Memoir
now browsing by category
The Labor of Knowing
Sipping my first coffee this morning, I realized I hadn’t walked among trees since Monday. Obviously, I had to remedy that. As I walked along one of my two favorite, near-by places to be among trees, I thought about a million things, first Annie Dillard because I can’t walk a path in nature regularly without meditating on Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and eventually working my way around to love and friendship – hardly a surprise given my current readings.
Ouiser visited for five blessed days this past week. Amidst all the fun and excitement, we, of course, managed a few serious conversations trying to come to terms with the chaos that seemingly envelops everything right now. We even found some calm among that storm walking this same path.
I’m still thinking and reading about love. Still crafting what I have to say about how love reveals itself through acts of care, respect, knowing, and assuming responsibility.
Recently, as I scrolled through Instagram videos, I am across one of a young woman who said that the more she really listened to men, the less she considered herself a feminist. It was click bait designed to create a scuffle. As I walked today, I realized what I found so terribly sad about the video – change requires the exact opposite of what this young woman outlined. The more I engage with men, listen deeply to them, and see the consequences of capitalist, patriarchal structures in their lives, the more deeply I commit to feminism.
My copy of Feminism is for Everybody is stuck on the shelf in my office. If I ever get back there, I may pick it up and return to this idea for further discussion. As hooks establishes, feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression. Today, I’m bringing it up, because I am thinking about that connection between knowing and loving. It’s no secret that gender influences why, how, and where communities choose to resist sexist, capitalist, and patriarchal structures or that pitting people against each other across race, class, and gender lines is one tactic to keep people from uniting to demand substantive change. It made me sad to see the tactic still working.
As I walked and thought of love and knowing, I also thought of how the work of knowing is as gendered as the work of caring. Women know men; they have to, their lives often depend on knowing how the men around them think and feel. Women know sexism; they live with the most immediate consequences of it and those consequences deepen and sharpen as they intersect across race, class, and sexuality. Feminists have also been vocal about these consequences throughout history. Yet, very few people men and women alike, have taken the time to know feminists and feminism. To believe women, as the #MeToo movement asked. To turn knowing into action and into responsibility to create change that will benefit everybody.
Today, as I walked through the blanket of leaves so thick that it was easy to lose the path, I wanted to post the beauty. To remember that these beautiful moments when we walk a path alone and the moments when we are blessed enough to share a path with a friend, are what we labor for. We must labor to know one another and for that knowing to become a part of an active love for one another.
A cookie is a cookie is a cookie …
Two incidents from grad school keep popping up as I re-visit bell hooks All About Love and Communion.
At the end of my MA program, I took my first feminist theory classes with a professor, who inspired me. She challenged me, and I admired her. She is the reason I ended up in the Ph.D. program at my school. She pushed me to go somewhere else, but I wanted to continue to study with her. In the end, she left the university right after I submitted my dissertation proposal, so I probably should have listened. (That is an entirely different story.) The exact name of the course escapes me, but I am sure it had something to do with feminist pedagogies and composition. I am sure, because I unwittingly ignited a firestorm of feminist debate at our end of the semester dinner party.
At the end of that semester I completed my first year teaching composition at the local community college. I’d opted to complete an internship style program rather than write a thesis. I brought some Cowboy Cookies (around my house that means oatmeal cookies with chocolate chips and walnuts) that I’d baked as part of my contribution to the dinner. At some point, I must have mentioned that I had also made enough cookies to take to celebrate the end of my first year teaching with my composition students.
After twenty years, I don’t remember the conversation verbatim, I am pretty sure it started with an exasperated comment from my professor wondering if I’d learned anything at all in her class. Because baking cookies for my students perpetuated gendered stereotypes about how women professors should care for students. Basically, I’d forsaken feminist pedagogies, shored up expectations that women will perform uncompensated caring labor, and made things more difficult for women who don’t fit the stereotype. I didn’t have a great come back. I pointed out that it was the end of the semester, and that the point wasn’t about caring for the students. I was celebrating a milestone – the end of my first year teaching. A classmate, who was every bit as passionate, strong-willed, and inspiring as our professor, vehemently defended me. She argued that the point of feminism is that I had the choice to make cookies or not make cookies.
They went on about it for long enough that the whole incident became a reference point for those of us in the class for the next few years.
A couple of years later, during my Ph.D. work, I had the opportunity to hear bell hooks speak. I believe it was at Winston-Salem State University. I don’t remember the exact talk now, but I know she talked about love. I know because I remember, with regret, how dismissive I was about her message. Still influenced by my professor and other feminist scholars, I was too focused on how work considered, “women’s work” is devalued within systems. And as hooks writes, “Patriarchy has always seen love as women’s work, degraded and devalued labor.” I went into the talk wanting a different kind of feminism from hooks; what she offered was more radical than I knew at the time.
