Month: June 2025

Postmarked: Pure Delight

Postmarked: Pure Delight

Meg

The other day my 20 pound “guard dog” lost his mind barking at the front door – standard protocol for walkers, cars, other dogs, pretty much anything that threatens his domain (i.e. happens into his view). This time, though, there was actually a bright yellow DHL delivery van idling in the driveway – something was afoot after all! The driver was still standing on my front porch scanning the bar codes and tossing packages to the ground when I opened the door. I was stumped because I couldn’t remember having ordered anything at all recently, let alone 4 things.

“Are you sure those are for me?”

He glanced down at the packages. “Yep, your address but a different name on each package. Have a good one.” And off he went.

I gathered the packages up and brought them inside. I double checked the address labels before he pulled away. Definitely for us. The packaging was all the same gray, plastic bagging but none of the packages were exactly the same shape or size. Some were almost lumpy to the feel, others more regular square shapes inside. And DHL? I was perplexed. A real mail mystery.

I have always loved good, old-fashioned snail mail. The love affair started before email existed, of course, when writing letters by hand was the primary way to stay connected with others. Connection being my driving life force, you can maybe imagine the novels worth of letters I have written across the decades. When I lived in the north Maine woods and only went to town once per week, collecting mail from headquarters was the highlight of the trip. Besides ice cream. That was also a thrill. When my kids were away at summer camp – no tech allowed – I semi-stalked (in the nicest, most sane way) our mail carrier every day to ensure I received any incoming letters at the earliest possible moment.

Back then, the mailbox was a magical portal. You never knew what might show up – postcards, letters, junk mail, packages, absolutely nothing at all. It was all a surprise, every single day. These days, ever since I set up a stop delivery with the postal service while I was on vacation, I get daily email notifications about what’s coming my way. Needless to say, very little arrives in the mail that’s a true surprise.

Which brings me back to those packages…

Remember when I mentioned the force that is the Wrexham AFC marketing department in my prior post about the football club in North Wales featured in the show Welcome to Wrexham? Well, here’s your proof. Just in case all you international fans had forgotten us, here’s a little reminder and shot of goodwill to go with it. Totally brilliant. And a two-fer of a surprise -not only were packages arriving out of the blue, but we also had no idea what was inside. As the Brits say, it was like a lucky dip (in American, that’s a grab bag)! Hats, water bottles, coasters, pins, a stuffed animal of the dragon mascot Rex. The women all got wallets. Why? No idea. But this random gesture sparked so many good feelings. This seems like the marketing equivalent of a random act of kindness. It was this happy little thing that dropped in and brightened our day. It made us all smile and think good thoughts about the football club and the people of Wrexham, Wales. Sometimes small gestures go a very long way.

Choose to Lean In – to LIFE

Choose to Lean In – to LIFE

Meg

I was listening to Anderson Cooper’s All There Is podcast the other day, specifically the episode Love is What Survives. People called in to share their stories of grief, and one phrase kept coming up again and again: “lean in.” It resonated in my mind because it connected with a funny experience I had had that weekend.

I had spent the weekend in Toronto with four friends. On one evening we were all jammed like sardines in a small SUV, one in front, three in the middle row, my friend’s husband driving us out of the city after a long day out. There were multiple conversations happening simultaneously among us all, a buzz of noise and commentary and general conversation. At one point, the friend sitting up front got her phone out and told us to lean in. Two of us did, looking up and smiling for the camera. Our other friend was either in the middle of another conversation or misheard and called out forcefully, “No!” It was so completely out of context and character that we all broke into instantaneous fits of belly laughs. We laughed so hard we couldn’t speak, until someone wheezed out another “no!” through giggles and laughter would erupt through the car all over again. The rest of the weekend was peppered with a call and response of “lean in!”, “no!”, punctuated with more laughter. We even have a keepsake picture memorializing the moment with three of us gumming it up for the camera and only the left eye and shoulder of our fourth friend in the frame.

I was reflecting on that lean in moment and the weekend full of friendship, rejuvenation, and laughter as I kept hearing the phrase “lean in” while running my errands. And I started to think – that really is the key, isn’t it, to this life? You have to lean into it – to friendship, to love, to taking chances sometimes (like when I got on that plane and flew to Guatemala, which is what started me on this blogging and writing journey and reignited a part of me – through connection and purpose – that had been dormant). You have to lean in to LIFE – to ALL OF IT. Even the hard stuff.

It’s natural to want to protect oneself from difficult feelings, to have the curated instagram version of an emotional life where everything is beautiful and awesome and happy all the time. It can feel better to be numb or to press down hard feelings in the hopes that they will stay quiet or go away. It’s counter-intuitive to face into – to lean into – pain and grief, but that’s actually the recipe for healing. It’s also the recipe for genuine, authentic living.

