13 states in 3 weeks

We just returned from a three week road trip that took us to see family members and friends in Louisiana, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Massachusetts. We also passed through Arkansas, Virginia, West Virgiania, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and barely dipped our toe across the border into Vermont.

Here are some things that caught my eye along the way.

Day one of travel was on July 4, so we got to watch a driveway fireworks display that maybe didn't live up to all the safety protocols one might hope. The kids loved it. (Insert that teeth-clenching emoji; that's how my face looked the whole time.)

We stopped in to visit my step-grandmother and her sister (both lovely people) in Tennessee, and we got to feed the fish and turtles in their beautiful pond.

Theo took one look at their guest room and said, "Whoa! There's like a thousand flowers in this room!" In the relatively small number of houses he's been inside in his nine years, I don't know if he's ever seen wallpaper before.

I took one look at that incredible light fixture and wondered whether I could DIY it somehow.

This church is just around the corner from my step-grandma. Wow, right?!?! I felt the spirit just standing in the parking lot on a muggy Wednesday morning.

It's a little treacherous sharing the road with semi trucks and other large haulers as you wind your way up and down and through the mountains.

Years ago, when my kids were much younger and always getting into trouble, I made a list of all the things damaged or broken when the cousins gathered for a week at my mom and dad's house. I recently read back through it (spilled nail polish on the carpet, flushed a toy down the toilet, etc.) and felt relief that we are past that stage.

Or are we? About 90 minutes after we pulled into my parents' driveway, one of my kids and one of my sister's kids (both teenagers who definitely knew better) tried some trick shots at the dartboard and accidentally hit a can of spray paint with a dart. It spun around and sprayed black speckles all over the place.

I managed to fit in a little thrifting/antique browsing. I resisted the temptation to add this phone to my collection. Dig those numbers.

And finally, a record album I spotted at a goodwill, and a Dolly Parton picture from a Tennessee rest stop. Somehow the church lady looks absolutely bonkers, yet Dolly has almost the same hair volume and looks amazing and cool.

          

On geneaolgy, miscarriage, and abortion

(~7 min read)

This is an account of my own pregnancy loss, mingled with thoughts on related topics. I've left out the more graphic details, but proceed with caution if the subject of pregnancy loss is difficult for you. Lots of love and healing to you if you are recovering from or grieving a lost pregnancy.

**********************

Mormons are pretty obsessed with keeping records of family relationships. Many of us spend hours doing genealogy research: tracing our roots back to our early ancestors using census data, immigration lists, rubbings from old gravestones, anything that will provide information on another branch of the family tree. We decipher handwriting to learn who married whom and when, we log names and dates into charts, and we literally store this data inside a mountain in a vault that can withstand a nuclear blast. We want to make sure that every single person who ever lived is accounted for, and that's not hyperbole.

So, Mormons love genealogy. Hold that thought, and I'll come back to it.

Several years ago, I got pregnant for the third time. At my first doctor appointment, around 8 weeks gestation, I learned that the pregnancy had already terminated. My obstetrician offered two options: schedule a surgery to remove the embryo, or wait for a spontaneous miscarriage. I asked her which she recommended, and she said it was my choice.

I reasoned that there was no need to go in for an elective surgery, which carried its own inherent risks, like any surgery does. My body would just take care of things when it was ready. But also, there was definitely a whisper in the back of my mind: Dilation and curettage. That's the same surgery they use for abortions. I don't think I want to do that.

My doctor gave me the impression that I would likely experience something like a heavy period. Several weeks later, on a Saturday, I started bleeding. My husband Matt was an hour away, camping with one of our kids, so I put my other kid in front of the TV and hung out in the bathroom. I passed a lot of blood. An unnerving amount of blood. Everything went black and starry, and I fainted, hitting my head on the door frame on the way down. 

When I came to on my bathroom floor, I called a friend. She found me lying on the cool tile in our front entryway, trying not to move too much. Matt came home from camping, and my friend took my kids to her house. I fainted again and then took a ride in an ambulance to our nearby hospital.

The on-call doctor was occupied, so we waited for her backup to arrive while I continued to bleed. In the case of a full term pregnancy, you deliver the baby and its accoutrements (cord, placenta, etc.) and then the uterus continues to contract until it has flushed out all the extra blood and tissue that was in there. In my case, that process wasn't working properly, and my body just kept pumping out blood. The ER staff gave me various drugs to stop the bleeding, but none of them worked.

