Overbuilding

I’m working on building a screen house for some folks, and it occurred to me, not for the first time, that I am an overbuilder. Where most folks would use 3/8 sheathing, I use 1/2 inch. When 2×6 joists would be adequate, I spec 2×8. I hate it when structures have bounce in them.

Things used to be built to last for an indefinite amount of time. I think they still should be.

“When we build, let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for present delight nor present use alone. Let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for; and let us think, as we lay stone on stone, that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say, as they look upon the labor and wrought substance of them, ‘See! This our father did for us.‘ ” – John Ruskin (1819-1900)

As one in love with the world

The writer (and personal hero of mine) Will Campbell told a story in his memoir, Brother to a Dragonfly, about a time as a child in Jim Crow Mississippi when he and a bunch of (white) friends are playing and a black child walks down the road.

Campbell and his friends begin chanting slurs at the boy, using the N-word. His grandfather, hardly a bastion of egalitarianism, calls the boys out for it, and told them that N-words don’t exist anymore. In other words, we don’t call people that now.

Campbell would recall this story in middle age as formative for him, one of half a dozen experiences in his life that shaped him forever around race. And yet, he says, it had virtually no impact on anyone else who was there. He wonders why it stood out so clearly to him as instructive, while others who were there don’t even remember it happened.

I feel a bit like that these days as I, a teenager in the 1980s who watched countless cautionary tales about machines that revolt and kill us, watch my peers embrace machines that even their creators think will revolt and kill us.

Sarah Conner would be ashamed of us.

In his essay “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine,” Wendell Berry delivers a response to his critics who came out when he mentioned, in his legendary piece Why I’m Not Going to Buy a Computer, that his wife types his manuscripts.

Both pieces are brilliant – Berry at his best. And while parts are dated, as any conversation about technology and culture must be, his critique of technology and the roles we assign it are biting.

My wish simply is to live my life as fully as I can. In both our work and our leisure, I think, we should be so employed. And in our time this means that we must save ourselves from the products that we are asked to buy in order, ultimately, to replace ourselves. – Wendell Berry

As I write this, the sun is rising, and since my desk faces east, the light through the east facing window in my office increases bit by bit. To my left, outside the north facing window, the call of the myriad birds that nest in the oak tree make a pleasant harmony, and my cat Puss scratches at the door to remind me that her food bowl has been empty for approximately 23 seconds and she is in danger of starvation. I live 1/2 mile from the interstate, and when the birdsong pauses, I can hear the hum of the semi-trucks, carrying their cargo to markets hither and yon.

As I embrace all of these senses and sounds, all I can do is feel joy that I am alive to experience them, and to know that there is no way I can write anything at this moment not influenced by all of it, even if I do not mention them. After High School, you no longer have to show your work.

Like Berry says in the first essay, I do not want to write faster. I do not want to write easier.

I want to write better. I want my writing to be more tender. I want it to reach deeper into the human heart. I want my writing to be more human, to invoke more compassion for the natural world, and to evoke a sense of empathy for other humans who need help to thrive.

AI cannot do that for me, because AI has never buried a parent, never feared for their life or the life of someone they love, never doubted, never hoped, never watched a sunrise over the water, never heard the call of the mockingbird, never walked in the woods, never felt relief when a check arrived, never eaten a piece of blackberry cobbler.

AI, in other words, knows jack shit about anything real. Your AI agent can quote a poem about love, it can even “write” one, if by write we mean rearrange words until it looks like what it believes a poem about love should look like, based on the millions of poems it has stolen from the creators of those poems. But no emotion will have gone into it, no judgement, no sense of self. No AI agent has ever cried as words appeared on a screen. No AI agent is enraptured by the hum of the data center in which it resides, moved to tears at the thought of the water table it is destroying with its existence.

Any reader familiar with my blogging will know that I have spent the last quarter century constantly struggling to figure out what I am actually doing. Am I a nature writer? A self-help writer? A spiritual writer?

The rise of AI, and the rush of my peers to slurp at its teat, has shown me that I am, first and foremost a human writer.

I write about and for humans, as one who is in love with humanity and the world in which we live.

Site Changes

It’s been a busy morning.

