This is what happened: The wheels touched down at DCA at 4 p.m. I grabbed my carry-on and speed-walked to the Metro station right outside. I marveled at the convenience—two different metro lines that went to the airport—both of which took me to one of the two hotels I tended to frequent in DC without switching trains. The DC Metro was convenient and cheap.

This trip, I was staying at the Hampton, not the Hilton. Hotel rooms are super expensive here in the spring, and I try to shop around for the best price. I had to remind myself which hotel because it meant taking the yellow-line train rather than the blue line.

I hopped off in Chinatown and dragged my bag the three blocks to the hotel. I didn’t mind. First, I love walking through the city, and second, it was a beautiful afternoon to be outside.

I entered the hotel through the double doors, and queued behind a lady at the counter who was being helped. This is when my day took a turn for the worse. It was taking so long to help this woman, I grew impatient. I checked in online while standing there. The Hilton app said it would notify me when my room was ready. I looked at my watch. It was 4:45 p.m. What the fuck? I thought to myself. Rooms are supposed to be ready by 3. This is bullshit. I’m a gold member!

But I still wanted a physical key, so I continued to wait. Finally, she finished with the woman in front and I stepped to the counter.

Hi, I said. I checked in online, but I’d like a physical key.

What’s your room number?

908, I said.

There’s no room 908, she answered back. In fact, no rooms in this building end in 08, so that can’t be. Could it be…

This is where hangry and inconvenienced merged.

That’s just what I read, I said through thin, tight lips. So, I don’t know. How about checking by my name?

Then she said…wait for it…

Are you sure you’re staying at this Hampton?

I looked at my app, but I already knew. I was staying at the other Hampton. I had stayed there once before, but I liked it the least of all the hotels. I’m sure I chose it for the price.

Now I was double hangry. I had counted on checking in and going straight to Karma, my favorite little Indian joint, around the corner for dinner. My plans foiled, I decided I would go there anyway, with bags in tow, because there wasn’t much to choose from around the other Hampton that didn’t require a bit of a walk. I thanked the girl and headed out, but Karma wasn’t open yet when I got there. I pretended to study the menu outside the front door until they unlocked it ten minutes later. I walked straight to the bar and dropped my bags.

Karma was one of our old haunts when Russ and I lived in D.C. Being there at 5 p.m. on a Tuesday, I had the place to myself. I enjoyed a nice glass of rose with a bowl of spicy peanuts while waiting for my chicken tikka. I thought about how much Russ and I supported Karma during the pandemic. There were three local businesses we decided to make sure and support through the shutdown.

We had loved Karma already, before the pandemic, but really loved them after witnessing the owner supporting first responders at the hospital with free hot meals he loaded in his car and transported there himself. Businesses were really suffering, barely surviving, but Karma extended a hand even then.

I texted Russ from the bar. I said, “I’m really proud of the support we gave [Karma] during COVID. We did good. Place is still thriving.” The restaurant might have been empty early on a Tuesday night, but I knew they had expanded to two other locations. That wouldn’t have happened if they weren’t being successful. Did Russ and I contribute to that? Probably not, but it didn’t matter. It felt good to know we did what we could, investing in our community, sometimes tipping staff a 100% during a very uncertain period in all of our lives.

After dinner, I called an Uber to take me to the correct Hampton. I was knackered from the long day, but finally satiated. My fiasco was a good indicator that I still struggle with adulting, but somehow I was still employed, despite my deficiencies, and maybe I could rest assured recounting times when I behaved like a good human-being. After a tiresome day, it was enough.

I used to laugh (somewhat ironically) that here in South Texas, running sometimes involved jumping over copperheads. It’s happened too many times. Their “Hershey kiss” camouflage is for real. Once, I looked away from the ground only long enough to wipe the sweat from my face before I saw the coppery creature on my path. In a split second, I found myself lifting my foot and jumping across it, instead of placing it on the ground in front of me. Phew! I thought to myself, looking back over my shoulder to see that the snake hadn’t moved from that spot. Only once have I changed course, but that was for a coral snake that didn’t move after I chucked a couple of rocks and branches close by. I decided that the dogs and I shouldn’t take that chance, and we headed back the way we came.

This past Saturday was the dogs’ favorite kind of day. It had rained all day Friday, ushering in a cold front, so I knew the park would have lots of standing water in the fields and low humidity. The dogs ran and played for thirty minutes before we turned to head for the car, which was another twenty-minute walk back. As we neared, I put Bergy on the leash, keeping him with Sylvi and me. I looked back to see where Tuukka was and called for him to catch up. It wasn’t unusual for him to hang back as we headed for home. He liked to stretch out “park time” for as long as possible. When I looked back the third time, I realized Tuukka hadn’t really made up any distance, so this time I was insistent. That’s when I noticed he was holding his right front leg up and hopping towards me.

I jogged back with Bergy and Sylvi to meet him. I picked up his foot to make sure he didn’t have a thorn piercing a pad, but I didn’t feel anything unusual. I flexed his joints, pulled on his leg, and palpated it, but Tuukka didn’t react to any of it. My heart sank. Non-weight-bearing could only mean one thing, I thought to myself. On the leg he had surgery on a year ago, no less—a fracture.

Sorry, Tuuk, I said. You’re gonna have to hoof it back to the car.

We were on a part of the trail off-limits to vehicles, and I couldn’t carry a 90-pound dog that far. I patted Tuukka on the head and slowed down to match his gimpy stride.

Just take your time, Buddy.

It wasn’t until we got home twenty-five minutes later that I realized Tuukka’s leg had blown up. Now he wouldn’t let anyone touch it without crying. I dropped Bergy and Sylvi off and carried on to the emergency room an hour away. Russ had called the one closer to us, but it had a five-hour wait. As it was, once we arrived, we had to wait two hours to be seen by a vet. I stuck my head out of the exam room after an hour, hoping to flag someone down. I did, asking her, “Umm, he has a snake bite, so shouldn’t someone see him?”

I didn’t know this for sure yet, but I thought I should act like I did in order to receive some immediate attention. I was thinking the timing of treatment may be crucial with this kind of thing. Again, I didn’t know, but it seemed intuitive to me that it would. Besides, Tuukka was starting to shiver, trying to curl into a ball on the slick vinyl floor. Wasn’t this indicative of shock? I asked for a blanket.

Finally, they injected Tuukka with some pain meds and Benadryl for the swelling. They collected blood to make sure his kidney and liver values weren’t compromised and to ensure his blood-clotting capabilities were still good. Lucky for all of us, his blood work was perfect, so we could forego the anti-venom infusion. Had we had to do that, the bill would have crested over $3,000.

They sent us home with pain meds and an antibiotic for any secondary bacterial infection. I thought this was a good plan. God only knows what a snake skimming a swampland picks up in its mouth at any given time.

Yesterday, four days post snakebite, I took the dogs back to the park. At the front gate, I told the attendant what had happened over the weekend. She shook her head in sympathy.

She said, “Well, you know what my mama always told me growing up after a dog got bit?”

“No, what?” I asked.

“She’d say, ‘Well, now he’s vaccinated against it.’”

I don’t know if her mama’s right, but I sure want to believe her.

But I hadn’t noticed any of that yet. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the woman’s very nice leather boots tucked into a tight pair of designer jeans, paired with a cropped leather jacket over a pullover shirt. Mind you, while airports and airplanes might be chilly, Houston’s temperature had climbed to the upper 80’s with matching humidity by then. I marveled at her ability to wear all of that despite the weather. I, myself, was flushed. Cheekily, I thought, “You enjoy that, sister, because in ten years you’re going to invest in something called ‘travel pants’ with an elastic waist, made with a synthetic blend of fibers, and you will pay handsomely for them, and be happy they exist and that you can.” I cracked myself up thinking, “Global warming isn’t confined to merely Mother Earth!”

This is hyperbolic of me because some of my friends are never warm. That trip to South Dakota I took with my girlfriend in March? She was dressed in the car like she was on a ski trip, and I might as well have been dressed for a day at the beach. The thing was, she was still cold, and I was still too hot. But I do have to brag about the travel pants. I bought my first pair last year to take with me to Italy because they’re loose, flattering, and lightweight. They are the kind of pants you can dress up or down, depending on what shoes you wear with them. They held up amazingly well in Italy, where it was also very hot at that time, and I wore them a lot. You can find them here from Beyond Yoga.

This year, I decided that before my first “big” business trip, I needed to graduate to grown-up status, not only with the travel pants, but with a new backpack. It was time to ditch the ugly green backpack I had carried around with me for the last twenty years. That bag had been all over the world, to many different equestrian events, vacations, and overnight trips, and it had carried more than one dog in its heyday, so the backpack had tremendous sentimental value. Honestly, it was was perfect, minus the off-putting shades of green.

This past winter, while spending some time in New York City, my friend and I ran into URBN ELEMNTS at Grand Central Station. The founder/owner was manning a kiosk there. I enjoyed chatting with the young guy and thought he had great design vision, as shown in his products. I didn’t pick up the bag there, but ordered the DOWNTOWN Backpack Tote when I got home. This is the bag I took with me on my recent trip to DC. As a grown-up would, I swapped everything I needed from my old bag into my new bag before I left. It wasn’t until I arrived at the office that I realized my FOB wasn’t with me. Not only that, but I had also forgotten to grab my AirPods. Luckily, I’m old school enough I had a book with me for the plane, but I sure missed those noise-cancelling capabilities while flying. So, not so grown-up after all!

I especially missed my AirPods while racing a half-marathon in Georgetown, down the C&O Canal. While I’ve only raced with them once before, in my last race in February, I knew I'd really miss having them. I chastised myself. The last race I had forgotten my watch, and this race I forgot my AirPods. It was only when I arrived at the start-line—after the taxi got lost on the way to the race—that I realized I had also forgotten to grab the bottle of electrolyte-water sitting on the bed next to my pinny, the one I had purposely moved from the dresser to the bed so I wouldn’t forget it.

I might have a “grown-up” bag now, but I have to admit, there are a lot of days I’m hard pressed to consider myself just that: a grown-up. Russ told me I was “raw dogging” the race. Just making do with what I’ve got or “don’t got.” I groaned. He was so right. I had to admit this seemed to be my modus operandi for most things. But I’ll raw dog it any day. Playing grown-up is a lot harder.

Someone posts photos on Facebook. They are in poor condition; a rack of ribs above bloated bellies that hang. I recognize the name on the post. She is a young woman who actively networks lots of homeless dogs. She is working hard at networking this trio. I comment on her post. I’ll take them some food if that’s okay, I write. She suggests a can of tuna—or two—because the puppies are sick of kibble or can’t eat it. I show up with what we have: a large can of Chunky beef-and-vegetable soup.

All of them are skittish. One of the puppies, the color of a Hershey chocolate bar, growls vehemently at my presence. I admire her. Oh, you’re the smart one, I whisper to myself. I wouldn’t trust a human either. The other puppy is white with tan splotches. Both are as tall as presumed be their mother, a grey pit bull, making the puppies appear to be three months or so old. The bitch picks up her plastic soup dish by the rim and carries it to a safer distance. You’re no dummy either, I think.

The woman meets me at the park. Let’s call her The Networker, because this is what she does. She says the puppies have a foster already, but Mama only has one for two weeks. There’s not enough time. They plan to trap the dogs, but they wouldn’t trap Mama until she had a committed foster. Wow, I said. That was fast for the puppies! She tells me that, ironically, a rescue from Iowa is in the area. They decided to sponsor the dogs, but needed fosters here before transporting them north. But Mama will need a foster after the first two weeks, she said.

It feels like kismet. The fact I happen to be in town and not traveling; the fact I see the dogs’ post on Facebook, and meet The Networker while feeding them; the fact a small rescue from Iowa just happens to be in town the same time the dogs are dumped and agrees to take them on; the fact Mama has a foster for two weeks, but then doesn’t. You might call this a bunch of coincidences. I call it kismet.

The Networker kept Mama for those first two weeks instead. Because she loved her. She did the hard work of worming her, vaccinating her, fixing her, and bathing her. She taught her what a new normal looks like and what love and security feel like. The rescue then gave Mama a name: “Cami.” This kept her in line with the “C” names of her puppies. But in our house, we call her Sylvi. Because she is our guest, not merely a rescue dog, and because she is indeed “from the forest.” A marvelous dog deserves a marvelous name.

It’s been an interesting journey with Sylvi in just fourteen days. They say a dog changes in three days, three weeks, and three months, but it was day five when all hell broke loose. Sylvi picked a fight with Tuukka after he jumped on the couch next to me. She was trying to establish what was hers, if anything, including me and the couch. But my boys are forgiving, even when Sylvi makes a straight line to get where she’s going, even if it means scooting between Bergy’s legs, or clipping Tuukka in the snout as she dashes past. Personal space is a distant second to perceived safety.

Noises concern her, whether it’s Russ sneezing, a toy squeaking, or landscaping trucks clacking and rattling past. Sylvi stares at ceiling fans like they’re helicopters trying to land. The six-pound cat clocked her before the end of the first day, notching her concern that terrorists live among us. The world is brand-new to her, and I wonder whether she spent her life tied to a tree, forgotten, or locked in a padded room with no contact. Yet…Sylvi is so sweet.

It hasn’t been easy for any of us. Russ and I are weary from walking multiple dogs on multiple walks, juggling different schedules and needs, along with our own. It is a three-dog night every night, and a three-dog day every day. You think this happened by coincidence? Does it sound like fate, the moment when one man’s trash becomes another man’s treasure? On day eleven, the zoomies showed up, first thing in the morning. What is she doing? I wondered, then I knew, and laughed. Kismet called Sylvi, and here we are.

If you’d like to help more dogs like Syvi, please consider a small donation to the rescue that stepped up to help her, Tails in Transit. You can find the donation link on their Facebook page.

Want to read more about rescue dogs? Check out this sweet story about Garnet here:

SilentPunt

My Meditation Coach Weighs Fifty Pounds and Likes Belly Rubs

Lots of newcomers this week - Welcome! A reminder to all, it is my hope that these things are fun, and/or insightful, and/or interesting for you to read. On some weeks I may even thread the needle and hit all three…

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2 months ago · 69 likes · 84 comments · Henny Hiemenz

Lastly, who doesn’t want to read a book titled Animals Taught Me Everything? I’ve pre-ordered it and so should you! Get Pam Houston’s latest here.

We based ourselves in Rapid City, where we flew in. Before the trip, my friend had found a charming cabin she thought might be a nice perk, but I balked at the idea. I have experienced too many lackluster AirBnBs, including several cabins, the kind where the silverware is filmy, the mattresses are thin and hard, coupled with fat, synthetic pillows, and the rugs smell suspiciously floral. I voted for the local Hilton with the rooftop bar, and that’s where we stayed. We might not have known what we were getting into, up there in South Dakota, but we could guarantee ourselves a decent sleep. Besides, basing ourselves in town meant we were halfway between the Badlands and the Black Hills. We had easy access to many key areas.