It wasn’t until 2021 or 2022, that I finally started to read hook’s work on love, that I was ready to really listen. In the All About Love chapter “Community: Loving Communion,” hooks opens by reminding us that “Communities sustain life — not nuclear families, or the “couple,” and certainly not the rugged individualist.” For hooks, “When we see love as the will to nurture one’s own or another’s spiritual growth, revealed through acts of care, respect, knowing, and assuming responsibility, the foundation of all love in our life in the same. There is no special love exclusively reserved for romantic partners. Genuine love is the foundation of our engagement with ourselves, with family, with friends, with partners, with everyone we choose to love.”
My professor wasn’t wrong. Overtly caring work like nursing, teaching, child care has been characterized as women’s work and degraded and devalued. You can find a million articles about it, and if you require less academic/more real world proof, watch Meet the Parents again and pay attention to all the jokes about Ben Stiller’s profession. Resisting that devaluation has been important work, particularly when we consider the way that devaluation compounds as it impacts across race as well as gender.
We are, however, so clearly living in broken communities. [gestures hopelessly at the world]
hooks’ message was more radical than I knew, because I couldn’t comprehend the ramifications of these broken communities. Love isn’t all we need. We also need action. We need the “acts of care, respect, knowing, and assuming responsibility” hooks says demonstrate love. I think we also need the accountability that comes with responsibility.
I know I’m guilty of conflating love/acts of care a bit as I am trying to work out their relationship in my stories. Their relationship and the difficulty of teasing them apart for discussion is some of the point. We need a broader vocabulary of love, and we need a less gendered understanding of the labor of love that enables us all to assume the responsibility of it.
Clearly, there is a lot to think through here. I’ve reached the limit of blog-post attention span, though. So, I’ll pick up the threads another time.
Personal Holidays
October 4, 2008 was as gloriously sunny Saturday as it is today on October 4, 2025.
I know, because on October 4, 2008 I was supposed to enjoy a day at the North Carolina zoo with my ex-husband. The sun shined and the leaves had just begun to change colors. It was a truly rare Saturday that the ex-husband and I had the opportunity to spend time together. Instead, October 4, 2008 became a day I can never quite forget and that I never really know how to celebrate, Stroke Day.
I last celebrated Stoke day in 2018. It felt like 10 years was enough time to mark, so I did it right. I invited friends to my place in Aberdeen, NC and we had a lovely spread of snacks, and I had a cake made.
It was a great end to the Stroke Day commemorations. So, I didn’t really expect to be writing about it still.
On this Stroke Day, though, I haven’t been able to escape the memories. Maybe it’s the fact that the day is falling on a Saturday again. Maybe it’s the fact that, in a year that has already challenged me and the rest of the nation, yet another challenging event has just begun. The seventeen years since stroke day have taught me the depth of my strength and the boundless capacity of my joy.
So, whether I choose to commemorate it or not, October 4th remains a personal holiday for me. One that reminds me to be as grateful for the struggles as I am for the gifts.
Reading 2025 pt. 1
For the first time this year, I decided to try to keep track of all the books I read. In the past, I have made half-assed attempts to chronicle my reading in my journals, but never really manage to keep the effort accurate. This year, I’m a little more serious about it all. I created a notebook to keep on my night stand to chronicle every book I finish this year.
Finishing, as opposed to start or buy, is a huge distinction here. My attention span and ability to stay focused on one topic long enough to finish a book seems to be at an all time low. I think that is part of why I started this little note book and list. Perhaps, I am hoping that adding a title to the list will give me motivation to finish what I start.
“Reading” also has a pretty expansive definition for me. I don’t care about format, reading is any engagement with a story, fiction or non-fiction, written by someone else. That means I could have read a physical book, an e-book, or listened to an audio version of the text. It all counts as reading for me. As I try to keep myself in the habit of posting, I will periodically share something from my list here.
The first book I finished this year was Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume Book I, translated by Barbara Haveland. Balle is an a Danish author writing a book set in France that at first sounds like a re-hash of the Bill Murray film Groundhog Day. Tara Settler, an antique book seller, becomes trapped in a repeating November 18th. Book one of this series follows her attempts to understand and cope with her new reality. (I am only part way through Book II, so I can’t actually let you know how this works out.)