In keeping with the rebrand I mentioned last week, the blog has now moved to a new url – smallofferings.com. Unless you are reading this via RSS or on Mastodon, it should be seamless for you. If you are reading on RSS, the new feeds are here. It’s being syndicated to Mastodon at this account.

I did a light redesign, with a whimsical logotype and using red highlights. I’m not sure I like it – we’ll see. I still have some rough edges to knock off around the corners.

There is a new About page, that tries to explain what’s going on here.

If you are reading this via email, you are currently on the Essays plan, which means you will get the longer essay type posts when they publish – likely 1 or 2 emails a week. In other words, the way it has been.

But I am now going to begin sharing links and short notes to this site as well, and I don’t want you to get 15 emails a week. If you would rather a weekly email with everything I post in it, you can go to the footer of this email, click on manage your subscription, and then click Digest, instead of Essays.

I think that’s it – pardon the dust during these renovations, and we now resume regular programming.

PS: Wanna see something cool? Here is a short video of the pollinators playing on the 12 foot tall Swamp Sunflowers in my front yard.

Here. I made this for you.

The way I was told the story, there was a pastor who had finally gotten to go on a long, well-deserved vacation, and while he was gone, a young preacher just graduated from the seminary filled in.

When the regular preacher got back, he asked his head deacon how it went.

“Oh, he was decent,” the head deacon said. “But I think every great preacher has one sermon they preach over and over, and he just hasn’t found his yet.”

Recently, I have been spending a lot of time thinking about what I’m trying to do with my writing. What my one sermon is, if you will.  And I think, if I have to nail it down, I’m just trying to make a case for a better world.

I have a newsletter that has gone out each week for almost 12 years, and it has a pretty tight purpose: It’s about how to survive in a harsh and brutal world.

I wrote a book about food, love, and memory.

I write sermons each week about how we build a better world than the one we have now.

I have a podcast where I tell stories that tend toward hope.

And then there is this blog. I have struggled with what goes here. It tends to be a mishmash of things. The leftovers, if you will. Things that don’t easily fit anywhere else. But mostly, they are small personal essays that trend toward the same pattern: Here is an alternative to this current world.  It doesn’t have to be like this.

The essays are descriptive, not prescriptive. “This is what I did”, not, “This is what you should do”.

All of this makes me a very bad internet writer. It also makes me a horrible spiritual teacher. Because the world is desperate for people who tell them what to do.

Not just what to do, though. What to think. How to think.

In the before times, the marketer Hugh Macleod told us that the market for something to believe in is infinite. And it’s true.

But I am not interested in telling you what to do, or believe, or what to think.

I don’t want to tell you how to schedule your day so that you can drink a cup of coffee on your back deck and watch the sun rise. Hell, I don’t even know if you have a back deck.

And then there is social media. Which is a damned mess.

What began for me as a way to stay in touch with people I care about and as a way to find new people has become a place that seeks to addict me to posts that either make me sad or outraged. Except when they want me to buy something.

Yesterday I opened my Facebook feed and the first 12 posts were either ads or people or groups I don’t follow, and have no real interest in. I have more than eleven thousand followers on there, and less than 10% of them ever see anything I write. Instead, they see what Facebook wants us to see.

Which is apparently things they want us to buy, or things that will make us mad.

And don’t get me started on the ways social media throttles free speech. If I have a link to an article I think you should read, if I post it to any of the social sites, they make sure virtually nobody sees it in their feeds, so you will stay on their site.

They have algorithms that decide what you can or cannot write if you want to be seen. I’m sure you have seen the social media shorthand folks use to get around it: Unalived, graped, yte folks. I totally get why they do it – if you don’t, nobody sees your stuff.

But I want to write and link to what I want. I hate being told what to do. I hate the idea of an algorithm training me to write acceptably to them as the cost of readership.

There is a trend in recent years to become more analog. People are buying flip phones. Using paper calendars. Sending postcards. Using paper planners. Much of this is in reaction to the ways tech, and especially algorithms and AI are being forced upon us.

