Cardinal crimson missing goodbye

We never got to say goodbye. One day, he left. Angrily, violently, surprisingly, blindsidingly. There was confusion, worry, fear, rage, shock, numbness, open-heartedness, hope, hopelessness, willingess, shut down, tears, secrecy. And so many lies. But the hardest thing to reconcile is that we never got to say goodbye. We didn’t know it was goodbye. On so many levels. Gone. Ghosted. The kind of sudden absence that haunts your dreams, that wakes you up clutching your sheets, your hair, your t-shirt, trying to find purchase in reality. Anything real. Was any of it real? What even is real? Where is he? Where is she? What does any of it mean? And what is the meaning in that?

There is a cardinal, a male a husband an adult guy bird, who frequents my deck. He is resplendently cardinal red. Is that crimson? Or is it cardinal? I always thought of crimson as minimally maroon, but Harvard is the Crimson and all the merch is maroon even my diploma so I think crimson is actually a less vibrant red than I wish it were for its name. The word that connotes, denotes meaning. Crimson. Cardinal. But I guess when I think about the papacy which I don’t very often because I do not like organized religion and really have some deep and abiding concerns about Catholicism, amongst others, I think about cardinal red and how utterly magnificent the red that the Cardinals get to wear is. It pisses me off sometimes that so many fucking pedophiles and pedophile-adjacent-coveruppers-closeted men-just-go-be -gay proudly and openly please-the good amongst us love and support you-get to wear that utterly magnificent red that cardinal birds, the males of course, just grow into and pass on genetically.

Genetics is an interesting field. Biologically determined? Biologically destined? Nature. Nurture.

We never got to say goodbye, and I look back on years of nurture, nature, nurture, biology, choice, and I look at the cardinal on my deck and I love him. He is partnered, married, with a biologically female cardinal; those less vivid women with beaks like magnolia seeds, as if they put lipstick on to glow up a bit because brown is not the new- or old- and never-will-be cardinal red of their men. We have several cardinal pairs, but this man on my deck is my favorite because on his legs grow feathers that look like breeches or jodhpurs, I think of those as synonymous although they aren’t they connote denote different things. Anyway, this man cardinal has the most magnificent cardinal red capri pants that are not so dull as to just be cardinal red but also vibrant with lowlights and highlights and the point is that none of the other men have them and I wonder why he does. Biology? Genes? A mutation? A choice? Destiny? I don’t know but I feel daily that he is lucky and I am lucky that he likes Royal Canin cat food, subtype not important, and watches until Ruthie finishes eating never all she is too precious. So the mister approaches as she leaves and not long after but not always his lipsticked missus joins him, but she has no fun pants she’s pantsless which is maybe what she chooses to be but he is utter delight and looks rakish and rogue and just a bit street.

I suspect that he that she that they will leave one day and that I won’t get to say goodbye to them. I will be sad but it will not hurt like this not goodbye because probably some part of their genetic code is telling them to fly elsewhere. And maybe so is mine but why? That was not part of the bargain not on my bingo card and I am having some trouble adjusting.

Because when you should have a goodbye and you don’t get it, there’s a breach. And things go sideways and even though you try everything to reorient the north star isn’t north anymore or not quite so. And you sit and ponder crimson maroon cardinal and biology destiny choice nature nurture harm kindness and you wonder what you missed if you missed anything why how. And it can be hard. I love his pants so much and his nod of the head. Cardinals are supposed to denote connote visits from dead loved ones. But what if the dead loved one is my Nanny? She is a woman and red cardinal is a man does that work? And what if the loved one isn’t dead but just gone left missing migrated? Where does that leave the visited?

Berlin & now in the midst of a scorcher

I’m in West Virginia right now, and today hit 104 degrees. Yesterday wasn’t far from that, and tomorrow promises to be warmer. As y’all know, I grew up in the Deep South, so you might think I’d be used to this, but this here is fire hot. I spent a good bit of the past two days scraping and sanding our deck despite it all, but this isn’t good or normal heat. My heart hurts for the goats and cats and all the other beings that make this place home. I have vats of water everywhere and am hoping for the best.

