our final days as a family of three
Last time I’d mended fences in Far West Texas was December 2015. Figurative fences, that is. Giddings taught me that concept, the one of going to check in on old relationships so that you don’t become a stranger to people or places. It’s paid off hugely for him. He’s a professional fence mender, always welcome anywhere he goes for the effort of keeping in touch. Ingratiating yourself with good humor and old stories and a 6-pack goes a long way in this life. Not only is it a skill but the established good will can be passed on to your offspring, as is my case out in the desert. If it’s not my own relationship then I often introduce myself as Giddings’ daughter and doors and arms open for me.
I knew I needed to go to my heart’s homeland before my next baby came and I enter the mother cave for the foreseeable future. I wanted to take Danny and Felix but those long drives would be too much for a toddler so instead I asked my best friend, Rachel, to go with me. Our friendship was born out there in Marfa. People around town preordained our friendship before we even met, sure the two of us would be a good match. They weren’t wrong. The origin is sort of blurry except for a clear memory of the two of us standing beneath a zillion stars whispering secrets to each other the very night before she left Marfa behind for bigger things. We reunited soon after in New York City, fledgling hustlers, and even now I can’t tell you a moment that solidified us as best friends except that we’ve just always been extremely honest and encouraging with each other which has amounted to more than a friendship. It’s a sisterhood.
I landed in El Paso and rented a smart little sky blue Volvo XC40 and began the trek into big sky country. I usually drive around with a toddler in the backseat asking incessant questions and so a simple thing like loud music on a long drive put me in a good place from the start. I’d been warned that the area hadn’t seen rain in a long time, that the Rio Grande was merely a series of puddles, and so I kept my expectations low for beautiful clouds and thunderheads. When I turned off I-10 and onto highway 90 in Van Horn I spied dark skies down the road. And then, about 20 miles from Valentine, the rain came. Rain on the road and rain in the distance, the sky big enough to show me multiple storm systems. I pulled over to take pictures and the smell of creosote hit me like an emotional rogue wave. The leaves of the creosote bush, a hardy, water-greedy desert plant, contain a waxy resin that perfume the air when they’re wet. Growing up I thought that was just what rain in the atmosphere smelled like, not knowing it was the plant and water in tandem. Being awash in it again after nearly 10 years made me weep, a core facet of self bubbling out of my eyes in pure joy. There is nothing like rain in the desert. I drove on to Marfa, checked into the historic Hotel Paisano, and took a sweet little nap while I waited on Rachel to come through the door.
rain on Highway 90
In she came, all love and road weariness and excitement. Our Texas accents immediately began flowing. We sat in the courtyard and ordered margaritas and the first of many a chip and salsa. Then on to a very Marfa dinner down the road consisting of too cute little plates of food like pink deviled eggs and hot olives. In no time I was spilling every single one of my guts to her like she was the Texan wailing wall. It’s important to have somebody you can spill your guts to, at least it is to me. I can tell her literally anything and she is unfazed, so long as I’m ready to hear her opinion of it. We walked around town as much as my 7-month pregnant belly would allow, and noted all the changes since we lived there. In bed that night we argued about where farts belong when you’re sharing the sheets (I say under the covers so long as your ass is facing away from your bed partner, she says out of the covers, always). I slept a blissful, uninterrupted 8 hours that night.
The next day we loaded up on snacks and made our way north to Ft. Davis and onto Balmorhea, but not before stopping in on Rachel’s friend Johnny Williams and his firecracker wife, Mary. Johnny is a fellow in his 90s who used to work for the border patrol and flies planes and whose living room has an unimpeded view of the David Mountains. Rachel’s got such a close relationship with him and Mary that she can walk right into his back door and he greets her with a big laugh and a hug despite being caught in his underwear. Thus began many a running into of old-timers who are full of succinct, perfect Texan bullshit quips and a big ol’ smile to go along with it. The same thing happened moments later at the Ft. Davis general store where Rachel ran into Roseland Klein, a kind old woman who used to run the classical music hour at Marfa Public Radio. Roseland had just come from yoga and proudly boasted of being 95 years old and still able to do a headstand. Rachel later told me that Roseland once told her that the secret to a long life is a daily glass of champagne. On we drove through Wild Rose Pass with all of its red rock turrets and vibrant green cottonwoods and into the flat desert plain of Toyahvale, Texas, home to Balmorhea State Park, the most magical swimming pool in the country. Growing up, my family made annual summer trips to Balmorhea. Giddings taught us to swim there. My brothers caught minnows and turtles and lizards there, they did their first high-dive jump there. I used to make a point of bringing my college boyfriends there to blow their minds. A veritable oasis, the pool is 1.3 acres large and 30 feet deep. The water that feeds it is from San Solomon spring and is an unchanging 72 degrees year round. We picked out a picnic table beneath a Velvet Ash buzzing with cicadas and thirsty bees and went about the important business of sizzling in the sun and cooling off in the water on repeat.
It's the dichotomy, I think, that makes Balmorhea so special. Outside the pool fence is barren land and arid winds. Within the fence is life – the screams of children, the whoops of teenagers, the camaraderie of Texans who’ve trekked long miles to cool off together, the blue-greenness of the animal-filled water, the catfish and minnows and turtles and barn swallows and bats and insects and human beings all mixed in the same space. It’s the Texan version of a Saharan watering hole where you see elephants alongside lions alongside gazelle, all desperate for a drink. Slowly paddling around, I let my unborn son know what a gift this was, for me and him to be there together at this moment, and I made a promise to myself in those waters that my boys will know this pool and understand it’s magic the same way it was gifted to me by my parents.
Balmorhea
On the way back to Marfa we blew out the speakers in the car playing Dolly Parton too loud. “Scream singing”, Rachel called it. Back in town with fresh sunburns and dressed in our Marfa finest, we met up with a few folks – a force of a woman named Natalie who moved into town right when Rachel and I left and with whom Rachel shares a very special and recently deceased ex-boyfriend, David Tompkins. David died in a flash flood in town a few years ago. No shit. A flood in the desert. Such an extreme way to go in such an extreme place, a story that no doubt carries its own mythology and is terrible and also somehow beautiful in the legacy that is David. We also happened to be there on his death anniversary. My oldest friend Molly Walker’s youngest brother, Travis, joined up with us briefly, all handsome and grizzly and sun weary after his day working at a local ranch. More familiar faces joined us. After dinner we went to a local bar I remember being drunk at in my 20s and I wished to be drunk there again.
In the morning we separated. Rachel went to see Johnny and I had breakfast at the local coffee shop, running into yet another old friend, Ari, who is also pregnant. We pressed our bellies together and I’ve gotta say, even with how brief all these interactions were, with all of these old friends there is a love because there is a history, and I was surprised with just how comfortable I felt being in Marfa. I thought I’d be less confident, maybe an echo of my 25-year-old self, but I felt right at home because in so many ways I was home. 10, 15 years can pass between seeing a friend in the desert and you’re still going to kiss each other’s cheeks all the same.
