Even in Minnesota, you forget.

You’re busy with travel. With kids. Grandkids. They are so overscheduled these days, it’s exhausting. Finding time to plant those annuals. What about fertilizing? Are we doing No-Mow May this year? Not with all the rain. Some of us have mowed two, even three times.

A miracle: the rabbits have not destroyed everything. My azalea came back. So did the mock orange. The mugo pine was a loss, but not a tragedy. Could be worse is a Minnesota mantra.

It’s a good year for lilacs. My fragrant, blue-blushed French cultivar handed the baton to pink Miss Kim. The bloomerang — so named because it blooms in spring and in fall — was next. The neglected “common” variety — taken from my childhood home — bends heavily over its trellis. The progression of blossoming, one variety after another, softens my heart.

Way too late in the season, I begin to dig up the weeds crowding my lily of the valley. Thin the hosta. Push a wheelbarrow full of Solomon’s seal down the sidewalk to one of the six women named Mary who live on my block in once-solidly Catholic St. Paul. (I was raised Lutheran in the suburbs. Neighbors joke that that they took a vote before allowing me to move in. My name tipped the balance in my favor.)

The ice is gone. ICE is gone.

So are Renee Good and Alex Pretti, shot and killed in January by agents of our own government. George Floyd, crushed under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer on Memorial Day exactly six years ago.

Say their names.

On Saturday, I met a couple of friends at the Black Forest Inn restaurant. A Minneapolis institution, it’s located half a block from the site where Alex Pretti was gunned down by masked federal agents. Seconds earlier, he’d leaned to help a woman from the snowbank where other federal agents had pushed her.

“We used to walk here, when I lived on Groveland.”

“How far was that?” Karen asked. “Did you feel safe?”

My rehabbed apartment faced a church known for its handsome stone exterior and excellent music. My fellow tenants were grad students, artists, designers, academics, and the man I met when I was twenty. The one I did not marry.

“About a mile. Safe? Mostly. I never came here alone.”

That night coming back from the Art Institute, where I was taking a class. It was a January evening, but the bus was late and the temperature in the mid-thirties. I decided to walk. Even in my long wool coat, hair wrapped in a bun, arms full of books, the men in those cars saw only Young. Female. They pulled to the curb. Reached over to unlock their Buicks and Cadillacs. That guy in the shadows — I took a shower after I’d locked the door behind me. Then I called the man I did not marry.

“You what? And expected something different?”

Yes. I expected safety. But so did Alex Pretti and Renee Good.

I looked around the restaurant. Hand-painted murals of hunting scenes covered the walls. Coats of arms and antlers completed the look. Was the Black Forest Inn the only place in my life that had never changed?

“The first time I came here, I was in sixth grade.”

A field trip. We were studying German. I ate spargel and. warm kartoffelsalat. Spätzle. Ordering in German, I felt cosmopolitan.

“How long ago?” My incredulous friends are from California.

“58 years.”

Who could have guessed that this unassuming place would one day feed protesters in a city occupied by its own government? Patrons paid what they could afford, knowing that many businesses were shutting down out of a new kind of fear. There was no way, no way, that this bohemian neighborhood would see teargas, marauding thugs, two shocking murders following another one on a Memorial Day six years earlier. That there would be demonstrations, incidents recorded on pocket-sized phones with cameras, and surreptitious food deliveries to safe houses. At age twelve, I worried about umlauts.

Due to Minnesota’s two seasons — winter and road repair — I did not navigate the closed roads and detours to Renee Good’s memorial site or George Floyd Square. I went home to my lilacs and lily of the valley. With every hard shove of my spade into the earth, I thought of those three murdered humans. Today, I say their names, and those of others.

My husband’s name. Gone three years now, he worked hard to plant and nurture a yard that four decades ago was nothing but scrub and scruff. My mother’s name. The last Mothers’ Day picnic near the “common” lilacs in her yard. My father’s name. I planted a rose in his memory, called “Hope for Humanity.”

Let us never lose hope.

How are you honoring your loved ones, the bright souls taken too early from this earth, your heroes? How do you remember them? Tell me in the Comments. Say their names.

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Wishing you growth and beauty on this Memorial Day.

~ Mary

Last week was the rabbit test.

No, I’m not talking about that test. (Google it if you must, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.) The date varies, depending on the previous winter’s snow depth; range in temperatures (mild, cold, Minnesota cold); adequacy of fall preparation (where did I put that rake?); cost of recent plantings (I once had a bank account with money in it); and the deviousness and depravity of the local bunny population.

My rabbit test is scored according to the number of curse words I utter as I walk around my yard, itemizing the carnage. Three years ago, they took a cotoneaster, two serviceberries, a lilac that used to bloom twice each year and now blooms never, and every single tulip bulb. This year — so far, I haven’t made the full tour — my dwarf mugo pine, Alpine currant, and a mock orange were eaten entirely to the ground. Four shrubs near the fence, stripped like chicken bones. The pagoda dogwood I planted in memory of of my husband: don’t ask.

And yet.

For the first time in over a decade, the apple tree near my back door is covered in pink and white blossoms. I’ve done one thing right this spring: called the arborist. The crew has been out twice to treat whatever disease keeps producing the stunted, wormy apples that even the squirrels won’t eat.

I gasped when I opened the invoice. Then I thought of my husband’s futile efforts to prevent the anticipated ripened fruit from turning into hard little grenades. Insecticidal soap. Neem oil. Flytraps hung from branches. His own special formula of rodent repellent.

I look at the tree. So many blossoms. I write the check.

May 1.

I wake to music, coming from the nightstand on what I still call his side of the bed. Strange. Then I remember: the Bose player I gave him so long ago, the one I stopped listening to after he died because why listen to music alone? I’d set it to the classical station as a reward for going to bed and rising on a regular schedule. For practicing good sleep hygiene.

Now is the month of maying, When merry lads are playing, Fa la la la la la la . . .

I lift my head from the pillow and let my hair fall in my face, without pushing it back. When was the last time I looked through a curtain of my still-blond hair?

The Spring clad all in gladness, Doth laugh at Winter’s sadness

More fa-la-las. A madrigal. How long since I listened to madrigals? This one’s delightful, it’s the one everyone knows, or should.

The announcer tells us that it was written by Thomas Morley in Shakespeare’s time. With Midwestern bashfulness, he adds, “It’s a little bawdy.”

Say, dainty nymphs, and speak, Shall we play barley-break?

Barley-break. Inviting the bonny lasses to roll in the hay. The rabbits were bawdy, too. I go downstairs and make the single cup of French press I allow myself each day, and only before noon.

May 2.

I wake to noise. Laughter. Loud bass thumping, unintelligible words. It’s eight a.m., and someone’s having a party.

Two houses down. A student rental. I pull on my bathrobe and look out the front window. The street is lined with luxury cars, high school graduation gifts from parents for whom financial aid is not a consideration.

It’s Kentucky Derby Day. Girls in big hats and extremely short dresses, boys in summer-weight suits and bowties. Each is holding the first of the many mint juleps they will drink throughout the day as they proceed from one house to the next, walking and then staggering, girls holding each other up. Hats and bowties will be shed. I wonder if any celebrants will make it to post time — 5:02 in our Central zone — without passing out.

I shut the window. Someone will call the police on these merry lads and dainty nymphs. The response may take a while. So much frolicking on the greeny grass of this usually quiet neighborhood.

May 3.

“Rhubarb!”

My six-year-old friend, Ruthie, is waving a fat stalk with a big leaf. I walk over to the strip of soil between our yards. Once a shared boundary, it surrendered to the predations of weeds and aggressive groundcovers at some point, when I was busy looking away. But Ruthie has mapped the ownership of certain plants, including the rhubarb. One clump is in her yard; two are in mine.

“Here’s one of my stalks. Can I have two of yours?”

“Of course. One from each plant.”

I get a paring knife from the kitchen. It’s a good year for rhubarb; the stalks are thick, not skinny and limp. I cut two, then slice off the toxic leaves, setting them aside to put in the trash.

“Can you come over to my house?”

“I’d be delighted to come to your house.”

She brings out two bowls, each filled with a cup of sugar, and sets them on the child-sized table on the patio. We dip our stalks, stirring and grinding them.

“When I was your age, and I asked my mom for sugar, she always said I was sweet enough,” I say. “She let me have sugar anyway. But not too much. She didn’t want me to get cavities.”

My mother died in May 2001. Twenty-five years have passed since she sat at a picnic table, surrounded by her family. I can no longer look at pictures from that day. A near-skeleton, in a wheelchair with an oxygen tank. Not the mother I want to remember.

Twenty-five years, the blink of an eye.

“Am I sweet enough?”

The fragrance of lilacs that day. But this year? Damn rabbits.

“You are the sweetest six-year-old girl in the world. But I think you’ve had enough sugar for tonight. Make sure you do a good job of brushing your teeth. Cavities are no fun.” I glance over at her dad, and mouth And they’re expensive.

I lift my favorite little girl off the ground and spin her around. As I cross the grass to my house, I turn to say one more thing.

“In the fall, this tree will be full of apples. You can have as many as you want.” But dad and daughter are already indoors.

Remember, last year, when you saw that apple? The only good one on the tree. You pointed it out, and I gave it to you. That’s why I decided I’d never cut down this tree.

I’ll tell her that story another day.

Hello, dear friends, and happy May-ing! A special welcome to the — many! — readers who’ve joined the Writer, interrupted community in the past few weeks. I’m honored that you’re here. My deep gratitude to those of you whose continued presence sustains me. I take no one for granted. It is my greatest joy to bring you my best work.

Now, drop a few words in the Comments. Tell me how your garden grows. (If it doesn’t, come sit by me. We can comfort each other.) Who’s your favorite King’s Singer? I like the guy in the pink tie.

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A big welcome to all new subscribers! More than two hundred of you have joined in the past month. Writer, interrupted is a community of nearly 6,000 readers who’ve opened their hearts and inboxes to me. I’m honored — and humbled — that you’re here.

Mary

It is a privilege of aging to rearrange time.

No longer an arrow or a flat circle or a giant weight over my head, time is a shape-shifter. A palimpsest: layer over layer of memories. I lie in bed half-awake, soothing an infant to sleep. The following morning — or 37 years later — that same sweet boy calls to wish me a happy 70th birthday.

I stand at an altar on a day in July, sweat running down the back of my wedding dress. Three minutes later, snow swirling outside a hospice on an April night, I sit with the lifeless body of my husband of 43 years.

There are no false starts.

Grief is one way we grow.

As a native Minnesotan, I grew up understanding life as a series of spokes branching out from a central hub: weather. Blizzards, thunderstorms, heat, humidity, flash floods and hard frosts dictated our activities. The state high school hockey tournament snowstorm hit on schedule during the third week of March. We took our family vacations in August, when my dad’s ragweed allergy flared. From November through April, the smell of wet wool filled the entryway as scarves and mittens sizzled on the radiator. Lilacs bloomed at the end of May; mock oranges and plum trees breathed their scents into the night air during the first week of June.

This year is different. Between the Ides of March (heavy snow) and April 17 (hail and tornados) the temperatures rose into the eighties, fell below zero, and boomeranged in between. Forsythia bloomed. I turned seventy. A bird hopped across the porch roof in front of the window where my very old cat was seated. Mini noted, for the last time, the first robin of spring.

It’s Saturday, the twenty-first of March, the day after the vernal equinox. I’m sitting with my neighbors in a loose arrangement of chairs spilling out from Brian and Rebecca’s garage into the alley. At ten in the morning, the temperature’s already reached 75 degrees. That’s 79 degrees warmer than the previous Monday. Spring in Minnesota is not what it used to be.

A clamoring overhead: the trumpet-rattle calls of a squadron of sandhill cranes. Their flight path is taking them west, toward the Mississippi River, a small course correction in the return to whatever migration group they’re part of. This way, over here, now I see them, what’s the rush?

On the ground, we’re holding our own forum. There’s the roast-your-own-beans delegation, the homemade ginger-beer contingent, the maple syrup caucus.

“It’s perfect weather for the sap to rise.”

Ralph brings up pictures on his phone. Rennet jugs — his forty acres are in Wisconsin, famous for its cheese — collect the clear liquid, and an arterial network of blue plastic tubes siphons it to restaurant steam table pans. He and his wife Cindy carry them to a stock watering tub set over a wood fire.

“We brought home two gallons of syrup last week. From fifty of sap.”

I live among folks who bring a surge of generative energy to the world. They make, harvest, build, imagine, organize, knit, purl. My current skill set does not extend much beyond loading the dishwasher properly. I stand, so abruptly that I splash lukewarm coffee onto my jeans.

“Gotta get home to Mini,” I say. “It’s been years since I fed her.”

I hurry out before anyone asks how she’d doing. Within days, she will let me know that it’s time to summon the vet.

Sunday, March 15. I’m in the sunroom looking out at twelve inches of fresh snow when the doorbell rings.

At three in the afternoon, I’m still in my bathrobe. This isn’t unusual for me. But as I’m never sure how others will react, I hesitate. After the second ring, I wait thirty seconds, then peek out the bow window of the sunroom. Someone walks away from the door. A child, bearing a snow shovel. I set down my coffee and hurry to intercept her.

“Hi there!” I call. She turns. Squints at me from across the softly drifted front steps.

“Is it okay if I shovel your sidewalk for ten dollars?” Her voice has the confidence of someone who’s earned many Girl Scout cookie badges.

She’s about eleven. The snow isn’t heart-attack heavy, but it’s dense. Wet. For ten dollars, I should put on my coat and boots and join her. Let her think she’s the one doing the actual shoveling. Invite her in for hot chocolate.

But I’ve finished off the Swiss Miss, scraping the last of it from the container to make a tan gruel that tasted like sweetened chalk. To get dressed seems pointless. Changing from one pair of pajamas to another has become my winter clothing rotation. I won’t badger her with questions about school, the thing grownups ask about when they’re done with exclaiming over how big you’ve grown. This sturdy child is the size Nature intended her to be; she’s Nature’s business, not yours.

I sprint upstairs. Ten dollars is all the cash I have, or I would give her more. She folds the bill and zips it into her jacket pocket. Fifteen minutes later, my sidewalk is the cleanest on the block, and I’m still in my bathrobe. The girl has moved on. Her unhurried pace tells me that she will always find the right tools to make her way in life.

As I return to my seat in the sunroom, my heart lurches.

It was on a day like this, almost exactly three years ago, that I tried to clear a path for my husband’s wheelchair. On the morning he left our home to enter hospice, a similar amount of snow had fallen. My black puffer coat flared open like a crow’s wings as I sobbed, flailing, my face swollen with tears. The dull blade of my old shovel didn't crack the layer of frozen slush against the pavement.

Two angels appeared out of nowhere. Rebecca put her arms around me in a tight embrace.

“Mary, we’ll do this,” she murmured. “Go be with your husband.”

Brian was already at work, moving slabs of snow, leaving nothing behind on the concrete.

“Go,” Rebecca whispered. “He needs you.”

I went. Back indoors, I crouched next to the wheelchair that was useless in our old house, with its stairs and angles and the upstairs corridor to narrow for people to pass each other. We cried together until my brother arrived. He’d driven four hours that morning to help with our final, hardest move.

Monday, March 16. Overnight, the temperature drops to minus four. The streets are fully plowed but icy as I drive the two miles to the office of my therapist, who I’m seeing for the first time.

Diana appears to be roughly ten years older than me. Because my birthday’s approaching, that would put her at — wait, eighty? She could die, send me reeling into another loss, three years after my husband’s death. Maybe I should rethink this, find someone younger.

Instead of, How many drinks do you consume in a week? she says, Any concerns about alcohol? I tell her no. I like her phrasing; it doesn’t require math or induce shame.

She refrains from asking What do you hope to accomplish in therapy? That’s the kind of question that — along with the job interviewer’s Where do you see yourself in five years? and the hairdresser’s Do you need any product today? — that make me want to excuse myself from human interaction until my singed neurons heal.

We don’t discuss EMDR, CBT, DBT, C-PTSD, or whether I think we’re a good fit. My preferred treatment modality is talking; we’re a good fit, because she’s listening. I make an appointment for the following week.

We stand. As she shows me to the door, she asks again. So, you think your main issue is grief?

I don’t know how to answer.

Saturday, March 28. No Kings Day. The country’s flagship rally is taking place on the grounds of the Minnesota state capitol. A few days before my seventieth birthday, I am going to my first political demonstration.

At ten a.m., my son parks in front of the house. His wife and mother-in-law are with him. We walk three blocks to the bus shelter, and watch five packed buses pass us by. After half an hour, a driver sees us — two old women clutching their millennial progeny for support — pulls over, and stops. We climb in.

It’s not like a Tokyo train. But for the reserved denizens of the Twin Cities, who have to suck in their guts and pull their children close, it’s a bit friendlier than usual.

The driver drops us at the edge of a crowd that organizers will later estimate at two hundred thousand. We move by inches under a brilliant sky. Someone raises an arm, pointing, calling. Look at the eagles!

In a convergence of symbol and meaning so perfect it seems staged, two bald eagles are indeed soaring overhead. After a minute, they’re gone.

Are they migrating, like the cranes? I’ve seen giant eagle’s nests along the riverbanks near my house and in the Boundary Waters, close to the Canadian border. In Minnesota, land of 10,000 lakes and the headwaters of the Great River, you are never far from an eagle.

My eyes fill with tears. This gathering has been blessed. Following a winter of occupation by our own government; of masked thugs and teargas; of five-year-old Liam in his bunny hat, taken by ICE and deported, it feels like a cleansing. After the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, it feels as if a message has been sent: Go forth, holding them in your heart.

One hand-lettered sign reads It’s So Bad, Even the Introverts Are Here. We are a few feet behind its bearer, who — true to the placard’s sentiment — raises and lowers it so quickly, I can’t get a picture. When Bruce Springsteen takes the stage, I lift my phone. Tilting it to capture bare tree branches and the capitol dome instead of the heads in front of me, I record the Boss singing “Streets of Minneapolis.”

We leave on a bus with enough room to sit comfortably together. At home, I pull out my phone. For the ages, I think, hoping I’ve at least gotten the sound. I press the replay button.

What I’ve captured is a three-second view of a stranger’s coat and boots, and some dead grass. I hear my “Ope, sorry,” as I apologize to the ground. When I held up the phone a second time, I’d forgotten to hit record.

Two days earlier, March 26.

Mini purrs with the bliss of a blind kitten as I cradle her head. She rubs her face against my hand with hard, insistent pushes. Her teeth are slightly bared as she seeks the mother who never nursed her. I’ve withheld that part of her origin story, not wanting her to know that she was the runt, the one deemed too tiny to survive. Mini. Though she be but little, she is fierce. She will follow Titania and Tybalt, two cats who preceded her, into a midsummer night’s afterlife.

The softest blanket. The A-frame shelter of my bent legs. Pillows and footstools arranged on the floor to help her navigate the front bedroom. All winter, we slept together in the narrow daybed that was my daughter’s. Before that, she curled against me every night in the bed my husband left when he moved to hospice three years ago.

She slips from my arms and resumes spinning. That is the word for the tight circles of her pacing, something she’s been doing now for days. Maybe even a couple of weeks. Minimizing this symptom of neurological decline, I’ve been repeating a desperate mantra. She’s eating. Drinking. Still uses the footstools, the cushions, the litterbox!

But she’s peed on the floor a few times. Fallen more than once. I wake at three a.m. not knowing how long her gaze has been fixed so intently as she winds her way around, tethered to some invisible post.

Suddenly, she stops. Calm as a Buddha, she faces the wall. I move forward and press my hands against her sides. Her purr is resonant and even. We sit, unmoving, for five minutes. Then she brushes against my arm as she makes her way to a cushion, lies down with paws together in front of her chest, and closes her eyes.

If you’ve had to say goodbye to an animal who loved as fiercely and tenderly as Mini, you know the wordless communication that passes between you at the end. I thank her for the nights she waited at the door for me to come home, hollowed out by a job I hated. For the pandas — of course they weren’t stuffed! Of course each one was not the previous one! — she brought, yowling and trilling loudly enough to wake the neighbors. I thank her for staying with me, so I would not be alone on this earth.

She tells me it’s time. That I will be okay.

