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Word for the Year

And a Happy New Year to you. We’re just starting the lunar New Year, right? So that’s about as good a time as any to come back to this space.

I’m not trying for New Year’s resolutions, but I am thinking about a word (or words) for the year.  Resolutions tend to set us up for failure or too-high expectations, and they remind me uncomfortably of diets—a lot of inflexible rules, a lot of can’ts and shouldn’ts, instead of encouraging permission slips.

Words for the year are different. If you work near a window (and I hope that you do), you might know something about what windows can do for you and your work. Working indoors means that you focus a lot on what’s right in front of you: your keyboard, your coffee cup, the stack of papers with their separate demands. Every once in a while, though, you glance (or stare) out the window. That glance reminds you that there are distances outside the rectangle of your desk, and that there’s a different quality of light besides indoor light bulbs.

Words for the year work for me just that way: windows that reset my vision, that remind me to refocus and expand.

Last year’s word was light. I wanted to focus on light—sunlight, for example, and it was a particularly un-sunny year. I wanted to run, but only if I didn’t take it too seriously. No agro mixes of Beastie Boys or Franz Ferdinand for most of the time—no, I wanted the Fleet Foxes. (Fleet: light: coincidence?) I wanted to write if it was light and fun. (It was.) I wanted to remember just how much love, and thus how much light, I have in my life. I wore a Larimar pendant almost every day, to remind me of the luminous sunlight and tropical ocean water of the Dominican Republic. Light got me through a lot. Somehow that worked, I think. I can go to intermediate yoga classes and keep up. I can run farther than I ever have, and running is not the torturous act that it once was. Though I used to hate being upside down for most of my life, I can rest comfortably somehow in a headstand.

Quick digression: I didn’t know what headstands meant for me until recently, either. I was talking to one of my yoga teachers about how I’d hated being upside down when I was little. Didn’t like loopy rollercoasters, or even somersaults, or even dangling over a couch arm. “Why is that?” she asked. “Is it a control thing?” Whoa. I stopped short. Oh, crap. “Y…eaah. Probably.” This feeling of being upside down is, like much of this uncertainty, probably very good for me. I’m starting to pick my way through the woods of uncertainty again. I am going off the comfort of stability and beaten albuterol no prescription paths and clearly marked trails.

So this year’s word? It’s closer to the intent of a resolution. It might be go.

I’ve got an artist statement in the works. Last year I tried to write one as part of a grant application, and it was terribly painful. I couldn’t even finish. The inner editor and critic had a field day. “I’ve always wanted to write and read ever since I was a little girl…” Bleahhhhh. Having been a professional literary critic for so long, it was humbling to have to write about my own writing. “Why do I write? Shouldn’t the writing speak for itself?” the writer-artist in me pleaded. No, that’s not what foundations (and publishers and agents, I imagine) want to hear.

So I had to look at what I do write, and what I have written. What are the issues that I write about the most? What do I want to accomplish as a writer? See, if you asked me what my teaching philosophy was, I could have told you about that easily. And really, the Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie actually said much of what I would have wanted to say in her wonderful TED talk, “The Dangers of a Single Story.”

But as a writer? My hunch is that I will have to write more before I have a more developed writing philosophy. Nevertheless, given what I’ve written, just in the last year or two, I have a better idea of what’s important to me. I want it to be more like my teaching philosophy, infused with principles and politics and social justice. What I have so far is much more personal, but at least it is honest. So far it’s about loss and memory. I wrote a draft, but I’ll have to take another whack at the statement and get back to you. I just have to do it. I have to tell myself: just go.

Go can also be part of letting go. A few days ago, I recycled several bags of papers from my old life. That night, I had a series of dreams about being a published author, preparing for book readings. I had the excitement, the nervousness, and the adrenaline. I always woke up before I started reading, but I woke up happy.

Go means that I can probably go to more intermediate yoga classes, and that I can step up my time and pacing on my runs. Go reminds me to just apply for that writer’s grant, to publish the blog post, to revise the book proposal. I’m getting close to forty, and that’s as good a deadline as any for a first book. Go reminds me to write.

Go is the window that both reminds me to rest, yet pushes me out into the distance.

 

(What’s your word for the year?)

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What uncertainty looks like

“We just need to get to the ocean,” Josh said.