We pressed on to Alpine. I took Rachel to the mountain behind the university to meet Hiram Sibley, he of the bona fide Texan Sibley royalty and father to children I grew up with. Before we knew it, we were being offered cannabis soda and swept away on an ATV for a tour of one of the most interesting homes in west Texas, a multi-domed wonderland in the round that, as a kid, I always thought was the epitome of wealth. Hiram talks really fast, frequently breaking into Spanish, and had a story for nearly every beam and brick in the place. I’m not sure we came away retaining most of what he told us, apart from a tale of a treacherous plane ride over Copper Canyon and an offhanded remark that Giddings Brown was famous for having “the only successful ménage à trois in west Texas”. Dehydrated and talked to death by Hiram, me and Rachel experienced our first bout of tension which was solely due to the condition of our bodies needing food and water asap. It would be the first but not last reminder of how deceptive the dry heat can be. You think you’re fine until you really are not. A pitcher of ice water and two Caesar salads later and we were back in good spirits, heading east down highway 90 towards Marathon.
Glass Mountains north of Marathon
I used to drive this stretch of highway 90 daily back when I was 18. I dropped out of college and moved to Marathon to intern for the photographer James Evans. I was also boy crazy and the only boys worth being crazy for lived in Alpine, so every night I drove the 30 miles to Alpine to avail myself of a young man who played the drums in the local rock band and then drove back to Marathon each dawn to work the breakfast shift at the Gage Hotel. Here I was again, flooded with memories, and trying my best to bite my tongue knowing I was inundating Rachel now with too many stories. We both noticed how much greener the landscape was as we came into Marathon, which apparently was not suffering the same drought conditions as the rest of the region. We checked into the Gage, an iconic, upscale cowboy hotel flush with leather hide and cow skulls everywhere. Giddings ran the hotel in the late 80s (this is also the site of his “successful” ménage à trois, meaning he was in a throuple with two women who I now consider aunts, though I think the term “successful” is a stretch because now I know the arrangement was really only beneficial to Giddings. The women merely tolerated each other because they loved him). I’d never spent the night at the hotel. Our room was plush and air-conditioned. I freshened up and met Rachel at the bar, then we drove to dinner at the home of James Evans and his wife Marci.
It's sort of hard to put into words who James is to me. I’ve known him since I was five but we didn’t form a relationship until I was 18 when I moved to the middle of nowhere to learn photography from him. That summer he had just released his book Big Bend. I came home after my first year at college directionless and with a .48 GPA. His book was sitting on our coffee table and I remember being transported by it. “I want to do that”, I thought. So, I wrote to him and he said “come on out!”, warning me my apprenticeship would be unpaid and he expected me to take it seriously. Long story short, he fired me after a few months. Serious about boys and rock n’ roll and drug experimentation I was. Serious about sanding the floors of his new studio and framing his prints I was not. Years later, when I got serious about photography, our relationship took off again, this time as mentor/mentee, though I think we also straddle the familial.
His new home was designed by his beautiful wife, Marci, and sits on the very edge of town looking north to the Glass Mountains. It’s an exceptional space. We sat on their porch and ate a chicken dinner James cooked us. I was so happy to see him. I loved bragging on Rachel and her brilliant career as much as I loved watching her seamlessly engage with people new to her. It’s a gift of hers, the immediate way she can relax a room with an effortless joke and an easy smile. Plus she looked like a gazillion pesos in her turquoise dress and Justin boots and red lips. The sun was setting and James was attempting to ask me questions about my life but I could see his eyes were distracted. Finally, he admitted “I’m sorry, but the light is so great on the mountains!”. Spoken like a true photographer. The time was nigh for us to break out our cameras and all the small talk and chicken dinners in the world could not replace the accelerated heart rate between me and James nerding out about our cameras and the beautiful evening light we were so desperate to catch with them. He hopped into his pickup to go grab strobes from his studio and before I knew it, I was James’ subject, me and my pregnancy and the Glass Mountains, and I loved every second of it. At some point a friend of James’ showed up and James introduced me as his daughter, which the friend accepted as fact and nobody corrected. It was very sweet. Before we left that night we had all posed for each other. I was feeling a love so big in my heart and renewed inspiration to always take pictures. James is 70, but he’s got the spritely humor of a mid-twenties Puck, and when he has a camera in his hands his whole body bends and twists like it exists solely in service of making the best photograph. I love him entirely.
Me and Rachel spent that night and the next morning splayed on our king-sized bed, trading stories about how we grew up and the people we loved and lost and the defining moments of our lives that changed their trajectories for the better. Our lives could be books, I think.
We checked out of the Gage (but not before I signed the guestbook “Hope Dickens, daughter of the legendary Giddings Brown”), stocked up on coffee, water and sandwiches, and started the drive to Big Bend National Park. Right as we turned south, I spotted a bright red stripe across the asphalt and swerved so swiftly that I nearly flipped our car. After a few adrenaline-fueled catching of breaths, Rachel forgave me for nearly killing us to save the snake (a red racer, pretty sure) but insisted I not do it again.
There’s a surprising majesty that overwhelms you as you get closer to the park. The Chisos mountains loom in the distance like a mirage against an impossibly big sky, and then before you know it you’re in them, prehistoric earthquake upheavals demanding attention in every direction. It’s a good thing the speed limit is set at 45, one is liable to roll off the road gawking at the landscape. We pulled off the road a few times to take photos, each time only spending a few minutes outside the safety of the air-conditioned car as the outside temperature climbed well past 100 degrees. In the basin of the Chisos we attempted a quarter-mile hike but turned back less than halfway because the heat was so intense.
The heat makes you want to give up, which I was ready to do. Ready to call it a day and retreat to our waiting hotel room in Terlingua. But Rachel had never seen Santa Elena canyon and urged us to go, and me, a tour guide at heart, knew I couldn’t abide not indulging her one of the borderlands greatest natural wonders. We descended from the juniper and agave-filled mountain and snaked our way through the lowlands. It’s like Mars. Strange formations jut out of the scorched earth in every color of dust imaginable. We made it to the parking lot that sits just in front of the mouth of the mighty canyon. The temperature gauge on the car read 121 degrees. We’d come this far, we needed to see the canyon on the other side of the bamboo stands, so we steeled ourselves for the wave of heat and dashed out of the car. Rachel briefly squatted to pee and then we walked all of two minutes to view the canyon opening. Even in that two minutes I could feel the skin on the top of my feet burning. We turned back and speedwalked to the car, noticing that the pee had evaporated in the elapsed minutes.
the mighty Santa Elena
Rachel retreating from the canyon
Finally, the heat took a toll. My body wanted to shut down, just go to sleep. Certainly, the added furnace cooking up a baby within me wasn’t helping things. I’ve never experienced heat like that. I can’t imagine any living thing being stuck in it. As we drove to Terlingua all I could think of was the thinness of metal and glass separating us from being baked alive. I put all my faith into that thinness and chewed gum to keep from falling asleep and steered us to Terlingua.
