to the seventeenth edition of Tiny True Stories! Happy new year! If you’re new here, hello, and thank you! I’m so happy to see you. A bunch of new people found their way here from Substack, and I’m so glad to see new readers. If you like TTS, please feel free to share it with a friend! I love finding new readers who aren’t my mom (love you, mom!).
This is a monthly newsletter where I share supershort true stories you can read in 5 minutes or less. I also share recommendations for other things I loved this month—food, books, poems, memes, anything. Tiny does not just mean short—I write about the forgotten, small, mundane stories of our lives, where most of us spend most of our time, and look for their unexpected magic. I include an audio version of each story as well.
If you’re not new, hello to you, too! I see you reading every month and I love you so much.
December’s post is coming so late it’s now January’s, but life was lifing, as the kids say. We had many visitors and travel in November and also a month and a half of illness (it seems like everyone is deathly ill right now—I’m so sorry! Did November wreck us all?), so in December didn’t travel and barely hosted at all, and tried to sit on the couch as much as possible. We celebrated Christmas and New Year on that couch and while we missed family, I’m proud to say I have no resolutions at all.
Well, except one: I want to read a poem every day. I’ve been trying to read the first book of the ACOTAR series for months (I’m almost done!) and I cannot seem to move any faster than that. I keep reminding myself I have a four-year-old and a five-month-old and the fact that we’re all alive and well-fed is a miracle; anything else is a bonus. But I think I can manage a single poem, its own version of a tiny true story.
Here is the first poem of the year:
i am running into a new year
i am running into a new year
and the old years blow back
like a wind
that i catch in my hair
like strong fingers like
all my old promises and
it will be hard to let go
of what i said to myself
about myself
when i was sixteen and
twenty-six and thirty-six
even thirty-six but
i am running into a new year
and i beg what i love and
i leave to forgive me-Lucille Clifton, from Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980
It’s three o’clock in the morning and my baby son is coughing. He coughs so hard he gags, then whimpers, and all I can do is gently shush in his ear and murmur words he can’t understand, “it’s okay, it’s okay,” when it clearly isn’t. Headlights flash past our window and I wonder who else is awake at this hour. I’ve never had a sick infant before. I have an older daughter, but she was born early in the pandemic, and she so rarely interacted with others that she didn’t get sick until she was 1. She was old enough for me to explain what was happening, old enough to understand a little.
This is the worst part of parenting—not the sleep deprivation, not the worry, not the all-encompassing need—when your children are suffering and you cannot do anything to help them. My son has just learned to grab. He coughs and holds onto both of my shoulders tightly. He does it so hard he pinches me, and I let him.
The thing is, he will be okay, mostly, probably. He will be safe in his own home from violence and (probably) war. He will be loved, and he has a doctor we can call and can afford. Sure, there’s the bad air quality or the earthquakes, the president, and fear, the many ways the world can destroy him despite our best efforts. There are no bombs here, though while he nurses, I play Minesweeper on my phone with one hand. When I win on the expert level, a little smiley face at the top puts on sunglasses. Much more often, I set off bombs by accident, a slip of the finger. I frown, and hit play another time.
It's three o’clock in the morning again and I’m awake with my sick son again. It’s winter in Northern California, and pouring rain. The rain sprays the window as hard as a hose and makes rivers in the gutters. The baby coughs when I try to lay him down, so I hold him up to the window and say “Look! Rain!” glad to have something to show him besides my concerned face. A bright light throbs across the room and I realize it’s lightning, so rare in Northern California. The only other time I saw lightning here was also in the middle of the night, awake with my daughter when she was a baby. Both times it felt like we were all suffering and here was a bottled moment of power, just for us.
My son startles at the thunder and I tell him “It’s okay,” again. In the orange glow of the nightlight I can see his soft spot on the top of his head, where his skull bones have yet to fuse together, fuzzy hair just starting to grow. I kiss it, and can feel his heartbeat there, just below the skin, and realize this is as close as we’ll probably ever get.
In the morning I take my daughter out to jump in the puddle that always forms in our driveway, the last thing to evaporate. She bends down to pluck a bright red seed out of the water. She loves it, and asks, “Is it okay if I keep it?” I tell her it’s okay, yet another thing I am not sure about, and I try not to worry about acid rain, or microplastics, or chemical runoff. My daughter picks up three more red seeds from the puddle and puts them in my pocket. “Keep them forever,” she says. I put them in a bowl on the counter, and nearly throw them away many times, but I catch myself. She has since forgotten about them, but now it’s the new year and still I leave the bowl out on the counter. I think how simple of a request it is, really, to keep this one small thing for a little while longer, how glad I am to be able to say yes.
This essay by Sarah Twombly called “No Country for Daughters.” It feels right for 2025. “You cannot have her.” You cannot have her.
This recipe for cranberry pie with a pecan crumble topping that I made twice this holiday season. It’s a little different, and not super kid-friendly to be honest, but I love cranberry and pecan and it’s nice to have another pie that isn’t pumpkin (all due respect to my queen, pumpkin pie).
All of Cynthia Erivo’s runs in the new Wicked movie.
I said this in one of my group chats yesterday, but here I say it to you too: May 2025 go easy on all, and if not, may we be up for the fight.
Until next time,
Jill
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