crushed ice and other summer tips

a disorderly personal update

Every time I sit down to write all I can think to say is this: one night in April, a woman and her three daughters were asleep in their home in Oklahoma City. Twenty armed men burst in, yelling, and the girls thought they were being kidnapped and trafficked. The men forced the mother and girls outside in the darkness and the rain, not giving them time to change clothes. One of them, a minor, was in her underwear. The mother told the press later that they’re a very modest family — the girl’s father hasn’t even ever seen her in her underwear. The heavily armed men took their family’s phones, laptops, and all their cash savings, and left.

The men were federal agents. They had the wrong house. They did not apologize, and they couldn’t say when the property would be returned.¹

Or the story I read this morning, about a father of three Marines who was beaten and taken by ICE while at his landscaping job. His boss had instructed him to throw trash away in a dumpster that they weren’t supposed to use. He followed orders. Now he’s on his way to a detention center in Louisiana. Or the woman who lost her midterm pregnancy while in that detention center in Louisiana because she wasn’t given any medical care. Or the breastfeeding mother, wife of a Marine, who was detained by ICE because her estranged mother missed an immigration hearing. Or the detention center in Texas where adults fight children for access to water. Or about the plan to use FEMA money to build a new immigrant detention center in the fragile Everglades of Florida (this coming after all the false claims and manufactured outrage that Biden’s FEMA didn’t have enough money to support Western North Carolina after Helene because they had spent it on… immigrants). Or all the people dutifully showing up for their immigration hearings only to be deported.

There is a new story about masked, armed, violent men kidnapping people on the streets of my country every day, and this action is not about safety, this is not “worst first.” This is about money and racism and fear. It’s about a new variation on prisons for profit. I am ashamed, and I wake up every morning wishing someone could tell me how I can get my body in between ICE and the people it's kidnapping.

I don’t want to write about this to you – it’s bigger and deeper than what I can say here.

And I don’t want to write about this to you because there are so many things being damaged right now that it feels wrong to choose just one.²

And I don’t want to write about this to you, because you probably already know. You have probably already called your representatives. You are probably praying your prayers of lament right now. I don’t think anyone needs to hear my perspective on this – who am I?

But then I remember how painful it is to me when Christian leaders seem to stay silent while the violent play on. Regardless of what we think about the right solutions to issues of immigration, we must be clear and loud about the image of God in every person, about the dignity and love due to every human being — and so in case you need to hear one more Christian say that, here I am.

I have to say this much, even if it’s repeating it into a void, even if it’s not enough; and maybe having said it, I’ll actually find myself free to say something new next time.

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So, here are some of the things I’ve been meaning to tell you, in brief (they’ve been piling up as I’ve been stewing at the very idea of writing anything without acknowledging how the *everything* of it all is weighing on me).

After being bumped from a flight in December, I had a very hefty flight voucher to use, so this month I took my daughter to Montreal for a joint birthday celebration. My sister came, too, and Kirsten even dropped in for a night. Some highlights:

• Drawn & Quarterly, a small and well-curated bookstore with a focus on graphic novels (we got books by David Lynch, Leanne Simpson, and Miyazaki). We also visited Indigo, a two-story bookshop in the mall that had some amusingly put together displays (bath salts and fuzzy slippers alongside romance novels and We Can Do Hard Things, for instance).

• Elena for my birthday — some of the best pizza and wine of my life, and let me remind you that I once lived in Italy for four months.

• Riding electric bikes by the Lachine Canal

  

• the MBAM, especially the exhibit on Berthe Weill. Weill, a woman in a male-dominated field, hung paintings on a clothesline in her gallery when she ran out of wall space. She was one of the first to champion many artists in France at the turn of the century — among them Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Amedeo Modigliani, Henri Matisse and Suzanne Valadon.

• The extensive and unpretentious vintage collection at Eva B.

• Penultimate note: I do recommend traveling with my sister. When I left my phone in the uber from the airport, I was resigned to never seeing it again, but she was indefatigable and we had it back within 24 hours. She made our dinner reservations and she bought Rosie the good sunscreen.