So, I am going backward a bit myself – to about 2006. In 2006, I had this blog, and I would post links to videos I thought were funny on the new site called YouTube. I would write essays about things I had strong feelings about. I would link to other writers, and react to their writing. Lots of us did these things.

By 2010, much of that had moved to Social Media, and we got comfortable, and began to post less and less to our blogs. And then in 2013, Facebook began to restrict your audience unless you paid them. But by then, we had quit posting to sites we controlled, and had pushed our audience to social media.

So, I am taking back control. I’m recommitting to this blog, and will now be updating it regularly as if it is 2006 again. Sure, maybe only 200 people will see something I write, but at least it won’t try to make money by making me angry.

I’m rebranding it too, as part of my recognition of what I’m doing with my writing. What was formerly Hugh’s Blog (I hate naming things) is now Small Offerings, a site where I share things with you that either I write with you in mind, or that I found online and thought you would enjoy.

I have come to understand that each thing I create for others, whether a blog post or an essay or a book or an omelet or a cutting board, is a small offering to the world, a tangible representation of the world in which I wish to live. When I post something, it is me saying: Here. I made this for you.

What this means going forward

I will continue to write small (~ 1000 word) essays each week. The subjects will revolve around what is occupying my mind at the time. That might be my work, or my long-term effort to make my yard into a wildlife habitat, or the recipe I am trying to nail down, or the story of a trip we took.

But I will also share links to things I think are important, or that need wider distribution, or that I think are hilarious and that brought me much needed joy.

I will share small things – like a great photo, or an inspiring quote, or maybe a meme that really sums it all up.

Some of you reading this only read these things when I post them to social media. I currently syndicate this to Threads, BlueSky, Facebook, and Tumblr, and I post the full text on my personal Facebook page. For now, I have no plans to stop that.

Others read it via email. I have no plans to stop that either, but I recognize that most folks want less, not more, email in their inbox.

If you are a current email subscriber, you will continue to get an email with the full text of any essay blog post. This will be 1-2 posts a week.

The new posting schedule will begin next week, and after that, there will be an option to get one summary email per week with all essays, short posts, and links. I’ll let you know when that is live.

And some of you are still sitting on your RSS feedreaders. The RSS feed for just the essays is http://smallofferings.com/category/posts/feed/ and the RSS feed for all the posts is the same as it is now: http://smallofferings.com/ feed/

Rebranding is chaotic and involved. I am working off a long list of upgrades and features, so bear with me if things seem to be in disarray, that is because things are in disarray! For example, it really bothers me that I don’t have a logotype yet for the blog title on the website.

And of course, I should say that all of this – the more than 15 hours I have spent on this project over the last two weeks, the costs for the email service provider to deliver the posts, and all the costs of being a professional independent writer in the 21st century – are all covered by the membership team that supports my work and that allows me to focus on you and your privacy, instead of using intrusive ads and sponsorship deals. If my work matters to you, I hope you will consider becoming a member – not just for the perks, but to keep my voice online.  

If you liked this, you might want to subscribe, so you don’t miss future posts.

Tom chose us

We live in town, but in a neighborhood that was a suburb of the city before it was annexed a hundred years ago. Our street was generally built out in the early 1950’s, and leans heavily toward midcentury ranch houses – but plan book houses for ordinary people, not anything like you would see in Dwell magazine.

The lots are large for city lots – ours is ½ acre, and is on the smaller side of average. A neighbor down the street has three acres. The lots are wooded, with fifty foot tall pines and oaks and magnolias everywhere. And also, stray cats.

Our neighborhood has a pretty severe feral cat problem. It’s a combination of negligent pet owners, biology (cats have LOTS of kittens) and lack of a proper animal control office in our city. There are no easy solutions on a policy scale, but on an individual scale, it’s pretty simple: trap the ferals and get them fixed, and then release them back in your yard. It’s simple, but not cheap – a spay or neuter can easily cost you $250, and that would be cheap. It’s not all that easy either, as you have to hunt to find vets that will work on ferals, you have to trap them, and you have to have space for them to recover for 24 hours at a minimum.

But, if you can swing it, it works. The now sterile cat keeps the territory safe from other cats, and she (or he) will live in your neighborhood for years without making new kittens. It breaks the cycle.

