Filling Time: TwinLife Empty-Nesting

All the World… and a Stage

May 27, 2026

Last Thursday I flew home from Walt Disney World. It was my 21st trip. My first trip to Disney was in 1988. My parents, my brother, and I took the sleeper train from the Northeast to Florida. At the time, there were only two parks open: Magic Kingdom and Epcot. Six years later, when I graduated from high school, my parents asked what kind of graduation trip I wanted to take. We weren’t a family that traveled much, but they wanted to do something special, and I said I wanted to go back to Disney World.

So we did.

A few years later, my Nana took the entire family, including my uncle and my boyfriend (now my husband) to a much improved Disney World. It was a dream come true for her, a girl who had grown up in poverty. Splashing the wave pool at Typhoon Lagoon made her smile like a child. In that moment, Disney stopped being just a vacation and became part of our family history.

When my Nana passed, my mom decided to honor her by becoming a Disney Vacation Club member. It was my mom’s dream to take her grandchildren someday, just as my Nana had taken us. When my children were born, Disney became part of their childhood. Our biennial trips were something bigger than rides and fireworks displays. They represented family, memories, and time together, and each trip we would toast “Nana” for starting a family tradition. As my twins reached high school graduation age, we all quietly acknowledged that 2023 was probably the “last big family trip.” Except it apparently wasn’t.

Because last week, I made my 21st trip, and my kids and mom were there alongside me.

After traversing the World Showcase at Epcot several times (10,000 steps NO PROBLEM!), laughing about duck incidents past and present, and spending time with my college kiddos riding rollercoasters and my mom at the bar, less than 24 hours after my plane landed, I was back in the car driving to Central PA for the fifth time in seven weeks. This time, though, it wasn’t because of a visit to my daughter’s college. It was to celebrate my high school choir director and the dedication of a stage in honor of her 21 years of teaching.

I went from 21 trips to Disney to celebrating 21 years on a stage that helped shape who I am today.
Stepping from one kind of history to another, I spent the weekend celebrating a teacher who had a huge impact on so many alumni – enough that nearly 100 of them showed up to perform in a reunion concert. As part of the planning committee, I had a full weekend: setting out the memorabilia, organizing the rehearsal, stepping into the role of stage manager, singing my featured number, and giving the dedication speech. It was over 48 straight hours of organizing people, solving problems, and keeping things moving, but I also spent the weekend talking to people I hadn’t seen in over 30 years, digging deep to find my extrovert self.

There’s something strangely wonderful about reconnecting with people from your past. You meet each other again as fully formed adults while simultaneously seeing flashes of the teenagers you once knew underneath. My time in Central PA made me think about what it meant to grow up in such a small rural school district and how our teacher cultivated our inner talent and helped us grow into pretty cool human beings.

All of the movement from Disney to stage meant that by the end of the weekend, I was exhausted.
I had walked all the world and landed on stage, and in doing so, I realized how much of my life is tied to place. Disney. That stage in my high school auditorium. My parents’ home. The small town where I ran the streets with my childhood friends. Each holds pieces of me. It was a lot of history to confront in a single week. And, of course, I know, All the World[‘s]… a Stage.
10,000 Steps

May 19, 2026

I go to the gym almost every morning. It’s a habit I got into during the pandemic. I was going before that, but not every day. When the world shut down, though, my gym immediately started offering classes on Zoom at 7:00 every morning. Every day, I would get up, go downstairs to my basement, hop onto Zoom, and do a workout class with my coaches in their own homes and all the people in their little square boxes. I even made a Brady Bunch-style Zoom song for my gym because it really did keep me going during a hard time.

Now, I’m just in the habit of going every day. Because of that habit — and because going gluten-free helped me kick my sugar habit — I honestly don’t think too much about what I eat on a daily basis. I generally have pretty good eating habits, but even when I don’t, I’ve always known that with a couple of days of dedication and motivation to stop eating junk, I could maintain my weight and general level of health that I wanted.
So even though my friends warned me, it’s been a little surprising to me as a middle-aged woman that it’s getting harder and harder to do that.

Recently, ChatGPT and I had a conversation about it, and it told me I probably wasn’t walking enough. And honestly, it’s right. I’m too sedentary. I spend most of my day sitting behind a computer screen. I work out daily, but outside of the gym, I’m just not moving enough. I’m stuck behind a computer for most of the day and too exhausted at night to do anything active.