Really? I thought. As much as I love the ocean, I wasn’t sure if we should really go. We have two littles, after all. Even with each other, with rock-paper-scissors,  drawing materials, and an Ipad for company, they can get impatient on road trips. Did I really want to drive for about three hours out to the coast just for one night on Thanksgiving weekend?

We hadn’t gone anywhere on a family vacation, getting-away-for-getting-away’s-sake in far too long, almost several years. Over the last few holidays, and over the last two summers we had promised ourselves a vacation, even a staycation. Things never quite worked out, and money was far too tight.

But we had to get away. It had been a month of waiting, layered on top of other months of waiting, layered on top of months of career transition. A couple of weeks ago we’d been waiting to hear about job news for me. When news came—not quite a simple yes, not quite a simple no—I had to rethink what uncertainty means, and what stability would mean.

*****

Despite my slight misgivings, the four of us piled into the car. I’m a terrible camper, because I want to take EVERYTHING with me. I packed ridiculous amounts of clothing and two grocery bags of snacks for the girls, for an overnight trip. We drove down the coast. On the way down we drove over long bridges, crossing wide rivers, and as we neared the coast, we caught glimpses of the ocean behind the hills. But then we got to the cottage, half a block from the beach. We knew we had to catch some time on the beach before it got too dark; the Northwest winter sunlight ends by 4:30. So we bundled up, and walked out to the sand.

To our left, Haystack Rock reared its head. It was low tide. Part of the beach was so wet, it seemed to overflow with pieces of sky. The wind whipped around me, the horizon stretched into the distance. And, there, unexpectedly,  were all those crucial times I’d spent near the ocean.

There were all those coastal road trips that Josh and I took to the Oregon Coast in grad school, before grad school. We’d been to Cannon Beach, and Manzanita, and Coos Bay: quick weekend trips, or even part of a week.

There was our honeymoon, where we drove back from Mill Valley and San Francisco to Seattle, up the coast. That week we saw more moods of the Pacific than I’d ever seen, from an optimistic turquoise to a stern cobalt grey.

There was the morning after we’d slept next to the ocean in a cabin. I woke up to the sun rising over a village where the Russian River meets the Pacific, in California. It wasn’t the sunlight that woke me up that morning; it was the reflection of the light on the water, as pink and as golden as the haze in a Maxfield Parrish painting. I looked over Josh’s shoulder, and saw that glorious light.

Why was I surprised that the beach would insistently tug the memories right out of me?  It was the power of the waves: pounding slowly in, pancaking towards you, and foaming away. It was the sharp wind, clear and cold in so much open space. And this surprised me: it was the sound of the ocean that I’d missed the most. Oh, we have polite wavelets in Puget Sound. But nothing like these waves.

And it was the pull of the horizon—it stretched so far away, I couldn’t really see where it ended.

*****
Back at the beach cottage, the little girls were simply thrilled to be somewhere else for the night. They squealed their way through each bedroom, opened each kitchen cabinet, and climbed onto the mountainous easy chair multiple times. The toddler, who loves putting things away, happily unpacked her clothes into a dresser and began work on my overnight case. I laid on the couch, as relaxed as cooked spaghetti. By nightfall I had a book in one hand, a toddler sitting on my stomach and the other curled up next to my legs. We were all in front of the fireplace, content as kittens. Josh had gone grocery shopping and was making us something with pasta in the kitchenette.

Lying there with the girls, my memory traveled still farther back. In seventh grade I visited Mendocino with my GATE class. For part of the trip we sat near the ocean in near-silence, and wrote about what we were hearing and seeing. There I wrote some of my first prose poems. It was my first stream-of-consciousness writing, and words poured out of me almost faster than I could write. We also made lists of our favorite words, and had to read the first fifteen words out loud. (As steeped as I was in fantasy novels at the time, I remember that unfortunately the word “darkling” made it onto my list.) But I  remember a certain small silence that fell over the group after I’d read my list out loud. I was so uncertain and so afraid of so many things, but even then I knew that I wanted to be a writer.

In our cottage, I left the bedroom window open before I went to sleep. And the ocean roared all night long.

(P.S. Photo credits here should go to my husband, Josh Parmenter. The batteries on my camera were out that day.)

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One more breath

Just to be clear, because I don’t want to scare anyone, everyone’s fine here.

