Seasons.

I want to tell all the stories but find that my voice is quiet because of all the talking and listening and child-rearing I’ve been doing. We’re in Detroit, swimming in family. It’s amazing; all the aunties and uncles and cousins and sisters and brothers. Everyone picks out all the people that our kids look like. He looks exactly like you when you were a kid. He’s got his uncle’s head. It’s that upper lip. 

I’m at a coffee shop right now to try to get some brain power back. I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to keep Isaac from eating my stepmother-in-law’s fake flowers while I prepare breakfast or wash dishes. He likes to eat the little pastel foam “berries,” while I die quietly because he’s killing me. 

A woman wearing pants and high heels just walked by my table. She has either a fake or real Louis Vuitton handbag, I wouldn’t know which. This coffee shop is a little odd, very suburban, but I don’t know my way around the city, and I needed a place to write. 

It wouldn’t seem like a country would change much in four years, but this land of plenty certainly changes fast. 

New things: 

The knives have colored blades.

People use avocado oil now.

The grains and cereals and flours are out of control. This is a good thing, but it still surprises me to walk into any old grocery store and find a chia/quinoa flour mix. 

You can buy something at Taco Bell that says taco on the inside, dorito on the outside. The billboard caused me to turn to Chinua and say, “I don’t want to live on this planet anymore.” It’s like everything has simultaneously become more healthy and less healthy. We’re polarizing more, perhaps. It’s a bad habit, the polarizing.

It is possible to pick up a pack of licorice and see Gluten free written on the package. 

Cars talk to you.

The streets are red in San Francisco: the bus lanes are red and glittery downtown. Red streets! What will they think of next?

But some things never change.

The sky is large and blue, the trees gorgeous. Freeways are full of cars, people here like big flags. I still need to sit facing the room in any restaurant or coffee shop, or I risk crawly back syndrome. Old men fall asleep in the coffee shop’s arm chairs. People are kind and friendly, sometimes in surprising ways, or rude, sometimes in surprising ways. I still hate shopping in America. 

I’m doing better with grocery stores because of my newfound skill of pretending that I’m a superhero when I go shopping. I know it freaks people out when I talk about my wonder woman cuffs, (I over-share with new friends) but it’s not that I think they have actual powers, it’s just that they remind me that I am a superhero and my name is Mighty Provider and my super skill is the ability to walk into a too-large store and peruse its over-complicated shelves in brightly lit cattle lanes and extract only what is needed to feed my family—no more, no less—without crying. I read labels! I pass the weird products without a second glance! I don’t melt down!

One thing I’ve noticed about anxiety, or neuro-atypicalness, or whatever it is that I have, is that my propensity to think that I should be able to do things that other people do makes me feel a lot worse. If I stop thinking about giant stores as something normal that I should be able to handle and start thinking about them as a large mountain that I need to scale, I find I have the power for it. 

You might try the same trick with whatever it is that you are afraid of. Instead of wondering what is wrong with you that you can’t do this easy thing that everyone else can do, think of yourself as a giant bird, able to glide into the situation and glide out without being harmed. Or put on your wonder woman cuffs and your superhero persona.

And then there are trees. A bad situation caused a meltdown in me the other day— the first truly public one I’ve ever had. Afterward, I lay under the redwoods and watched the the needles shining in the sunlight. I broke off needles and smelled them. The branches moved and I tried to let my embarrassment and sadness wave off into the sky with them. 

Now the leaves are changing here. It’s been a long time since I’ve been in any kind of autumn, let alone an autumn where leaves turn colors. Every morning I look at the leaves to see the changes that have occurred overnight. I also check on Kai, who is going through some kind of massive growth spurt, watching to see the inches he’s leaping through. And I see again that some things change, and some things never change and seasons of change are deep in the heart of God, he put the seasons and the years into place, the eras of a person’s life, the way we sometimes change slowly, sometimes not at all, and sometimes in giant, man-boy strides. There are things about myself that I wish I could change. I probably never will, and sometimes that knowledge makes me want to curl up in a corner and vow to never talk to anyone again. But other times I sit and look around for my shoes and my cuffs because it’s time to scale a mountain.