So a little over a week ago, I set a goal for myself: an additional 10,000 steps a day.

I had a couple of rules. First, the steps had to be outside of the gym. I couldn’t count the exercise I was already doing. This had to be in addition to the gym. Second, I could only count steps when my phone was actually on me. If I wandered around the house without it, those steps didn’t count. I needed to physically see the number adding up on my phone, to intentionally move for a prolonged period of time.

And third, while my goal was to hit 10,000 extra steps every day, I also knew I didn’t need to become ridiculous about it. I didn’t need to pace next to my bed at night just to hit a number. The point was really to get myself out of my chair and be more active throughout the day.
So when I’m working from home, I force myself to take breaks and walk laps around the house. I figured out that one full loop is about 100 steps. Ten laps equals 1,000 steps, which makes for a pretty good break from sitting at my computer for hours.

I’ve also tried to fit in a 3,000–4,000 step walk around the neighborhood after I come home from the gym and before I start work for the day
These are just some of the ways I’ve been changing my routine, and for the last week or so, I’ve managed to get those additional 10,000 steps almost every day.

So now I’ve been filling some of my time with steps. Ironically, many of my steps bring movement back to my home, just as the pandemic did. The purpose comes with getting up and moving intentionally, a shift in routine that will move me forward.

Picture taken while getting some steps around my house
Non-Stop Laundry and Mother’s Day in Between

May 13, 2026

It’s event season at work, which means the university schedule is on overdrive and work days spill into nights. I’m used to it; it’s been my life as an educator. But I had set an intention about a month ago to take back some of my time that I have so freely given to my job. I recognize that by continuing to try to hold all of the pieces together myself, I was starting to break. I told my husband that I was committing to working only a 40-hour work week moving forward so that I could see what happened.

I lasted exactly one week. This past week, my days spilled into the evenings, and that time was filled mostly with heavy conversations about the future of higher education that aren’t theoretical anymore. My meetings were filled with hard questions. Real implications. Lingering thoughts that sat with me long after the conversations ended. My days working from home were punctuated by non-stop laundry as I worked diligently to remove the “dorm smell” from every piece of cloth that my son brought home.

In the middle of that, I planned and led a curriculum design workshop for colleagues. Workshops are one of those things that looks like just a few hours on the calendar on a single day, but they actually demand days of thinking, shaping, and revising. I care about that work, so I gave it what it needed, which is how the hours kept adding up.

At some point during the week, my husband said, “You really suck at working a 40-hour week.” He’s not wrong. I’ve been trying. But the work refuses to be contained.

On the other side of my world, Tuesday brought my son back to the house, and we spent the evening together. We started at the high school baseball game, where I half-watched the team and talked to the parents and half-wondered at the not-so-boy sitting on the bleachers. He was itching a little to be back on the diamond, but as he analyzed the game and talked to the fans, I knew he was too old to be there. He had grown a lot in a year.

We processed some of the growth together in conversation after the game, enjoying the hot tub under the stars. Reflecting on his time at college, he shared what worked, what didn’t, and what might come next. The time together felt like a pause in the craziness of the week; I was able to take it all in, bask in his presence, and just be a listening mom – not an intense educational designer.

And then, like that, the week came back into motion, and my son was off again. He was travelling with some college friends for a week of camaraderie and celebration, and I was left at home, figuring out how to fill time. It was a preview of what this next phase of life looks like.

By Friday I was exhausted, but I could not slow down. I started the morning completing book edits that I had received from my publisher two days before with the instructions to return them in a week. Then I hopped in the car to drive back to my daughter’s college (the fourth time in five weeks) to move her out for the semester. I helped her pack up a life that was just built months ago – just as I did with her brother the week before. We filled the car with bags and bins as we dismantled a space that held so much growth. At home I repeated the motions: unpack the car, sort the laundry, complete load after load, relish in her presence.

Mother’s Day happened somewhere in there. I celebrated with my own mom at dinner on Friday before the big move out, but I spent most of the day on Sunday with my daughter. Like I did with my son earlier in the week, we processed her year as we shared time together. And then she went outside to help my husband put together patio furniture.

I dropped to the couch for just a minute, gathering my strength to go help.

And I fell asleep.

Not intentionally. I was just… done.

It was a long week full of a range of emotion. I was tired in that full-body way that comes from performing too many roles at once, all of them meaningful, none of them optional.