Given how little I enjoyed the film Groundhog Day, how much I enjoyed On the Calculation of Volume surprised me a bit. Comparing the two works isn’t really possible. Their different genres, purposes, and universe’s far outweigh any similarity in their premise. On the Calculation of Volume is a quiet and subtle exploration of time, self, and relationships. Perhaps I love it most, though, because as Tara recounts how she started chronicling her experience, counting and describing the nuances of her different November 18ths, she says, “Maybe there’s healing in sentences.”
Perhaps that is what I am attempting to do as I tear through books this year – allowing the sentences other people write to make their imprint on me, to heal me through recognition. Perhaps, even more strongly, that is what I am attempting to do here, to heal through my own sentences.
All this has happened before …
The important work is done. The guest bedroom is complete, for now. Ouiser will even have her own TV to enjoy while she is here. The new office, well that is another story, it’s not so complete. There are piles of books and stuff all over the floor. My new desk is in its place, though. And I’ve cleaned off just enough space to write at it.
Dragging the piles of things from one room to the other, I stumbled across this old post-it note titled “Daily Quarantine Questions” from 2020. I don’t remember when I copied down these questions, or where I got them from, maybe Brene Brown. I’m so glad they survived the last five years, because they were an amazing reminder of how to get through chaos and overwhelm.
- What am I grateful for today?
- Who am I checking in on or connecting with today?
- What expectations of “normal” am I letting go of today?
- How am I getting outside today?
- How am I moving my body today?
- What beauty am I either creating, cultivating, or inviting today?
I am 97% sure I don’t need to explicate for you why these questions felt so relevant and perfectly suited to this moment. This is a blog, though, and that kind of thing is kind of what we are both here for, right? Don’t worry, I’ll keep it brief. The sweeping scope and pace of change in the first two weeks of the current presidential administration has felt chaotic, to put it mildly. Announcement after announcement has kept everyone on edge; it’s been hard to find the space to pause between the stimulus and response, to paraphrase Viktor Frankl.
These questions came back to me at the perfect time. They provide a path, showing us how to find the space for ourselves. They also made me realize how much we’ve all internalized since 2020. Of all the things to be grateful for in the past two weeks, the greatest has to have been realizing how we’ve learned to check in on each other when things are hard. Yes, I am purposefully using an expansive “we” here. I don’t think it is just my small circle of friends who have spent the last few weeks, sending a couple of extra texts, making overdue phone calls, and maybe even sending the occasional piece of snail mail. These questions and these practices are the skills we learned five years ago that are going to strengthen us today.
![They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us by [Abdurraqib, Hanif] Book cover. Blue background, picture of wolf head and chest on a man's body wearing a red track suit with white strips down the shoulders and arms, and a thick gold chain around its neck.](http://grabow.co/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/TCKUUTKU.jpg)
Finding the questions also made me curious about what, if anything, I’d posted about the questions in 2020. I looked back through the archive, something I rarely do, and found this entry, “Unexpected Joy,” from February 2020. If you are new here and haven’t read this book of essays by Hanif Abdurraqib yet, you should. They are great. The post, written in 2020, actually talks more about 2016. It doesn’t mention the questions, but it does address what the questions are meant to help you find – the unexpected joy. Like connections, and maybe even growing out of our connections, joy is essential to our survival, to our healing, to our resilience. I think I say it best at the end of that entry.
Abdurraqib concludes, “Joy, in this way, can be a weapon–that which carries us forward when we have been beaten back for days, or moths, or years.” And I remember how beaten down I felt in the years leading up to 2016. How alone I felt trudging from one crisis to the next just trying desperately to hold it together, to make sure I could provide for my family. Yes, there were moments of joy in those years, friendships made, but I remember how my smile rarely reached my eyes, and my guard never fully came down. In 2016, joy became my weapon. It carried me forward each time an event beat me down. Joy also became the weapon of my recovery. It flooded my life in the fall of 2016: the house full of friends at the birthday party I threw for myself, the renewal of old friendships, the long mornings and afternoons on the deck, the comfort of the dogs and cat as we settled into our new normal. The joy in those moments, big and small, salving my wounds, healing me, and carrying me forward.
Ask your questions, check in with your friends, and may you all find your joy.
Progress
I meant to post this weekend, but I got a little distracted putting together furniture. Since Ouiser is coming to stay with me soon, I am finally making some incremental progress on switching out the guest room and my office. My old office is still full of random piles of stuff, but I’ve mostly cleared out the guest room. To help motivate me I bought a new book case and desk for the new office space. They arrived remarkably fast this week, so I took it as a sign to get moving on this transformation.