Photo by Kampus Production on Pexels.com

It took me a long time to learn that, unfortunately, the feelings don’t go away just because you avoid them. In fact, ignored feelings often strengthen and distort, like a crack in the foundation that settles in more deeply as time passes, eventually shifting the structure enough that the walls start to lean. In my early days of grieving my mom’s health and my health while trying to juggle kids and work, I would use the analogy that the wheels were coming off. Maybe a more apt analogy was that I had built a house out of a deck of cards and was spending all my time running around trying to keep the wolf from blowing my extremely precarious structure over versus strengthening it from within.

I can’t help but continue to reflect on the wonderful, cleansing laugh of my recent lean in moment. The whole weekend was a beautiful example of leaning in – of showing up, making memories, standing by your people in good times and bad – and also just because. That’s really the essence of life. We are here so fleetingly in the grand scheme of things. When a group of friends comes together in a circle they lean in while while leaning on each other. It’s a hug that is simultaneously the support we need to hold each other up. So lean in – to it all! That’s what sustains you!

Is Being Stuck the Same as Finding Stillness?

Is Being Stuck the Same as Finding Stillness?

Meg

The theme of my first poetry/writing class was Stillness. Finding stillness seems like a good idea in this whirlwind world. I often think it would do me some good to find a little stillness in my busy mind and can’t-sit-still body. I get the idea. But I went to a dark place with it, and all I could think about was being stuck. I had to ask, after reflecting on it for a couple hours, if being stuck was the same as finding stillness?

These last months I have been living ever more into the bittersweet of life, the tide carrying me along in a daze. My kids are growing – literally inches before my very eyes some days. And my mom keeps on beating the odds and crushing life. Except, in her case, I ask myself more and more often – why? She isn’t living the life she would have wanted. She wouldn’t recognize much about herself currently, though her loving heart, joyous spirit, and beautiful laugh remain in tact. I tell people all the time that since Alzheimer’s started affecting her she remembers what’s in her heart way more than what’s in her head. I’ve felt that to be true, and didn’t realize that Tennessee Williams is quoted as having said,

“Memory takes a lot of poetic license, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart.” – Tennessee Williams

It’s neat to think about memory living in the heart for someone who is severely cognitively impaired and doesn’t have a memory in the traditional way we think about it. It’s a gift that my mom has such a loving disposition because she doesn’t say much, certainly not much that makes sense. A lot of the time she has this far off look and I have to work to get her to focus on my face. So it’s not the most interactive relationship, and yet, she still exudes love, which is gratifying and heartwarming.

I wonder sometimes if her stillness in time is stuckness. The world keeps on whirring on by her and she remains essentially the sane and completely oblivious to it. I know I certainly feel stuck right smack dab in the middle of the sandwich even as the world keeps whooshing right on by. I heard someone on a podcast recently say that a sandwich is too generous a term, referring instead to this stage of life as more of a panini. Call it what lunch item you will, I’ve been in this for a very long time and this past summer I officially hit the summer of my discontent. Shakespeare may write about winters of discontent. I can tell you, no iambic pentameter involved, that this rainy ass summer stuck between kids launching and mom lingering, was discontenting. Probably not for the first time. Nor the last.

I’ve been caring for my mom for 10 years. TEN. During that time my kids went from babies to toddlers to teens. They are growing, launching, evolving. My role in her care, what it requires of me, and how I navigate it, have all changed and evolved during this time as well. And, sure, my mom has changed, too, but not in any good ways. She’s still alive, and she still gives love, but she also has no agency and isn’t part of her kids’ or grandkids’ lives. She is physically here and simultaneously absent. She’s the most present absent person I’ve ever met. She has missed it ALL even though she is literally, physically, right down the road. These last months I’ve just been stuck on the tragedy of that and the purgatory of this responsibility as well as my grief.

It’s the dawn of the summer of 2025, and I am just getting around to editing and posting this piece that I drafted in 2023. That tells you without any words required what life is like stuck in the sandwich! I recently read Mothers and Other Fictional Characters in which the author, Nicole Graev Lipson, shares the Portuguese word “saudade,” which translates roughly to “the presence of an absence, the ache that replaces what’s gone.” That’s such a perfect way of describing grief (I called it The Void in a previous post). It’s feeling the presence of the people we have loved who have departed this Earth fully. In my mom’s case, I actually live with the absence of who she was every day. Saudade.

Saudade – the presence of an absence, the ache that replaces what’s gone – page 20, Mothers and Other Fictional Characters by Nicole Graev Lipson

Anderson Cooper’s All There Is podcast talks a lot about grief, too much for me, to be honest, because I get it and I typically look to podcasts for an escape. But the title of the most recent one, Love is What Survives, struck me because that just makes sense. The pain we feel in loss is love with nowhere to go. I am grateful for having been so loved. And that helps move me forward and feels the slightest bit like the stuckness, for now, is melting.