By the end of the week, I realized we were crossing into something new. The edges of summer break showed what it would be like when both kids were not home at the same time, each growing into their adult lives on separate planes. The house is still in transition from the move-outs and the pieces haven’t settled fully into place, yet I can feel it in the rhythm of the week.

Time is changing again.
Taking the Long Way

May 6, 2026

I laughed out loud – literally – at the loaf of bread sitting on the hood of my car. It was so my mom. Almost as soon as I showed up (late) at the 6:15 PM meeting for the reunion concert at my high school, she asked me if I wanted to ride with her while she drove another committee member home afterward, a trip that would have taken over an hour. I was tired, and I was honest. “No. I worked all day, hopped in the car, and haven’t eaten dinner.” She nodded in understanding.

“I bought chicken salad” (my favorite local cuisine), “and I have a loaf of gluten free bread in the car. Get it before we leave.”

Moms never stop being moms.

Without going into all the details of why I didn’t get the bread from her car as directed, after a tour of the renovated auditorium where I had performed so many times as a teen, I walked to the parking lot and burst out laughing when I saw a loaf of bread tucked into the hood of my car.

This was the start to my extra long weekend that took me the LONG way to move my son out of his college dorm. My travels began with a trip to my daughter’s college, my third time in four weeks to see her dance. This performance was the big one, a mainstage on the biggest stage on campus. As a first year student, she could only be in one number, and I lucked out – her number was first.

I say I lucked out because my second stop of the weekend was to move my son out of his dorm the morning after my daughter’s performance. Since the schools are about 5 hours apart, I decided to drive about halfway after I watched my daughter dance, spend the night on hotel points I had accumulated over the past few years, and wake at a reasonable hour to finish the drive. With her scheduled to perform first in the show, it meant I could get to sleep an hour earlier.

As I sat in the back of the audience, waiting for the curtain, I thought about the fact that my kids had finished their first year of college. It didn’t seem possible. Where had the time gone? My mind wandered between the to-do list I was mentally building for moving my son and wonderings about how the house would change (again) as the kids came home for the summer.

And then she stepped on stage, and for a few minutes, I was fully there. She was beautiful, graceful, and perfectly anchored on stage – a stage where I had once performed (though not as a dancer). Watching her do the thing she loves, in the place that is now hers, helped ground me in that moment. And then the number ended, and I slipped out the back door. I walked across the parking lot, texting her to tell her she had looked beautiful on stage, and yet I was already thinking about the next stop on my weekend trip.

The hotel where I planned to stay for the night was about three hours away, and since I was going to arrive late, I checked in on the hotel app. By the tine I arrived, my mobile key was in hand, and for the first time ever, I bypassed the front desk and went straight to the room that I was assigned in the app. When I opened the door, I realized pretty quickly something was off.

Two bedrooms. A full living room. A kitchen with a dishwasher, stove, and full fridge. It was way more than I needed for a 7-hour rest. I double checked my reservation, confirmed I hadn’t made a mistake in booking, and started to wander the space. I turned off one, then two TVs, and placed my bag in one of the bedrooms. As I picked up the remote in the second bedroom to turn off that TV, I glanced at the welcome message and startled at the screen that announced someone else’s name. I wondered if I was actually in the wrong room and if “John” would be entering sometime while I slept.

I grabbed my phone and ID and headed down to the lobby. It turns out I had been given a complimentary upgrade (they had run out of rooms), and that maintenance had probably moved a cable box from one room to another. The hotel clerk assured me that nobody else would be accessing the room, and I slogged back to go to bed.

It was strange, all that space, so I claimed one bedroom as a dressing room and the other for sleep. The next morning, I drove the rest of the way to my son’s campus, where I helped him pack up his room. As we filled bins and bags, I pushed back feelings about the process. Each item was physical evidence of a year that somehow both just started and is already over. My son said, almost offhandedly and with his sarcastic tone, “It seems like only eight months ago we were doing this.”

He was right. It did.

And it didn’t.

Because I remembered very clearly moving him in. Yet at the same time, I had no idea how we got from that moment to this one so quickly.

I spent about 24 hours with him. Not long, but enough. Enough to pack, to talk about the year gone by, and to prepare for the next step to come. He had to stay on campus for a final exam, and so my husband, who had been on a business trip and unable to make the first leg of my trip, had driven a second car to meet us for this moving out moment. We left that car for my son, and it was another small shift. It would be the first time he drove the distance from school to home, all alone, a (not so) fully grown adult doing yet another adult thing that was both completely normal and slightly disorienting.
My husband and I drove a fully packed SUV back to our home and unloaded all the bags and bins and remnants of a year gone by into our front hall. He said, almost offhandedly and with his sarcastic tone, “Thanks for bringing me all my son’s dirty clothes.”