I’m not talking about one last breath; I’m talking about one more breath. If you practice yoga, you know what I’m talking about. I’ll come back to this in a minute. While you wait, you can take a look at the picture I took, over left there. It’s a tree that I pass every day when I drive back from my yoga studio.

*****
So: I’ve been looking for a job.

I’m not going to write too much about the career change here, for a number of reasons. Maybe I’ll write more later. But I can say that the job search hasn’t always been easy. I’ve had a job or some version of a job since I started college. Nevertheless, I’ve been lucky in so many ways.

I have the very best of partners, the one who surprises me with a copy of this book by one of my favorite authors, the one who nudges me to go for a run when I’ve got anxiety to burn, whose belief in me is bedrock to my days. I have two adorable daughters who constantly make me laugh and teach me to discover the world anew. I have the very best family who has taught me about resilience through the courage of their examples. I have the very best friends both “on” and “offline,” who bring me presents like this book and send me messages and hugs and go out for coffee, where we analyze and then take over the world. I have roots in my community, and friendly faces at my grocery store and the playground at C’s elementary school, and my yoga classes. I’ve got a house that I love in a neighborhood I love. And during my unemployment I’ve been able to do a lot of writing, for causes and people that I support. If it takes a village to raise a child, I can tell you that it’s taken my village to support me during this time, and I’m so grateful for you all.

One of the most difficult (and in some ways, interesting) parts of the job search has been thinking myself out of one career and into another one yet to be determined. I spent almost 12 years thinking myself into that last professional identity; that career seemed to carry so much certainty and forward movement. I loved parts of that job, and I will miss them dearly. But as things stand now, I will probably be leaving that career behind. I’m glad that I get to keep so many of the relationships that I developed in that time.

I’ve been applying for jobs for about four months now, and I think there’s some light at the end of the tunnel. I’m excited about the possibilities. In a job market like this one, I’m extremely grateful that I even have possibilities. But right now, I need to wait, for at least a few more weeks.

Last week, the waiting room space was just about to drive me a little insane. The suspense, the tension, the lack of resolution. I wanted to scream, or go for a run, or tear up a hotel ventolin inhaler no prescription room, or preferably all three. “Why does it take so long?” my 3-year old likes to ask. “Because you’re not being patient,” I like to answer sometimes. And last week I realized I’m not being patient. (Great: just like my 3-year old.)

For the first time in my life, I understood the idea behind Waiting for Godot, if not Waiting for Guffman. I wanted to write a play called The Waiting Room. You know: the set would be furnished with bad landscape art, and old issues of Good Housekeeping, and Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” played on Muzak panflute. The main character would be waiting, unable to leave the room until someone else unlocked the door for her. People would come to slide unexpected presents under the door, and talk to her through the windows, but she couldn’t leave until it was time.

But of course, I didn’t know how the play would end. I suspect that I’ll just have to write it and find out.

*****

And here’s where I’ve come to appreciate the beauty of “one more breath.”

Yoga teachers often say this phrase to you when you are holding a pose—let’s say, downward-facing dog, or Warrior 2—and they want you to stay in the pose for just a little bit longer. They usually say this to you when you’ve been in a pose for a while, or for a little longer than you’d like. In those poses your legs might be screaming like 1960s Beatles fans, your arms might be stretched out taut as John and George’s guitar strings, and the rest of your muscles might be protesting like Beatles fans stranded outside without tickets.

In that kind of tension, “one more breath” can feel like a very, very long time.

If the pose is especially challenging, “one more breath” is the very last thing you want to hear. Some days you’re kinda pissed, actually, that you have to stay there a bit longer. (Not at your teacher. Don’t get pissed at your yoga teacher. They can make you hold poses even longer. If you’re my yoga teacher and you’re reading this, I don’t mean you.) But I’ve decided—and this must be yoga rewiring my brain, I can think of no other way to describe it—that “one more breath” is one of the very best things that yoga can give you.

See, in yoga the breath becomes a way to measure time. The space of “one more breath” is where you’re challenged, you’re waiting, and (somehow) you’re calm. In those few seconds you hold the pose. Sometimes, it’s true, you fall out before it’s time to move to the next pose. But more often than not, you stay in the pose, and you keep breathing. Your mind and your body say together, “It’s okay. You can do this. Just a little bit longer.” You learn to inhale slowly, in, and exhale even more slowly, ouuuuut.

