notes from a northern rainforest @northernrainforest - Tumblr Blog

Beach Day

If you want to see what it means to make someone flinch, ask me if I want to join you for a “beach day.” The thought of it makes my skin crawl – crawl, that is, like it’s covered in gritty sand, caked with sunscreen, and under attack from small insects. I’ve never really enjoyed the beach, even as a small child, which I recognize makes me unusual. But consider the facts: I can’t spend more than a few minutes in the sun without getting burned. (I know… cry me a river. But with white privilege comes white responsibility.) I like my food cold if it’s supposed to be cold and hot if it’s supposed to be hot, as well as sand-free in either case. And these days I travel with two small children at different stages, who require very different kinds of attention. It would be entirely possible for Ladybug to disappear into the depths of the ocean while I was changing a dirty diaper. All this to say: a day at the beach has never been my idea of a day at the beach, and I simply assumed that would always be true. As with so many things here in Alaska, though, my perception has shifted. For one thing a “hot day” in Ketchikan is about 77°. To situate the reader, a hot day in New York is 95 and humid; a hot day in Los Angeles is 112 and dry like a cookie left in a backpack for several weeks (speaking from recent experience.) So when friends organized a beach day over Memorial Day weekend, I made an exception. Flo is teaching summer classes and working diligently on his dissertation which makes me, I suppose you’d say, a PhD widow. So Ladybug, Bronson, and I were on our own. Naturally, since we had plans, Bronson slept all morning (a dream, of course), and Ladybug, overly excited, woke him up. (Again: of course.) So I was mad from the the time we left the house and then arrived, arms overloaded with beach stuff, to discover that our two sets of friends had accidentally set up camp on either end of the quarter mile long stretch of beach. I set our blanket down halfway between them, because it was the only shady spot I could find, and set about changing said dirty diaper – after all, what self-respecting baby doesn’t enjoy a nice alfresco poop? I’ve noticed that the average number of children in a family here in Ketchikan is somewhere between three and 87. So while I’m not too proud to ask for help, oftentimes the people whose help I could ask for have way more little ones to keep track of than I do. That’s how I ended up spending a good portion of the afternoon toting gear from one end of the beach to the other, baby in carrier, while Ladybug proceeded to change in and out of every article of clothing we’d brought with us. At one point I found myself, in a moment of true parental defeat, scolding her for getting her clothes wet and sandy. At the beach. Needless to say, not my finest moment. But it was at that very moment, or perhaps a moment later, that I caught myself looking up at the horizon. Here I was, mountains in the distance and Pacific beyond, the glistening water of the Inside Passage directly in front of me, children laughing and squealing as they jumped in and out of rafts and floats and giant blowup flamingos. What, exactly, was there to be upset about? I smiled. I didn’t want to smile. I wanted to be self-righteously annoyed. But as so often happens it’s those moments of weakness and frustration that bring the most clarity, and even joy. The month of May marked two years since we lost our baby girl and one year since we loaded everything we own onto a barge and sent it north. So May of this year has been, relatively speaking, quiet as a mouse. But that doesn’t make it any less significant of a month. It’s the days, weeks, and months of inconsequence that make up so much of our lives. Who would want it any other way? It can’t all be suffering, or transformation, all peaks and valleys. The plateaus are important too – the long stretches of smooth road surrounded on either side by endless cornfields. Call it South Dakota on the road trip of life. It’s entirely possible, and often easy, to forget how important these quiet times are; spending so much time with a baby who spends so much of his time in quiet wonder is a good reminder of the power of awe. Until Bronson showed up, I was the one who dropped Ladybug at school every day. And most sunny days I would say the same thing as we drove over the Third Avenue Bypass, with its incredible views of the mountains and the water: Aren’t we lucky, I’d say, to have a commute like this one? She always agreed with me. It was only after a few months that she finally piped up from her booster seat. “Mommy,” she said. “What’s a commute?”

Attempting to define the word for a five-year-old reminded me of my own childhood commutes. I walked to elementary school in Brooklyn, a walk that felt like the big city version of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood: up to the corner, past the bodega and the dry cleaner, past the “popcorn tree” (flowering pear maybe?), to the old brick schoolhouse across from the library.

Starting in seventh grade my commute got significantly longer: I took three trains to get to upper Manhattan. On a good day the ride itself was about forty minutes; with the walk to and from the subway stations (and I walked very fast) the whole thing rang in at just under an hour. An hour in the morning. An hour in the afternoon. Two hours a day, five days a week, for six years: I spent a lot of my teenage years in transit. I don’t remember minding it, especially because there were plenty of times when I didn’t just hop on the train and go home. When the weather was nice, particularly when I was older, I would walk south from 94th and Park, heading in the general direction of Brooklyn, and go as far as I felt like before getting on a train. On those days, the island of Manhattan felt like it went on and on and on, every little side street an opportunity to explore something, whether something I’d seen a thousand times or something I’d somehow never seen before. Manhattan, of course, has that effect on everyone: no matter how many times you walk down the same street, there’s always something new to see. Experiencing it at 12, and 15, and 18, on my own, made me streetwise and wary but also bold and eager; I knew that life would never be without its surprises, and that if I felt like stretching myself, I’d always be guaranteed a discovery.

Revilla Island boasts fewer Michelin-starred restaurants and Broadway theaters than Manhattan does. One could argue that it makes up for that in hiking trails and totem poles, in gravelly beaches and humpback whales. There is so much to discover, wherever you are, if you’re willing to get your clothes a little sandy and wet, if you’re willing to look up to the horizon and smile.

Budget Cuts

In case you’re too busy reading my blog to follow the politics of the state of Alaska, here’s a brief rundown from an admitted newcomer. Last October when he was up for reelection, Bill Walker, the previous governor and an Independent, stepped down in the aftermath of a scandal involving “inappropriate overtures” made to a woman by his lieutenant governor. That left two contenders. The Democrat, Mark Begich, had been a US senator; Flo actually met him at our local radio station when they were both being interviewed on the same day. Ladybug and I were listening for Flo to come on and talk about university events but Begich talked for awhile before Flo’s segment; I found him interesting, but Ladybug was not impressed.

“Ugh,” she said. “He just keeps talking!” In short, most people’s view of politicians.

I think it goes without saying (does it go without saying?) that I am a Democrat – though my recent move to the “coast” of the Tongass Narrows changes slightly my status as a member of the coastal elite. Regardless, Flo and I were pretty dang disappointed that Begich lost. The winner, Republican Mike Dunleavy, was elected on the campaign promise of restoring the PFD. Allow me to explain – again, forgiving my very rudimentary understanding of the whole thing. The Alaska permanent fund was established in the late seventies, in the wake of the construction of the Alaska pipeline; a lump sum is given to each Alaskan once a year, with the variable amount effectively contingent on the price of oil. This year it amounted to about $1600 for every man, woman and child in the state; in the past it’s been significantly more. (I should note that we won’t receive it until we’ve lived here a full calendar year, which will mean 2020 for the three of us and 2021 for Bronson, I believe – the indignity of having a birthday in early January.) To outsiders, those of us who just moved here from down south and aren’t yet eligible, for example – it can feel like a bonus. But to many Alaskans, it is the thing they wait for all year. A friend here told me that there are people in remote villages who rely on the PFD to pay their bills. The day before the dividends were handed out last fall, I overheard a salty dog of an old man, possibly drunk, talking on the phone.

“I’ll get you the money as soon as the PFD comes through,” he said, like a character in the Alaska version of a gangster film: To Live and Die in Ketchikan.

And it’s not only homesteaders and people living on the fringes. This money is important to people. One of my friends used hers to buy a new oven; they’d been out an oven for eight months, waiting for the PFD. In the lobby of the aquatics center last October, watching our kids practice the front crawl, parents debated about whether to use the money for vacations or household upgrades (middle-class concerns to be sure, but I did notice that none of the people I knew actually used the money for vacations – something else always seemed more urgent.) All that to say, Dunleavy was elected in part on the basis of his campaign promise calling to restore the PFD’s former glory, and to retroactively distribute funds he felt had been taken from the people by the previous administration. Now. I’m not going to delve too deep into the politics of a state to which I have just moved. I really don’t know what the right answer is. I do know this: a budget that allows for Dunleavy to award this money also includes cuts in the billions of dollars to the Alaska Marine Highway system and the University of Alaska. Obviously, the latter of those two would be a real problem for us. If Flo were to lose his job, the life that we’ve built here over the last eight months would be impossible to maintain. We would have to move. As I write this (and “write” should be in quotation marks, since I’m talking into my notes app like an old timey doctor into a dictaphone), I’m walking down Jackson from the top of a high hill, looking out towards snowcapped mountains on Gravina Island with the waters of the Tongass Narrows gliding by below. We had friends over for dinner last night, a chaotic group of kids and babies and nursing mothers, all sitting around eating linguine and clams and talking about hiking. I called Ladybug’s school yesterday to ask about serving on their board. Things are happening for us here – things we like. Bronson was born here. I won’t be dramatic and say that I plan on dying in Ketchikan. I have no idea where or when I’ll die. (Way to bring the mood down, Bolton.) But we’ve been very happy here. And frankly, I wouldn’t even know where to go next. So as it turns out, the looming budget cuts for the state of Alaska, which are probably not even national news, well, they’re affecting us on the most basic of levels right now. I will say, we have high hopes. I could go into detail, but the gist of it is that, though small, the Ketchikan campus features a maritime academy that the governor has toured and thought very highly of. Flo thinks that may be the salvation of the school. Then again: if the marine highway system shuts down, is there any point in a maritime academy at all? Any thoughts of buying a house have been tabled, at least for the moment. All this has gotten me thinking about the ways I inadvertently implement cuts in my own little life. I didn’t go on my regular walk today, the one where I tuck Bronson into the carrier and watch his eyes grow heavy and eventually close. Ladybug stayed home from school, Flo had several meetings at funny times, and the day just sort of got away from me. So it’s evening now, though it’s still light (it’s amazing how quickly the days have started to get longer) and I’m walking by myself. I didn’t start the walk by myself, though. When Flo got home and I handed off the baby, Ladybug chimed in and told me that she wanted to come on my walk. I started to say no. I fact, I did say no. A couple of times. But she was undaunted. My brother and sister-in-law had sent her a super-secret spy notebook today and some new crayons. She put on her shoes and a little stocking hat and grabbed her notebook. Off we set: me slightly annoyed that I wasn’t getting my time alone and would have to slow my pace; Ladybug all excitement.