I responded, “Yeah, somehow we brought home an SUV worth of stuff, AND we lost a car and still don’t have our kid.”

A loop in time and distance complete, I wondered what the summer would bring.
The Backyard Pool

April 28, 2026

I spent most of my childhood living in a house under some version of construction. My parents purchased a 150-year-old farmhouse when I was a toddler, and they spent the next couple of decades bringing it back to life. They did it with their own minds and hands in segments as time and money permitted over the years. What started with creating livable quarters (bedrooms, bathroom, kitchen, family room) turned to modern improvements to the property itself. They closed in the old summer kitchen and porch to extend the useful space; they built a swingset and fort for their growing kids; they added a garage.

In my pre-teen years, they made the decision to put in a pool. I’m not 100% sure why they chose that particular improvement, but I do know the impact it had on me. It became a place where my middle and high school friends and I gathered, where my college boyfriend and I played during visits on summer break, where extended family came together for reunions, and eventually, where my children splashed happily and learned to dive.

I knew that the pool helped to create community, and over the years, my husband and I tossed around the idea of taking on pool construction for our own house. Having observed how little we enjoyed the physical and mental labor of house renovations and yardwork over the years, my dad sagely advised us: “Don’t get a pool. You don’t want to take care of it.”

His logic stuck. Our disinterest in (or perhaps our inability to) putting in enormous effort beyond our jobs and our kids is the reason we never got a dog, though we both had them growing up. It’s why pets will not fill our time as empty-nesters. It’s why we don’t have a flower garden or vegetable garden or any other high-maintenance project that requires ongoing care. All of it takes time and effort that we have not had to give over the years of TwinLife.

So we decided not to do a pool when the kids were young. We were content to play on the backyard swingset and take small hikes through the woods. But then six years ago, a microburst flattened an entire section of our woods, taking out nearly all of the trees in the yard too. The backyard behind our deck had been completely destroyed, though we were lucky no damage was done to the house.

As I stood at what had been the border of the yard and the woods, looking through the ruins to the horizon beyond (not something that had ever been visible before), I wondered, “What can we do with this?” My mind wandered beyond the cleanup to the possibility of an outdoor fireplace or pergola. I mentally scrolled quickly past “a pool,” knowing my husband agreed with my dad that we didn’t want to take care of it.

Eventually, my husband wandered down to look at the aftermath with me, and we turned together from the fallen woods to the backyard. I verbalized my question.
“What can we do with this?”

Without a beat he responded, “Let’s put in a pool.”

And just like that, we made the decision to do the thing we had been warned not to do. My kids were about the same age I was when my own parents had opened their pool. I knew they would love it. (They did. Of course they did.) I knew they would gather with friends many times over the years. (They did.) I knew it would be a place where our family could gather and play. (It has been.) And I knew if we added a hot tub, I’d spend more time in the water.

Last week, I opened the season in the hot tub, listening to an audiobook and watching the sun set. My husband eventually joined me, and before we knew it, my daughter was on FaceTime, hanging out with us. The thing we had once said we wouldn’t do now sits at the core of time filled together.
Time Is a Strange Thing

April 21, 2026

Time is a strange thing.

My husband and I started the week watching Dark, which is about more than just time travel. It’s about how time can be on a loop and how what is meant to happen happens, regardless of how you might try to change the past.

Later in the week I travelled (again) to my daughter’s dance performance. We had lunch and wandered the quad, abloom with the cherry blossoms that made every spring at my alma mater magical. In that moment, I wandered the campus with knowledge; she owned it.

That night I was able to see her do hip hop for the first time in a while. Watching her, I was aware of the versions of her I’d seen before, layered into the dancer in front of me at that moment – she was the same and somehow so much different, more mature.

While I was there, I met with one of the first professors I had in college. Thirty years ago I sat in his lecture hall, and on Friday, I shared a coffee with him. I did my first mini-research study in the social sciences in his small group breakout back then. Now, we chatted about the state of higher education and commiserated about being faculty members at liberal arts colleges. Sitting with him,I viscerally recalled being his student, and in some ways, no time had passed. And at the same time, everything had changed. We had become colleagues – sharing our expertise, pushing each other’s thinking, swearing (literally) at the state of the world.

