How it's going

a little check-in

1. The woodland pollinator plants we added to our gardens are all still alive, and the deer have left them alone. Goes to show how asking a local expert (thanks, Ellen and Jerilyn!) is the best way to choose plants that work in your space. Pictured above is agastache “Blue Fortune,” or hummingbird mint—kind of a risk because it prefers full sun, but it appears to be thriving, with new flowers! The bees love it.

2. We have not sprayed our yard, and appear to have the same number of bugs bites as usual.

3. The library no longer charges late fees! We will try not to abuse this privilege.

4. We’re working with other families and teachers at Bea’s school to come up with a “no-fuss,” no-plastic-junk fundraiser that’s still fun and creative. Will report back!

5. Our weekday vegetarianism is going strong—on July 1, we’ll have been at this for half a year. All are healthy, no one has complained, and I feel much less stressed and more creative about cooking on weekdays. Plus, it’s good for the planet! The exceptions are: the girls sometimes get a BLT or a hot dog at the pool, and sometimes I’ll use weekend chicken in a weekday meal or stock.

6. And oh, also, the girls will have fewer rights to bodily autonomy than I’ve had my whole life.

I can’t wrap my mind around that last piece of news. Every morning, I wake up forgetting that it’s happened, and then I remember, and it’s hard to get up but I have to. And the gun ruling! And prayer in schools! And they’re not done yet!

I went to the type of high school where hunting rifles were prominently displayed the back window of every pickup truck parked outside, and where the coach and the principal—the biggest bullies and sexists in the school—would pray to Jesus every chance they got. But at least you could get an abortion and get out of there. I remember drawing a political cartoon in art class of a pickup truck with PRO-LIFE on the back gate, and rifles in the window and women in the back trapped inside hunting dog cages and thinking, as I drew it, this is maybe a bit on the nose. But now everywhere is King William County in the 1990s—except you won’t be able to get an abortion.

I think it’s important to talk about these issues, even when it feels like there’s not much we can do. On Sunday, I attended a “SisterScene” community discussion Zoom to talk about our trip to Alabama, the FTT, and the work ahead. Emily Cox, the group’s organizer, began by making space for people to share where we were when they heard the news about the overturn of Roe, and how we’d processed it. One of the activists on the call said that she’d been to D.C. recently with the Poor People’s Campaign, and was so inspired by that trip that she’d made cards at home to give to people, with the web address written down on them. She hands them out to people she speaks with at the grocery store, the post office, wherever.

I thought this was brilliant—especially because the cards are handmade, and given as a kind of offering. Here, check this out on your own time, but it’s something I value and believe in.

It reminded us of the “calling cards” we made last year, and we decided to update them this year. Bea has been learning cool facts from a new book she got at So & So, the Brittanica All New Kids’ Encyclopedia. “Want to know a cool fact?” she’ll ask me. The answer is always of course. Then she’ll tell me that in the Edo Period, women were also trained as samurai, using weapons that benefited from their powerful balance. Or that the first novel, The Tale of Genji, was written by a woman in Japan. Or that fossil hunters have found fossilized dinosaur poop.

We decided to turn some of these cool facts, one by one, into little cards we could hand out to people we see. You can put your mom’s or dad’s email or phone on one side (handy for meeting a new friend at the pool), or just a picture. Maybe not as practical as the Poor People’s Campaign site, but useful in a different way. A little lift for someone who might be having a tough day. A reminder that the world is immense and wonderful, and that people—individually and together—have been doing incredible things for a long, long time.

It’s a good little craft to take up part of a kid’s morning or afternoon, or to work on after dinner. Just cut card stock or watercolor paper into squares or rectangles, and ask your kid to fill them with cool facts or drawings. It helps to have an encyclopedia or fact book, but any book of nonfiction will do—Harriet and I read a book about insects last night, and we learned about Goliath beetles.

Of course, the more people who know about the Poor People’s Campaign and their seven steps before the mid-terms, the better. Forward together, not one step back!