I feel like I should back up and say something about my TSA experience the morning I flew. I had checked wait times for the security queue all week leading up to our trip. Most of the time, it reported a wait of 210 minutes to go through security. As a result, I planned to be there at 4 a.m., four hours ahead of take-off. But on the way to the airport, the queue said five minutes. I thought it must be pure luck, but after standing in line for thirty minutes, the queue time upgraded to 210 minutes. All in all, it took 90 minutes from start to finish, and in that time, I had covered two miles from all of the switchbacks in the line. Dragging my carry-on back and forth, carrying my backpack, I thought about how my mom might have handled this inconvenience if she had been with me, and I really couldn’t picture it. I felt bad for the elderly I saw struggling, and the handicapped, and wondered how they were expected to endure all of that. An older couple arrived at my gate after me, looking like they had barely escaped a tropical tornado by the look of their frayed ends of white hair. I made way for them, giving up my seat and the empty one next to me, before they dropped. For a first-world nation, I wondered how it was we could so easily resemble a third-world country without much effort.

Had I checked a bag—which would have required standing in another line to drop it off—my wait time would have doubled. ICE agents were present, as the news cited, but I couldn’t understand why they would place them there. They aren’t TSA agents, so they had nothing to do. It made no sense. We paid one set of federal workers to stand around the airport, but we won’t pay for the department we actually need in order to travel safely? We might as well have asked the National zookeepers to be present. The few TSA agents who were on staff moved quickly and were incredibly pleasant. I’m not sure I would have been that friendly working the wee-hour shift unpaid. But after I successfully arrived at my gate, there was good conversation with my fellow passengers about the TSA issue*. Every one of us felt bad about the employees’ situation. The pipe fitter across from me lamented, “They have families to feed, bills to pay. I can’t even imagine.” None of us could agree more.

When we landed in Rapid City, my friend and I drove east, straight to Badlands National Park. Our first stop, because we were passing it, was Wall Drug. My traveling partner had fond memories of wanting to visit Wall Drug as a child, as they drove past in the family station wagon, much to her father’s chagrin. Did they ever make it? I can’t remember whether she said they stopped there or not because by the time she finished her story, we had arrived at the Wall exit off Highway 90. We entered the sleepy little town two blocks long without a single stoplight. Wall Drug was an adorable, small boutique, roadside emporium that also served food, counter-style. They boast their coffee still only costs five cents, just like it did in the 30’s, but I passed on trying it. I can tell you the burger was delicious. I also picked up a grey skull cap while I was there. It was chilly when we landed, and I knew where we were headed, out on the open plains, it would probably only be colder and windier.

I’ve always been a sucker for a straightforward, descriptive name, such as “Red,” for a bright chestnut horse, or “Little Mama,” the name of one of our cats, but I especially love the accurate toponym “Badlands.” The native Lakota people were the first to call it “mako sica,” which translates to “bad lands.” After visiting the area, I could understand how the name came to be. Just looking at the area, it was hard to imagine anyone traversing it, whether on foot, horseback, or wagon. The terrain almost resembled a stalactite cavern turned inside out, like an orange peel, with its sharp spires and rocky formations shooting from the ground towards the empty sky above it. In reality, the different landscapes in close proximity resembled many places at once. The colorful layers of sedimentary rock reminded me of the sophisticated palette surrounding Thermopolis, Wyoming. The vast prairie, the color of wheat, reminded me of the great swaths covering Kansas. The park’s canyons and spires reminded me of New Mexico’s diverse canvas. All in all, it was hard to take in and process all of the beauty it contained.

When we finished visiting the Badlands, we headed to the hotel. GPS took us down a gravel road, which was presumably a cut-through. We stopped when we saw an abandoned rusted-out car frame .“U R ON SACRED LAND” was spray-painted on the side. I thought it was an iconic photo opp. A bit further down the road, we noticed a small herd of buffalo. There was a big ravine between us, so I jumped out of the car and crossed the field. That’s when I saw one bison alone, standing away from the herd. I switched direction to walk closer to them. The lone bison trotted a couple of steps, stopped, and looked at me. I realized then it was a bull and I stopped to watch him. When he didn’t move, I continued walking. This time, the bull pronged away from me, towards the herd, before stopping short and stomping the ground. I continued walking as he watched, before he buckled at the knees, rolling his head and shoulders in the dirt, then jumping up and pronging all the way to his herd. I turned back and yelled to my friend, “I think I pissed him off!”

“Yeah, you sure did! she said, chuckling. “He was watching you the whole time, and he was not happy you kept walking toward him.” I took note because, in actuality, I was really far away from him to feel threatened, plus there was a significant ravine between us; neither of us could have crossed.

The next day, we woke early. We were two of four people to see the sun rise over Mt. Rushmore. One older guy looked homeless, wrapped in a dirty blanket to keep warm, and the other lady we found out was a traveling nurse. This wasn’t her first stint in Rapid City, and she loved being back in the area. The four of us basked in the silence and the emerging sun over the massive monument. Seeing Mt. Rushmore was a good reminder that you can appreciate a good photo of something, but there is nothing like experiencing a person, place, or thing in the flesh. Staring up at the smooth, chiseled faces, I thought about how lucky I was that my parents taught me the value of traveling as a kid to see firsthand whatever a new place and culture has to offer. Experiencing different ways of being and doing things naturally spreads connection and empathy with others. I’m so grateful for being dragged around to different places—whether it was a road trip to see Dad’s family in Baltimore for the holidays, or it was a planes, trains, and automobiles trip all over Europe for three weeks as a teenager. Traveling was as natural to me as eating a bowl of Lucky Charms for breakfast and while watching a couple episodes of Bugs Bunny.

Before we left Mt. Rushmore, we decided to walk down to the Sculptor’s studio even though it was closed. The stone pathway was shaded by the Ponderosa pines and interspersed with steps down to the studio. There, a perfect pine cone stood upright in the middle of the path, waiting for me like a gift. “Ahh, thanks, Dad!” I thought to myself, picking it up. I planned to take it home to reside next to the other one I found in the middle of my trek one day at the Lake Houston Wilderness Park. These pine cones serve as a symbolic gift from my father, but they also remind me of the great pine cone sculpture we saw while visiting the Vatican last September. There are so many layers to a spiraling pine cone, and there is no beginning or end. To me, it is a beautiful representation of life and death, and how they merge. I noticed the Ponderosa pine cone had a reddish hue, not unlike the Presidents’ faces at sunrise or the Black Hills squirrel I would see later that day while driving the Wildlife Loop through Custer State Park. There, we saw herds of buffalo, antelope, wild goats, prairie dogs, and the “wild” donkeys that are descendants of the original donkeys left behind after the gold rush ended in the late 1870s. The eighteen-mile road looped through the foothills of the Black Hills, that glorious in-between that marks the end of the mountains and the beginning of the plains, and back again. It was easy to lose track of my thoughts and let a stream of consciousness reign as we traversed the vast landscape. It was a great reminder of how important the land is to me, how special the outdoors that surround us are, and everything contained within it.

On our last day in South Dakota, the same day we were flying out, we retraced part of the Wildlife Loop before heading north on Highway 385 to Pactola Lake. It was a bit of a push, given our schedule, but we were so glad we squeezed it in. We went through the quaint town of Hill City to get there and passed the small, yet charming South Dakota State Railroad Museum. Of course, I thought of my father, and how much he would have loved to see this museum in the middle of nowhere. The thought made me smile. We crested the hill, now on a dirt road, high above Pactola Lake. I felt like I had been transported to somewhere in the Mediterranean. The water was dark blue, shiny like a sapphire mirroring the sun’s rays, and surrounded by rolling forest. The view was exquisite.

Our brief sojourn into the western side of South Dakota left me wanting to come back. It seemed like a paradise for outdoor enthusiasts, with its parks, hiking and biking trails, and the vast number of beautiful lakes in an otherwise dry, almost desert climate. I saw all of it, but I wanted to do it all. I thought about the park I would soon be returning to once I got home to exercise the dogs. It’s 5,000 acres of swampland. It’s so wet year-round, the mosquitoes take flight in February, and by April, they’re swarming. It’s impossible to venture there without wearing a thick coat of chemicals all over myself, and including the dogs, but it’s the lesser of two evils. Being confined indoors at home sounds a lot worse. Despite the challenges, the park is a happy place for the dogs and me. Occasionally, they run a few deer, or maybe even an odd wild pig, but the one thing Tuukka and Bergy can count on is seeing puddles and pools of water at the park. This more than makes up for the park’s other shortcomings, proof that happiness can be found anywhere outdoors, even in a swamp. But living in suburbia, I’m grateful the dogs have access to so much open space and freedom. Maybe one day they’ll get to experience the vastness and the beauty of the Black Hills, too.

I never understood the attraction to weights. I mean, I get the point of lifting, but I wondered how much it really helped the average “cardio” athlete: the swimmers, the runners, etc. Besides, I was addicted to cardio. That “swimmer’s high” and “runner’s high” are real. But after two weeks of alternating running with weights, I began to understand. Weight machines accomplish two goals. First, it prevents me from running every day, so there’s that. (For now, anyway.) Second, it allows me to pinpoint my weak spots, such as my hips and IT bands, and work on strengthening those. But I’ve discovered the machine part of the weights is key. They allow me to lift a fraction of my body weight at a time, versus carrying all of it at once. I don’t think I could appreciate this “boost” in mechanics until now. I get it. Weight machines are for the middle-aged or those recovering from injury. Same thing, pretty much, right? (Ok, ok, calm down, all you weight junkies. I’m just kidding…about some things, anyway.)

This is what happened. My “weak” side became my stronger side in running. No longer did one knee and heel bark the loudest on one side, but my IT band and my groin on my once “strong” leg began whimpering profusely. I ran my race, but I knew I was on the verge of a serious breakdown, especially coming off of it. I should also mention that my gym offers a lot of different classes: strength and cardio, boxing, spin, hot pilates, but spoiler alert, they are all HIIT classes. This is what corporate does: they whittle down a “sport” into its basic, core components, then turn the speed up on full blast. Why do 10 repetitions in thirty seconds when you can do 45? Despite this physical input, my weak points weren’t benefiting from the exercises.

So I decided to tap into some of my previous physical therapy exercises, isolating each leg with strength-training exercises. One of the most popular techniques they used was standing on a box and lowering one leg as far as one could, without losing their balance or their standing leg buckling inward at the knee. The other one they liked to use was a single-leg kettlebell deadlift. Basically, you are lifting one straight leg behind you as your upper body leans forward, holding the kettlebell. Practicing these exercises now, four years later, I struggled with both, so much so that I didn’t feel like I was actually doing them and consequently didn't get much out of them. But at the gym, I can use a machine and achieve the full range of motion for the intended exercise because I am using only a fraction of my body weight. I get it. I need tools now. Using weight machines isn’t unlike grabbing a pair of blocks before yoga practice. I won’t lie. I was totally against blocks—for me—at the height of my yoga practice in my thirties. My mantra in class was either “Try harder” or “Suck it up, Buttercup.” (Ok, ok, that’s not very enlightened thinking, I know, but pool to yoga mat…that’s spiritual growth, right?)

After the second week, I asked Russ, “So, am I swole now? I think I am.”

He smirked. “How many times have you been? Four? Ask me again in six months.”

But my runs are better. My legs feel stronger. The niggling pains are gone. I entered another half-marathon at the end of April. If that isn’t swole, I don’t know what is.

“I became quietly seized with that nostalgia that overcomes you when you have reached the middle of your life and your father has recently died and it dawns on you that when he went he took some of you with him.”

—Bill Bryson

Our neighbor died last week. He lives across the street on a corner lot. His house doesn’t face us, but the driveway behind the house does. He was just shy of his 85th birthday. I didn’t know it then, but his daughter had arrived that morning to take him to a doctor’s appointment. Like my dad, he never woke up.

We watched the scene unfold from our front windows. First, an ambulance arrived, and then a fire truck. It was eerily quiet. There wasn’t a lot of rushing. Then the daughter dropped the recycling bin at the end of the driveway. I quickly slid on shoes and tried to catch her, but I wasn’t fast enough before she was back inside the house. I knocked on the garage door, but no one answered. I went back home to grab a business card.

This can’t be good, Russ and I said to each other in passing.

This time I walked to the front of the house where two firemen stood chatting on the lawn.

Hi, I said. Can you please hand this to Paul’s daughter? We are his neighbors across the street. If she needs anything, or if there is anything we can do, please let her know we are happy to help.

They took the card and nodded.

Honestly, I couldn’t peel my eye from the scene. It was only two years ago that I lived it from inside the house. First the ambulance, then the fire truck.

After about an hour, the ambulance left, and so did the fire truck.

That’s not good, I said to Russ, but he already knew.

But it was when the police cruiser arrived that I lost all hope. I knew what it meant. Our neighbor was gone.

First the ambulance, then the fire truck, then the police car.

Like us, they weren’t prepared for the loss of their dad. Sure, he was of an age that kind of thing could happen, but this was also a guy who mowed his lawn every week and rode his bike every day. He was always busy with some home improvement or servicing his own equipment, such as the lawnmower or his pristine truck. Our dad didn’t have nearly the mobility our neighbor did, but he was mentally sharp. Every day, he read the Wall Street Journal and the Houston Chronicle, and discussed politics and culture with his friends and with us. Dad was still very much ingratiated within life and within his own life.

Watching the scene unfold across the street, Russ asked me how I was doing. It was only two years ago that the exact same situation played out in our own home. I told him it stirred up a lot of emotions: anxiety, dread, sadness. I knew exactly how the neighbor’s daughter felt in that moment: profound grief and helplessness.

I thought I had a pretty good handle on death. I’ve made peace with it. It’s going to happen. None of us can stop it, so why not reconcile that fact while we’re living? Maybe it will even sharpen the color of the days we do have left.

I think about death a lot. I consider, This could be your last day on Earth. How do you want to leave it? But seeing our neighbor wheeled out their front door on a gurney sort of slapped my face with the reality once more. Death is so finite. This sounds redundant, or self-explanatory, but I can’t help pondering what it means in practical terms. It’s what I thought seeing the black sheet covering the lifeless body, and I thought this when we found Dad in his bed on Christmas morning. The permanence of death, a lifetime extinguished, rolled over me like the first wave of a tsunami.

