Postcards from the Road

Dear Friend,

1. [an end]

In April, I lost the infrastructure of my life. Our beloved daycare closed. Was closed. Closed by its parent organization. Without warning.

The news leaked on April 17th. They weren’t going to tell us.

A donor paid to keep the doors open two more weeks.

There is a long story to tell here and one I want to help tell. It is the story of the greatest group project I have ever been part of even though not a single one of our goals were met.

Every time I sit to write, I just think about how much we lost. Instead of continuing to write this post, I started texting one of my kid’s favorite teachers, the one she would visit every day a year after leaving her classroom. She’s still looking for work. I’m hoping to help with some resume/cover letter input but it’s not enough. She should have had a job right now, one she could rely on, one she was incredibly good at.

I tend to be a person who freezes when I’m sad. I go into crisis mode. I want to fix something. I engage too deeply with my mind and body. But I can’t write. Can’t off load. Can’t put it down.

There is a world within this closing that these sentences can’t contain. I’ll write more about the end at some point. The end was the greatest group project I have ever been part of.

I also tend to be a person who finds words most easily when I’m angry. I had a lot to say while telling the leadership what they did to us.

The day the school closed, we got on a plane to Ireland.

2. [connemara]

   

   “Beauty isn't all about just niceness, loveliness. Beauty is about more rounded, substantial becoming.”

   -John O’Donohue

I’d had my eye on a certain airbnb on a lake for several years. Last summer, it had an unexpected opening in the coming May. I booked the full block.

We took daily hikes marked by wind and rain, ate warm scones in the nearest cafe, supported Pippin’s newfound commitment to lemon fanta.

2b. [London ER]

Pippin got sick during a few days in London. We didn’t think it was serious at first. She gets tummy aches. And of course she was tired! We were walking a lot! But then she spiked a fever overnight and woke crying about belly pain. Time to find a dr.

We tried an urgent care first. Called them to schedule and they said to go to the ER instead in case she would need imaging.

Checked in at the Royal Hospital Pediatric Emergency Room at 10:30 am.

Discharged at 11:45am the same day. With a diagnosis from multiple tests and doctor evaluations. With antibiotics in hand without having to go to a pharmacy. With sheets of stickers for her to play with.

At no cost.

I cried.

3. [daphne’s cornwall]

I travelled with Common Ground Pilgrimages again. Last year was Persuasion in Lyme. This year, Rebecca in Fowey. Robbie and Pippin left me at Paddington Station and took their flight home. I took the train to the coast and joined 21 others to engage a text and take long hikes through the landscape that defined that text. Led by the one and only Carmen Maria Machado, we gathered each morning to say what this story meant to us, of a whole self split between a nameless narrator and the titular, dead (but never gone) Rebecca and the land/weather/sea itself making the story unfold. Nothing stays a secret forever my mother always said. Or the Bible: “For there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open.”

4. [surgery]

Scalpel to my nose. Splints up my sinuses. A septum un-deviated. A week of struggling to breathe and sleeping with my face turned up to the steam off the humidifier. It’s taken me two weeks to come back to an energy baseline. To feel like the summer is beginning.

5. [the end]

Everything has changed. I’m thinking about changing everything.

Love,

Dana