We did start slowly. Ladybug kept stopping me so she could unbutton her little notebook, pull out a crayon, scribble something, and then reverse the process. She pointed things out, too. “Look Mama!” Ladybug said. “It’s a ketchup and mustard house!” It was true: there are two houses next to each other a few blocks from us, one bright yellow and one bright red, that I’d never really noticed before. “Look Mama!” she said, indicating across the street from the condiment houses. “That house is so cool!” It was a wide house with two levels and a big deck that looked sort of like a duplex but wasn’t; I couldn’t tell you why it was cool, but it was. “Stop!” she shouted, still only three blocks from home. “I have to look at my map.” Ladybug pulled out her notebook and consulted the scribbles she had made earlier. She pointed us in the direction that we should head. She found some berries. She noticed buses. She ran ahead, and lagged behind, and drew pictures and talked and held my hand and laughed and skipped. Eventually she’d had enough so we doubled back, I dropped her off, and I picked up my pace. If having a newborn means falling in love with someone you’ve just met, having a five-year-old when you have a newborn, at least for me, has meant something closer to a marriage that’s headed for divorce. The newborn relationship is a series of meet-cutes: “He spit up all over me and then looked at me so helplessly that I had to laugh!” Parenting the older child now consists of button-pressing and limit-testing, of the building up of micro-aggressions that lead to epic explosions: “She threw a tantrum because I put yogurt, then fruit, then granola, but she wanted the fruit on the bottom and I LITERALLY CAN’T ANYMORE.”

Children always ask if their parents will love them less when the new baby comes along. The parents always say no, of course not, there’s room enough in our hearts for all of you. Which is true. But what we fail to mention is that it’s really easy to love a newborn; it’s much harder to love almost anyone else. When Flo and Ladybug have argued in the past and she’s come to me in tears, I’ve often said to her, “It’s hard to live with other people.“ A new baby is a person, but with respect to Magda Gerber and Dr. Sears and everyone who preaches the importance of respecting our newborns – they are still just barely people. Yes, each baby has a life of his own, and I have immense respect for what what my baby has been through up to this point and the person he already is. But. A baby is also a vessel for all of our dreams, for the things we love about ourselves and our partners; he represents the abundance of life that we have been seeking and, in his shy smile and soulful eyes, have finally found. (We had that time with Ladybug too, I should say, and it was dreamy.) A child, though, is in many ways already fully realized. Ladybug is the most intense version of herself at five, even if that five-year-old self will only exist until she turns six. For the rest of her life she will embody the self that she is at that moment, in that season, and it will be fascinating and thrilling and scary for her dad and me to behold. Right now it’s intense, because five-year-olds can be intense. They can be bullheaded, attention-seeking, and mean. Ha. Sounds like me sometimes – must be my daughter. Which is what the walk reminded me. That this girl with her notebook and her rainbow-colored coat – because “rainbow” is her favorite color – is still the manifestation of everything that has ever mattered to me. The arrival of her brother has made it harder for me to have the patience to remember that, but that doesn’t make it any less true. I’d like to think that I’ll be kinder tomorrow, that I won’t snap at her when she lifts up a table and carries it, haphazardly and seemingly for no reason, directly over the tiny bed in which her brother is sleeping. I can’t guarantee that will happen. I’m growing too. I’m trying to be the best version of myself at this season in my life, and I’m not always particularly successful. But the magic of life and of parenthood is that I’ve made no campaign promises. I have no constituents that are going to send me packing after one term if I don’t deliver. My cabinet is populated by people who cheer me on and commiserate with me and make me laugh, and I can wake up every morning and decide how best to move forward.

So if Alaska Marine represents travel and the university represents education, then couldn’t it be said I’m cutting them out of my own budget by not taking a walk with my daughter, by not learning from her and helping her learn? How can I ask the governor to keep funding these institutions unless I’m funding them in my own life?

Ladybug’s maps were so clear in her own mind; all I saw were scribbles. That’s the way it is sometimes with maps. I’m just going to keep walking and looking for berries along the way, hoping for the best.

Portrait of Woman on Beach with Baby Carrier

(subhead: OMG I took a selfie! I think I’m a millennial now!)

Harder

I got a call last week that the hospital needed Bronson’s footprints for their records, and could I swing by Labor and Delivery in the next few days? Sure thing. Peacehealth Pediatrics is in the new wing of the hospital: down the hall from where all my OB visits were, across the lobby from where I saw the cardiologist, a short walk and an elevator ride from where I delivered Bronson. So the next time I brought Bronson in, three days later, Flo and I walked him down to L&D.

It was funny being back there.

“Were we only here four days?” Flo asked, as we walked by the room that had been our home for that short stint. It was hard to believe. It felt as though we had moved in—the nurses our own personal household staff, making me tea in the middle of the night, giving me back rubs, admiring the artwork Ladybug brought from school. And then of course we had two and a half more weeks in hospitals – different cities, different nurses, same institutionalized living. But now here we were, waltzing back in with our baby six weeks old, on an errand which required the kind of freedom I had ached for when we were in Washington.

It happened that my favorite nurse was there: a bright-eyed woman a bit older than me, with teenage children and a hairdo startlingly reminiscent of Sarah Palin during her 2008 campaign. We chatted excitedly and then she turned to me with her big smile.

“Isn’t it just so much harder than you ever imagined?” she asked.

I was thrown. I thought she remembered that we had a five-year-old, that sleepless nights and spit-up weren’t new for us.

“Oh, we’re doing okay,” I said. Her smile fell a little. She looked puzzled. The conversation continued. And then, seconds later, I realized what she was talking about. She’d had a son at 29 weeks. We had talked about it a lot when I was in the hospital. She wasn’t asking if having a baby was hard. She was asking if having a premature baby was hard. If having a sick baby was hard. I turned back to her.

“I didn’t realize what you were asking,” I said, as all of it hit me with the weight of a brick building. “Yes. It’s so, so hard.”

The whole tone shifted. She took my arm and talked reassuringly to me. I was flooded with relief: I had finally admitted to a feeling that I didn’t even know I had. Holy mackerel, I realized. This. is. hard.

When Ladybug was a baby she didn’t sleep. I shouldn’t say that: she slept if she was being touched or held or carried. Even then, her naps, even as a newborn, were twenty minutes long. When put in a car seat, she cried from the minute she got in until the minute she was taken out; not for her the car nap. She nursed incessantly, and rejected both bottle and pacifier. When I went back to auditioning and working, she often came with me, because the alternative was a hungry, crying baby. We made it work. And then one day I read a book by Dr. Sears and there was a two-page section on “high needs” babies. As I read it, I started to cry: it described Ladybug to a T. All these feelings I didn’t realize I had – feelings of overwhelm and isolation, of frustration, loneliness and fear – they suddenly became normalized. Other people had babies like mine! Sure, no one I knew had a baby like her. (My closest mom friend at the time was a neighbor and we’d make plans around her son’s three-hour naps. I was stunned on a daily basis by the duration of those naps.) And none of my child-free friends understood why it was so hard for me to do anything with them. But it didn’t matter. Dr. Sears had validated my experience, helping me look back at the previous few months with clarity and a greater sense of respect for my ability to meet a challenge.

My conversation in Labor and Delivery that day did something similar. I was so blissed out to be home with Bronson, so thrilled beyond words to have put our hospital days behind us, that I had managed to ignore how incredibly challenging my days still were. In fairness, I think I’d put up something of a wall: I had decided that the minute we got home, every hurdle we faced was simply related to having a newborn. Not sleeping? No one sleeps with a new baby at home! Feeling anxious about his breathing at night? Every parent worries about that! But Sarah Palin’s long-lost sister, one of the kindest nurses we met on our three-week odyssey, had reminded me that it’s different. Sure. Ladybug was “high needs.” But she was a baby. At the end of the day, all babies are high needs. They’re completely helpless without us. With Bronson, there’s something else. There is the fact that he often can’t finish nursing because it takes too much effort, so we switch to a bottle, and even then he sometimes falls asleep partway through – not milk-drunk, but exhausted from the exertion. Or the fact that he sometimes stops breathing for slightly too long, his whole body tense and taut, and recovers with a baby-sized shout and the saddest face you ever saw. There’s also the nebulizer we use with him – a small, loud machine that vaporizes saline into a mask and helps clear out whatever might be blocking his tiny nostrils (aside from the bone, which of course is the biggest hindrance to him catching his breath.) The first time we put the mask on him we expected a fight, but we watched him take huge, deep breaths, and then fall asleep after just a few minutes. I’ve never actually watched someone shoot themselves up with heroin, but based on what I’ve seen on Netflix, it looks kinda like that. It’s still one of the last lines of defense – if he’s not hungry or wet or tired but he’s upset, it’s time to nebulize.