Despite the monumental loss, I did find comfort in the fact that Dad died at home. In essence, he died with dignity. Not once in his lifetime did he spend the night in a hospital, and unlike his own father, he didn’t die in one either. He wasn’t sick or injured, tended by strangers in a strange bed, and doped up on medication, and he didn’t have to rely on a bedpan to relieve himself. No one ever showered Dad, but himself, and he never needed any help in the bathroom, as in, he never got stuck on the toilet. Dad couldn’t drive anymore, but he had an amazing network of friends who showed up every week and took him to his lunch group, the Romeos, or “Retired Old Men Eating Out.” I don’t think it gets much better than this when it comes to the business of dying. Remembering this brings some peace to the memory of his passing, and I hope it will for our neighbor’s daughter, too.

Do you ever wonder what happens after we die?

Why do you believe what it is that you believe?

Christmas night—so conceivably 24 hours after my father passed—I was barely asleep on the downstairs couch with both dogs when a loud noise in the kitchen woke me. A drawer had slammed. The dogs woke too, but they didn’t bark. They stared silently toward the kitchen from their places intertwined with my legs. The noise gave me chills, and the hair on the back of my neck raised like a mohawk. The silence between us was as thick and heavy as mayonnaise.

Then the microwave beeped, as if someone was trying to start it. How did I know that was the start button? How did I know it was the knife drawer that snapped? Was my hearing that good I could splice one button from the others, one drawer from the rest of them? Maybe. But I have zero doubt I was right about both of these things. Some things you feel so deeply in your core that any opinions, doubts, or judgments slough off all by themselves, leaving exposed only the bare, naked truth. Tuukka, Bergy, and I sat up for a while, waiting for more distractions from the kitchen. When the silence settled once more, I stroked the dogs and whispered that everything was alright, that they could go back to sleep now. Just as I started to settle myself, a white light flashed out of the corner of my eye, passed the staircase by the floor, and shot out the pane-glass window. That was it. Dad was gone.

Ahh, the mysteries of living a human life.

Energy is neither created nor destroyed, so where does it go?

This weekend I am joining a friend to celebrate her dad. He passed shortly before my own father did, back in 2022. She would like to spread some of his ashes in a special place and asked me to come along. I feel honored to be invited. I’m looking forward to the excursion and to celebrating both of our dads.

It seems like it’s that time in life for me and for others in my age range—the 50s. When we all went to college at the same time, I didn’t think anything about it. When we started marrying at the same time, I was too busy buying bridesmaids’ dresses to realize there are many seasons to life, both collectively and personally. Then came some babies, but I have to admit that, like me, most of my friends chose not to have kids. I think our chosen labor of love was horses instead. But then there was the wave of divorces, and that’s when I began to realize we are all part of a season, depending on our time and place in life. Right now, along with my Gen X brethren, I feel like I’m in the season of monumental loss. Middle age is the reason we notice birds now, wear comfortable shoes, and reflect more on a past whose future has ended. Losing a father is the end of an era. Mitch Albom says it best: I love you everyday. And now I will miss you everyday. Cheers to all the dads.

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I asked the crucial question: By chance, have you left him alone in the house before?

Yes, she said.

And he was fine? I probed further.

Yes, he seemed so.

So…no separation anxiety that you noticed?

None that I could see, she said.

Honestly, the match hinged on this single question. If you’ve never had a dog with separation anxiety, let me try to explain. Having a dog with separation anxiety means the back door might become raked by claws and teeth alike, remodeling it, and window blinds could get chewed in half. God forbid the dog might accidentally lock themselves in the bathroom (by shutting the small door) and chew a hole in said door trying to squeeze through it.

Having separation anxiety could mean you might begin to take the dog with you…everywhere. It might also mean that while you’re shopping in Home Depot one evening, the store makes a public announcement from the loudspeaker that the owner of a black pick-up truck should come to the front to pick up their dog that was found stuck halfway in and halfway out of the cracked window.

Having a dog with separation anxiety might mean you find a chunk out of your steering wheel, or your seatbelts chewed in half, returning to your car after a Sunday morning church service. The car may not even belong to you, the dog owner, but to your parents instead. Whoops.

Having a dog with separation anxiety means you eventually lock them out of any dwelling when you have to go somewhere, so they can run free on the farm, but first, you will have to beat them down the gravel driveway because they insist they are coming with you.

Why didn’t we kennel the dog? It’s one thing to come home and find your stuff destroyed, and it is something else entirely to come home and find your dog’s face half destroyed and the kennel beat to shit. I wanted to try medication to curb the poor dog’s anxiety, but my spouse at the time didn’t. He preferred to let the dog do what he wanted, go where he wanted, using the hundreds of acres of farmland as a buffer. Except that eventually wasn’t enough to contain them. The dog figured out how to go from the farm back home, about a five-mile trek, that crossed a highway with a 50-mile per hour speed limit. That’s the problem when you leave separation anxiety unchecked: the dog keeps changing the rules as to what they find acceptable and what no longer is.

“Undecided.” That was the name written on the vet’s paperwork for the dog in South Carolina. According to his keeper, he passed this hurdle with no problem. He was also a good age—not a total puppy—but still young enough to want to go running with me most days.

I hadn’t had a dog in four years, since Cracker died. Cracker’s demise was swift. He was 15 and a half when I noticed a lump in the scruff of his neck. Two weeks later, he was gone. The lump turned out to be a mast cell tumor. “Not cancer,” the vet told me, but “acts just like it.” It felt like one and the same. This dysfunctional immune response was very aggressive in a short period of time. The lump appeared, the size of a table-tennis ball, and the next thing we knew, Cracker was struggling to breathe. Humane destruction was the kind option. Cracker was my dog of a lifetime; my sidekick; my best buddy; my business partner; riding partner; horse show companion; you name it, Cracker did it or was there. I still owe a debt of gratitude to the dog who got me through fifteen years of tumultuous trials and tribulations. There was a lot of dog stuffed in that fourteen-pound body, but his heart was even bigger than that.

I wasn’t keen to have another dog right away, but this was especially true living in an apartment in Washington, D.C. In my opinion, that kind of urban dwelling requires a certain type of dog with a certain physique (small) and a certain disposition (relatively quiet).

Only a year and a few months after Cracker died, COVID broke out. The world was sheltering in place and/or working from home. The animal shelters were emptied, and pretty soon, one even had to queue up in order to foster a dog. I was one of those people working from home who thought it would be a good idea to foster. Because we were in an apartment, I focused on senior dogs in need. A friend shared a rescue org, and I filled out the application and was offered an interview.

A girl called me, and we chatted about dogs. She said she would check my recommendations, and didn’t mention the fact that my friend who hooked me up with the rescue was a small vet who was friends with the founder/owner of the rescue, but I didn’t think much of it. I got a call-back a couple of days later. The girl said she had concerns because my primary vet told her Cracker’s vet record was spotty, with big gaps in care, i.e., vaccinations. The girl said she wasn’t sure if she was comfortable giving me a dog.

I have never felt so much shame in my entire life. I was a recently retired equestrian professional who had dedicated twenty-five years of her life to horse care and their well-being. Dogs were a huge part of that in that timeframe. My entire identity was wrapped up in animal care and communication at a high level. Our mantra every day was “the horses come first.”

Being judged on the one thing I was truly good at and cared about made me feel like a total piece of shit. My imposter syndrome flared from syndrome to fact. Yes, there were gaps. This was due to financial constraints. The only consistency in compensation in the horse world is inconsistency. But after the age of five, I didn’t worry so much about Cracker’s annual vaccinations. He was good to see the vet every third year, and I knew I was lucky to get away with it, due to the benefits of our lifestyle. I cried on the phone trying to explain this.

This wasn’t my only weird experience with a rescue. In 2011, I applied to adopt a greyhound. The couple drove 45-minutes to the farm to interview me.

What do you feed? they asked.

Iams, I said.

Well…[X] would be better, they said.

Okay….

What kind of water do you have out here?

The farm runs on a well.

Hmm, bottled water would be best, they said. What about a fenced yard?

I showed them to my permanent round pen. It was three-board fenced and about 24 feet in diameter. I did tell them the entire 75-acres was fenced, but that fell on deaf ears. We went out to look at the round pen. I signed a piece of paper that said Darby, the four-year-old greyhound I adopted, would always be contained or on a leash. The first day I had her, I tied her leash to the stall door while I went to catch a horse to bring into the field. When I came back three minutes later, the leash was chewed in half. Cracker looked up at me and rolled his eyes like, “What were you thinking?”

After that, I left her in the barn apartment until I could walk her between rides. Eventually, I let her hang out in the barn with the leash attached, dragging it around. It helped that Cracker had excellent recall, but one day I unclipped the leash, and that was it. Darby had our 75 acres to run on, and she also had the neighbors 150-acres, because we left one gate between us open. The fact was, she wanted to be where everyone else was. She might chase a deer—scaring the daylights out of it—but she’d roll back to the barn as soon as the deer jumped the fence line.

That’s what the rescue rep didn’t know. She didn’t know that Cracker and, eventually, Darby, spent every minute with me or someone they knew. In their entire lifetimes, they never once spent the night at a commercial kennel. Their days were spent hacking with me around the farm or to the ring, sunbathing at their leisure, or curling up in the tack room on their beds. As far as dogs’ lives go, theirs were pretty amazing. But maybe if the rescue rep knew all of this, she wouldn’t have cared anyway. What was their most important prerequisite to qualify as an adopter or foster parent? A fenced yard? A solid vet record with a history of annual vaccinations?

The rescue granted us the fifteen-year-old miniature poodle needing a place to land. The young woman then sent me a friend request on Facebook. About a month later, she made a post asking for an oral surgeon for her and her daughter. She needed someone who would work with a patient who didn’t have insurance. I have to admit, my first thought was, “Well, isn’t that rich of you? How ironic.” Who was she to judge me? I thought she was an irresponsible parent. Why were her financial constraints for a child more acceptable than mine for my dog? This is the problem with exercising judgment. It spreads like wildfire. If she had shown me a little more grace, I would have extended it to her right off the bat, too.

But I’m also a massive hypocrite as I write this. I have to tell you that I’m a hard ass. I think there is a certain threshold of care that qualifies as good. Honestly, I feel like the basics—food, shelter, and water—are highly subjective and debatable as to what qualifies as acceptable. Is an igloo on a 30-degree night an acceptable shelter? Is remembering to fill your dog’s water bowl twice a week enough, let alone remembering to feed them regularly? Consistent basics are non-negotiable for me, but alone, in my opinion, they don’t qualify as good care.

Good care is spending time with your pet every day. It requires patience, forgiveness, and communication. Good care means a safe place to play and exercise most days. There is a homeless man who sits at the same metro station in D.C. with his dog. For several years now, I see him there when I visit, and I think, this dog has it better than a lot of dogs who are neglected, abused, and worse. So what qualifies as good care, not just adequate, let alone what does it mean to show your dog love?

Dogs are struggling in the south. My experience is anecdotal, but true nonetheless. Every winter, I saw it in Aiken, South Carolina, when we relocated the horses there. Loose dogs trotted up and down the main roads and the back roads. Cardboard boxes of puppies would magically appear on the edge of someone’s farm. I waited and waited for it to happen to me. How could I say no? I wouldn’t have been able to, which was the point. I always wanted another dog, and I still do. But it never happened. It always happened to someone else. Back north those dogs would go, in March, with their chosen snowbird.

Here in Houston, the problem is just as bad. New dogs are showing up all of the time. Passersby post them on social media, try to network them, but the shelters are full and so are the rescues, and fosters are tapped out. Russ and I tried to help a couple of dogs out last year, but it was really difficult, already having two big dogs of our own. We had to keep everyone separated, which meant the two dogs stayed in our backyard with a big covered porch. But they were so skinny, they could fit through the fence boards between the driveway and the porch, and they did. Come trash day, they slipped through the fence in the pouring rain to pillage our neighbor’s trash bags at the end of their driveways, ready for pick-up that morning. The street was a mess.

I planned to keep them for a week, then take them to the shelter on “intake” day, but the day before that, the shelter announced on Facebook that it wouldn’t be open after all. I was at a loss as to what to do. One house next door to us was recently sold and sat empty, but the neighbor on the other side of us heard them bark all night for a week straight. In the meantime, I called the number on the dog that was wearing a collar and left a message. Two days later, the owners called back and came to pick them up. Russ chastised me for calling them because the dogs were painfully skinny and obviously had been on the run for at least a month. Needless to say, when I saw those dogs pop up on social media again this year, I knew he was right. So what is adequate care again? Remind me, because I’m not confident that I know.

I think it’s fair to say that my experience with rescues has been clouded. I hate admitting this, but because of it, I overlooked them when searching for a dog. When Tuukka Raskal’s face showed up in my Facebook feed (as we quickly named him after Bruins’ goalie Tuukka Rask), with a history of known behavior, and an ideal age for our lifestyle, I was more motivated than ever to pursue him. Before we even met, Russ and I had shelled out over six hundred dollars on vaccines and neutering him. We boarded Tuukka at a friend’s facility for a week so his “finder” could get back to her normal life after keeping him for almost a month. I drove nine hours, stayed in a hotel room that night, picked Tuukka up the next morning, drove halfway home, and spent the night in another hotel room before making it back to the city by lunchtime the next day. All in all, it was a lot of expense and logistics to jump through for one random dog, when there were so many in need around us, but I saw this as plucking one from the south, where loose dogs were ubiquitous. I had hoped it would happen by serendipity all those winters ago, but it never did.

Tuukka just turned four on March 15th. We gave him this date for his birthday, tacking on three more months than what the vet estimated, because after having Tuukka for a month, we decided he couldn’t possibly be more than eight or nine months old. For starters, he gained twenty pounds in the first month alone. Sure, he had some weight to gain, but this was a growth spurt, too. He jumped from 50 pounds to 70. And once he got to know us and trust us, we noticed Tuukka really played like a juvenile pup.

I had a laugh/tussle with Henny Hiemenz last week. He was speaking about shelter dogs and his experience volunteering at the shelter. He remarked regarding dogs that “being ‘traumatized’ is a heck of a lot better than being inherently ‘bad.’” I grant the fact that Henny was speaking in generalized terms for the sake of his point, but the word ‘bad’ used to label any animal always triggers a defensive reaction in me. I pushed back. I said I’d take a bad dog over a traumatized dog any day of the week. Why? Because I don’t think there are bad dogs, only misunderstood ones, or ones ruled by their genes that happen to clash within the limits of domestication.

Traumatized dogs, on the other hand, are usually the result of human interaction of the nefarious kind. For instance, when we first got Tuukka, Russ and I would walk through the door, into the house, to a cowering Tuukka. The first few times I took the trash bag out of the bin, he cowered and tried to hide. That is a traumatized dog. Bergy, Tuukka’s sidekick, was a ‘bad’ puppy when we got him. He chewed furniture, drywall, and shoes. But that isn’t quite right, is it? Bergy was just a puppy who needed a lot of stimulation, exercise, and attention. There’s no such thing as a bad dog, only a misunderstood one.