We rented a room at La Posada de Milagro, a rock compound in the Terlingua ghost town owned by Mimi Webb Miller, rancher and former girlfriend of Pablo Acosta, aka the Ojinaga Fox, the most famous drug smuggler in the region. Finally, a chance to rest. I slept in the bed and Rachel drank a beer in the clawfoot tub and snoozed there. Later, we dolled ourselves up and wandered over to the Startlight Theater for dinner. Memories abound here. As an adolescent, I used to crush on the owner’s husband, a mustachioed man who looked like a white-haired Clark Gable. My parents took me to the Starlight for my 14th birthday dinner and afterwards Giddings asked me to walk with him. In the parking lot, he admonished me for the hicky I was desperately trying to conceal on my neck with makeup. “Don’t let them brand you, honey” I remember him saying. I once saw Giddings put a live white scorpion in his mouth on the porch of the Starlight. I drank margaritas with my future husband there, just before we made love on the altar of the adobe church up the road.
Even though it was evening, the wind still blew an uncomfortable 90 plus degrees outside, and the inside of the Starlight offered little relief. The servers were dripping sweat but they and the patrons didn’t seem bothered much by the barely-functioning AC. Rachel and I ordered cheeseburgers then turned our attention to the local fellas taking the stage to croon covers of Townes and Willie. One of them was a willowy string bean of a man, tanned and greying and handsome. In another life, I thought, I’d be living down here, hair long, tan, childless, sipping a beer at the bar and clapping for my warbling cowboy. Then they started singing “Till I Gain Control Again” and all of a sudden I was weeping, totally unable to gain my composure. Rachel seemed delighted at the abrupt display of emotion and, somehow, losing my shit in front of her felt really good. I didn’t even know why I was crying except that it just felt so right to be home. I managed to stammer “I’ve been gone too long” and dried my tears on the paper napkins. We wandered the ghost town for a few windy minutes after dinner, threw some rocks down the old quicksilver mine shafts, and called it a night.
We woke on our last day to a breakfast at Mimi’s little restaurant attached to the hotel. My plate had refried beans so lard-filled they were the lightest of browns. We also ordered mango and chamoy smoothies, a vibrant orange-yellow against a fiery pepper red. On our way out of town we stopped at the Terlingua cemetery, one of the stranger burial grounds in the country, where the soil is too rocky to put bodies in the earth so they lay underneath heaps of sun baked stones. The graves are typically marked by makeshift crosses made of weather-beaten, nailed together crosses and then anything the living bring to the gravesites to commemorate their dead – beer bottles, rafting oars, ceramic chickens, plastic angels. I saw a few names I recognized, friends of Giddings, including the grave of David Tinsley, one of Giddings’ best friends who died in a head-on collision not so long ago because he broke his own rules (no drinking and driving, no smoking pot and driving, no driving at night). (He’d apparently violated all three).
We drove the loop along river road which hugs the Rio Grande. At the top of the tallest hill, we pulled over to peer down at the river which is all but gone. On the drive to Marfa we revealed some insecurities to each other, mature acknowledgements of our faults that I think can only be spoken of so clearly because we’ve been to therapy and done the work.
the Rio Grande from river road
My final hours in Marfa were spent at an old friend, Yoseff’s, house. Yoseff is one of the people I met in Marfa when I was 26. He was an art intern, too, except he ended up making Marfa his permanent home and is now expecting a child there. He put together a beautiful Mediterranean feast. Faces familiar and new showed up for a meal full of old stories and laughter. Again, my cup was filled. Again, I promised myself and others I wouldn’t stay away another 10 years.
Rachel and I parted ways with a few kisses on the lips and a layered, needlessly unspoken solidarity. More is said through the grasping of each other’s shoulders and the long look in the eyes that says something like “I see you. I know you. Don’t forget it.” We’d really been through something, riding around that desert together, being in that heat together. Our sisterhood runs deep and now it’s even deeper. She is my ride or die.
On my caffeine-fueled drive back to El Paso I remembered to gather branches of creosote which now hang in my shower, filling the steam with the aroma of desert rain. I made it home the next day, the windows down as I pulled off the highway to Woodstock, the breeze a cool 72 degrees and the landscape a lush green. In that moment I felt so much gratitude, both for the temperate, verdant forest that is my home and for the expansive desert that is my heart.
We finally moved to Bearsville. Every move in my life, all 30+ of them, have felt like a mid-way point, a stepping stone to the ultimate goal, which isn’t always the healthiest mindset. Each place is a chapter or whole story unto itself, of course. Living in Frederick was mostly wonderful with its own set of gifts, but it was especially difficult living there knowing that our final destination was next. Even then, it felt as distant a dream as any other time. The property was so raw, the house so in need of restoration. We bought the Bearsville property three years ago only to languish in the imagination of what will be one day. Always "one day”. But here we are, after years of red tape and dozens of drafts of engineered drawings and pulling our hair out waiting on permits. We landed on our final stepping stone, a small furnished sublet just a 10-minute drive from the house, and our dreams are so real we can physically touch them, all unmowed grass around the pond, all clay-smelling sheetrock and piles of excavated soil. The drywall is up, the painting has begun, the hardwood floor goes in this month.
There’s no way to prepare for moving to a place where you know nearly no one. Our last year in Frederick I found a group of friends in some other mothers, became close with their children, had a comfortable routine and consistent childcare that afforded me time to myself. In Bearsville it’s just me and Felix left to figure out our days. Going to the local library brought some culture shock. In Frederick, toddler story time took place in a large corporate room where dozens and dozens of parents were commanded to keep their children close by or else leave the room. In Woodstock, story time takes place in the library attic, a colorful but dingy place, and the children are allowed to roam free which is a recipe for chaos. Woodstock is, let’s see, a thirteenth the size of Frederick, so it can feel quite small and isolating. There was some initial panic at the sight of all the hippie moms and making our own fun, but it’s since given way to a rhythm that is slower and quieter than where we came from. It’s not bad, just different from living in a bustling downtown atmosphere. We live on a dirt road in the forest. Every day we take walks with the dog happily off-leash and by our side. We throw rocks in the stream, we smell the multiflora rose, blow dandelion seeds and check our bodies for ticks. In the early evening we drive to the property to sit in the construction vehicles the building crew left behind and to check on the goslings nesting on the pond island. And really all I have to do is walk outside to remind myself why we chose this place. The hills are verdant. The birdsong is off the charts. The coyotes howl across the mountains at night. My son has access to nature in ways he didn’t before.
