The whistling tea kettle breaks the early morning silence in my house, providing a welcome respite from the to-do list circulating in my brain. I pour the steaming water into a coffee cup that was once my grandmother's, adding a slice of lemon. The sun is barely starting to rise, light filtering into the windows in that way that made me first fall in love with this house. It's now, standing on the edge of the beginning of the day, when I sometimes find myself having conversations with ghosts.
I've spent much of the past few years thinking about resiliency. About what it means to be resilient, why some people are more resilient than others, or at least appear so, about how to raise a resilient child. There is, of course, no one answer but community, that feeling like you belong has to be one of the keys.
How did you do it? I often muse out loud in the early morning to the original woman of my house. I've been researching the history of my home over the past few months and have discovered that a Jane Chapman bought the land my house sits on from one Allen Avery in 1892. By 1900 according to U.S. Census records, she was living here, in the house that is now mine, which she owned until her death in the early 1930s. There are so many things I wish I could ask her, like if she had the greenhouse built and what she grew, how she fit her husband (and how, given the time period and her marital status, the land and house came to be in her name), herself and four kids into this house, what it was like to live here during the 1918 influenza pandemic and what gave her strength then.
There’s only so much I can discover about Jane, yet there is something soothing in knowing her name. Knowing she laughed and cried and lived in this house too.
Go outside. Sometimes, when the light is particularly magical, and I can just feel it's going to be one of those days when you want to be outdoors, I can practically hear the voice of one of my first childhood friends telling me to go outside. She died before my daughter was born, yet there are so many moments when I'm watching my toddler jump off a rock or run amok in the grass that I think of Beth. So much of my early childhood was spent running wild in her sprawling backyard, the outdoors and our imaginations our entertainment. She was the foundation of one of my earliest creative communities.
You're tougher than you think you are, my grandmother would often tell me. It would be impossible to count how many times I've uttered that phrase to myself over the past few years.
In the early mornings in my kitchen that used to be Jane's, surrounded by dishes that used to be my grandmother's, I think of all of them. About their resiliency.
Some people simply feel the way you want home to feel. My grandmother was that for me. In a big family where I never quite fit in—born too early to sit seamlessly at the kid's table with my siblings and cousins yet not old enough to sit comfortably at the adult's table, she always ensured that I knew that I mattered. That even when she didn't agree with me, I knew that what I thought, felt and said was valid and counted for something. She became the person I ran every major decision by. She'd patiently let me talk myself in circles until I was ready to actually take action. When I knew I was having a daughter, there was no question in my mind she'd have part of her name (even if my grandmother always hated the name Florence).
Even as I was losing my grandmother to dementia over the past few years, I also felt like I was getting pieces of her back. My daughter does this movement with her head when she rolls her eyes the exact same way my sister does, which is the exact same way our grandmother did. There are phrases my mom says now and little gestures she makes while interacting with my daughter that take me right back to summer days spent with my grandmother. In the same way, my grandmother would drag me outside when it rained for a walk through the puddles; my daughter always wants to go out in the rain. Little things that remind me of the bigger things about how she made me feel.
And that's the thing, isn't it? That feeling that others know us, that they're on this journey too, even though the paths aren't ever exactly the same but that we belong. We can't hide the climate crisis from our kids, and we really shouldn't try. We're teaching them how to live, and that includes facing scary things. But by creating space for their feelings to matter, for their imaginations to run wild and places to return home to, we’re creating the communities that will help them face scary things.
Until next time,
~ Bridget
Published: How Award-Winning Nutritionist Ellie Krieger Keeps Weeknight Dinners Healthy for Martha Stewart.
Read: For some good news, I loved this article on where nature is, in fact, healing. A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table by Molly Wizenberg is a lovely collection of recipes and the stories behind them. Oh, and if you don't feel like baking, take a look at the Girl Scout cookie menu. You can order them online from Troop 6000, which serves girls in the NYC shelter system.
Working: On a piece on bat houses for Architectural Digest, on oyster farm tourism for HipCamp and easy recipes for cooking with kids for The Day Magazine.
Love this: "We're teaching them how to live, and that includes facing scary things. But by creating space for their feelings to matter, for their imaginations to run wild and places to return home to, we’re creating the communities that will help them face scary things."