I can’t believe I went four years without a dog between Cracker and Tuukka. I vow to never do that again. The boys, Tuukka and Bergy, bring incredible amounts of joy into our lives. Once, on the tail end of COVID and before we had Bergy, I took Tuukka to the D.C. office with me. Dogs weren’t allowed in the building, but I snuck him onto the fifth floor using the service elevator. The suite was empty, and I did my work with Tuukka curled next to my desk. When we left that afternoon, I took the service elevator once more. When the doors opened at street level, there stood one of the front desk personnel. She looked at the dog, I looked at her, and then she looked at me. “Is that a service dog?” she asked. Unable to think fast on my feet, I blurted, “No, but we were just leaving.” I scooted out of the building with Tuukka leading the way. He may not be a service dog, but a rescue dog Tuukka was. The question remains, who rescued whom?

On day four, I decided to take a pilates class, and spin the day after that. My quads felt a bit looser, but I still couldn’t descend stairs like a normal, healthy person. I kept researching my next race; nonetheless, pushing the date further and further back with every enquiry. Maybe November? Then I caught a past episode of Mel Robbins while I was driving the dogs to the park one morning. She interviewed Dr. Amy Shah. Dr. Shah proposes something she calls the “30/30/3 plan.” In a nutshell, she proposes a daily eating routine of thirty grams of protein in your first meal, 30 grams of fiber intake throughout the day, and three probiotic foods. How many diets have we heard about in the last twenty years? There’s the Atkins Diet, the South Beach Diet, the Ketogenic Diet, the Paleo Diet, the Mediterranean Diet, the Blood-Type diet, etc, not to mention all the different cleanses and fasting plans.

I tried some of them, but had trouble sticking with them, which isn’t usually a problem when something works well. I think this is where I found this plan—not necessarily a diet—different. There was definitely instant gratification, which helped, but it was also specific and easy to follow. This is usually my winning combination for a successful outcome, no matter what it is that I am doing. Sometimes I vacillate between thinking this is because I might be lazy, and don’t want to think too much, or maybe I just prize efficiency as a vastly important element, especially when it comes without quality being sacrificed.

This is the thing: I thought I generally ate a balanced diet. Sure, I like the occasional banana milkshake, but overall, I was eating square meals. But after 30/30/3, what does “balanced” even mean these days?? I always thought the “30 minutes of exercise a day, five days a week” was a bullshit guideline some pale scientist living in a basement-lab made up after studying mice on treadmills into the wee hours. That’s enough exercise to promote good health, or is it the bare minimum before one is ensured a premature demise of some kind? I don’t know, but I smell bullshit.

I’m not saying 30/30/3 is a balanced diet (it’s not calling itself a diet at all, but a “plan”), but it does suggest three very specific goals to hit in a day. Listening to the entire episode and reading more about how to best fuel a middle-aged woman, I realized I have been under-fueling myself. By a lot. I thought 30 grams of protein was enough—that it satisfied the “balanced” diet I was consuming—but for a woman like me, middle-aged, with an active lifestyle, trying to run long distances, I discovered I need anywhere from 120 to 150 grams of protein a day.

How did I not already know this?

I started by tripling my daily protein intake to 90 grams. My first surprise was how much food intake was required to hit those numbers. “Snacking” became replaced with other high-protein food items, instead of pimento cheese scooped from the container on the edge of a cracker. On the third day, I ordered protein powder, because, quite frankly, I wasn’t able to eat my way to a high-protein diet. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t tried powders in the past, but I didn’t notice any difference in how I felt or my energy levels, so I stopped. I realize now that additional protein still wasn’t nearly enough to help my body out. I was still running at a deficit.

The other nugget I learned from Dr. Shah is that a “high protein” food is easily identifiable by multiplying to protein count by ten and comparing it to the number of calories per serving. For instance, when I checked out the Kodiak Power Waffles, they have 12 grams of protein and are 250 calories per serving. While they are branded as being “protein-packed,” they aren’t actually a high-protein food. When multiplying the protein by ten to get the number 120, it’s far below the number of calories at 250. By definition, this is not a a high in protein food. I find this little “trick” helpful in blowing past all of the hype and slick branding companies use to market their products.

On day 6 of my new nutritional plan, I woke up and walked down the stairs effortlessly. My mind was blown. I thought to myself, “Here today and gone tomorrow.” Honestly, my joints and muscles hadn’t felt this good in a very long time. I understand that correlation is not causation, but I’ll take this improvement as a win that happened to coincide with a big change in daily routines. I can’t believe I’m admitting to this, but now I track my protein intake in my Notes app on my iPhone. I’m turning into my father. The last few years of his life, he kept a log of what he ate, the medications he took, and who he talked to or saw, among other things, in a leather-bound annual planner with the year engraved on the front in gold lettering. I’m halfway there already, Dad, just digitally.

One side note of this experience, so far, is that I feel like I’m not eating for pleasure anymore. Even my beloved Chicken Divan has turned utilitarian. (A stretch, I know.) I no longer consider the question, “What sounds good for dinner?” Now, I think about how to wrap my daily 30/30/3 requirements by the last meal of the day, and as a result, everyone else is subject to what’s on that menu, too. But there have been other benefits, in a short time, besides navigating stairways. My joints feel a lot better; I’ve had less gastric distress, especially after running; I have more consistent energy across the day; and so far, I’m handling the early heat and humidity better than I did last year. I told Russ that I felt like a diesel truck that just figured out it’s been fueling itself with gasoline. (Ask me how I know what happens when you do this, insert eye roll.)

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. While I can’t say I’ve done things exactly the same the last—let’s say, five years—I have felt insane when the result turned out the same: Sidelined. And I have to admit, I feel pretty stupid right now. I calculated my running schedule to precision, but didn’t pay that much attention to the nutrition side. I took it for granted. I’ve been a fairly slim person all of my life who basically ate a balanced diet. Basically.

But the “basic” guidelines for nutrition make as much sense as the guidelines promoting exercise for thirty minutes a day, five days a week. I suppose these recommendations cater to some sort of regression to the mean, although I know not what that might be. I am only sure that these guidelines were never meant for me, especially now. Maybe my insanity will have a chance to take a turn for the better. It hasn’t been that long, but it sure feels like it’s headed in that direction.

—Mike Tyson

It was my first road race in four years, and my first half-marathon in nine, and I forgot my watch. The only thing worse would have been to forget running shoes. I mean, a forgotten pinny with your competitor number and bar code can be replaced, but shoes? That’s more complicated. No watch? Who carries a spare? I checked out the other runners ahead of me. Everyone wore a watch, but me.

Mother Fucker! I shouted in the car. We had been on the road for fifteen minutes.

What? Russ asked.

I forgot my fucking watch! UGHHH.

You’ll be fine, he said, but I was pissed. I thought about all the money I spent to race ill-prepared. Not only did I end up traveling for four days the week of the race, but three weeks prior, my running completely derailed. On a seven-mile training day, my legs stopped at mile five. They quit like quicksand gelling to concrete. I had no choice but to stop. Walking along that dirt road with the dogs jogging in front of me, their tongues hanging out, I thought, This is not good at all. How can it be? Last week I ran 47 miles. Most of it felt great…

After that, my legs were locked up for four days. Then I tried a few slow miles, and it took another three days for them to loosen. I wasn’t feeling particularly optimistic about my thirteen-mile race. I trusted my wind would be fine—it always was—but what about my muscles and tendons? It really begged the question for me: Where does soreness end and pain begin? I still don’t think I have an answer or truly understand the difference, but I can certainly appreciate that they are not the same thing. I also wondered if my running hadn’t crossed into an addiction. Sure, everyone loves the runner’s “high,” but isn’t an addiction something that controls you, instead of you controlling it? I hit almost 50 miles in a week because the running felt so good, I kept going. If those aren’t the words of an addict, I don’t know what is.

A good runner will tell you not to try something new in a race; don’t wear new sneakers or new clothes, don’t carry new gels you’ve never had, nor drink a sports drink you’ve never tried, but that’s all I had going for me this race. I was running with only a handful of short runs leading up to the race, not entirely sound, and with several gels I only tried a couple of times before my legs quit in practice. Now, I was racing without wearing my watch, on an 80-degree day.

What could possibly go wrong?

I thought the race was a bad idea. This was not going to end well. But my stubbornness prevailed. Tightening my laces, I reminded myself, You don’t have to be sound on Sunday. There’s only today. How is it, after all of these years, that horses still inform my decisions? I was comparing my situation to that of a Three-Day Event horse who had to show-jump on Sunday, leaving all the rails up, after completing a grueling endurance competition the previous day. Shit, I had it easy.

As the race started, I contemplated the definition of failure. I knew I wasn’t going to hit my goal, so by all estimations, I was failing right out of the gate. But I needed this race. I haven’t attempted a half-marathon in nine years. My last “official” race was the Army Ten Miler in 2022, before Russ and I left D.C. It’s one of my favorite races and attracts a huge number of entries. I treated it like a celebratory send-off, a moving meditation of gratitude for every gift D.C. had granted me the last six years.

Having no watch, my entire race strategy relied on “feel.” I pushed myself at the start to run one tic faster than I wanted to, because I know I can never make up time lost at the beginning by starting too slow. Another strategy I’ve always used is to increase speed by one tic when going up hills. The goal isn’t to outrun the other competitors at this point of inflection so much as maintaining my own speed by not letting it drop off. This race, I also tried not to slow down on the backside of the hills to catch my breath, but to maintain my speed, in essence, catching my breath on the fly. All of this worked until mile eleven. Like a buzzy house-fly slapping an invisible windshield, I hit the proverbial wall. I could hear my own breathing over the music plugged into my ears, which was never good.

Two more miles, I told myself, that’s twenty more minutes. That’s it. I had felt strong most of the race, so I considered trying to “sprint” the last two miles, but it was not to be. I had no idea what my minutes per mile were up to this point, but the last two had to be considerably slower than the rest. Mentally, this was like getting kicked in the teeth.

When I discovered my finish time, I was somewhat surprised. I had clocked an average of a 9:39 mile. This felt like a win for someone who wasn’t operating at 100 percent for the last several weeks, even if it was 22 minutes slower than my PR. Maybe my definition of success and failure has changed, or maybe I’ve just rationalized them. I’m okay with either scenario.

After I showered and changed, I found myself sitting on the couch and scrolling for another race. I like having a goal and something to work toward. Maybe I’ll get a coach this time. That way, they’re in charge, not my addiction.

Compound interest, he said.

I’m not saying Russ is wrong. At all. He has a valid point. But I don’t like being in debt to anyone, let alone the government. Any compounding I would earn on my tax dollars would be minimal, compared to the peace of mind I get knowing a large tax bill isn’t looming around the corner of the new year with my name on it.

I’m sure I’m not alone when I say taxes give me PTSD. As a 1099 employee for most of my working life, I dreaded Income Tax Day. In 2000, my first year as a professional equestrian, I cleared $7,264 in profit after subtracting all of my expenses. I was proud of this fact. I almost felt like a real professional, cutting my teeth in the business world, ending the year in the green. Then the local accountant said I owed $700.

What? I asked, sure she was mistaken. How can that be? I only made $7,264.

Yep, she said, nonplussed. She was the stereotypical accountant at tax season. She looked like she was sucking on a lemon and had misplaced her hairbrush two weeks ago.

And now I need a check for $700, she added.

The thing was, I didn’t have it. It would be another ten days before I had that much money in my account, and it was already earmarked for something else, like a feed bill. I remember wanting to scream. How could anyone who worked seventy-five-plus hours a week, busting their ass, only clearing $7,264 after everything was “reconciled,” owe anyone anything else?

Horse owners often don’t total the cost of what they spend on their horse(s) in a year for fear of the truth, but this was where my mathing skills halted, for the sake of self-preservation if nothing else. I wasn’t going to reverse engineer what this meant in terms of wage per hour. That number wasn’t poverty level so much as a lying-in-a-shanty’s-dirt-ditch level of poverty.

My professional career didn’t start with a bang, but I had managed to pay for my horse by myself. There were no subsidies, or windfalls, or anything else, outside of my muscle and sweat. And paying for my horse was all I cared about in my twenties—because twenties—and because I could. I had no other attachments or responsibilities to worry about. I felt like I had won, especially since so many naysayers told me—before I even arrived in Middleburg—that I’d never make it in the horse world.

It was my Social Security benefits page that reminded me I made $7,264 in 2000. Sometimes during tax season, I like to review my earnings history. It reads a bit like a mystery novel, since the numbers don’t graph cohesively. They more resemble spaghetti thrown against a wall. My last year in horses, in 2015, I made $39,916. That was my second-best year in earnings during my career. The worst year was 2010—traumatic for many reasons—when I took home $8,515.

Once, I told Russ, Math is the only true language. The oldest language. He disagreed. He said it was physics. I said math is physics, as in, the building blocks of physics, but he only dug his heels in harder. The point being, I’ve learned along the way that math is a true language, but because numbers are used, or controlled, by people, math can be subject to misinformation.

Before I really contemplated leaving the horses, a well-meaning friend assured me I could clear $40,000 a year by only selling horses. Their point was that I should tweak my business model to sell more. Their declaration dumbfounded me. I questioned whether they had calculated the cost of staff, mortgage or rent, and every other bill that comes with running a horse biz into their own equation.

I had the distinct feeling this person, who had wildly deeper pockets than myself, had cherry-picked some numbers and not others to come up with that figure. But I learned a couple of lessons that day. Just like I already knew not to take investment advice from someone with no investments of their own, conversely, I learned it was just as unwise to take business advice from someone with a completely different set of resources.

In storytelling, they say the audience matters—or the author should at least know the audience they write for—but so too does the source matter, especially when you’re contemplating your own bottom line. Numbers don’t lie, but people often do, even to themselves, and even the well-meaning ones. Going a bit deeper, I also understood that a business’s revenue is only half the equation for success. For a business to be solvent, knowing the spend is just as important.

Recently, Insights Magazine posted the top prize-money winners in Eventing for 2025, including how many horses each rider competed at the FEI level to achieve this distinction. This is a wonderful accomplishment for all of the riders on the list, especially those with only a handful of top horses. Still, I think the conversation would be just as interesting if we also discussed how much it cost each rider—and their owners—to get to the top.

In March of 2025, Dror Poleg outlined the differences between our old economy, or way of doing business, called the Linear Economy, and today’s Nonlinear Economy. This new economy is hallmarked by uncertainty and volatility. Poleg says, “The production process of intangible assets is nonlinear: unpredictable, disproportionate, and volatile. The same inputs and efforts can produce wildly different outcomes.”

