FULL OF INVITATION

This time, I really tried.

As a Christmas present, the kids gave me a list of places they wanted to visit with me, experiences they wanted to have, this summer. Thea had an additional request: Let’s not do everything in one trip.

This past week we took two mini-trips. I tried to make each one digestible.

First, we took Amtrak to DC on Monday. We stayed in Alexandria. And went to Project Word, a museum centered around language and words that Thea uncovered. Then we had dinner with some family friends. Tuesday morning, we schlepped out to the National Arboretum. Explored the National Portrait Gallery and the American Art Museum. Stumbled into an exhibit at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library. And then loitered for too many hours in Union Station before taking the Amtrak home.

Wednesday, we drove to the Blue Ridge Tunnel near Afton and hiked — picked some flowers, then continued on to Harrisonburg to see our friends, Tom and Judy. We had dinner, stayed overnight, then took a morning hike with them and their dogs (ages 13 and 16!). Thursday, we took back roads home with a stop at the Market at Grelen, and a sad bonus: feeling overwhelmed by the sheer size of a data center being built in Louisa as we drove past.

Friday was recovery day.

What I mean to say is it was a really good week. And slow enough that I was able to see something I already know and appreciate more clearly. My kids are easy, smart and fun to be around.

I really appreciate the gift of seeing my tween and a college-bound teen in ways both new and old at the end of the long week of exploration and boredom.

As dinner wound down with my friends Matt and Kristen, Thea leaned over and whispered that she was going to take Jack for ice cream, then back to the hotel. “So you can have some adult time with your friends,” she explained, casually.

The next day, when we were all tired of walking and I suggested we check out Palmer Alley in City Center, Jack stretched and immediately said yes. Which led us to the crazy animal statues of “A Wild Race Against Time,” and then the MLK Library exhibit. No one was jaded. No one checked out.

“Let’s not,” Thea saying as I suggested one more thing Tuesday afternoon. “Let’s,” Jack saying at a different moment.

Jack’s quirky, off-hand comments. The two of them walking ahead of me, comfortable with each other. Thea pulling Jack playfully along when he was completely done at the Arboretum.

Rebounding quickly from a case of the grumps. Suggesting adjustments. Tolerating shitty hotel rooms (major fail, Harrisonburg). Zoning out during the last leg of the trip.

My kids are smart. They’re fun. They’re resilient.

And they really love each other.

That’s the present they gave me.

I’d like to believe that my fundamental orientation toward people is to move toward them. To reach out. To share a thought. To initiate.

Unsolicited this summer, both the teen and the tween named this as one of the things they like about me: You have a wonderful ability to make life feel full of invitations and You take us on adventures. (Their words.)

You can’t get more clarity than that from two people who know you deeply and authentically.

I have another fundamental orientation that is anchored by decades of insecurity. It’s something along the lines of, Maybe you’re not enough, or maybe you’re too much.

I spent a number of years of my adult life getting tangled between these two orientations in a sort of social and relational paralysis. I’ve spent the last two years exploring what it looks like to lean harder into outreach and initiation. Trying to surrender the insecurity (or reassure it at least).

As I work on a new center of gravity to carry me through this next chapter of life, I’m beginning to realize something else.

Maybe we live in a world where it is natural — for reasons — to wait to be moved toward. One big Sadie Hawkins Dance.

And as I do on every dance floor, perhaps I have spent most of my life misreading almost everything about other people.

I’ve acquired a lot of artwork this year. It’s all leaning against various walls in my rental house.

I still wonder how people decide where (and how) to hang their favorite art. Now, having accumulated all these things during a time when I’ve been dismantling and rebuilding a life, I actually have to decide where they belong.

I’m sharing them here because I think they’re all differently lovely. The images above are six of my favorites right now:

• I spent hours combing through my friend Judith Anderson’s paintings earlier this year before settling on these three abstract pieces.

• Jack spent six weeks at VCU art camp, and I asked if I could have this oil acrylic he did of the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart.

• The color and composition of this room in Philadelphia caught my eye, and reminded me of Raoul Dufy. It’s by Katie Pape, who runs an art collective in Saxapahaw, North Carolina.

• Katie also did these three small watercolors of the Haw River.

• I bought this effervescent moose print when my friend Kitt and I went to see Walter Salas-Humara at Chilton House last month.

• My mom painted this spray of yellow flowers more than fifty years ago, and it was headed for the trashcan when I grabbed it. It deserved a frame, and a place in my home.

Creating and sustaining relationships, still. What my life will look like this fall with one kid in college, and Jack and I not just staring at each other across our computers every other week.

Aging dogs. Figuring out how and where to hang all of this artwork. How to keep my life feeling like it is full of invitations, both extended and accepted.

Some major projects that just landed in my lap at Floricane. Novels, reading and writing them. New bands I want to discover and love.

Misogyny and politics (and music, and business, and education). Michigan and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Ukraine and Russia and NATO.

How we can possibly rebalance artificial intelligence without breaking the global environment, our global and local cultures, the global economy, and our ability to think and learn critically.

Little things.

I had this idea that I would start a new novel in October, and then July happened.

I’ve been taking it slow. Actually working on plot, thinking about characters, sketching chapters before I start writing them.

Scanning the first ~12,000 words of Down to the Sea makes me think that I’ve got a pretty solid novel in progress.

Nothing seems broken yet.