• Final note: I don’t care about travel as much as I used to. I was so happy to see the mountains around Asheville from the plane. I found myself distracted from foreign architecture by thoughts about the half-finished paint job on my porch back home, and wanted to get back to it. Guess I’m old!

Other joys:

• The new album from SG Goodman, Planting by the Signs, is like if Lucinda Williams had been born in Appalachia instead of Lake Charles and grew up on Karen Dalton and Bill Fay. My favorite track at the moment tells a story of SG, as a child, coming upon a group of kids beating a snapping turtle. She asks to take a turn, but turns the stick on the kids instead. “Small town’s where my mind gets stuck,” she sings. “I grew up hard on bottom land where only crops should grow/ Watched people reap what the demons sowed/ And I take it with me everywhere.”

• There’s a lot to hate about amazon, but I do love that they give Amy Sherman Palladino as much money as she wants to make television shows. Etoile wasn’t a perfect show, but the leads were all great — star Lou de Laage was incredible —and it made me want to go to the ballet.

• One of the less-bad ways I disconnect from reality is through reading cozy mysteries. While I was helping paint the back porch, I listened to Murder at Gulls Nest, narrated by Siobhan McSweeney. On the airplane, I read How to Solve Your Own Murder and How to Seal Your Own Fate by Kristin Perrin, and on Saturday I read Murder Takes a Vacation, in which Laura Lippman goes ridiculously cozy (and pays subtle homage to one of my all time favorite books, Betsy and the Great World).

• In Asheville in June, we have a thunderstorm nearly every day. I sit on the covered porch and just listen.

• I’ve been preaching cicadas and (tangentially) ravens (beginning at about minute 27).

• I’m really desperate to read a good long review of Wes Anderson’s newest, The Phoenician Scheme. Had I but time and world enough I’d go see it again and do it myself, but alas. In his long-honed and oft-mimicked style, the film follows a man who is beginning to grasp his own mortality, and wants to secure his legacy. He reunites with the sole daughter he hopes will be his heir, and she accompanies him as he tries to keep his last scheme, the Phoenician one, from failing, while a boardroom of forgettable white men try to foil him by driving up the price of a common (and phallic) bolt. (I think I got those details right; they’re not really the point.) Meanwhile, he’s having dreams of encountering God at the pearly gates. Most reviews I read argue that the lesson our protagonist learns is a lesson about the value of family, but I don’t think that’s quite right (unless the lesson is about the way having a daughter makes men better). Rather, it seems to me that it’s a film about the way that facing our mortality reveals the cruelty and meaninglessness — or ridiculousness, see the basketball scene — of most of men’s greedy and violent endeavors. There are a lot of religious references — Anderson grew up in the Episcopal Church — the one I’m probably reading into… the protagonist’s project called is called Sussman-korda, which I can only hear as an allusion to Sursam Corda, or lift up your hearts, the beginning to our weekly prayers. Choose ye this day, etc. The final thing I have to say here is that we (Jack, Rosie, her friend Jo, and I) saw direct visual echoes in this film to movies from our childhoods — The Sound of Music, The Princess Bride, Star Wars, Casablanca — and I haven’t seen any review mention this! Tell me if I’m crazy.

• We have had a lot of cabbage in the CSA this month: Crunchy Vietnamese Cabbage Salad with Pan Seared Tofu and Roasted Gochujang Cabbage were both delicious.

• New fully-funded writing workshops opened for application this month at Collegeville, with a couple more I can’t wait to share about - make sure you’re following on instagram or substack so you don’t miss these announcements.

• As I’ve been sitting here, a blue jay, a robin, and a squirrel have been eating the blueberries off my bush. I guess I should go claim some before they’re gone.

stay hydrated,

Amy

1. The story is here: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/us-citizen-family-traumatized-ice-raid-rcna203700

Not that it should matter, but the woman and her daughter are all American citizens.

2. The other things (nationally) that have grieved me the most: the sudden end to USAID, the cuts to science and climate research, the threats to higher education and free speech, and what’s being done to our protected lands and national parks (ongoing, and as recently as today).