Past and present sat right there together.

Over the weekend my husband and I watched Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning, which takes you back through nearly 35 years of the series with flashes and flashbacks. As I wondered at how Tom Cruise never seems to age, I realized that my husband and I have been together through almost the entirety of that movie franchise. Which is a long time.

We ended the weekend bowling with friends we haven’t seen in a very long time. We’ve known them since our younger years, before kids. It felt familiar, but also somehow different. It was like stepping back into something that had been waiting for us but that fit in a new way. We laughed. We ate. We shared stories. And we made plans for how we might fill time together moving forward.

After bowling and dinner, we headed back to relax in front of the TV – this time in our separate domains, watching our individual guilty pleasures. I chatted with my kids about our weekend, and they wondered which aliens had replaced their anti-social parents who had suddenly had three social outings in ten days. Scrolling through the DVR while we talked, I saw that The Way Home had started its new season. A fitting end to the week, I turned it on, watching a show about time travel that underscored my feelings that time was both strange and inevitable.

In just two weeks, my kids will be coming home after finishing their first year of college. I don’t know where the time went. I’m not sure how I filled it (though I have many weeks of blogs to remind me). I’m beginning to realize that time is both moving forward and looking back. It’s looping and collapsing. It’s returning me to people and places and versions of myself that I thought were in the past.

Time is, indeed, a strange thing.
Working through the Hard

April 14, 2026

Last week, I traveled to my daughter’s college to watch her dance, which is always amazing. While I was in town, I met up with my high school choir director and a friend to practice a song we’ll be singing in an upcoming alumni pops concert.

While I was visiting with my former teacher, she told me she always loves reading my blog. She said she appreciates that I write about what’s real and that I don’t try to gloss over everything; I’m honest about how hard it can be.

And, dang, it’s hard.

It’s hard to work full time outside the home in a job with a lot of inherent stress. It’s hard to navigate being a mom. It’s hard being with the same person for over 30 years. It’s all hard. And sometimes all that hard just makes you tired.

I’ve been tired a lot lately.

If I write about the “real” of last week, I get to share the joy in seeing my daughter dance, in singing show tunes, in meeting up with an old friend to watch a college baseball game in the sun. But I also need to share that by the time I got home Saturday evening, all I wanted to do was lie in bed, and that feeling didn’t change when I woke up Sunday morning. I was lethargic and unmotivated and sad, mostly because of work stuff, but also just everything.

Finally, as I lay on the couch Sunday morning with the sun streaming through the windows, I said to myself: You need to get up and do something.

So I did.

I thought that my husband and I should work on our FillingTime relationship by actually finding things to do together, so I decided we should go biking. I’m not sure the two of us had been on bikes together since our children initially learned to ride. In fact, neither of our bikes was actually rideable (needing some major TLC), so after I convinced my husband this was a good idea, we hauled out the kids’ bikes, cleaned them off, pumped up the tires, and set off on a Sunday adventure.

We entered a local rail-trail around noon, along with a gaggle of hikers and bikers who also felt the need to get outside on one of the first beautiful Sundays of spring. We quickly realized that our normal workout routines did not prepare us for biking. It was work! By the time we biked to the next town and back (about 10 miles total), my legs were screaming, my abs were twitching, and my butt hurt.

But I was out of bed and off the couch. I had worked through the hard, and I didn’t want to go home. So I suggested that we hit the local cider mill on the way back to the house. We hadn’t been there in a long time, and it was the perfect, sunny day to join everyone in a 20 mile radius who was thinking that cider would be the perfect afternoon drink.

After ordering our drinks, we found a single picnic table in the sun where there was room to sit. My husband asked the couple who had occupied it if we could join them, and we sat down on the opposite end and started chatting. We talked about work and the kids and where/when we want to retire.

Then I noticed someone sitting on a picnic blanket wearing a shirt from my son’s college, so I wandered over to ask if he was an alum. While I was talking to him, my husband made friends with the couple sitting at the other end of our table. We talked with them about their relationship, and she asked me for advice. I shared my thoughts with her, and she smiled – a brilliant smile. I joked that I wanted to be invited to the wedding.

Shortly thereafter, a very precocious six year old became my husband’s new best friend, and her mom and I chatted about being moms – and how hard it is. She asked me for some advice, and I shared my thoughts with her. She thanked me with tears in her eyes as the family packed up their blanket to head home for the day.

