If I never let it go

I lost my gloves twice last weekend, over several hours and locations, only for us to be reunited both times. These are black leather gloves I’ve had for at least ten years—gloves I’d recently been feeling were nearing the end of their life. With me, at least. I don’t know why I felt it was their time to go, except that I’m wired to let things be lost long before they are.

A dear friend I went to Vegas with a million years ago can attest to this—to my weeping in a bathroom stall after having my bag returned to me with all its contents still inside. “I had already let it go,” is what I said then, hunched over in a red dress. In dreams, I’ve heard myself repeat this phrase.

I’m a collector of many things, and even so, I worry that what I love will be destroyed or disappear or simply be lost. Every mental mood board I’ve ever made is glitter-glued with this notion.

Not so at the movie theater though, where someone had propped my single lost glove on the railing for me to claim after the credits rolled. Or after I unknowingly dropped the pair of them on the street outside of my house, where my husband retrieved them hours later in the dark with our dog. Both times when I noticed them missing, I said: If they’re gone, they’re gone. But they were not gone. And my practiced acceptance couldn’t quell the relief I felt when those beat-up old gloves were returned to me. Only it wasn’t just relief. It was love.

Whatever else any of this means, it’s not my life’s work to let things go before they’re gone. Maybe the dream refrain will change in time. Maybe I will go to sleep tonight and the gloves will be tucked inside the Vegas bag, a bag I no longer have.

• Coming up ASAP: I’m facilitating poetry workshops as part of the poetry incubator at the Winter Poetry & Prose Getaway in New Jersey—my second year in a row. I am ready to eat cake and discuss beginnings and endings! Middles too, sure. And it’s not too late to register!

• Also ASAP: Dear Brian Gresko and I are doing The Lab 2.0 at Writing Co-Lab for another two back-to-back sessions! It’s $50 for 1 session or $90 for the two. You get a whole lot of learning and community, including my infamous Power Hour generative workshop and Brian’s The Creative Accomplice. I never do the same slides twice! And you get all the recordings and some very nice emails.

• ASAP, but a little less so: The spring preview is afoot at Blue Stoop, which means you can have a look at the low time commitment, high time enjoyment, 3-week virtual class I’ll be teaching in March—and then sign up when registration opens later this month! It’s called “Long Story Short: The Art of the Personal Essay” and it’s intended for nonfiction and nonfiction-curious writers at all levels.

Join me for a conversation with Kristen Martin at The Pen & Pencil Club in Philly on Wednesday, February 4th at 7:00pm. Shawn Hunter fans rejoice! We’ll be discussing Kristen’s fantastic and perpetually timely book, The Sun Won’t Come Out Tomorrow: The Dark History of American Orphanhood. You can get ahead of the game and register right now.

I was honored to read at lovely Katie Bennett’s Personal Velocity reading series at beloved H&H in Philly last month with wonderful Lauren Holguin and my dear agent sibling Shayne Terry. (I recommend Leave to everyone, not just new parents but to anyone who loves someone who is a new parent.)

Despite doing other book-related events, I had never read aloud from my essay “In the Direction of Yes” in my wonderful friend Michele Filgate’s second anthology, What My Father and I Don’t Talk About. Strange thing to write about your life and read about your life, but probably even stranger to be the object of such affection (my husband) and listen to it out loud in the world. Differently strange! Strange together, forever.

Finally starting Six Feet Under. Going to Montreal at all, and especially in the snow, so much snow. Making sweet potato latkes for Hanukkah and then again for Christmas.

Mr. Mercedes, except that I can’t in good conscience recommend it to anyone for so many reasons (but I enjoyed it and if you watched and you enjoyed (?) it, let’s talk). Brendan Gleeson. All the Gleesons. And the Skarsgårds.

These:

Going to the doctor, really. Nail polish that dries perfectly. The Halloween scene in Meet Me in St. Louis, how it’s not unlike the burning of Christmas trees on New Year’s Eve in South Philly. Time and its tricks. My new watch box. An unseasonably warm day in the middle of winter (the what, not the why) and my dog, in general, as he barrels toward 13.

The next book or books. Reading them, writing them. Being alive and staying that way.