social epidemic, and it’s about the atomizing effect of modern life, in particular, city life. It’s about New York City, and the AIDS epidemic, about outsider art (and insider art), and how technology is changing our ability to see and not be seen. It’s brilliant and elegiac, mourning the deep, almost intractable experience of loneliness, while still celebrating our ability (and art’s ability) to foraging for connection anyway. In its final breath, The Lonely City becomes a book of hope. Relentless in their attempts at connection, Liang and her artists reach out across time and space towards a common wholeness. “We’re in this together,” Liang writes, “this accumulation of scars, this world of objects, this physical and temporary heaven that so often takes on the countenance of hell.” Read this book. Read it again, and again.

• Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol: Before our move, I read a lot of books to get them off my shelves. I like Dan Brown, and I like a story that makes me turn the page (I read both The DaVinci Code and Angels and Demons in a weekend). The Lost Symbol is another Langdon novel, and follows the same structure as the others; this time we’re in DC, and it’s the secrets of the Masons we’re concerned with. I found this novel less propulsive the others were, but it was enjoyable, and interesting, and gives me something to think about while we play live-in tourists of the district.

• Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle Books 1-3: I read these books early in the year in a trance of language and exposition. The first half of Knausgaard’s six-volume autobiographical novel was dizzying in scope and intimacy. The first book, the tightest of the three, focuses on the fallout of his estranged father’s death and, to a lesser degree, the adolescence that drove the estrangement. Book two is sprawling, Knausgaard exploring his own fatherhood, his creative adulthood, and his marriage. I burned out on Boyhood after six weeks of Knausgaard, but until that point, I was captivated by these books. I’ve never read anything so intimate, raw to the point of aversion. I’m holding out on books 4-6, until I’m ready to devote several more months to this extraordinary piece of art.

• Amanda Coplin’s The Orchardist: What a quiet, elegant novel. Haunted by the disappearance of his sister, orchardist Talmadge lives in isolation, until two girls, both pregnant and scared, arrive in his orchard. When Talmadge becomes the sole caregiver for Angeline, daughter born to one of the sisters, the parental love he takes on for both his adopted daughter and the woman who left her in his care becomes complete and consuming. He’ll chase the wind for them, and blind inside this ferocious love, Talmadge becomes obsessive in his attempts to reconcile their collection demons. This novel swells across 400 pages, a distillation of the endless, dangerous love of a parent for their child.

• Garth Stein’s Raven Stole the Moon: A reread, about a mother whose son died in Alaska, and her attempt to reconcile with her grief, and bring his soul rest. Drawing on traditional Tlingit narratives, Stein brings ancient stories to rest alongside intimate, personal drama. I loved this novel for its dual ability to haunt and to heal. Jenna Rosen needs resolution after her son’s death, and in returning to the place that’s both her family home and her son’s grave, she’s forced to confront her heritage, her grief, and the future she hasn’t let herself enter.

• Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea: Technically, I didn’t finish this book, because I got so irritated with it that I gave up seven pages before the end. The short of it: a murderer is on board an Irish ocean liner bound for New York in the middle of the potato famine, and there’s unseen bonds between the murderer, the nanny, the American writer, the wealthy Lord, and his English wife. I stuck with this novel, because I’m sure the author had a strong vision for his story, but it was so badly executed. Don’t read it, but if you do, watch for the scene where he shoehorns Charles Dickens AND a not-yet-active Jack the Ripper into the same Whitechapel pub.

• Anna Quindlen’s Still Life With Bread Crumbs: This was a disappointing novel by a writer I’d been looking forward to reading. Still Life with Bread Crumbs is about a renowned photographer moves to a small, East Coast village to save money and rekindle her faltering career. There, she meets a younger, woodsy man, photographs strange alters in the forest, and tries to reconcile the upper-crust life she’s lived with an uncertain financial future. I’ve read several other novels like this that all seem to fit into the “wrote on a deadline, for a middle aged female audience, without much concern for audience enjoyment.”

• Stephanie Danler’s Sweetbitter: This publisher darling from 2016 was my favorite novel of the year (and I really didn’t want to like it as much as I did). Twenty-two year old Tess moves from nowhere to New York City to begin her life. She’s hired at a dated, elite restaurant in Union Square, and is swept so thoroughly up into this world of work and wine and cocaine and codependency that she can’t see the fall until she’s landed. While I was disappointed that the novel’s crisis point was about the love and lack of it from two men, I found this novel’s power elsewhere: in the heady, intimate portrait of a young person’s becoming. As fragile as it is fierce, I was rocked and reminded of all the moments in my own young becoming where life felt, all at once, like a feast I’d been barred from, and a room I’d been invited into, and an river I was drowning under.

• Meg Wolitzer’s The Ten-Year Nap: Wolitzer’s 2008 novel is so of its time that it was like reading an anthropological study of a world just expired. Set in a wealthy New York City community and written through the lenses of five women and their mothers, this is a “women live lives of quiet desperation too” novel. Each of these mothers are navigating the space after the needy years of young parenting, and muddling their way into a second act. There’s plot here (one women becomes an accomplice in hiding a friend’s affair, another befriends a girl in South Dakota who wants to become an artist, a third struggles to accept her adopted daughter’s atypical development), but mostly, it’s a novel about a particular brand of wealthy motherhood anxiety. Who are we without our children, and who might we become as they need us less and less?

• Philippa Gregory’s Three Sisters, Three Queens: You know how there are writers you read, because they shake your bones, and writers who you read, because they write about queens having sex and being devious? I started this after watching part of the royal wedding (a precursor to my truly impressive December House of Windsor documentary spree), and I gotta say, I think Gregory is losing her touch. Fifteen books on the Plantagenets may be too many.

• Deirdre Madden’s Time Present and Time Past: I found this slim, neon green novel in the basement of the St. Paul Half Price Books when we went home for Thanksgiving, and I read all but two chapters of it on the plane home. Madden’s novel is set in pre-recession Dublin, and about a man in the middle year of his life who begins to experience strange, almost supernatural shifts in time and place. He goes to pick up his young daughter’s friend, and opens the door on a man who looks exactly like himself; sitting in a pub, he sees this daughter in her frustrated young adulthood; sitting in the office, his modern world evaporates, and for long moments, he’s his father, or maybe his grandfather. It was a strange, beautiful novel where time and memory are manipulated in order for the reader to meditate on ordinary, beautiful, frustrating way our lives move, endlessly, forward.

• Frances Mayes’s: Under the Tuscan Sun, At Home in Italy: This was a delight of a memoir, that I was able to take such pleasure in, because I was a child when it was released, and didn’t have to actively live through the faux-Tuscany fever that it apparently kicked off. I’ve written more elsewhere about the beauty I found in Mayes’s poetry-tuned language, and in her meditations on home and belonging.