I stand. Mindful of her awareness, I tiptoe downstairs and pull up the Final Journey website. Pictures, profiles, names. Which vet is available today?

Renee.

Like Renee Good. I’ve found the right person

“I can be there by three,” she says. “I have everything we need. She won’t feel any pain.”

Upstairs again, I lift my companion onto the bed. Kneeling by her side, I croon into her ear. You are my Mini, my only Mini, You make me happy when skies are gray.

The vibration in her throat has grown faint. My voice breaks.

Please don’t take my sunshine away.

How do you deal with the hard things in life? You know: the grief that feels overwhelming, but can be the wellspring of a new life. Letting go of beloved companions, when you desperately want them to stay. Reaching a milestone — birthday, anniversary, retirement — and finding it more complicated than you thought it would be. Tell me about it in the Comments.

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Dear friends,

Many of you have come to know Mini through the stories I’ve told about her since I began sending out posts on Substack. Her presence was a gift; she sustained me over the three years since my husband died. But age takes its toll: first arthritis, then night blindness, then walking into walls. When the familiar territory of the house became a place of falls and anguished cries, I moved with her into my daughter’s former bedroom.

We kept each other company through the winter. She declined slowly, then rapidly. Last Thursday, I made the decision to call the vet. At the age of 23, Mini passed into the next world.

The loss of her has been crushing and strange. Every grief is different, but this one has caused me to stumble into a new realm, where reality is fluid and I can’t trust the earth to hold me up. For that reason, I’m reposting this piece from December, 2023. I hope to be back later this week with something new.

With love and gratitude,

Mary

The cat in this picture is twenty-one years old. That’s one hundred and four in human years. Without the benefit of life in a blue zone or a Mediterranean diet, how has she achieved such longevity?

Mini was a barn cat. The runt of the litter, rejected by her mother. She survived. Was rescued. Fostered. Loved. Let go, many times, for many reasons: a boyfriend’s allergies, anti-feline rental covenants, her habit of purring and hissing simultaneously if an untrustworthy human approached. When my daughter was in college, she inherited Mini through someone’s complicated separation agreement.

When a teaching job took her to another state, Mini moved in with us. Other cats came and went, burning through some or all of their nine lives. Mini stayed. In April, 2023, my husband died. Mini and I became the sole occupants of a three-bedroom house built in 1913.

I mention the age of the house because Mini is a hunter. When cold weather comes, so do mice. In this part of the Upper Midwest, temperatures can fall to minus thirty degrees Fahrenheit. In the market for a cozy place with cracks in the foundation? Tempted by that pantry cupboard with the small hole in the baseboard? Mini welcomes you. Your name is already on the menu.

She is, based on every internet search I’ve done, a Siberian. She checks all the boxes: sweet, loving, smart, beautiful, vocal, agile, adorable. Her coat is composed of three layers. The inner fur lies against her skin like a silk slip. Next is the insulating layer, each strand of which marries the texture of a dandelion seed with a fine grade of goose down. The glossy top coat elegantly defies the elements. Her markings — she is of the storied Neva Masquerade family — carry the subtle camouflage tones of the taiga.

Until two years ago, she took great care of this coat. I never brushed her. She never needed brushing. I tried, once, to carelessly unravel a knot I thought I’d found. I took a curry paddle, something more suited to a German shorthaired pointer than to Russian aristocracy, and went after it. She embedded her incisors in my flesh.

But at age twenty — ninety-six in human years — she was not quite as limber as before. The mats appeared overnight. They grew thicker each day. Each time I approached her with the new miracle comb or brush I’d ordered from Amazon, I learned that her memory was as sharp as her teeth. I tried working the mats apart with my fingers. Massaging them with cornstarch. With coconut oil. I plied her with treats, hiding my scissors.

Imagine a length of live electrical wire. Form it into the shape of a cat. Watch YouTube videos. Try everything you think might not get you killed. Finally, admitting defeat, bring it to a pet groomer who gets okay reviews on Yelp. On a rainy night in May, 2022, that’s what I did.

For seventy-five dollars, the groomer shaved off enough fluff to fill one and a half grocery sacks. She removed the mats, leaving enough fur to give her an edgy, leonine profile. Hacked, uneven, but blessedly free of lumps.

‘What do you think?”

The groomer was sleeved with tattoos. Left arm, dogs; right arm, cats.

“Cool,” I said. “Love the crest. And the puffy boots.”

I wrapped my shivering, silent kitty in a bath towel. Opening the carrier on the kitchen floor, I expected to find her motionless and traumatized. She walked out, looked around, went downstairs, came back with a mouse.

A toy mouse. The real mice were cowering elsewhere, terrified.

Two weeks later, I sat leaning against my husband. Our sweaty hands locked as the oncologist pulled up the PET scan. An angry red tumor had devoured half of his left lung. Inoperable, the doctor said. Terminal.

As we lay stunned in bed that night, we heard Mini. Siberian cats are, as I said, vocal. Mini is, in that respect, off-the-charts loud.

Trills, chirps, wails. Yowls. She boasts, celebrates, extols. There are times I want to get up and close the windows, for fear that the neighbors will think we’re torturing her. But she’s not suffering. She’s not calling for a mate, or crying to be fed. She has a message for the universe.

Come. See. It is I, Mini, the Magnificent. I have slain the mighty beast. Come. Admire. For I have brought you . . . DINNER!

After a few questioning, disappointed meows, she was quiet. She landed on the comforter and curled up between us. I reached down to stroke her choppy fur. I don’t remember whether or not we slept. In the morning, I stumbled over the stuffed panda, unicorn, and hedgehog she had left for us on the floor near the foot of the bed.

Undeterred by a bad haircut, Mini provides for her family. (August, 2022)

I kept journals. I took photos. I wanted to document the time I spent with my husband, not knowing how much time that would be.

It was just under a year.

The photos give an incomplete timeline. He was a passionate gardener. I circled the yard, carrying my phone as a counterbalance to my sadness. In May, tulips. April: lilacs, irises, bleeding hearts. June: roses, clematis, mock orange. July: bursts of Asiatic lilies. A family of robins had nested in the arbor he’d built. I filmed their growth from our kitchen window. On June 29th, one fuzzy yellow head emerged. On the 30th, there were three ravenous beaks. And on the 11th of July, I took a picture of the last chick to leave the nest, sitting uncertainly on a fence.

He built that fence.

Fewer pictures. His cancer was progressing. Chemo helped with the pain, but did not stop the metastases to his clavicle and ribs. Radiation failed, as did immunotherapy.

In August, the vine threaded through another of his fences produced small clumps of tiny, sweet grapes. In early September, we took our final trip to Lake Superior’s north shore. It’s a sacred place, a liminal space. Gooseberry Falls, formed from some of the oldest rocks on earth. Sumac, goldenrod.

I don’t have many pictures after that. He slept a lot. I took care of him, until it became too hard.

And Mini? She took care of him as well.

We moved him to a residential hospice in March, 2023.

I hesitate to share his picture. I expect threatening rumbles from the black monolith of his crematory urn in the living room. He hated to be photographed; I had to do it on the sly. In the curve of that feline body against the vulnerable human, I see the tenderness of a pieta.

Mini’s mats were far worse than the previous year’s. But her outer coat hid them from view as they grew thick as cotton ropes. All winter, I’d fed and petted and ignored her. After a long day spent running errands and visiting the hospice, I came home to find her walking oddly. She was stumbling in a circle, her head fixed and immobile, facing to her left.

“Mini. Oh my God. What happened?”

I searched her fur. She cried out. Horrified, I realized that in tugging at a mat, she’d caught one tooth under her skin. It was stuck like a fish hook. Her head was pinned to her shoulder.

Shocked, sobbing, I managed to work it loose. It took nearly an hour.

“Poor sweetie,” I whispered. “I’m so sorry.” I carried her to bed. She pressed her fierce little body against mine. Eventually, she slept. I stared at the ceiling.

“We’ll fix this,” the vet said. “She’ll bounce right back.”

A cleaned wound, a cute knit onesie, antibiotics, and something called a “soft Elizabethan collar” instead of the pejoratively labeled cone-of-shame, set me back two hundred and sixty-six dollars.

“There goes my liquor money for the week,” I told the receptionist. She laughed, thinking it was a joke. I brought Mini home and tucked the collar down so that she could eat her Fancy Feast, while I stroked her head in remorse.

The vet told me I could remove the collar after a week. Mini’s teeth went immediately to the wound. Another visit. A third. More than eight hundred dollars had now left my bank account.

On a morning in early April, I pushed a syringe of gabapentin into her mouth. I waited two hours for the sedative to take effect before taking her in for a proper grooming.

“Relax,” I murmured. “You’re gonna love the way you look.” Six months later, she was beautiful again.

In March, 2026, after 23 years spent bringing joy to this world, Mini let me know it was time. No more waiting at the door. I opened it for her, and she walked into the last of her many lives.

No matter the amount of time that has passed, grieving is hard. It casts a long shadow. One way to combat that darkness is to celebrate the life we have now, here, on this beautiful earth. Because it’s my birthday month, and the month in which my husband departed this world, I am extending my offer of 25% off annual subscriptions until April 30. If you’ve been reading for awhile, please consider a paying subscription. Help keep award-winning, independent writing alive.

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Thank you for reading. I’m grateful you’re here.

Just as light is both wave and particle, grief is tsunami and raindrop. Avalanche and snowflake. Noise and signal .

A rotisserie chicken is a study in sadness. A cauliflower crust pizza, a diorama of hell.

The dishwasher consumes your forks. None of your black socks match.

Welcome to widowhood, Year Three.

My husband died in April 2023, a year after he was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer. We were married forty-three years. While memories of him have softened in some places, they’ve sharpened in others. Almost daily, I find myself stunned by some small remembered sweetness, or an unresolved hurt. Sometimes I’m ambushed by a longing so intense I need to stand still, eyes closed, waiting for it to subside.

With no one around to perform cognitive-behavioral interventions, most days begin with a furious recitation of my inadequacies. Mary, you are so stupid. What’s wrong with you. You forgot to (return, empty, clean, fix, buy) X. The house is a disaster. What’s wrong, what’s wrong, what’s wrong with you. Sometimes the voice harangues me all day. It gets worse. Expletives. I’m shouting. The neighbors will hear. I can’t stop. I would stop if you were here, I tell myself, and it’s possible that I would.

There are moments of joyful surprise. I open a door, flip the switch, and think, How thoughtful of him to put a light in the closet.

But when the bulb burns out, my anger turns outward. I search the basement. No replacements. Why didn’t he buy a ten-year supply of them, and batteries for all these devices? Why three remotes to work the TV and suddenly all of them are dead? I can’t find the power cord. Not for this iPad, or for that one, how many iPads did he leave behind? Dozens of cords. Where did he hide the one he knew I’d need?

When rage is exhausted, sorrow steps in. After three years of loops and spins, I have landed in the same place where I began.

As the surviving spouse, I’m in charge of the narrative. But grief is an untrustworthy collaborator. It pulls out one memory at a time, examines it, returns it to the darkness. Themes, frames, representative moments: are my choices fair, my edits respectful of his memory, or face-saving and cowardly? Am I trespassing, or in denial? There has to be some inviolable connection at the heart of a marriage that lasted more than four decades.

• That time in the Boundary Waters Wilderness when the map misled us into a bog. Up to our waists in muck, we unpacked our gear, ready to leave everything behind as we slid our canoe ahead. Hours later, we emerged to find the real portage, twenty feet away. Had the map been correct, it would have taken us no more than fifteen minutes to haul our packs and canoe over the same distance.

• Those nights I worked late and came home to find he’d made dinner for me and left it in the fridge before going to bed. Such tenderness in the gesture, in the imagination and variety of those meals. Always beautifully plated, at a time when I could not see beyond ugliness.

• If we’d taken the other path, would we have learned our mutual language of survival?

• If he had not fed me, would I still be alive?

You get through the first year. The grief is intense, but you survive. Manage. People admire the way you process your loss. You are holding up. Showing up. The house is tidy, within reasonable parameters. The yard isn’t crying out for Roundup. Not yet. Thistles and thorns come later.

At the beginning of the second year, things are going well. You quit therapy — a mistake that doesn’t manifest itself until two Thanksgivings later, when things go from delay to disarray to mortification. Worse, a new genre: you’ve invented slapstick-horror dinner theatre. What else can you call it when you’re so disorganized that a cheese tray and a bowl of glazed pecans become the meal itself and not its bookends?

You wonder if people are a little afraid of you. If you should be afraid of yourself.

The doctor diagnoses vertigo. Mentions rocks in your head; you freak out until you realize he’s joking. Calcium crystals in your ear shifted and sent you spinning like a top into the ER.

Ear crystals? Sixty-nine years on this planet, and that’s news to you. The cure is to crank your head five ways from Sunday to move them back into place. A maneuver half chiropractic and half Exorcist, it looks medieval but it’s a miracle. You can do it at home with a YouTube video and no co-pay.

The woman — you — who scrubs the bathtub and sends thank-you notes goes missing; gradually or suddenly, you don’t know. No Mary alerts blare from your phone. Every so often, you get out the Clorox and spray the grout. It hits you that the word grout carries within it grubby, grime, grim, grit, gray, grave. What else? You reach for the OED and search for cognates —

No. Get a grip. You’ve gone dirt-blind and are trying to turn mildew into literary inquiry. The world doesn’t work that way.

Except that in your new life as a full-time writer, it does. It’s a brave and thrilling new world. Compost is essential to growth.

Mail, including dozens of unread New Yorkers, lies in sloppy stacks throughout the house. In the kitchen, three picnic coolers and a plastic Halloween pumpkin crowd the butcher’s table, narrowing the path to the door. Here’s the Dutch oven that fell too close to your feet, more than once. We won’t talk about it. All toes survived. Just put it away, for God’s sake.

Back to the living room. Even though it’s March, the house is still decorated for Christmas. The tree, covered with ornaments. Nutcrackers all over. Stockings, wreaths. Garlands. The porcelain village. And because you abandoned the job, storage boxes are piled up where the Christmas presents should have been but were not, because you didn’t buy any.

You need to see a therapist. Next week, or sooner. To do so, you will have to get a referral from a primary care physician. On the Medicare website, you find one who can get you in tomorrow.

For the first time in three years, you exhale.

Mini, my 22-year-old cat, still blesses the earth with her existence. Last summer, her health declined. Night blindness made her frantic in the full territory of the house. She bumped into walls and furniture, fell on the steps. We moved, together, into assisted living in my daughter’s old room. With a small, familiar perimeter and stepped arrangements of footstools and pillows, she feels safe. I feel less alone.

With spring approaching, I trade the duvet for a light blanket. It folds around us in gray velvet wrinkles, like one of those improbable dog breeds the audience loves but will never take best in show.

I draw my knees up beneath the covers, creating a blanket fort. I’m trying to find a comfortable way to rest my laptop on the slope of my thighs but it turns out that there is none. I move her to one side and straighten my legs.

Life with Mini is a series of contortions and negotiations. So is writing. I could untangle myself and move to my downstairs study. Sitting in a decent chair with a desk at the proper height would be better for my back. But I’d be beyond the limit of her awareness, past the vanishing point at the center of her universe. I can’t bear her pacing, her cries when she can’t find her way out of a corner.

Across the room is a wall of bookshelves. I stare at the spines with their familiar titles. Thanks to The Seven Basic Plots, I don’t need to leave home to find a new one. Five copies of Mrs. Dalloway. Should I move them to different rooms? Separate them, like quarreling children?

The night ends in judgment and hesitation, as I mentally sort reference books. Does an imprint’s pedigree matter? Or is The Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus a kind of slow Labradoodle that might benefit from placement on a lower shelf?

We leap into Daylight Savings Time. An hour vanishes. I drop my collection of pointless questions into it before it disappears.

I learn a practice called One Good Thing. Every day I write down one good thing. It can be something that happened that day. Something I see, hear, feel, taste, discover or remember on that particular day. Just one.

Here’s yesterday’s Good Thing:

I get to eat sautéed kale five nights in a row, and call it dessert.

You’d think I would have taken more pictures of him, especially during those last days when he was in hospice.

Views of a frozen courtyard through the window of his room.

A late winter storm: ice-covered twigs.

A screenshot of a poem by Pablo Neruda. The poem, “Keeping Quiet,” begins:

Now we will count to twelve / And we will all keep still

It ends:

Now I’ll count up to twelve / And you keep quiet and I will go.

I am keeping still. He is gone.

His final haircut, a few gray strands before his post-chemo hair grew in, dark and curly. I could have saved some in an envelope.

I scroll through the few photos he posted on Facebook. None, not even his profile, are of him. I delete Facebook.

Mini’s appetite is still robust. That’s why I’m spending another Saturday night in the pet supply aisle at Menards.

I lift a jug of fresh-scent, lightweight — in some other atmosphere, perhaps — kitty litter into the cart. And feel immensely tired.

I head over to the grocery section. Two cans of soup. Off-brand tortilla chips. Half a pint of half-and-half could be a line rejected by a tunesmith of those clever ditties from the golden age of radio. Peanut, peanut butter: actual song lyric. I round the corner to toiletries and remember I’m out of dental floss.

A dozen cans of Salmon Supper and a double roll of paper towels. Everything feels twice as heavy when I place it on the belt as it did when I took it from the shelf. I grab a few extra plastic bags to line the wastebasket. Mini is still using her litterbox. Good girl, Mini.

I’m an old woman who lives in an old house and sleeps with her very old cat. Is there anything sadder?

Well, yes. In addition to all that, I’m someone who buys dental floss at Menards.

In Hokusai’s famous image, boats are swallowed by an enormous wave. Mount Fuji stands placidly in the distance.

Hokusai used the same method to create a series of flowers. In this one, the poppy’s trajectory is the same as the wave’s.

Today’s One Good Thing:

All motion is forward motion.

A noise. I look at my watch. 3:25 a.m. I’ve fallen asleep, again, in my clothes. Eyes half-shut and bleary, I squint in the direction of the sound.

Mini. On the floor, pacing in a tight circle. Jaw set, eyes fixed, gait relentless, my 22-year-old cat winds herself around a heartbreaking spiral of decline. She veers into a wall and pees on the hardwood floor.

I lift her out of the way, grab a towel, and drop it in the spreading puddle.

“Sweetie, it’s okay.” I place her on the bed, covering her with the throw. As I stroke and massage her neck, her breath eases into the even cadence of sleep. I fetch a rag and disinfectant.

I find the energy to brush my teeth and pull on pajamas. I search Google, again. Every result comes with the same stern directive: Call the vet.

My list of reasons to avoid calling the vet: Today she’s eating. Drinking. Using the litterbox. Not in visible pain. She’s immortal!

It’s true. I have been to the edge with her more times than I can count.

When the time comes — and Mini will tell me when — I’ll summon the doula. Eased by potions and in peace, Mini —

I will keep quiet, and she will go.

Downstairs in the living room, the Christmas tree lights alternate, flashing between white and colored bulbs. As Year Four approaches, the house throbs to life.

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One more thing?

Thank you, dear readers, for making these challenging years the best of my life. I would not have made it through without you. I am forever grateful.

~ Mary xo

“Mary. Are you coming to our bonfire tonight?”

I turn, caught in the act of taking out the trash. Ruthie is standing on the back steps of the house next to mine. She swings the storm door open, hangs from the handle.

Is this a real invitation? I see Dan and Meg through their kitchen window. Maybe it’s a party for friends their age. Millennials, like my own children. The self-introduction meme from The Simpsons comes to mind: Billy Corgan, Smashing Pumpkins; Homer Simpson, smiling politely.

Yellow puffer coat, sparkly dance skirt, her mother’s fleece-lined boots. Ruthie, age six.

“Of course I’ll come. Thank you for inviting me.”

“Yay!” She runs inside to tell her mom and dad.

I lower myself onto the kitchen bench and take off my sodden canvas shoes. Lean forward to peel off my socks. Leaving damp traces, I climb the stairs to the room I still think of as my daughter’s, even though I live in it now, sharing the space with my aging cat.

“Mini. Catch of the day!”

I set down her dish, filled with the newest temptation I hope will put flesh around her ribcage. As she’s nearly blind, I lift her small body and plant it in front of. the bowl. She sniffs around the edges, then goes back to her pillow and closes her eyes.

What to wear?

