On a cool autumn day in 2018, Jeff and I drove through the gate of the apple orchard in Virginia that we had owned for 23 years (but would not for much longer) and made our way down the grassy hill, through the trees we’d planted, to the simple cabin we’d built. A little numb, I fingered the key to the cabin door before inserting it into the lock. It’s okay, I thought. It’s time to leave all this behind. I felt solid in our decision to sell and ready to carry it out.

But when I opened the door and stepped inside, I was overcome by a feeling not of sorrow, but of being home. The room I stood in, and the small loft upstairs, were entirely ours—our things, our tracked-in dirt, our unique smell. My body relaxed in a way it had not in many months. Before me were the windows we’d worked so hard to put in, and the coat hooks Jeff had whittled from apple twigs he’d found. My grandmother’s kitchen table, where we’d eaten many a candlelit meal, looking up to the mountains. My parents’ folding chairs. A sense of deep belonging entered me. I stood still for several minutes, reveling in the feeling. And then I set about taking it all apart.

Ten years. A decade. A tenth of my life, if I should live to 100, more if not. It seems like a very long time since we lost Reid, our only child, in a car accident—and it also seems like yesterday. The arrival of mid-March always catapults us back to those early days. How could it not?

When a child dies, the void in the parents’ life yawns like a cosmic black hole that threatens to pull you in and obliterate you. Moving away from that force, putting distance between myself and the event horizon (science’s term for the point of no return) was unquestionably the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It was so tempting just to let it take me. And who would blame me? But over time I managed to break free. I consider this the greatest of my life’s achievements (though I know at any careless moment, I could drift back toward its deadly rim.

Older

Beautiful inside and out

Invisible

I gave a little start when those words flashed onto the screen during a presentation by the poet Elizabeth Bradfield. Liz was in the process of describing six-word stories, modeled on Hemingway’s heartbreaking For sale: Baby shoes. Never used. The photograph showed a wall from the 6 Words Minneapolis project, in which city residents were asked to briefly describe themselves. This entry spoke directly to an experience I’d been having of late but hadn’t quite been able to name.

Consider: I smile at a young couple who are walking with their baby out of the grocery store as I enter. Their eyes flit briefly over my face and body without expression.

Waiting in a loose group of people for service at a food truck—there doesn’t seem to be a line—the fellow taking orders looks straight at me and then asks the guy in back of me what he’d like.

I’ve been doing one of those intense, year-long spiritual programs, where meditating on a daily lesson will, I hope, bring me bit-by-bit closer to the divine. It’s been hard, really hard, but also amazing. I have 47 days to go.

Today’s lesson is “My heart is beating in the peace of God.” Sounds wonderful, right? Only problem is, my heart isn’t the least bit peaceful. Actually, it’s smokin’ angry. My husband and I had an exchange this morning. Let’s say it involved money. Let’s say one of us has been spending more than the other, and that it isn’t me.

“I need you to be a part of this community.”

More easily said than done, especially when the place in question is a poor neighborhood in Detroit.

I was spending the afternoon with the Reverend Faith Fowler, executive director of Cass Community Social Services (CCSS), a nonprofit organization that for many years has worked to transform a cluster of largely abandoned city blocks into a functioning community, an oasis of truly normal life in an urban center where a typical “normal” day may include sporadic gunfire.

What does it take to help people in our most blighted cities?