Summer clovers

what a difference a week makes!

In spring, I find four-leaf clovers by the handful. Big, perfectly shaped beauties I tuck inside books, arrange like bouquets in teacups, or give to friends and students. Tiny, vividly green ones. Sometimes I even find five- and six-leaf clovers. On a walk, I can spot a four-leaf clover by the roadside without even trying. I can see them from the corner of my eye on a run, and I’ll stop and pick them, tucking them inside my sports bra.

But summer is different. I barely look for them in summer because for some reason they’re really hard to find. Maybe the heat has dried them up. The quality of light may be different, with the trees leafed out? Maybe I’ve picked them all.

A week ago I felt like my luck—all our luck—had truly run out. It was crazy hot and dry. I’d already embarked on a bunch of rabies-related ER visits that will be quite expensive (more on this later—I am fine and do not have rabies). Then in the middle of the night, I fainted, and fell directly on my face. I had to go to the ER again for an EKG, blood tests, the works! (All checked out—I’m fine.)

But the worst was this sense of impending doom. Our excellent president, Joe Biden, was so down in the polls he was behind in Virginia, my true blue home state! Two-thirds of Democrats felt he was too old to run again, and people were considering voting instead for a man with a worm in his brain or a felon and sexual assaulter.

But not long after we got home from the ER, I got a text from my good friend Cat.

“Yes!!!!” was all it said, and I knew President Biden had done the honorable thing. I suddenly did not care that I might be washing dishes for UNC hospital, or that my banged-up face could scare crows away from the garden.

The sense of relief, even joy, I’ve felt since last weekend is beyond anything I’ve experienced politically in a long time—definitely since the start of this presidential race. Vice President Kamala Harris is killing it on the campaign trail, and Democrats are fired up. She is a warrior for reproductive rights. She backs homeowners over big banks. The Sunrise Movement (a youth org focused on climate change) has said Harris could be “the climate game changer we need.” My students are sending me TikToks I can’t open because I don’t have that app on my phone—but I can see from the link that they’re cool. Kamala Harris dances in drum lines, and she’s even a Simpsons superfan??

Count us in! Not just for Kamala Harris but for all the great Democrats running in North Carolina: Josh Stein for governor, Mo Green for superintendent of public instruction, Allison Riggs for NC Supreme Court, and all the great House and Senate candidates running to break the supermajority. I was already in the tank for these guys, but now I feel like we have the wind at our backs as we canvass, phone bank, and more. (More on this soon.)

Today is also my birthday—I’m 48!—and I’m almost all the way healed up. I’m going kayaking with Bea and my friend Krista in a little while, and later the whole family is getting together with friends at one of our favorite outdoor spots. I’m supposed to have a piece about the rabies vaccine situation published on Wednesday, and I’ll share it with you when it comes out.

That clover at the top of the post, by the way—I found it yesterday, on a run. A good reminder that sometimes you just have to take a moment and look.

Lots of love to all the Frog Troublers!