The temperature, warmed up to the mid-twenties, calls for layers. Thermal top. Medium-weight sweatshirt under a heavier, hooded sweatshirt. No gloves. Pushing the season, but I’m a native.

What to bring?

It’s been so long since I bought groceries that I’m out of my indicator staple, peanut butter. I grab the potato chips I’ve been saving for just such a bare-pantry moment. Gripping the bag, a bottle of riesling cradled in my elbow, I make my way across the snow.

Dan’s built a blaze in the in the firepit in front of the three raindeer figures that have adorned the yard since Thanksgiving. Wire frames covered in tiny white lights. A buck, doe, and fawn. All winter, the sight of this crèche has comforted me.

“Nice fire.” The wind shifts; my eyes sting. “Must be hard to keep wood dry over the winter.”

The front door opens. Ruthie, with a paper plate full of brownies; Meg steadying her down the steps. Those boots, more than twice the size of a little girl’s feet.

“Mary, I have a loose tooth!”

She sets the plate on the chair. Opens her mouth and wiggles a lower incisor.

“I see. And you’ve already lost one.”

“Yes. The tooth fairy gave me ten dollars.”

“Wow. Teeth are expensive these days. When I was your age, I got a dime.” I glance up at Meg. Ten dollars?

“We were on vacation. Mom said the tooth fairy couldn’t get change. Do you want a brownie?”

“I’d love a brownie.”

Salt, sugar, grease, alcohol, chocolate. Neighbors. What could be better? The fire sparks and snaps. Wind gusts drive the smoke in all directions. I’ll need to wash my hair when I get home.

“I’m not going to eat one. My tooth might come out and I’ll swallow it. Then the tooth fairy won’t bring me any money.”

“I bet she would. Maybe not ten dollars, though.”

She turns her head to watch a van moving slowly up the street.

“I’m going to bring the brownies to my friend at school. So he can have something to eat if the ice people take him.”

If the ice people take him.

In what kind of world does a six-year-old worry as much about losing a classmate as she does about losing a tooth?

In a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, benign creatures mass together on a school playground before they attack. The sense of menace and unease is sustained within the context of fiction. Children scream and run in response to a threat we know is manufactured. They are acting. The director may be a tyrant, but there are no real bullets on the set.

“I want to go inside.”

Meg lifts her daughter and carries her past the reindeer family. The flame has subsided into acrid plumes of smoke.

My hands are raw. Stiff. Bad choice, leaving those gloves at home.

“Thanks for this, Dan,” I say. He nods. Squints.

“You bet.” The stoic response of a fellow Minnesotan.

On February 12, the border czar announces the conclusion of Operation Metro Surge.

“We’ve had great success with this operation, and we’re leaving Minnesota safer. As a result of our efforts here, Minnesota is now less of a sanctuary state for criminals.” He goes on to clarify that ICE will not be pulling out entirely. A small footprint of agents will remain, for an indefinite period of time.

Four thousand arrests. Three people shot, two of them fatally.

Safer, they say. A success, they say.

I can’t shake the image of Alex Pretti, face down, shot multiple times in the back. The bloodstains he left in the snow.

The Farmer’s Almanac bestows a name on every full moon and the month that contains it. Each is illustrated with a folksy image, the kind you might see on a rural giveaway calendar. You don’t want to be greeted by Hunger or Sore Eyes over your morning coffee. Better to start your day with a strawberry or an ear of corn.

The editors chose Snow Moon for February. March is the Worm Moon; April, the Pink Moon.

Two dates with personal significance are forthcoming in April. One is the third anniversary of my husband’s death. The other is my seventieth birthday.

I share that day with Renee Good, the woman who was shot three times through her windshield by an ICE agent. Like me, she was an American citizen, a poet, and a mother. She will not be able to celebrate her thirty-eighth Pink Moon, because she died of her wounds in January, the month of the Wolf Moon.

I meet my son and his wife at a locally owned restaurant in St. Paul. We are supporting as many of the small businesses eviscerated during the occupation as we can.

“My mom went to a protest last week. She left before they started arresting people,” my daughter-in-law says. “She’s on a Rapid Response team, and gets Signal messages.”

“That’s great,” I say. “Does she follow ICE vehicles in her car?”

“No. She didn’t get the training. Maybe she won't need it now.”

“Let’s hope.” Just how small is that footprint ICE is leaving behind?

I’m in my neighborhood Signal group, but haven’t been summoned. I didn’t get the training. No one taught me how to verify license plates and send out ICE alerts. Maybe that isn’t my calling. Is it too grandiose to say I’m here to bear witness with my words? At least I can print flyers and hang them on doorknobs.

My son teaches in an autism program in a school on St. Paul’s East Side. The area is home to a large immigrant community. It’s been targeted, but residents stay mostly under the radar, aided by a stealth network of volunteers.

He holds up his phone, showing a photo of his middle-school students packing groceries.

“They really get into it. You never think about the skills involved until you watch someone learning them.”

Skills. Assessing each item by weight. By content. Packaging: metal, glass, paper, cardboard, plastic, none. Shape: square, cylindrical, rectangular, round, flat. The density of bread and marshmallows compared to cucumbers and melons. How can so many things look so different from each other and still be called tomatoes? The riddle of eggs, the mystery of bananas.

“You do good work in this world,” I say. My son and daughter exist as evidence that I have not wasted my life.

I dress like a beatnik most days. Staying up late at my laptop takes a toll. Sometimes it’s five a.m. when my head jerks up and I see that I’ve covered three pages with semicolons. That’s when I stagger off to the bed I share with Mini.

Upon waking, lacking the working memory needed to search through my closet, I reach for one of a dozen black T-shirts — no turtlenecks, I’m saving up for something chic — pairing it with black leggings and socks. Some days, I throw on a cardigan. Other mornings, a men’s XXL off-white canvas shirt. Too big for my husband, he never wore it. But I recall the tenderness I felt as I wrapped it in Christmas paper so many years ago.

It’s Ash Wednesday and the first day of Ramadan. Yesterday marked the beginning of the Chinese New Year. The Fire Horse gallops in once every sixty years. I want to harness this confluence of spiritual energies.

My wardrobe is a magnet for cat hair. I have lint rollers in every room. If I leave the house for some event, I swap out the tees for a red sweater. I’m going boldly into that good night. Red is my color. It’s the Year of the Fire Horse.

I hope Mini will be here when I turn seventy. At 22, she’s a centenarian in human years. Having risen from her deathbed countless times, she has a few things to teach me about longevity. The most important: Get some sleep.

My husband and I spent many of his last evenings sitting in wicker chairs next to the gas firepit on our upper deck, or lounging with cocktails in front of a copper brazier on the patio. In previous years, there were raucous nights with Brian and Jeannie, before they sold their house and moved to Texas, passing along their fire ring to Dan and Meg.

During our weekly happy hour over Zoom, Jeannie tells me she’s going to an ICE OUT rally in Brownsville.

“It’s my first demonstration. I’m going to set up my table.”

She learned Spanish and became certified as a voter registrar. Every week, she and Brian drive to a college town near the border, where she sits for hours at a time, helping young Hispanic American citizens change the world.

Vote.

To support the people of Minnesota whose lives continue to be affected by Operation Metro Surge, here’s a link to a number of local aid organizations:

standwithminnesota.com

Thank you, friends, for opening your hearts.

Mary xo

I don’t see myself as a political writer. There are many out there. Whether or not I agree with them, I respect and honor their choice.

What is happening in Minnesota is beyond politics. It is an issue of human rights and dignity. It is about standing up to care for others.

Tell me what you think in the Comments. I look forward to a lively discussion. As always, personal attacks will not be tolerated.

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Dear Friends,

I have lived my entire life in Minnesota. I moved from Minneapolis to St. Paul, settling into my present house forty years ago. Only someone with deep roots here can understand what it’s like to love a place that rewards you in summer with an abundance of lakes and parks, bike trails, and walking paths, before slamming you in January with the wind-chill factor. How diabolical: a number designed to make you believe you’re miserable when actually you’re fine, considering. It could be worse.

Yes, there’s winter. Brisk. But jumper cables, a full tank of gas, and an abundance of kitty litter in the trunk will get you through. Just don’t take out the ice scraper. Ever. It’s a jinx.

If you move here, you will be mystified by the rituals of The Long Goodbye and The Last Donut. Don’t worry. In some future post, I will enlighten you. Maybe. Let’s not get too personal right away. Sometimes it takes a few years.

In the meantime, strangers will shovel your sidewalk, dig out your car, and call out a search party for the glove you dropped.

You’ve heard of Minnesota Nice. Call it Minnesota Normal. What’s happening here is, sickeningly, not normal.

I’ve been working on this post for what feels like forever. One thing happens, then another, and I can’t write through the heartache. Every sentence felt shallow and pointless. Things happening in the streets push their way into my every thought.

Even my grocery lists are not immune:

Yogurt. Peanut butter. What else? Moisturizer. Is Target the only place that carries that brand? I know Target’s on the bad list, but so many Somali women work there. If no one shops there, will the store close? Will they lose their jobs if they’re afraid to go to work?

An overnight forecast of minus 21 degrees. I deploy space heaters, run a trickle of water through the basement faucets, check the pipes. Does Amazon share Ring footage with ICE? Is it safe to use Google to find out?

Friday night, I fall asleep at my computer. Saturday morning, ready to hit Publish, I glance at my phone.

A text from my son.

What we are seeing is real.

~ A woman, 37, in red shirt, light blue jacket, tan beanie and a wide smile. A minute later, Renee Good was dead.

~ A Hmong elder in undershorts, Crocs, and handcuffs, with a red and pink blanket draped over his shoulders. Standing in subfreezing cold, in front of the door ICE agents had bashed in before ransacking his home, searching with no judicial warrant for two alleged sex offenders who had never lived there and were unknown to the family. They drove him around for an hour, questioned and fingerprinted him, demanding to see his ID. Which Scott did not have in his shorts.

~ A five-year-old boy wearing a Spiderman backpack and a blue knitted bunny cap. Despite pleas to leave him with caregivers, Liam was sent with his father to a detention facility in Texas. If, because of “optics,” he is released, does this erase his trauma?

~ A man, 37, in brown parka, khaki pants, duckbill cap, phone. Alex Pretti, lying face down, bullet holes in his back.

What we are seeing is real.

I feel pressured to write a polemic. A screed, outraged and politically charged. But that isn’t who I am.

I don’t use a bullhorn. In meetings, I’m the softest voice in the room. When I speak up, I feel as if I’m shouting.

Two Sundays ago, fifty neighbors crowded into a house three blocks away from mine. Strategy, division of labor, resources, connections. What do we, each one of us, have to offer?

It was a good meeting. I live among people who understand that caring for your neighbor may sound like whistles being blown, raw shouts of Shame! or the crackle of a radio at a schoolyard, warning of the presence of ICE vehicles. It is a quiet discussion among people who recognize that the softest voice in the room might be worth listening to.

It is the poem Renee Good did not get to write.

It is a human imperative.

Words matter.

I’ve spend much of my time on this earth gathering, assembling, thinking about words. What I see is alarming. Words emptied of meaning, deprived of context, beauty, and truth. Stories filtered through the greed-silos of social and corporate media. Banned. Defiled. And, of course, “weaponized.”

Think about that last one.

My immediate association — maybe ingrained during the Covid epidemic, from the way the virus is spread — is “aerosolized.” Cloying faux-floral air freshener. Migraine-inducing cologne. The product a novice hairdresser blasts in your face. Noxious, invisible, toxic chemicals. Teargas.

There is also “atomized.” We are separated, isolated from our communities, believing that we are alone in our fears and sorrows. This is the epidemic of loneliness there is so much hand-wringing about. Young men sit for hours in their basements on social media and are — another association — “radicalized.”

I wonder what drives someone to hide his face behind a mask, suit up in military gear, and join with other men similarly dressed, masked, and armed, to terrorize fellow citizens. What makes someone shoot a poet in the face, or a nurse in the back?

Where do they get their vile words?

AWFUL is the latest acronym for a woman perceived as fitting a certain stereotype. It stands for Affluent White Female Urban Liberal. Renee Good is AWFUL. So is her partner, Becca Good, who is being investigated by the Justice Department.

From The New York Times, January 17, 2026:

Domestic terrorist.

Professional agitator.

AWFUL.

I’ve been called the c-word. The b-word. The p-word. If you’re a woman, you know the sting and humiliation of hearing those epithets hissed or shouted or spoken in a matter-of-fact male voice in your direction.

Years ago, I filed a complaint against a workplace supervisor for addressing me with one of these words. I described it as “a derogatory gender-specific epithet.” It was more than one, and it was more than once, but I was fed up.

He called me at home. “Don’t do this,” he said, his voice rising in panic. “Look how much trouble you’ve caused me. I’ll be flipping burgers for the rest of my life.”

I reported him.

A few days later, I looked up from my seat in a coffee shop near my house. He was standing in front of my table, dressed in combat boots and carrying a camouflage backpack.

“Don’t do this,” he said.

He removed his aviator sunglasses, I could see the smug certainty in his expression. Of course she’ll back down. She’s a p***y.

I changed my routine. Found new places for lunch. Varied my choice of parking spaces. He found me. Again. Again. That smirk. I got tired of filing reports. Besides, didn’t he have the same rights as anyone within a public space? Could I prove that the hang-up calls at midnight came from him?

Eventually, he was fired. The manager told me that, while he could not comment on specifics, I’d be relieved to know that my complaints had not factored into the decision.

“He’ll probably leave you alone. He was terminated for something more serious than a little name-calling.”

After an ICE agent shot Renee Good three times through the windshield of her car, terminating her life, she was subjected to a little name-calling, too.

Her words to the man who killed her were, “I’m not mad at you.”

I won’t repeat what the agent said as he walked away. To do so would be to give him the last word.

He does not get to have the last word.

Friday — the day before I received that text — was the day of the general strike against ICE: walkouts, business closures, boycotts, tens of thousands of people marching in subzero cold. My son, who participates in most civic protests and is a union steward, decided to sit this one out.

“Happy birthday,” I said when I called him. “How does it feel to be 37?”

“Not a whole lot different.”

“You’re getting to that age. Only the milestones count.” I remembered when I reached the point when the birthdays of my children were the only ones I celebrated.

“Stay warm,” I said.

“I will. Love you.”

Renee Nicole Good, age 37.

Alex Jeffrey Pretti, age 37.

A friend asks if I want her to escort me home.

“Thanks for the offer,” I say. “But it’s only a couple of blocks.”

Twilight. The streets are empty. The only footsteps are mine, steady and loud where the pavement’s clear; a sound like the cracking of tiny bones where it isn’t. The cold air amplifies my sobs. The warmth of the gathering shatters.

Mary. You’re old. Invisible. Tiresome. A widow. It’s been almost three years, no one cares anymore. Going home to your cat. Mini’s 22, how long is she going to live? You’ll be a cat widow. Maybe you already are.

My fear when I leave the house? Not that the boiler will blow, or that if I disconnect the cameras, thieves will break in. I worry that Mini, confined to my daughter’s old room for her safety, will die of heartbreak. Or that when I find her small body, I will.

I’m pleased to see Ruth behind the cash register at Target. She doesn’t ask, “Paper or plastic?” She’s already placed one paper sack inside of another, repeating this five times as she scrutinizes my cart. As I unload, she passes each item across the scanner so quickly that I can barely keep up.

“How are things?” I ask. “Were you here when that guy came in to, uh —”

“Take a whiz? No. I saw the video.”

I’m about to say more, about the Praetorian guard of agents who accompanied the ICE commander and stood watch outside the men’s room. The whistles and shouts and profanity from customers. But Ruth is focused on stacking each bag with canned and boxed goods, followed by a layer of medium-weight items, bread and eggs on top.

“I keep my head down,” she says.

Looking more closely, I recognize that hunted look. Maybe she’s 65, or a year or two older. But she’s had this job for a long time. Managers less than half her age are beginning to sidle up, saying too cheerfully, Have you picked a retirement date? and You could take a round-the-world cruise with all the money you must have saved by now. Maybe she’s been transferred from a store in one of the tony suburbs. Given the worst shifts. I’ve seen that look in my own eyes, in the break room mirror.

If the till doesn’t balance at the end of the night. If she’s five minutes late coming back from lunch. Her hands in plain view at all times.

She glances up at the opaque half-dome of the pitiless lens that could determine her fate.

I take off my coat and head upstairs. Mini hasn’t touched her food since I left for the meeting. She’s curled up on the stack of pillows that, until a week ago, she was able to use to climb up to the bed we shared.

Now that I’m sitting on my footstool next to her, she chows down vigorously, turning her head to the side that has a couple of remaining stumps of teeth.

“Mini-girl,” I say. “What can I do?”

I reach down to pet her head, but she pulls back. The instinct of cats nearing the end is to hide from predators. I’m violating her safety zone.

What can I do? I’m signed up for the secure chat. I downloaded the app and wrote down my number on the sheet that went around. Chose a cool handle and a tough-looking profile picture. I await further instructions. In the meantime, I’m operating on my own.

Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to double-bag everything, so that the bottom doesn't fall out.

*From the book Kitchen Hymns by the Irish poet and conflict mediator Padraig O’Tuama, Copper Canyon Press, 2024.

I don’t need to tell you how hard things are in this moment. That what is happening here in Minnesota affects us all. That what you see is real, that words matter. So do actions, no matter how small they may seem. Tell me more in the Comments.

What can you do? Here is a link with some ideas:

Stand With Minnesota

Sending love,

Mary

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Dear Friends,

It’s been some time since you’ve heard from me. Illness knocked out all my energy, and I’ve spent the past three weeks flat on my back in bed. Because I rarely get sick, I have to reach back to the 1968 flu pandemic for a parallel.

I was twelve. I hallucinated. I thought I was attacked by a giant plush White Rabbit. It was my brother, playing Jefferson Airplane on repeat.

I wish that today, I was only hallucinating.

Minneapolis/St. Paul is my home, where I’ve lived all my life.

I’m not here to bring darkness. You’ve had plenty of it.

“I’m not mad at you.”

~ final words of Renee Good

Six days ago, I wrote the poem that follows. I woke up. Crashed, woke up, crashed. Wrote. Crashed.

Now, I’m awake. It is what poets do. We wake up and write.

Ice is not safe; it won’t spare you

when four tires hear separate shouted instructions

nothing stops the skid, a three-point turn

into what happens. A physician

steps from the crowd; arms up, hands

empty of all but do no harm

and is turned away. We have our own medics.

Mittens clipped to her six-year-old’s cuffs; her own hands

raw, bare. The snowball’s paused in play, in air —

that last wave to her son, as the school bus

pulls from the curb. The poet goes indoors, sits at the kitchen table

reaching for the right meter, light feet tapping hummingbird, happily —

not expecting the full, the final stop.

It’s cold today. But in my neighborhood, there’s warmth. The messages go out, the email chain: Let’s get together. Hold each other. Talk.

Toy animals spilled from the glove compartment.

To remember the small details of someone’s life is to honor them in death.

Beware of darkness, friends.

Love, Mary

Tell us your thoughts in the Comments. I’d love to hear what you’re thinking. About the events unfolding in our world, yes. But most of all, I want to know what you and your friends and neighbors are doing to take care of each other in these difficult times.

Thank you to all for reading. A heartfelt welcome to the many new subscribers who’ve found me within the past weeks. It uplifts me to know you’re here. This work gives me more joy than any I’ve done in my life. You, dear readers, sustain me.

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Writer, interrupted is a reader-supported publication. All of my work is currently free, and all subscribers have my deepest gratitude. I’m honored that you’re here. If you’ve been reading for awhile and have the resources to support my work, please consider a paid option. Your gift helps keep independent publishing alive.

White, white, white.

Wrong.

By now, you’ve probably read that the Pantone Color Institute — a global design cabal tasked with the heavy responsibility of this decision — has chosen its Color of the Year for 2026. It is . . . white.

Not just any white, however. Here’s Cloud Dancer:

According to Pantone, Cloud Dancer is:

a lofty white that serves as a symbol of calming influence in a society rediscovering the value of quiet reflection. A billowy white imbued with serenity, PANTONE 11-4201 Cloud Dancer encourages true relaxation and focus, allowing the mind to wander and creativity to breathe, making room for innovation.