Last week I was in Berlin, and most days it was well above the average temp for June. Regardless, I really enjoyed my week in a place brand new to me. Oliver is attending in innovation program there so I flew him over on June 9 so that he could rest up before move in on the 12th and so that we could do a tour of the BMW motorcycle factory. That was absolutely fascinating. Think of every stereotype you have of incredible German engineering and precision, and you will see it all come to life in the factory. The warehouse part was a kinetic ordered chaos of millions of parts, robots, autonomous units, and highly trained people. That all feeds in seamlessly to the dynamic production lines which produce every BMW bike you see on the road anywhere in the world today. Many of the robots have such charming humanistic features; it was sort like encountering Star Wars droids in real life.

Berlin is not particularly pretty (I’m sure part of the reason is that 80-85% of its buildings were destroyed during WWII), though it has some very pretty elements, and it is huge, so I’d never recommend going there for a quick weekend unless you were revisiting. I was glad to have six full days and grateful for the extensive, easy, affordable, safe public transportation. My sister joined me for the weekend and we did two fantastic tours—one a Third Reich walking tour and the other a bike tour of “alternative” Berlin. Combined with excellent restaurant recommendations from our Airbnb host, I left feeling like I had a good sense of it as a vibrant, accepting, progressive city with a hell of a lot of history and a relatively new and burgeoning identity, knit together in admirably functional ways. Nowhere is remotely perfect, and unfortunately the right wing is attempting a comeback in Germany, but it was such a relief to be in a place that unapologetically values things like the environment, public transportation, and acceptance of all manner of identities while also celebrating music, the arts, and innovation. The environment and public transportation aren’t woke; they’re responsible and practical. It’s not normal for Berlin to have been in the mid-90s or WV to be near 105 right now nor is it reasonable to have to have a car to get literally anywhere.

Everywhere I met people from all over the world: Australia, Denmark, Georgia (the country), Turkey, the Netherlands. Every single one of them is appalled by trump and America; none are coming to visit anytime soon. The Australian couple had just canceled their two next trips to the U.S.- they have traveled in America more than many Americans have, they have made friends here, and they don’t feel at all safe coming. It’s just heartbreaking and totally understandable. The Dutch men clapped me on the shoulder and wished me luck ever getting rid of trump. The Danes were horrified and perplexed. “I didn’t vote for him,” I said over and over.

While standing atop Hitler’s Berlin bunker (now, delightfully, a shitty parking lot over the bunker which has been filled with cement), our Third Reich tour guide, a Frisian, told us about his grandfather who was a high ranking SS leader who committed suicide the day after Hitler did. His family has done its best to make peace with that history, most by moving out of Germany and to the U.S. Our tour guide’s father is the only one of the kids to have remained in Germany though he settled quietly and far away in Frisia. I wondered how his U.S.-based relatives feel right now. I didn’t have the heart to ask. I did feel openly thankful that many Germans have wrestled honestly with their past and have made very intentional societal pivots since. How mature! Our bike tour guide, when I said that Berliners seemed very relaxed and laissez-faire about stuff like thumping 24-7 nightclubs near parks, drugs/drinking, and all manner of sexual and gender identity, said “yes, you don’t get in my business, I won’t get in yours.” That attitude plus a largely functional state makes for a good quality of life. I felt, in Berlin, despite the vast diversity of everything, much more of a social contract than I almost ever do in the States. It can be done!

Today, during one of my cooling sessions inside, I peeked at my phone to find messages from friends:

This is shocking. It means ICE can send someone to a country not their own with no notice and no due process/no chance for the person to explain they might be killed if they are sent there. https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/23/supreme-court-third-party-country-deporations-00419210

Wow. We are so fucked. (News.)