My blood pressure dipped very low, like, diastolic in the 40s low. It's a pretty terrible feeling to be in a facility full of trained health care workers who are trying one thing after another, failing to stop your uncontrolled bleeding. It's the closest I've ever felt to death, lying there weakly while my energy literally drained out of me.

At one point I asked someone when I'd need to get a blood transfusion. "Oh, don't worry, you aren't there yet," he reassured me. "You can lose a third of your blood volume and not need a transfusion." My first thought was, Well, how do you measure that third? How do you know how much of it I left back at my house, in the toilet, on the bath mat, in my underwear?

Eventually, the doctor showed up, and I was prepped for surgery. Since I was at a Catholic hospital, I had to sign a form in which I had to either declare that I would bury the stuff they were about to remove from my body, known as "products of conception," or else give them permission to bury it. 

Got that? I was lying on a gurney, exhausted, disoriented, and with a plummeting blood pressure. I was minutes from surgery, and before we could proceed I was required to make decisions about what to do with leftover blood and tissues, fragments of an embryo that had stopped developing a month or two previously. If that's pro-life, it sure didn't feel pro-MY life. I signed the paper, then counted backward from one hundred and fell into anesthesia sleep around 96.

A few hours later I was sitting on the couch at home, sobbing with my head on Matt's shoulder. I was sad about the lost pregnancy, but far, far more than that, I was letting out the terror I had been holding all day, the fear that I was going to die. While lying in the hospital bed, when nothing was working to stop the bleeding, when my blood pressure kept dropping, I wondered if I had said goodbye to my kids for the last time.

I subsequently talked with other women who had experienced miscarriage. More than one confirmed scary amounts of blood loss, lightheadedness, and fainting. This was not some wildly unusual circumstance, and the fact that I was sent home with such a pitiful lack of information still makes me angry.

Shortly after my miscarriage, I met with the leader of my local church congregation, called a bishop. I asked him to clarify our doctrine about the status of that lost pregnancy. Will it be "on the records of the church," a phrase we use when blessing new babies and baptizing new members? Will I meet that person some day? Will he or she be part of our family in the afterlife?

I was surprised to learn that there aren't answers to these questions. There is no official doctrine or policy about exactly when the spirit enters the body, what the status of that spirit is in case of miscarriage, and if the spirit is there, whether it is linked to the woman who carried it, however briefly. Nowhere does our church doctrine declare that life begins at conception, or at 8 weeks, or at 15 weeks. A pregnancy does not have the same status as a baby that is born and takes a breath.

So how is it possible that a church that cares so deeply about record keeping and linking families together, a church that encourages me to find and document every tenth-great grandparent, has no need to document a miscarried embryo/fetus/baby? Why don't we give it a name and make a record of it? (To be clear, some people still do give their miscarried babies a name and/or hold a funeral service, but it's a matter of personal preference, not based on official policy.)

Could it be that live birth qualifies one for a different, more fully realized category of personhood? I suggest that a living person is more important than a potential person and should have more rights. You are welcome to believe differently, but to force your own religious beliefs on others is unethical and unconstitutional. 

Six of the nine justices on the Supreme Court are Catholics. What if instead they were Jehovah's Witnesses, who believe that blood transfusions are against God's will? Would it be ethical or constitutional for them to force such a belief on the rest of the country, or to allow state legislatures to do so? Of course not.

There’s a flashback scene in season two of Bridgerton in which the mom is in active labor with her eighth child. Things aren’t going well, and the doctor pulls aside the man of the house to consult. He’ll try to save both, but if he must choose between them, should he save the mom or the baby? It’s disturbing and shocking, and I wonder if it’s the kind of urgent scenario people picture when they say that they are only in favor of abortion to protect the life of the mother.

But reality is often far less dramatic. What about a woman who was preparing to leave her abuser, only to discover that she’s pregnant with his child? What about a woman struggling with mental illness, or who knows from past pregnancies that she is headed for a black hole of postpartum depression? What about a woman who is exhausted to the bone due to caring for the children she already has? Shouldn’t we allow women to determine for themselves how to save their own lives?