Where do I start?

Cloud Dancer is like a secular religion’s meeting space at a convention center. Once you’ve found the room — and boy, do you feel time pressure when there’s a hyphen in the number — you’re asked to surrender your eight-dollar latte at the door. Or you may stand on the other side of the hallway and drink it, as long as you’re mindful that the session begins in two minutes, precisely at eight a.m., and no latecomers will be admitted.

You remember through the fog of caffeine deprivation that the only beverage allowed in the room is water; the only food, vanilla wafers. Shoes off, hushed voices, scented candles. Merch, including branded athleisure wear and mood rings that appear to be stuck on maximum transcendental awareness.

You find an aisle seat. It’s a good thing that it’s uncomfortable because the lighting’s dim and the air conditioning seems not to be working. Then the teacher, the guru, the guy whose face is on the books on the table in back invites you to close your eyes. He begins to lead you through a guided meditation.

Invite, lead, guide. Come with me, whispers Cloud Dancer, in a voice like fabric softener. You rouse yourself with that strategy you mastered so long ago: fingernails dug into thighs.

“You are dancing on clouds. Released into relaxation. Your thoughts are spacious. Billowy.”

Billowy? You bury your face in your arm, feigning a coughing fit. Mumble excuses as you head for the door. The coffee you hid on a folding chair behind a spare room divider is still there. You are shaking so hard with laughter that you have to wait to pick it up, or risk spilling it or snorting it through your nose.

I don’t know about you, but my immediate association with “billowy” is fitted sheets. Would you paint your bedroom in Fitted Sheets?

Me neither.

I once succumbed to the adjectival overreach of Sherwin-Williams in order to tell people that I’d painted my living room Nude. The joke was old even before the paint fumes cleared. “Nude” could have been any color, and it would have sold. This one was like my eight-dollar latte, if I’d asked the barista to make it with no more than an eyedropper full of French roast.

It’s been years since I stood on that stepladder wearing old shorts and a T-shirt ripped in a unsexy way, holding a rag to wipe paint drips from the woodwork. The walls haven’t darkened or faded; they are forever off-white. My guess is that Nude is still lurking under aliases in paint stores, tiresome and a little creepy.

In 1962, Crayola re-christened the offensive Flesh, calling it — of all things — Peach.

What’s in a name? I’ll let you decide.

My mind drifts back to Cloud Dancer.

There’s no need for me to rehash the memes, the accusations that the color choice is socially, politically, and in every other way tone-deaf. Others have speculated that Pantone is predicting that 2026 is the Year of the Rapture. Is the number a code, to be parsed into month, day, and hour? Were the color gods huffing irony, or can they really forecast — or fix — the future? Will we all trade in our stainless steel ranges for stoves the color of warm milk?

It’s the picture that I find hypnotically strange.

Maybe it’s the feeling that the spirit of Bob Ross is nearby, itching to add another happy little cloud. The bendy-doll posture of the woman, doing something with her body that not even Simone Biles would attempt. The fact that you can’t see her face. The outfit! I haven’t owned elephant bells since the pair I was wearing caught in my bike chain, resulting in a chipped front tooth and a lasting regret for believing it was uncool to compromise safety for fashion.

It’s AI, badly generated. Look at the boxy stiffness of the top. Does she have a jet-pack strapped to her back? An air conditioner? Nothing woven behaves that way. The bulky, uneven hems of her pants would not pass muster in a seventh grade home economics class. Will someone please find her a pair of five-inch heels, before she trips on them and chips her tooth?

She’s dancing on a cloud, you say. Point taken. But what does AI know about the suitability of a happy little cloud as a dance surface?

What bothers me is that background sky. The Bob Ross shade of pale blue. It’s a color suited to a Spring. The woman in the image is clearly a Winter.

Forty years ago, before influencers and the Internet, “color consultants” roamed the aisles of department stores. Their job was to determine the hues that harmonized with your skin tones. They assigned you to Spring, Summer, Winter, or Autumn. Then they went to work on your wallet.

I don’t know what machinations were at play here, but the dicta of coordinating shades must have generalized from the three-color paint chips at the hardware store, the decrees of the fashion industry, and “You look great in burgundy,” to a new level of genius.

Just as your astrological sign fell into the categories of Air, Earth, Water, or Fire, you were now one of the four seasons. How simple and how brilliant. And it worked.

One day, as I pretended to shop for designer clothes at a nearby mall, a saleswoman approached. Looking me up and down, from my Cost Cutter haircut to Target blouse, baggy jeans to scuffed sandals, she exclaimed:

“You’re not a Summer! That turquoise is just wrong. Let’s get you into some clothes that bring out your very best you.”

She sat me down on a stool near a dressing room. She brought over garment after garment, holding each one next to my head. Nodding. Frowning. Setting them aside, narrowing the range to shades of dying vegetation.

“I knew it. You’re an Autumn.”

Autumn. One of those words as pleasing on the page as it is spoken aloud.

“Try this one. It’s perfection. Just for fun. I’ll start a room for you.”

I’ll start a room for you. Try this one. Wait, I’ve got something better. How sensational is that?

The words. The attention. The lighting — the more expensive the clothes, the more flattering the illumination — brought on a surge of longing. Who was I, beyond a stay-at-home mom with crappy clothes and a paused university degree?

I was an Autumn.

I handed over my credit card.

Everything in my closet shifted several degrees towards drab. Sepia. Khaki. Taupe. Dull tans and sad dried-berry shades left me dying on the vine, my spirit decomposing. The only upside was that because I did not work outside the home, I could put on my squash-blossom yellow Donna Karan blazer, without worrying that the puréed vegetables I spooned into my daughter’s mouth would show.

I was an Autumn because I’d gone shopping on the cusp. Everything Summer has been deeply discounted and pushed out of sight. All of the clothes I’d bought were at full price. It took me two years to pay off that disastrous shopping excursion. I was trapped in garments that made me feel wretched, and couldn't afford to buy new ones.

I didn’t believe I deserved them.

To assuage my discomfort over the Huggies and Luvs I’d been wrapping around my daughter’s bottom since she was a newborn, I practiced whatever environmental penance I could.

I brought my few woolens to a dry cleaner that advertised an eco-conscious approach, forgoing noxious chemicals. They charged double the cost of every other place, but brought less shame in the presence of friends who used an expensive diaper service. At least I was doing something to help preserve the planet.

As a dour young woman searched in back for my two pilled Shetland sweaters, I noticed a display of flyers, printed on light pink paper, on the counter.

Are You a Spring, Summer, Autumn, or Winter? Find out! Free In-Home Consultation with a Certified Color Specialist.

“Free? No strings attached?” I asked the cashier.

“It’s a service. We are The Seasons.”

Yes, that was the name of the cleaners. Or something like that.

When I got home, I called.

The color specialist wore face powder and rouge and the shade of lipstick my mother wore before she gave up worldly things. Her hair was an unnatural black, except for a widow’s peak, streaked with gray.

“I’m Mary.” I held out my hand. She glanced at it.

“Marvel.”

A comment? No. The badge on her blouse confirmed that it was her name.

I’d set the dining room table for two. Lace placemats and the Spode teacups I’d picked up at an estate sale. “Tea?” I said.

“No thank you.”

Marvel’s black suitcase thumped as it met the floor. I hadn’t seen one like it since the Fuller Brush man visited our house when I was five. My mother bought some floor wax that smelled like candy but had a skull and crossbones that meant Poison, and a long-handled radiator brush. That was it. He never came back.

I moved the cups aside. Marvel set a tilting mirror on the table and pulled back my chair.

“Sit down.”

I sat.

Silently, she brought out scarves. Limeade green. Washed-out periwinkle. Apricot: the fruit I hated most. Violet that had been through one too many rinse cycles. All of them were made of a rough synthetic material that scratched my neck as she draped them, one after another, over my shoulders. I looked down at her case.

Other scarves. Teal. Sapphire. Ruby. Black. The saturated tones I loved, gleaming in velvet trays.

“What about those?”

“Those are for Winters. You’re a Spring.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

She folded the scarves rapidly, and placed them on top of the others. She lifted out a tray to reveal a trademark pink sample box. She was a representative of that company.

So that was why she’d rushed. I was a Spring because those were the scarves that were on top and easiest to reach.

As she started laying out eyeshadows, I held up my hand.

“I have plenty of makeup. I only need one thing.” I paused. Of course the consultation wasn’t free. A service. I was expecting to tip her. Nothing more. But I knew I’d have to buy something to get her out of my house.

“Mascara,” I said.

She pulled out a tube and a sample wand. Both looked used. Unsanitary.

I stared at the label. “It’s brown.”

“You’re a Spring. Black is too harsh.”

“Brown.” My fury rose. I stood. “Brown is —” she was already sweeping away those pyramid-scheme containers into her box, a pink not found in nature — “an abomination.”

It took Marvel less than a minute to pack her things. Without a backwards look, she was gone.

When I was seven, I sometimes spent Saturdays with my dad at the old hospital pharmacy he was clearing out ahead of a move to his new one. My “job” was to sort through old bottles in the storage room, and take home the nicest ones to clean. A lot were dark brown. Some were clear, with a pretty design. I was overjoyed to find the blue ones. They were cobalt blue. I wrote that down in the list of words I was keeping, because I was a writer and needed to know beautiful words.

My mom inherited a ruby red glass serving platter when my dad’s mother died. Juice glasses and dessert bowls: bottle green, two words that transformed each other if written in that order.

When my children were young, I sewed clothes for them. Sometimes, I saved enough money to make outfits for myself. I remember an intense pink linen blazer and a royal blue dress of fine wool crepe with a bateau neckline and asymmetrical waist. Lost to moths. Enough said.

I am a Winter, drawn to the cool, pure, saturated Winter palette. Add deep purple and black to the colors I’ve listed. White, as long as it’s not Cloud Dancer. Give me a box of crayons filled with these colors and I will be happy forever.

Not big on Fashion Week, though I did like Taylor Swift’s engagement sundress. And Ralph Lauren’s runway, as shown in this article from the New York Times.

You don’t have to read or watch the whole thing. Just feast your eyes on this:

Forget Nude. I would sell my house for this red.

I would live in this red.

Have you ever had a color consultation? Have you found your perfect season? Share your stories with the community in the Comments section. There’s no judgment. All of us have, at some point, been led astray

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Who’s Flossie? you ask.

No one knows, I could reply. Or: A gossamer creature who lives on in the imaginations of the few who’ve heard her story. I’m not here to state the obvious: The name written at the top of a recipe card. Because you can see that for yourself. Beneath the spots and stains that add character to the cursive letters, there was an actual person. Someone who chopped onions.

The next question: What’s a small amount? A follow-up: What type of onion? As a native Minnesotan, I’m confident that the answers are: 1. No more than a tablespoon, and 2. Yellow.

Next, celery seed. The I also add implies that this ingredient is a statement of personal preference. However, both words are firmly underlined. Is this a reminder to take the McCormick’s tin out of the cupboard and set it on the counter with the sugar and salt? It is not until I make the recipe sans celery seed that I realize I’ve left out the critical ingredient. The one that lifts it above all other cabbage salads.

Two things. First, Flossie’s becomes a marquee dish only when that small amount — one-eighth of a teaspoon, determined though trial and error — of celery seed is added. Second, what I shrugged off as a quirky suggestion from my mother-in-law (who copied these instructions from a treasured source text) was a subtle but brilliant addition. Having no expectation that her cooking would draw attention, she gave herself a small pat on the back.

Do refrigerate overnight before serving. It keeps well, if there’s any left.

We all have our paradigm of what Thanksgiving should be. We map out routes, calculate geographic, political, and emotional distances, and arrange our tables accordingly. Everything goes smoothly: the bird is moist; 1.5 bottles of wine per non-abstaining adult is a reasonable measure; the cranberry-curd tart deserves its five-star rating in the New York Times.

When the women congregate in the kitchen after dinner, leaving the men to watch football, it is by choice and because the dishwasher is so much quieter than the TV. No one needs to raise her voice to add to the discussion. As there is no all of this, every single thing, we’re not stunned and exhausted all the time.

We exchange recipes.

“Mary. That cole slaw. I’ve never tasted anything so wonderful.”

They open the Quick Notes app on their phones. I recite it from memory.

“That’s it? You’re not leaving anything out, are you?” One of the other six Marys — we’re all old, and this is Catholic St. Paul — has a legitimate reason to ask. I may have been guilty of this in the past.

“Scout’s honor.” I was never a Girl Scout, but as I said, I’m old. “Do not leave out the celery seed. If you don’t have any, I’ve got plenty at my house.” Three jars, in case of nuclear holocaust.

“One more thing.” They look up. Aha, caught her.

“The name of the recipe is ‘Flossie’s Cabbage Slaw.’ Write that down, at the top of the page.”

They do. One of the other Marys says, “Who’s Flossie?”

I smile. “The woman whose recipe this is.”

We all have fantasy Thanksgivings. This one takes place in a world in which there is no all of this, every single thing. In which no one has to pretend to understand football. A world in which Flossie’s name is at the top of the page.

My Thanksgiving memories come in sets, like dishes. I have several, each associated with a particular era of my life. One set, from my childhood and adolescence, is mostly chipped and cracked. All of the dessert plates are missing. Though some are faded, each piece has the same pattern:

The frozen 25-pounder, free with a ten-dollar purchase. Through social services, if poor. (We, proudly, are not.) Or free, regardless of income. Minnesota is the turkey state and couldn’t get rid of them them fast enough.

A block of butter, melted in a saucepan, darkened with poultry seasoning and pepper. Add a fist-sized onion (yellow.) Simmer for an hour. Mix with store-brand bread, cubed the night before. Into the turkey, into the oven, salmonella does not yet exist. Stuffing is meant to be stuffed into every crevice and cavity.

Thanksgiving is the meal my mother always gets right. Her whipped potatoes are fluffy and smooth; her gravy: silky, without a single lump. Everything makes it to the table. She never forgets the green bean casserole.

The single off year was when half the country made the same mistake: cooking the turkey in a brown paper grocery bag. It was the mid-seventies. Harebrained fads existed before social media. But this one? It was a wonder it didn’t catch fire in the gas oven of my mom’s workhorse Tappan stove. In kitchens across America, birds emerged salt-crusted and pale from their paper wrappings. Women cursed quietly, ripped away the paper, basted them with butter and pushed them back in for another fifteen minutes, vowing never to do that again.

It was also the year of the electric knife. Of pre-macerated breast meat and shredded legs and thighs. Dad wanted to use it at least once, because my three brothers had chipped in with me to buy it for his birthday. He was overwhelmed by the thoughtfulness of our gift.

He hacked away valiantly. The Christmas ham and a couple of beef roasts were its victims before it disappeared. My dad was reserved, uncomfortable with the role of paterfamilias. He went back to using the meat fork and knife that had been a wedding gift, that allowed him to slice quickly and neatly, without drawing attention.

Cleaning out the house after my mother died, I found the electric knife at the back of a cupboard above the refrigerator. It was where I’d hidden it. After paying for it with babysitting money at Sears — my brothers did not, after all, contribute — I’d kept the box. After the debacle, I’d cleaned the knife, and repacked it with a feeling of dull shame. What an inappropriate gift.

Or it felt that way, at the time. Now, millions of Sunbeam electric knives, in their original boxes, are showing up in garage sales. Boomers and millennials buy them, out of nostalgia or irony or because they might be repurposed in some way.

I plugged it in. Yes, it still sounded like a chainsaw.

Another set of memories: the many years I had Thanksgiving at my house.

Both families, two groups of in-laws. Infants grew to toddlers, to tweens, then teens. One year, we crammed twenty-three guests at three tables. Over time, some married, and went off into lives full of children and in-laws of their own. Elders died off abruptly or after long illnesses. Cousins came and went. My brothers and their spouses moved to other parts of the country or the world. There were splits, factions. Ghosting. A grudge. It was time, we told ourselves.

We dwindled to six: my daughter, son, husband, me. A girlfriend married into the family; a boyfriend vanished. In 2023, my husband died. We are now a family of four.

Throughout the years we’ve gone from the good china to paper plates with Thanksgiving motifs, to whatever sets we cobbled together with the everyday, then back to the good china. I continued to cook for twenty-three. Huge bird. Cloverleaf rolls. Fifteen sides. Four pies. A sweet potato casserole containing Courvoisier and a clever blend of spices, topped with praline. I tweaked it, changed it up. More brown sugar, less brandy.

Every year, someone exclaims, “Flossie came!” And I give them yet another copy of her recipe (now annotated to give credit to Dolores, my mother-in-law) before sending them home with bags full of leftovers. I pack them in my mother’s real Tupperware bowls so they will have to return them for refills when they come the following year.

And I give them my recipe for “Mary’s Sweet Potatoes.”

It was on the bus that took you to Broadway. Or the streetcar that went the opposite way, to Franklin. The first stop was Nicollet. No, Hennepin. The holiday season just beginning. Or an early snowstorm had stopped traffic. The bus. The streetcar. Sitting. Standing, hanging on to straps. Women on their way home from shopping at Dayton’s. Women just finished with their shifts at Walgreens or Powers. Lunch at the Forum Cafeteria. An appointment at Medical Arts. Business in the Foshay Tower. Women laughing. Chatting with friends. Strangers. Or staring out the window, bearing the weight of a diagnosis.

However the story is told, the important details are the same: A recipe, shouted from one woman in the front to another in the back. Conveyed by women in between. Written down on shopping lists. Address books. The backs of hands. Gay voices. Giddy laughter. Brightly patterned scarves. The smell of wool, and White Shoulders. Breck shampoo. Jergen’s lotion.

Someone calls out, What’s the name of the recipe? Shouts and murmurs. Heads tilted, nodding. A name repeated from one end to the other: Flossie. Flossie. Flossie.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Now it’s your turn. Do you have a recipe to share? A story? Tell us about it in the Comments. I’d love to hear it, and so would the community.

Dear friends,

I won’t be celebrating a traditional Thanksgiving today. But it will be a very special one, as it is the birthday of someone I love dearly, who — like the woman in the story above — is carrying the weight of a medical diagnosis.

I am, however, celebrating YOU!

In the two years since I sent out my first post, Writer, interrupted has grown from no subscribers to the 5,500 lovely readers who have signed up to receive my posts. For now, none of my work is behind a paywall. I’m deeply grateful that many of you have chosen to become paying subscribers.

Less than a month ago, for the second time, one of my stories received a Featured award — Substack’s highest honor — and Writer, interrupted became a Substack Bestseller. Thanks to your generosity, I was able to write a check for the cost of saving both the Grandparents’ Tree and the apple tree I wrote about in that post. That is a huge blessing. Now my children — along with the six-year-old neighbor girl who saw the lone apple, giving me hope that the tree would survive — will enjoy their legacy for years to come.

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Please ❤️, comment, and ♻️ (restack) my work. This thrills me to no end, and helps get my work out to new readers.

With love,

Mary xo

“Mom. Go out on your deck. Now.”

My daughter’s text message included a photo of a bright yellow sky. An intense red streak crossed it diagonally. Meteor?

“Where? What?” I texted back.

“The park a block from my house. Northern Lights.”

So far south? Not unheard of, but not common. Maybe the solar storm was more intense than expected.

The door leading from my bedroom to my upper deck was jammed shut. It took a couple of good pushes before it swung open into the November night.

In stocking feet and a thin sweater, I shivered as my eyes adjusted to the darkness. Through a patch of open sky framed by my big maple’s leafless branches, I caught a glimmer, a slow ruddy pulse behind a thin scrim of cloud cover.

Was that it?

If so, it wasn’t much.

My phone pinged: another photo, more vivid than the first. It made sense that my daughter saw things that I could not. Although her apartment was only ten minutes from my house, her street dead-ended in shadows. It didn’t face the unholy glow of traffic, the miasma hovering over a freeway less than half a mile away. She wasn’t pinned, as I was, between two cities — Minneapolis and St. Paul — with an unequal distribution of gravity that pulled energy in her direction.

“Anything?” Her text arrived with a third image, a swirl of candy-apple red above a shuttered ice-cream stand.

“No.” I added a downcast-face emoji.

“Try looking through your phone.”