Everyone I know is near-tears and/or enraged pretty much all the time, myself included. I’m still reeling from the political assassinations in MN and am pretty freaked out by the daily onslaught of anti-liberty rules and regulations being handed down by anti-democratic jerks. Two days ago, I woke up to a text from Oliver (still in Berlin): “did you see that trump bombed Iran?” Everything feels upside down.

My sister and I did the Third Reich walking tour on the day of trump’s obscene military parade here, and I will tell you that we both felt we were reliving a terrifying, odious playbook.

Exciting news is that Tom and the kids are officially Italian citizens (as of last November), AND I recently found out that I passed my language exam for spousal citizenship. This exam was a four-hour monstrosity whose reading section was rather like the SAT but in Italian and also included lengthy written and listening sections plus a live oral assessment. I don’t think I’d studied that hard since grad school, but the six months and hundreds (thousands?) of hours paid off, and we will soon submit my enormous parcel of background checks (from state of birth on) and official documents, all translated and apostilled in the hopes that I, too, will become the Italian I am (my grandfather was Sicilian). Sono così orgogliosa!

Holding the line at 49

I am 49 today and before you say, “Wow, that’s almost 50!” I do want you to know that I am well aware of that fact. Time. It marches on.

Perhaps not surprisingly, I am in West Virginia for my annual birthday plantathon. It has been a spectacularly gorgeous day, and before you say, “Wait, it’s a Wednesday and you still have a child at home: are you there alone?” I want you to know that yes, yes I am here alone. And it’s delightful. Time. Sometimes you don’t get enough of it by yourself, to spend in the way you want, and because it marches on, well…take it when you can. Happy birthday to me!

I’m in our dining room which is also a sunroom, and I’m surrounded by healthy plants (both inside and out) and birds are chirping and enjoying my window feeder and the wind is blowing and my back is aching like a 49-year-old’s back even though I work out twice a week with my trainer Felipe who kicks my ass via Zoom from Argentina all the while telling me I’m “doing amazing.” Do you know I totally believe him even though I’m not sure I am doing amazing? I don’t care. I’m trying. And his dog, Truman, is the cutest. As is Felipe really. And being that young seems ages ago and also yesterday. And that both/and keeps tripping me up. Time. It marches on and lets you know about it. My friend Karen and I are forever sharing stories about living for forced interruptions during our Felipe sessions because my god, we’ve both had two kids and our core strength is never again gonna come anywhere close to what it ever may have been or what Felipe’s is. Probably Truman’s too.

This morning, I made blueberry scones and lemon curd (from a jar) and coffee, and while eating breakfast, a crimson cardinal landed on the fence outside, and I know it was my Nanny coming to say Happy Birthday, Em. I miss her all the time and she’s been gone more than a decade.

Today I mucked the barn, feathered out new straw all over it which of course the goats insisted on eating as I spread, and weeded and mulched and planted and talked to all of the worms and other little beings I encountered, and thought a lot about how fucking excruciating this past year(s) has been and all that it’s forced me to learn and stand up for. I thought how Nanny would get that. How my mom gets that. How stupidly hard life often is and how you will be forced to learn lessons that you’d really rather not. You can’t beat ‘em but you can join ‘em, and I guess that’s the meta lesson.

Y’all, some tufted titmice are fighting in the window feeder. They are so cute.

Anyway, hard is hard, but lessons can be good, and as time marches on, I would rather learn and pivot if it means this one life we get will be happier or more fulfilling or, maybe, just simpler? Less hard? I’m not even sure how to articulate it. It’s not binary, really. But you probably understand. Some things I’ve (re)learned this year:

Profound grief can be felt when someone is not gone but is gone from you. Such absence can feel like your heart left your body and started walking away from you, maybe punching you in the solar plexus on the way out. Grief remains a dicey social topic, not least depending on who took your heart and left and how and what was or was not explained (Tom and I are fine; this isn’t that).