• Frances Mayes’s: Bella Tuscany: The Sweet Life In Italy: See above.

• Patricia Engel’s Vida: Top five books I read this year, and my favorite collection of short stories. I read Engel’s The Veins of the Ocean when it was published in 2016, and was impressed with her language, and the intimacy of her narratives. Published before Veins, Vida established Engel’s voice and and scope. These interconnected short stories are about everything: immigration in America and the dislocation of being from somewhere, boyfriends and men you want to be your boyfriend, the ragged sadness that exists in all of our towns and cities, the hard path we take to adulthood. It’s a gorgeous, gorgeous book that I’ve found myself pulling off the shelf again and again.

• Liane Moriarty’s What Alice Forgot: I bought this book in an airport several years ago (why are the terminal booksellers so appealing in the odd between times of check-in and boarding), and was recommended it again and again. While I didn’t love this book, I read it in a particular moment when I hadn’t been reading and wasn’t writing at all, and it broke both slumps. A novel doesn’t need to pry open the bones to be worth reading. As a writer (who had a short story rejected again and again, because it was plot weak and language heavy), I needed to be reminded that plot is what keeps the reader turning the page. I read this novel, about a woman who wakes up from an exercise injury and can’t remember the last decade of her life, in a day or two. Hold on to the joy of getting lost in a story; it’s what brings us all to books in the first place.

• Cheryl Strayed’s Wild: I’ve inadvertently read (or listened to) this book every year for the past four years. Strayed’s writing is powerful and poetic, and her story about healing all her broken pieces has remained timeless and relevant each time I’ve read it.

• Ruth Ware’s The Woman in Cabin 10: Remember how down I was on Ware’s first novel earlier in this list? Her second, this one, was much, much better. Traveling on the maiden voyage of a luxury, boutique cruise ship, travel journalist Lo witnesses a woman thrown over the balcony of the cabin next to her own. As she tries to call attention to this horrific crime, it becomes clear she’s pulling at a thread that the wealthy cruise owner doesn’t want unraveled. An Agatha Christie-esque, locked-room mystery, this novel kept me reading late into the night.

new year, new intentions: a gentle course for 2019

We’re in the new year, and like I have every January, I wrestle with how arbitrary this designation is—and how sacred it continues to be.

In Minnesota, the light thins in January. It becomes soft and pale, and it lays itself on white snow. It’s a clean light, an energizing one. It’s become a yearly returning for me. We pack away the old year, and the days lengthen by seconds, and then minutes. In January, I feel a clarity and energy I usually have to work to find.

I like to begin each year with a set of intentions (semantics maybe, but these aren’t resolutions). The rules are: these intentions can’t be measured with a chart or checklist, they can’t rely on anyone else’s action or energy, they have to be able to evolve. My theory being that intentions bring a framework to a otherwise blank stretch of time. They’re a room to grow in, not a list of what to do.

For 2019, I’ve set five intentions for myself, each one representing a stepping stone in a process I’ve already begun (some I’ve even written about in previous year’s new year’s posts). Like I said, these aren’t goals I can ever finish; they’re tender spots I want to bring light to.

If I’ve learned one thing, it’s that the year (any year) will bring with it whatever it will. There’s a wildness to life I’ll never get my hands around. Set down beneath those buffeting winds, these intentions get to be a gentle path. Think of it as an invitation.

Here we are again, come grow with me.

—Connect With My Body—

For years, I reduced to my body to its aberrant and unruly parts: it matured before I hit double digits, swelled and expanded while my peers remained girls. I learned I could manage it a bit, and slid up and down on the scale of deprivation (food) and punishment (exercise). In college, depression and anxiety manifested in my physical body; harsh acne medications ravaged my immune system, and I began dealing with what I now assume will be a long life struggle with inflammation and food/digestion issues.

I dealt with this from the earliest ages by separating myself from my body. I could exist outside its discomforts or expansions, divorce myself from it and from the attention it received it. The more it demanded my attention, the angrier I got with it. Now, I punish my body for being a body, and then I wonder why I can’t live inside of it.

In 2019, I want to change this narrative. Practice connecting with my physical self with the same level of attention, and gentleness I bring to my emotional or intellectual self. This means listening compassionately when it communicates its needs, embracing healthy movement as a form of love (and ditching the exercises that feel like torture), continuing to monitor which foods make me feel good and which don’t, but never punishing myself for what I eat. I’m hoping for a reconciliation: my physical body with my emotional body, honor and healing and love and care for both as one.

—Practice Flexibility—

Have you ever heard someone joke about how they say no to plans, because they’ve already planned to do nothing? This is not a joke to me. If you invite me to something too last minute (and I’m in a particularly rigid mood), I’ll short circuit. I’ll probably cry; I’ll definitely need time to process; I may even get angry at you, because your kindness is highlighting my own rigidity.

In 2019, I want to grow my ability to be flexible. I don’t need to (or intend to) turn myself into a “go with the flow” girl, but I want to stop being the “actively thrash myself against the rocks to avoid the flow” girl. I want to problem solve better when a new decision needs to be made, to be more graceful in the moments when life interferes with calendar, to introduce more ease into my life (and the lives of people who have to navigate my rigidity).

When I shared this intention to Instagram, someone left a comment about how we cling to our structures, even when they don’t serve us. This structure of hyper-organization doesn’t serve me. I need to learn to be more flexible, so that when life gets in the way (as it always will), I can handle it without melting down.

—Consume Consciously—

That word “consumption” is tricky, because it applies to just about everything. Media, entertainment, advertisement, as well as food, clothing, our material possessions. And the double bind is: everything we consume impacts another part of our lives.

The more television I watch, the less time I have to write. The more money I spend on on clothing I don’t need, the less ability I have to travel or save (my perennial financial goals). Depending on how I buy food or what I buy, my grocery run will create waste that contributes to the thinning ozone and rising global temperature.

Half of being a person is consuming the world, and I don’t by any means intend to limit or reduce my consumption. Instead, I want to bring a higher level of awareness to what I consume and how. It’s like yoga, and how practicing it requires you pay attention to your breath and spine. We can take responsibility for what we’re aware of, and more than anything else, I want responsibility over my consumption. These are choices I make; let me truly make them.

—Take My Work Seriously—

And by work, I mean my writing.

I think everyone who is an artist as well as a teacher/nurse/electrician/desk jockey/service worker, struggles to claim their art-work as a pursuit as serious as their for-pay work. Last year, I turned a corner in understanding the responsibility I have to market what I create, and in embracing that, the framework I put around my writing sharpened. I want to take that 2018 energy and put it to work in 2019. More writing, more sharing, more practicing, more learning, more seriously pursuing audience, and readership, and platform.