There, you realize it: one more breath is really just fresh life, waiting to rush in.

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Why I Write

(In support of National Day on Writing, here’s what I tweeted, using the hashtag #whyiwrite.)

My oldest daughter came home excited from school one day: “An author is coming to visit! Can I get his book?”

She began to write and storyboard her own books shortly after that.

That’s the kind of magic I’m talking about.

(More news and a giveaway, and my homage to Twitter, coming up soon! And, you too can play along: why do you write?)

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Upcoming news

As you may or may not have heard, there was a teacher’s strike here in Tacoma over the last week. While we were incredibly fortunate to be covered for child care, for the most part, it was also stressful for our family and for the community. I went with C to volunteer at a sandwich-making party at our closest food bank, St. Leo’s Food Connection. Though the strike’s over, I wanted to make sure that the Food Connection’s “Food Bank in a Backpack” program received some attention, and I’m grateful my Seattlest.com editor was interested (we’re down here in T-town, after all). It’s not my best writing, done late at night, but I’m proud that the essay’s out there and I hope it helps the good folks at Food Connection and other ventolin otc usa food banks.

I’m also thrilled that I’m going to be talking about adobo, family, history, and the gaps in between on KUOW, the Seattle NPR affiliate. It will be broadcast on KUOW Presents on Saturday, September 24th, at 12:06PM (just after noon). I think that you can listen via streaming, and via downloadable podcast after it’s been broadcast. All of this came about partly because of this adobo blog post, so thanks again to everyone who’s been reading.

And, I just submitted a story about my family sukiyaki recipe to Remedy Quarterly, a super-cool indie food magazine about “stories of food, recipes for feeling good.” It will be out in Issue 7, the “heritage” issue.

And there’s more news in process, but I can’t share it yet! More soon.

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Assignment #7: Blackberry poem

Blackberry Picking: A Poem For My Daughters

Sometimes I think
that the secret is to look for berries as if you were a small animal.
(Wait: you are small animals.)
To search for fruit the way the plant wants you to see it.
The plant actually wants you, small ones, to find the berries.

So, step on the thick thorny vines that get in your way—
blackberry vines can take that, trust me,
so wear good shoes—
and then lift the vines up.
Maybe use the leaves themselves, as gloves, then lift,
and then the clusters of berries will appear.

But you’re not done yet: are the berries ready?
If they’re dark purple, that’s one clue.
Are they a little bit soft? Do they give, just a little, to the touch?
Then they’re ready.
I like to use my thumb and first two fingers to gather albuterol online together,
nearly a kiss, closing on the end,
And then pulling gently.
I think about the way the plant wants to be harvested:
a small animal mouth, a soft tug.

And of course I worry about all those thorns.
But I want you to have as many thorns as you need.

I want you to protect what you know to be tender.
I want you to grow thickly stubborn as vines,
the ones strong enough to protect and nourish and shelter,
who fight for all the sunlight they can find.
I want you to know the ecstasy of the harvest, the harvester and harvested.
I want you to know about the scratches and the stings
and always, always, always, the going back for more.

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In this economy

 

Photo by Josh Parmenter

1.
Did you know that “economy” comes from ancient Greek, meaning “to manage a household”? True story. So let’s begin and end there.

2.
Well, you know.

In this economy, we use the phrase “in this economy,” trading it easily as a head shake or a handshake. Layoffs, job losses, not to mention inequality on so many fronts that we don’t even think about the backs, literal or metaphorical.

Sometimes, it’s true, we say it as an excuse crutch, a lip curl dismissal, a shoulder shrug adjective.

Sometimes we say it as a paper cut insult.

And sometimes we say it like we’re fluffing a pillow on a guillotine.

Let’s be clear: too often we say it too damned often.

2.
And saying it too often makes it part of our everyday fabric, and we might forget that this economy will not always be this economy.

Or rather, we might forget that this economy sparks other economies, or what my friend A calls “informal economies.”

So in this economy, I feel a manifesto coming on.

3.
Informal economies? Barter and trade. Eggs for milk. Classes for web updates. Child care for an airport ride. Under an informal economy, the currency I have may not be what you normally accept, and it may not seem equal at first. But there’s wealth in the social fabric woven by our exchange.

This economy depends on the question, “how can I help you?”