We stayed at the cider mill for hours, engaging with strangers in authentic conversation. I didn’t seek out these conversations to change lives; I just started talking to people, and what started out as a day of lethargy became a really lovely day of local color, one where I was able to connect with others.

Dang, it’s hard.

And sometimes the way through isn’t big or dramatic. It’s just getting out of bed, touching grass, and opening up, just a little, to whatever might come of it. It’s about letting your inner light out to shine a bit for others so that they can shine back to fuel you.
The Line between Past and Present

April 8, 2026

Last week I straddled the line between past and present in a way I wasn’t expecting.

I started the week by attending the local high school’s baseball season home opener. The date had been on my radar for a while. I still follow the team’s social media, but even more than that, the change in season from winter to spring always marked a change in our family’s routine. My daughter had many performances that filled our weekends, but weekdays revolved around baseball. My husband and I spent many afternoons and evenings on the sidelines – usually freezing — cheering on our son and his teammates.

As February turned to March, my body knew that baseball season was coming. I also started to get more questions from the head of the baseball boosters about what we had done last year, so I was keyed into when tryouts were happening and when the season kicked off. When I saw that the weather for the day of this year’s home opener was going to be relatively moderate, I figured I’d attend. I wanted to cheer on the boys that I had gotten to know last year, sit alongside the parents who had become a baseball family during our Cinderella season, and, perhaps more than anything, fill the hole in my heart that was left after an abrupt end to 13 years of being a baseball mom.

It was a different experience sitting on the sideline as a fan without the pressure of having my son on the mound, playing short stop, or up to bat in a big moment. It was a little like how my mom explains grandparenting – all of the joy without any of the responsibility. All the hellos from parents on the sidelines made me smile, and watching the players I knew filled my heart (a little). I did not get to see them win in a walk off, however, because I had another past-related thing to do.

With my kids going to college and my work responsibilities becoming more complex, I had to step back from some of the volunteer work I have been doing for quite some time. One of those roles involved managing the digital aspects of a major fundraising event, including email correspondence, file sharing, and website updates. Because I had organized and/or created most of the systems related to these tasks, I needed to train my replacements. So after I stepped back in time at the baseball game to touch grass in my past, I stepped forward just a bit by shedding some of my past volunteer role by training people to take over my jobs.

It was an odd combination that made me realize I was straddling a line between past, present – and future. And, quite frankly, it made me ready for some forward movement.

Over Easter weekend, I spent time cleaning outside – wiping down deck furniture, picking up garbage that had made its way into our woods during a windstorm, and generally getting things ready for the kids to come home at the end of the semester. I texted my son to ask if we could throw away his old swing trainer. I sent a message to both of them asking who had left their lunch in the woods (super gross discovery, btw). As I cleaned, I thought about the fact that I was preparing for what might be the last summer I have everyone in the house for an extended time.

At this point in the story, you would think that my outdoor cleanse would be a metaphor for cleansing my past while I discover who I am in this year of FillingTime. Perhaps that was my intent for deciding to spend my Saturday scrubbing, sweeping, and making a welcoming space for my kids.
Clearly, it wasn’t. Because when Monday came around again with another home baseball game on the schedule…

Well, I decided to drop by to see how the team was doing. It wasn’t in my plan, so I wasn’t prepared to face the cold and wind that typically whips by the field, but I figured that I had nothing waiting for me at home, so I’d stop for an inning or two.

The game was close, and unlike the game the week before, I felt myself getting truly invested in the outcome. I was nervous for the pitchers. My heart raced when the bases were loaded. I cheered loudly when one boy battled to a full count walk. I was in it, despite my frozen toes, and I high-fived my parent-friends when we won in a walk-off.

I was fully living, just a little bit, in that past that I still haven’t fully let go.

I felt something similar when I took my daughter to the high school musical while she was home over spring break. As we drove to the school, I asked her if it felt weird. She said it didn’t, but it did to me. I said to her, “There is something missing, and I’m just not sure what it is.” In hindsight, I think what was missing was watching my kids do their thing in a place that had become a second home to all of us.

Just as I felt watching the kids I knew perform on the stage few weeks ago, I was happy for the boys on the baseball field this past week. I was present, fully present, in the now. But there was a part of me still living in a year ago, when it was my kids. I felt it viscerally, as if I was straddling a line between past and present, a delicate balance as I prepare to jump into my future.