“The most painful state of being is remembering the future, especially the one we will never have.” –  Søren Kierkegaard

Ah, and if you made it this far, to answer my own question, no, I still cannot sit still so apparently being still and being stuck are not the same. In fact, sitting still would allow me to write more blog posts. Being stuck prevents me from doing so. Somehow being stuck gets in the way of the emotional and physical stillness of the mind required to create. Or that’s what I think anyway. Since I seem to be finding room to write again, it seems whatever blocked me mentally for the past two years has shifted. For now! Always, just for now. One day at a time.

Crossroads and Goalposts…or Two Roads Converged (at the Racecourse Ground)

Crossroads and Goalposts…or Two Roads Converged (at the Racecourse Ground)

Meg

You know the Robert Frost poem The Road Not Taken, where two roads diverge in a wood and Robert Frost takes “the one less traveled by and that has made all the difference”? It’s one of my favorites. I’ve always been that person taking the road less traveled – and I am certain that those choices have indeed made the biggest differences in my life.

But, lately, I’ve been thinking less about diverging paths and more about what happens when roads converge, when parallel lines inexplicably but inevitably meet at the vanishing point, when connection happens in a place and time that seems to be almost predestined. That’s magic.

I don’t usually write about a TV show. Heck, I barely watch TV. It’s rare to find a show that everyone in the family enjoys, but sometimes a show captures your attention and your heart and doesn’t let go. For our family, that’s been the case with Welcome to Wrexham. If you haven’t watched, here’s the quick version: it’s a docuseries about the Wrexham Association Football Club (AFC) – aka soccer – in North Wales – the oldest club in Wales and third oldest in the world – that was relegated (i.e. demoted) due to poor performance season after season. They got stuck in a low level semi-professional league for almost a decade and a half. The club was bought several years ago by actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, who are attempting a fairytale comeback and documenting it as they go. Kind of a real life Ted Lasso.

It’s not just about football or I would have checked out long ago, I am guessing. What makes the show special is how intrinsically linked the football club is to the community and the community to the club. Wrexham is a hard scrabble community that’s a bit down on its luck, quite like their football club. But they are a people who show up and cheer for (in their own special vitriolic way, as the case may be) their hometown team even when they continue to lose and disappoint. These are fans who live and breathe their team. They are a community that has gone through tough times economically and remain proud of and committed to their town, region, and sense of place. Wrexham is a place where people help each other out and make their own luck because nothing comes easy so they brew a cuppa tea and carry on with it.

If that sounds familiar, that’s because it is.

I grew up in Philadelphia, a city that is equal parts heart, hustle, and heartbreak. It can be tough, resilient, a little rough around the edges, gritty, and always full of character (and characters). Both Philadelphia and Wrexham are towns with deep history and beauty (as well as a touch of piss and vinegar). Both have been underestimated, overlooked and written off too many times. They also both feature crazy (okay, enthusiastic) sports fans, for whom every loss is personal. A guy I went to high school with once said that losing in sport was “the Philly man’s destiny.” Ouch – and also not entirely wrong. The history of sports heartbreak pervades the local consciousness. Still, sometimes, despite ourselves, we actually DO win, and then all hell breaks loose (in Philadelphia, the all hell breaking loose part happens win or loose).

So, yea, Welcome to Wrexham is fun and also it hit a lot of familiar notes.

If this were any other underdog sports story, though, I would have moved on by now. But Wrexham is different and this one stuck. Why? Well, props to the formidable force that is their marketing team, let’s be honest. And, also, of course, the Rob McElhenney/Philadelphia hometown connection is a blast. I get a kick out of the Philadelphia Eagles cameos and the description of the green Wrexham jerseys as “Philadelphia Eagles green.” Plus, would you believe that my neighbor in Boston grew up in Wrexham? You can’t make this stuff up. That’s a lot of roads converging. What do a Philly girl and a girl from North Wales have in common? A lot, it turns out!

The story of Wrexham AFC is not one just about sticking together and overcoming adversity no matter the circumstances, though it is those things, too. It’s about finding hope where and when you least expect it and rewriting the narrative. Welcome to Wrexham is the lens through which this journey is shared. It provides a window into life in North Wales and a proximity to a local football club that Americans don’t typically have access to. It invites viewers to feel part of a storied team that is the beating heart of a historic, resilient community. Wrexham’s magic is in building bridges and forging lasting connections, both of which are bigger and more enduring than the show. And connection, like I said before, is my driving life force.

Up the town!

Diolch (thank you!), as always, for reading.