There’s something I need to say here about the difficult year we had, about its contrast with the year we’re going into, because it’s shaped the person I am in this new place, made me more available to it. From November to February last year I lost my mind. I became almost instantly infatuated with a close friend of mine which invited a lot of chaos and heartache into our lives. I was honest from the jump with my husband, with my friend, with just about anybody who asked how I was doing at the time. My mind was fixed on a fantasy, or else twisting itself to justify the fantasy, while my motions and body were tethered to reality. It was an absurd way to live, being needed and feeling so far away. In hindsight, I see it now as a final act of rebellion. Not a rebellion against my life, which was and is full of love and goodness, but a rebellion enacted by a younger version of myself that is slowly but surely fading in the face of a person with an entirely different set of values and concerns. This younger version prized rock n’ roll and art at all costs, sought validation in the eyes of men who preferred the fantasy to the whole picture, was able to move my body where it pleased and stay up late. This version burst through with her final death rattle and shook up our lives. Pathetic is what it was. I acted a fool, hurt my partner, and lost my friend to boot because he let me act the fool (perhaps that last bit was a blessing in disguise. Real friends don’t let friends be idiots). And then, almost as quickly as it overwhelmed me, it left me. I became pregnant unexpectedly, life’s hilarious way of snapping one back to reality, and one day I woke up very much needing my husband and my son and everything fell back into place. Not that it’s been all blue skies. The bruising sometimes lingers. But Danny and I are stronger for it, and most importantly, I know myself better. I know what’s important, what’s always been important, and that clarity is sharp. I’m not sure there’s been a time in my life where I’ve felt more at peace. A friend called it a reconciliation.
A few days ago I found myself overcome by this deep contentment. Felix and I were exploring our new area, checking out the local state park. He had recently become enthralled with a book on camping so we were exploring the campground, remarking on the tents, the pop-up campers, the fire pits. We found a wooden playground humming with carpenter bees. We dipped our feet in the lake. We walked across bridges and spent several serene minutes sitting quietly on a bench, watching swallows and red-winged blackbirds hunting bugs over the water. When it came time to walk back to the car Felix asked me to pick him up. I hoisted him onto my hip and he buried his rosy-cheeked face into my neck, his arm stretched across my chest, his hot, sticky palm gripping my shoulder. He whispered a quiet “mama” and I inhaled the sweet smell of sweat on his scalp. Just then his brother kicked in my belly. I was struck with the realization that I was carrying both of my children at the same time. Brothers. Babies. Me, their mother. It was a beautiful, sunny day. I looked out across the lake towards the mountains and felt a glad, sincere tranquility wash through me. A mother of brothers. This is exactly where I want to be. This is all that matters, these boys. I am devotedly theirs. It is enough and it is everything.
Felix at our pond
my guys at the local swimming hole
with Felix and his brother on my birthday
me n Fe
beautiful Felix
That happy news I mentioned? Pregnancy. We began talking about another child when Felix was not but 4 months old. We had two embryos banked, both females, waiting to be awoken from their frozen slumber when the time was right. Their names were #2 and #13. We couldn’t transfer one until I was finished breastfeeding and that didn’t happen until Felix was 16 months. Soon after he was weaned we began the process - birth control, then meds to prep the uterus, monitoring to check the lining and finally, an embryo transfer. It was so different from the time we transferred Felix, when each day was a countdown and each moment an obsessive and fearful hope for the future. This time I went alone, barely scrambling childcare in time, distracted by my daily duties.
I also went in with major ambivalence. It took me a while to articulate this thought - I don’t want to be pregnant again, I don’t want to breastfeed again, I don’t want to raise a newborn again, but I am excited for the future of our family. I boasted to anybody who asked that I didn’t really care if it worked or didn’t, that our family is complete as it is. A little part of me even kind of hoped it wouldn’t work. I was proud of myself for being so chill, so blasé, so whatever. I was gripped with apathy.
So embryo #2 was transferred into me and the wait ensued. I took a pregnancy test far too early and it came back negative. I knew it would, it was only 3 days post transfer, but even so the result disappointed me. The disappointment surprised me. Maybe I really did want this. My husband and I talked about names, rarely agreeing until the name Ramona came up. Ramona means “wise protector”. We both loved it. Shortly after, I got a clue in my crossword “Cleary’s beloved character ___ Quimby". Ramona! A sign. More signs followed. A few days later there it was, a positive pee stick, positive blood work, steadily climbing HCG levels, and we rejoiced. Her name was Ramona Fern, a name, a daughter, a sister, an idea, a completion. She’d be due the day after my birthday, just how we planned it. She’d be two years and two months younger than her brother, just how we planned it. I told everybody - my family, acquaintances, far away friends - seeing no need to keep it to myself, despite how early it was. I’m excited. And besides, if it doesn’t work out, there’s no need for me to keep that to myself either, I reasoned. But why wouldn’t it work out? It’s a genetically tested embryo, she’s already implanted, my body has done this before.
Best laid plans, right?
We had our first ultrasound on Thursday and I went in more nervous than I expected to be. Danny and I took a few quiet moments in the car to press our foreheads together, to feel the assurance of each others’ presence. And then, just as sure as the pines are ever green, there she was, heart beat flashing like a disco ball. 111 bpm. The doctor took a picture and wrote “Hi Mom! Hi Dad! Here I am!”. Such relief! “Ramona!” we bellowed while driving home. Ramona is on her way!
That night my mom and her boyfriend came over for dinner. We told them of the heartbeat and they told us they were getting married. Joyous news all around. As I walked up the stairs to put Felix to bed I felt a wetness. Not unusual. The doctor told me to expect spotting. “Brown or pink” she’d said. But no, this was bright red. For 20 agonizing minutes I lay in the dark with Felix, unable to examine myself further, unable to Google. Once he was in a deep slumber I snuck away and checked again. More blood. I called for Danny. We didn’t know what to do so we kept going about our night and then I checked again. A big clot. Okay, I’m miscarrying. We examined it. It’s loose oval shape resembled the gestational sack we’d seen on the screen. This must be it, this must be her. I texted my friend Rachel “She’s gone.” Just like that. I can’t remember what prompted me to call the emergency line at the clinic, but the doctor on call gave us hope that this may just be bleeding from the subchorionic hemorrhage they spotted in the ultrasound. They’ll recheck in the morning. Reassured, I got back in bed.
An hour later, feeling my pad full, I stood up to go to the bathroom and whoosh, a gush. A large, wet softness fell out of me. Another step and another whoosh. “Oh my god” I gasped and Danny came running. Clots, cups worth. Very clearly my uterus was emptying itself. This is what I think it is. I showered, returned to bed, barely slept and bled all night. I dreamed I was in a multi-level shopping center, bleeding through my pants and desperately searching for a doctor. Finally I was in a hospital bed, surrounded by my grandmother’s elderly women friends, and an old woman doctor came in and declared me “still pregnant!” without examining me. “What? No!” I protested, “you have to check!”. “You’re pregnant!”, she yelled, “and you owe all of these women an apology!” In another restless dream I was soaking through pads and tampons on a white bed and dream Danny meanly said “you’re a fucking tick!”. Humiliated and confused, I demanded a divorce. (This is not a reflection of my marriage in the least. My brain was mirroring my stress back to me in terrible ways).