There are also the steroid drops, and the doctor visits, and the texts I send fellow moms before they bring their little ones over to play with Ladybug, in which I try not to sound like a jerk. (“Hey! Heard your little guy got sent home sick from school yesterday – poor thing! :( Happy to raincheck, cuz, you know, I’m not actually sure how many Seattle trips our Medevac insurance will cover and even a little cold will earn Bronson a ticket back to Children’s. At least the playroom there is nice, LOL!”)

But really it’s the nights. The long nights, when I hear him struggling, gasping, his arms reaching out as if he could pluck the air from around him and drink it in. We do what we can, Flo and I. But our nurse friend was right: it is harder than I ever could have imagined.

I should be clear: I am not complaining. Anything short of Bronson becoming an actual psychopath, and I hope never to complain about him. Because I am so stunningly glad he’s here. Every minute with him, even the bad ones, feel like a gift I wasn’t sure I’d ever be given. I would stay awake all night, night after night, if that’s what it took to keep him breathing; any parent would. And the truth is, what’s hardest about all of this isn’t actually that it’s hard for me at all. It’s that it’s hard for him. Sometimes Flo and I catch him in a still moment, looking around interestedly, giving us small smiles – and even then, we look down to see his tiny hands clenched.

“You can relax your hands,” we tell him. “You’re with Mommy and Daddy. You’re safe.”

But he’s not, not completely, and he knows it. Bronson has never been able to breathe freely, which seems like the easiest thing a person can do.

In spite of everything, Bronson’s world is a beautiful place. I tell him this on our daily walks. It’s sunny in Ketchikan right now, so we’ve been walking. Most days he’s either already asleep or falls asleep the minute I step outside, cuddling him in his carrier. But one day recently I watched him watch the world. As we stepped outside in the fading afternoon light, Bronson’s eyes got bigger and bigger, as big as the Alaskan moon. He blinked and blinked as I talked to him about trees and leaves. (I told him the words in French and Italian too, because what fun is it to not raise the most pretentious baby in southeast Alaska? Bonus: no one can accuse me of not using my college degree.) I told him that the trees in Alaska are bigger than big, that they stay green all year round, that instead of leaves they have sharp pointy needles. None of these are words that Bronson has ever heard before. None of these are sights he’s ever seen. But starting now and starting here he will have a chance to learn about all of it. And like the rest of us, he will yearn to be taught. It takes a lifetime to learn everything that matters about a lifetime. Bronson’s journey has just begun.

Seattle Children’s

I wrote this post three weeks ago tonight, the night before we were discharged from the hospital. (The update is that we are home, and Bronson is hanging in there.) I hesitated in posting it, which you’ll understand when you read it. It’s a coming-out, of sorts, in that it deals with not only sick children but dead babies. You’ve been warned.

I woke up at two in the morning because I heard soft crying from the other side of the curtain. An eleven-year-old boy had been admitted earlier in the evening and was sharing a room with us, along with a crowd of his kind and concerned grownups. The boy had just been diagnosed with type one diabetes and would be in the hospital for a few days while they taught him and his parents how to regulate his blood sugar. Everyone had seemed fine as the evening wound down but now, in the middle of the night, he sounded small and scared.

“I can’t,” I heard him whimper, his voice high-pitched and thin.

“Yes, you can,” his mother said, not firmly, just gently.

The exchange made me want to cry too.

We are not at Providence-Everett anymore. We no longer look out Bronson’s NICU window at the Jolly Spinner, a whimsical piece of found-object art that does spin in the breeze and is, in fact, rather jolly. Ladybug loved that sculpture. She also loved that there was a canopy created by some evergreens in the little courtyard behind the lobby which she turned into a secret hideout. Ladybug sort of had the run of the place, actually. There were no other Alaskan families with babies in the NICU there; everyone else was local, and came to see their babies for shorter stretches. We basically moved in, so Ladybug apprenticed herself to the nicest of the nurses, helping them take the baby’s temperature and give him a bath. She could often be seen skipping past the nurses’ station on her way to get a snack in the kitchen, or read a book in the atrium, or pick out a hat for her doll from the collection of knitwear that had been donated. We had gotten used to Prov-Everett, actually. But for days Flo and I had been telling the attending neonatologist that we didn’t think Bronson had a cold, or that his congestion was just caused by swelling. We wanted an ENT consult, but the attending was resistant, in part because it couldn’t be done there. This meant another transport, this time to Seattle Children’s, and a transport is hard on a baby. But after ten days at Prov-Everett, we finally got the go-ahead and Bronson and I were off—another day, another ambulance ride.

We had a room to ourselves in the NICU, which I took for granted. Here at Children’s, we were transferred to the pediatrics ward—a step down from the NICU in the best possible way, except that because Bronson is “clean” (what he has can’t be communicated to another child), we’re stuck sharing. So there I was, in the middle of the night, listening to the crying of another woman’s child.

And this is the heart of the thing. This is why the 93-degree therapy pool here has open swim for families of patients every day. It’s why parents and caregivers can get free haircuts from volunteers, and massages in the family resource center. It’s why there is a gorgeous, fully-stocked playroom, staffed by volunteers who help little ones make crafts or blow bubbles. It’s why everyone who works here, from the Bob Balaban character who got me my “Parent” lanyard, to the lifeguard, to the barista in the lobby Starbucks, to the woman who gave me a pretty pouch filled with shampoo and soap—it’s why they’re all so nice. Because having a sick child is terrible. It’s heart wrenching and scary, it’s enervating and lonely and sad. And, as it turns out, our child isn’t even that sick. The day after we got here, he was scoped by an ENT doctor: a small camera inserted into his nose showed the doctor that Bronson’s nasal passages are narrow, a condition called nasal pure forma aperture stenosis. The good news about this diagnosis is that he should grow out of it. He wasn’t eating much when we arrived here, still getting a good amount of his nutrition from a feeding tube inserted in his mouth. But I began whispering to him the night of the ENT consult—if you take this bottle, you will get bigger and stronger; if you nurse, we’ll be able to go home sooner. And soon, he was doing it. He began gaining weight. He started to cluster feed, like a full term baby would do. Day by day the wires came off—the IV was dialed down, then turned off, then removed from his foot entirely. Today a nurse shut off Bronson’s monitor; I can no longer see when he desaturates, or when his respiratory rate changes. He lies in my lap right now as I type this, with nothing on his body tethering him to the hospital. He is almost free.

There are so many children in this building who are not almost free. In the small chapel, there is a memorial book listing hundreds and hundreds of names of children who died here. I had a baby who died in a hospital too. She was only 21 weeks when I gave birth to her, tiny and breathless. I said hello, I said goodbye, and I never saw her again. I was wheeled out of the hospital with a box in my lap that said Precious Baby Girl. It contained a picture of her, a teddy bear, and a blanket—one of the few pieces of fabric that ever touched her cold skin. This was nearly two years ago. Since then we’ve moved across the continent and I’ve given birth to another baby, but I think about her every day. The doctors told me that even if she had survived childbirth at term, she would have been hooked up to feeding tubes and breathing tubes for the rest of her short life. When Bronson was at his worst, wires and tubes extending from his body, machines clicking and beeping and whirring all around him, all I could think was, “What’s wrong with my babies?”

The question lingers in the air here. Medicine, I’ve concluded over the last three weeks, is as much art as it is science. Doctors often don’t know what’s wrong. A pediatrician today told us that parents know more about their children’s conditions than doctors do; we are the experts. But we are so invested in our children, so profoundly afraid of losing them, that we can’t possibly be expected to act and think logically when they are at their worst. I have cried more in the last two years than I thought possible. There was a brief break in the tears towards the end of this pregnancy, when I finally began to feel confident that my baby would survive. And then he came early, and the fears were sparked all over again.

If all goes well tonight, we will leave Seattle Children’s tomorrow. Bronson will be exactly three weeks old; he and I will have spent the entirety of his life, not including the time we’ve logged in ambulances and on airplanes, in three different hospitals in two different states. There is a part of me that is scared of what’s next. As my mother pointed out, it’s possible to go a little crazy in the hospital; a person can begin to believe that the outside world is not safe, that the institutionalized life is easier and less terrifying. Like the guy in The Shawshank Redemption who can’t adjust when he’s let out of prison, I worry that I have become reliant on the beeping and the whirring to tell me that my son is okay, that he won’t die like his sister did. But the reality is muddier. I have no proof that my children will outlive me. I can’t control what happens to them anymore than I can control what happens to me. The best I can do is to hold their hands when they are afraid, when their voices are high-pitched and thin. The best I can do is to speak gently to them when the night is at its darkest. Like the Jolly Spinner, there are times when we will be still and times when the winds will move us in ways we can’t predict or understand. I have lived every minute of these three weeks but soon they will be a memory, and I will do my best to let the winds blow as they please, bringing with them better days.

Windows

If you’ve ever stayed in a European youth hostel, you can picture the kind of room I’m in right now. It’s windowless and Spartan: twin beds, lumpy pillows, an ancient phone on a beat up nightstand between the beds. It’s cold in here because the air is cranked up too high, but there’s no thermostat. There’s also no clock. Time doesn’t matter here, and time also matters a great deal. The main difference between this room and a room at a cheap pensione in Florence is that when you step outside you’re not greeted by the picturesque banks of the Arno. This room is one of the two “sleeping rooms” in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Providence Pavilion for Women and Children in Everett, Washington, and I’m here because my baby is across the hall, hooked up to machines.