I sent a thumbs-up, then went back indoors to find shoes and a jacket. What had I done with all the outerwear? It was Veteran’s Day, November 11. Where had the year gone? When had phone and camera merged, one word assimilating the other so completely that kids growing up would not be able to recognize a receiver if it hit them on the noggin? Old-woman questions. Apparently, I’ve become an old woman.

My closet confirmed it.

I pushed aside the lightweight dresses I’d hung so optimistically in April, in preparation for going to places where such things were worn. Instead, the t-shirts and shorts crammed in my bureau had comprised my summer wardrobe. Linen wrinkled if you looked at it. Rayon shrank back, the fabric whispering Dry clean only. Time, labor, money: how much I save by being a widow with no social life.

I pulled on a sweatshirt and canvas slip-ons. Lack of real footwear, noted. Penny loafers were supposedly back in style. I own a pair. Ridiculous. Penny loafers had their day, in 1956. They should have stayed there, instead of sneaking onto my shoe rack.

Back outside — the door still resisting, maybe my son can take a look — a single helicopter crossed my view, followed by a small plane, both on their way to St. Paul’s downtown airport. A relic of the forties, it ought to have been retired long ago. But no; they kept it open to irritate me.

The redwood boards under my feet had suffered from three winters of my neglect. Some buckled at the edges. Many were cracked lengthwise. The railing was loose where nails had rusted. I kicked at fallen twigs and knelt, elbows on knees, a human tripod. Faint pink ripples, then nothing.

I held up my phone. Looked at the screen.

Crossed over into another world.

I’d read a few days earlier about the solar storm, a big one, that would be entering the earth’s magnetic sphere. I thought about driving north on I-35 the hundred and fifty miles to Duluth, then up the shore to Grand Marais. Finding an Airbnb. Setting up a proper camera. Then I remembered two things.

First, November 10 was the fiftieth anniversary of a different storm. That night, in 1975, the ore boat Edmund Fitzgerald had broken apart on Lake Superior. Every year, lighthouses along the Great Lakes are lit, in commemoration of the twenty-nine crewmen who lost their lives. This year? Good luck finding a place to stay, as rentals filled with thousands, all taking the long weekend to honor the dead; the soundtrack, Gordon Lightfoot’s haunting “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” on repeat. Many would stay an extra night or two, hoping to experience the Northern Lights as well.

Second, Mini. My cat, now twenty-two years old, is reaching her final days. She spends her time sleeping on what is now her daybed and making the cautious, arthritic journey over footstools and pillows to her bowls and litterbox. When she can’t find me writing at my too-small desk, eating awkwardly at the nightstand, or next to her under the blanket, she is frantic. If I’m gone for more than an hour, she wanders the house, navigating with her whiskers. Her cries when I return are pitiful; her joy when I curl up next to her is mine as well.

I had no choice but to remain in my bubble of light pollution. At my age, I would probably never have a chance to commune with one of the most sacred and mysterious of natural events.

Mary Oliver wrote an extraordinary poem called “Sometimes.” These four sequential lines, in bold text, are taken from it. My thoughts, below each line, are in plain text.

Instructions for living a life:

My husband and I spent countless evenings on our deck, wicker chairs pulled close to a gas firepit. Speaking in hushed voices, we watched flames leap above the glass rocks that concealed the burners. We sipped whiskey, or — after the trees had dropped their leaves — liqueur-spiked hot chocolate. Since his death two and half years ago, I’ve avoided our private retreat, rarely opening the shade that covers the mullioned glass of the door. The bed we’d shared for the forty-three years of our marriage stands three feet away.

That was one life.

I’m sixty-nine, born in the year of the penny loafer. As of last Wednesday, pennies will no longer be minted in the U.S. I’ve saved a few. Two will be enough to take me into my next life. Lift one foot. Then the other.

Keep going.

Pay attention.

When my daughter texted me, my first thought was Why bother. I won’t see anything. I never do.

Eclipses. Supermoons. Meteor showers. That time when five planets aligned. The once-in-a-lifetime astronomical events I’ve missed by not driving west or flying south or making my way to Peru or Australia or wherever I needed to go to witness these things I saw after the fact in pictures taken by others, or learned about through the breathless accounts of those who had made that leap.

I have denied myself stillness. Wonder. Joy.

I have not paid attention.

Be astonished.

I snapped dozens of photos, holding my breath for the device’s three-second night delay. Drapes of magenta, curtains of green, waves of violet and yellow rippled across the sky. Standing now, forearms against my sides for stability, I tapped the the screen. Again. Again.

Sometimes, astonishment speaks in a quiet voice. I didn’t see the big showy bursts, the five-alarm red and the fireworks green that got all the press the next day. No bold and beautiful paparazzi displays.

I saw gently moving skirts, a little ankle showing beneath the hems. Celestial actors taking the stage for a curtain call. Dances, not with wolves but with fairies and sprites. After twenty minutes, the show was over.

As I waited for an encore, imploring the capricious electrons to return for another performance, the warmth drained from my feet. My fingers stiffened. It was November, after all. I went indoors.

Tell about it.

I sent more photos to my daughter. Gorgeous! was her reply. Then: Good night.

When I’m working on a project that requires complete engagement, I often lose track of time. This happens with my writing, more frequently than not. So it was with the photos.

I cropped out aircraft and alley lights, straightened images, but made no other edits. Hearing the early rumblings of rush hour, I disengaged from Mini. On my way to brush my teeth, I decided to step out on the deck again. It was quarter to five.

The lights had returned.

A drapery of sheer pink, green, and blue hung in the sky. A final blessing, perhaps, of the twenty-nine souls lost fifty years ago to the gales of November. I took two pictures before the lights gathered in a pink cloud, drifted to the east, and vanished.

I sent pictures to my daughter, and to my son.

And now, dear readers, I’m telling my astonishment to you.

Love, Mary xo

Friends,

I have never felt as much gratitude as I do today.

As many of you (1,300 in the past 30 days!!!) are new subscribers, I want to share a few things about myself.

Two years ago, on November 3, 2023, I hit Publish to send my first Substack post into the world. I had no subscribers. All I had was the urge to tell my story.

Ever since I was a child, I’ve wanted one thing: to be a writer. But life happened. I was interrupted. Making a living. Supporting a family. Caring for my husband after he developed Stage 4 lung cancer. All worthy pursuits, and I am proud of these accomplishments. But despite earning my MFA in writing and a few pieces published here and there, I never called myself a “real” writer.

In April 2023, my husband died. We had been married for 43 years.

Something happened that I did not expect. Grief opened my heart.

Something happened that I did not expect: I began to write again.

I called my Substack “Writer, interrupted.” At age 67, I thought I might be too late.

It wasn’t. You, dear readers, have given me the best two years of my life.

During these past two years:

• More than FIVE THOUSAND readers have become subscribers.

• Many of you choose to support my work with a paid subscription. For the first time in my life, I earn an income as an author. The joy of knowing that readers value my work enough to pay for it is indescribable.

• Writer, interrupted reached #1 Rising in Literature (ahead of Margaret Atwood!) AND

• Became a Substack Bestseller, with more than 100 paying subscribers, AND

• Was honored as a Featured Publication — Substack’s highest award for excellence — twice.

I did not achieve these things alone. It is only through your generosity and encouragement that Writer, interrupted succeeds. You have my undying gratitude.

Writing, like grieving, is an act of love.

Interruptions are not forever.

It’s never too late.

Here’s what two recent paid subscribers have said:

~ “Thank you for touching my heart. ~ Elinor R.

~ “There is wisdom and comfort in your words and your stories as I navigate my own grief and pain from recent losses. Thank you.” ~ JR

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For now, everything I publish is free. But if you’ve been enjoying my work for awhile, please consider a paid subscription. I offer both annual and monthly options. Help keep award-winning independent writing alive. All subscribers have my undying gratitude.

As a pillar of emotional well-being, an arborist is as important as a hairdresser.

A good handyman is a well-kept secret.

A working refrigerator is the crowning achievement of civilization.

Prove me wrong.

October is my favorite month for all of the usual reasons: fall colors, crisp apples, the scent of cedar clinging to sweaters as I take them out of storage. An abundance of chocolate. Warty, improbably shaped decorative gourds. The genius of the cake designer who sticks a Barbie doll into a ballroom-gown-shaped creation frosted in black and tiered with spiders and bats, then smears her face and arms with blood-red food coloring. This — okay, next to the meat department and on the opposite side of the store from the toys, but still — at Target.

Much as I once loved to sneer at the seasonal overgrowth of PSL (pumpkin-spice latte, like a viral illness, is known by its initials) I’m now concerned by its spread into the marketplace. Not only are food items subject to its predations, but cosmetics, fragrances, home goods, and cleaning products have been pumpkin-spiced. I would not be surprised to learn that the baristas at my local paint store have been mixing in a bit of nutmeg or cinnamon to add some PSL-adjacent warmth to the walls of a drab mudroom.

My refrigerator is — oh no oh no, not PSL-toned major appliances! Did I just Beetlejuice them into existence by uttering those three letters three times in close succession? No? Whew. I can sleep tonight — Apologies. I’m getting ahead of myself.

Back to coffee: In the few weeks since my refrigerator died, as I wrote about in my most recent post, I was forced to live almost entirely on shelf-stable, relatively non-perishable foods. What that means is that every morning I loaded Colombian beans into my burr grinder, set it at medium-coarse, spooned the grounds into my French press coffeemaker, brought distilled water to the correct temperature in my gooseneck electric kettle, poured it carefully, waited four minutes to push the plunger, filled my favorite mug to the rim, and then —

Ruined it by stirring in Coffee Mate powder.

When I say ruined, I mean it was indistinguishable from what you’ll get from a vending machine. Or — worse — from Starbucks, during this season which I refuse to name after their lab-escaped Level 4 scourge to humankind.

But I have exciting news.

Last Wednesday, the refrigerator of my dreams arrived. The delivery man plugged it in, and there was light.

Then came milk. Cream. Eggs. Cheese. Yogurt.

Perishables, in a state of not-perishing. There must be some Buddhist term for that. I can say only that I felt something between relief and bliss as I unpacked blueberries, cherry tomatoes, and kale from grocery sacks, and arranged them on glass shelves and in crispers.

After months of throwing out spinach gone slimy within two days after purchase, green peppers face-down in a stew of their own juices, and bolsters of ground beef questionable in the fluctuating climate of the freezer, I open the stainless-steel door and rotate containers of condiments, turning the labels to the front so I can read them.

“À demain, Bonne Maman,” I say to the raspberry preserves. Then I reach for the half-full can of Fancy Feast, remove the aluminum foil, and take it upstairs.

“Mini,” I croon, as I scoop dinner into her bowl. She stares at me from the daybed in her luxury suite, my daughter’s old room. Her eyes, all pupil, focus on the lamp behind me. At the back of her mind, something clicks into place. She stands, stretching as far as her arthritic limbs will allow. After negotiating stacks of pillows to get to the floor, she polishes off her meal with the gusto of a kitten, then returns to her meditative position on the blue and white quilt.

After twenty-two winters in this world, will she live through another?

The real question is, Why am I saying good night, in abysmal French, to a jar of jam?

The Grandparents’ Tree is restless.

That’s not what I tell my arborist, when I call for an evaluation. Obviously, his training leans in a different direction, although he’s probably heard weirder things.

“Branches are hanging over the roofline. They look unhealthy,” I say.

When it storms, when the high winds blow, they keen and wail and lash against the house.

“They scrape against the siding. Also, I’m worried about the shingles.”

The Grandparents’ Tree is a sugar maple with leaves that form a palette of soft colors in the fall: red, rose gold, and gold. We planted it in our front yard in 1987, after my father died. My mother-in-law had passed eight months earlier, and my father-in-law, eight months before that.

This curious numerology didn’t factor in to our decision to plant a single tree as a memorial to three lives. Our yard was small; trees get big. The previous owners had left us with some failing sandcherries and a thorny Russian olive, which we’d taken out right away. Empty spaces begged to be filled.

At first, I watered the sapling diligently. But I hadn’t set it properly. The base of the trunk was misaligned with the lawn’s surface. Still, it grew steadily. Twenty years later, it was fully grown and glorious. But its roots cabled the lawn, ropy and hard. Mowing was a challenge; tripping, always a concern.

My husband’s death, in April, 2023, created its own weather system. Storms no longer built predictably through hot summer afternoons, releasing typical amounts of lightning and rain before moving on. They seized mornings, nights, entire days; shook them fiercely, brought down heavy branches and carried away good black dirt. Weeks of drought followed a wet summer. A dry winter arrived the year after the third-snowiest on record. The result was a hellscape of weeds, an overgrowth of vines. Shrubs gone wild.

“Can you stop by this week?” I ask, staring out a window that hasn’t been washed in God only knows how long.

“You bet.”

When the phone rings at 8 a.m., I’ve just fallen asleep. I reach over and — yes, I remembered to put it on the charger, there’s a voicemail, but whose voice?

“ . . . coming around the corner right now. I’ll meet you in front.”

In front. Of what? Oh. Tree guy. The house. Now?

It’s not easy to get dressed when you’re ninety percent asleep. I manage clean underwear. Socks. Buttons. When I join the arborist in front, he’s staring up at some branches. They’re leafless not because it’s October, but because they didn’t leaf out in the spring. Or they did, and I didn’t notice.

He gestures towards the spreading tentacles at the maple’s base.

“Girdled,” he says.

I realize that I’m shivering, and he’s not. I’m in a flannel shirt. He’s wearing a quilted jacket. The temperature is in the low forties. So soon! It takes me a moment to remember that it’s the third week of October.

“How long has it been that way?” I ask, knowing the answer, feeling the shame of it. That my actions nearly four decades ago had caused so much damage. Knowing at the time that I was careless. I could have dug the tree out and replanted it. Made a circle of wood chips, instead of seeding grass right up to the base. Watered less. Watered more.

“From the beginning, I’d say.”

The beginning.

Before my father-in-law died, he kept calling my name. I walked into the room and he reached for my hand. Looked into my eyes.

The beginning.

When my mother-in-law was diagnosed with breast cancer, I was the first one she told.

The beginning.

On Parents’ Days at school, my father was the only dad there. When I took first place in spelling bees, he was the only dad there.

“How much to take it out?”

I’m detaching myself from my life savings — such as they are — more rapidly than I could have imagined. Maybe I should just go looking, once again, for a handyman with a chainsaw.

Hahahahaha.

“Take it out?”He finishes a quick sketch. “No. We can fix this. It’s just a matter of digging down and cutting these roots apart. Then we add nutrients to the soil. Do some pruning. It’s a great tree. Beautiful foliage.”

“That it is.”

He makes a few calculations on his notepad, breaking down the cost, and shows it to me. Still a lot, but only half of what I expected.

“Anything for the grandparents,” I say.

“Ah. Memorial tree.” He nods. “They’re giving you a hard time? Keeping you up at night?”

“How did you know?”

He closes his notebook. “Did you have another tree you wanted me to look at?”

“In back.”

As we scuffle through the leaves of the enormous silver maple — it gets a pass this year, except for one limb hanging over the neighbor’s house — he stops abruptly.

“It’s not the grandparents who are restless.”

As he says this, I can see that the arborist is quite young. Forty or forty-five, but with an old man’s name, Albert, and an ageless soul.

“You need to think of your children.”

My son, thirty-six; my daughter, forty. They don’t remember their grandparents, except for my mother, who died in 2001. They grew up with the tree, raked and jumped in its leaves, played under its branches. It belongs to them. I’m standing in their way.

We walk towards the apple tree. He diagnoses the problem immediately.

“Black spot. Fungal infection. We’ll take out the dead branches before winter. Three soil treatments in the spring through summer. You’ll have plenty of apples after that.”

Thirty years ago, we planted two apple trees. One was my gift to my husband. The other was his gift to me.

Ten years ago, we cut down one of them. It was sick. We couldn’t save it. The other tree kept going: blossoms in the spring, apples in the fall.

But it slowed down. Fewer blossoms; fewer apples. A big limb broke off in a storm. I thought the tree was lost.

Last spring, there were hardly any blossoms. Squirrels took a slim, sour harvest of green apples over the summer. After one bite, they’d drop them in the grass.

Last month, my six-year-old neighbor asked, “Can I have that apple?”

A single apple on the tree. I hadn’t seen it until she pointed it out.

I pulled it from the branch. Handed it to her. “The tree made it just for you,” I said.

I didn’t tell her that it was my husband’s tree. Or maybe it was mine. I can’t remember, and it doesn’t matter.

The tree now belongs to the little girl who saw that it was still alive.

I know my children will share it with her.

It’s the time of year when we remember those who’ve passed on to what is ahead for all of us. Some say that the space between this world and the next grows thinner, and we’re able to see and speak with the deceased. Do you have a story to tell? Please share it in the Comments. I’d love to hear it, and so would this community.

Writer, interrupted is a reader-supported publication. If you’ve been reading for awhile and enjoy my work, please consider a paid subscription. Help keep fresh, award-winning, independent writing alive.

Subscribe now

October is my favorite month of the year. It’s also my husband’s birthday month. I believe he would have loved this update on the trees we planted and nurtured over the forty-three years we were married. Caring for all living things is a way of keeping in touch with those who have gone on ahead, and those who will follow. Writing is my greatest joy. Sharing these posts with you brings me indescribable happiness.

There are two days left of my October offer. From now through Halloween, new subscribers will receive 20% off a yearly subscription, along with my deepest gratitude. Not ready to commit? There’s also a monthly option.

You can ❤️, comment, and ♻️ (restack) my work. This thrills me to no end, and helps get my work out to new readers.

With love,

Mary xo

“I’ve got bad news.”

Words you don’t want to hear from anyone. Today, it’s the refrigerator repairman who utters them, ten minutes after he shows up at my house.

“Here’s the problem.” He holds up his phone. A picture I can’t interpret, any more than I could an X-ray or an ultrasound. He expands the image and points to something gray and furry, coiled like a rudimentary digestive system. His explanation comes down to this: my refrigerator is dead, and this is what killed it.

“The replacement part costs a thousand bucks. HomeServe won’t cover it.”

Of course they won’t.

“You’d think a refrigerator would last longer than ten years,” I say. In 2015, we remodeled the kitchen. Because my husband did all the work, we were able to keep costs down. Nothing we bought was high-end. We were home cooks, not Cordon Bleu chefs.

“Seven to ten years is the lifespan these days.”

“That’s insane.”

“Can’t argue with you there.”

My parents. His grandparents. Forty, fifty years: appliances lived that long and even longer. Tappan stoves. Singer sewing machines. Maytag washers. We reminisce. Lament. Commiserate. He gives me the names of two stores that sell scratch-and-dent and floor models. “You’d be surprised at the discounts. Unfortunately, they don’t deliver.”

Unfortunately, they don’t deliver.

Welcome to the life of a widow.

This is a tale of not one, but three dead refrigerators. I’ve numbered them not chronologically, but by the relative amount of space they occupy in my brain. I’ve just introduced you to Fridge #1.

Fridge #2 is the side-by-side we moved to the basement during that 2015 remodel. We used it for extra storage, and to dry-brine Thanksgiving turkeys. It began to fail around the time my husband was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer, in May, 2022. He died the following April.

Tending to it, as it lost control of its functions, was one of his last obsessions. While he could still walk, he’d head downstairs to check thermometers and arrange foods accordingly, to keep them out of the danger zone, where listeria and salmonella thrive. He moved condiments like chess pieces on the glass shelves.

As he grew weaker, he wrote instructions on a Post-it:

Crisper on left leave baking soda. Vegetables not fruits go in other. Only half gallon milk, unless take out 1 bottle orange juice . . .

I slipped the note into a drawer. Was I attending to him, or some half-gone major appliance? I was his primary caregiver until he went to the residential hospice where he spent the last five weeks of his life.

During that time, I lived on Amy’s frozen entrees. Five minutes in the microwave, done. It’s possible that after stacking a half-dozen of them in Fridge #2, I walked away without making sure the freezer door was fully closed. Or slid the pickle relish diagonally when I should have moved it straight ahead. Failed an opportunity to take a jar of horseradish as a pawn. Whatever the cause, something went bad. I came home one afternoon to a house filled with flies.

My memories of those weeks are unsparing. The flies added a Biblical level of raw punishment. There were no flyswatters in the house. I bought three at Menards, in carnival colors, as if battling pestilence was a game of ring toss. I unspooled sticky traps and hung them from the basement ceiling with thumbtacks pushed into the plaster.