Every year I move on with the change of seasons. And yet this year I still live, just a little, in the past as this spring begins.
Let’s Drive

April 1, 2026

I started driving a tractor when I was old enough to sit on my dad’s or grandfather’s lap and take the steering wheel. This skill came in handy when I was older and my dad “let” me mow our backyard – at least the easy, flat part of it. Perhaps because I proved myself capable of driving in a rectangle, my dad put me behind the wheel of his MG when I was 14. Our country road was the perfect place to teach me how to drive a real car (even before the legal age), and learning to drive a stick shift on that particular car meant I would be able to drive pretty much any vehicle I encountered (#iykyk). Maybe this is why I wasn’t overly concerned when I hopped on an 8-passenger plane on a flight home from a wedding in Maine, and the pilot told me I would be the designated co-pilot. I mean, I could start the MG on a hill without stalling. How hard could it be to land a plane?

My dad restored my mom’s 1962 Corvair for my 16th birthday. It had been waiting for some TLC, and in order to give what Ralph Nader called a “death trap” to his little girl, he fixed every safety issue called out in Unsafe at Any Speed. By the time he restored that car, he had plenty of practice keeping our family “fleet” alive. My parents often owned at least five cars, two of which would actually start on any given day. With two people working outside the home, the game of roulette was not always fun, but my dad learned a lot about engines over the years. By the time I got my license, we had cars that worked until they didn’t (the MG was notorious for this), cars that sat waiting for their day to come again (the 1964 Chevy is still a flower pot on my parents’ farm), and even a car that would only drive in reverse. My parents often inherited my Grandpa Joe’s vehicles at the end of their useful life – and yet they somehow squeezed a few more years out of them.

So I learned to drive on a 1972 MG; I spent my high school days behind the wheel of a 1962 Corvair; and I got a 1975 CJ5 Jeep (also restored by my dad) for my high school graduation. Despite the fact that the maintenance keeping these cars on the road for me to drive happened in our driveway or our garage for my entire life, I never learned how to change the oil or even a tire. When I turned 16, my parents handed me a AAA card and said to call someone else if I ran into trouble, not to try to fix it myself on the side of the road.

Given that both of “my” cars did not have fuel gauges that worked, and I wasn’t great about doing the math that told me when I needed to fill up, I did end up stranded a few times when I was a teen. My dad always saved me. It wasn’t until I was an adult and on my own that I needed to use that AAA card, and every time I’ve done so has been related to a tire problem.

My husband and I also have a fleet of cars. With the kids off at school, we have to rotate which car we drive so that none of them sit for too long, especially in the winter. Ironically, since we’ve been empty nesters, we have had more tire issues than in the last decade combined. We blew out a tire as we drove into town for my son’s family weekend in the fall. AAA to the rescue! Not too long after that, my husband lost one on his way to work. Then, when my daughter was home for spring break, she called to say that her indicator light was on and there was a huge screw in her tire. Run flat tires to the rescue!

I figured dealing with three different cars with three different tire issues in less than four months meant that we were in the clear for a while. Even so, as I got in the car to drive to see my son last week, I wondered whether I should check the tire pressure. I was leaving home, headed south to an appointment before I planned to get on the highway for a 5.5 hour ride. I didn’t get an indicator light, so I didn’t check.

And then…

As I got into the car after my appointment, I saw the dreaded yellow tire pressure light. I groaned and started planning my what-to-dos. The pressure was about 10 below the other tires, but I didn’t see a nail or anything in the tire, and it was still in drivable range – so I gambled. I headed toward the turnpike, hoping the nearest rest area was not too far away. I figured if all went south, at least I had my AAA card!

I made it to the rest stop, where I was pleasantly surprised to find free air! The tire and I had a nice talk about how it needed to keep itself inflated for the next 375 miles — and back again – and it listened.

Last week I spent 11 hours in the car, listening to podcasts and books and generally vegging in my own mind, as I travelled between my son’s school and my home. I also spent time visiting my son, wandering the campus, and listening to presentations by upper-level administrators about the future of the school and the opportunities available to students. The trip filled my heart – so much so that I almost forgot that it started with a tire-pressure warning. The drive was absolutely worth the time.

Me, as an adult, in the MG, which my dad restored (surprise!), and sitting on the lawn I used to mow.
I don’t like to read. But I did.