I was 35 weeks and 5 days pregnant when I woke up at 1:18 am.

“My water just broke,” I said to Flo, and my heart sank. They had told me several days prior that I should “chill out” and “take it easy,” when I visited labor and delivery to talk about the symptoms I was having, which felt suspiciously like pre-term labor. I did do things differently: I stopped going to the gym. I started doing dishes while sitting on a bar stool (for what it’s worth, we should all be doing this. It’s comfortable.) But at the same time, a small voice inside me was egging me on: reminding me to finish little tasks, to tidy up loose ends. By Saturday, I was walking through Safeway with Ladybug slower than I’ve ever walked anywhere. I almost could have predicted I’d go into labor that night. But I was at the grocery store, because we needed milk. (It’s currently turning into yogurt in the fridge. Turns out, we’d never drink the milk after all.)

Regardless, there I was at 1:18 am, trying to be clearheaded about what to do next. I packed a few things (real talk: mostly snacks) and tried calling a couple of friends before realizing that Ladybug would be joining us at the hospital. Unsurprisingly, she was thrilled. She had already packed a bag in case she needed to stay at a friend’s house. But staying at the hospital? Even better. (The next morning she did head to a friend’s for the day, and stayed there that night as well. I’m all for including the family in life events, but I don’t need to be managing a five-year-old between earth-shattering contractions.)

Earlier that week I had gotten a pregnancy update email (baby was the length of a head of Romaine lettuce at that point, I think) which highlighted the need to map out the best route to the hospital. Flo and I giggled about this, thinking back on our interminable drives to and from UCLA Medical Center as we waited for Ladybug to arrive. To get to PeaceHealth Ketchikan, by contrast, the directions were straighforward: turn left out of driveway. Turn right on Carlanna Lake Road. Turn left into the ER. It took us a minute and a half to get there from our house, where we parked steps from the entrance of the ER by a sign that said “Reserved for Patients.”

I will not bore you with my birth story. Was it Chekhov who said, “Every happy family…?” Forget it, I just googled the phrase and will spare you my version (it’s Tolstoy, by the way. Also Russian, so arguably I was close.) “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” This is true for childbirth too. Every birth story is unique and gnarly and often funny, and the ones that go haywire are unhappy in their own ways. But if you’ve heard one birth story you kind of get the idea: the built-in spoiler alert is that it ends with the birth of a baby. As wild as the story may be, the ending is almost universally the same. All I will say is that Flo and I were holding our son at 5:43 pm, sixteen hours after we packed up our little bag and our little girl and left for the hospital. I am in love with the name we chose for him, but for the purposes of this blog he will be known as Bronson. (Long story. Ask Flo.)

Anyway, in our case it wasn’t labor and delivery that made for the interesting story. A few hours after birth, after the little man had crawled his way up my chest like his sister had done and rooted around for some dinner, the nurses noticed he was struggling to breathe. So began several days of cannulas in his nose to send air more easily to the lungs, and then an IV drip to regulate his blood sugar, and then a 24-hour moratorium on breastfeeding so he wouldn’t aspirate, and then and then and then. In the same way that they say one intervention in labor can lead to a snowball effect, it felt as though Bronson was encountering more and more obstacles day by day. But he seemed well enough by Thursday morning that we were talking about being discharged the next day. Then he stopped breathing. He was in my arms in the tiny nursery—he’d been in my arms most of the night—and he suddenly seemed sleepy. The night shift nurse stared hard at the monitor, adjusting the leads that connected him to it. Within moments, our quiet night together turned loud, bright, busy. A team of nurses, doctors, anesthesiologists, respiratory specialists—they all got to work, drawing blood, inserting a new IV, pumping air back into his lungs. It was quickly decided we would need to be medevaced to to a bigger facility with a proper NICU, which meant Flo raced home to pack me a bag. Ladybug and I cried softly in each other’s arms.

Bronson and I were loaded onto an ambulance, which drove onto the airport ferry, which then headed around the backside of the airport to a police escort and a waiting Lear jet. Bronson’s tiny body was dwarfed by the enormity of his incubator. The kind man who worked for LifeMed and sat next to me on the plane briefed me on flying in a Lear jet: basically, it goes very fast, and might make you sick, and you’ll get there in no time.

The whole time we were in the air, I honestly felt like I was dying. I was semi-reclined (perhaps in a nod to my recently revoked status as a patient.) I couldn’t breathe well, and it felt as though the top of the plane was pressing down on my chest. I stared out the window at the clouds and drifted off, out of exhaustion and terror. I couldn’t see my baby, but partway through the flight, the EMT who was sitting next to him asked for my phone. She took a picture of my beautiful boy, his eyes open and bright. He seemed to be doing better than I was.

We landed in an airfield in Everett and a firefighter walked me to the bathroom in a huge hanger. The whole thing felt so absurd that I wanted to make a joke, but for once in my life I really couldn’t think of anything to say. So I said thank you. En route to the hospital, the ambulance driver pointed through the window at the largest building in the world (so he said); a huge sign on the front of it said Boeing. I felt like I did the first time I stepped off the subway in Tokyo—that everything was big, foreign, pulsing with life in a language I didn’t understand. Bronson had another apnea episode when we arrived at the hospital but I wasn’t there to see it. I had been shunted upstairs to Admitting, where a woman who looked exactly like Iris Apfel spent ten minutes misunderstanding our primary insurance. (I think it’s in the middle of Mr. and Mrs. Smith that Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt get into an elevator and hear The Girl From Ipanema; after a few seconds of calm and muzak, they get to the next floor and step out, guns blazing. This is what it felt like in Admitting.) Soon, though, I was back downstairs, staring into Bronson’s room as a soft spoken doctor stood next to me and plied me for information about what had happened. I turned to him.

“To be clear,” I said, asking the thing I realized I’d been wondering all day. “This isn’t a question of, ‘My baby may not make it.’ Right…?”

“No,” he said firmly. “He will be fine.”

Still. After my baby settled down for the night, his room buzzing with machines, his body a tangle of wires, I wandered across the hall to the sleeping room and made a few sobbing phone calls. I was decidedly not okay, because I was pretty sure my baby wasn’t either.

That was ten days ago. It’s been two weeks since I glanced around my living room to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything, turned off the lights and drove away. Two weeks since I wandered the halls of PeaceHealth Ketchikan, looking through the windows at the wintry darkness between mind bending contractions. Two weeks since they said, “Pushpushpushpushpushpush,” and I did and I did and I did and then I held a small red-faced boy in my arms and cried. Two weeks of living in hospitals, he and I — and things seem easier. I chatted with a couple of nurses just now, using words I didn’t know two weeks ago, talking diagnoses and comparing the opinions and temperaments of attending neonatologists. Bronson can breathe on his own, though we’re still figuring out the root cause of his problem, which (it’s becoming clear) may extend beyond his prematurity and into something congenital or structural. Stay tuned; when I know, you’ll know. He’s eating, and sleeping, and pooping, and generally doing all the things babies do.

The other day, Flo smiled a little when he saw the blankets in the sleeping room. (He and Ladybug and my mom are staying at a Hampton Inn a few blocks away, which feels like the premise of a bad sitcom.) “We used to have these blankets in our house,” he said. This baby, our baby, who lives in a crisp clean room in a state of the art hospital — his grandfather raised five children as a single dad cleaning hospitals like this one. Our little guy has his middle name. There’s been so much talk in the last few years about privilege, but I’ve come to realize from this experience that privilege extends beyond race, class, gender, and so much else that we’ve addressed in the conversation. Privilege extends to access. Privilege extends to the ability to be relieved of pain and suffering. (That is, at least as far as medically possible.) Privilege means a shared language, and the ability to speak up for ourselves. Privilege gives us a window to look through: we can choose to see all the beauty others seem to have that we have been denied, or we could recognize the beauty we ourselves have been given that others may not have access to. All we have to do is open the window, and breathe. It’s the breathing, of course, that is the hard part. But we’re working on it.

On strangers and friends

I missed something yesterday that I never expected to miss, that I didn’t even realize was miss-able. As I was driving down to Saxman, the native Alaskan community south of town that has a big community center where Ladybug would be singing in her school’s winter concert, I stopped at a stop sign. I looked to my left and the man in the car about to turn looked exactly like an old neighbor of mine in Los Feliz. I don’t know this man’s name. I never actually spoke to him, other than to say hello. But often on my neighborhood walks, or my hikes in Griffith Park, he would be out too, two dogs in tow. This was a person I truly did not know. He was not a friend; not even an acquaintance. But in a big city there are so many people that we encounter over and over, just by the sheer chance of living within a few blocks of one another. That man’s face is etched in my mind. (If you’d like it etched in your mind too, I’ll say this: he looked like the most Interesting Man in the World from the Dos Equis commercials, but slightly less hirsute. Got it? Good. And yes, my greatest wish is that you google image “hirsute.”)

Is it strange to miss a stranger, someone I never even met? Does he miss me? It’s probably never occurred to him to miss me; he may never have noticed that I’m gone. Or perhaps he has noticed – he may think I’ve moved two miles away, or have a slightly different schedule now, or a newborn who’s keeping me inside for the moment. He may stop at a stop sign one day and see a woman that reminds him of me, and wonder.

