I was not right about anything. It may have been less humiliating if I had found out that I had been right about even one thing, but truly: I was not right about anything. Here are some facts that have been true about my individualized pregnancy experience.

Secretly, there are 51.

My life has gotten a lot better since I started keeping a diary every day, and it is much easier than you are imagining it is.

Today I would like to talk about the Never-Asker. This is a category of person for whom: It is hard to ask a friend to watch the dog when they go out of town. It is hard to ask for a ride home from the airport. It is hard to ask for the take-out category (Ethiopian, please!) they really, really want. Is this you? Read on.

And you learn the secret joy about bulbs, which is this: bulbs are pretty easy. You can just kind of put them in the ground and forget about them. Kale is fickle and requires a lot of pruning and easing into soil and whatnot. Bulbs are fighters. They remember to come up and bloom and all you have to do is bury one, somewhere, at the time that is designated by the map on the back of the bulb package you bought from a hardware store.

It was obvious that the book was the Trojan horse of all the art forms. You can do anything in a book. You can paint in a book, or do letterpress, or write poems, or make dried flower collages, or even do stupid (non-clay based, granted) sculptures alá pop-up books. Books had it all.

How simple and kind it is to do something for another person just because you love them, or care about them, or want them to know that you see them. This piece of writing will never be seen by anyone else. You can’t come back to it and Copy+Paste it into your memoir. It’s slow and truthful and private, and that is a rare, lovely thing.

Anyone can make cookies. Let’s get that straight.

Many intelligent people over the past several weeks have pointed out in conversation that Nature doesn’t seem to care all that much that it is a global pandemic. Nature keeps on doing SPRING, because baby, SPRING is a party that doesn’t need any guests. It’s its own guests. It is going to come whether or not you feel that such a behavior is prudent.

You do NOT need binoculars (although, sure, that’s a fun addition; just don’t assume you’ll figure them out quickly), and you do NOT need a fancy scope. You don’t need anything but stillness, bird seed, and a little bit of outdoor space (a window sill is enough).

I’m not sure how I learned this, or when, but I figured out somewhere between the first orchid and the second orchid that children need to be able to be children, and that this required that someone be a grown up.

You don’t have to be proud of your body or happy with your job or accomplished in your personal goals to have love that is total and powerful and complete. You get to have love now! Today! Don’t be afraid — just take it! Like a jar of wrapped pillow mints at the front of a neighborhood Italian restaurant, that’s what it’s there for.

It’s Friday morning again and I sit here staring at a blank screen with the words “How To” lingering seductively in the TITLE box and I have no idea how to do anything. 

If we’re being really honest, Groundhog Day isn’t really about anything. You get to put whatever meaning you want inside it. Why pass up an opportunity like that? I hope you have a beautiful weekend, celebrating an arbitrary rodent, while the ground inevitably freezes and everyone else stubbornly clings to their dismal seasonal affects.

If you take one thing away from what I’ve written here, let it be this: anyone can make a pie, any time, with any thing. Do not be intimidated by the pie. Embrace the pie as possibly (definitely, but I don’t want to argue with people who love Legos) the best invention man hath wrought. 

I feel that I have been cowardly to be putting down Portland, especially when it took such good care of me as I grew up. I rode the bus in middle school, and I learned to appreciate rain. I learned the names of perennial flowers and I was encouraged to recycle, compost, and vote.

Alexis recently gave me back the copy of “UHF” I’d given to her for Christmas when she was 11. She is cleaning stuff out of her house; she’s making space. When I publish this blog post, Alexis’ due date will have been three days ago. I do not know what the baby’s name is going to be yet, although I have begged to know, and I have a secret guess. Alexis doesn’t want to make a big deal out of any of it. But there is just no way to not make a big deal about a baby.

One of the reasons this task is so wonderful for grounding oneself in the present is that the robins don’t stay still. You stay still, and they hop around unpredictably, so you can’t ever be sure whether you already counted that one or not. This means you have to start over again and again. I recommend counting the slowly.

A true epic tale is a-foot.

A footnote, shall we say?