March 25, 2026

Ironically, I’m an English teacher who hates to read. Also ironically, I’m a published author that doesn’t love to write.

So much to say here about what may or may not fill my time in the future, but I want to focus on the reading this week since that’s how I filled my time – kind of.

This semester, I’ve been professionally developing as I step back into teaching adolescents. Though I’m not in a high school setting, the teens and early twenty-somethings I’m working with this semester are a different generation than the ones I taught in the early 2000s as an English and social studies teacher, the NYC students I visited and interviewed in the in-between-generations that had a smartphone for the first time, and the 8th graders I taught during my sabbatical in the 2010s. With my professional hat I can say that reading and writing have changed a lot since I personally learned how to do both, and I’m constantly thinking about me as a high school and college student – who literally hated to read and figured out the formula for how to write – and how I may or may not have survived formal education in our current era.

My basic philosophy is that in order to improve yourself, you need to read and write. But what that means to me is probably not what it means to you (reader).

Reading and writing has changed, even though school doesn’t (at large) accept it. Take this conversation I had with a student last week as evidence. We were discussing his final project in the course, which would bring together personal narrative, library research, interviews, and his ideas for how to chart a path forward. We were working on the personal narrative, and I asked him to create a “life map” and talk me through what he created.

He had sketched out some images and added some words, just as I had suggested he do for this brainstorm session. As he talked, I started to imagine his sketches and words as a combined product, rather than a traditional narrative essay, and I invited him to create it. I suggested an art form or even a comic book form, to which he responded, “Really? I can do that? That would be so much easier for me!”

And why shouldn’t he be able to express his ideas in a form that works for him, especially in an era where most of what we consume (i.e., “read”) is based in image, video, and short snippets? All this to say that my approach as a teacher this semester is to count everything, and moments like the one I had with this student affirm that stance.

At the same time, I’m definitely still learning. In fact, I am always learning. I’m not the expert in the room, but I am a lead learner, so despite the fact I don’t like to read, I know that I learn from other perspectives. As I try to model learning for my students, I decided I needed to do what I was asking them to do.

The second portion of their project was to “read” at least five sources in order to ask “big questions” that might fuel their future inquiries. We spent a class session roaming the stacks in the library – mostly because one of my students did not know that the library existed (yes, you read that correctly). I asked them to find a book that looked interesting and to read it – perhaps abandon it if warranted.

And now back to how I filled some time last week – especially because this blog is not supposed to be about my work life. After work hours that same day that my students explored the library stacks, I attended a panel presentation titled Pioneers in Dance: Celebrating Black Women Who Have Made History. This is exactly the kind of event I would have been interested in attending before my life of FillingTime – and that I would not have done because I would have been on a baseball field, at a dance recital, or otherwise attending to my kiddos’ lives. With nothing but time to fill after work last week, however, I decided I could finally just say “yes.”

And I am glad I did. The panelists included the first African American Rockette, as well as one of the founding Black ballerinas of the Dance Theater of Harlem. Their stories about discrimination, the devaluing of Black bodies, and breaking color barriers were new to me, and as I thought about my own dancer now off at college continuing to dance, a girl who had access to a school that allowed her to dance every year on the Alvin Ailey stage, I began to wonder about access to the arts for every child, especially those who do not grow up in a community where access is easy.

At the panel I learned that the Swans were a group of five women who are reclaiming the historical narrative of Black ballerinas, one that was complicated not that long ago when Misty Copeland became the first African American woman to become principal dancer at the American Ballet Theater. Lost in the celebration of breaking the 75 -year history of ABT was the fact that she was not actually the first Black female principal dancer of a dance company.

The Swans’ story is now a book, which I bought at the event I attended and then spent some time reading over the weekend. I’m reading the book in print – something I haven’t done in quite a while – to engage my brain differently and to, perhaps, mirror the discomfort my students might feel while they walk the stacks in a library they didn’t know existed on campus.

I “read” a lot. I’ve been in book clubs in the past, mostly for social/political conversation. But to participate, I almost always listened to the assigned books. In fact, nowadays I almost always listen. It’s doable on my commute (to fill the time), and it’s easier on my middle-aged eyes when I’m at home. I can also multitask, engaging my brain in a book while I cook, clean, or organize my always quiet house. This weekend, I listened to two fluff books. And I started reading a print book that I bought at an event. I read – in multiple modes and for multiple purposes – to fill time. But also to learn and to grow, which is a pretty good way to spend time.

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