People have been killing flies with these simple devices forever. I doubt that they flailed and cursed as I did. I hit blindly. Savagely. Then I saw Mini.

My cat was crouched on the floor, stilled by the terror of my betrayal. I’d left her alone every morning, but had always come back as her recognizable human mom. What was this creature, so crazed by a few harmless bugs that she morphed into a monster?

“Mini.” I rested my cheek on the floor next to her trembling body. “I’m so sorry, little one.”

As I write, she’s resting on the daybed in my daughter’s old room. I’ve set up a desk with my computer near her food and water bowls. There’s a litterbox in the corner. She navigates a terrain of stepped pillows, footstool, and cedar chest, then returns to the quilted coverlet. From there, she keeps watch over me.

Twenty-two in feline years, immortal by any reckoning.

Last June, I traced an alarming noise to the dining room buffet. Behind its doors, the sound of the wine cooler had gone from a gentle hum to a growl. The metal surface was warm. Inside, a six-pack of beer and bottle of Lillet were tepid. Ice had built up in the back, behind the cava I’d forgotten was there. I reached around and pulled the plug.

Silence.

I sat back, hands covering my face. The wine cooler had been an anniversary gift to my husband.

Twenty-five years ago, we didn’t drink much. But the doors of the built-in buffet opened onto a space that was perfect for the solid, glass-fronted two-foot square box I found at the Sharper Image store at Mall of America. It was classy, but not ostentatious. We used it increasingly, then constantly.

An old Loudon Wainwright III song: Drinks before dinner and wine with dinner and after-dinner drinks. Grilled salmon, beef tenderloin, risotto. Those evenings we moved from sunroom to front porch to the Adirondack chairs on the brick patio next to the pond to the gas firepit on the deck with the door that opened from our bedroom. After he died, I didn’t trust myself to open a bottle of wine when I was alone. I was afraid I’d polish it off by myself in one night, bookending it with a Vesper and a small snifter of Hennessy.

My daughter helped me haul the cooler from the buffet to the living room. It took three days to thaw the salt lick of solid ice that had formed, unnoticed, inside an appliance that might have lasted forever, had I paid attention.

Fridge #3 sits where we left it, emptied of everything but reproach.

I go online. Costco carries the latest model of Fridge #1. I check the dimensions. Measure the space, making sure there’s room on all sides. It’ll be fine, I tell myself. Just in case, I measure again.

I have an upcoming dental appointment. The crown I need to cover a fractured molar won’t be cheap, but I can’t put it off any longer. My insurance has a Cinderella condition, whereby funds go away at the end of the year.

Until I decide, I can still use the freezer for yogurt and cheese. Ice cubes stay frozen in trays. There’s a place on the top shelf of the regular compartment where I keep cans of sparkling water. Blueberries, mayo, and an opened bottle of kombucha huddle next to a vent in back. It seems chilly enough, but the air doesn’t circulate.

There is one blessing: not all fruits need refrigeration.

I arrange apples, clementines, and bananas in a bowl on the counter, then remove everything but the apples. Voilà: a tableau not unlike something Cezanne might have painted, except for the stickers. I scrape them off with my thumbnail.

Two days after the repairman’s opinion, the dentist gives me hers.

“You need this done now. Unless you’d rather have a root canal.”

One pebble in a dish of beans, a piece of walnut shell, or an ill-advised bite into a piece of English toffee, and I will need a root canal. Crowns are cheaper and less painful. They can do it in two hours, right there in the office.

Her assistant presents me with an estimate, circled at the bottom of the page.

“That’s after insurance?” I say. She nods.

I shake my head. She holds out her pen.

“Do you have a payment plan?”

They do. I sign.

Two weeks later, my cracked molar is encased in a ceramic crown. The refrigerator is still in my virtual cart.

I’ve measured. Measured again. Contemplated a chainsaw. A blowtorch. Fridge #1 was a tight squeeze. Three people pushing, one (me) watching with trepidation as the doorway birthed a fridge.

“Mom. What is the problem?”

My daughter doesn’t get it. Why was it so hard to get that fridge through the door? The house was built in 1913, but all of the windows and doors are standard in size. How many major appliances have been brought in and taken out, without cutting holes in the roof?

“Those delivery guys just didn’t know what they were doing.”

She’s right. I’m catastrophizing. The word crashes in my head, bearing little resemblance to what is going on in the world. I’m seeing epic collisions among ratcheted-up anxieties and the need to book a haircut.

How to itemize dread?

Property tax, due in two days, up 22 percent from last year.

Soffits and fascia that won’t get done now or maybe ever but perhaps I can get the gutters put back to where they were before they fell off the house.

The boiler. When temperatures dropped into the forties, it kicked in, roaring like a beast. The house shook. I turned the thermostat down to 58 and it shuddered off. The boiler has worked for thirty-nine years and that might be a record, but thirty-nine is a number heavy with superstition.

The big maple’s been slamming branches towards the ground. So far they’ve missed the house, although one took out a section of fence. I’m afraid to call the arborists. They’ve trimmed it twice. The second time, our neighbor gave them permission to drive a cherry picker into his back yard.

“I wouldn’t mind if you took out the whole tree,” he said.

Doing that would require a crane to lift it over the rooftops, and cost more than a new car. I’ve lost sleep over this. Anything on this list could drain my bank account. I’ll have to sell my house. Where will I go? Not to one of those senior-living places. I’d rather pitch a tent in the desert.

The big limbs are called widowmakers. The universe is not short on irony.

My grocery list begins in block letters: SHELF STABLE. It continues with Peanut butter. Canned tuna. Soup. Powdered creamer. That last item is as low as I can go, lower than bouillon cubes. I end with The usual suspects. Olives?

I can’t handle Target. Aldi’s is too far away. What’s left is the supermarket on Summit Avenue with its carriage-trade prices.

Those women who look older than God are there. Faces pinched with loneliness, avoiding eye contact. I’ve thought I will never be one of them but here we are, shopping for groceries on a Friday night. Each of us is enclosed in a sorrow that might crack us open if we spoke of it.

I pick up one lime, set it down. Pick up another. The sign says $3.99/pound. How much can two limes weigh? At Target, they’re 29 cents apiece. These can’t be much more.

Fresh corn, last of the season. I move on. Chicken breasts, you’re kidding me. Yogurt, lactose-free, 32 ounces. How many times can I thaw and refreeze it, before it enters the danger zone? The oldest living woman just died. She ate yogurt three times a day and was rewarded by becoming the oldest living woman. Do I want her title enough to risk eating danger-zone yogurt?

The granola is Kind, the size is Family, the price is $8.99. It tastes like sawdust. I opt for Purely Elizabeth, a smaller bag but a dollar cheaper. It won’t make me choke. It may even be healthy.

Annie’s rice-flour mac and cheese: $4.99. A craving for that blend of starch, fat, and sodium hits, a longing stronger than nostalgia. I reach for a box. I’ll have to eat all of it in one sitting but that will be easy. There’s almost nothing in the package.

In the bread aisle, I find gluten-free in the corner of a shelf. One loaf is $9.49. I pick it up and cradle it in one hand.

When I lived in my first apartment — a place I hardly dared to leave even in daylight — ten dollars was the most I ever spent for a week’s worth of groceries. Once I made fried rice, and added Worcestershire instead of soy sauce. I cried as I scraped it into the trash.

I stand holding the bread until someone comes up behind me and I realize I’m blocking the aisle. It goes in my cart on top of four cans of Fancy Feast.

At checkout, the two limes ring up at $1.73. The total is just under a hundred dollars. I carry the two sacks to my car. I tuck a blanket around them to keep them from falling over, the items inside from breaking.

“Be good,” I say, as I close the trunk.

When I get home, I have a girls-night meal with Annie, Amy, and Elizabeth. I sit on the floor next to Mini. As she gums her dinner, I stroke her head. She returns to the daybed and gives me a look that says:

I’m twenty-two years old. I have not lived this long to watch you f**k up your life.

I return to my desk. Writing is my life. The world’s oldest cat is watching.

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October is my favorite month of the year. It’s also my husband’s birthday month. He would be seventy-two if he’d lived, and proud to see me writing again. I imagine him smiling, as grateful as I am for all of you who subscribe to Writer, interrupted.

His ghost is haranguing encouraging me to offer a discount. From now through Halloween, new subscribers will receive 20% off a yearly subscription, along with my — and his — eternal gratitude. Not ready to commit? There’s also a monthly option.

You can ❤️, comment, and ♻️ (restack) my work. This thrills me to no end, and helps get my work out to new readers.

Love, and happy hauntings,

Mary xo

Every month speaks its name in a particular way.

January: Jan-you-air-ee, a cold wind blows through it. February: a mouthful of sounds stuffed into one word. Why is the shortest month the hardest to pronounce? March: Lambs versus lions. Not pretty. June: One rich vowel with a full dance card of rhymes. Moon. Spoon. Call of the loon. August: On a gust of wind, summer scatters into fall. A month ephemeral as milkweed seeds.

September.

Biting into a medium-tart apple. Snap of a three-ring binder. Schoolbuses, their mutterings and roars unchanged since the first time I waited for one at the curb. Sep-tember, the slap of one crisp consonant against another.

September, when the air changes abruptly and you wake up with the chilly knowledge that you have done nothing all summer.

Making a dental appointment is easier than booking a restaurant table. Open an app, choose a date, send it to your phone’s calendar. 10:45 a.m. on October 1. Simple, right?

Right. So why has this task taken me all morning?

Don’t get me wrong. I treasure my opposable thumbs. Look what they’ve done for us as a species! We’re no longer tree shrews. We build model airplanes. But when it comes to texting, scrolling, and entering characters in meaningful sequences, evolution leaped over my head to the next generation.

Sunday. My daughter mows the lawn and stuffs twigs into yard waste bags. A lot of twigs; a lot of old maples. My son checks the boiler in preparation for winter. Then he’s on his phone, ordering from Pizza Luce.

“Ruby Rae.” It’s what I always order, because it’s a bold name for a pizza, with spiciness to match.

“Already put it in, Mom.”

No one wants to be predictable. It’s one degree from boring. But Pizza Luce runs seasonal specials that feature mashed potatoes and squash. Broccoli. My son and daughter-in-law always — predictably — order the Fire-Breathing Dragon. My daughter wants something complicated, with hot honey. Should we get an appetizer?

Before I can say Buffalo wings, my son has added them and placed the order. My daughter sends a Spotify playlist to the speaker she’s just reprogrammed. (I’d unplugged it because Alexa lives there and one of her skills is “Summoning Evil Spirits.”) They did all this with speed comparable to typing 100 words per minute. I’ve never managed more than sixteen.

Their dexterity is native. We bought a Mac SE when my daughter was four, and were Apple devotees through endless iterations of devices, revealed during those memorable keynote events. (I was smitten with Steve Jobs’ black mock turtleneck and faded jeans. The moment he announced that the seemingly useless fifth pocket on a pair of Levi’s was designed to hold an iPod Nano will live in my mind forever.) We were an Apple household. Smug. Ahead of the curve. Now I have drawers full of cables that connect nothing.

And my thumbs are fat.

Flossing, I worry about displacing a tooth. Gum disease can cause Alzheimer’s. I swish mouthwash across a cracked molar. The price they quoted to fix it. Teeth are more expensive than cars.

What would be the difference if I let a few more brain cells log off? My executive functions are no longer governed by gray matter. Circuits encased in a Space Gray rectangle are in charge.

Damn your sneakers, Steve Jobs.

The construction-paper tropes from grade school have stayed with me. Transitions from one month to the next, sudden and complete as the swipe of an eraser on a blackboard. Autumn leaves removed from classroom windows as if by some efficient weather event, replaced by grinning pumpkins and ghosts. Then turkeys and Pilgrim hats, followed by pine trees and the effluvia of Santa’s sleigh.

Why are these arbitrary slices of the year so stodgily branded? Snowflakes, hearts, kites, umbrellas, tulips. Nothing changes. There’s no Spring Fashion Week, introducing frilly new floral hybrids. No Pantone shade displaces another in the crayon box.

Scissors, paper, paste: these are still the pillars of creation.

When I say I did nothing, I mean nothing.

Cue the shame:

Bright yellow bags of potting soil lean against patio chairs. Petunias and salvia, moss roses, geraniums, all chosen so strategically in May, died in the plastic embrace of their store containers. Tools rusted; new gloves stiffened and lost their partners. The serviceberry that died the same winter as your husband is a flailing stick. Weeds grow between bricks. Weeds grow everywhere.

That strip of grass between your house and the neighbors’ house? Once a DMZ, now breached by creeping Charlie from your yard. Last week, their six-year-old daughter brought out her newly adopted pair of guinea pigs. Set them down on what used to be grass. Little wire fence. Bowl of water. You haven’t seen them since. You are a murderess.

You never called the arborist, even when those two huge limbs broke the fence and the pond fountain. Because why? The first one missed the power lines. Twisting like a gymnast in that hailstorm, the second didn’t crush the sunroom. You are living a charmed life. Rotted branches creak and sway over the roof, stayed by some hand you’ve magically-thought into existence.

Paint peels. Trim warps. You haven’t sealed the decks. The gutters that fell from the eaves when your husband was in hospice are still on the ground. Your crimes against horticulture and home maintenance are numberless.

You sneak out after dark with the trash and recycling, averting your eyes from the rusted gas grill. The cedar railing, chewed by squirrels. Slink back indoors, where things are just as bad, but there are shades to pull and substances to smooth the edges of whatever this is. You can’t name it; your feelings wheel has gone missing. But it’s one of the big ones, a wave clawing back another, as in Hokusai’s painting. Tiny fishing boat, tiny fishermen, Mount Fuji a miniature in the distance.

How different your life would have been with less self-hatred and a 401K, I tell myself, thinking of the joy I felt as I dropped those gardening gloves into the shopping cart, next to the holy basil. Bright magenta, they fit my long fingers and covered my wrists.

Unpartnered.

The nights are cool. There’s a breeze. I crave sweets. Why?

The New York Times said this new health concern is due to climate change. But so is everything else, and I can’t find the article.

I don’t sleep. The next night, I fall asleep in my clothes. Go two, then three, days without a shower. That is a reason for not leaving the house, not calling the Gutter Guys, for keeping the shades closed. Climate change.

Mini has lived so many lives, they may be counted as incarnations.

I don’t know why some search committee hasn’t pronounced this 22-year-old Siberian the next Dalai Lama. She can’t be the first candidate born in a barn in a distant land, in this case Wisconsin. To be overlooked for so many rounds by a panel of purebred Himalayans. Why do they keep missing her?

She checks all the boxes: 1. Levitates tinsel balls. 2. Possesses ability to romance mice out of the narrowest cracks, then let them go. 3. Displays benevolence toward all sentient beings, chipmunks and dogs included. A feline bodhisattva, forgoing nirvana, staying in this world to guide others to enlightenment.

Every night my husband was in hospice, and during the two and a half years since he died, she’s been my companion. On my pillow. Next to me on the sofa. At my feet as I eat my solitary meals. Purring steadily as I bury my face in her fur, sobbing over a small thing that feels enormous; the pain referred from the disappointment of a package of raspberries gone bad to full-out alarm as I realize that the fridge isn’t keeping anything cold and everything perishable has to be thrown out.

Climate change is everywhere.

When she started peeing all over the house. I carpeted the floors with towels, washing them three times a day. Then came night blindness. Pupils dilated, eyes dark and unseeing, she wandered the house she knew so well, bumping up against walls and furniture, disoriented, guided only by whiskers.

I barricaded my study with a 15-inch-high scrap of plywood. The next morning, I stumbled into it, and fell.

I was carrying my laptop. It landed flat on the hardwood floor.

Writers, you understand. All seventeen drafts of your novel. Strangled darlings crying out to be revived, you will do anything to pull them from the trash and paste them back in! All those research files you were going to organize: you meant it this time. Have you saved anything? Printer out of ink. For how long? External hard drive backup, anyone? Did you renew your damage protection, and is it worth a nickel on a five-year-old MacBook Pro?

You power it off. Wait sixty seconds. Turn it back on. Hold your breath.

The sound. The chord. The relief as you search each application. Nothing’s lost.

Except for Mini’s freedom.

My daughter’s old room becomes a sanctuary. I have to call it that because prison is too hard, as is care facility. Nursing home. A Place for Fluffy.

I place a pan of clean litter under my yoga mat. Waterproof sheets. Bring up her food and water. Set cushions against the radiator and outlets. Line them up along the wall where, after my daughter left home, I’d moved in shelves and built a wall of books. It’s been ages since I looked through them.

All of Rilke in one place. C.S. Lewis. I find stories from the first fifteen years of The New Yorker, selected and published in 1940. O’Hara. Parker. Wolfe. I’d bought it used, decades ago, for 75 cents.

“Mini. We’re roommates with Erskine Caldwell.

She turns her head in the direction of my voice. I sit next to her on the daybed. Hold out my hand. She pushes her face into it, the way cats share their bliss. Lays her cheek against my palm, a blessing.

And on the third day, she recovers.

This shouldn’t be a surprise. How many times have I almost made that call to the vet, then waited, listening for breath to slow and her body to grow still. Seventeen? Twenty? Can I handle one more time —

She stretches. Jumps from the bed, goes to the door. I open it, and she strolls out. Goes downstairs with slow dignity. Returns. This is her home, and she’s not leaving it. Not yet.

I heat a can of soup and carry it upstairs. Set out her Fancy Feast: dinner for two. We sleep curled together. She nudges me alive, her purr a full rolling boil. She knows when sorrow comes. Cats need no feelings wheel.

The door stays open now. When I disappear from her sight, she goes from room to room until she sees me.

She uses her freedom to find me.

September is Suicide Prevention Month. shares her personal experience, and discusses the symbolism of the semicolon tattoo here: “A semicolon is used when an author could’ve chosen to end their sentence but realized they had more to say. The author is you, and the sentence is your life.” ~ Amy Bluel, Project Semicolon

is a place where poets share a poem and what it means to them. Recently, contributed an elegy in memory of her first wife, Diane. The brief essay aches with tenderness: “I would have given her my stem cells and a chamber of my heart, but I wasn’t a match. What I could do was meet her other needs, to the best of my ability.” Read it here.

(I’m excited to announce that I will be featuring X. P. in an upcoming post, discussing her new book, Mortal Sugar, recently published by . Don’t miss it).

— poet, professor, author of the Substack , and unstoppable force of nature, has added ’s Substack to her long list of projects. CWC is the online community of writers — many on Substack! — that Maya founded in 2023. With a stellar list of guest authors, workshops, and a deep vault of past programming, it is the equal of a top-tier MFA program at a tiny fraction of the price. If September brings on that hunger to broaden your mind, check out CWC for the learning experience of a lifetime.

Welcome! I’m glad you’re here. I write about grief, and much more. Losing my husband to cancer after 43 years of marriage turned my life around. Grief opened my heart. It inspired me to pick up my pen and start writing again. Life surprises us that way.

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Today, the unthinkable happened.

How many times have you seen these words? How often have they appeared in a news story, in reference to a mass shooting of schoolchildren?

I don’t know, either.

Last Wednesday, I got a text message from the blood bank. As a frequent donor, I get a lot of them. This one was a little different. O negative Minnesotans urgently needed as local hospitals treat recent trauma victims. Please donate ASAP.

Urgent. O negative. Yes, my blood type is always urgently needed. They have me on speed-dial. I get a text the moment every 56 days, at the moment I’m eligible to donate. If I don’t respond, I get another. An email. A call. Another text. I’m popular. Tomorrow, I thought. Right now I’m busy.

I went back to work, revising one sentence of a Substack post for the eighteenth time.

Wait. Recent trauma victims?

I picked up my phone. Pulled up the headline. You know the rest. Right?

I’m not saying you should remember that on Wednesday, August 27, 2025, an individual fired 116 rounds through a window into the sanctuary of Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis, where primary-grade students from the parish school were celebrating Mass. That the shooter killed two and injured eighteen, before committing suicide.