Pregnancy and childbirth and are inherently dangerous and potentially deadly and should not be forced on any woman. If you believe that terminating a pregnancy is wrong, please understand that you are holding a personal religious belief that applies to you alone. You are free to go your whole life without ever getting an abortion. But the United States is not a theocracy. We don't infringe on the rights of others to satisfy the religious beliefs of one group. 

Leave a woman's medical care to the woman and her doctor. Give her the right to self-determination that you undoubtedly expect and demand for yourself.

Books read in 2021

Time for my annual book roundup. 

I read 41 books last year, a new personal record! After resisting for years, I finally got into a few audiobooks, which I listen to primarily while doing my school carpool route.

My favorite fiction book of the year was Circe. Every stage of her life was a surprise or a delight or both, and I was truly sad when it ended. I don't re-read a lot of books--my to be read pile is just too long for that--but I will probably revisit Circe. 

My favorite non-fiction was All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership. If you feel like you have an unequal partnership, you should read it for the solidarity and for some ideas that might help. If you think you have an equal partnership, you might still be surprised. Regardless, you will probably be enraged at the ways men have come up with to avoid care work and house work.

A close second in non-fiction was You'll Never Believe What Happened to Lacey: Crazy Stories About Racism. I guess I'm really drawn to books that make me hate humanity a little bit.

Best romance (rom-com? chick lit?)  I've ever read: Evvie Drake Starts Over. It has characters, relationships, and dialogue that feel more realistic that the genre usually delivers.

This was a heavy duty Harry Potter year. My eight year old and I burned through books five, six and seven (not to mention watching all the movies and taking a family visit to HP world in Florida). We agree that book seven is amazing, packed with action and adventure, tragedy and emotion, and a satisfying triumph for the good guys.

My goal for the new year is 48 books. 48! It's ambitious. Probably by December I'll be reading a stack of graphic novels to catch up.

A rite of passage for the toxic internet age

Two weeks ago, my husband and I went to visit some friends. We sat around a campfire in their yard and talked about how our kids are doing in school and speculated on when we might get our COVID vaccines. But since it happened to be January 6, we mostly talked about the horrific scene that had unfolded hours earlier at the US Capitol. I had brought a bottle of sparkling juice that was left over from New Year’s Eve, so we toasted Stacey Abrams and Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff. We stayed up way too late for a weeknight, and it was totally worth it for some adult conversation.

Before bed that night, I updated my Facebook status with similar sentiments to our toast: Hooray for Georgia, hooray for Stacey Abrams, shame about the right wing terrorists. The next morning I woke up to this as the first comment:

"You're a stupid bitch."

The author of this nuanced political discourse, who I'll call Rudy, seemed particularly offended by my use of the phrase "right wing terrorists" and claimed that I would pass on my "stupid bitchness" to my offspring. He used that nasty, gendered slur against me four times in six sentences. I guess he really wanted me to feel the hatred and grievance and bitterness that that word carries.

I guess I should have seen this coming. Should have known that political discussions on Facebook can turn ugly on a dime. It can be a cesspool out there.

But this is new territory for me. In my two and a half decades of being an adult on the internet, it's the first time another adult has called me a bitch to my face, real or virtual. It feels a bit like I've reached a rite of passage. I've been initiated into the club that virtually every woman in politics belongs to, including AOC and the rest of The Squad, plus a bunch of other women I know and respect. 

Maybe we should start throwing a party for this. The first time someone calls you a bitch, a confetti bomb goes off and a group of singing waiters brings in a huge cake, frosted with a B and lit with sparkler candles. "Welcome!" says my friend Amelia, who teaches high school.

"We are so glad to have you, and by that I mean we are so sorry to have you," says my friend Emily, who has a rotten ex-husband and a couple of rotten ex-brothers-in-law.

"I joined a couple years ago," says my friend Jenna, a physician assistant who sometimes deals with disgruntled patients.

"I've been in this club forever", says my friend Bea, who works in online gaming and is therefore the wizened elder of the group.

"Not as long as I have," sighs my 82-year-old grandma.

I don't like the word "bitch." I mean, obviously I don't like it when it is used to denigrate and demean women, but I also hate when it is used against men as a way to insult them by associating them with women. I don't even particularly care for it when we use it in a joking or sarcastic way, like saying, "Bitch, please..." to your friend. I know that some women take heart at reclaiming the word, but not me. I just think it's a trash word, and I'm sorry that I've already used it five times. 