This economy rests in a counterintuitive imbalance. A trust that whatever you give will come back to you, probably in ways that you never imagined, probably when you least expect it.

In fact, this economy depends on a surplus of trust, an abundance of altruism, an unprecedented deficit of selfishness.

This economy depends on the unexpected kindnesses of near-strangers, the stunning acts of giving across continents, across oceans, across alleys into backyards. Like my friend’s S’s love for her friend J, like my friend T’s love for her former home and her people. Please give there, give what you can. By itself, it might not feel like much.

But sometimes giving in some small way is all we have, and all we have is exactly enough.

4.
I know. We can burn out on giving, you want to say. I know.

So I want to tell you about my friend A. We’d ventolin inhaler 2mg worked together over e-mail, and we met in Seattle when she came there for a conference. We lost touch, regained it again. In an e-mail shortly thereafter, she explained that she’d gone through near-unimaginable health issues and surgeries for a young woman our age, which I’ll leave vague for her privacy. She was going through another round of issues as we wrote. I couldn’t say much, but I could write back a little bit, mostly to say, “I’m here.” It wasn’t much.

Almost a year later, I lost my job.

When the whole process of job loss began—and it was a long process, almost a year—I sent out a message to friends asking for moral support. So many responded with shock, with anger, with disbelief, with hugs. I felt and needed them all. A was on the recipient list.

And yet A, I knew, was enduring even more health complications upon complications, severe as the face of a cliff. And from that place, she wrote, “Send me your mailing address! I’m sending antioxidants!”

I sent her my address. I pictured a bottle, some kind of herbal supplement. A few days later, a small plain brown cardboard box arrived on my doorstep, shipped with a FedEx mailing label. No note, not that a note was needed, but these were clearly the antioxidants from A.

It was a box of homemade biscotti. Part—only part!—of what A was facing, herself, was cancer.

Not much: exactly enough.

5.
Now I can remind you that “economy” is about managing a household. As a writer, economy makes me think about tightness and restraint.

But in going back to the origins of the word, there’s comfort and expansiveness and freedom. Doesn’t that make “economy” easier than textbooks and infographics, than pie charts and statistics?

In other words: shouldn’t this economy be about making a home?

P.S. I asked A if I could publish her story here. Part of her awesome response: “For the record, I *did* intend to put a card in that box, but it came down to a ‘send it while they’re fresh, or put in a card’ choice. I chose freshness.”

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Where I’ve been

A can of vintage MSG. No, this is not where I have been. Though that would explain a lot.

Where have I been?

Well, I’ve been thinking about you. You’ve been on my list, believe me.  I imagine you peeking through the velvet curtains, clicking the website address in vain. Anybody home? Not recently. Ah, well. I’ll try again. And I’m grateful you did.

I’ve been writing, so don’t worry too much about that. You can find my latest food writing here about chocolate and butchers and teriyaki history on Seattlest, and about yoga and running here for my yoga studio. I’m also excited for my upcoming first freelance assignment with the International Examiner, a Seattle Asian American community newspaper. And there’s some other writing I’ve been doing that I can’t quite post here just yet. But I’ve been writing hard. Just not here. Sorry.

I’ve been reading, too. I bought a few new books for the first time in ages—my own copy of Stephen King’s memoir On Writing, plus Colum McCann’s novel Let The Great World Spin, on the recommendation of a couple of friends. I’m excited to begin Monique Truong’s latest novel Bitter In the Mouth.  I’m also two-thirds of the way through Daphne Kalotay’s novel about ballet and jewelry and Stalinist oppression, Russian Winter. And I don’t want to return my library copy (though I will!) of the letters between Julia Child and Avis DeVoto, collected and called As Always, Julia. Their affection and wit and friendship made me fall in love with the two of them, and made want to write more letters again.

And I’ve been following the discussion on the movie and book The Help. In case you haven’t ventolin inhaler for sale seen this response yet, by Ohio State University professor Rebecca Wanzo, I highly recommend it. It’s pretty evenhanded and thorough, acknowledging the book’s emotional power while sustaining a more detailed critique.

I’ve been out and about a lot more—even a lovely date night here!–which is mostly good for me, not so great for the household sleep schedules, and thus not so good for downtime and writing time here.