Or that the two who died were 8-year-old Fletcher Merkel and 10-year-old Harper Moyski. That they had radiant grins and loving parents. That the actions of the adults and the older children were heroic; that as they dove under pews to shield the youngest, one child was shot in the back. That another held a doctor’s hand on the way into surgery, asking if they could pray. That there were candlelight vigils. That the tight-knit community was brought more closely together in the wake of tragedy.

We won’t talk about the shooter. The hate-filled journals. Social media posts, quietly taken down. Types and quantity of weapons, legally obtained, careful planning, suicide note, motivation unclear. Warning signs. Shock and disbelief.

All you need to remember is this: your blood is urgently needed.

But you can’t give blood, because . . . reasons.

Reasons? Let me guess.

You’re too busy. (What, revising a single sentence of your upcoming Substack post for the eighteenth time?)

You’re still in your pajamas. (An opportunity to make a bold fashion statement.)

You forgot to eat breakfast. (A. Take a piece of bread. B. Spread peanut butter on it. C. Wash it down with a non-alcoholic beverage of your choice.)

You hate needles. (The people who take your blood are really good at it. They’re pros. Literally. But no one’s forcing you to watch.)

You faint at the sight of blood. (Then don’t look at it.)

You have, uh, ba-bes-iosis? (If you can’t pronounce it, you don’t have it.)

Your blood type is not O negative. (Lucky you. You won’t get hammered with phone calls and text messages every 56 days. THEY TAKE EVERY BLOOD TYPE.)

You don’t like the color choices of the elastic bandages. (Oh for crying out loud. Purple. Always. In honor of Prince.)

They force you to eat cookies after giving blood, and you don’t eat cookies. (Seek counseling.)

Did you know that:

Blood accounts for 7 percent of human body weight. The average adult has a blood volume of roughly 1.3 gallons. A donation of whole blood comprises one pint. A drop in the bucket. You won’t miss it.

You’ll be fine.

Thirty years ago, my first published essay was featured on the op-ed page of the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

The headline was “Lessons of Peace in a School Gym.” In it, I wrote about two instances in which shots were fired at the school where my son attended kindergarten. The first:

My son came home from school with a note from the principal. He pulled it, crumpled, from his Power Rangers backpack. Expecting the usual notice about an outbreak of head lice or chicken pox, I glanced at it as I stirred the pasta. Reading it, I set down my spoon and sat motionless at the kitchen table.

~ At approximately 2:10 this afternoon, shots were fired on the school playground. NO STUDENTS OR STAFF WERE PRESENT AT THE TIME OF THE SHOOTING.

Two months later, another note:

~ About a dozen shots were fired today in the vicinity of school property. At the time, a few students were playing outside. NONE WERE HURT. All children were kept indoors for the rest of the day. For the rest of the school year, a St. Paul police squad car with two officers will be posted near the playground during school hours.

Here’s one more excerpt:

I was thrilled when my son got into the Montessori magnet school. He loved working with the materials, and the school’s motto, “Education for Peace,” made a big impression. He learned to sing in sign language. To fold paper cranes. To distinguish a rhombus from a trapezoid.

He learned to hit the floor at the sound of gunfire.

That last sentence, inconceivable at the time, is now boilerplate in school curricula across the country, from preschool forward.

Of eligible blood donors in the U.S., only 3 percent donate each year.

There are too few licensed therapists to accommodate the — presumably — vast number of people who hate cookies.

Come on. I know you can handle a Rice Krispie bar.

I’m not trying to be hard on you. There are many other ways to be a hero. Volunteer. Staff the canteen. Stock the fridge. Answer phones. Give money.

Do one thing.

So what were those lessons of peace on the squeaky floor of the gym?

An all-school pageant dramatized “The Interdependence of All Things: From the Big Bang to the Mighty Big Worm.” Each child made costumes out of materials released during the the kickoff of the universe: Mylar, bedsheets, paper towel tubes, paint, glitter, and bicycle tires.

The kindergartners dressed up as the Periodic Table. Each wore a cardboard sandwich board labeled with the two-letter symbol designating one element. Alex was Al: aluminum. Auburn: Au, gold. Ruth: Ru, ruthenium. Although coached as an evenly-spaced dance line, they bunched together, as young elements do. Building galaxies is an untidy process. They do not expand evenly.

Trees, Flowers, and Crops (first grade) were nourished by Water (second grade: faucets, sprinklers, lakes, rivers, rain.) Lots of chasing involved, as the plants didn’t stay planted.

After “Things We Use and Enjoy” (fifth-graders awkwardly outfitted as boom boxes, microwaves, and TV sets) hurried across the floor, out came a dazzling, undulating Chinese dragon: The Mighty Big Worm. Sixth-graders got the dream role, operating this multi-legged parade float. It devoured the third-grade fruits and the fourth-grade vegetables and compostable containers, who ducked under its fringe.

Reduced, reused, recycled: all was renewed. The children burst forth from under the bright and shaggy Worm.

Standing in a circle, holding hands, they pledged to do one thing good thing each day. They shouted “We Are One World. Together We Bring Peace.”

Then everyone ate cookies.

If this post touched you in some way, please take a moment to hit the ❤️ button. To share, the ♻️ button will bring my posts to the larger community. Both actions will bring more eyes to my work. Better yet, subscribe! You have my undying gratitude.

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I want to tell you that I always try to write from the heart. From a place of kindness. This morning, I published a post that was ugly and mean-spirited. It came from a place of unprocessed pain. When I say that, I’m trying to be as honest as I’m able to be. I owe that to myself, and to you.

As a writer and a human being, I do my best to rise above my worst impulses. Sometimes I fail in small ways. Sometimes I fail spectacularly. That is what I did today.

I disappointed you. That hurts more than anything. I tried to fix it, to scrub the snarkiness through revision. That’s not good enough. I’ll try again.

I’d like to offer some context, and share an experience that doesn’t justify my spite, but may give you some insight into the feelings behind it.

The friend I wrote about in “Butter Sculptures and Baby Goats” was someone I called a friend for sixteen years. She was my co-worker before I retired, and the only person from the company that I remained in contact with. We hadn’t seen each other for some time, but we reconnected last year.

Together, we went to the State Fair. We went out to lunch together. Art exhibits. She invited me to her house for dinner. on Valentine’s Day. It was a sweet gesture. Valentine’s Day is one of the times when I miss my husband the most.

I called her one evening, no special reason. Just to talk. But she started out the conversation with, “Mary, you need help.”

I was shocked. She then proceeded down a laundry list of grievances, some dating back to 2009. Most of them I didn’t remember, or I remembered differently. What she said is not important. But I was stunned.

“You hurt me very much,” she said, repeatedly.

I apologized, although I didn’t know what I was apologizing for.

Then she said, “You talk too much about your dead husband. You need to keep in mind that not all of us have had long, loving relationships like yours.”

That hurt.

And then she asked me how long it had been since my daughter's diagnosis with breast cancer.

“Five years,” I replied.

She said, “So she’s had five good years,” and hung up.

My daughter has not had five good years. She’s had five years of surgeries, chemo, radiation, immunotherapy, targeted therapy, nerve damage, migraines, lymphodema, financial struggles, insurance struggles, pain. More pain. More pain than I can imagine. More everything than I can imagine.

I don’t know why anyone would say what my friend said.

For me, there’s the grief of another lost friendship. I tried for more than a month to write about it for Substack. But mostly, it’s this:

My daughter has not had five good years.

I don’t know why anyone would say she has.

Much love to you, my friends.

Mary xo

Folks. I want to apologize for this essay. It is mean. It is hurtful. It does not present my true feelings about the State Fair, or humanity in general. It focuses on a single bad experience. I wish I could unpublish it, or take it back. I feel that it shows the worst in me. It is sneering.

I try to write from a place of kindness. This is not kind. Please accept this edited version, and disregard the one I sent out this morning, after a bad night. Thank you.

Mary xo

A visit to the Minnesota State Fair can go smoothly. Or it can go south.

Good days result from attention to four elements: weather, time, crowds, and compatibility. Read the forecast. Arrive early. Avoid opening day and weekends. Go with someone who worships quilts at the same level of devotion as you do. Who stuffs her Minnesota Public Radio tote bag with trail maps at the DNR building. Who marvels at the inventiveness in the list of new foods (deep-fried Ranch dressing, sweet corn cola floats, cotton candy iced tea with edible glitter) but no way in hell is going to stand in line for them.

Bad days echo Tolstoy’s observation about unhappy families. Each one is unique in the number of possible ways it can cause misery. One of them is to go there with the wrong people.

I don’t know if there’s a “What’s Your State Fair Personality?” quiz/dating app out there. I don’t think it’s a bad idea. If your true nature is that of a John Deere tractor, you may not want to stray too far from the combines. However, a preference for Pronto Pups over corn dogs is not, to my mind, a dealbreaker. You will find them peacefully coexisting on opposite sides of Dan Patch or Judson Avenue. (Yes, the fairgrounds have named streets, and one of them honors a famous racehorse.)

But grease on a stick is one thing, and a plot of land comprising 322 acres in the center of a major metropolitan area is another. To go from Coliseum to Grandstand to Midway to Machinery Hill in the space of a few hours is not a stroll in the park. You need to negotiate. Strategize. To make sure everyone’s footwear has good arch support and can handle a dropped Sno-cone or a sticky mash of cotton candy.

Factor in astrology. Meteorology. Thirty minutes after you meet your friends in Heritage Square, the planets are at war. The atmosphere is stockpiling weapons it will use later to knock down trees, hammer cars with hail, flood basements, and leave a third of the metro without power.

I went to the Fair last year with my friend S and her boyfriend, D. Had anyone offered us a compatibility checklist ahead of time, I would have passed on the invitation.

I wish them well.

The State Fair is known as The Great Minnesota Get-Together. Every year, roughly two million people — more than a third of the state’s population — pass through the gates during the twelve days up to and including Labor Day. It is a very big deal.

August, 2024, seemed to exist in its own moment. Our governor, Tim Walz, the Democratic nominee for vice president — remember? — was busy campaigning elsewhere when he would normally have been at the Fair, hugging piglets and going on insane rides for the press.

I couldn’t put my finger on it. Time hovered in that late-summer stillness, before Labor Day and the first day of school. Was there a campaign going on? No one showed passion. In a year when a political keyword was “weird,” nothing was weird.

But then, nothing at the Fair is ever weird. The word does not apply. We are blessed with a healthy normality.

The dairy princesses sit for eight hours in a refrigerated booth, gawked at by strangers as the sculptor pares and scoops away 90-pound blocks of butter to uncover the princess within.

They wear winter coats. Sitting in a 40-degree controlled environment for eight hours requires fortitude. As a fellow Minnesotan, I wonder if their thoughts drift to the matter of making sure the snowblower is in working condition and the jumper cables are in the trunk.

But not to worry. A snowblower that starts right up, jumper cables and an ice scraper in the car year-round: that’s your holy trinity of preparedness. Perhaps the princesses are just hoping that the sculptor won’t carve off their noses. If that happens, it can be tough to fix.

The Agriculture-Horticulture Building always moves me to poetry:

Craft beer, Christmas trees. Honey and bees.

Crop Art. Apples: tart, or so sweet

They’re called First Kiss. Look at that giant beet!

All right, it’s doggerel. But look at that giant pumpkin!

The thunderstorm, as promised, and more. A deluge, what they used to call a hundred-year rain. It ended dramatically at sunset. The sky was orange, not from Canada’s wildfires but from sunlight reflecting off drops of moisture in the atmosphere. Rainbows: the sky was a burning cauldron, but with rainbows.

Can you mend a broken friendship with rainbows?

Can you mend a broken promise with your readers?

I hope so.

Two days later, with my daughter, there was this:

And this:

One good day, with the right companion. And baby goats. It was enough.

Now, I want to hear from you! Tell me about the times you went to a fair and had a less-than-stellar experience. Or the good times, especially if there’s a baby goat in the picture. Pickle lemonade, deep-fried candy bars: what’s the strangest food? I know you have great stories you’re dying to tell. And please hit the ❤️ and the ♻️ spinny thing to get my work in front of more readers. Better yet, subscribe! You won’t miss a post. Just hit the blue button.

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Writer, interrupted is a reader-supported publication. Nothing is paywalled. I hope to keep it that way. But if you’ve been reading for awhile and would like to support my work with a paid subscription, it would bring joy to my heart and help me continue to send you my best work. You’ll be joining a vibrant community of readers who care about independent writing. Just hit the blue button.

August is a month that doesn’t get a lot of attention.

May ends, and summer begins, with Memorial Day. June has Flag Day and the summer solstice. It’s chock-full of weddings and graduations. July — full summer — starts on the 4th, Independence Day. Then there’s a long drought of holidays until September when it’s Labor Day and all of a sudden you have to put away your white shoes and find your penny loafers or whatever’s in style for Back to School.

August is known for phenomena based on a mash-up of weather and astronomy. The dog days, so sultry your Labradoodle won’t go for a walk? Blame Sirius, the Dog Star. The sky is falling? It’s the Persiads meteor shower, silly. The eighth month has a pretty empty dance card.

But in case you missed it, Tuesday was National Night Out.

This annual event was originally held in 1984, on the first Tuesday of August. People turned on their porch lights and banged on pots and pans. It was an era of Neighborhood Watch Groups. The idea was to coax people out from behind their doors. To deter crime, it helps to know who lives where and what their names are. You can keep an eye out, in a non-creepy way if there’s a sticker on your front window that attests to your alertness.

Potlucks, barbecues, and picnics offer an opportunity to connect. Who are the people in your neighborhood? Here is a chance to find out.

I don’t know how widely National Night Out is observed. In Minnesota, it can be a big deal. Our long winters are isolating. Not everyone belongs to a book club. Firefighters and police officers make the rounds in their impressive vehicles. Kids are awed; grownups, reassured. Our city is safe. Budget cuts haven’t yet begun to sting.

And it’s summer. Don’t waste it.

In my neighborhood, here’s how it works:

A few volunteers coordinate things in advance. This can be dicey. For example, your special dish is potato salad. Everyone expects to find it on the table at any potluck at which you are present. But you live on the odd-numbered side of the street. The self-appointed event organizer announces that the even-numbered residents will bring salads and hot dishes; the odd- , desserts. Next year, “we” will switch.

You’re about to say, Do we really need more sugar? Aren’t we sweet enough? because your mom always said that but the event organizer stands, everyone else stands, meeting’s over, and to speak up would be pointless.

So what if yin and yang aren’t balanced, you think. You’ll bring your potato salad anyway. National Night Out is not the time to incite rioting in the streets just because your signature dish is AWOL.

But the day gets ahead of you. On Tuesday afternoon, you open two cans of baked beans and dress them up, tossing in this and that as you’ve been doing for years. You’ve perfected the dish, as evidenced by the fact that everyone in the family will eat it. But: canned beans! Definitely sneak them onto the table and walk away.

Then, you realize that you’ve saved yourself a trip to the one grocery store that sells the brand of mustard you need for the potato salad. There is no substitute. But the price has crept up. Doubled. It may be time to release your grip on perfection.

At 4:30, I peek out the front window. No one in sight. Did I mess up the date? No, there’s Dan, carrying sawhorses to block traffic at the intersection. At 5:00, Susie and Jane set up tables. Half an hour later, I cross the street with two packages of brats and a casserole dish.

“Hi, Mary!” the event organizer calls. Several women look up. In majority-Catholic St. Paul, there are four Marys, a Mary Ann, and a Maryann on our block. The event organizer is looking at me.

“You must have a white cat,” she says. I look down. My black T-shirt is covered in Mini’s fur. “Maybe not the best thing to wear around food?”

I look up. Behind her, an eye-roll and suppressed laughter. Three people have brought their dogs.

“You’re right. Thanks for setting me straight.”

I don’t say the thing that popped into my head: But I love my cat so much I’m wearing her!

Instead, I hang my head. Shuffle home. When I return with ginger beer and a fold-up camp chair, I’m wearing a different black T-shirt. This one’s immaculate, never worn. Before he died, my husband bought it for me from the Metropolitan museum store. On the front is an outline, in shiny gold, of the Greek goddess Artemis. She’s drawing her bow. I don’t know what, or who, she’s aiming at.

The crowd gets bigger.

Dan has delivered flyers to dozens of households on adjacent streets. About a hundred neighbors show up. The crowd is even larger than in previous years, when we had bands and food trucks. People aren’t here to party. They want community.

I meet Patrick. “Good Irish Catholic name,” I say. “I’m a stealth Lutheran.” We agree that it’s sad that the local parish was forced to close their school after decades of educating most of the neighborhood’s children. I miss seeing the red polo shirts that designated St. Marks’ students, made them stand out like cardinals.

Mary from the corner tells me that the previous owner of my house just died. “I’ve got the obit,” she says. “It’s what you’d expect.”

My husband and I bought our house in 1986. Over the years, we’ve heard doors slam, saw shimmering, faceless figures, felt chilled in 90-degree weather: the usual paranormal stuff. About a month ago, things started up anew. Lights turned on or off, windows closed or opened, pillows thrown, all in my presence and without Alexa’s command. My name, spoken in a a high laughing voice I don’t recognize.

“When did she die?” I ask, knowing the answer.

“July 1. Says she requested ‘no services be held.’ ”

“I’ll light a candle.” I think of the sins she’d committed against the house. How long it took to undo them. “Do you know of a good exorcist?”

Leah, home from college, pours liquid into a soap bubble machine. (These exist, another single-purpose object designed to facilitate the prime directive: buy things for your kids that are really for yourself.) A toddler holds up a slice of watermelon to a bubble drifting by. It pops, covering the watermelon in bubble soap.

Pointy things are what you use to pop soap bubbles. Watermelon slice = pointy thing, but also = good to eat, unless (taste = YUCK) covered in soap bubble. What to do? Hold up watermelon slice. Blow on it. No soap bubble. Give to Mom. Get new watermelon slice. Repeat 1x? 2x? (Looks at Mom.) Mom shakes head = no.

Mom is major source of funding + Chief Science Officer. Is/is not conflict of interest? Where’s Dad? Over there, holding hot dog, talking to other dads. Grab leg, test for the millionth x the most important hypothesis of all. Yes! Oh brave new messy, sticky, glorious world!

Gravity works.

Dusk descends. Folks move from their small groups, mingle, disperse. A good evening. Politics set aside; talk was of of concerts and travel, roofs, gutters, and gardens. Gardens in the neighborhood — except for mine, I can’t keep up — are lush and well-tended.

We’re hungry for beauty. Gardens are a gift to the souls of those who plant them and those who experience them. We walk past the echinaceas and milkweed, clumps of prairie grass, hostas and clematis and leopard lilies, species not yet decimated by the marauding beetles and borers riding the back of climate change. Small plants survive, shielded by large ones.

It’s time for bike races. It doesn’t matter who wins. We think of the children who grew up in these century-old houses. Some, like mine, are in their thirties and forties, the age of these new parents. There was a long dearth of small kids. But they’ve returned. We shout and applaud. Everyone wins.

Sparklers. Bedtime tears. The street lamps come on.

I balance empty dishes — the beans are gone! — and my chair up the front steps. Inside, I hear nothing at first. Then Mini’s arthritic legs, navigating the stairs. Small, careful thumps. Her dish is empty. I get the Fancy Feast. Down to one can. Mini is 22 years old, with the appetite of a kitten about to double her weight.

“The ghost must have eaten your dinner,” I say, stroking her back as she jaws the soft food. “She’s a hungry ghost.”

Her long hair, once so silky, is dull. The drab undercoat shows through. It is nature’s way of protecting her, in her last days, from predators.

She wants my company now, all the time. I’m her safe place.

Ghosts. She knew, when he didn’t come back from the hospice, that my husband was gone. That was more than two years ago.

She is still my safe place.

Last time, I promised you Part Two of my post on broken friendships. After days of work, I found that I was carrying burning coals to a place they did not belong: my heart. My hope, when I post this story, is to be honest and kind. You can read Part One here.

With love,

Mary xo

Do you celebrate National Night Out? Have other regular gatherings with your neighbors? Tell me in the Comments. To help people find my work, just hit the like ❤️ button, restack ♻️, or share with friends. Better yet, subscribe! I love having you here. You’ll be joining a vibrant, engaged community of readers. And you won’t miss a post.

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Writer, interrupted, is a reader-supported publication. I write, about once a week, stories taken from my life. I take on the big subjects — grief, loss, loneliness — and show you how things as small as a pair of socks can transform your life, bringing hope, abundance, and joy.

