Berlin & now in the midst of a scorcher

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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!

Adieu 2024

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Two posts this calendar year. What a shame. As the author, I can, of course, only blame myself. But it is, indeed, a shame to have so little to show here for this year.

It was a hard one—one of the hardest of my life. I imagine that stress has inspired my literary muteness, that and the fact of the kids getting older. Old enough that our lives are still intertwined but the ages that theirs are not my stories to tell nor even (most often) my side of them. This blog has accompanied me through so much of parenthood so far. I believe I first wrote, on Tumblr if anyone even remembers that platform, when Oliver was 18 months old. He will turn 16 in March which is hard to imagine in some respects and not remotely difficult to understand in others. He just got his learner’s permit, and we have begun to loosely discuss college visits and what he might want in that experience. Awareness of the great joy he brings Tom and me on a daily basis and how significantly we will miss him when he leaves the nest brings me to tears sometimes.

During this arduous year, I have tried to keep centered by broadening my creative endeavors, both in the garden and on fabric, by spending time with my fur babies, and enjoying time and travel with Tom and friends.

In February, to belatedly celebrate Tom’s birthday, he and I flew to London and drove to Wrexham, in northern Wales, to see Wrexham AFC play Notts County.

Have you heard of or watched Welcome to Wrexham? It’s a sports docuseries produced by Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney and about the historic-yet-floundering football (soccer) club they bought during the pandemic. We started watching during season 1 when the team was dithering in the national league which is the very bottom of the English Football League. I especially fell in love: the team and story are sort of like a real life Ted Lasso tale meets old mining town that needs an infusion of hope and resources. Wrexham AFC is the third-oldest professional football club in the world and their stadium, the Cae Ras or Race Course, is said to be the oldest still in use.

the English football league pyramid

The team was promoted to League 2 for the 2023-24 season, and we left on Valentine’s Day which is well into things. It was such a delightful adventure. We had beers at The Turf, a great pub that directly abuts the Cae Ras, saw so many stars of the show (athletes and town citizens) that we felt we’d come to know, I sheepishly but enthusiastically asked for selfies with many of the players, and we both got plenty of kit to wear. Notts County is a long-time Wrexham rival so I’d really hoped that game was the one we could attend. We’d had to get up in the middle of the night in January to try and beat all the other international fans in the online ticket grab but came away with two tickets and thrilled.

And, we won!! One of our favorite players, Steven Fletcher, a Scottish Viking god man, scored during the first half, and the win pushed Wrexham into the automatic promotion zone. Thrillingly, the lads are now playing in League 1 and are in 2nd/3rd place at the time of this writing (and playing Barnsley tomorrow to start the New Year.)

PHOTOS BELOW:
top row: Em at The Turf, owned by the wonderful Wayne Jones; Em with Steven Fletcher!
second row: Em & Tom in the Race Course on game day; Em outside of the Cae Ras in her crazy kit
third row: Wrexham mural, not far from the stadium; statue honoring Wrexham miners and steelworkers
fourth row: Em with James McLean (Derry man!) who is one of her faves; Arthur Okonkwo, goalie extraordinaire

The players are all SO nice and so thankful for the community’s support and love. They are always happy to sign autographs and take selfies and have a chat. Honestly, I just loved every bit of the vibe in Wrexham. In the Marks & Spencer in town, we spied some of the players—Steven Fletcher, George Evans, and, I believe, Will Boyle—but didn’t bother them as I’m sure they get it all the time.

We stayed at a darling Airbnb, and our hosts Jenny and Darren could not have been lovelier. They have a yard of chickens that I got to play with, and Jenny, not really a Wrexham fan but a watcher of the documentary, actually spotted Tom and me in an WtW episode months after the game and kindly let me know. Eagle eyes, I tell you!

Welcome to wrexham: notts again

Sometimes, when life feels the hardest and worst, it’s best to just fly to coop for a bit if you can. There is great privilege in being able to turn away from absolutely crap, and with gratitude for our ability to bolt, I’m so glad we did.

In July, as a belated 20th anniversary celebration, we again raced across the Pond, this time to Amsterdam and then London, for the Eras tour and then Wimbledon. But more on that adventure later.

For now, I send a hearty middle finger to large swaths of ‘24, and I wish all of you, all of us (but not Cheeto or his people), the very best for 2025.