But what makes it uglier is that Rudy was not just some random troll. We went to the same high school and then waited tables at the same restaurant when we were in our twenties. Once after work, Rudy offered me a ride from the restaurant to wherever it was that people were meeting up. An Alanis Morissette song came on in his truck, and we sang every word together as we rode along. (I'm pretty sure the song was "Ironic", which is kind of ironic...don't you think?) We were silent for a couple minutes as we pulled up at our destination. Before we got out of the truck, he said something like, "You know, that was really nice. Just listening to the radio and not feeling pressure to talk." I felt the same way.

Rudy and I were never close friends; we lost touch once we were no longer co-workers, and then at some point became Facebook friends, as you do. In the past few years I've had some interactions with him on my political posts that made it clear that our world views are miles apart. A vocal Trump supporter, he was annoyed when I said that we should use the proposed border wall money to support refugees. He bristled when I suggested that people call their representatives to advocate for the end of family separation. He jumped to Trump's defense when I complained that Trump was corrupt and transactional. His comments were usually sneering and disdainful, but never quite hostile.

Until now. What was it that pushed Rudy over the edge? Was it the loss of both Georgia senate races? Was it the fact that it was orchestrated by a woman, Stacey Abrams?  Was he angry that all the "patriots" storming the capitol got such negative coverage from that pesky mainstream media? Anxious that there are only a few more days left until his man Trump is booted from the White House? Maybe it was inevitable that Rudy would call me a stupid bitch eventually.

There is an upside to this. I was able to show Rudy's words to my teenage sons as a perfect example of what not to do, of exactly how not to be a man, in the same way that I did when Representative Ted Yoho called Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a "f---ing b----" on the steps of the Capitol. You remember Ted Yoho, right? You'll never believe this coincidence, but Yoho and Rudy are both from Florida AND they both call women b----es when they don't like what the women are saying. Wait, maybe Rudy learned from Yoho? Now I'm picturing the transcript:

"I'm Ted Yoho, and this is my Masterclass...

How to Put a Woman With Opinions in Her Place:

Step one: Call her a b----.

Congratulations! You have completed the course. Now go forth and shut those b----es down."

The other silver lining is that the responses to Rudy's comment had me feeling like Captain America in Endgame. You know that part where he's just gotten his butt handed to him by Thanos? He's alone and beaten up, but then he hears Sam say, "on your left." Those sizzling portals start to open, one fzzzt sound after another, and suddenly he has people backing him up. My people showed up, too, one after another, telling Rudy where to shove it.

Fzzzt. A friend I met on a train while backpacking in Europe. Fzzzt. My senior class president from high school. Fzzzt. The dad of a friend I've known since 6th grade. Neighbors. My cousin. Friends from church. In the vast range of human experiences, having people stick up for you is a really, really good one.

My favorite comment in response to Rudy came from my sister. She swooped in like Captain Marvel, and her sassy retort punched a hole right through that spaceship-sized troll:

"Bitches get stuff done, Rudy. Just ask Stacey Abrams."

Books read in 2020

I read 34 books in 2020, tying my personal record from 2019. It feels a bit illegitimate since almost half of them were graphic novels and/or juvenile lit. Not that those aren't legitimate books, just that they often take a lot less time to read and so it feels like I'm padding my total by including them. 

At the end of 2019 I decided that in the coming year I wanted to read a lot of nonfiction, sort of stretch my brain a bit, ya know? Oh boy did I NOT end up doing much of that in 2020. My attention span for several patches of the year was much more suited, as I mentioned above, to graphic novels and juvie lit. I did read four nonfiction titles: The Joys of Homemaking (read mostly for kitsch value), Why We Write (so good if you are interested in how writers get it done), Catch and Kill (excellent and disheartening and infuriating), and Siblings Without Rivalry (a parenting book that I finished two weeks ago and am already failing to implement even though I know it would be helpful).

I spent a lot of time in the spring reading classics written by and mostly about women: Pride & Prejudice, Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea, and Little Women. Perhaps this was a form of self care as I settled in for a year of quarantining with four men. If you are friends with me in real life, I might have already recommended this, but I'll say it again: I really, really enjoyed watching/listening to Jennifer Ehle do a chapter at a time of P&P on youtube. She's charming as heck and you should check it out.