In other words, effort and outcome have become decoupled. The old career playbook of working hard to succeed no longer computes. I think I felt the effects of this change in economies, sort of trapped in its crosshairs as it grew, before I had words for it or maybe anyone did. I’m not saying I was the only one—far from it—I’m just acknowledging that it is difficult to appreciate your situation, in the midst of a slwo-moving tornado, when you’re working and living inside the middle of it.

Of course, it hasn’t helped that income hasn’t keep pace with GDP for the last forty years. Economist Kathryn Edwards cowrote a paper on the trends in income from 1975 to 2018. She discussed it on her podcast, The Optimist Economy, most notably when she cited the counterfactuals of what income would have looked like if it had kept up.

She said—and I’m paraphrasing here—“In prime age workers, those 25-54, the middle person who made $42,000 in 1975 (in inflation-adjusted dollars), if their income had kept pace, they would be making $92,000 year. Instead, in 2018, they were making $50,000. Speaking for all Gen Xers, we have questions. WFH? (What Fucking Happened?)

Twelve years ago, a riding student handed me a thumb drive.

What’s this? I asked.

It will compute compound interest over time, he said. You can play around with it, stick in any number, and change the number of years to see how it affects your investment growth. Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world, Jenn.

He wasn’t (isn’t) wrong. Nowadays, you can find a compound calculator on any personal finance site online. But that thumb drive spun the two hands of the time machine gasping in my head. For a while, I had felt like I was no longer winning with the horses.

Anything valuable I owned was tied up in the business. What that meant was the value of the business’s assets changed every day, not unlike the stock market. It’s all unrealized gains—or losses—until cash changes hands. What you earn selling something, the price, is exactly what it is worth at that moment.

But I needed to know. What do I have? Because something can become nothing in a nanosecond. I saw it happen to a budding professional selling expensive horses from Europe. One of the first prospects they imported turned out to be dangerously nappy. Long story short, the kid ate the $45,000. Who can do that?

That was the kind of incident that could bankrupt someone like me. After twenty years, my success of “making it in the horse world” felt more like a pyrrhic victory. It was time to cash out. That was a pivotal moment in my life for so many reasons. Now, looking back, I can say that horses almost bankrupted me, but in the end, ironically, they saved me financially, too. How many people can say that?

Nowadays, I’m the kind of person who submits tax records well ahead of the deadline. Losing a few dollars of compound interest is worth my peace of mind. After all, I don’t owe anyone anything. Not until next year, anyway.

When did running become such an elitist sport?

I started racing in 2014 at the Ocala Half-Marathon in Florida. The entry fee might have been $75, and it included a t-shirt and a pint of beer at the finish. To be completely honest, I don’t remember if it was that race or a different one, but I can distinctly recall standing in a bare field at a horse-trial in Aiken not long after, freezing my ass off. I marveled then at my choice to spend $225 per horse to be there, rather than spend a fraction of that and get something useful in return. I’m, of course, being a little cheeky here. First, the horse owners were paying; it wasn’t necessarily me. And the horses always benefited from a competition, in addition to the fact that not everything worthwhile in life revolves around earning a medal for participation. But a t-shirt and beer—plus the race—for the price of entry? At that time in my life, both of those items fell into the category of “need,” not “want.” The math was starting not to math.

What I really wanted to do was run the Chevron Houston Half on January 11th. This marathon attracts some of the best runners in the world because the course is flat and fast. It’s a good place to qualify for other prestigious races, such as Boston, or to achieve a PR.

How did I arrive here, entering a race after four years of not, with so much foot trouble in between? Well, the running was going really well. Too well. After a short hiatus last fall due to a medical procedure, I picked it back up, and it was like no time had passed. In fact, things were going even better than good. They were great. My lungs were untouchable, and my legs were strong and fiery. I discovered some hidden speed. So I ran further…for longer…for two weeks.

Then my shins were sore; then my knees. After that, the pain traveled to my heels and the outside blades of my feet. “Whack-a-Mole” was back. I found an incredible massage therapist to help. She made my muscles feel better, but the pain below my knees remained. She suggested magnesium lotion, which helped. Arnica tablets also improved things, but one day I dissolved so many under my tongue repetitiously, the medicine made me jittery and nauseous. I began icing my shins, using vet-wrap I keep around for the dogs to hold the gel packs in place.

I had sore shins once before, about nine years ago, and made the regrettable decision to try to run through them. It took more than six months for my shins to forgive me. So this time, I decided to try “slogging” it instead. This term crossed my social media feed at the right time, when I needed to hear it. Running super slow on purpose?? This seemed counterintuitive to someone who was always trying to improve their running by clocking faster times and who felt like they were already slow enough—much slower than they used to be—and that someone was me.

I look like an asshole. That was my first thought, out there on the sidewalk slogging away, while the cars raced past me to work. But I slogged for a week straight, and something amazing happened. With each day, my kinks began to dissolve. It took less and less time to feel “normal” on my feet. I decided to add a tempo run the following week to see what would happen. Everything went well, and while I was sore the next day, I slogged through it. The day after that, I added some short sprints. I wasn’t as sore, but added a slog after it anyway. Elizabeth Clor haș a much nicer way of referring to a slog. She, and probably most other well-seasoned runners, call this running in Zone Two. When I read her Facebook post a couple of weeks ago about the benefits of running slow in Zone Two, I checked my Apple Watch on a slog, and sure enough, I was running in that zone.

I came home and mused to Russ, “Well. I think I’ve learned something new.”

“Oh yeah? What’s that?”

I said, “I’ve learned that if I run slow between workouts, I have really fresh legs the next day.”

Never one to miss a beat, Russ smirked, “Look at you! Learning something new about your body at the age of 54!”

“I’m 53,” I snapped.

He laughed.

“Only six more months, baby!”

But Russ wasn’t wrong. I did learn something new. I should have known better, but somewhere along the way, I decided the rules didn’t apply to me. I would never have trained the horses this way, so why did I set these unrealistic expectations for myself?

I often used the banking analogy of “deposits and withdrawals” to explain the overall goal of horse training to my students. As a professional, my job was always to make deposits in every horse. This meant giving them an accurate ride to the jumps; never asking too much; always being fair; and instilling confidence at all costs. Students learning to ride, or training a young horse for the first time, often make withdrawals during the process. This comes with the territory for anyone learning a new skill, especially one that involves partnering with an animal, just like it did for me when I was a kid learning to ride. Common mistakes, or “withdrawals,” can include jumping up a horse’s neck in front of a show-jump; pulling back on the reins in the air (over a jump); galloping too fast at a cross-country obstacle; or losing your temper in the dressage arena. The list of how to fuck-up when learning to ride is endless.

But here’s the thing: horses are insanely forgiving creatures….to a point. It is this point—the point where withdrawals outnumber deposits—that a rider seeks to never reach in their chosen partner. This point of no return is found deep inside a horse and happens when a rider has “lied” too many times for the horse to forgive them. When this happens, a horse might decide water jumps are never safe, or maybe it’s the dressage warm-up or the triple combination in the show-jumping that feels dangerous to them.

In the end, the rider is supposed to act like a parent. There is a difference between a parent teaching their kid to swim, then challenging them to swim to the other side of the pool, versus throwing them in the pool and standing there watching them struggle, hoping they eventually figure it out. Horses don’t like it when their riders throw them into the proverbial pool.

Anyway, back from my segue to running. The commonality is I only recently discovered all of my running thus far has been “withdrawals.” Attempting to run fast every run hasn’t been fair to my body. How did I believe this was a smart thing to do?

Now I have learned to make deposits by slogging. While I felt total pleasure all day long making deposits when riding, I have to admit they aren’t nearly as much fun when running. No intersection between adrenaline and fatigue exists when running so slow, leaving my mind unsatisfied. Running might always be a moving meditation, but slogging isn’t fast enough to absorb the noise of my monkey brain. I suppose, hidden in this frustration, is another lesson waiting to be discovered down the road. (Pun intended.)

I wasn’t kidding earlier when I asked when running became an elitist sport. I remember lining up for the DC Rock-n-Roll Half next to a couple of college girls in dirty sneakers and sweatpants, wearing no bib. They were running the race, but weren’t registered. I had no problem with this. You can afford the fee or you can’t, and I applaud others’ efforts to exercise and challenge themselves physically. Derek Thompson recently quoted a previous guest on Plain English. He said, “The greatest medical intervention known to mankind is exercise.” I agree. Running is my silver bullet, even more than writing, which is painful to admit to myself, because I love writing. But running, sort of, fixes… everything.

With an updated training regimen that includes a lot of slogging, I have also updated my closet, specifically shoes. I have invested in several pairs. I used to keep two good pairs at all times and an old pair in case of sloppy footing. Now I keep two fresh pairs of my favorite OnCloud Cloudmonsters for tempo runs; an old pair of these for the slop; Adidas Adizero Evo Sl for longer runs and slogs; and the Nike Zoom Fly 6 for sprints and race-pace runs. All in all, I am about $1,000 deep in running shoes, all for the sake of reducing the risk of injury. By wearing different sneakers for different workouts, I change how my feet and body absorb the concussion and impact with each pair.

When I rode horses, I kept six pairs of Sergio Grasso boots at all times. Two pairs were for horse shows; two pairs were for daily use at the barn; and two pairs served as back-ups, in case of bad weather or any other malfunction. Back then, that was roughly $6,000 worth of riding boots at one time, bought new and rotated as they wore. One thousand dollars for running shoes sounds a lot more palatable in comparison, but it certainly is a slippery slope, especially when this investment is supposed to occur every four months. It makes me consider what might be next. One day, so too shall running become unaffordable for the average, avid fan.

Houston posts many photos on her page, some of which she titles “Today’s Beautiful Thing.” I don’t know where she lives—or visits—but the landscapes she shares are rugged and remote, beautiful, and appear off the grid. Even more charming, it is clear Houston is a dog lover, particularly of Irish Wolfhounds, going so far as to pen a novel called Sight Hound about a playwright and the bond she has with her dog. It took me months to realize this Pam Houston was the same Pam Houston who authored Cowboys are My Weakness, a collection of short stories I relished in my twenties.

This past September, I had no difficulty finding “something beautiful today” while traveling up the west side of Italy with my husband. Starting in Rome, specifically Vatican City, the beauty was so vast that it often overwhelmed my senses, making it difficult to savor each beautiful thing as fully as I hoped to. Amongst all the gilded luxury and grandiosity, I found the simple “Fontana della Pigna,” the thirteen-foot bronze pine cone set in the aptly named “Cortile della Pigna,” or the Pine Cone Courtyard, to be mesmerizing. My photo here strips the sculpture of its magnificence that one can absorb in person.

In Christianity, the pine cone symbolizes eternal life, rebirth, and spiritual awakening and enlightenment. I was taken with the sculpture, because of its symbolism, and also because I made the association that the sculpture resembled a “spiral,” like a coiled spring, an educational metaphor I often used to help my equestrian students make a leap in their understanding. When a student complained that they were still struggling to learn a technique they had been learning last year, I was quick to point out that they weren’t in the same place as far as their capabilities, and that every rider’s “learning journey” lived on a spiral.

Their struggle might feel the same, but the rider was actually on a different rung of the coiled spring because of all the work they had done leading up to this point in their educational journey. As my students’ eyes on the ground, it was easy for me to measure the incalculable improvements, for I had a perfect view of the entire picture. But to them, deep in the struggle, challenges can feel indistinguishable. As an ambitious professional at that time, I understood their frustrations firsthand. It wasn’t called a “learning curve” for nothing. Growth oftentimes isn’t linear, but rather circular. Many times I reminded myself of this truth in order forfeit my own frustrations for the greater good: progress. Seeing the towering pine cone that day, in all of its glory, everything clicked into place. To me, it was the perfect representation of enlightenment, with its ideal shape and many layers.

Returning to a drought in Houston was like being dropped into a photo shot entirely of negative space. I had to cultivate patience to find my “something beautiful today” among the meager offerings. Always, always, there were the dogs; like Bergy when he flattened his ears behind him and smiled, weaving his needle-nose all the way to my hand, so happy he was to see me; or Tuukka, who sung his greeting like a true hound before grabbing a stuffed toy from his pile to present to me, his big chocolate eyes squinted together in pure joy; this from the dog who once cowered any time we walked through the door. There is beauty in the moment but also in the transformation.

One day at the park where I walk the dogs was especially bleak. I was surrounded by a beige landscape of parched stalky grass, dryer than straw, under the blazing Texas sun. Staring at the gravel in front of my shoes, I asked the universe, “Where is my something beautiful today?” repeating it like a mantra. I swallowed the thick air and looked up. To my left, I noticed a small patch of yellow flowers, more like a bouquet. I stopped so I could look further down the road. I scanned for more flowers, but there weren’t any. I turned around and looked behind me, but the field was empty besides the grass.

I thanked my dad for the flowers. Since he’s been gone, almost two years now, I considered that he must be the purveyor of each day’s beautiful thing. When he died, I ran and hiked these same woods, bawling my eyes out, wailing at times, shedding my sorrow into the universe one footfall at a time. The woods are where we meet.

Not long ago, I had just begun my walk when I came across a pine cone standing upright on the gravel road. I stopped and bent down, staring at its perfect architecture, the confluence of symmetry with asymmetrical parts. The pine cone was perfect. I thought of the one in Rome.

I stood back up and surveyed the area. The pine tree was tall, but sparse of branches. I couldn’t find any other pine cones, destroyed, trampled, intact, or otherwise. This perfect specimen felt like a gift. The dogs and I continued our walk, but on the way back, I stopped and gingerly picked up the pine cone, carrying it to the car. It now sits at the front of my desk.

It’s not usually too challenging to discover something beautiful in the woods, because nature has a way of consistently delivering. There are the clandestine hogs, of course, and the coyotes, and even the copperheads and corals I sometimes find myself hopping over at the last second on my runs. Their camouflage is quite convincing! It was only a few days ago that I spotted a great Barred owl near the scraggly tree that had yielded the pine cone. The owl stared at me with its huge, dark eyes, its head slowly swiveling to follow me as I headed down the road.

But “something beautiful today” isn’t limited to visuals. Sometimes the source is a sound, such as Bergy lifting his head from a dead sleep in the middle of the night to howl like a wolf would at a full moon. I remember the hair stood up on the back of my neck. I had never heard Bergy make this sound before. He howled twice, long and slow, uninterrupted. But I think Bergy was as surprised as I was. He opened his eyes when he finished, looking embarrassed at first, like he wasn’t sure what had happened. I wondered what he possibly dreamt about to cause such an unusual occurrence.

“Something beautiful” can tap any of the senses. It can also be just a warm thought or feeling. It never fails: when I spread jam on my toast at breakfast, I don’t think of my grandfather without smiling. He liked his layer of jam thicker than his slice of toast, and so do I.