Not unrelatedly, female friendships are the linchpins of life. Some women are shit (Pam Bondi, Usha Vance, Marine Le Pen, etc) but any (good) woman will tell you that she’d be up the creek with zero hope without her female friends. They are the ears, defibrillators, water, comrades, “tell me, girl,” spare tires, laugh tracks, diaries, emergency everything, honest, photo taking, wise, antibiotic, disgusting in the best way, care package sending, late night call picker uppers of life. Without my girls, I think I’d just have quit by now. I would like to add that I have two male friends that I consider girlfriends and that is the biggest compliment and thank you SA and MB.

Some-a minuscule percentage-of men seem to be getting this, but it’s not nearly enough, and I truly feel sorry for them. They are missing out on SO much. And I say that as a woman who birthed two boys and has spent years trying to underscore the value of emotion and sharing it. To their credit, they do feel and share it. To my fatigue, they only feel and share it with me. Do better society. Back to girlfriends. **Please take a moment to listen to Sister Suffragette by Glynis Johns in Mary Poppins. My dear friend Jennifer recently reminded me of this treasure, and shit, it holds up. Not least because…well, if you don’t get the why there, you’re hopeless.

Always behave such that history will not consider you a disgraceful cunt of some sort. Do you see what I did there? If, in that sentence, you’re upset by the use of “cunt,” you are probably not behaving well. Do better. Especially every single trumper, maggat, and other meanie out there. To be fair, WHAT is the Venn of Bad in which one is not a trumper or maggat? Truly? What is left in “bad”? Like, if you abuse animals, I suspect you voted for trump. You appear to be fine deporting a Maryland resident and father to El Salvador with no cause, so you don’t seem to have standards that constellate around good.

Another thing I’ve learned is just how important it is to keep learning, so let me know if there is any answer to the above question about the Venn of Bad. I don’t know that there is, but I am open and eager. Beyond that Venn, I continue to love learning about plants, birds (“peak middle age, Mom!” -Oliver), needlework, Irish literature, some other literature. Irish politics, Ireland, my students, and my female friends. Less enthusiastically but perhaps most importantly is learning to hold my own lines.

Holding ones own lines, aka knowing, asserting, and holding your boundaries, is, to be honest, an absolute pain in the hole for non sociopaths and, probably, most men. Not saying men are sociopaths but they are a lot better at boundaries. Boundaries is probably the #1 or 2 source of angst, fret, therapy, etc for all but one women I know. That woman is a dear college friend, she is neither male nor a sociopath, she is just awesome and powerful. A rare breed in my experience. You go, TC!

I am NOT good with holding my lines, but damn if this past year hasn’t said, “Emily, hold these lines or throw in the towel of life.” And so I have tried. And continue to try. And you know what? It is absolutely worth it, even when it is terrifying, risky, the threat of the unknown looms, or someone gets mad. MY values, my integrity, my moral compass…those are all worth holding the line for.

Most of the birds have returned to their nests and the goats and cats have called it a day. I’m still waiting for the orange feral cat to come get his dinner that I left out on the deck. Poor lamb- he heard me open the door and is hiding, but I hope hunger overrides his fear and he emerges for a double Fancy Feast.

I thank every single dear one of my friends and family who remembered me today. Your notes and texts and calls meant and mean the world to me. Oh, last lesson: It is NEVER a bad time to thank someone or let them know you’re thinking of them. NEVER. Do it more. You’ll never regret telling someone that they mean something to you or have done something that you appreciate. It puts goodness out in the world to thank and take time. It softens edges, it is healing. The world needs tenderness now more than ever. Also boundaries. Jesus christ, can we have more Harvards and fewer Columbias, more Marc Eliases and fewer Skaddens!

Look for and add to the beauty, tend your and others’ hearts (not least because you never know what they might be going through), stand strong and don’t be a cunt, be good to nature and it will repay you more than you could ever wish, and if you’re grieving, find your women. Do it now. Time marches on.