I read memoirs by these women who all happen to be white and over 50: Rachel Dratch, Nell Scovell, and Meredith Maran. They're like my ghosts of Christmas very-near-future, I guess.

I read a few books that reminded me of the damage that a dirtbag man can do when he holds any amount of power: Catch and Kill being number one, but also Just the Funny Parts and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian (the latter being not through the story itself, but through my subsequent reading about the author's behavior).

I read two well-written stories about young(ish) women trying to figure out their place in the world that also left me thinking about relationships: Writers & Lovers and Such a Fun Age.

Finally, these don't fit in a category together, but I highly recommend Good Talk, News of the World, and The Dutch House. All three are so good.

Happy New Year, fellow book lovers!

My Hamilton top ten

If you read my decade-in-review post back in January, you might remember that I listed falling in love with Hamilton as one of my highlights of the 2010s. At some point during our shared, all-consuming obsession, one of my sisters said, "Hey, I've made a list of my top ten favorite Hamilton songs. You should do it too, and then we'll compare them."

Make a list? About Hamilton? Don't mind if I do. I started a note in my phone, and I believe the first draft included about twenty five songs. For reference, there are forty-six songs in the show. I couldn't even narrow them down to my favorite 50%.

Now here we are a couple years later. Watching the original cast movie on Disney+ has reignited all my Ham love, so I dug out my list and tried to get it down to a more reasonable number.

My primary judging criteria are as follows:
Is it fun to sing? (thank you, Lin-Manuel Miranda for putting most of it within my vocal range)
Does it make me feel deeply? (all the sad ones did really well, obviously)
Does it contain clever wordplay? (I mean, they all do, so that metric is kind of useless)

Here we go!

10. Cabinet Battles #1 and #2

I'm already cheating and putting two songs into one slot. But they are like two parts of a whole, so why not? My very favorite parts are "we know who's really doing the planting", "you don't have the votes", Madison quietly muttering "...France", and "uh, do whatever you want; I'm super dead."

9. Election of 1800

Here's a song that's great for car singing. Plenty of times I've been driving to the grocery store, begging Alexander to tell me who to vote for at the top of my lungs:

Jefferson or Burr? we know it's lose-lose
Jefferson or Burr? but if you had to choose
Dear Mr. Hamilton
John Adams doesn't stand a chance, so who are you promoting?

The build up is so good, and then Hamilton finally answers with an excellent burn against Burr:

I have never agreed with Jefferson once (oh!)
We have fought on like seventy-five different fronts (oh!)
But when all is said and all is done
Jefferson has beliefs, 
Burr has none (ooh!)

Also, Jefferson's "whaaaaat?..." at the suggestion that he seek Hamilton's endorsement is one of my favorite single lines in the whole show.

8. Dear Theodosia

This is the sweetest lullaby ever.

I'll do whatever it takes
I'll make a million mistakes
I'll make the world safe and sound for you

7. The Room Where It Happens

I liked this song but didn't love it until I sang it at a Hamilton karaoke night a couple years ago. It is so fun to sing it and pretend that you are a fraction as talented as Leslie Odom Jr. 

6. Satisfied

I didn't include My Shot on my favorites list, though it is obviously a great song. I once heard Lin describe My Shot as Alexander's "I want" song. Well, this is Angelicas's "I want" song, and the heartbreaking part is that a woman in her time typically didn't get nearly as much latitude with how she used her shot. She is stifled by gender roles, restrained by loyalty to her sister, and ultimately she concludes, "I will never be satisfied." But at least it's really fun to try to keep up with her as she raps and sings about it.

5. Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story

I absolutely love that Eliza gets the last word. She stayed at home and raised their eight children (no small feat there) while Hamilton followed his ambition, built a career, and literally helped create a country. But her list of accomplishments in the years following his death is wildly impressive as well. Eliza got some crap done.

4. Burn

During my very first time listening to the cast recording of Hamilton, I had a friend who was feeling heartbroken over her ongoing divorce, so I thought of her as I listened to Eliza sing about her own broken heart. I was standing in my kitchen, listening to the words, and my tears dropped onto the countertop. When Phillipa Soo's raw voice says, "you, you, you...", it basically rips your heart right out and sets it on fire along with Alexander's stupid letters.

