Dispatch from The Wild Middle: On and On
A Memorial Day weekend dispatch about campaign work, teen girls, a fire down the street, old grief, new rhythms, tacos, and the ordinary life that keeps going whether we understand it yet or not.
I wrote for almost six hours yesterday morning while the air was still cool.
Before the sun got hot.
Before the day started asking things of me.
The words were already there, moving around in my head like they had somewhere to be and I was the unpaid intern responsible for getting them there.
I have probably written thirty-five hours over this holiday weekend between work and Substack and whatever strange compulsion keeps handing me sentences before I have had coffee.
That is the thing about people like me.
The work starts before the day does.
Bodhi woke me at six on Memorial Day morning, which was generous compared to Saturday, when he woke me at 5:15 because he needed outside, then again at 5:45 because apparently dawn is a group project and I had been elected chair.
I started the morning the way I start most mornings lately, with “On and On” by Fanny Grace playing somewhere in the background while I tried to catch up to my own brain.
That title feels right.
On and on.
Life does not pause so you can understand it.
It just keeps arriving. Rude, honestly.
Memorial Day always feels strange to me.
Part barbecue. Part grief ritual. Part American contradiction.
People post pool photos and paper plates full of food, while somebody else is standing in a cemetery trying to figure out how to keep breathing without someone they loved.
Both things are true.
Some of us are resting because somebody else carried something heavy once.
Some of us are carrying heavy things now.
Friday was campaign math and human infrastructure.
I met the finance intern on one campaign, young and sharp and already closer to the real machinery than most people ever see. There were meetings all day. One with an old boss and a good union brother driving through town, which felt less like work and more like being remembered by people who knew earlier versions of me.
There were plans to finish, scripts to write, turf to cut.
By 11:15 Friday night, I realized I had forgotten dinner again and was standing in the kitchen eating my second bowl of soup for the day like that was somehow a complete nutritional strategy.
Not sorry.
But also, damn.
There is a particular kind of midlife woman who can move political strategy, write campaign copy, co-manage a household, text five people back, and still forget she is technically a mammal who requires food.
I am her.
Send broth.
Saturday was full in a different way.
I launched a canvass. Finished communications plans and posts for two campaigns. Kept moving pieces around because that is what the work requires.
Inside the house, life was doing what life does.
Teen girls were teen girling.
Adults were adulting with mixed results.
The animals continued their campaign for collective bargaining rights around food, doors, and my sleep schedule. Their organizing model is strong.
This house is not a traditional anything.
It is me and L., best friends trying to build a life under one roof with kids and dogs and cats and unfinished rooms and competing nervous systems.
Kate and Allie meets The West Wing meets The Golden Girls.
Except everyone has trauma, campaign deadlines, and at least one basket of laundry that has legally established residency.
We are still learning each other in real time.
Not the easy stuff. The real stuff.
What happens when people are tired. How we talk to each other when feelings get sharp around the edges. What the girls will remember about the way we handled these years together.
Some of that came to a head Saturday night.
Not in a dramatic movie-scene way.
In a real house way.
The kind where people are tired and tender and trying to say true things without burning the whole place down.
Which, as it turns out, was a terrible metaphor to be carrying around that night.
Because earlier that evening, there was an actual fire down the street.
Awful. Truly awful.
Our elderly neighbors likely lost everything.
Everything.
And then the street moved.
L. brought Ms. E a pair of shoes.
She brought a chair.
One of our neighbors, a union member, ran into the smoke when we could not find her.
People came out of their houses without needing instructions. No meeting. No agenda. No one stopped to build a theory of change. A terrible thing was happening in real time, and a street full of people decided they were not going to stand there empty-handed.
That is the thing about solidarity.
Most people think solidarity lives in speeches.
But that night it looked like L., carrying a pair of shoes across the street for an elderly woman who had escaped her house barefoot.
It looked like a chair pulled into the yard so Ms. E could sit.
It looked like our neighbor running into smoke because someone might still be inside.
There is something there.
Some things hold during the emergency and fall apart later.
People too, probably.
The smoke stayed in the air for hours.
And still, the rest of life kept going, because life is deeply inconsiderate that way.
The dogs needed out. The kitchen needed tending. Campaign work sat open. Teenagers still had feelings. Adults still had feelings. The basement waited downstairs like a raccoon with a mortgage.
There is always a basement.
I had wanted L. to go with me to choose plants, but that did not happen. Sometimes the sweet little version of the day you imagined gets interrupted by the actual life you are living.
So I went anyway.
Because gardens are future tense.
Nobody plants things because they believe nothing will grow.
Also, sometimes a woman needs to buy plants so she does not commit a misdemeanor in a Target parking lot.
Both things can be true.
There is something new in my life now.
I still struggle to define it.
Maybe that is the point.
It is delightful and scary and healing and terrifying, and I do not know what this is yet.
Maybe grief changes the way you approach tenderness.
Not smaller.
Just slower.
More aware of how quickly a life can split itself into before and after.
So I move carefully.
Not gracefully.
Let’s not get carried away.
But carefully.
And still, something in me is waking up anyway.
Sunday brought old friends.
There is a particular relief in being around people who knew you before this version of your life existed. People who do not need the backstory explained every five minutes because they helped carry parts of it.
By Monday evening, neighborhood kids were back in the pool with Sophie like children understand something adults forget all the time:
joy does not wait for perfect conditions.
And now it is Tuesday morning.
The house is tired in that specific way houses get tired after a three-day weekend.
Wet towels. Half-finished drinks. Dogs passed out in strange positions. Campaign notes still open on the table. Laundry in various stages of surrender.
This morning the girls went back to school for a day and a half, before summer starts, which is objectively ridiculous and exactly the kind of administrative decision that makes me believe nobody making these calendars has spent meaningful time around fifteen-year-old girls in May.
They turn fifteen this week.
Fifteen.
Which feels impossible and obvious at the same time.
Maybe that is true about most of life lately.
The days are long.
The years are feral.
And everything keeps going on and on.
We Build Anyway.
jess