Thanks for sticking with me, everyone! Buon Capodanno!

Travel and Taylor and time

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Jack and I are just home from a whirlwind college visit trip, our last I believe. We flew to Glasgow last weekend with the intention of seeing the University of Glasgow and spending a few days in a new city before leaving Scotland to drive from Durham to Bristol to Southampton—pretty much as north to south, east to west as you can go in England.

We travel well together, and our college trips have been enormously memorable, fun, exciting adventures that we both treasure. We’ve trained, flown, and driven through small town Connecticut and Massachusetts to thumping Edinburgh during its annual Fringe Fest to happy Dublin, venerable St. Andrews, and burgeoning Belfast. Jack has been a delightful wingman in every place and on the myriad historical, political, literary, and nature pilgrimages and tours on which I’ve dragged him. I will treasure our days of laughter, good and bad meals, many encounters with marvelous strangers (and a few unsavory ones including a dude who we passed on the street in Glasgow and immediately challenged Jack to an airborne arm wrestle that lasted entirely too long*), and his willingness to see myriad places as possible homes rather than “foreign” lands of lesser worth.

Although he spent a terrific day in Glasgow last summer and I’d heard great things, we did not expect to fall madly in love with the city. But we did, fairly immediately. It is so vibrant in its pride of place, warm and welcoming people, artsy vibe (it’s a UNESCO City of Music), activism, fabulous restaurants, and architecture, much of which is stately and gorgeous. And, if you’re from Glasgow, you’re a Glaswegian, which is just a very cool moniker.

Glasgow has four universities, and we saw U of Glasgow and Strathclyde, both of which have excellent engineering programs. If I had to give you an American sense of them, I’d say they’re vaguely like Columbia and NYU in that Glasgow has a campus, green space, and sits in a distinct neighborhood (a la Columbia) while Strath is deeply integrated into the streets of central Glasgow (a la NYU). We met students at both; all raved. Strath was not for Jack, but Glasgow knocked his socks off. Mine too. Founded in 1451, it’s full of history and is phenomenally beautiful—looks and feels like Hogwarts—and all the students we spoke to were positively thrilled to be there. One said, “this is a great place to come and find yourself.”

Scenes from around Glasgow:

That and a great education are the two things I want most for my boys in college. They are precisely what I got at Northwestern, and I find them equally important, the finding yourself perhaps even moreso than the education. Jack’s high school experience has been, to put it charitably, a mixed bag. I feel so terribly hopeful for what college might be for him. Perhaps I think back to my own vexed high school years and how utterly crucial college was in terms of getting to start over. I knew no one in Evanston and so could fashion a new Emily or, rather, learn who she really was or could be without the baggage one acquires while growing up. It can be hard to shed a skin when others already think they know who you are, hard to pivot from a self you’ve just sort of matured into as a child and sibling. For me, at least, college was the first time I couldn’t easily fall back on anything but me, and that was scary and awesome and critical and thrilling.

The University of Glasgow grounds:

Three days in, we rented a car to head to Durham, a hilly city in England’s North East that is home to Durham University which Jack had researched and felt very excited about. He does NOT like to sit in the front seat while I’m driving on the left side of the road and so decamped to the back with headphones and snacks. I loaded Spotify and settled in for what was not, as I had previously claimed in laissez faire fashion, a 90-minute drive but rather a 4-hour trek riddled with tiny “streets,” roundabouts from hell, and a shocking paucity of gas stations. As the sun sets around 4p in that part of the world right now and we’d moseyed over to the rental car place with leisure after a lengthy visit to U of G followed by a late lunch at Mrs. Falafel, we were in inky blackness fairly quickly. I hate to drive in the dark.

Even before crossing the Scotland-England border, I needed gas which was, as I mentioned, nowhere obvious to be found; upon Google-mapping “gas,” we were deposited at a diesel-only truck stop in Lockerbie. A teachable moment, I tell you. “Jack, look up the Lockerbie bombing…Libyans…PanAm plane crash…while I find another station.”

From the back seat, “Mom, what? Libyans and a bomb in Scotland?”

Anyway, he learned, we can now say we’ve been to Lockerbie and we did find gas, and in figuring out to both get the attendant to zero the machine and to then pay inside after pumping (can you even imagine anywhere with that trust in America?), I had a chat with the attendant and a customer who, after I told them where I was from and how lovely it was that they didn’t have random crazies with guns like we do, told me that in fact they do have random crazies with guns although many fewer and honestly the biggest issue there is major drugs but it is beautiful.