I think often about what Cheryl Strayed said about her Wild success: “I didn’t just get lucky—I worked my fucking ass off, and then I got lucky. And if I hadn’t worked my ass off, I wouldn’t have lucky.” Several years ago, I decided to work so hard on my writing that if I never achieve traditional success, I won’t be able to blame it on myself. That’s the kind of energy I’m bringing to 2019.

I’m excited this year of writing. I’m excited about what could potentially happen, but more than that, I’m excited about what I’ll learn, and how I’ll grow.

—Tune In To My Intuition—

This is the big one, the true focus of my new year. If I were to choose a single word for 2019, it would be intuition.

2018 was a year of extraordinary change, but so was 2017, and in quieter ways, 2016. This transition into my late twenties has been a series of gangbuster growth moves, and massive development of the self. My gut tells me that in 2019, there will be fewer wild leaps into the unknown, and more more measured steps forward, but in a strange way, the slow steps feel more frightening and fraught then the big leaps.

When we decided to move from Minnesota to Maryland, we did so knowing that we knew nothing. It’s was exhilarating and reckless, (in a financially sound, meticulously planned, deeply interrogated way), and we knew the experience could be anything between extraordinary and disastrous.

In my yoga practice, the instructor I follow talks often about how we already have everything we need. I think this is more true and more universal than I’ve ever allow myself to believe. Going through old journals last year in preparation for our move, I had the beautiful and painful experience of seeing, in a kind of retrospective realtime, the ways my younger self both listened to and ignored my gut instincts. I can see how I once had everything I needed, and while in the most essential moments, I listened, in all the ones leading up to crisis point, I didn’t. Reading those journals made me want to shake or kiss the girl I once was, but I think a better way to honor her is to grow.

In 2019, I want to listen better to my intuition. In the same way I want to listen more carefully and more compassionately to my body, I want to listen more carefully and compassionately to my internal knowledge. If it’s true we already have everything we need, let me learn to hear and trust it.

there and back again: minnesota for thanksgiving and homesickness that doesn't fade

We leave, we return, we leave again, and the lines I drew between home and not home begin to blur.

Before we flew home for Thanksgiving, I told Chris I was anxious. Big feelings make me anxious. What would it feel like to be in Minnesota again? Would it make Maryland more familiar? Or less? Would my heart break when I left, or does it get easier to hop from here to there? (A friend whose done this longer than me told me it never does.)

I cried when we landed at MSP. Actually, I cried when we entered northern airspace, and Chris pointed out I was crying over Wisconsin, but I teared up again when we circled low over the airport, and I recognized the world we were coming down to. Walking through the MSP terminal to baggage claim, I asked Chris if we could come home after just one year.

We’ve made no decisions—they’re not even on the table yet, but in my small voice, I needed to hear home is always an option. Maryland was never meant to be forever, but the question is what did we move out here for? And when will we have had enough of it that we’re ready to move home again?

—

When we talk about what home is, Chris and I fall on different sides of the track. He misses access to friends and family (and trust me, I do too), and he misses the familiarity of knowing the area (again, me too), but what he doesn’t have is achy clawing I do over being away.

When we landed, I had to stop myself from buckling. The air, the air, felt like home. For four days, I paused each time I stepped outside. You don’t know homesickness until you’ve sucked home-air like it’s your saving grace.

As much as I’ve missed my people, it’s been the intensity with which I miss Minnesota that’s surprised me. It’s what I was promised: that I’ll miss the water and the trees, but missing water and trees is more painful than I could have known. (Maryland’s got water and trees too.)

On Wednesday, I drove around the cities, and I named each city blocks. You know me, you know me, you know me. My sense of direction is the eternal joke, but there’s a difference between knowing where you and not knowing. Being back in Minnesota, I knew. These street hold my history.

Our visit back was four days, two short days and two full, structured around the holiday and buffeted by the promise that we’d be home longer at Christmas. We bought the tickets In September, when we were high on homesickness, and wondering how to make the long Maryland days move faster.

This season away is teaching me what everyone whose ever needed to build a home for themselves knows: That you create it wherever you are. It sounds like a Hallmark card, but it’s true: Home is where Chris and I are together. It only took a few days for our apartment in Maryland to become every bit the retreat that our apartment in St. Paul was. Now that I’ve hung Christmas decorations, we’re as anchored to what we know and love as we’ve ever been.

But still. Minnesota’s there like a specter, and a promise, and something else too profound and mysterious for me to yet name. It’s my home, and I’m not there, and that alone tilts the earth just a little bit.

-

On Sunday night, I cried in the dark, and told Chris I didn’t want to return to work. It seemed like a concession to say to all this heartache “look, you’ve got a life here too.” A day of work and a trip to the grocery store, and I remembered that that yeah, we do live here now, and most days, that doesn’t make me blind with homegone sadness.

We’re back to holding Minnesota and Maryland in both hands. In August, I told myself my job was to observe and honor what I was feeling. Observe and honor, observe and honor. Decide nothing. There’s the right now, and there’s the what’s next, and there are the places we someday want to get to, but how?

taking risks + saying yes: thoughts after a first season in maryland

I don’t mind sharing the hard or ugly parts of life—life gets hard and ugly; let’s talk about it. It’s the middles that trip me up. The space between the unknown and the understanding. I stop writing in this space (as I have these past few weeks) when the questions start to pile up.

We’ve been in Maryland three months now. A whole season. Thursday, it snowed, and I was reminded that there will remain all this space between what’s familiar and what’s not.

When we first moved, I thought about all the roads. My sense of direction is a joke, but I’ve always said I know where I am, I just don’t know how to get to where I need to go. I got here, and I didn’t know where I was anymore. All my history lived somewhere else.

The word I kept using was dislocation. I was dislocated.

Three months in, and we’ve located ourselves here in Southern Maryland. We’ve jobs in local schools that are enjoyable and entertaining (guys, you thought high school was a trip when you were in high school? Return as an adult.), and our weeks have developed their cadence. I write in the morning, we work. In the evening, we swap hallway stories, and on the weekends, we daytrip to museums and national parks and villages established during the Revolutionary War. We’ve even had visitors all the way from Minnesota.

We’ve established our routine, and like they say, ideas bloom within boundaries. Now that my time and energy isn’t subsumed by the details understanding our new geography, I’ve the freedom to explore what this move means for us on a broader scale. A writer I admire wrote about how moving brings the quiet. Remove yourself from the noise of all your former lives, and you’re forced to face yourself.

Remember all those questions you told yourself you’d someday answer? They’re starting to pile up.

It’s interesting to track what’s blossomed while being out here. Career, it turns out, has been one of my greatest preoccupations. What is I want to do with my life? And what do I want to get paid for? How do I measure success if it’s not via a career path? And how do I measure success if I’m not receiving it down other avenues either?

