On the End of the World (With a Book Recommendation)

The other week, I found myself having repeated versions of the same conversation with various friends, family members, and myself. 

A few examples:

My husband, who is reading the sermons of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. for a research project, shared some of Dr. King’s thoughts on race, nonviolence, and forgiveness. Preached in the 1950s and 60s, his sermons are prophetic and his words are just as true and necessary today. “Was anybody listening?” I wondered.

We had friends over for dinner the other night and began discussing literature. My friend Jane mentioned reading James Baldwin and thinking, “He wrote all this back then?! Wasn’t anybody listening?”

I pulled out a book for summer reading that’s been sitting on my shelf for some time: Resident Aliens: A provocative Christian assessment of culture and ministry for people who know that something is wrong, by Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon. Then I noticed that my copy – which was published in 2014 – is the “Expanded 25th Anniversary Edition.” Which means that for at least the past 33 years some people have been saying that things are wrong both inside and outside the Christian church. Was anybody listening?

My father, who is reading a biography of Thomas Jefferson, shared this quote from a letter Jefferson wrote to John Holmes in 1820: “I regret that I am now to die in the belief that the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generation of 1776…is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons [.]” 

Did you catch that?!? Just 44 years after the Declaration of Independence, one of our founding fathers died believing that America had failed.

Life is usually so busy and loud that it takes a lot for me to have an epiphany. But these events, within the span of a single week, seemed to be circling around a single concept. Was it that humans have terrible hearing? That we do hear, but are too distracted or selfish to act? Or perhaps that humans, regardless of our hearing, have terrible memories: We cycle through the same problems, and what seem like new problems today have actually been problems for generations?

Click here to continue reading this week’s “Faith in Vermont” in The Addison Independent.

On Change and Summer

The “classroom” where I homeschool my two youngest daughters is an open space with sloping ceilings built on top of our garage. There are windows on all four sides of the room. Throughout May and June, as our school year wound down, I had a view of two things just beyond our yard that seemed to represent the changes happening in the larger world. 

It was early spring when I first noticed the surgical mask caught on a bush at the edge of the woods. My daughter’s desk is directly underneath a west-facing window, and as I glanced outside one day while helping her with a math assignment, a flash of blue caught my eye. We’ve all become far too familiar with this particular blue during these years of the COVID-19 pandemic. I’m still not sure how a surgical mask came to be tangled up in the branches of a bush several meters from our house; my best guess is that it blew out of someone’s car.

I didn’t remove the mask. For starters, it was just far enough through thick brush to make it an unpleasant chore. But I was also curious to see what would happen to it if left to its own devices. Would the wind, which often blows quite strongly through our yard, dislodge it? Would future archaeologists find it, preserved in our heavy Vermont clay, and date it back to the time of the pandemic? 

Against all odds and weather, the mask clung to that bush. Every school day I’d look out the western window and see that tenacious flash of blue. At first it stood out in stark relief against the bare grey branches. As the leaves began to emerge, it became more difficult to discern. And then, one day, I looked outside to discover that it had been swallowed entirely by the lush green of new summer leaves. 

Click here to continue reading this week’s “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.

The Birds…And The Bees

It wasn’t the first time a bird had become stuck in our woodstove; this had happened twice before. 

The three events all began with a scrabbling, scuffling, fluttering noise in the corner of our living room. This type of noise can be shrugged off once or twice, but after subsequent repetitions the message is clear: There is another living thing somewhere in this room. 

The first time, it was a House Sparrow. The second time, it was an Eastern Bluebird. Now it was a European Starling. 

Click here to continue reading this week’s “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.

My Kids, in the Middle of the Lake

It’s funny what a difference two weeks can make. 

Just two weeks ago, I wrote a column about how my husband – always on the lookout for new ways our family can have fun together – had outfitted all seven people in our family with bicycles. I ended that column with the line: “And now my husband is starting to dream about inflatable kayaks, so perhaps we’ll see you on the water, too!”