I love such interactions. Back on the road; headphones on Jack in the rear, Spotify and Taylor Swift up front for me. I will be honest in telling you that while I was a decade ago, Swifty-meh, I am now a full-blown fan. An ardent Swiftie, and proud. I find that her music can be experienced in various ways: superficial/easy listening fun; reminiscent “ooh, she gets break ups and young love;” and fuck, have I made the right decisions along the way of living?

A friend recently saw the Eras tour movie and raved about it for days; she and I admitted that we both cried during the film. Oliver and I took Mom and Dad to see it, and Mom is now as much a fan as I am. Another friend saw the movie and is now hellbent on seeing an Eras concert wherever she may need to go to do so, even though she has already seen 4 previous (non-Eras) shows. A dearest BF and I bought tickets to see Taylor play in Amsterdam next summer. None of us is younger than 47. What is going on? Why did at least two of us cry in a movie of a concert?

I think it’s option three in the “experiencing Taylor’s music” that I delineated above. I believe I speak for all of my sample set, most of us middle age and newly- or almost-empty nesters, when I say that in Taylor we see a woman of total power and agency. She is both relatable and not remotely relatable. She has experienced so much of what we have and she has experienced things we never will because of her talents, yes, but also because she has not settled in any way. She lives her life on her terms and with total independence. That hasn’t been pain free; she has earned everything. Our marriages and children and settled lives haven’t been pain free either, and I’m not suggesting that we have regrets. Our lives and hers are simply different. But for women, who constantly manage societal and familial expectations, who sacrifice both willingly and grudgingly, who still neither see nor often experience gender or economic parity, to listen to and watch a woman who is so thrillingly independent and successful use her voice and own her power and her femaleness, well, it tugs at something. Is she living something we could have? I’m not sure it even matters if we’d have wanted anything like her life. Probably, we wouldn’t. But it’s the thought exercise of another path and the stunning visual of a different outcome.

We made it to Durham, to an odd’ish guest house with, surprisingly it felt, an Indian restaurant in its basement. We were voracious and thrilled and immediately placed an order. If y’all are ever in the Durham area, do not miss the Cathedral. It is magnificent, worthy of its fame. Here are but a tiny sampling of the photos we took.

Durham Cathedral (1-5) and town (6). Jack took the spectacular picture of the vaulting in the central tower. It is not filtered.

Jack felt zero connection to the University and because he was so besotted with U of Glasgow, we decided to skip the rest of our England visits and instead return to St. Andrews and then again to Glasgow. This was very wise, not least because I had apparently been on another planet when mapping our trips and had, as with Glasgow to Durham, vastly underestimated the driving times in England. Three cheers for cancellable and easily changeable hotels, flights, cars, restaurants, everything.

On the way from Durham to St. Andrews, I drove us to Bamburgh Castle. If you are not a lunatic The Last Kingdom fan as am I, you would have perhaps been able to miss Bebbanburg without a second thought. Because I am as big an Uhtred fan as I am of Taylor, there was no chance I wasn’t hauling it to this Northumbrian coastal fortress where I could intone “Destiny Is All” while imaging hunky Viking guys with swords fighting to reclaim what was rightfully theirs.

Fenan, uhtred (so effing hot), Sihtric. Below: Bamburgh/bebbanburg

Taylor kept me company for the rest of the drive, to St. Andrews and then back to Glasgow. Through endless roundabouts and missed turns and past pastures full of sheep and views that took my breath away. Through tiny villages and bigger towns and by school kids and Christmas decorations being hung.

Scotland is a magical country. I think Jack will end up there for college and I think that’s fabulous. As we left, I felt that tugging again, the wish for more time, the wonder about the road not taken. He, and all my students whose next big step is to leave home and go to university, is on the cusp of something so big and transformative. I almost feel envious.

*Personally, I think the arm wrestle was better than my experience of being puked on from behind an hour before landing in Dublin two summers ago by a guy who had been WAY over-served. I’m not sure where the guy whose butt and penis we saw while sitting outside for dinner (also in Dublin). He was not aggressive, simply underpantless in a very public place. Having grown up in Louisiana, I was largely unfazed by either of these experiences.