I knew it would be strange and possibly uncomfortable to make a cross country move without attaching it to a career objective, but I didn’t realize how much I relied on work to provide me with a sense of worth or accomplishment until I left it. Turns out, salary and benefits really can be an anesthesia against the bigger pictures you thought you’d one day paint.

I left a job in Minnesota that I’d loved, and traded it in for a position that I didn’t need my college degree to qualify for. My job out here is easy. It’s what I make of it, and while some days are harder than others, I generally get good stories and warm fuzzies, and after 6.5 hours, I leave. Nobody sends me emails, and you know what that means? It means I got exactly what I wanted: the ability to focus my energy elsewhere.

Basically, I’ve removed my own ability to say no to new ideas. My work doesn’t provide me enough satisfaction or occupy enough time to protect me from desires and passions, and the twin excuses of too hard and too scared don’t wear as well out here, because what else do I have to do out here? It’s what have I got to lose, but on steroids, because while the worst possible outcome is still only failure, it’s failure achieved 1,100 miles away from everyone who I’d be embarrassed to fail in front of.

Did you know that I sew felt and sequin Christmas decorations? I’ve been doing it for several years now, making tree skirts for family and friends, updating our stockings, playing with embroidery and beadwork. Remember that old McCall’s pattern for felt and sequin stockings, with the reindeer or Santa applique? That’s what I make, but hopefully a little prettier, a little less tacky, a little more timeless.

I’ve opened an Etsy shop and started an Instagram page, because why not? I love sewing these stockings and tree skirts and ornaments, and I’ve taken enough custom orders to make me think strangers on the internet may love what I make too. So far, I’ve made no sales, but honestly, I’ve been thinking about doing this for four years. Trying is better than wondering.

It’s all about the great cosmic why and why not. Why are we here? And if we have to ask that question, why not shoot our precious shots? It’s uncomfortable, to be honest, to reduce these questions to their parts and ask them of ourselves, but there’s not much else for me to do right now. I miss Minnesota like all hell, but I’m not ready, not nearly ready, to throw in the towel and come home. I love my job, but I’m not sure how to make a career out of a position that doesn’t require of me my diploma or hard won experience (though they do earn me an additional $10k a year). I know that writing is at the very center of my purpose here on earth, but how do I turn it into more than a hobby, and how do I stay in love with it if I never derive measurable or recognizable success?

These aren’t Maryland questions. If I’d stayed in Minnesota longer, I would have had to face them there too. They’re driftless question, twenty-six year old questions, transition questions. Questions that don’t necessarily need answering, but absolutely need attending.

They’re the work questions, the toolshed for the work we do to keep up with our becomings.

best books i've read lately

Let me tell you about the best books I’ve read since August.

I’ve been on a burner lately. After devouring the Harry Potter series after we moved (Harry Potter being my literary equivalent of chips and queso), I dove into the piles of unread books I hauled across the country. Some have been barely okay, some not even okay, but other have been shining jewels. I love a book that turns on all the lights.

—

THE LONELY CITY, Olivia Laing

I read this book on our vacation, reading the majority of it, fittingly, in New York City, the city where Laing becomes intimate with loneliness. I’m not sure how to genre this book: memoir? art criticism? treatise? social history? All of this, but something more?

Laing, drawing on her own experience with loneliness writes about the five artists whose work and lives dealt with loneliness: Edward Hopper, David Wojnarowicz, Henry Darger, Andy Warhol, and Klaus Nomi. She explores the way the art of these five men was born out of their own lonely experiences—the art Wojnarowicz created inside the confluence of hustling and the AIDS epidemic and his own abject poverty, Darger’s strange, massive works of violence, created over a lifetime of almost total isolation, the eerie greens and open spaces of Hopper’s paintings, even Nomi’s weird, ethereal music (so strange and haunting I can’t listen to it)—and connects it with the broader social and psychological experience of being lonely. It’s a book about connection. And about what happens when we don’t receive it.

I read it as I tried to read New York City, tried to make my way, psychically, emotionally, through this beautiful, brutal, indifferent and intense city. It contextualized New York, and it contextualized my own loneliness. “So much of the pain of loneliness,” she writes, “is to do with concealment, with feeling compelled to hide vulnerability, to tuck ugliness away, to cover up scars as if they are literally repulsive. But why hide? What’s so shameful about wanting? About desire, about having failed to achieve satisfaction, about experiencing unhappiness?”

BIG MAGIC, Elizabeth Gilbert

Big Magic is one of those books I almost don’t want to talk about, because how can I add to what’s already been said? Elizabeth Gilbert’s frank, playful, funny meditation on creative living is wonderful. It’s an invitation to engage with creativity for no other reason than a love of being creative.

I read it as a writer, and, of course, Gilbert wrote it as a writer, but I think anyone with a creative practice could be woken up by it. This book is about taking the results of creativity less seriously, the work of creativity more seriously, and the practice of it sacred. Like she says:

“Pure creativity is something better than necessity; it’s a gift. It’s the frosting. Our creativity is a wild and unexpected bonus from the universe. It’s as if all our gods and angels gathered together, and said ‘It’s tough down there as a human being, we know. Here--have some delights.’”

In the short time since I finished this book, I’ve returned to it a hundred times as motivation to finish what may be the worst short story I’ve ever written, to restart a longer project I’ve been kicking around for two years, and to continue to submit a short story I think is possibly the best I’ve written (and has received a dozen rejections already). The mark of this book’s value: I haven’t even gotten it back onto the shelf yet.

THE ORCHARDIST, Amanda Coplin

So many of the books I read I wouldn’t recommend to many. The Orchardist, gorgeous, rich, and poignant, is one of those books. It’s a quiet, poetic novel that tells a broad story in intimate details. I think many readers would find it slow, the plot secondary to its characters and their introspective experiences of the world.

Two girls come to Talmadge’s orchard, a sprawling complex of apples and apricots planted in an isolated Washington valley in the late nineteenth century. They’re pregnant and feral, and after one sister loses her baby and the other kills herself, Talmadge is left with an infant and a young woman too restless for his orchard. This story is told over decades, and the plot spins out over Talmadge’s deep, conflicted love for both the baby who grows into a woman and the woman who grows into a lawbreaker.

I read this book for its language, this sparse, dizzying flood of poetry. Amanda Coplin realizes this removed world with an elegant precision. We see the scope of time, its weight and shape in this quiet novel. She writes, of Talmadge’s experience of train travel:

“It was the rapidity that overwhelmed him and bothered his sensibility. He had moved slowly all of his life. He was used to seeing things drawn out of themselves by temperature and light, not by harsh action. But this was something different. This was how people lived, now.”

The Orchardist surprised me, and soothed me. I devoured its grace whole.