Here in Ketchikan, if I run into someone enough times, eventually we will introduce ourselves to one another. This has happened over and over. It’s mostly other mothers with small children, women I see at the library, wrangling toy trains away from toddlers in an effort to check out books and move on with their days. Or we see each other at the gymnastics club as our kids run and climb, red-cheeked and laughing. Or we smile at each other over cupcakes at the birthday party of a mutual friend’s child. “Hi,” we’ll say to one another a few days later in the grocery store, or as we sit down a row apart at a performance of the Nutcracker. “I know you from story time.” From then on, every time we see each other, we’ll smile and chat. There may not be as many people in this town as in the cities where I’ve always lived, but my world is slowly expanding to include more of them in my circle of acquaintanceship.

After I started writing about this – the missing of strangers, the meeting of strangers – another thing happened. I’m rarely on social media anymore, but a friend had a baby, so I went to look at pictures, and suddenly I was scrolling through the weeks and months I’ve missed. And then, an RIP post, for a former hairdresser of mine. How would I categorize the guy who did my hair for a dozen years? Our words – friend, acquaintance, stranger – they go from too cozy to not cozy enough. This is a person whose hands were in my hair every few months, cutting away the part of me that had died since the last time I saw him, lightening my roots in my twenties and covering up greys in my thirties. We talked about books and movies, about his life changing hiking trip in India. We talked about my work, and then my daughter, when she arrived. He once cut my nephew’s hair, a squirmy little guy who was magically still in the chair that day. I went to Henry at first because he was cheap – operating out of an old school barber shop on Melrose, and later from the back room of a hip upscale-ish place on Fairfax. My friend Robbie recommended him to me, years and years ago, and over time I recommended him to lots of other people too. He was a part of my life in LA – and looking at the memorial posts for him, and the obituary in LA Weekly – I began to realize that he was a part of LA life in a greater sense too. Henry, as it turns out, was a record store owner in the early eighties who hosted in-store appearances by bands no one had ever heard of: Duran Duran, Depeche Mode, Billy Idol. He ran weekly club nights and became a fixture on the radio station KROQ, introducing American audiences to UK artists like Siouxsie and the Banshees and Culture Club. He was a “luminary in the underground 1980s Los Angeles rock & roll scene he helped create.”

I know all this because of what I read, not because of what we talked about while I sat in his chair. Henry was mild-mannered and unassuming (other than the fact that his hair was often blue, or dread locked, or long, stringy, and ghostly white.) I knew he was a vegetarian, that he liked pizza from a certain Melrose spot, that he took the bus home, except for the occasional night when I was his last customer and dropped him off. Is that all I needed to know about him?

I suppose we know what we are meant to know. We all meet each other at the point when our lives intersect; we cannot always know what came before and what will come after. I arrived in Alaska with an only child; soon, and forevermore, everyone here will know me as a mother of two. Someday I will look at small children and say, as a woman did to me yesterday, “That feels like a long time ago.” The people I meet then will know me differently, but I will still be myself. I suppose the best thing we can do is to ask each other questions – not about who we were, or who we want to be, but about who we are right now. The present is a gift, as they say, and given my acting background, it’s also the thing I’ve been taught to value above all else. “Be in the moment,” we hear again and again as we come up through acting classes. “Don’t plan, just do it,” I’ve instructed my students as they fumble their way through improvised scenes. It’s easier said than done, of course – I spend an inordinate amount of time reflecting on the past and thinking about the future (to be fair, it’s mostly about what I’m going to eat at my next meal.) But it is possible, and especially with a preschooler and a squirmy pregnancy, “being in the moment,” is not hard. I know from experience that once a pregnancy is over it’s impossible to remember what it feels like to have a baby moving around in there, hiccuping and kicking and wreaking occasional havoc. It is delightful and a strain, both, and then it is over, and then the present moment is something else entirely. I will probably never be pregnant again; this very temporary present will be the past for the rest of my life.

So I will honor the people I left behind in the other places I’ve lived, as well as those who left us behind for the great beyond, by doing my best to be my best, right now. That’s how we become the Most Interesting People in the World, no?

A rare sunny day at Bugge Beach.

Thanksgiving

It’s Thanksgiving here in Ketchikan (and everywhere else in the US) and the past few days have been an interesting study in island living. Tuesday Ladybug and I ran a few errands after her morning at the gymnastics club – they open it up to little ones one day a week and it’s a pretty awesome way to blow off some steam when the rains are hitting hard. Our first errand was to drop a package at the post office. Hot tip: if you’re ever in Ketchikan, and the line of one or two people at the post office right by the Alaska Marine Highway ferry terminal seems interminable, you can head five miles north and go to the post office in Ward Cove. Ward Cove as a neighborhood is just a blip: if you’re driving fifty up Tongass Highway (not, by the way, an actual highway by most people’s standards) you’ll have to downshift slightly as you go around the bend, the cove to your left, with its Fed Ex outpost and handful of float planes. The gymnastics club is tucked in next door to Fed Ex, in a converted warehouse. They moved recently (though before we arrived) and there was some grumbling about the jump in price: a 10-punch card for Tot Gym is now $40, up from $25. I could see how this would feel like a big increase. On the other hand, I would encourage anyone who’s actually mad about this to go to any indoor play space in a big city in the lower 48; it will cost at least twice as much.

Anyway, if you continue north less than a quarter of a mile, you’ll see the Ward Cove post office on your right. Tucked into the same little shopping strip – can I call it that? I’m going to – is a combo gas station/liquor store/pizza place, a hair salon, and the Green Bean, one of the best coffee places on the island. They roast their own beans – a good reminder that we’re living in… well let’s call it the GreaterPacific Northwest. I doubt anyone in Seattle or Portland is looking to Ketchikan for our coffee culture, but it’s here and it’s real. It’s similar to how good coffee is omnipresent in Amsterdam – walk into any office or home there and one of the first exchanges you will be a part of is “Koffie?” “Ja, lekker.” I think the weather and the dark winters foster this attachment to warm deliciousness, which is fine by me. I’ve always been a fan of a hot drink on a cold day.

All that to say: you’ve just experienced Ward Cove. You could continue north and you’d never know that you missed a magical feature of the island. So instead, turn inland from Tongass Highway via Revilla Road (within a very short distance, you’ll be fully surrounded by Tongass National Forest), then turn onto the road with the brown campground signs and you’ll hit Ward Lake, with its forested loop. The first time Steve and I did this easy little hike, he told me he’d Vision-quested it: as in, when we were trying to escape Los Angeles like we were in an old Kurt Russell movie, he pictured what he wanted, and the Ward Lake loop was it. Dark and mossy, it’s the kind of path that desperately wants to grow over itself; but for all the pesky walkers, it would undoubtedly succeed. In the time of the WPA, folks up here erected several wood and stone shelters with fireplaces – after a walk or a fishing expedition, and even in the pouring rain, a person could have a pretty excellent picnic, looking out at the lake. The last time Flo and I were up there, someone had made a fire and left it burning; the little cabin beckoned us, and we sat by the fire and warmed up.

So that’s Ward Cove andWard Lake. But back to the post office. It was raining (I forgot to mention: it’s always raining now) and Ladybug whimpered about not wanting to get out of the car again. So I gave her an apple, I locked the doors, and I left her in the car. It’s worth noting that there have been incidents of arrests for leaving small children in parking lots in big cities and suburbs. It’s also worth noting that I wouldn’t have left her alone in the car even in our gatedcarportin Los Angeles. But if you could see this post office, you’d understand. There’s just no reason to imagine that a child wouldn’t be safe there. And of course if you’re reading this in a small town like Ketchikan, you’re probably wondering why I’m bothering to mention it at all – of course a five-year-old is okay on her own, in a parking lot, for three minutes, especially with the doors locked. What could possibly happen? It’s just such a shift for a kid raised in New York, who started raising her own kid in LA – places where anythingcould happen.

Errand number one: done. It was back to town and into Island Pharmacy to pick up a prescription. Island Pharmacy is one of three pharmacies in Ketchikan, and it’s the only one that’s independent (the other two are at Safeway and Walmart.) It’s also a single minute from our house. While we were in there, one of the women working behind the counter mentioned that she still needed to go shopping for Thanksgiving.

“Don’t,” said the older woman paying for her prescription.

“Uh oh,” I said. “Are the stores crazy?”

“Yes,” she said. “And there’s nothing on the shelves.”

I’m not sure I’ve mentioned this on the blog before, but it is possible to walk into a grocery store here and find that they’re completely out of, say, eggs. And I mean completely out. Not, like, you might have to buy brown instead of white, or the only ones they have are the $7 cartons where the chickens sleep on memory foam mattresses and only eat kale. (I’m usually somewhere in the middle: uncaged, ideally organic, but I don’t need the chickens to have been massaged on a daily basis.) There are simply no eggs, and any plans you may have had involving eggs will have to be put on hold. So the idea that the shelves were wiped clean was not a crazy one.

Flo got home early that day, so the three of us hightailed it to the grocery store. As we’d been warned, there were some gaping holes. No heavy cream. No egg nog. And, as a lady told me grumpily in the produce aisle, no canned sweet potatoes. We had a long talk about how many fresh sweet potatoes she’d have to use to make her casserole, which normally required three cans; this conversation felt so backwards that I wasn’t even sure I could be helpful, but I tried.