In my heyday as an equestrian, there wasn’t a more incredible feeling than galloping a fast horse. For a few minutes, I felt like I was part of the power and speed in the natural order of things, like it was somehow harnessed, which sounds redundant, but is also an incredible illusion. It was like catching a ride on a strike of lightning.

Hard to believe next month it will be ten years since I left the horses. My friends don’t ask me as often anymore whether I miss it, but my answer has never wavered. I miss the horses and the relationships I had with them. Now, I’m left to my own two feet to feel any speed or power, which is… deflating. But running every day does fill me with a sense of accomplishment and gratitude, even the runs that are total garbage. On those days, I can’t seem to find the starter switch to my lungs, or my legs feel potted in cement. But even on those days, I remember all my body has done for me in the past: twenty-five years of riding horses, and supporting myself, through hard, physical work. My body is still going, arguably with more care and consideration, as it should. But I’m out there even now, searching for “something beautiful today.” The world is full of them. What’s yours?

The first couple of weeks of waking up after two hours had me considering whether my body was trying to send a message:

You belong in Europe.

Ahhh, sounds good, I thought, but I merely said, “Yes, but the details are murky.”

(I mean, what about the dogs??)

I was waking, fully alert, before some of my neighbors lay down for the night. I suppose if an entrepreneur could bottle this energy, they’d make a fortune. I had more than a few superlative workdays, sixteen hours long and longer. But then I got tired. And cranky.

I just want to fucking sleep.

Kinda ironic for a girl whose mantra used to be: “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.” This translated to doing whatever needed to be done to complete everything. Count me in. I would repeat this mantra when I saw my day’s (or week’s) dance card brimming with the insurmountable. Riding at five different farms? Check. Driving four horses to Montreal at 2 a.m.? Check. Mucking twelve stalls, riding seven, cleaning all the tack? Check.

Got it!

My heart would beat a little faster those days, and I was ready to dig in, no matter how long it took to finish. Anyone who has shared a barn with me knows what this meant: leading horses from the fields to their stalls in the dark, all the way to the two-mile jog past dusk—because riding itself didn’t lend enough fitness—long after the last horse was put away properly and the cement aisle was swept spotless.

But I’ve always been an eight-hour sleeper. Early to bed, early to rise. Pretty much the only one in my family who rolled like this. It’s been the last few years, since the pandemic, that I started waking at three or 3:30 a.m. This is a couple of hours earlier than I usually start my day, but it’s not an unwelcome aberration. I’ve made the most of this time, before my early-bird husband rises, writing, just like I’m doing now. There is nothing more conducive to uninterrupted writing than an entire household asleep, including the dogs curled in their beds, who ignore me as I tiptoe around gathering my things.

It took almost two months to reset my circadian rhythm after Italy. That’s a lot of sleepless nights and crankiness to boot. Over that period, I tried melatonin, THC, alcohol, no alcohol, a combination of those things, all with mixed results. Now, I am taking magnesium and melatonin, which allows for light sleep until my magical hour of 3 a.m. I don’t want to take these two things forever, but this is progress. Sure, I’ll sleep when I’m dead, but I’d like to start now, please.

Just a little bit?

Whenever I meet someone from New Jersey, I say, “Every good story starts in New Jersey!” They chuckle uncomfortably, perplexed by the joke they don’t understand but are included in. I’m thinking Springsteen, Nicholson, American Pastoral, when I say it, and also, what other state can name one rest stop after Judy Blume, followed by another named for Bon Jovi? Besides, what about those tomatoes and corn? They don’t call Jersey “The Garden State” for nothing.

I wasn’t born there, but I did grow up there. I had one of those idyllic childhoods in the seventies when little kids trick-or-treated without parental supervision, running door to door with empty pillowcases in their greedy little hands, and waited for the school bus with the other kids under a tree in a neighbor’s front yard, regardless of the weather. The worst thing that ever happened to me at the bus stop was when “Number Nine,” another neighbor’s young pup, stopped by one morning and wouldn’t stop humping me. The dog was taller than me, and it was work to fend him off. At the age of nine, I was confused about why he picked me and not the other kids, and why he chose me over the sandwich I was holding in my brown paper bag. I didn’t know if I should feel special or embarrassed by the attention, a theme that would seem to run rampant for the next thirty years.

My mom and I just visited our friends in New Jersey, who still live there, albeit at the shore now. It’s been fifty-three years of friendship. Not many people can say they knew someone else before they knew themselves, but this is true of me and Heather. I had to wait four months for Heather to be born, but after that, we were dumped in the same playpen together, and the rest is history. We were inseparable, despite our differences, until I was eleven, when my family relocated to Houston for my dad’s job.

From the beginning, we programmed “compromise” into each other, due to our differences, a trait that would endure, both the good and the bad about it. As kids, Heather voted to play Ladies of the Day, when we dressed up and carried purses to each other’s houses for a tea party. I lobbied for time with the ponies, either riding the real ones, Domino and Nino, or pretending we were horses ourselves, jumping courses in the backyard, which was really nothing more than picnic benches turned on their sides. Neither of us was really happy with the other’s choice, sighing when we lost the draw, but we sucked it up and went along, because doing something borderline intolerable together was more fun than going it alone.

Heather and I lost touch from time to time as we grew up, sometimes going years without reconnecting, but despite these periods of distance, we have always been able to pick up where we left off. I think there is something truly unique about the trust and familiarity that develops within a childhood friendship that becomes irreplaceable later in life, making it the unicorn of all relationships; to know there is someone who exists that nearly knows you as well as the two people who really do: your parents.

Mom and I met in Newark, having come from Houston and DC, respectively. I worked for a couple of days in the city with the other members on my team, which included a team-building night of karaoke. When I heard this was on the schedule, I thought back to my only experience nearly twenty-five years earlier, when girlfriends insisted I sing Like a Virgin at my bridal shower. Luckily, this didn’t happen in public; we were at a friend’s house, but I sounded awful, and I could never understand why people thought this was a fun thing to do, in public and on a stage, no less. But a lot has changed since then. Now, groups of friends—or in this case, coworkers—can sing in a private room, more like a sound booth, with superb acoustics, holding a souped-up mic that smooths out all the irregularities and imprecisions from an untrained voice. Couple that with alcohol and every one of us sounded like rockstars. I know you’re dying to ask, so I’ll go ahead and tell you. I sang White Rabbit. For a hot second, I thought I had missed my calling.

I squeezed in a quick visit to Delaplane after that to visit a friend before heading to New Jersey for the weekend. Our plan was for a scenic bike ride (with a killer hill) and a stop at the winery on our way home. We had almost reached the turnaround point when we came upon a couple of walkers ahead of us. I don’t know how I recognized them from behind, but I did. As we passed them, I turned my head to double-check before shouting their names. It was my old neighbor from Upperville walking with her now-grown-up son. I hadn’t seen either of them in twenty years, when he was just a baby, but she looked the same. I had to marvel that I was riding bikes with an old neighbor, now a good friend, when I came upon another old neighbor I hadn’t seen in decades. What were the odds? Seeing that I was next headed to New Jersey to visit more neighbors, I had a bit of a nostalgic moment thinking about all of the great neighbors I’ve been fortunate to have crossed paths with.

I landed in Newark a couple of hours before Mom did, so I decided I would grab lunch and work while I waited. I have to admit I didn’t think it odd to order fish and chips at 10:30 a.m., as my first meal of the day, but I was flabbergasted when they didn’t have a single jar of malt vinegar on hand to serve with it. Facing me, drying a glass, the bartender shook his head. He said, “I’ve only had like five people ask for it the whole time I’ve worked here, and that’s been eight years.” Only in Newark, Buddy, I thought, stuffing a dry fry in my mouth.

What did we do while we were in New Jersey? Mostly laughed. A lot. As in the kind of crying laughing about old memories that makes your face sore and leaves you winded. One day, we ventured to Seaside Heights and walked on the beach. The water was green and clear, made even more beautiful by the pods of dolphins swimming past and the couple of whales we spotted a little further out. I know the boardwalk gets crowded in the summer, but I had to admit the Jersey beach is probably one of its best-kept secrets. If I could afford a house at the beach, I would buy it there. We topped a lovely afternoon off with a lobster roll at a local spot right next to where the fishing boats docked. This was only my second lobster roll ever…because the first one years ago wasn’t great. I learned a valuable lesson in Seaside. Where a lobster roll comes from matters, and also what you put on it. I’m a huge fan of mayo, but butter and hot lobster go together like chocolate and hot fudge. I want to say it was the best lobster roll of my life, but since there have only been two, I don’t think my endorsement alone can lend credence to how delicious this thing was, but I’m positive any connoisseur would have agreed with me.

The trip was a whirlwind, but I got to spend quality time with people I adore and try my hand at some new experiences, which I’m always game for. The mild weather made me miss the northeast even more, reminding me that the time to bid a return is likely sooner rather than later. As Heather’s teenage son reminded us all, twirling his lacrosse stick from hand to hand amidst the crystal in the dining room, our heads bobbing, waiting for impact, “more of our life was behind us” than it was in his case. The kid wasn’t wrong. The best time for visiting with friends, making new memories while recounting old ones, is now.

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Halloween, Daylight Savings, The New York City Marathon. This can mean only one thing: Soup Season. It’s my favorite time of the year. I’ve always loved autumn and all of its trappings. Maybe I find it special because I so enjoyed its hallmark features growing up as a kid in New Jersey, such as the chameleoning landscape and chilled air, only to trade it for seven dusty years in Houston (poetic license, since Houston is on the gulf, but roll with it since it reminds me of a delightful story about a fantastic wine called 8 Years in the Desert.)

Back then, I couldn’t wait to pull a thick woolly sweater from the back of my dresser to wear under my green puffer jacket into the Big Apple for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. We’d park by the Central Park zoo to meet up with other friends there, sipping the hot cocoa we’d brought in a thermos while we waited, before all of us shuffled through the crowd en route to a spot in the front row.

One time, when the parade was over, I skipped down the sidewalk to catch up with my family after gawking at the city, much like my sighthound these days spotting airplanes amidst the clouds. I slipped my hand easily into my Mom’s, completely chuffed with the day. I could barely contain my glee. But when I looked up, a stranger’s face smiled back at me. I had grabbed the wrong hand. The woman laughed and nodded towards my family, who were in front of us. “They’re right there,” she said. I dropped her hand and needled my way past.

Back in Texas these last two years, I miss the warm colors, but the weather is finally turning, and in this household, there is an inverse correlation between the temp and the soup. Mom hatched our first pot on Halloween afternoon. She made chili. She constructs hers with ground beef, lots of beans and onions, and all the other usual suspects, but the secret ingredient, in my opinion, is the Penzey’s ancho chili powder added in equal proportion to the regular chili powder. It’s not precisely what a mole sauce is to an enchilada, compared to its regular red sauce, but you get the idea. It adds another layer—a “profile,” if you will—of decadence and flavor.

I love soup. I always have. In this way, my father and I differed. He never considered soup “dinner” or “a meal.” Every time I announced soup was on the menu, he’d frown and grunt, rapping his knuckle on the table. “That’s not dinner,” he’d say, to which I’d chirp, “Well, it is tonight! Don’t worry, Dad, you’ll like it!” That last sentence was likely a lie, since he was determined not only to dislike the soup, but also the entire dinner experience.

It was as if soup was somehow cheating, although my dad had no problem eating sushi or fast food and calling it a meal, both worlds apart, yet unique unto themselves. I wondered if some of it had to do with the fact that everything in the bowl touched. There are those who don’t like the foods added to their plate to mix with one another—whatsoever—and soup is nothing short of a deconstruction zone on a countertop assembled unceremoniously with the glue that holds it all together in the bowl: liquid. Maybe, for some people, soup is a nightmare, but it begs the question: How do these people handle the messy middle: Sandwiches?

Last night I made one of my favorites: Sausage, Sweet Potato, and Kale Soup, a recipe shared by my sister. Since there are many versions of this recipe available online, I quickly found this particular one, as it was simple and easy to follow, and the website was user-friendly, without any pop-ups or videos opening every few seconds. The soup turned out hearty, garlicky, and will last a few days, which is one of the many bonuses of soups.

After ten years, Russ has finally rubbed off on me. Admittedly, a better cook, he leaves his soups partially deconstructed, kept in different containers within the fridge, assembling them only before reheating. This, he said, was to prevent certain ingredients from breaking down in the soup base, such as pasta or potatoes, which can become too soft and disintegrate when left for too long.

So I left the roasted sweet potatoes in their own container this time, and the shredded kale still in its bag. When I was ready to eat, I grabbed a handful of kale and placed it at the bottom of my bowl. I poured the heated broth, which contained everything except the kale and sweet potatoes, over the top of it, blanching the kale to a bright Kelly green. I added a serving spoonful of roasted sweet potatoes on top, still vivid orange, almost like they were a garnish. Now combined, every texture and every taste was as it should be.

Several years ago, a young man on Russ’s work team told me he ate steak every Friday night. We were at an Irish bar for happy hour with the team, and while people pigged out on apps and alcohol, here sat this young man at a table with a paper napkin tucked into the collar of his white button-down shirt. He reminded me of Alfalfa from The Little Rascals.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because,” he said. “When I was a kid, we never had steak. We hardly had enough food, period.”

Wiping the grease dripping down his chin, he continued. “I told myself when I ‘made it,’ when I was ‘rich’ and had enough money, I was going to eat steak every Friday night.”

So he did.

I’ve thought about this kid a lot over the years, whom I met only once, by chance. I knew he wasn’t rich, by any means, but in his eyes, he had made it, and he was. I knew how he felt. It wasn’t steak, and I’m not rich either, but Soup Season is a celebration of all of those things: security, safety, sharing, and warmth. It’s a woolly sweater pulled from the back of a dresser before heading to a Thanksgiving Day parade with your family. And for those who need just that, there is always a seat at my table.

It sits on the 17th floor of a 21-story courthouse. Large windows hang catty-cornered on two walls, providing sweeping views of the city below. One wall stands bare except for a dry-erase board, blank. At the far end, two matching bathroom doors face each other like mirrored jean pockets stitched in chrome.

The twelve strangers must reach three separate verdicts. But I didn’t know any of that the Monday morning I drove downtown—it was the day after my birthday. One minute, I was eating Russ’ Italian Cream cake; the next, I was one year and one day older, crawling through Houston rush hour, another set of wheels in the city’s grind.

It was my first jury duty. In D.C., I’d postponed my summons several times, and they’d simply vanished. Not in Houston. The court rescheduled the moment I postponed my date (because of my upcoming travel). Two months later, standing on a Nashville street corner, I glanced at my phone and saw the reminder pop up—for the next day. “Oh shit,” I muttered. “Now what?” Luckily, I could reschedule one last time.

When I finally checked in to the courthouse, about two hundred of us filled a creme-colored bullpen for nearly an hour. Then, the bailiffs split us into four groups by the last digits of our summons’ numbers. My group—thirty-two people—was lined up, handed laminated juror cards, and herded down the hall.