DARK PLACES, Gillian Flynn

Thrillers disappoint me constantly. I always read a few in the fall, and I always end up being let down by most of them. Either the mystery falls apart in the final hundred pages, or it isn’t properly solved, or if it is solved, it’s only done so in some random, pedestrian accident. (OR, looking at you, Into the Water, the mystery is solved only after we understand the reasons why men use women as fatal collateral in their emotional upbringing). But this one? Better than Gone Girl (IMHO).

Libby Day is the sole survivor of a brutal, Satanic attack that took out her mother and two sisters when she was a child. At 32, she’s run out of money, the donations of sympathetic stranger finally used up. To make some cash, the makes a paid appearance at a meeting of true crime fan club meeting. What begins as a way to keep bilking the men and women obsessed with her family’s murder out of money turns into a hunt to discover who actually killed her family and trailed their blood across her walls.

I read this book in three, very full work days. Devoured it. The pacing was excellent, the characters compelling without being likeable, and while Flynn’s writing isn’t to my taste, it’s propelling. And the murder, oh this murder. It’s perfect. It’s creepy; it’s grisly; it’s violent, it’s not built on inherently sexist gender dynamics, and in the last twenty pages, when all our questions are answered, it’s goddamn satisfying.

My reading life waxes and wanes (usually in direct proportion to how much television I’m watching—wonder of wonders), but right now, I’m exhilarated at the clip I’m reading at right now. These were the best of the third quarter.

—

What’s on my shelf for the rest of the year? A 1999 edition of Granta (the excerpt of Jasmina Tesanovic’s diary of the Serbian Civil War was awful and astounding), likely a few other thrillers, Laura Kasischke’s In a Perfect World  and I’m thinking a reread of The Age of Innocence.

Tell me what you’re reading. Tell me what I need to be reading.

chris and me + moving away: how maryland's been on our relationship

Let’s talk about the ways we love, and fail to love each other. Let’s talk about them even though it’s hard.

This move brought with it a storm of homesickness that stunned and stunted my first days and weeks in Maryland. Like everything in life, the move was harder than I expected, and hard in ways I didn’t expect.

I didn’t expect the sadness, no, but I also didn’t expect how I’d respond to the sadness. How it would make me both silent and combative, how it would shape this season for me and Chris.

I don’t like sharing my failings (who does?), but I’m been learning about myself, about who I am when I’m vulnerable, who I become when I feel lost, and I like sharing what hurts and what heals.

We got out here, and in the first, borderless week, I felt these gaping holes open—not just missing Minnesota, or missing family and friends (though both were there), but missing the stability of knowing the place on the globe I occupied. It was bigger than homesickness, but included homesickness, but also needed a language separate homesickness. Something that included loss and being lost, but also included brightness: notes of curiosity and excitement.

Before all these knots of pain and fear and dislocation, I became what I’ve never been before—a stonewall. I went silent when I couldn’t find a way to explain what it was I was feeling, and when I could explain it in ways that made sense to me, but not to Chris, I got harsh.

(This is what I didn’t want to talk about—the ways I responded when I was hurting. I get why babies scream, and toddlers hit. We want to give our pain a name that someone else will recognize.)

Who knew that I, overly articulate and expressive to the point of exhaustion, would meet my sadness, and fall silent before it? Who knew my emotional interior would become so complex I’d lose my arsenal of language?

One night, I sat on our kitchen floor and cried, so angry and ashamed that my first experience of our adventure out here was one of sadness and retreat. Chris took the floor next to me, and took my hand, and said “I know you feel safest when you’re alone with your pain. I don’t know how to join you in that right right now, but I want to. Can we find ways to let me care of you too?”

It’s heartbreaking and humbling to have your partner ask you to make room for him. Chris is a warrior for us, and he keeps us strong when I flounder. He’s tender and brave in ways I’m still learning, and while I’ve thrashed through my discomfort and sorrow, he’s waited for me.

This move is our first striking out on our own. We’re each other’s only people out here. It’s just us, and when we decided to move, that was the exciting part: who were we going to be when there’s no one and nowhere else for us to go?

--

One month in, and I think we’ve come through the worst of of the dislocation. We’ve named the varied sadnesses of living away from home, and we’re learning to negotiate the ways those sadnesses manifest themselves. It’s only been a month, but in relationship years, it’s been long. We’re grown and stretched and fortified ourselves. Built new forms of trust, and stripped away more layers of year. Hard work for four weeks time, but good, good work.

I’ve called him this before: Chris is my miracle of love. He’s my radical re-education in how to receive love, how to be loved. We wouldn’t have moved here if we didn’t trust completely that the love we share would hold us. But it didn’t take long for us to find these bumps, these failed experiments and wrong turns and accidental crossroads that can weaken relationships not ready for them.

We talk in terms of lessons, and Chris has been kind enough to approach my frustration, and stonewalling, and furious sadness as lessons. Already, we’re stronger for what we’ve learned. More intimate and more attuned to one another. Already I see the playing out of the single faith that brought us here: That the together is the home, and that inside the together, we can do anything, be anything, become anything.

I am grateful, and grateful, and grateful for a partner who is patient with me. Who is tender and empathetic and willing to weather my storms. He’s learned the extraordinary lesson that it’s pain that makes us painful, and he soften when I harden. His is a love of returnings, of circling back and back to my points of pain and shame. He’s showing the love of unconditionals. In turn, in all my messy, frustrated, frustrating ways, I hope I’m showing him the same.

Right now, this move feels like a half-framed house. Please stay in it with me. It’s in the building that we’re finding all this beauty, that we’re strengthening and steeling our love, that we’re becoming, together, ourselves.

the overlap of all these endings and beginnings: summer 2018 recap

It was almost a jolt for me, last Monday, when I began to see my social media feed fill with “goodbye summer” posts. Even though my work is tied directly to the school calendar, it didn’t register that, of course, summer is drawing to a close.

I’m tethered to rhythms, and usually, I love to let seasons border and bookend chapters of my life. This past summer, though, was such a wild, sprawling, rangy season that I can’t count it as just one thing. How was the sweltering Memorial Day weekend we spent with friends part of the same season as the dark, fogged over Fourth of July we spent along the North Shore? And what was August? This month where we crossed borders and time zones and oceans and mountains in both the air and sky. Into what category do I put the month we visited two countries, returned to our own, then moved from its middle to its eastern edge?

All summer, I thought in terms of endings and goodbyes—and we said a lot—but now that I’m on the other end of summer, I’m starting to wonder if it wasn’t actually more about of beginnings.