When we awoke early yesterday morning sobs poured out of me. A deep, wailing ache took over and Danny held me as it worked its way through. We entered the clinic later, just one day after seeing our girl’s flickering heart, both grasping at a faint shred of hope that maybe she had survived the trauma of the night before. No such luck. “I’m sorry” the same doctor said. She sat across from us, looked me directly in the eye and compassionately promised this was not my fault. Tears welled up. I needed to hear that more than I knew.
In the afternoon I picked up my guitar for the first time since before Felix was born. I crooned sad Roger Miller and Townes Van Zandt songs which felt an appropriate avenue for my tangled emotions. Felix objected, insisted I sing him Wheels on the Bus instead. Later, I drank a glass of tequila in the garden. I watched my boy excitedly try to touch the bees who were busy collecting pollen from the aster. Danny dug a hole beneath the honeysuckle and we buried a piece of my miscarriage. We held hands and pressed our foreheads together. Just then, my neighbor over the fence began playing “Right in Time” by Lucinda Williams.
Now I find myself wallowing in humility. How cavalier I was to tell everybody, how deceitful was my apathy. Why did I convince myself I didn’t care? How could I have not foreseen the depth of my desire? Not anticipated how much it’s going to suck to tell the moms at the playground? Not because it should be hidden, but because it actually hurts? I think I must have been shielding myself from the possibility of this moment. My nonchalance was proportional to the truth of my longing.
We got some really happy news which we commemorated by going to my secret pawpaw foraging spot and collected about 25 pounds worth of these soft little beauties. By the time we got home they had all mashed together in the bag and created a drippy mess (note to self: collect them flat somehow?) so I spent hours that night peeling the skin, processing the pulp and setting the seeds aside. A few days later I met up with my garden club gals and made them a pawpaw pudding. It was delicious! The consistency of pumpkin pie but with that distinctive pawpaw flavor - kind of banana/mango-y.
I went dormant. With the most earnest of intentions and fervor to write, I began this blog as I was beginning grad school, where I intended to use my talents in writing and photography to carve out a little niche for myself among the naturalist-minded artists of the world. I felt a responsibility to understand the mechanisms of environmental degradation so that I could effectively translate it, so that those translations would create a stir in somebody else’s heart. I am still compelled to this because it’s something I can offer, but the enthusiasm for creation retreated inward when the pandemic hit. Priorities shifted. We were living in Crown Heights where the orthodox community flouted safety guidelines. I was panicking daily at the idea of Danny’s asthmatic lungs succumbing to the mysterious deadly virus and Trump was threatening to red zone New York, so we left. Moving to Danny’s hometown in Maryland was never the plan, but weeks in an airbnb became “why don’t we see what’s for rent here?” and well, we just stayed. I graduated over zoom. We started trying to get pregnant. Art took a backseat.
Fast forward 3 years. I’m writing this from the garden sanctuary I built in the backyard of a townhouse in a big but small enough town. We rented this house because I was led here by a rabbit. No lie. I was out jogging one day and stopped in front of a house that had a For Rent sign. Suddenly, a rabbit appeared. It hopped over to my shoe, sniffed it, and kept hopping down the sidewalk before it cut into a yard. I followed it and the house it turned at also had a For Rent sign. That’s the house we live in.
the backyard, June, 2020
the garden, May, 2023
We bought an old fishing cabin with a one-acre pond in the Catskills in 2021. Turns out, mortgage rates were at an all-time low, which is feeling pretty good from my seat here in 2023. The property is a stunning place with tall white pines reflected on the glassy surface of the pond like a painting. We’re building a home there, but it’s not ready to move into yet.
the pond in June
The biggest, wildest, most beautiful thing that’s happened was that we had a child. His name is Felix. His name means lucky, which suits him, and not just because he was born on the thirteenth minute of St. Patrick’s Day. He is big-eyed with a broad smile and a sweetness that would tank the most cynical of hearts. He’s approaching 18 months old and it is only now that I feel like I can sit and write about the complex miracle of motherhood. It has walloped me. It’s an ever-changing bigness that has shifted my identity in that I am either fully consumed and comfortable as mother and/or finding other parts of me brushing up against mother that the delineations between Hope and mother are so blurry that even the Hope that is separate from Felix is just that - Hope separate from child, not just Hope. That probably makes no sense. It’s just that the lines are not clear and there is no such thing as compartmentalizing “runner” “gardener” “friend” anymore because now I am a gardener who is a mother, a friend who is a mother, etc. Anyway, he is wonderful. He is everything I hoped for and I really hoped for this child. We conceived him via IVF, which was a fog of stress and emotion that took a long time but now looking back feels like a blip compared to the onslaught of vigilance, patience, resolve and exhaustion it requires to raise a baby. I am his primary caregiver and fell quickly into an attachment style of parenting. For the first year of his life I barely left his side. Breastfeeding is by far the hardest thing I’ve ever done but was so richly rewarding, also. Now that he’s weaned and walks and has opinions I am feeling my love for him exploding through the seams of my heart. There is a difference between a reliant, immobile baby (as delicious as that is) and a toddler who chooses you, a small boy who runs to hug your legs while screaming “Mama!”, who asks you to pick him up so that he can burrow into your arms, who volunteers kisses with his rich, sweet umami breath simply because he loves you. It is heaven to me, being his mom.
Felix at 2 months
Felix at 9 months
Felix at 16 months
So that’s life in the smallest of nutshells. This is me trying to return to writing. A blog post a week. I can do this, right?
As shelter-in-place orders took effect across the country in March, trends in consumer activity have been closely monitored. Among the bestselling items these days are spirits like tequila and gin, with sales jumping 75 percent compared to last year. While Americans stock up on liquor, certain bats are being blamed as one source of the virus behind COVID-19. Few praise other bats for their role in producing the tequila that makes one of the most popular, do-it-yourself cocktails - the margarita.
On hot summer evenings in the 1990s, my parents, homemade margaritas in hand, would walk us over to check the status of a neighbor’s garden. In the small, isolated desert communities surrounding Big Bend National Park in far west Texas where I grew up, a neighbor’s blooming agave, or “century plant”, was an occasion. Because everybody’s yard contained at least one agave, witnessing a bloom was always a certainty.
Century plants grow wild all over southwest Texas. The leaves of the plants can be broader than a large man’s hand and five feet tall, taking up a plot ten feet across. Their name is a misnomer. They live for seven to fifty years, not a hundred. But they only bloom once, right at the end of their lives, and their bloom is so dazzling and precious that, as children, the fable was that it happened only once in a hundred years. Hence, “century plant”. When the plant is ready to flower, an asparagus-looking dagger with the diameter of a telephone pole emerges from its center. As the stalk reaches an astonishing thirty feet tall, it unfurls its branches laden with bright yellow blossoms, a dazzling display to marvel at against the backdrop of a dusty town and endless sky.
A Mexican long-nosed bat. Photo by Steve Buchmann.