We squeezed into two lifts and emerged on the seventh floor. We stood once more in order before a closed courtroom door. But before we entered, the bailiff turned us around. Something about the case had changed. I learned that because we hadn’t actually made it inside the courtroom, we would now be reassigned to another case and not dismissed.

This time, sixty-four of us lined up—the first thirty-two from my original group, in order, plus thirty-two more. Later, I’d learn: thirty-two meant a misdemeanor. Sixty-four meant a felony.

When we entered the courtroom, it felt oddly like a church—benches, silence, and the sense of judgment hanging in the air.

The prosecutor rose first. He looked impossibly young—baby-faced, clean-cut, sideburns just starting to silver. “What we know,” he said evenly, “is that this was a death caused by a knife.” He gestured toward the defendant. “This gentleman stands accused of causing that death.”

The defendant sat partially turned toward us, hands folded in his lap, expression unreadable. He could’ve been twenty-one or thirty-five. It was hard to tell with his smooth skin, short cornrows, and thick black-rimmed glasses. He looked interested in the process of voir dire, but also unperturbed, almost like he didn’t have skin in the game, or was riding a wave of confidence.

The process of voir dire lasted more than four hours. It’s less “jury selection” than “jury elimination,” as both sides chip away at biases. The prosecutor was smooth, deliberate, but the defense attorney … not so much. Mid-fifties, gold signet ring, custom suit—he looked like he went to Vanderbilt or Washington and Lee—but he fumbled out of the gate like a newly-minted court-appointed attorney. I thought, Buddy, were you handed this case five minutes ago? Cause you’re losing and you haven’t even started yet.

By the end, I was wiped out. I drove home in a daze and fell asleep before dinner. The next day, I wondered how it was going to be possible to make it through a week and a half of proceedings.

The next morning, the trial began. The defendant wore the same black jacket and the same glasses. Trying hard not to look at the guy, I knew in my gut that my dogs probably lived better than this man did. I wondered what his days could be like—or were like—before jail. Did he have a warm place to sleep? Did he ever sleep in the same place twice? Did he know the difference between good pain, such as exercising (on purpose), and bad pain, such as losing a friend or family member unexpectedly? One kind of pain fills you up, and the other one hollows you out like an empty corn husk. I wondered if his parents were the kind who told him they loved him or whether they themselves were broken. I was about to find out about a lot of this and more.

The prosecution presented its case for the first four days of the trial. They started by stating the facts. This man stabbed someone multiple times. This was an irrefutable fact both parties agreed to. What was up for discussion, the proverbial “seed of doubt,” was “the why.” Was this self-defense? Did the victim “have it coming?” The prosecution aimed to prove that this homicide was anything but self-defense. I used the word “homicide” in the previous sentence, versus the word “murder,” because the defense objected every time the prosecution said the word “murder.” Until they proved it was murder, they could only refer to the death as a homicide. (See? Words matter.)

The prosecution rested, and the defense called one person to the stand on behalf of the defendant: his mother. I’ve since thought about this a lot. What must it feel like to an old, frail woman to enter a courtroom to plead on behalf of her adult son? What must it feel like for the man who only has his mother to speak up for him? The defense pulled out his birth certificate and asked the mother what was written under the word “father.”

“Unknown,” she said. It reminded me of the time I winced reading Tuukka’s first vet record. Before he came to live with us, before he became our Tuukka, under “name,” it just read, “Undecided.”

Before the trial started, a friend suggested I be the foreman. I wasn’t opposed. But after enduring the deliberations that followed the proceedings, I’m glad I didn’t offer to do it. Twelve people trying to reach a consensus three times in a row was brutal. I began to think it was rather amazing that the judicial process still existed in the first place, and still worked the same way it always was intended to work. I’m going to get a lot of haters for saying this, but jury duty poses a strong argument in support of AI. Getting twelve people to agree on anything proved fraught with strong emotions, flying in the face of the cognitive fallacies that often follow, especially when we were forced to make several life-changing decisions.

First, we had to decide if he was guilty. Sounds easy, right? Well, it wasn’t. There is always that “one person,” and this was true for jury duty. We weren’t initially in consensus whether the guy who stabbed another man several times was guilty or not. I have to admit, at that moment, I really hated that woman. I seethed with anger. I thought, “You are what gives every liberal Democrat a bad name right here, right now.” She finally came around, but then we had to deliberate whether this was a “crime of passion” or not. This determination would set the parameters of sentencing. If the crime was “sudden passion,” sentencing began at five years of prison time, all the way to life. If it wasn’t a crime of sudden passion, sentencing began at fifteen years to life.

We deliberated for nine hours on this alone. I applauded myself for not saying much as I listened to people’s opinions fly across the table as to why this was or wasn’t a crime of passion. My heart was beating out of my chest, but my lips were pressed together, shut tight. Maybe I am beginning to mature in my fifties. Finally, someone looked at me and said, “You haven’t said much. What do you think?”

I said, “Stabbing someone dozens of times in the back is not a crime of passion.”

Going meta, I began to think this was where we would fail as a species. A microcosm to the macrocosm we live in, when the facts are laid out, scraping off any wrought, irrelevant emotion proved impossible. I was in a room full of smart people—an M.D., a chemical engineer, teachers, an artist, contractors, all successful people by any paradigm. I consider myself a compassionate person, but I also believe the guilty must reckon with the consequences of their actions, no matter their previous experiences. Let us not forget the one who died.

I was shocked how many jurors brushed the facts aside to focus on their “idealized” version of what might have happened. Certainly, this was led by their own sense of compassion and empathy, which is always a fair approach to life’s questions, but I learned a very valuable lesson that day: It’s easy to have sympathy for the person standing right in front of you and forget about the pain and suffering of the victim who is no longer here. It became clear to me that victims need advocates, especially after they’re gone. When it came to sentencing, I suggested thirty years. I thought this was generous, considering.

“Why are you so set on thirty years?” they asked.

I answered, “Biology. How many sixty-five-year-old killers do you know?”

I figured thirty years was enough time for any rehabilitation to occur, whether it be supervised intervention with counseling and medication, or just simply enough time to heal what wounds could be healed in this person—enough so that he could not be a danger to society, if not a productive member with a decent life.

Countering a fellow juror, I continued, “I mean, if your child lived down the street from this person in fifteen years,” I asked, “and he harmed them, wouldn’t you regret it?”

She seethed back, “What sixty-five-year-old Mr. John Doe does is none of my business. I’m here to evaluate and prescribe sentencing for a thirty-five-year-old man, that’s it.” I found this answer wildly confusing, coming from a mother.

But jury duty touched me in a way I could not have predicted. I considered how only in this situation, in this courtroom, would my life intersect with someone like John Doe. After we found him guilty, we learned of his troubled past, which started long before he was sent to juvie for seventeen years. Yet, why did I feel like my life was in closer proximity to his than certainly Jeff Bezos’ or Mackenzie Scott’s, and sometimes this was true of some of the people I shared space with daily, especially when I rode horses professionally. I felt so far away from the people I worked for—owners and clients—and much closer to the immigrants who worked part-time for me. I shared in the scarcity they felt, maybe the insecurity of daily life, as well as their formidable work ethic that no white kids could touch, with the exception of three great kids across a twenty-five-year time period. That’s not a lot.

During the trial, we watched a video of the defendant’s interrogation. He was already being held for another crime that occurred after the murder they had just discovered. Skinny and strung out, sitting in a chair in the corner of a small room, he said, “ I keep asking Jesus, why me?… I am a man, I am not a bitch! … You see, my time ain’t like your time. Your time is 24 hours. But I live 48, 72 hours in a day. It’s Demon Time, Man …Time don’t make no sense to me.”

My stomach lurched watching this wretched soul pontificate his life. I knew he spoke the truth. I believed him. I often say I feel like I’ve lived three years in this one alone, or that I’ve lived several lives in this lifetime already. I understood. I got it. Despite our differences, I had way more in common with John Doe than I wanted to admit.

Lacing up in the dark the last few days, my feet chasing the spotlight shining from my forehead, I’ve had plenty of time to think and run with no distractions. I considered how I once thought running was lost to me forever, so pernicious were the pains in my fascia and the small bone spur on my right heel. The size of a pinprick, it has caused its share of agony. “Oh, this is much too small to do anything about,” the doctor said. “Insurance will never cover something like this [surgery].” (This experience sums up health care in America pretty well.) So, basically, what I heard was, “Live with it.”

So I carried on. I tried many different insoles inside my shoes and compression socks for recovery; there was all the ice and ice packs applied to my insteps; and the multiple tubes of diclofenac sodium I went through, rubbing the cream into my ankles, my arches, my left elbow (don’t ask, because I don’t know), and my right knee. This helped the most, but only for a little while.

But if this post is starting to sound like a self-indulgent reverie about perseverance and determination, it’s not. I wasn’t thinking about any of that, about “living to fight another day,” like I might have in the past. I kept running, no matter how my feet showed up, because it was about the running. I run, no matter the shape or form of it, the way others eat breakfast or pray without a thought. It’s just what happens.

I’ve often wondered why the horses didn’t stick to me in this same way after a lifetime of pursuing them. To this day, almost ten years later, I’m not sure I have a complete answer. Is it possible to love something so much—too much—so when it burns out, it can never be revived? Does a phoenix eventually stop rising from the ashes? (It’s not a cat, after all.) I still love the horses with all my heart, but on a spiritual plane. Any thought of engaging with them seriously (is there another way?) nauseates me. I realize this is not a normal response, and it’s a sad one.

But riding and running are conjoined in relationship. They are both beautiful unto themselves and require study and devotion to practice with any modicum of symbiosis. I am grateful to the horses for all of the incredible and hard lessons they taught me. Running is the same. In my early thirties, it improved my riding to the point where the last horse of the day had just as good a ride as the first one. Running improved my flatwork and my cross-country riding, both endurance sports in their own respective ways.

Running in the dark this past week, I realized I’m at an age where running is no longer in service to me. Rather, I am in service to it. As I run, I listen to my footfalls to hear if they sound the same or if one foot lands harder and louder. I am considering how my feet land in their shoes. My right foot tends to land on the outside blade first, rolling in to my big toe (like a club foot?) while my left foot lands almost perfectly flat from the ball down to all five toes like a proper handshake with a good grip. Sometimes, when I try to correct myself, my right foot runs into my left foot. I’m just waiting for the day I go ass over tea kettle like I used to when my spurs tangled with each other.

I tend to drift right when running (like show jumping?), so I watch the imaginary line in front of me, making sure not to veer. Keeping my arms “in their lanes,” so they never come close to crossing my midsection, helps. Sometimes, when I’m struggling and tired, my feet start stabbing the ground and falling behind me. It is then I must remember to keep my toes in front, viewing them like “chair pose” in yoga, and think about lifting my knees so my step keeps a “rotation” to it.

This is my favorite impasse, where the rubber meets the road, when I have to start to dig in. The proverbial “wall” is ahead, but still a ways away. This is where creating a sense of ease to combat the fatigue is key, even if I must artificially manufacture it. This is a brand-new lesson for me. I’ve discovered the more ease I can muster, the faster I usually go, and the longer my run is pain-free.

On that note, I’ve also discovered the value of resting, not as an afterthought, but as an inscribed, necessary part of the process. I once begrudged it, now I embrace it. I know how easily running can be taken away. I’d rather plan for an “interruption” than reconcile a termination. After all, beginning again is another chance to learn something new. Hopefully, tripping over my own two feet is not one of those things.

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I had just carried two armsful of dirty clothes down the stairs and dumped them in the washer before returning upstairs. That’s when I realized my phone was missing. I scourged the usual spots: the desk in my home office and the side table by the couch; I even checked the bathroom sink. I doubled back to the bed. That was the final location I surfed past where I might have dropped my phone en route to scooping up my dirty clothes. Not seeing it, I backtracked my entire path from the closet to the washing machine and back again.

“Note to self,” I said to Russ, exasperated and winded from the steps and equal measures of anxiety, “It is better to turn the washing machine off before sticking your arm down in it, than not.”

Russ shook his head. “Whadya go and do that for?”

I snapped back. I was irritated. “Because I thought my phone was in there!” What I wanted to say was, why else would I stick my arm in a tub full of dirty clothes and soapy water churning together, except to retrieve a valuable item? Duh.

But I didn’t.

That’s when he called me a squirrel.

I was panicking now and starting to question every move I made. I ran back downstairs and checked the fridge. Maybe what I thought was the half-and-half returned to the shelf inside the door was really my phone. I ran back upstairs and tossed the usual suspects once more. I picked up the stacks of magazines and books and peered underneath. I shook out the dogs’ fleece blankets crumpled in their beds and the heavy knit throw stuffed in the corner of the couch. Just like that, my black phone bounced free onto a cushion, like a dead flea hitting the floor off a hound dog. After that debacle, there was a similar expedition to find my passport. Russ had pulled his own from the briefcase that morning, where we kept our important documents, only to inform me mine was not where it was supposed to be.

This was the second time I thought this trip wouldn’t happen or wasn’t meant to be. The first time was in April after an unexpected tax bill and Russ losing his contract. That time we postponed the trip from June to August, but now I was beginning to think that, for some reason, this trip was a bad idea.

By the time we sat in our seats the next day, I was spent. This might sound ideal before an eight-hour flight—and I was out before wheels up—but I have a bad habit of crashing from the get-go, only to wake shortly after take off believing a third of the journey was behind us. This was still true sitting in my middle seat, although I roused long enough to hear the pilot say we’d be delayed a bit longer. The winds had shifted with the sudden rainstorm, prompting the air traffic controllers to “reverse” the airport. I had no idea such a thing existed. Can they “reverse” airports? I pictured DCA with its long runway over the Potomac River before touching pavement at the last second. How would that work? But I wasn’t awake long enough to answer my question.

We were two hours late leaving, and our layover in Chicago was only two hours long. Russ and I hustled our rucksacks through O’Hare, threading our way through crowds for a half mile (my Apple Watch confirmed), only to reach our gate and find the other passengers disembarking due to a mechanical issue. We were sweaty messes, but I began to wonder if our bad luck wasn’t shifting around like the airport had. Maybe what seemed like bad luck was actually good luck?

The next morning, we landed in Rome. I wrote in my journal, “September 1, 2025. Note to self—This is the day my feet swelled in their socks so much I could hardly slip on my unlaced sneakers. At least my ankles look normal. But they’re next.” A quick walk up the jet bridge and my shoes were loose already, but I knew what came next: compression knee-highs.

Russ hired a driver to take us to the hotel. I thought the man said his name was Marmot, but it was Mohammed. So like my father, I engaged our new driver in conversation, peppering him with questions. I discovered that he was from Iran and was working on his Master’s degree in Italy.