In the end, we got everything we needed. We’d already found a pasture-raised turkey (read: the kale-eating kind) a few weeks prior (two turkeys, in fact; we did a test run when our friend Charlotte came up – Flo made a full on Thanksgiving dinner for her birthday.) It’s Thanksgiving morning, the turkey is thawed out, I have some pumpkin and cranberry-related items to start making, and my parents will get here tonight. When people ask when they’re coming, I say either “Flight 67” or “the 5:00 ferry,” and everyone knows what I’m talking about. It’s like living in an extended episode of Wings.

Last year, our family was one of millions who drove east out of Los Angeles the day before Thanksgiving. We were headed to Castle Valley, Utah, to my sister-in-law and brother-in-law’s magical place (Flo and I got married there, in the shadow of Arches National Park.) It took us two hours to drive twenty miles; we pulled over and had dinner, after which things picked up a little bit. Flo showed me a picture of that same exodus a year later – lines of unmoving cars, brake lights illuminating the freeway. This year we’ll be driving a mile and a half to pick up my parents from the airport ferry.

I’m thankful for a lot of things today – for Ward Lake, and for the Ward Cove post office with its empty parking lot, save a small apple-eating girl. For Green Bean coffee, and the local pharmacy, and the fact that I can live without whipped cream on my pie (BUT JUST THIS ONCE.) For the people I’ve met here, and the people I haven’t met yet, but will. For the sunshine and long days we had when we moved here, and for the rain and the darkness we have now. For the two people I live with whose hearts are all wrapped up with mine, and the third little person who’ll be joining the party soon. And for all of you, wherever you are. Happy Thanksgiving from southeast Alaska. Please eat enough whipped cream for me.

Power

The power went out last night, an hour after I’d stocked the fridge and a half hour before we were going to start making dinner. The last time the power went out, Ladybug was in school and I was just across the parking lot, at the rec center. Somehow the cardio machines were still functional, so I carried on with my workout – and it never occurred to me that my daughter might be fifty yards away, in the dark, and scared. Only when I picked her up did she coming running up to say, “Mommy, the power went out and I was as brave as I could be!” It turns out she was in the bathroom with two other preschoolers when the lights went out; the three of them held hands and walked back toward their classroom. They were picked up on the way by the school librarian who had come to find them, and they were very proud of themselves for being so clearheaded in the face of an emergency.

Last night, once the lights went out but before it got fully dark, we pulled out candles, headlamps, and flashlights and geared ourselves up for the possibility of a long evening with no power. After the lights had been out for ten minutes, I started calling restaurants around town to see who was open. On our way to Fat Stan’s, we tried to figure out where the grid started and ended; the power was on at the post office but off at A&P across the street. I later found out that our Coast Guard friends who live ten miles north of town lost power too. (They had cereal for dinner, which didn’t actually cross my mind. When your preschooler inexplicably hates eating in restaurants, you jump at any chance to say, “Sorry, we haveto go out.”)

I was slightly disappointed that the power was back on when we got home, but I can’t say I was surprised. As many outages as there have been since we’ve lived here – I think it’s up to four – they’ve never been long. It was Flo and Ladybug who reported back from their respective schools the most common reason: bald eagles get tangled up in the wires and blow the transformer. (Or as Ladybug put it, “They break the wire and the power goes out.”) I grew up with power outages, though rarely in Brooklyn. We spent our summers at a little house in Maine (the Canadians across the lake call them cottages, and New Yorkers would call them cabins, but the locals on East Grand Lake all call them camps.) Life at the camp was simple. We kids had a dishwashing schedule which rotated meals by day – really easy with three children in the family. If you had the breakfast dishes you were in luck; a handful of oatmeal bowls and then you could run out and go swimming. Lunch got more complicated, and dinner was the absolute worst, so one of us came up with a compromise: you could choose to cook the meal, and then Mom and Dad had to do the dishes. This is how and why I learned to cook – not because I had some deep love of fine cuisine (although I was always a fan of beautiful illustrated cookbooks) but because I wanted to avoid the odious doing-of-dishes. There was also no television at the camp, and the only person with a computer was our dad – a big hunk of plastic we all called “the IBM PC” – so all fun had to be analog. It’s funny to think that losing power would be such a big deal in that context – we were already living a pretty low-tech life. But it wasa big deal. Some of the most fun summer evenings I remember involve playing Scotland Yard by candlelight. (If you’ve never played Scotland Yard: do yourself a favor.)

So our power was back on last night, but I tried not to let the power of the adventure fade. We all stayed in the living room together, doing our own separate things part of the night, but then reading some new library books together, playing limbo with a jump rope. I’ve sometimes felt sad for our little one that she doesn’t have any allies in the house; if the grownups don’t want to limbo with her, she’s on her own. It has bred a creative spark in her, which is cool. I often see her instructing an entire schoolroom filled with stuffed animals, or turning empty sketch pads into letter-learning workbooks, a doll by her side. But I do think she’s lonely at times: there is no dishes chart, because there’s simply no one to share the task with. One would think an evening in the dark might exacerbate that, but I’ve always found power outages to be thrilling and to bring people together, and Ladybug seemed to agree. Right when the lights clicked off, she and Flo raced down to pick up a package at the post office – a task she might otherwise not have wanted to do, but she was too curious to see the post office bathed in darkness. Even the drive to dinner became an adventure, as we looked for lights in all the businesses we passed and discussed which friends might also be in the dark.

We had something of a haphazard earthquake kit in California; Flo was convinced that the most important element was ramen, but half the case of ramen ended up in my trunk and I couldn’t tell you where the other half was. (Also. I’d have to be very, very hungry to eat cup-a-noodles at this point in my life.) We did have several big jugs of water at the ready, and a first aid kit. But the tricky part about an earthquake kit is where to keep it: what will be destroyed in an earthquake? Where will you be? If you’re somehow trapped in your kitchen, you’ll be fine for awhile; no one keeps an earthquake kit in the bathroom, but of course that would be the worst place to be stuck – no food or drink if the water turns off, and a window too small to escape from. I lived in LA long enough to feel several earthquakes. I was two blocks from the epicenter of a pretty big one and even though it only lasted ten seconds or so, I’ll never forget the feeling of my feet losing their grip, my body tossed around like I’d come unglued from a snow globe. Flo lived through the Northridge earthquake, which shut down the city. He still talks about the eerie devastation of it, 25 years later.

These are eventualities we don’t have to consider anymore, but it’s a good time to put together a power outage kit. We’re going to consolidate our flashlights and headlamps, buy some more candles, throw in a deck of cards. Maybe we’ll put some sort of treat in the box – something we only have when the power goes out. I’m at the stage where I wonder how many more outages there will be before the baby comes. Could there be one while I’m in labor, the entire maternity ward going dark, Ladybug at home with her aunt or her nana, proud of herself for being as brave as she could be? The funny part about a baby is how little he will require: there’s no need to add anything to our kit for him. All this baby will need, for a very long time, is us. Someday we will have a dishes chart, maybe inspiring one of our children to learn how to cook. Someday we’ll play Scotland Yard (we’ve already tried, but it’s hilarious with a four-year-old.) Someday I’ll look up and see Ladybug building her schoolroom, forcing a little boy to sit quietly and listen to her, the way I did to my very accommodating younger sister. It’s been a tough couple of years, getting us to the family that we want – a blog post for another day, perhaps. But in the day to day, caught up in the mundane details of child-rearing, the grief melts away and it’s all very simple: a board game, some library books, limbo-ing with a jump rope. It’s the stuff of life, and there’s power in that.

Off the rock

Like Harry and Meghan on their Australian tour, Flo and I jetsetted this weekend, baby bump on full display. A few minor differences: we had an almost five-year-old with us, we flew coach, and we only made it as far as Seattle. Also, I’m six months pregnant but I look like I’m about to give birth on the light rail, so the breathless coverage of wardrobe choices reserved for Meghan wouldn’t be quite as interesting in my case (read: a lot of leggings.) Lastly, we weren’t on a diplomatic mission: there’s no dermatologist in Ketchikan so we were in Seattle for a yearly skin check. Yes, it’s as sexy as it sounds.

Shortly after we moved to Ketchikan, I heard several people talk to each other in passing about “getting off the rock.” In Brooklyn in the late eighties (still my main reference point for everything) this would have meant kicking a crack habit. But I quickly figured out it’s island speak for “going anywhere but here.” Having just arrived, and with gorgeous weather at that, I couldn’t appreciate what that might mean to some people. It’s now been three months, and though Flo and I have both left town for very short work trips, this was the first time the three of us went to the airport together and headed down to the Lower 48. I have to say: it was kind of magical.

First, Ketchikan International Airport, or KTN. It took us three minutes to drive down the hill in the still dark morning, past the Alaska Marine Highway terminal, the post office and A&P (Alaskan and Proud, our local-est grocery store) and park in the airport ferry lot. It’s a dollar a day to park there. A dollar. A day. If you’ve ever driven to and parked at an airport in a major city, you’ll appreciate how complete giddy it can make a recent transplant to spend three minutes and four dollars and be done with the process. Ah but wait: the process was not quite done. After parking and paying, we boarded the 7:45 ferry and arrived at the airport at maybe… 7:48? A motivated person could swim the Tongass Narrows in about the same time it takes to cross it by ferry – not because the ferry is slow, but because the waterway is so, well, narrow. We have TSA pre-check, a product of a particularly bad hour I spent alone at JFK with a two-year-old who delighted in running away from me as the security line crept forward. It was a lifesaver whenever we left New York or LA, but in Ketchikan all it means is you don’t have to take off your shoes. There’s one security line, and even if it’s slow there’s little danger of missing your flight: once you get through security you’re already at your gate – because there are only two, and they’re next to each other.