This past week, my mother- and father-in-law flew in from California for a visit. After my husband picked them up from Burlington Airport, he swung by Costco for what has become the Traditional Post-Airport Shopping Binge. Usually they come home bearing a couple of rotisserie chickens, industrial-sized bags of baking soda, and trays of croissants large enough to feed the population of Rhode Island. 

They came home with all of that, but this time they had an inflatable kayak, too. 

The inflatable paddleboard arrived the next day, and another inflatable paddleboard is en route. 

Click here to continue reading this week’s “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.

The Family That Bikes Together

Our family’s pandemic coping strategies have failed to follow national – or even logical – trends. We were already living in Vermont, homeschooling, gardening, and keeping chickens when COVID-19 hit, so we had many of the boxes checked already. In fact, the pandemic prompted us to send several of our children back to school, because of the crushing social isolation of homeschooling during COVID. Sure, we did some mainstream things like buying a large inflatable pool for our yard, walking our driveway obsessively, online yoga videos, and binge-watching The Mandalorian, but I may have been the only person in the world who stopped baking sourdough in response to COVID: It took a pandemic to make me emancipate myself from my starter. 

One pandemic-related trend was dubbed: “The Great Bicycle Boom of 2020.” When it became clear that COVID-19 would be sticking around for a while, bicycle ridership and sales increased dramatically. For reasons of both recreation and safety – riding bikes was perceived as safer than riding public transportation – people scrambled for bicycles, leading to supply-chain shortages. 

On one of our mid-pandemic daily driveway walks, I floated the idea of upping our bicycle game to my husband. Our four daughters, who love riding their bikes, barreled past us, riding back and forth along the quarter-mile stretch. The issue was that neither my husband nor I had a bicycle — having had two stolen during our years living in the San Francisco Bay Area – nor did we have any way to transport our toddler. 

“Maybe we should look into getting ourselves some bikes and a trailer so we could all ride together somewhere other than the driveway,” I suggested.

Click here to continue reading this week’s “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.

Back to All That

In 1967, the author Joan Didion published an essay called “Goodbye to All That,” in which she attempted to unravel the factors that led from her falling in love with New York City to “the moment it ended” eight years later, when she and her husband moved to Los Angeles.

In 2006, inspired by Didion’s essay, I wrote my own reflection on loving and leaving New York City. Like Didion, I spent the majority of my 20s in Manhattan. Seven years later, I was preparing to move with my husband to Berkeley, California, so that he could attend graduate school. And I was surprised to feel a sense of relief – urgency, even – upon leaving the city about which I’d once written, “Finally, I am home. New York City is where I belong.” 

Reading my words alongside Joan Didion’s, it seems that we both reached the point at which New York City ceased to make us feel young and alive, and started to make us feel old and tired. For her, it was realizing that there was nobody new to meet; for me, it was the creeping gentrification that seemed to be erasing the city I’d moved to seven years before. Echoing Didion, I wrote, “[P]eople whom I might like to meet can no longer afford to live here.”

So I left, and I didn’t return for 16 years – not really. There was one weekend trip in 2008, when my husband and I brought our infant daughter to visit New York as part of an East Coast trip. We stayed with friends in Brooklyn, because by then almost everyone we’d known in Manhattan had moved to the outer boroughs. We found that navigating the city with a 6-month-old was an entirely different experience: less fun, more harrowing. When we visited those same Brooklyn friends in 2018, we set foot in Manhattan only to catch the ferry for Ellis Island. 

But it’s worth noting that about 20 years after she penned “Goodbye to All That,” Joan Didion moved back to New York City and remained there for the rest of her life. 

Last week, I returned to New York City, too.

Click here to continue reading this week’s “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.

The Show Must Go On

When I was in school, I was a theater kid. 

We called ourselves “Drama Queers,” which is probably no longer acceptable – but this was the 1990s. The label conveyed our pride in being different, quirky, set apart. In a suburban high school where most of our classmates spent afterschool hours zipping around the playing fields, we “DQs” sequestered ourselves in the windowless box of the theater and attempted to embody characters that were not ourselves. 