I experienced a groundwater shift in my writing life. I finished a novel I’m unbelievably proud of, and I identified and committed to concrete goals and steps for those goals to move my writing forward. I felt my relationship with Chris shift into a deeper gear. Travel stretched us to become more tender, and in the moments when the fears and stresses of moving brought out in me qualities that are far lovable, we had the opportunity to push past the ugliness, and move deeper into love. To enter new levels of unconditional care is, if not a true beginning, a beautiful continuum to be moving along. In so many ways, we were preparing for beginnings: Preparing our friendships to (hopefully) withstand distance, preparing our career paths for new leaps, preparing ourselves to move away from everything we know. Even when we sat in London and I cried over all the endings, it was actually the rushing, tumbling into beginnings that I made me want, so badly, to stay put.

I need more time to think about this. As much as I love bringing my experiences into cohesion—this is what keeps me writing—I don’t like reducing life beyond its size. I’d planned to forego any attempt to write about summer, but obviously I’ve changed my mind. If I’ve learned anything from journaling (a habit I’m haltingly building), it’s that there’s value enough in creating the record. It’s time’s job, not ours, to make sense of these seasons that blast us or our lives apart.

- - -

So what was summer 2018? A whole beautiful mess of things.

Memorial Day Weekend

Memorial Day Weekend was summer at its finest. The temperatures soared beyond where they normally sit, and we launched into summer. St. Paul Farmer’s Market on Saturday morning, rooftop drinking in the afternoon, and the evening at a baseball game with our friends. The next day? Soundset 2018, and a full day of live music, and kickass friends. We even fled our apartment on Friday night to catch the last of the sunset over Lake Nokomis, because the world was just so beautiful in that dying gold we didn’t want to miss it. That one weekend felt like what summer should always, what last year’s summer was like. The kind that’s a gift we don’t get very often.

Goodbyes to to the Job I Loved

In June, I got to say my spiritual goodbye to a job I’ve loved and found so much reward in. I got to spend a week with my now former team and a bunch of excited and exciting kids, experiencing the final stage in a project and process that lasts all year. I wouldn’t actually end my job (or have to say the goodbyes that made me sob) until August, but that week in June served a goodbye to the program. It also made me realize how much joy we can find in endings—when we know they’re coming, they give us such extraordinary presence.

Saying Goodbyes to Minnesota

July was full of goodbyes to Minnesota. Chris kicked off the month by surprising me with a birthday getaway to the North Shore. We got to retrace our own early history, I saw lupine growing wild along Highway 61, and then after climbing forty-five minutes along the socked in cliffs of Palisade Head, we got ten minutes, where the fog shifted and the cliffs of Lake Superior opened to us. I got to say goodbye to the place in Minnesota’s that feels most steeped in history and home to me.

In July, we also made a point to visit some of our favorite spots in the cities—Hi-Lo Diner, Minnehaha Falls, Nina’s Cafe, St. Anthony Main, Lake Monster Brewing— and we said goodbye to Chris’s hometown with one final (for now) night of bar hopping with friends. It was always going to be impossible to say a proper goodbye to the Twin Cities, and why try? We’ll be back. And maybe restaurants will close and new bars will open, but our home will always be our home. As glad as I am to have had goodbyes at a few favorite places, I’m also glad we didn’t try to say goodbye to everything. Like someone said to me at the Sebastian Joe’s in Lake Harriet, “you visit your favorite places when you’re back, and they get better, because you know what to compare then to now.”

New York - Dublin - London

Then there was our trip. Seventeen days of exploration and travel and miles of pavement pounding in gorgeous and unfamiliar cities. I’m never recovering from London, and even though New York feels like a separate trip, I’m already hoping we get back soon. This trip, though, was one for our books. Not just because it was the first Chris and I took together, but because we were dazzled by so much, exposed to so much, and learned so much.

Our First Weeks in Maryland

I’ve been introducing myself all week, and it’s tripping me out to say “we haven’t even been in Maryland a month.” But it’s true! We moved less than a month ago.

So far, we’ve done a lot of settling in, but have found time between IKEA runs and new jobs to do a little exploring. Our goal for the year is to spend at least one day, at least every other weekend, sightseeing, exploring, or playing tourist. (My personal goal is to visit every National Park in the area, so we can collect all our National Park Passport stamps. Don’t laugh.) So far, we’ve visited Calvert Cliffs State Park (with my parents), Cunningham Falls State Park, Catoctin Mountain Park (Camp David is somewhere in this park), been into D.C. once, and to Alexandria (so charming) a few times.

I can’t get over the history here. I’m floored every time I pass the home of one of the signer of Declaration of Independence on my way to work, and when I pass signs that the townhouse George Washington is still right here, steps from sidewalk I’m on. It’s a different kind of American history, as well as geographical and pre-historic history, to be surrounded by, and just like everyone said to us,, it’s really cool for us history nerds to be this close to so much history.

As for fall, I’m looking forward to it—assuming the weather here in Southern Maryland changes. (I’ve been warned that it can stay warm until December, but that temps generally drop in late September). We have a giant list in our living room of places we want to see or visit while we live here, and, more importantly, we have plane tickets home for Thanksgiving. I’m looking forward to a new season, and for the rhythms and routines we’ve developed so far to become more natural, maybe start to feel something like home.

all the magic london had to give

London was a storybook. It was six days of pure magic.

London is another city I have loved from afar, primarily through literature. For so long, London was the center of Western cultural production, and, for good and bad, the center of the Western literary canon that I devoured in my childhood. This city showed up, again and again, in the books I read and the histories to which I was drawn. Harry Potter visits, as do the Dashwood sisters (Sense & Sensibility). Dracula is entirely about the threat and defense of London as the heart of the British Empire, and all of Shakespeare is influenced by the city in which his plays were first performed. I even wrote my senior thesis about London, and the role Sherlock Holmes’s played in demystifying the sprawling metropolis.

My desire to see London has been so strong for so long that I can remember a specific, physical ache in my chest that came when I thought about London. A few days before we left, my dad heard me telling someone where we’d be traveling. From behind me, I heard him say she’s always wanted to see London.

On our first night in London, I cried on the Tower Bridge. We left our hotel for a walk. We weren’t navigating towards it, but within a ten minutes, it started to rise up in front of us. The Tower Bridge, and to our right, the Tower of London.

It was the view of the Thames that got me. We stopped on the bridge to look out over the river, and in that view, I recognized everything—the bridges crossing the river, the castles and palaces and government strongholds alongside these towers of chrome and glass. Even the cranes and scaffolding were familiar, a city built on its own preservation. The sun was sinking, its light breaking to dust and gold along the river. It wasn’t just that I’d seen the image in photos and films (though I had), but the thought that wouldn’t leave me that night. I kept thinking this is the city of all my books. This city I’ve dreamed of for so long.

In New York, I couldn’t get my hands around the city, and maybe that’s because the island is so condensed. Stories piled onto one another, one community’s history bulldozed to make way for another's. London, however, is sprawling. It doesn’t stack. It widens and spreads. I felt the same massive wonder, but none of the overwhelm. All this beauty? All this magic? I felt I could feel it in my hand, collect it, carry it with me.