Wasn’t that a fascinating explanation of small town airports? Aren’t you so glad you’re keeping up with my blog? Okay, so if you’ve flown through a lot of small airports none of this is interesting for you. But for me, it’s pretty mind boggling. I’ve told several people since we moved how much lower my stress level is, and sometimes I wonder if it’s hyperbole – I still run at an eleven most of the time, elevating the making of school lunch to a federal case – but it’s situations like the airport run that remind me how true it is. Life is easier when there’s no traffic, and minimal driving in the first place; when lines are short; and when there are simply fewer people everywhere you go.

So it was interesting to be back in a big city after some time away. As long as Flo and I have lived on the west coast – and combined we’ve logged about fifty years – neither of us had ever been to Seattle (unless you count the Alaska Airlines terminal at SeaTac.) Several people in Ketchikan asked if we’d be renting a car, so I second guessed our decision not to; but the minute we arrived I realized with relief that, like almost every big city I’ve ever been to, it’s easier notto have a car than to have one. (Dallas is the exception that springs to mind. And, obviously, Los Angeles.) SeaTac’s version of the AirTrain is free, and it took us directly to the light rail station; $6 and 35 minutes later, we were walking up Broadway on Capitol Hill, taking in the restaurants, the rain-soaked leaves and the preponderance of rainbows.

“It’s not pride week, is it?” I said, trying to remember what month we were in.

“No,” said Flo. “I think this is all the time.” As far as I know, there’s no gay neighborhood in Ketchikan; we were officially back in the city.

Capitol Hill is epically cool, in the best sense of the word: it’s not completely gentrified yet (although I’m sure longtime locals would disagree with me), so there’s an interesting mix of people, stores and architecture that reflect the changing face of a city. It was the perfect launch pad for three and a half days of walking adventures. We walked down to Swedish, the big hospital complex, for our dermatology appointments and got epic views of the Puget Sound from the sweeping 14thfloor windows (while partially disrobed – take that, Harry and Meghan!) From there we wandered down Pike (Pine? I’ve been told they’re basically the same street), stopped for perfect coffee at Victrola, ate Mediterranean from a food truck next to a little park, took the monorail up to the Space Needle and found an awesome playground. After that was a walk to the flagship REI, which looks like the flagship LL Bean, and I’m honestly not sure who got the idea from whom, since they’re both hella old stores. By the time we hiked up the 45-degree angle that is Denny (Street? Avenue?) and back to our place, we understood why they don’t call it Capitol Valley.

The next two days were more of the same: a combination of walking, kid-oriented fun (hello, Pacific Science Center), and stocking up on provisions. We were like old-timey sailors on shore leave: minus the brothels, plus a massive Trader Joe’s list. And more than anything, we charted our meals like we were navigating the stars to find the promised land. With only so many meals, we had to be careful not to waste them. Thai, pizza, dumplings, sockeye, and delicious bakery bread all made the cut. Indian and sushi are on the agenda for the next trip. (And yes, I recognize that it may seem strange to leave the Salmon Capital of the World for three days only to get salmon elsewhere. It’s basically a combination of being boat-less, friends-with-boats-less, and the grocery stores in Ketchikan not selling local fish. The whole fishing thing here is a bit bewildering to a newcomer: a post for another day.)

I asked Flo if he missed this aspect of city life: stepping outside and just walking, with stops along the way to run all sorts of errands (we all got very mediocre haircuts at a walk-in place; the price one pays for speed, convenience, and cheapness.) We agreed that we missed it, except having come most recently from Los Angeles, that feeling is almost like being homesick for a place you’ve never been; it’s been a long time since we’ve really lived that kind of life. What we both love about the city as a construct is not endemic to life in So Cal. It’s why we loved living in Amsterdam, and why we’ve often talked about packing it up and going back to New York. Certain cities have a vibrancy that can be felt from the minute you step off the light rail and out into the rainy evening, and Seattle is one of those places. But there’s magic and beauty in the quiet too, in the slowness of small town life on a distant island. The bushes in our yard have finally stopped producing those big juicy blackberries, replacing them with hard little ones that take a lot longer to ripen, and possibly never will. The season is nearly over, and another season is here. This is how seasons work, of course, but it can be easy to miss when life is moving quickly and every falling leaf lands on concrete.

When we landed in Ketchikan, fewer than half the passengers got off the plane; everyone else was headed for Juneau. Alaska Airlines operates like Greyhound up here – they make a few stops and you get off when you need to. We stepped off the jetway and into the tiny terminal, then down the gangway towards the ferry. The lights of the town lit our dark passage across the Narrows. One small passenger had a new puppy she’d gotten in Portland. There was a group of laughing boys, a basketball team flying home from a game. High school athletes in Southeast Alaska (and I’m pretty sure the rest of the state) rack up a lot of air miles flying from game to game; members of the visiting team often stay at the homes of the local team, like foreign exchange students from a few hundred miles away. There’s something collegial about being an Alaskan. As independent as everyone is, there’s a spirit of generosity that runs through this place. An hour after we borrowed that sander a few weeks ago, pulled from the well-stocked basement of a friend, she knocked on our front door. She had mentioned the sander-lending to her husband and he told her it wasn’t working very well – so she ran to the hardware store at dinnertime, bought a new one and dropped it at our house. We’re all in this together.

We flew back from Seattle three months to the day from when we first arrived here. I mentioned to the same friend’s ten-year-old that we’d only been here for three months and she looked at me with big eyes. “Really?” she said. “It seems like you’ve been here for so long.” In many ways, it seems that way to me too. Sometimes you arrive somewhere you’ve never been and realize it’s a place you’ve been homesick for your whole life.

My drive to the chiropractor.

Bulk hoochies, anyone?

Alaska Day

This week we celebrated Alaska Day. So here’s a pop quiz.

Which is true? On October 18 in the year:

a) 1867, commissioners arrived in Sitka to raise the flag denoting the sale of Alaska (for $7.2 million) by the Russians to the United States.

b) 1958, President Eisenhower signed the Alaska Statehood Act, making Alaska the 49thstate.

c) 2003, nine out of ten people in Ketchikan bought the same pair of brown XtraTuf rain boots, which they have proceeded to wear almost daily ever since.

If you guessed A and C, you’re right! (Also, ahhh... multiple choice!)

I didn’t know Alaska Day was, as the kids say, a thing until last weekend. Someone mentioned it in passing, and I started noticing signs indicating which places would be open and which closed on Thursday the 18th. (As an example: the Rec Center was closed; the Thai restaurant was open.) Growing up we celebrated Brooklyn Queens Day (with a day off from school!), which on the one hand seems hilariously parochial. On the other hand, without even looking at the numbers I’m going to go out on a limb and say ten times as many people live in Brooklyn and Queens as live in the entire state of Alaska. (Just looked it up: approximately 5 million people live in the two boroughs, while 739,795 people live in Alaska. Not quite ten times, but pretty close for a complete guess, if I do say so myself.) And imagine if Russia still had a foothold in North America (and a big one at that) – the purchase of this state by the US is about more than a tract of land. The night of the 18th, Flo turned on a local TV station that was airing footage of an Alaska Native conference taking place in Anchorage. People of all ages stood up to represent their tribes, performing memorial dances. It was moving to see them, the kids especially, singing and chanting in languages I’ve never heard before, stone-faced and solid, embracing the cultures that two successive nations tried to obliterate.

I’m not sure what my point is, except to say how little I actually know about the state I just moved to. I spent all of fourth grade studying New York City history. One entire year of my history education, spent studying the city I lived in – admittedly an important American city, but a city nonetheless. All I knew about Alaska (until probably college) was the name of the capital and the fact that, weirdly, it was connected not to the US but to Canada. As an adult I’ve read some fantastic books that take place in Alaska, my favorite being The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. I LOVED that book and between that and a random Sandra Bullock movie I once saw on a plane, I’ve always wanted to go to Sitka.

Cleary this is not a cohesive picture of the biggest state in the country. (Again, I’m not sure when I figured out how much bigger Alaska is than Texas, but it was solidly into adulthood; it’s not only twice as big as Texas, it’s one fifth the size of the entire continental United States.) And I certainly had no idea that there was a part of Alaska, the part I now live in, that hardly sees snow in the winter, and rarely even drops below freezing. I’ve had so many phone calls with customer service reps in the last few months, whether changing my address or attempting to order something that may or may not ship to us, in which the person on the other end of the line talked immediately about how strange it will be this winter when the sun never comes up, or when we’re buried in snow. So I’m not the only one whose understanding of this vast place is colored by movies and a prevailing sense in popular culture that it’s uniform across its vastness, and that it’s also somehow “other.”

There’s still so much about Alaska that I don’t know. And still so much I don’t know about Southeast Alaska, and Ketchikan, and even my neighborhood. Small children, we’re told, start thinking about the world by looking at their household, then their street, then their neighborhood – in other words, they go in concentric circles outward, ostensibly because it would be too hard to digest it all. I’m doing that too, while simultaneously taking an outside-in approach: attempting a crash course on thousands of years of history about 663,268 square miles, while at the same time learning which pizza place in Ketchikan is the most reliable (Ward Cove is winning so far), which pumpkin patch the most fun for a four-year-old (the one held by Search and Rescue.) The micro and the macro, as it were.