I’ve been making jam, stocking the jam closet space downstairs. There’s a wonderful line from my goddess of domesticity, Pat in one of L.M. Montgomery’s novels: “While I move and live and have my being I’ll want a jam closet.” A jam closet! I might have scoffed a few years ago. Ah, but now. Now I understand.

And if you read the last few paragraphs of this haunting essay by Alexander Chee, you’ll get some of the feeling of where I’ve been. “What can you trust of what you can’t see?” his yoga teacher asks at the end. Like the yoga students in that essay, I’ve been moving thoughtfully through uncertainty, and trying not to fall.  It is terrifying and it is heady. Because of that combination, I’m sure it will eventually be good for me.

Nevertheless, I’m here too. I made you chocolate cookies. They’re still warm. Or you can spoon up some homemade peach jam over vanilla gelato, to hold onto summer as I have for the last two nights.

In other writing news, my creative nonfiction essay, “How It Feels To Inherit Camp,” is being republished and anthologized. It appeared in Kartika Review this year. I’m thrilled. And I’ll keep you posted.

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Where I Write

1.
Picture the calmest, bluest sky that you know. Mine comes from the dusk of Sacramento summers: a dark but softly glowing cobalt blue sky. That’s the sky that contains every summer evening of my childhood. That blue marks the cooling of a brilliant heat for me, and, at the same time, the blue that remembers that heat, something like the center of a match’s flame.

2.
In 2003, my sister and I walked down the cool white entrance ramp into the Henry Art Gallery. We rounded the corner, went down the stairs. A large panel of that summer blue met us on our left, high up on the wall. A pyramid of stairs pointed up towards the panel. Our eyebrows lifted, we cocked our heads to the side a bit. Hm, interesting. Blue, rectangle, stairs. Simple enough. We knew it was contemporary art, so we thought we’d give it a chance, take a closer look.

And then it happened.

“Would you like to go inside?”

The voice came—not from the blue light—it wasn’t that kind of magic, not yet—but from the art docent who had been quietly standing in the corner of the room.

“What? Inside?” We still stood, confused.

“You just have to take your shoes off.” He gestured to the wooden benches behind us. They had cubbyholes and now we saw a few sets of shoes.

We took off our shoes—this, too, felt like childhood, like home, where everyone had to take off their shoes—and left them by the benches. We looked back at the docent.

“So—we can just go in?”

He smiled. “Yep. Just go up the stairs.”

3.
The stairs in James Turrell’s installation Spread are a stark pyramid. They lead up to that blue panel, some 15 feet off the museum floor. This height means that your sense of a solid foundation recedes further and further the higher you climb. By the time you reach the top of the stairs, you’re standing on a fairly narrow platform. You have to climb, just a bit, to reach into the panel.

Or, what you thought was a panel. What you thought was a panel is actually a room ventolin inhaler us online filled with the most lush, calming light imaginable. You can barely see the corners or the walls of the room. By your internal architectural logic you know that there should be a wall facing you when you enter the room. But somehow, somehow, you can’t see where that wall should be. You don’t know where the far horizon of the room ends. The sharpest edges in that space—it’s no longer a room—are the edges of that panel where you climbed in. The panel’s now a window, looking back onto the museum floor.

But the space continues to defy your architectural logic, to twist all your instincts at being confined. Usually a window is an invitation, calling you to look outside. But the not-horizon of the room compels you further in. You don’t feel confined; you feel expansive. You want to drink that blue, to drink the light as if it were water. The light is that fluid, that soft, that nourishing.

So you walk as far as the docent will let you walk. And you drink.

James Turrell, Spread (2003). Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington. Photo by Richard Nicol.

4.
When the docent asked us, “Do you want to go inside?” it was beyond Alice’s fall down the rabbit hole, beyond the children’s journey through the wardrobe into Narnia. Childhood wish-fulfillment beyond wildest expectations.

Do you want to go inside the light? Yes. Yes, we do.

That’s where I want to write: in the blue that marks the cooling of a brilliant heat,  in the blue that remembers that heat. In the blue at the center of a match’s flame. It’s the space that defies architectural logic. It’s the space that compels us to drink, where we can’t see the horizon.

I’d like to submit this to The Rumpus’s series, “Where I Write,” so would love constructive feedback. I worry that it’s not…something…enough. Alternately, please leave your response to the Reverb 11 prompt–“Describe an unexpected moment, activity, sighting or conversation that touched you during July.” I’d really love to hear from you.