“What will you do after you finish?” I asked.

“America!” He said, smiling into the rearview mirror, catching my eyes with his own.

“You want to go to America?”

“Oh, yes!” He said.

I think I had forgotten it wasn’t just those desperate for a decent life and/or seeking asylum that America drew like magnets, but there were still plenty of Dreamers—not those born here—but those who believed their dreams would be, if only they could get here. As our trip went on, this edict became even more true.

The hotel in Rome sat catty-cornered to the Pantheon along the edge of the Piazza della Rotonda. We soon discovered that the square was popular in the wee hours, when young girls wandered through, belting out “Dancing Queen,” and the young men hooted and hollered.

It has been two years since I traveled intercontinentally, and before that, it was six years. This is odd for someone who crossed borders multiple times a year for the horses, whether shopping for the next superstar or spectating at a global-level championship. However, regardless of the “where” or the “why,” I have always found travel to be inspiring. There is nothing quite like a change of culture and experiences to align my perspective more unto myself. I become more of who I truly am. It might sound counterintuitive to become more of who you are the more displaced you are, but traveling does just that. It layers more perspective onto my own, and peels away the unnecessary layers, often replacing them with fresh ones, like the many petals on a peony.

A few years ago, friends and I were discussing travel when one of them shared an idea that went like this: “It’s not that you don’t like a particular place; it’s more that you don’t like that version of yourself in that place.” I’ve thought about this a lot since. Where have I been that I didn’t like a version of myself there? St. Lucia was probably the first destination where I landed and wondered, “What the fuck?” It was my first time experiencing true poverty at eye level. Driving to our “compound” (a Sands resort) from the airport, we passed rows of shanties, goats tethered on corners using short pieces of rope, and people bathing in buckets or peeing in the streets. Then they slid the gate closed behind our car, locking us in and locking them out. Every morning, I walked the 500 feet of “beachfront” back and forth, like a caged animal. There was nowhere to go. I suppose this was the entire point of the resort.

I learned a lot on that trip. I knew I could not be anywhere that cages me from freely moving around. I also cannot support a place with such abject poverty surrounding it. It just felt wrong. I cannot support “normalizing” such gratuitousness on one side of the fence while bleak scarcity is found on the other. I walked away from that experience with the opinion that resorts are nothing more than beached cruises of landlubbers gorging themselves 24 hours a day, wearing rose-colored shades.

A bit judgy of me?

Yep.

The trip to St. Lucia also happened to be my honeymoon—the first one—a foreshadowing of the future, as apt a metaphor as there ever was. The other resorters kept asking us, “So…is this your second marriage?” Because we were thirty and they decidedly….weren’t. We didn’t know yet we were “old” for honeymooners until that question surfaced over and over like the watered-down pina coladas the resort served poolside in cheap plastic cups with short straws.

Maybe if I went back now, and stayed somewhere nicer, my opinion of St. Lucia would be different, but I doubt it. If we are lucky, we do change with time, but I hope we also double down on our core values. Like oak trees planted in the ground, there is a delicate balance in all of us between our strength and our flexibility to help us withstand life’s inevitable storms and hopefully thrive.

But places are also changing with time. Visiting Italy thirty-five years later, there were noticeable differences, now viewed through the eyes of an adult. Everyone spoke English. This surprised me. Menus came with translations underneath, blackboards on sidewalks displayed the daily specials in English only, and Billie Eilish played on their radios—even the Arena in Verona cast subtitles on screens on either side of the stage. I must admit that I found this hugely helpful while trying to follow the story of Rigoletto.

People looked the same, too. Granted, Italy was littered with tourists, but everywhere in the crowd I saw the same Adidas or Nike shoes worn with the same varying cuts of blue jeans. Some even donned Skechers. (The Swatch Watch of footwear, when did Skechers become universally ubiquitous?) What was notably absent—to me—were the plump lips and fake eyelashes that surround me in America. No judgment here, just an interesting observation. It seems those trends have not transmuted Italian culture…yet.

My Italian friend remarked that culture everywhere, like wine, was converging into one another. (Like a regression to the mean.) “You see this wine?” he asked, pointing to the bottle on the table. “It all tastes the same. Whatever you buy, they produce it to taste a certain way.” His point was that wine was becoming monochromatic and generic, just like European /Western culture. I saw his point. What I didn’t want to admit was that I was guilty of doing precisely that—buying wines with similar tastes despite the grape. I have a specific profile I’m always searching for: a wine that starts big and bold and always finishes smoother than it started. I defend my quest for the “perfect” bottle by asserting that it has taken a long time to develop this palate (such as it is), not to mention the expense incurred along the way.

I assume this blanching of culture towards uniformity is a byproduct of globalization, namely its feature of 24/7 access to everyone and everything all of the time. I tried to reassure my friend that Italy had a historical context unique to itself, so rich and vast it was almost hard to fathom, and that was Italy’s great differentiator.

He said, “Yeah, but people care less and less about it.”

The crowds we experienced seemed to indicate otherwise, but I understood his point. Walking through St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, I marveled at what some interpreted as acceptable attire considering the posted dress code. The moment felt very much like an “I’m turning into my parents” TV commercial, but it made me wonder if pageantry wasn’t dead.

Our Italian friends, who live in Milan and Verona, asked us how we liked Italy. I told them I’ve always had a soft spot for Italy, ever since I was fifteen, and this sentiment still holds. I am nostalgic by nature, and for me, Italy is the epitome of what romantic and romanticized mean. I remember walking to the corner store with my mom in Sicily to buy a wedge of cheese from the shop and diving off rocks into a sea of rainbow-colored coral at the bottom. Those were the cherished memories of a young girl, but the past and the present indeed converged, standing in front of Michelangelo’s David once more, only bolstering my romanticism.

It’s the hands and the eyes.

I told our friends I thought Verona might be my favorite, but I am sure this was partly because they had grown up there. Their mother, with whom we stayed for a couple of nights, still lived there, as does one of the sisters. Called “Little Rome” due to its vast Roman history, Verona is a smaller city than Rome, yet I enjoyed the small-town feel and the beauty of the Adige River that surrounds it. Sitting in the Arena watching Rigoletto certainly didn’t tarnish my opinion either. Our friend said he loved Milan and loved living there. This made me consider that there is probably a vast difference between what makes a place great to live in and what makes it wonderful to visit.

It was only our second evening in Rome—our second evening in Italy— when Russ and I ascended the steps to the hotel rooftop bar overlooking the Pantheon. I ordered a Limoncello Spritz. I didn’t know it then, but later I would joke that limoncello had replaced my toothpaste and I was brushing religiously twice a day (#addicted).

Another couple was sitting at the table next to us, who I didn’t realize were American until they ordered.

“I’d like a martini,” she said. “One olive.”

I didn’t catch what the waitress said to her, but the woman slapped the menu down on the table and leaned back in her chair.

Laughing derisively, she said, “You mean to tell me I’m in Italy and you don’t have a single olive for my martini? Is this a joke?”

I sighed and cringed slightly, sipping my spritz.

I wanted to tell her, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do,” because the phrase fits the metaphor.

What I should have said was, “Try the limoncello, lady. No olive required.”

Connor happened to be walking past my swivel chair when she stopped. I was covered in a black smock from my neck to my knees. Cooper, my hairdresser, had just revealed the fact that she was only twenty years old.

I had asked Cooper, right before Connor showed up, “So, what does that make you? Gen Z? No, you are probably like a Gen Triple Z or something,” I said and laughed. “I mean, what comes after Gen Z anyway?”

Connor answered Cooper’s question with a pontification. “Well, she said, “I’m Gen X, so you must be Gen Y. I’m only ten years older than you, right?”

Bloody hell, I thought. There weren’t enough interventions in the world to close this gap in looks. I was a grandma compared to this girl.

“How old are you, Connor?” I asked. “If you’re only ten years older than Cooper, you can’t be Gen X.” The relief beginning to wash over me was palpable. “I’m Gen X,” I said.

Connor said she was born in 1996. Good thing I was already sitting down, or my snicker would have doubled me over. “You are not Gen X then,” I said, uncovering my phone from beneath my smock. “Let me look and see what you are. Yep, Gen Y,” I confirmed. “Barely,” I added, for Connor was on the tail end of that generation by a single year.

“I don’t even know what any of that means, Gen Triple X, or whatever,” Cooper said, shaking her head. She combed a thick ribbon of wet hair from the side of my head before sliding her index and middle fingers down to the jagged ends, where she snipped them off with scissors. Watching them hit the floor like baby shark teeth sprinkled across a swash zone was weirdly satisfying.

“I definitely did not say that,” I emphasized. “I said Triple Z. I have no idea what comes after Gen Z. Do they start over? Is it Gen A? The Fucked Generation?” (I definitely did not say that last bit.)

The hairdresser I had before was when I lived in DC. We first bonded over dogs. That’s why I liked her so much. She was nuts about this white poodley puff-piece she never wanted in the first place, but ended up taking him and taking him everywhere with her, besides the salon. She was smitten. How could I not bond with her?

For the sake of simplicity, I’ll call this hairdresser Tina. She was probably around my age, and now, I knew she loved dogs, or at least her dog. We were tight until the day she left me sitting under one of those Jane Jetson-type helmet-hairdryers for an hour or so, cutting two other women’s hair before starting my own. It was the longest appointment of my life, and for nothing.

I think this unraveling between my hairdresser and me first began when I discovered the salon, a national chain called Bubbles, now charged $50 to dry and style hair after a shampoo and cut, or in my case, after a color and a cut. This change in pricing structure was born in the aftermath of COVID. When the salon reopened following the shutdown, it did so with an updated price sheet, much like our apartment complex, which jacked rent by 18 percent as soon as the mandated rent freeze expired. (Have you heard me say this before? Too many times? Is it too much? Should I stop now?)

It took me a while to figure out why my salon bill seemed so much higher than what I estimated in my head. Funny how those receipts are never itemized. Finally, I asked the front desk to explain how my bill had reached the number on the slip of paper, breaking down one service rendered after another, until the “missing” charge —the fifty dollars unaccounted for —was revealed.

I thought, “Woohoo! Go me! Problem solved.” Armed with this new information, I told Tina at my next appointment that I no longer needed my hair dried at the end of the service. She protested.

“But it’s 40 degrees outside and raining!”

“That’s okay,” I said. “I have a ski hat and an umbrella. Besides, I’m just going to pull it back in a ponytail.”

“But you’ll get sick!”

I was unperturbed. “I won’t,” I stated. “I’ll be fine.”

Tina protested so much I finally blurted out, “Listen, I just can’t justify spending $50 for something that doesn’t matter to me. Especially for a service that was once included. I can’t do it.” My words must have slowly unraveled her heart like a bloodsucking worm until nothing was left but burnt flesh and resentment.

Funny thing, I think it was the middle statement that really undid her. Maybe she cared that I was a cheapskate, or perhaps she didn’t, but I think those words stung her the most, as if it were a personal attack on her own value system. But I had no problem with her or the service she provided. I was only thinking about the quality of wine I could buy for $50, which would never happen, but two bottles probably would. I would enjoy that a lot more. Besides, nobody leaves Baby in the corner for an hour. (All these Gen X references…anybody else get them?!)

Cooper isn’t a dog person per se, but she has cats. She adopted one, then adopted another for the first one. This I understood. She said all of her friends were having babies now instead. I winced. “At twenty?"

“Yeah, I know, right? I can’t even buy alcohol,” she said, “And I come home and my cats are all like yelling at me…and…what am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to take care of a kid?” She shook her head.

At the salon where Cooper works, the stylists have different levels, ranging from one to possibly a level four. Cooper is a one. I asked her about the various levels because I was wondering what the criteria were to advance. What I was really thinking was, “Cooper is way better than level one…”

I wanted to know who decides. Is it the salon? The state? A national governing body of hairdressing professionals across America? Did one even exist? I figured all of those orgs existed because in America, if it can be bottled and sold, it is or will be. Cooper said the salon had specific markers a stylist had to hit to move up the grades. Like cutting men’s hair, Cooper noted, or pixie cuts. I admitted my initial feeling to her.

“I have a hard time believing you are only a level one.”

Cooper laughed, “I know, right? Not only do you get a deal, but it’s a STEAL.” That made me chuckle. The kid was funny.

Spending a few hours together the other day (#bayalage), Cooper shared the recent local news. She told me she followed a news blog on social media. She just read that someone in one town over almost died when they pumped gas and the handle was laced with fentanyl. I told her when I lived in DC, I was afraid to pick up anything off the ground, or out of Tuukka’s mouth—such as the undetected chicken wings he siphoned down his throat like a funnel—or even a twenty-dollar bill. Having a “second-degree” fentanyl overdose was my biggest fear back then, but I made a mental note not to stop in that town close by for gas, even if it was 25 cents cheaper (#notworthit).

She went on to tell me about a test drive gone wrong, when the woman took off in the car with the salesman in the passenger seat, speeding and sideswiping other cars as she drove. She looked at the guy at one point and whispered, “I’m sorry.” He pleaded for his life and told her he had a family and kids. “Please don’t do this,” he begged. Somehow, the guy managed to stop the car and jumped out before she took off again.

Her final piece of bad news was about a liquor store robbery.

“Yeah,” she said. “That happened somewhere close by. On Mills Branch Road…I guess that’s a place somewhere around here…wherever that is.”

I was quiet for a second. “You mean the road?” I said, “The salon is on?”

Cooper stopped what she was doing and looked at me in the mirror.

“What?”

Pointing her scissors down at the floor, she asked, “This studio?”

“Yes, Cooper,” I chuckled, “This studio.”

“That’s the road out front?”

I busted out laughing.

“Yes, it is….ohhhh, to be young!”

I wasn’t laughing at her, so much as with her (half of that is the truth), because I knew I was that girl, and sometimes I was still that girl. It was amazing what we got away with when we didn’t know any better.

“This is the craziest place I’ve ever lived!” Cooper announced.

“WHAT?! This place??? Suburbia? Where your high school friends have baby daddies? What about murder and genocide and fentanyl in the streets?” I asked her.

She put her hand on her hip. “Wait,” she said. “Did you just compare fentanyl to having babies? Because those are two totally different things. I’d much rather have a baby than die by fentanyl!”

By now, I was doubled over in my chair, crying-laughing, and slapping my leg.

The kid was VERY funny.

Her comment reminded me of a working student from the past. We had gone to town to grab a cup of coffee. Climbing into my car to leave, someone from across the street congratulated me on having had a baby recently. I stood frozen, and like Mr. Roboto, said, “I have no baby.”

That working student never let me live down those four words, spoken like a true robot, blinded by headlights in a tropical storm.

Dogs.

I have dogs.

I think I’ll stick with dogs.