In super local news, Flo caught a couple of fish today and by the time Ladybug and I got home from a day-off-from-school play date, he had fileted them and they were ready to cook up for dinner. They were delicious – and free! (Unless you count the cost of a non-resident fishing license – we have to wait til we’ve been here a year to get the really cheap resident rate – and the mountains of gear. In which case, dinner was very expensive.) He and Ladybug are also in the process of rehabbing a ten-dollar garage sale dresser. The scraping and sanding and priming and painting are not the kind of thing we could have done easily in a small apartment in a big city, but here it makes perfect sense. I’ve rarely seen my little one more engaged in a project than watching her attack these old drawers, uncovering (much to her delight) flowers that were painted over long ago. Every drawer has brought the question: will we find more flowers underneath? Whoever painted them in the first place had a very clear idea about where they should be placed, but from an outside perspective there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason.

I don’t feel like an Alaskan yet – not by a long shot. But slowly we’re doing things that help us weave ourselves into the fabric of this place, and this place into the fabric of us. Texting a handful of friends to see who has a sander we can borrow (the answer is: all of them), and coming home to see Flo ratcheting the bear straps tight over garbage cans filled with fish guts – these are not things we did in Los Angeles. The 49thstate is vast enough to give a person the sense that there are more adventures waiting.

Including a big one, coming in early February: a baby boy, the first of our little clan to be born in Alaska. He’s the one whose tiny socks and cloth diapers and “Alaska Grown” onesies will be fitted neatly into repainted dresser drawers. Next year on Alaska Day, he will be eight months old, sitting up and crawling and smiling. He won’t know what it’s like to be from Brooklyn like I do, or from the heartland like his dad does, or from sunny California, a place his sister will always vaguely remember. He may leave this place someday; we all may. But this place will not leave him. For now, his tiny heart beats thousands of miles from the rest of the country, in this, his homeland.

Predators

(Trigger warning: I’m going to talk, vaguely, about sexual abuse here. And politics. Ah, politics.)

We finally saw a bear.

Occasionally Flo and I pick up Ladybug from school together, and this happened to be one of those days. We had watched her roll down the little hill outside her school with a few small friends as we chatted with their parents, and then we set off for home. As we drove uphill out of, ironically, Bear Valley, we hit the stretch of road known as the Third Avenue bypass. This is the truly stunning part of the five-minute school commute – forest to one side, mountains in the distance, our little seaside town just appearing at the crest of the hill. And this day, with the Tongass Narrows as a backdrop, a black bear reared up on the far end of the road and dashed in front of us, climbing up a tree once she was safely across on the other side. It was so surprising, in the middle of the afternoon, steps away from school and the library and houses, that we all started talking at once. The first thing I realized? No bear spray, no high decibel whistle, will stop me from having a full-on heart attack if I’m ever face-to-face with a bear without the (perhaps false) security of a windshield between us. I generally think of bears as “ambling,” maybe because in children’s books and cartoons they’re so often anthropomorphized as jolly and even a little dumb. Obviously I know they’re not all Baloo from The Jungle Book, but still: the image of a bear running twenty feet in front of me does not make me feel cuddly. This is a predator, and I’m glad all three of us were witness to it; nothing can teach a small child the value and importance of fear like coming face-to-face with it.

The week of the bear sighting, I felt more on edge than I had in two years, since the election that upended my whole understanding of Americans. This was the week the FBI spent investigating allegations against Kavanaugh that he was unfit to be confirmed to the Supreme Court because of a history of behavior that ranged from inappropriate and disgusting (revealing himself at a party) to violent and terrifying (attempting to rape a fellow high school student.) Like a lot of women, the #MeToo movement has made me reconsider some of the things that have happened to me over the years. Suffice it to say: there are women who have experienced much, much worse. But if I pull back and look at the whole picture, certain incidents remain clear and bright, like taking an iPhone photo in portrait mode. We are a powerful race, womankind, powerful enough to stand up to teenage boys at a party and to men at the highest levels of government – though not powerful enough to always win the fight.

I wrote this email to Senator Murkowski the day before she voted “No” on Kavanaugh, standing up for women and Alaskans and everyone who’s ever been victimized.

Dear Senator Murkowski, I am writing to implore you not to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. I am not asking you this as a Democrat, but as a woman. His past actions and unwillingness to admit his own failures as a young man show him to be a person who lacks both a moral compass and the ability to judge others fairly. My brother never did these things to women in high school and college; neither did my husband. Should we not hold Judge Kavanaugh to a higher standard than most men? Most women I know have stories of mistreatment by men. I’m sure most women you know do too. Our memories may not be perfect, and we may not have been perfect ourselves, but we deserve to be heard. If I were in Washington right now, I’d be holding a sign that reads, “We bear your babies and we bear your bullshit. All we ask is that you believe us.” Please believe us, Senator. You have an opportunity to send a message to the women of Alaska (where, as you know, the rates of sexual violence are sky high) that we matter. The world is watching. Please make your voice heard. I am rooting for you. Best, Liz Bolton Ketchikan

Bears get into our garbage, and they run across our roads, but ultimately man wields the power over them; in the past few weeks, two bears have been shot on the island by police officers or forest service employees. Women and bears have long shared a sad truth – it is men who are our true predators. It will be my lifelong job to gently teach my daughter that our greatest enemy often comes masked as our greatest friend, and to help her understand that a modicum of fear is a necessary ally. Until men decide that it is no longer funny or harmless or acceptable to victimize women, we will continue walking quickly, with our keys held as ready weapons between two fingers. Most importantly, we will continue to speak. You can hurt us, but you cannot silence us. There is another generation of girls, rolling down hills outside of schools all over the world, ready to rise up and greet you with a “No.”

Evening shadows at Knudsen Cove.

Helicopter parent, motorboat sounds

I don’t think I’m actually a helicopter parent (at least according to the internet’s definition: “a parent who takes an overprotective or excessive interest in the life of their child.”) But I’m sitting here watching kids splash around in the pool while my daughter sits on the sidelines and my Heart. Is. Racing.

I signed her up for swimming lessons as soon as we got to Alaska because this summer, inexplicably, Ladybug went from barely treading water to doing the breast stroke. Anything she saw an older child do, she did. It was magical to watch. And now suddenly we’re going backwards. Here at the Gateway Aquatics Center, new children need to be assessed before they are placed into a class, which makes sense. But class two looked suspiciously like an assessment too, and class three appears to be more of the same—there are currently two teachers for three students and they seem to mostly be blowing bubbles. Um, Icould teach my four-year-old to blow bubbles. Except I don’t haveto. BECAUSE SHE ALREADY KNOWS HOW TO SWIM.

So what’s an overbearing mom who doesn’t want to seem overbearing supposed to do? Threaten the teenage girls who run the program? This is where moving to a new place with an entirely new parent-child culture gets very tricky. I had a European friend in LA once gently tell me that I was New York-ing a preschool-related phone call—as in, as I understood it, I should 1) speak slower 2) sound calmer and 3) not assume that the people on the other end of the line were out to get me. This, I’ve found, is very challenging for me. Ineptitude or laziness or even forgetfulness (as in, “I forgot I told you I was going to move her up to a higher level after the assessment was over”)—well, as people back home would put it, it gets my Irish up. (And I’m only, like, fifty percent Irish.) But it’s enough to make my eyeballs pop out of my face. And that was in Los Angeles, which is arguably a lot more low key than New York—but Ketchikan makes LA look like Singapore meets Tokyo meets London. It’s reeeeeeeal low key here.

This is the part where I have to put on my best Midwestern smile (I can fake that, I think) and just tell the teenage girls what I need from them: make my daughter the next Michael Phelps. Kidding! I just don’t want her to spend 45 minutes blowing bubbles. Off I go. Wish me luck.

Update: That first conversation was puzzling. For one thing the seasonally-named young woman who is both the teacher of Ladybug’s class and, perhaps, though not definitely, the person who’s nominally in charge of the entire program, told me that she had already moved Ladybug up to level two. But it appears that level one and level two are combined (even though there was another teacher working with exactly one student on what looked suspiciously like level-two type stuff.) Also, the other teacher working with this level-one/level-two group is training, according to the girl that we shall call Miss Autumn (wrong seasonal name, but let’s start by giving her some anonymity.) I’m all for teaching teachers. Still, I find it hard to believe that this friendly young grownup in the striped bathing suit is only capable of teaching preschoolers how to make motorboat sounds. We left it that the teachers would work with Ladybug on some more advanced concepts in the next class, and my little one and I were both satisfied.

BUT the update to the update is this: After the next session, class four, the teacher/person in charge/seventeen-year-old Jillian Bell lookalike spoke to me (Jillian, if you’re reading this: I wanted to take a picture and send it to you but that seemed creepy.) Unprompted, Miss Spring (again, not her actual name) told me that she had drilled Ladybug on some higher level stuff that day. And it turns out there are some level one concepts that Ladybug doesn’t know yet. A few things are possible. The first is that this may be true. The second is that my daughter had an off day. And the third, which I am beginning to believe is the most likely, is that Miss Summer (nope, not that one either) was putting me in my place. And here’s how that makes me feel: awesome. If it turns out, after all these years of big city life, of walking fast and muscling my way as close to the top as possible in every situation, that I have moved my young daughter to a place where teenage girls can speak truth to power—this will be my greatest achievement. I have stopped fretting about swim class—for one thing because that’s a ridiculous statement in the first place and almost embarrassing to admit. And because fretting about swim class is proof that I am in fact a helicopter parent. But it’s also because knowing that I’ve put my daughter in the hands of a strong, confident young woman is worth a lot more than learning the front crawl. We’ll save that for level three.

Miss Winter for president.

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

notes from a northern rainforest