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“Hello Mary. It’s been a long time.”

I recognized the number. I knew it — by heart, as they say — but would have known who’d sent the text by those silky words alone. Lily.

“This is a sad time for you.”

Sad? Was I five?

“The obituary was beautifully written.”

My husband had died a month earlier. I’d done an adequate job of getting names and dates right. But an obit isn’t a poem, and the days we shared our writing were long past.

“I’m here for you as you move ahead.”

The last time I’d seen her was in early 2008. It was May, 2023. For fifteen years, I’d navigated the world without her assistance.

“Take your calls, anytime.”

I paused. We’d met in 1998. During the decade that followed, I saw her as a friend. I believed she was my best friend.

Looking at the screen — night mode, white words on a black background — I deliberated. Delete, respond, ignore? With all of the precision, and none of the tenderness, of the one I’d written for my husband, I tapped out a second obituary. I set the phone back on its charger and switched off the light.

I didn’t send it. But it’s there, ready to enclose in a bubble that I can release if I choose to inform my former friend that she is dead to me.

Dead to me.

If the expression has any currency past middle school, any meaning beyond a shoulder shrug or dismissive sweep of the arm, it fits the way I feel about Lily.

That’s not her real name. It speaks, however, to her imperturbable smoothness, the cool face she presented to the world.

Writers are always in some kind of relationship with each other. Think of these as genres. There’s Romance: obstacles, fights, reconciliations, flamed desserts. Biography: front matter, text blocks, indices, footnotes. Fiction: fluid plot lines, first person singular, lots of scarves. Mystery: Q. Can one ever really know another person? A. What do those initials on your cup mean?

None of these apply.

I’ve had more than one Lily in my life. Most have been female. (There were males as well, including bosses and boyfriends; this essay does not address those relationships.) Each recognized me immediately. They saw my craving for love, willingness to do anything for it, the denial of my own needs. To them, these were opportunities. Due, I’ve learned, to the conditions set forth during my childhood, I’ve embraced these people blindly.

These days, we call them narcissists. Some, a subset, are “toxic.” Borderline and Cluster B personality disorders clarify or muddy the diagnostic waters, as does the “dark empath.” What these people have is star quality, animal magnetism, charm. They stroke the ego.

It’s an old story. You build the stage. A performer arrives. Suddenly. you are special, an audience of one. You applaud until your hands ache, shout Brava! until your throat is raw.

Fantasy.

Lily of the valley is my favorite flower. The fragrance of those tiny, tender white bells sends me into rapture. But the plant is toxic. I am mindful of this, cultivating only a few, in a fenced-off area of the yard, away from small children or wandering neighborhood pets.

Cautionary Tales.

Lily of the valley is tough, with narrow, pale rhizomes and great snarls of roots. Every spring, I find that it has escaped confinement. I broke two shovels before I learned to go after it as the pips emerge, slim as a baby’s fingers, beckoning.

Grief.

I’ve sat on this story for years.

It’s likely that the parallels suggested above are overwrought. My mind reaches for metaphor as a way of sorting out complex emotions and understanding the experiences behind them. I’ve cut details, changed dates and locations, withheld physical descriptions, interrogated the text in an effort to scrub it of harsh or snarky judgements. The last thing I want is to make someone a villain.

My decision to post this came from a desire to share my experience of a type of grief that is not widely spoken of, a sorrow so deep that I almost did not survive it. When the loss of a friendship triggers great psychological distress and serious physical damage, it’s a tale worth sharing. When someone breaks your heart, steals your trust, and haunts you for years, it is a grief that needs to be spoken.

It is disenfranchised grief.

“Disenfranchised grief” arises from a loss that isn’t recognized within your culture or community. When the object of your grief doesn’t align with societal norms or expectations, no one acknowledges your pain. Tears? Over what? Put on your big girl pants and get back to work.

To be disenfranchised is to be deprived of something significant: a right, a power, a privilege. You are disabled, invalidated, nullified. Forbade. When no one acknowledges your pain, you’re unable to find solace. No soothing words, no tissue handed to you by the woman seated behind you in church. It is a hurt too shameful to speak of.

There are rituals surrounding the death of a parent or grandparent, spouse, parent, child, close relative or friend. But where is the comfort when you lose a limb, an eye, or a breast; have a miscarriage; get fired, get evicted, go bankrupt? When a beloved pet dies? What if a friendship ends?

What if it never existed?

December, 2000.

Two things happened on the same day.

One: I called my mother to wish her a happy birthday. During our conversation, she realized that I was calling from the psychiatric ward of a local hospital, and began to cry.

Two: Lily visited. She picked up one of the school photos of my children I was allowed to keep in my room. Gasped.

“Your daughter? Why, she’s lovely!”

“Thank you.” She held the photo by its edges, gazing at it with a disquieting intensity. "The other picture is my son.”

She reached, then pulled her hand back.

“Oh.” After a moment, she added, “How old?”

“He’s nine. Doing so well in school —”

“Those glasses!” Her voice shifted to a higher register. Was her tone . . . mocking?

“Nine years old, and already a geek. Too young for braces. With that overbite. What a shame.”

Lily’s own glasses were thick, shading her expression as she set down the picture of my daughter.

“You say they’re siblings. You sure about that?”

“I —”

“Oh, Mary. I’m kidding. It’s just that they are so — unalike.”

She pulled on her coat, and left. Her visit had lasted five minutes.

My stay in the psych ward wasn’t brought on by any uniquely stressful event. I hadn’t attempted suicide, nor was I suffering from the panic attacks that had periodically disabled me since age seventeen.

What preceded it was something I can only describe as slippage. It didn’t fall into the category of obvious emotional tectonics, a 7.0 or above on my internal Richter scale. More likely, it was a rock slide that blocked a highway, or a sudden sinkhole in a playground.

The PTA meeting. Once again, I’d volunteered for a planning committee, book fair or carnival. Once again, I’d been asked to bring cookies to a bake sale. Preferably oatmeal raison, something healthy.

In sixth grade, I was the only girl not invited to sleepovers. What was wrong with me?

Slippage.

My friendships with women had always been fraught. Short-lived, situational. The confidante in my mom group who moved to the suburbs. The neighbor who got whisked away by the mean girl who moved in next door. The exercise pal I saw daily, whose work promotion brought a status differential that embarrassed us both.

I had my children. My husband. Lily. At that moment, they were not enough.

What was wrong with me?

Home again, celebrating the holidays, I realized that my insecurities were unfounded. My family still loved me. Lily was still there for me.

She was for real. My friend; my best friend. The comment about my son was just something a woman who had never been a mother might say. Or she was jittery, not her real self, thrown off balance, she didn’t do hospitals. I was grateful that she’d made an exception for me.

We resumed our weekly meetings at the coffee shop where we’d become a fixture. Just as before, we wrote for an hour. Then we exchanged and commented on each others’ writing. Around us, in pairs and groups, at tables or leaning forward in leather chairs, other writers did the same. But they weren’t as intimate, as attuned, as Lily and I were.

She’d look up from a piece I’d written, usually a poem. I’d watch her face, waiting for her pronouncement. Good? Terrible? Was there a line I’d regret after sending it to an editor, a tone-deaf choice that would earn me a form-letter rejection?

Most often, her face was neutral. Her critiques might have stung, had they been spoken by anyone else. I lived for her praise, always the same words:

“Let me kiss the hem of your garment.”

My garment, in the beginning, was jeans and a sweater. I soon found myself dressing as if for a job interview. If she was going to kiss a hem, it shouldn’t be frayed.

February, 2008.

When I got Lily’s voicemail, it had been months since I’d seen her. She’d been busy: second marriage, home renovation, honeymoon in Japan.

“Meet me at the bookstore.” A date and a time. No greeting, no goodbye. I didn’t hear disdain; it was concealed by the brevity of the message. Only after I’d played it a dozen times did I notice the curl of scorn.

Lily’s call was perfectly timed. An idea had come to me the previous night as I stood waiting for the light rail to take me home from work. A motif built around a single image: a train. A shame train.

You start out as conductor of a fast, shiny engine. In charge. Your destination; your destiny. Over the years, cars are added, negative experiences and emotions, until you’re stuck. Stalled. Ashamed. When I got home, I wrote steadily. It wasn’t much of an analogy. Maybe it was a children’s book: The Little Engine Who Could, then Couldn’t, then Wrote Her Way to the Top of the Hill.

I parked close to the door, ran indoors and up the stairs. I sat down, breathing in the bergamot scent of Earl Gray. Lily looked past me as I spoke.

“Lily. I had a breakthrough.”

What I meant was, I’m writing. Writing. And it’s good.

She stirred her tea. Added hot water. Stared straight ahead.

“Lily?” Was this something medical, a stroke or a seizure? I pulled out my phone. “Should I call 911?”

She snorted. Finally, she looked at me.

“Only for yourself. Sounds like you could use another hospital stay. They didn’t fix your delusions last time.”

Twenty minutes later, I watched the elevator doors close in front of Lily’s face as she stared, face twisted with contempt, at the place where I no longer existed. It was the last time I saw her.

Memoir with unloveable narrator.

When I got home, I wrote in my journal:

Met Lily at bookstore. Told her about my idea.

Breakthrough? Ha! Your writing is shit. You are shit. You need to hold on to that shitty job. So what if you hate it. No one will hire you. Your husband is going to leave you and you will have nothing. Your shrink is a drug dealer. You’re an addict. A zombie. You should be locked up for ruining your kids. They’ll be lucky to survive. Your daughter might be okay, if she stays the hell away from you. Your son? He’ll be flipping burgers for the rest of his life. You. Are. Not. My. Friend.

On my way out, I bought valentines.

That was the last entry. The remaining pages, about nine-tenths of the notebook, were blank. In 2018, during a rare cleaning frenzy, I found more journals I’d begun and abandoned. A decade of unwritten or unfinished work, a sea of icebergs. I clung to wreckage.

Writer, interrupted.

Five nights a week, my shift ended at ten. I took the light rail — rhythm of the wheels repeating shame, shame, shame — to my car. I drove home through near-empty streets. Tiptoed into the house.

I fed the cat. In the living room, I put my head down on the arm of the sofa and cried, as quietly as I could. I sobbed, for the two hours it took before I was ready to go upstairs and slip into bed next to my sleeping husband.

During those six months my weight dropped from one hundred and sixty pounds to one hundred and fifteen. I don’t recall eating. At some point, people stopped complimenting me on my weight loss. Instead of, “You look great!” I heard, “Are you sure you’re okay?”

My manager called me into her office.'

“Mary. How are you feeling these days?”

“Fine.” I kept my eyes on her hair. It had the steely sheen of a helmet, fixed to her head, unmoving.

“Good to hear,” she said. Lowering her voice, she added, “I thought maybe it was the big C.”

The big C? Oh, cancer. They used to think it was a death sentence. Not like losing a few pounds.

Part Two of this story of friend loss will appear next week. Other posts on this important topic will follow.

In the meantime, I want to hear your stories. Have you felt grief following a loss that wasn’t supported or recognized? Tell me about it in the Comments. To help people find my work, just hit the like ❤️ button, restack ♻️, or share with friends. Better yet, subscribe! You won’t miss a post.

Subscribe now

About Writer, interrupted:

After my husband’s death in 2023, I was surprised to find that grief opened my heart. Six months later I sent out my first Substack post. I was a published writer, but had never been paid for my work. Writer, interrupted gave me my first experience of the dignity and affirmation that comes with being a paid writer..

None of my work is paywalled. I hope to keep it that way. If you’ve been enjoying my posts for awhile, please consider a paid subscription. Your financial support allows me to continue bringing you my best work. Give yourself the pleasure of keeping independent, award-winning writing alive.

Is there anything more depressing than watching fireworks alone? It turns out that there is: watching them alone from my own backyard.

Putting on my shoes, getting ready to take out the trash, I hear a popping sound. A bang. Another. The neighbor kids, two doors down? No, the noise is coming from the opposite direction.

The golf course.

Only a block from my house, but on the other side of the proverbial tracks. I never get the emails. It’s June 27. July 4th is a week away. As usual, the country club is setting off fireworks early.

Some years, they do it on the 3rd. Once, it was the Thursday prior to the Sunday that was the actual holiday. I haven’t checked the calendar to see if June 27 falls forty nights after the strawberry moon, but I doubt it. Is there a rhubarb moon? That might make more sense.

The trash bag is one-third full. Because I didn’t buy enough fresh produce, I don’t have the usual package of spinach, pair of cucumbers and an eggplant to toss after four days in the fridge. Today is Friday; garbage pickup is on Monday. Ahead lies another weekend of sort-of sorting, pretending to cull. I still have three bottles of expired salad dressing in the refrigerator door. My husband liked Green Goddess, Mission Fig, and Thousand Island. I’m keeping them a little longer because I like to recite their names. Grouped together, they’re the Salad Supremes. Baby lettuce, where did your leaves go? I make my own balsamic. Boring.

At least I’ve halfway filled the recycling bin. Although no one is deceived by the widow-sized garbage container, I do my best to pretend I’m a family of four. In the corner cupboard, on the lowest shelf, are two canisters of the protein powder that made him gag. In his closet, I find a broken umbrella and yet another pair of slippers. A cache of cough drops glued to their wrappers, a trove of unmended socks I somehow missed during the first round, two years ago. Death cleaning never ends.

The thirteen-gallon bag stretches, almost to bursting, as I wrangle it shut.

Standing on the back deck, I pause. Some of the fireworks seduce through sound as well as light. Whistle; boom. Crackle, scratch, sizzle. I feel like a trespasser. Like I’ve wandered, uninvited, into a stranger’s lawn party in a Cheever story. But more than that, I’m reminded of The Great Gatsby.

Bright bursts: flappers in their tiers of fringe. Champagne corks flying everywhere. The sky above the golf course explodes, an urgent narrative nearing its inevitable conclusion. Gatsby stands in the shadows as his world flames out over a golf course in St. Paul, Minnesota, his creator’s hometown.

You’re being weird, I tell myself. Literature, fireworks: an incendiary mix. I take one last look — cool, how did they do that, they’re getting so much better — and go indoors.

Standing in front of the sink, I drink a full glass of cold water. Staying hydrated, so important. My ribs contract around the stilled molecules in my chest. I wonder if this is anything like the pain my husband felt as cancer began to spread through his lungs.

Or is it grief? Simple, complicated, squamous-cell, benign, malignant? Could be a lot of things. Insomnia. I should set reminders on my AppleWatch. Fluids. Lunesta.

I count my breaths in all of the ways I’ve learned, remembering that the release is more important than the intake. All is exhalation. Sound, then silence. In fireworks, in novels, in life. After the final boom, there may be applause on the other side of the golf course. If there is, I don’t hear it.

Dear F. Scott Fitzgerald,

When The Great Gatsby was published one hundred years ago, it was a flop not given the critical acclaim it so richly deserved. The book is now required to be enthusiastically read in some most all of the finest American high schools. Apologies if you’ve already heard. I mean, you moved on. And there was no Internet.

I’ve followed your footsteps down Summit Avenue and up Cathedral Hill. Had a few dinners at the elegant restaurant that was once a drugstore where you loitered over bootleg sodas with friends. Gazed with longing at the golf course, thinking of your sledding parties, flirtations, and getting dumped being cruelly spurned, sending you straight to some floozy named Zelda strengthening your resolve to go on to become the author of, arguably, the greatest American novel of the twentieth century all time.

They named a theatre after you. Bronze plaques mark the addresses where you lived. A statue of you stood in front of your old prep school, until someone took a blowtorch to it and tried to sell it for scrap recently, when it was removed for refurbishing.

I feel sad. Tired. Lost. Why ban The Great Gatsby? Why ban any book?

What? Oh, nothing.

More explosions. Rattling the windows. Is this the alternate ending, the one that ends not in darkness but —

No?

I don’t know how to characterize this piece I’m writing. Two trains running? My brain does strange things at this unexpected time. Nothing is straightforward. It’s six a.m. and I’m going to try to get some sleep.

You’re on your own.

Last week, I drove north from the Twin Cities to stay with friends. Jeannie and Brian live in Texas. For twenty years, they were my next-door neighbors.

Bless their hearts, what a place. Huge bedrooms and baths, a deck perfect for morning coffee and evening charcuterie, three TVs, stone fireplace, loft, whirlpool.

For two days and two nights, we engaged in life’s higher pursuits: walleye, wine, Netflix, and watching the Lynx beat the Mystics, WNBA players in an arena filled with girls who want to be just like them. The thought occurred that they may not have that chance. We drank more wine and went to bed.

The big questions came up:

• When, on menus from diners to wagyu steakhouses, did sandwiches become “handhelds?”

• As for “sea salt”: doesn’t all salt come from the sea?

• Reading glasses. I buy mine at Costco, three to a pack, squarish and unflattering but they work. Many times a day, they disappear. After searching purses, pockets, drawers, and under sofa cushions, I discover four pairs huddled together in plain view on a table or desk. How is this herding instinct bred into them? Costco, what are you hiding?

• Cataracts. When I had my surgery, they gave me a choice: Near vision, or far vision? Easy, I said. I need to see highway signs. Nine-point font? Isn’t that what readers are for?

• Hahahahaha.

In a nearby town I bought two tops. One is teal, long-sleeved, with an asymmetrical cut. The other is printed in shades of blue, with a trapeze hem. I’m relating these details because these are the first clothes I’ve bought in five years and I’m relearning Fashion, a language I once spoke at the intermediate level.

Before leaving home, I gave myself a pedicure. Applied polish to all ten toenails. Gave myself bonus points for not missing any of them, and for not spilling acetone all over the bathroom floor.

I forgot to bring open-toed sandals. The peachy-pink, iridescent enamel is my secret, like silk underwear.

When I was twelve, I learned about fireworks.

At that time, they weren’t shot off after every event. Not concerts, winning games, civic celebrations, birthday parties or because some obtuse teenager wanted to make his baby sister cry. It was only on the Fourth of July that people drove to the places where trained professionals (guys missing fingers) sent rockets into the sky, usually from a boat on one of the lakes in a state that brags of having more than ten thousand of them.

We drenched ourselves in bug spray and wore light jackets. I had a cheap windbreaker, already unraveling at the seams. But in the darkness, it wouldn’t have been too noticeable.

Of course, the neighbor lady noticed. Before we climbed into our Rambler station wagon, she found the spot that would utterly deflate me, and punctured it.

“You have a shell! And it fits, even though you’re tall for your age.”

How did she do it? Tall for your age. A shell. It fits.

No it does not fit, look at my wrists sticking out, I ruined the sixth-grade class picture because I turned the wrong way and slumped, middle of the top row, tallest girl in class, trust Mary to ruin everything. It’s not a shell, it’s a windbreaker.

I got in the car with Mom, Dad, my youngest brother, his buddy, the neighbor lady and her daughter, my age, who I was forced to be friends with, who was short and wasn’t blond like me and went to a special school and did not know how to read.

What I learned about fireworks was that they weren’t exciting and half were duds and the oohs and ahhs meant nothing, the grand finale was nothing, and I was nothing.

I learned that age twelve was the dividing line: you no longer went to see fireworks in a station wagon with your family and your tormenters. You went with your friends, some who were older, some who were boyfriends or girlfriends, and you wore an actual windbreaker and sat on the roof or the hood of the car and paid no attention to the fireworks. Or you stayed home.

I stayed home.

Friendships are hard for me. Fraught. I pull back, afraid to be vulnerable. This does not mean I am rejecting you. It means that I’m still learning.

In the next few weeks, I have a couple of stories to tell about friendships that ended painfully after many years. These are stories of disenfranchised grief. I’ve been waiting a long time to tell them. The grief is real. You may have been through such a loss.

But if you’re lucky, you have people like Brian and Jeannie in your life. They are you true friends, the ones who won’t flame out and disappear. Treasure them.

Dear friends,

This is a love letter. To you, to friends, to F. Scott Fitzgerald, and to the famous final sentence of The Great Gatsby:

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

I don’t believe it has to be that way.

~ With love,

Mary

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"A Widow's Journey" cracked me wide open. Every word an arrow to my heart. Writers like you are the reason why I love language. Thank you." ~ Betsy

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