3. It's Quiet Uptown

This is another heart wrenching song that stopped me in my tracks. I was making my bed and I heard these lyrics:
The moments when you're in so deep
It feels easier to just swim down
The Hamiltons move uptown
And learn to live with the unimaginable
I rewound to the beginning and stood still while I listened to the whole song. Crying again.

When I did that Hamilton karaoke, everyone got an allotment of points. Meatier parts were worth more points, and smaller parts cost just a point or two each. I realized that nobody had signed up yet for Quiet Uptown, and I was about to snatch it when I remembered that I had never sang it without getting choked up. I decided that I'd rather not sob in front of a bunch of strangers at a bar, so I passed. On karaoke night, when we got to that point in the show, the host said, "Yeah, nobody signed up to sing Quiet Uptown, because, well, you know..." and we moved on to the Election of 1800.

2. Alexander Hamilton

This one is near the top of the list because it's the first thing you hear, and it makes you stop short and go, "Wait a minute, this is a different kind of thing than I've ever heard before." We did an impromptu sing along of this in my parents' kitchen  the night we told them we had bought them Hamilton tickets for Christmas, and it was the best thing ever.

1. Non Stop

Non-Stop has so much going on. Lin called it an "all skate", and I love that description. Almost everyone gets a share, and I can't help but sing all the parts myself, even though it's kind of impossible since they all overlap.
All the pieces of the story so far are shifting into new places. There are callbacks to the music and/or lyrics from at least 9 previous songs (Wait for it, That Would Be Enough, Right Hand Man, The Schuyler Sisters, Helpless, Satisfied, History Has Its Eyes On You, My Shot, and Alexander Hamilton).
You can sense Burr's bemusement and tolerance of Hamilton turning to a simmering jealousy/irritation/rage as the song goes on.  You can really feel it when he growls "Hamilton wrote THE OTHER FIFTY-ONE!".
You could probably ask me for my top ten a week from now, and it would look different. All the other songs are loosely slotted, and some might even fall off the list, but not this one. This stays number one.


Honorable mention

The World Was Wide Enough contains so much malice and sadness and regret, especially "this man will not make an orphan of my daughter",  Ham's death soliloquy, and Burr's quiet lament.

Now I'm the villain in your history
I was too young and blind to see
I should've known
I should've known the world was wide enough for both Hamilton and me 

One of my kids has a really good voice but absolutely will not share it with the world. No church choir, no school talent show, nothing. Once we were in the car when One Last Time came on, and we started singing together. Our voices blended really well, and when we pulled into the driveway we stayed in the car long enough to finish the song. That last note is satisfyingly beltable, and we gave it our all. It's a good memory.

The staging of this show is amazing, and I loved a bunch of songs much more once I saw them in motion. Hurricane is so well done. The whole stage swirls around, and the lighting makes it seem like it's getting swallowed up with water. The Reynolds Pamphlet is what my sister describes as "glorious chaos" with paper flying everywhere, and Jefferson prancing around, gleefully telling Alexander that he's "never gon' be president now". It's deliciously petty.
And in Your Obedient Servant, the barrage of Alexander's correspondence is just flowing across the stage to Burr and finally brings him to his breaking point.

And one more honorable mention that isn't even in the show: a cut scene called Congratulations. Check it out; it's fun!

What do you think? Is my list the worst because it leaves out both Yorktown and Guns and Ships? And how could I possibly not include Wait For It? I would love to debate this with other Ham fans, but just remember that Non-Stop is number one and I won't budge on that.

Photo collection: shadows

I've been organizing photos this week, and I noticed that I have quite a few pictures with cool shadows. Here's a collection.

My kids at a covered playscape. A shadow layered over a shadow.

A drawer pull on our bookshelf in the late afternoon sun

Gift shop at the City Museum in St. Louis

Peacock seen through a fence at Phillips Park Zoo in Aurora IL

Cousins playing in Grandma & Grandpa's yard. 

It's hard to wait for the evening sun to go down enough to get good shade over the digging spot.

A scrawny tree in Missouri seems to cast an oversized shadow.

Coyote and cactus ring toss

A shadow from my honeycomb chandelier

Shiny marbles in a basket

A wiggly hand at the Perot Museum in Dallas

Stripes of sunshine at a manufactured snow day

Thick brush strokes in the December morning light

Forced family fun on a path that had almost no shade. This was hot and unpleasant.

Forced family fun at the high school track