What did we do in London? We did so much, and yet so little. We walked miles and miles every day. (For context, on our lightest day, we walked 10 miles). If Chris and I discovered one thing on the earlier legs of our travel, it was that we needed to walk a city to know a city. After the first night, I almost an aversion to leaving the streets of London. On this first ever visit, I didn’t want to disengage with the wonder of seeing the city unfold by blocks and boroughs. Everyday, we walked until our feet ached. (Or, in my case, broke into itching hives that needed night soakings in our hotel sink).

We saw London from the pavement: the Tower Bridge, the London Eye, Houses of Parliament, (but not Big Ben; he’s under construction), Trafalgar Square, Westminster Abbey, Buckingham and Kensington Palaces, Notting Hill, King’s Cross, Brick Lane, St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Globe Theatre. We visited Old Spitalfields Market twice, strolled Whitechapel Road on our first morning and Greenwich on our last, braved the sweating crowds at Camden Market, and browsed three floors at John Sandoe Books. We also spent a quiet morning wandering the Inns of Court, quiet courtyards behind Old Bailey (Central Criminal Court of England and Wales) home to the professional organizations to which all barristers, to this day, are required to belong, and another in Belgravia, a parade of marble and flower boxes, empty on Saturday morning.

We still hit quite a few of the big sites and museums. We couldn't be in London, and not see where Anne Boleyn was executed or the princes in the tower were murdered. Even without seeing the crown jewels (the lines, people, the lines), the Tower of London was worth the half day spent there. The Tate Modern was thought provoking, as was the British Museum, but both were too crowded to spent too much time in. The National Gallery was a feast, and I spent the majority of my time walking between the John Constables and the J.M.W. Turners, both men masters of brush and light in their own ways. Ever since reading Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent about a foreign spy’s plan to bomb the Greenwich Mean Tower, I’ve wanted to see the Royal Observatory, and I’m so glad we made it on our final day. We visited Hyde, Regent's, Greenwich and St. James royal parks, and each was lovely in its own right (especially after we learned England doesn’t have open carry laws, and park vendors sell Pimm’s). The Churchill War Rooms were unparalleled. I did not realize, until we got there, that the museum is housed in the actual, steel and concrete insulated room where Churchill conducted British operations during WWII. We spent hours in the bunker, and still I I left with a diary from one of the secretaries who worked in the War Rooms, wanting to know more.

As far as food goes, our hands-down favorite was Rum Kitchen, a small Caribbean spot nestled behind the Logan Mews in Notting Hill. After the crowds of Portobello Road Market, we needed respite, and between the cool room, the rum, and the food (oh, the food), we were all three in heaven. For the rest of the week, Chris kept asking “remember Rum Kitchen? Is it too early to miss Rum Kitchen?” Another surprise favorite, delivered by Google maps, was the Mulberry Bush, quiet spot near our hotel with traditional British food and an atmosphere that felt like pub-cozy for the twenty-first century. Other standouts were everything we had in the Borough Market, breakfast at Popina in Mayfair, and cocktails at The Booking Office, gorgeous bar in the original reservation office for St. Pancras Station.

Perhaps my favorite experience of London (and definitely the reason we walked so much) was that everywhere we were, we were within blocks of something grand and historic. Over and over, we’d look for an Underground station, and realize we were a half mile from this palace or that monument, and why not just walk a little extra to see Buckingham; we were in London.

I fell in love with London in a way I haven’t fallen in love with a place since I visited Seattle at eighteen. I cried when we arrived, and when we left, I cried again. The city was, again and again, an experience of wonder. When I got home, someone asked “do you remember how London smells like fresh gardens?” I have a small sprig of pressed lavender from Hyde’s Park to remind me.

On our final day, I had with me the sense of an ending. We’d spent that leg of the trip with Chris’s best friend. Parting with him made me feel like we were all be moving towards our next. Like this was the closing of one chapter of our lives. Even the weather was starting to turn. After six bright, hot days, we experience our first and only rain, and as we crossed the Tower Bridge a final time, the breeze off the Thames was cool and strong. More signs of a changing season.

Our leaving London was the first leaving of many to come. Leave London on Tuesday, Dublin on Friday. Say goodbye to friends on Saturday. Put everything we own into a trailer on Sunday. Finish the job I’ve loved and turn in keys to the apartment that gave me a home on Monday. Leave the Twin Cities for a final night at our parents houses, and then on Tuesday, get up and leave again. This time, our parents’ homes, the states we were raised in, and the lives we’ve been building for 26 and 24 years.

I cried for our endings, sitting beneath the hulk of the Tate Modern, my head on Chris’s shoulder. So much in front us, yes, but so much we were putting behind us. I needed the moment to say goodbye.

our first week in maryland: homesickness, hope + an apartment tour

As my parents prepared to return to Minnesota and the reality that I wouldn't be returning with them set in, I kept saying, “I want this experience of leaving. I just wish it didn’t hurt so much.”

- - -

We arrived in Maryland last Wednesday after a Herculean 20+ hour drive, and spent Wednesday through Saturday existing in a bubble of excitement. Look, the Capitol! The Potomac! The Chesapeake Bay! The weather app now includes tides patterns! Target is five minutes away! There's Alexandria! Mount Vernon! Mountains! Crabs!

Our parents were still with, and our brand-new apartment smelled of fresh paint. Our floors were a disaster of cardboard boxes and IKEA assembly, but look how the space was coming together! Everything was unfamiliar. Everything was exciting. We were riding high on adrenaline and adventure. All the reasons we came out were felt present and close.

Then my parents left before dawn on Sunday morning, and the weight of what it means to leave fell on me. I watched their tail lights until they disappeared, then I let Chris bring me back inside.

We spent that first day alone in a heavy quiet. I cried and put books on my shelves as my mom’s location moved farther and farther away on the Apple map. This was the weight I couldn't feel when this move was just an idea and a plan, the weight of what it means to live separate from everyone you love.

I went to bed on Sunday still crying. In the dark, I told Chris that I'd thought I was strong enough to do this, and he said to me: “just because you're strong enough doesn't make this easy.”

I’ve long been afraid that I’m not brave enough or strong enough to withstand the fullness I so desperately want out of life. Getting out here to Maryland, and finding myself immediately mired in tears and homesickness resurfaced this fear. We’re on this grand adventure--why do I so desperately want to return to what I know? Why aren’t I more excited?

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The shape and weight of my homesickness has taken me by surprise. I expected a swell of sadness, but I didn’t expect it to edge out the excitement or joy of the move. I didn’t expected all these strange moments of sadness -- crying over a shelf pin found at the bottom of my purse, because it reminds me of my dad, who built me my desk or overspending at Target, because I felt oddly conspicuous and obviously out of place. 

