He rolls back healthcare benefits for transgender people during Pride Month. I have friends this ruling affects personally. It’s disheartening, it’s wrong, and it’s on purpose. In fact, it’s insidious.
How you vote and who you support has nothing to do with politics anymore; it’s about your values. You either stand with trans people, gay people, Black people, immigrants, and, you know, PEOPLE — or you support him and you don’t. Period. And if you don’t, you’re not my people.
The good news this week, of course, is that the US Supreme Court passed a ruling protecting LGBTQ+ workers (including transgender people) from discrimination. Hallelujah. One step back, one step forward.
Speaking of fascists, I try to be a team player, but every once in a while I have to lay down a law in the domicile. My latest fascist pronouncement: you have to wear pants when you’re deep in the woods. I mean, shorts would even be okay. But no pants? No service.
It’s not even the ticks, although certainly that’s a concern. It’s not even the deadly mosquito-born pathogens I refuse to read about, although social media is constantly feeding me those headlines. It’s the everyday bugbites, scrapes, and scratches. I draw the line at avoidable vagina rashes.
Eliza in particular has been absolutely riddled with bug mishaps this year. Twice she’s had an eye swollen shut by black fly bites. Another black fly incident — her ear blew up like a prize fighter after a particularly bad fight. She’s had extreme reactions to spider bites, a touch of poison ivy here and there, and nonstop itchy stuff everywhere, all the time.
Then last night, she got her finger caught in the wagon and had to go to the ER to have it glued shut. We brought her to the hospital in the pink sundress she’d had on all day, filthy and speckled with blood. Her face, too, smeared with blood and dirt, her hair full of haphazardly placed barrettes and “twists.” She was barefoot and screaming.
We will all remember 2020. The year of the hysterical ER visit. The year of the quarantimes. The year Black lives really began to matter in this country. The year that, with every fiber of hope in my being, we’ll get a new president who is at least mildly less awful.
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What I’m eating:
I have been obsessed with this lettuce a lot of restaurants around here use in their salads. For the last few years I have been trying to solve the mystery of what kind of lettuce it is and where it is from. I can get really possessed by things. Finally, my stepfather solved it for me, and I am so grateful. It’s baby crispy green leaf from Little Leaf Farms in MA. I emailed the company to find out where I can buy it in Brattleboro, and a nice gentleman wrote me back with the info: Price Chopper and Hannafords. So I can buy the lettuce grown by the sweet small local-ish farm — I just have to buy it from a big box store. Ah well. Baby steps!
Also, made pulled pork for the first time in my life! My husband is a vegetarian and my 5-year-olds are mercurial about food, so I love forward to eating 3 pounds of pulled pork by myself this week.
What I’m reading:
Thank you to my good friend Rebecca Pacheco for reading to us this Wendell Berry poem, which has always been an anchor for me in challenging times, but which is so much more powerful when read to one by another.
Just started reading How to Be Anti-Racist by Ibram Kendi. I’ve already promised this book to someone else when I’m done, which means the pressure is on. Dove in last night.
And lastly, I have been consciously collecting more books with non-White main characters. My friend Rhonda thoughtfully gave us the book Big Hair, Don’t Care, which is a sweet soliloquy on having big Black hair. My daughters are now obsessed with having big hair and demanded that I put their hair in “twists” this morning. Poor dears.
What I’m working on:
For Spencer Stuart: Sales Leadership in China: Managing the Dynamic Relationship Between Channels
Sometimes your writing makes me truly guffaw and that, my dear, is a gift to experience.