No creature appreciates those blossoms more than the Mexican long-nosed bat. While many bats feed on insects, the Mexican long-nosed bat’s diet consists exclusively of agave pollen and nectar. I knew a colony of females and their young roosted deep in a cave in the national park, coming out to feed when the agave flowers opened at night. I knew the margaritas clinking around in my parents’ to-go cups had a relationship to the plant we admired. What I didn’t understand was that the bats, the agaves, and the margaritas were intrinsically linked. Other than the occasional misguided bat flying through an open window at night, I rarely saw them.
The Mexican long-nosed bat has a single, migratory population that spends its winters mating in one particular cave, Cueva del Diablo, in the central Mexican state of Morelos. This is the only time of year that males and females congregate. When the young are strong enough to fly in the spring, they begin the journey northward with their mothers, following the “nectar corridor” of blooming agave into northern Mexico and the southern United States while the males stay behind in Morelos. As the females and their young consume the nectar, they also inadvertently eat and transport the plant’s pollen on their fur, making the bats a vital pollinator of the agaves. The agaves provide the food necessary for the bats to survive their migration and, in turn, the bats distribute the agave’s pollen, ensuring its survival. It’s a tale of symbiosis as old as time.
Enter tequila. Tequila is to the state of Jalisco, Mexico as Champagne is to the province Champagne, France - if it’s not from there, it’s not the real thing. In the 16th century, the Indigenous wisdom of the agave mixed with the innovation of the Spaniards created a distillation process that produced the powerful spirit we drink today. For centuries, the plant was cultivated and sold as family-owned brands. Today, most well-known tequilas are owned and distributed by large multinational corporations.
As the agave prepares to flower, it concentrates its sugars in its center, or piña. If left untouched, this sugar would eventually be sent up its stalk and into its flowers for the bats to feed on. For tequila producers, however, the optimal time to harvest is when the sugar is still in the piña. By not allowing the plant to flower and sexually reproduce on its own, growers instead rely on fields of agave clones, an efficient method for quality control and precise timing, but also a sometimes disastrous technique due to the lack of genetic diversity. Because the plants are all copies of themselves, they are susceptible to the same dangers like pests or disease. These monocultures have the most devastating consequences, though, for the bats.
By far the biggest tequila market is the United States, buying up 80 percent of exports. American demand for tequila has grown 158 percent since 2002. At the beginning of April, the president of the National Tequila Regulatory Chamber, Rodolfo González, quelled worries that tequila production would slow or stop because of the coronavirus. González, a tequila distiller himself, predicted growth rates between 4 to 5 percent in the tequila sector despite the pandemic.
To keep up with demand, producers rely solely on vast fields of cloned agaves, eradicating wild agave species and harvesting the clones before they are able to flower. If the bats can’t find and eat the nectar, they die. As of their last assessment in 2015 by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, Mexican long-nosed bats are considered endangered. In the last ten years alone their population has declined by over 50 percent.
Rodrigo Medellín. Photo by Anand Varma.
Mexican ecologist and biologist Rodrigo Medellín, affectionately referred to by many as “The Bat Man”, foresaw the calamity awaiting both the bats and the tequila industry decades ago. He knew a productive and resistant field of agaves required genetic diversity via pollination that only the bats could provide, and that the bats needed agaves to flower to avoid extinction. For years he has implored growers and buyers to consider the connection between the bats and agaves, advocating for allowing a fraction of the crops to bloom and be pollinated. In 2010, the Tequila Interchange Project was formed to encourage sustainable practices in the tequila industry, and in 2014, Dr. Medellín partnered with them to form the Bat Friendly Tequila and Mezcal Project, “an alliance of producers, scientists, and bartenders that advocates the preservation of traditional agave farming, naturally pollinated agave, and other sustainable, environmentally friendly practices.”
For the towns and cities of the American southwest that prize their neighborhood century plants, and for all Americans perfecting their margarita-making skills as they ride out the lockdown, sourcing and supporting bat-friendly tequilas is imperative to ensuring the resiliency of the tequila market, the livelihoods of the bats, and the continuous bloom of the agaves. Bat Friendly contains lists of brands that meet this sustainable criteria. We can ask our local liquor suppliers to stock bat-friendly tequilas, and perhaps occasionally donate what we would spend on our pre-pandemic cocktails to this initiative. The stunning bloom of the century plant is more than a display for us to admire. It’s a symbol of thousands of years of coevolution between bats and agaves. The next time you sip tequila, let it be a reminder of our responsibility to protect this fragile relationship.
Americans are being duped out of clean drinking water by the Trump administration’s repetitive farmer-centric rhetoric. A year ago last December, Andrew Wheeler, the soon-to-be confirmed Acting EPA Administrator, stood on a small stage in the Wilson County Exposition Center in Lebanon, Tennessee and addressed a gathered crowd of four hundred farmers and ranchers. Flanked by two John Deere tractors and an American flag, Wheeler, a former coal industry lobbyist, in his dressed down slacks and top-button-undone man-of-the-people look, announced the proposal of a redefinition. The Waters of the United States, as defined by the Obama Administration’s Clean Water Rule in 2015, is “particularly egregious”, Wheeler explained, “as landowners have told me it impedes the use of their own land and stifles productivity.” Although Wheeler failed to announce just what the new definition would be, he nonetheless was met with applause from an audience made up of not only seasoned farmers but also many insignia-donning Future Farmers of America youth, for whom he later posed for group photos, currently displayed on the EPA’s website.
Andrew Wheeler with FFA youth in Lebanon, Tennessee
It’s no mistake that Wheeler made his announcement at a small Tennessee farming community expo center, just as it was no mistake when Trump, 10 months earlier, signed an executive order, surrounded by farmers, to begin the rollback of the Clean Water Rule after making a televised statement that bemoaned the rule on behalf of “farmers, ranchers and agricultural workers all across our land,” claiming, without evidence, that the EPA was “putting people out of jobs by the hundreds of thousands” and “regulations and permits started treating our wonderful small farmers and small businesses as if they were a major industrial polluter.” He went on to feign disbelief that the Clean Water Rule was intent on going after homebuilders who dared to fill in a puddle, “just a puddle” on their lot.
It’s good optics for the Trump administration to surround themselves with farmers considering the long-standing regard Americans have for farming, a wholesome symbol of hard and honest work. Were Trump to surround himself with the true beneficiaries of the rollback - oil and gas executives and land developers, or if Wheeler had substituted his tractor props for oil derricks - perhaps stripping away protections of clean drinking water for one-third of the nation’s population would be less popular. Especially considering the Clean Water Rule not only preserved but broadened exemptions for agriculture, including a specific exemption for those pesky puddles.
The 2015 Clean Water Rule was a response to concerns over lack of clarity as to which water bodies fell under the 1972 Clean Water Act. It took four years of scientific analysis and over a million public comments to conclude that streams and wetlands have a significant hydrological and ecological connection to navigable and interstate waters. According to the analysis, 117 million people rely on drinking water from sources protected under the implementation of the rule, or about 1 in 3 Americans.