As I worked to assemble these pieces into a book case. I realized how much I enjoy putting together furniture. Sounds crazy, I know, but hear me out. It’s a bit meditative for me. My part of my brain is occupied with following the instructions and assembling the pieces, but there is a portion of it that can also wander. It’s a little like when I listen to books as I do jigsaw puzzles. Only at the end of it, I have a piece of furniture I can point to and say, “Look what I did all by myself!”
Any one who has been around these pages any length of time, knows I have a complicated relationship with my independence and sense of accomplishment. I relish my independence, and can be pretty stubborn about doing things on my own. Because my experiences often reinforced the lesson that I needed to rely on myself. Yes, it can be an invaluable strength to have this kind of stubborn independence. It can also be a real challenge. Learning to ask for help is the lesson the universe keeps putting in front of me.
I could have asked for help with these pieces of furniture. Any number of friends would have come over and helped me moved the boxes up to the third floor of my townhouse. Instead, I unboxed them on the first floor and made multiple trips up and down the stairs before assembling them here in my new office. It all worked out in the end. Neither of these pieces required two people for assembly, and I get to feel a great sense of accomplishment in my office space! It may still be a bit of a struggle to get myself to sit down and write, but maybe that sense of accomplishment will transfer and push me to do a bit more writing.
Also, I’ve already asked for help when I eventually move that large dresser into the new guest bedroom. It is not, and never will be, a one person job. Even I know that.
January
My work anniversary, January 6th, didn’t disappoint this year. It brought a weather related base closure and more snow than I have seen in a long time. The year was kind to me, however, and this time I did not lose power, though I am pretty sure we got more snow this year. Between the base closure for Monday and Tuesday, delayed opening on Wednesday, and the national day of mourning for President Carter on Thursday, it was a very odd week. I still worked every day, except Thursday, but I never really felt like I had a good handle on the day or time. One of the women I work with summed it up nicely by calling January a month of Mondays. I am not sure how the whole month will go, but that was a very great description of this week. There just wasn’t much continuity built into it.
Continuity or not, I did survive the week. I enjoyed teaching. Although much of the content is the same, I have such a different group of students this year. It’s really nice. It helps that I have less going on personally this year, so I am able to bring more of myself fully to class. My morning routine isn’t completely locked in, but I have been able to read & write a bit nearly each day. Early morning coffee in bed by the light of my Kindle remains a magic time for me.
Around my birthday last year, I found this book: Tolstoy’s A Calendar of Wisdom. It’s set up like a devotional with a collection of quotations and short ideas for each day. Some are from Tolstoy, but most are passages he collected from other sources. Reading my daily passages and reflecting on them helped me to get back into my morning routine, and I am looking forward to spending this year with this collection of ideas. A couple of recurring themes so far are about kindness and connection. For example, our kindness towards one another unifies the world. Of course, given my theoretical foundation, the idea resonates with me.
While it is always a present concern in my life, I think connection is going to be an important theme for me this year. Creating, cultivating, and curating the connections in my life feels significant now. It’s already when chatting with a friend last week, I said, “There is so little connection right now that every one feels precious.” And, the truth of the statement rang in my ears. As usual with all my words, intentions, and conditions for the year, I don’t know what it will mean in practice; I just know that connections will be important this year, and I don’t think it will just be for me. I think the truth of my statement is not necessarily in my personal life, it is in our cultural moment. As if it confirm my intuition, this month’s issue of The Atlantic contains a great article called “The Anti-social Century.” If you don’t have a subscription, it is worth looking up in your local library.
With this focus on connection in mind I signed up for the text-only version of Tara Brach’s, “A Year of Courageous Loving.” It gets started on Monday. My curiosity about this year is pretty high. Connection is just one theme that seems to be running through my ether, so it will be interesting to see where we end up next year at this time. No big resolutions or promises from me about how many posts or what their format or content will be, but I think it might be a little more active, and hopefully interesting, around here this year.
New Ink
Mostly writing to keep up the accountability again. It’s been an interesting week, and an entirely boring one.
The most interesting thing about the week is that I got a tattoo! It’s been several years since my last tattoo, and this one is a bit different than the others. I didn’t go into the process with a clear idea of what I wanted. I had my “inspirations”, a poem, a tattoo style, and my pack. I shared all those with the tattoo artist and she designed something for me. That meant I have known since September-ish that I was getting a tattoo, but I didn’t actually see this design until the day of my tattoo. All of you probably realize how far out of my comfort zone that took me.