I’ll be honest: I was not a great thespian. I played a lot of “citizens” — background extras who responded to the main action. But I was better at theater than I was at sports — and I loved it. Pouring myself into somebody I wasn’t, dressing up, the camaraderie of making a story come alive onstage, the applause; theater involved all the teamwork and creativity of sports, without the need for physical coordination. (Although I did suffer a sports injury – a torn ACL – while “walking the plank” off the stage as Pirate Starkey in a production of Peter Pan).

By the end of high school my tenacity was rewarded with a smattering of lead roles, but in college I was back to “citizen” status. For my final production, I wasn’t onstage at all, but was asked to serve as stage manager. I did this job well; the organizational skills required came to me more naturally than acting. It was, in fact, a version of what I do now in my everyday life: making sure everyone is where they need to be and has what they need to have. But I wasn’t as passionate about stage managing as I was about acting, so I let the curtain fall on my theatrical aspirations. 

Click here to continue reading this week’s “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.

Tuesdays With Beth

“We live just around the corner from you; you should stop by with the girls sometime.” 

It can be difficult to remember how our most important relationships begin since we don’t realize that something momentous is starting at the time, but the woman with the halo of white hair, kind eyes, and sweet smile said something like that to me back in 2011, as the congregation of Memorial Baptist Church mingled one Sunday after service. 

I felt vaguely uncomfortable. We’d just moved to Vermont with our three young daughters after a decade spent in major urban areas. Although major urban areas are significantly more diverse than small-town Vermont, it was easier for us to surround ourselves with friends of similar ages and affinities when we lived in cities. To put it bluntly: No elderly woman had ever invited me to pop over with my baby and toddlers. This wasn’t in my playbook.

But this wasn’t just any elderly woman: This was Beth Wilkinson. She lived with Roy, her husband of over 60 years, in an old white house on Main Street in East Middlebury. 

Click here to continue reading this week’s “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.

The Year the Music Died…And How It Was Reborn

I used to love music.

I would play music in the house and in the car. I listened to music as I walked or ran the streets of New York City, Berkeley, and our neighborhood in Vermont – first on a portable CD player, then on various incarnations of the iPod. My life had a soundtrack.

I used to go to concerts. 

My relationship with my future husband began when we attended an Indigo Girls concert together. We went on to see Diana Krall perform twice, the Dave Matthews Band, Elvis Costello, the Black Crowes, U2, Bob Dylan, and numerous orchestral concerts and operas. 

I used to follow singers and bands and get excited when their newest albums were released. 

The last album that I was aware of – the album I downloaded and listened through as soon as it dropped — was Babel by the British folk rock band Mumford & Sons. It was released in 2012,  nearly a decade ago.

It will probably not surprise you to learn that 2012-2013 – the year the music died — was the year our family got a puppy and the year I gave birth to our fourth child. These two events catapulted our house into a new level of happy chaos that drowned out the music. 

Click here to continue reading this week’s “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.

Parenting Teens and Saving the Planet

One of the best parts of parenting my teenagers is discussing the world’s problems and how to solve them. 

I was about to write: “One of the best parts of parenting teenagers is how passionately they want to save the world,” but I’m not sure that’s quite accurate. Saving the world, in my experience, usually involves getting out of bed before noon on non-school days, and we’re not there yet. It also requires one to move beyond an attitude of “everything-is-terrible-and-thanks-sooooo-much-for-giving-us-this-messed-up-word-Mom-and-Dad.” We’re not there yet, either. 

But my two middle-school-aged children are becoming quite aware of the nature of the issues that they’ll inherit. At the moment they’re studying Earth Science, and they are particularly concerned with carbon emissions, deforestation, and climate change. 

Because they are a) teenagers, and b) Americans, their potential solutions to these problems mostly involve buying things. We should buy an electric car, for instance. My eldest daughter apparently needs to buy more clothes – of the sustainable, recycled material variety. Their biggest push has been for our family to begin using bamboo toilet paper in order to save the boreal forests. They directed us to a company called “Who Gives a Crap,” where we could purchase 48 rolls of bamboo toilet paper for $64 (plus tax). We have seven people living in our house; that amount of toilet paper would last us roughly two weeks. 

Click here to continue reading this week’s “Faith in Vermont” column in The Addison Independent.