When the Trump administration formalized the rollback of the Clean Water Rule, they also released a far-less publicized 300-page financial analysis whose contents flagrantly conflict with the insistence that their motivation is the poor, overregulated, underappreciated farmer. Of the 248,688 permits granted between 2011 and 2015 to applicants whose work would deposit dirt or other fill into protected wetlands and streams, only 8 of those per year were from farmers. The majority of the applicants were from developers and extractive industries like oil, gas and mining.
One such wetland that has been stripped of its federal protection is in Bristol Bay, Alaska. In 2014, the EPA vetoed a permit placed by Pebble Partnership, a mining company, to extract deposits of gold and copper in the headwaters of Bristol Bay at a site known as Pebble Mine. Bristol Bay is the largest salmon fishery in the world. The proposed mine would destroy 94 salmon streams and 5,350 acres of wetlands, leaving an open pit larger than the island of Manhattan. It does not take much digging to discover that Mr. Wheeler, Trump’s pick to lead the agency that is supposed to protect our environment, is a lawyer whose former law firm represented Pebble Partnership.
It’s projects like Pebble Mine that are the real reason the current administration announced the repeal of the Clean Water Rule within six weeks of taking office. The average American farmer, who Trump claimed “wept in gratitude” when he forced the rollback, will in fact suffer alongside the rest of the country when our drinking water is tainted with pollutants, flooding increases, and critical wildlife habitats disappear because our streams and wetlands are irreplaceably destroyed for temporary, unsustainable gain.
I’ve only recently realized how encumbered I am by weighted space when I go out running. It’s not just when I run, but running is the best example, because I’m alone, I’m moving quickly, my senses are heightened, maybe peaked, hyper aware of my surroundings. My sight is drawn to flits of movement, reflections of light, pops of color, shapes delineated into outlines of the animals I’m looking for. On good days it’s just me there. I don’t mean just me in the park, although that does happen sometimes and there’s nothing quite like having a giant meadow in the middle of Brooklyn to yourself on a Tuesday morning. I mean it’s just me, fully present, an organism among organisms. But oftentimes I’m not alone. I hold so much space for my living ghosts. I run around and come across a sycamore grove, or a heron, or a patch of purple aster, and I stop and I appreciate it and I also show them, my ghosts. I say “Look at how beautiful this is. Do you understand me better now that you know what arrests me? Now that you’ve run this path in my steps?” I’m always showing her, my ghost, always showing her my adopted city, my adopted land, always showing her the trails I’ve cut through this giant metropolis and the secrets I’ve uncovered. I take her to the house that planted a yellow rose bush in front of a yellow wall, or I take her to Mozart’s bust tucked into the maple trees. Every time I show her, I prove I have a place in this world, my own version of a city she’s incapable of seeing unless I show her. And my ghost, when she lets me show her, she gets it. She gets me. And with that understanding, the doors to the possibilities of our love fling open and there I stand, endorphins ignited, arms wrapped tightly around the ghost of a friend who isn’t there.
And it’s only just dawned on me how long I’ve been doing this. I found a section of the park that floored me with its beauty, and I came upon it just as I was mulling over how long its been since she’s returned my letters, and in that moment the real life friend met the ghost and the real person subsumed her ghost and I finally realized not only how alone I am, but how long I’ve been carrying around this space, the space that belongs to the ghost.
Relationships are stories we tell ourselves. My relationships give me anchor points and help me craft an identity that I’m always grasping to illustrate. My friends, my husband, they give me an outline, and I fill it in with my responses to the world. There is a certain density, though, that comes with a one-sided story. And it’s not a matter of right and wrong, however much my sharp-tongued little ego wants it to be. Its the problem of holding space for a figment, for an idea, for a tortured desire, for insert-her-name-here. And now that I know that’s what I’m doing, I want to know how to let that space go.
Googling is no use. Even the term “holding space” is so mired in therapy lingo jingo that I’m almost annoyed it’s the single metaphor that makes the most sense. The space I’ve been holding is for a real person that I love, so the bulleted bullshit tip lists like “7 Sure Signs It’s Time to End a Friendship” can’t guide me through this conundrum. The closest concept my brain can devise is funerary. I’m grieving the loss of my idea of what this friendship was. And what do we do at funerals? Pour one out, remark on the good times, make a fire. So maybe I’ll have a funeral, I don’t know.
the meadow on a Tuesday morning
Excerpt from Rilke’s letter to a Young Poet, Borgeby gard, Fladie, Sweden, August 12, 1904
Videos recorded in 2013
The day we got legally married we ended up at one of our favorite little restaurants in our neighborhood which is where we took these photos of each other. I had forgotten we’d made these documents and now am so so grateful I carried my camera with me that day.
I love flowers. Most people do, I know. But I really really love flowers. It’s always been this way, or at least I have many memories of picking bouquets of wildflowers to bring home to my mother, recognizing early on the delight their beauty brings. It wasn’t until about 6 years ago that I began to find myself almost disabled by the sight of a beautiful flower. I’d see a fluffy, light pink vining rose dangling over a fence on my way to work and be stopped in my tracks, followed by 20 shots of it on my camera phone, desperately trying to photograph the essence of this unfuckingbelievable natural wonder that is a flower. I curbed my enthusiasm around others many times for fear of sounding, I don’t know, extremely basic? Like of course flowers are cool, they’re flowers! But then why I am crippled with love for them?? The only place it felt totally safe to nerd out was on trips to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, taking as much time as I wanted to gaze and sniff and touch the delicate petals.
I mean come on
Thankfully, around the same time, my good friend Irene and her partner Matt decided to begin their own flower farm and I found in her a kindred spirit with whom being a flower freak was accepted and understood. Treadlight Farm grows exceptionally beautiful flowers. Irene’s eye for flower beauty is unmatched, in my opinion. Several times I’ve stood on their farm and felt completely cleansed by the same air and light that the blossoms were reacting to around me. Irene and Matt’s example of eschewing their school and career trajectories to become flower farmers has been a huge influence in bringing me into this next chapter.
Irene with poppies
On a recent run past the gates of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, I was stopped dead by the sight of a light pink and green tulip with wavy edges. This is definitely the most beautiful tulip I’ve ever seen. I gawked a while, then ran off, returning to that question that’s been kicking around in my head for years - what is it about flowers?
Michael Pollan asked this question too in his book The Botany of Desire, saying “Let’s say we are born with such a predisposition - that humans, like bees, are drawn instinctively to flowers. It’s obvious what good it does bees to be born liking flowers, but what conceivable benefit could such a predilection offer people?” He goes on to cite evolutionary psychologists who say that our brains were developed via natural selection to be good foragers, and the presence of flowers is a reliable predictor of future food. “In time the moment of recognition - much like the quickening one feels whenever an object of desire is spotted in the landscape - would become pleasurable, and the signifying thing a thing of beauty.”