It’s perfect, though. As I thought about the poem, Instructions on Not Giving Up, all I could see were the literal images in it. What I love about my tattoo, is that I feel all the energy and the ideas of the poem, without literal images from it. The bird with wings spread wide is neither a fist nor a leaf, but it is “unfurled” and “like an open palm.” And my pack is all represented in it in ways that are obvious to me.
The other interesting ideas floating around my world this week has to do with older ideas. Knowing what is enough. When is it okay to stop, to say “this is enough for me”? What is good enough? And the question behind all of that, “What do I want?” These questions in and of themselves aren’t really interesting. What’s interesting is that I am facing these questions from a much different place. They haven’t activated me. I don’t feel anxious or insecure about my answers to those questions.
Unexpected
No big thoughts this week, just posting for practice and accountability.
Going into this week, I didn’t have much of a plan for Thanksgiving. Knowing it would be just me, I planned a left-over Thanksgiving feast that substituted chicken thighs for turkey meat. Not thinking too far ahead, Wednesday night I headed out to the store to pick up a few last minute things.
My days working at grocery stores must have truly faded from my memory, because I was prepared for busy, but not outrageously busy. As I stood outside the store, taking a phone call, my Thanksgiving plans changed slightly. Instead of lounging in my pajamas, eating and drinking whenever I was ready to start the day, I’d be sharing my left-over style dinner with a friend. I figured that required slightly more home cooking than I’d planned. (Homemade stuffing vs Stovetop)
To keep my life a little simple, I’d planned to just pick up a pumpkin pie and some Rediwhip to go with dinner. Unbelievably, the grocery store was out of pumpkin pies. They had plenty of pecan and one sweet potato, but neither of those were an option for me. So, I picked up all the ingredients, and found myself baking a pie Thanksgiving morning.
The dinner came together well, and I think I have finally established my own Thanksgiving routine. Since my divorce, I’ve hosted a vegetarian – just the sides and desserts style Friends-giving, spent Thanksgiving with friends and their families, and had Thanksgiving catered by Wegman’s, so I could have the leftovers without having to cook. Each of those Thanksgiving’s was a joy in its own way.
This year, though, this year, I found my base. When left to my own devices, without other plans, I know exactly what I’ll cook and how I will plan for Thanksgiving – simply and loosely. I make chicken thighs and gravy all the time and mashed potatoes more often than I should. The stuffing I do only make once a year. What really made this meal special, though, was throwing it all in a deep-dish pie dish like a Shepherd’s pie. It’s special, because it all just tastes so good together, but also because it helped me be super flexible with my plans.
As I said until Wednesday night, I’d planned to enjoy my little meal by myself while I puttered about the house ignoring chores and watching whatever tickled my fancy. As I stood in the Publix parking lot listening to my friend, my plans changed. Realizing that my friend needed company and not to have to leave their place, I offered to share my Thanksgiving and suggested it would be easy to assemble then bring over to warm up.
Thursday afternoon, I packed up the dinner, the pie, and some wine and headed over to my friend’s house. Everything worked out wonderfully and this was a lovely and special Thanksgiving. The simplicity and flexibility of my cooking plans served my traditions and memories, but also allowed me to be present and share a lovely holiday with a friend. That is the element of this meal that I want to be the tradition. Perhaps next year, I will share it with more friends in my home, or maybe I’ll do something wildly different. Who knows?
What I learned this year is that I all really require from Thanksgiving is getting set up for my favorite holiday of the year, National Pie for Breakfast Day!
I hope that you all had wonderful Thanksgivings!
Proof of Life
So, it’s been a while. I wish I had some wild stories of everything that has happened in the last year, or year and a half. The reality, though, is that life has just been life-ing. I am still aboard Quantico, as the locals say it. Life has been good to me, yet not without challenges.
In May, I said goodbye to a huge chunk of my heart.
The muppet was with me for 16 years. And, I still can’t type this without crying. The night we said goodbye a good friend took me out for a distraction dinner, and when he brought me home, I saw that the “only blooms once a year” cactus had bloomed for the very first time since it came to my house.
The fragrance filled the house and gave me the smallest measure of peace. Since then I have been distracting myself, keeping busy traveling and volunteering. Bet you’d never have guessed I would become a docent at a museum in my spare time. 🙂
After the election this month, I started to re-read Pema Chodron’s When Things Fall Apart. It’s a great book, if you haven’t read it already. It started poking at me from the introduction, where I received the instruction to “relax and write.” And kept at it in Chapter One: Intimacy with Fear, where I realized my failure to write was becoming a fear of writing. So … here I am. No promises about the future or trying to hard to catch up on the past, just the intention to “relax and write.”
D5 Creation