I’ve never been the girl to have a mantra, but mid-week, I made a deal with myself to “be present, but have a plan.” My sensitivity, my sadness, my love for the things that feel so far away aren’t wrong, but I don’t want them to consume me. When you’ve the history of depression I have, sadness can feel frightening. Who's to say this won’t be the blue patch that sends back into that dark country you’ve worked so hard to leave?

But not all sadness is depression or leads to depression, and as Chris so kindly repeated to me through all my tears: what I’m feeling is right, and it’s appropriate. Feeling my feelings is healthy and good. Loving something enough to cry for its absence is beautiful. It honors that love.

And while homesickness has dampened the excitement, it hasn't, by any stretch, extinguished it. There are all the things to do  that I'm excited for: I want to visit every Smithsonian, and hike on the Appalachian Trail. In December, Mount Vernon does candlelight tours, and on Assateague National Seashore, there are wild horses. Last weekend, we visited a state park known for its fossils. 

And then there's the beating heart of why we moved: the possibility. Above the job offers and the day trips, we came here for what if and what will. What will happen as we grow? How will we change? And in what ways will we become more of who we are meant to be?

We came out here to line up the dominoes, and see where they fall. We've set ourselves up to experience an onslaught of the unknown. That is absolutely going to make us uncomfortable.

Tears aside, here;s the highlight reel of the move so far: Our apartment is lovely. We leased it sight unseen, and what could have gone so badly has gone so well. This space is comfortable, large; the light is clean and effulgent. There's space for me to have a small writing nook, but not so large that Chris and I could lose each other in it. Our town is a surprising mix of rural and suburban. We’re five minutes in any direction from: A suburban, commercial stretch that includes a Target, a one stoplight "downtown," all county services, including the courthouse, and farmsteads. We’re also only thirty minutes from a metro station that bring us directly to DC, forty-five minutes from both Alexandria and the Chesapeake Bay (in different directions), a little over an hour from Baltimore, and a little over two hours from the Atlantic Ocean. (We’re also only four hours from Asbury Park, which is important since our entryway is dominated by a massive poster of Bruce Springsteen).

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This move is an experience and an adventure. We’re at the very beginning, and like any story, we don’t know how this all unfold. Thinking about it this way gives me the most excitement. I deal in stories, and here we are at the very beginning of our next one.

I may miss Minnesota, but he's the best home I've ever found.

we bring ourselves wherever we go: four days in dublin

We arrived in Dublin on a Sunday morning. A fine, flat rain punctured the surface of the Liffey, and the streets were all but empty. We passed three elderly women, each wearing raincoats the colors of jewels. They, and the doors in Merrion Square provided the only color. We'd flown overnight, a plan that seemed ingenious when I booked the tickets in February (fly out at one country's dusk, arrive at the second's dawn), but in reality, it was as brutal as it sounds. We didn't sleep on the flight. Chris's restless legs got the best of him, and he described his skin feeling as though it were crawling. The man next to us complained that this was the smallest plane he'd even ridden, and while we have less frame of reference, we were inclined to agree. We landed the walking dead. I was so tired that, even now, those first few hours seemed surreal. Compared to the constant movement of New York, the empty streets were a relief. It took a two mile walk (with suitcases, on small sidewalks and cobblestone--I still have bruises on my ankle) to our Airbnb to orient myself to the clock, to the day, to our trans-Atlantic position.

Dublin quickly became for us a city of lessons. The four days we spent here were decidedly rocky. Jetlag made us susceptible to the anxieties we're both having about our move, and neither of us handled well the discomfort of the unknown. While Dublin is a small, walkable, charming city with English speakers everywhere, the simple fact that it wasn't home was enough to dislodge our equilibrium. On our second day in Dublin (the sixth of our trip), we looked at each other and said we just wanted a break from all the decision making. Breakfast -- but where? And lunch -- but were? And what should we do today? Where is that? How will we get there?

The short of it: Dublin is where we had to admit we didn't have a groove.

As we planned this trip, we both acknowledged how much we had to learn. This was to be our first trip as a couple, the first (large) trip for either of us without parents, the first we we're taking as adults. I'd hoped traveling would come as easily to us as so many other aspects of our relationship, but it didn't. It took some learning.

Our first day in Dublin corresponded with our one year anniversary, and in retrospect, I like the timing. Dublin stretched us, made us grow. We started our second year in a place of vulnerability. We had to get tender with each other, and honest with ourselves. Why were we at odds? Why were we on edge?

A mother once said to me that from raising children, she'd learned that most problems between people can be solved with food, water, or a hug. I thought about that on our third evening, after we'd bickered our way through Temple Bar and ended our evening early so we could talk, uninterrupted by the movement of the city.

Our anxieties are always over connection. How do we tell the other what we want? What we need? How do we ask each other to hold the places too bruised for us to even name?

And as much as these tensions manifested themselves in our traveling (we are kings and queens of "but I want to do what you want to do"), they weren't about travel. They hadn't anything to do with travel. We bring ourselves with us wherever we go. It's the great myth of escape that we could ever lose our pain. In Dublin, we bickered over plans, but when we stopped to address the tension, we talked about deep-rooted insecurities, the mixed fear of and desire to be known. We talked about our move, and about how excitement is starting to blend with anxiety, with sadness.

While Dublin ended up being less about Dublin and more about our relationship, I should clarify: Our days here were good days, punctuated by tension (not the other way around). After my anxiety to see everything! do everything! lessened, our days mellowed. Dublin is a charming city with an understated beauty. Compared to New York, it felt like a village, and we were so happy getting lost in down these twisting streets.

Our first four days here in a nut shell: Irish War Memorial Gardens were an oasis along the Liffey. The Little Museum of Dublin was delightful, and because it's made up entirely of donations from Dubliners, it's a fascinating perspective on this city's history. I wish we'd gone the first day as an orientation to this city. We're in Dublin, so we had to drink Guinness. We toured the storehouse on our second day here, and as much as the tour was an advertisement for its brand, it was fun, and the best way to share a pint. Temple Bar was far too crowded for us. The Winding Stair Bookshop was lovely; the swans in St. Stephen's Green made me squeal, and the best food we had all week was the scones. Irish scones have ruined me for all baked goods. I'll never be the same.

My favorite moment of all though was the quietest. After attempts at two museums failed (one was closed, the other required advance booking), we found ourselves in the Irish War Memorial Gardens. The rain showers of the morning had given way to blue sky, and a sun so warm I shed layers until my arms were bare. We found a rock on the bank of the Liffey and dangled our feet over the clear water. I watched a bird's small, webbed feet pedal underneath the water. In so many ways, this could have been any other afternoon in the sun, but after spending six months saying to each other "baby, we're going to Dublin!," we were here. In Dublin! In Ireland! In the middle of this adventure! Forever let that be enough.