Carl Safina takes it further, I think, by offering the emotional component inherent within us, and if within us, then also within other creatures. “Flowers’ appearance and fragrance’s only purpose is to attract pollinators (mainly insects, at that, hummingbirds and honeycreepers and specialized bats). There is scant utilitarian reason why humans should also find the sight of flowers and their perfume any more attractive than the sight of fallen leaves… As brains elaborated and proliferated from a bee’s pleasure in a field of flowers, to our inner fish, to a bird’s delight in dance, and to our own - have our brains retained or even reinvented aesthetics that arose in other lines of life? If so, our convergence with the insects is a mystery worthy of awe for the little elders at our feet and flitting among the flowers of our gardens. Regardless of who gets our thanks for the honor, there is no more wondrous fact than that we are kin, bee and bird of paradise - and great elephant - stardust, all.”
the tulip that stole my heart
Safina’s viewpoint breaks barriers for me because it’s difficult to comprehend that my personal, human emotional response to flowers is strictly human. If we can delight in the transfixing beauty of the natural world, then surely it’s not just specific to humans, but more so, humans acquired that emotion from a much older and more ancient ancestor. I love the thought of thinking of insects as elders. I will endeavor to remember this evolutionary gift the next time we cross paths.
Today is the day I have to make a decision about where I’ll go to grad school. I have two offers of admission - one from Stony Brook University and one from Columbia University. I thought by now, after a month of mulling it over, that a day like today wouldn’t exist, that I would have been happily settled into my decision, already letting my mind run wild with the possibilities of the program I knew was right for me. Instead I woke up with a tightness in my chest, a desperation for any kind of sign, an extreme sense of loneliness, a precarious burdensome weight pressing in on me. Fear. Fear, my closest friend this past year. It is only natural that fear has been my constant companion today.
In December 2017, I attended the wedding of my husband’s close friend. At the rehearsal dinner I took notice of the mother of the groom, Lenore, a woman who exuded grace and power just standing still. Later, exchanging pleasantries and small talk, I told her what I did for work and she said it sounded very interesting. Trusting a sense of candor between us, I told her that actually no, I was miserable at my job, and even more miserable at the thought of another job as a creative in New York City, but I had achieved a good salary and health care, and as a newlywed in her 30s beginning to think of starting a family, it was too late for me to start over entirely. (Fear presenting in the form of complacency.) At this, Lenore let out a laugh and a playful arm punch and assured me that it was never too late to start over, especially if I was unhappy. She herself had not gone to law school until she was 35, and had her first child a few years after that. A few weeks later, sleeplessly spinning through my thoughts, the weight of her words sunk in. In the middle of the night I hovered over my phone and typed in “the study of the relationship between plants and animals” and the word “Ecology” appeared. That’s it, I thought. That’s what I want to do.
me in the middle, age 7, assisting the entomologist Milton Sanderson with his discovery of the New Mexican “hot bug”
Fear presents itself in many ways. One of the ways it showed itself to me continuously this last year was through doubt. Fear made me doubt myself, my abilities, my support, my intelligence. I’m good at dreaming and scheming, and for months I researched and organized graduate school possibilities, talking Danny’s ear off about this or that program. But fear in the form of doubt kept me from reaching out to those program directors because I was certain I’d be laughed at or shot down, what with my zero background in science and a mediocre undergraduate transcript. It took six months after meeting Lenore to finally hit send on an email I’d been sitting on for two months addressed to the program director at Stony Brook. I was sure he would tell me to get real, to go get a second bachelors. But within a day I had an enthusiastic and encouraging reply, and at that moment I knew I was going to change my life in a drastic way. I immediately made a plan to quit my job and signed up for a GRE class.
This blog could be paragraph after paragraph of all of my encounters with fear this year. But what I mainly want to share is this - the biggest lesson I’ve learned this last transformative year is that fear is a teacher. Fear challenges you to ignore it, to push through it, to hold it close to you and step forward anyway. Fear shows you the life you have and tries to make it more attractive than the unknowable. But fear’s great secret is that it’s an illusion, a veil between you and the reward that lies beyond. If I had not pushed through dozens of big and small fears this year, I would not be sitting here with a very good problem to have - the choice between two fantastic environmental conservation programs. I would not have been accepted into the Ivy League.
This last year I outdid myself mainly by swatting away doubt like an annoying gnat. Doubt told me “you’re not a math person” when what was waiting for me was the highest grade in my algebra and trigonometry class. I even enjoyed it. Doubt wondered why I was even bothering applying to Columbia and told me to keep my expectations low. But here I am, a non-scientist, B-level student invited to join a prestigious science masters program.
the grade on my algebra/trig final
I was afraid It would come to this, that I would arrive at this moment without clarity, with the fear of making the wrong decision. But as I’ve spent the day methodically going over my pros and cons lists for the hundredth time, I’m reminded of fear’s intent - to challenge me, to make me push through it, to trust the unknowable, to trust myself. Fear in the form of regret would have me believe there is a right and wrong answer here, but just knowing its intent tells me the truth - either decision will come with its reward, and that reward is simply what I make of it.
In the fall I’ll join Stony Brook’s Masters of Marine Conservation and Policy program. It’s taken a hell of a lot of pride-swallowing to turn down Columbia, and I suspect my ego may be bruised for a while by the fact that I don’t get to go around patting myself on the back for being a student there. But that’s just fear doing its thing again, making me doubt my own worth for choosing what I know is best for me and my future.
Yesterday I went to Robert Moses beach. It was cold and windy, and the beach was empty except for a few bundled up beachcombers. I sat on the edge of the tidal line, staring out at the water, and reflected on what’s brought me to this point. It’s been the audacity to listen to the small voice inside me that tells me I’m going to live an adventurous and interesting life. I’ve been almost too embarrassed for too long to articulate that simple knowledge. But now here I sit, proud and true to myself, embarking on a journey that is entirely mine.
Sometimes it’s helpful to make a list.
Scary things I did this year:
Told a doctor about my anxiety/insomnia
Ran a half marathon
Wrote an email to the director of the Marine Conservation and Policy program at Stony Brook
Signed up for a GRE math class
Went to the second GRE math class after overcoming the tremendous self-doubt I felt after the first class
Took the GRE
Took the GRE again after the tremendous self-doubt I felt after the first test
Tracked down the head of the math department at my community college to beg for placement into Algebra & Trigonometry
Gave my notice to my job of 6 years
Gave my notice to my job again and actually quit this time
Emailed a therapist
Started therapy
Told a family member a painful secret
Asked another family member to go to counseling with me
Reevaluated my relationship with alcohol
Asked my biology professor out for coffee
Wrote to the director of the environmental science department at my college
Applied to an unpaid internship
Wrote to the chairman of the science department at my college
Wrote to the director of the Ecology, Evolution and Conservation Biology Program at Columbia
Wrote to an esteemed ecologist
Wrote to an esteemed conservationist