We first noticed Tom over the winter of 23/24. A large orange cat who would come up on our deck and eat the food we put out for the ferals (so we can trap them), we saw him first on the security cameras. At the time, we were working on adopting out a set of kittens another feral had had in our backyard, and one of those kittens was a straight up ginger, so we assumed this was the father. I called him Tom, because some 80% of gingers are male.

I would see Tom in the back yard sometimes, but always at a distance, and I would chide him for neglecting his parental duties. I would tell him that it was irresponsible to go arund getting other cats pregnant and then not sticking around.

Tom was unphased, and would duck into the hedgerow when I approached.

But one day, I stumbled across a batch of kittens, just a few days old, in a hollow tree stump in our backyard, the second batch we had found that summer. Mom was nowhere to be seen, but that didn’t mean they had necessarily been abandoned. Momma cats rarely abandon kittens unless they are obviously damaged or dying. It was far more likely she was just off hunting.

If you are going to rescue kittens, it is so much easier, by several orders of magnitude, if you can trap the mom too. Because then you don’t have to feed the kittens every 3 hours for six weeks – you just have to feed Mom, and she does all the hard work.

 So, we set a trap for her, using the kittens as bait. You put the kittens in a pet carrier, then put the trap in front of it, and cover the whole thing in a blanket, leaving the mouth of the trap exposed. The momma cat smells her kittens, and to her mind, they have been moved to the end of a tunnel. She goes into the tunnel to explore, and BAM! The trap closes.

So now we had four ginger kittens and, surprise, a Ginger mom, our old friend Tom, who we had been misgendering all this time.

For the next six weeks, we would feed Tom and the kittens, who all lived in our garage storage room. We would go in and put food in the bowl, and Tom would hiss at us. By the end of the six weeks or so, when she began weening the kittens, her nipples sore and achy, she would tolerate our presence as we played with the kittens, but if you approached her, more hissing and screaming at us.

It was almost September when we got Tom to the vet and got her spayed. Two days later we released her back into the backyard, exactly where we had trapped her almost two months before. She darted from the trap and back into the hedgerow, free at last.

Two days later she was back on our back deck, eating the feral cat food. We would see her from time to time, sunning herself in the yard. We learned she slept at night in our flower bed.

And then one day, she started showing up when we were putting the food out. She would sit at the other end of the deck and watch us, and then run up to the bowl when we walked away.

And then she started sitting two feet away from us as we filled the bowl.  And then, sometime early this year, nearly two years after she had kittens in our backyard, she declared us safe, and now she rubs against our legs as we pour food in the bowl. She will follow us around as we water the plants on the deck. And, sometimes, she will allow me to pick her up and pet her. She looks a bit nervous, but she allows it, and then when I set her down, she doesn’t run away but will continue to rub against our legs.

She is on our deck most days now. She still sleeps in the flower bed out front, a permanent dead spot marking her shelter among the perennials. Every morning, she greets me when I leave the house, and will sometimes stand at the gate to the deck and fuss at me to open it, despite her being completely capable of getting over it herself, like she does countless times a day.

She’s a pet now, I guess; a permanent resident on our property. Outdoor cats are bad for the bird population, but we have modified things a bit to make it safer for the birds, like making sure there is clearance around water sources and that bird feeders are not just baiting them as a hunting hide for cats.

I would never choose an outdoor cat, but it seems like Tom has chosen us.

The other day, I saw her lying on the deck, sound asleep, belly up in the air. Cats bodies are most vulnerable underneath – they only show their stomach when they feel safest. And I guess for Tom, that space of safety is our back deck.

I’ve spent a large part of my career working with victims of trauma, and one thing I have learned is that you cannot heal from trauma while you are still experiencing trauma – you have to have a safe space to heal.

I’m glad we are able to be that space for Tom.

The dead hedge

Our half-acre lot is a rectangle, with our house running perpendicular to the wide side, with a quarter of the lot being front yard, and the rest being back yard. And in the backyard, where it can harm no one, is a large hackberry tree.

Or perhaps more accurately, was a hackberry tree. It’s now actively dying, and has been since the great drought of 2024. It has died from the top down, so that even today the lowest branches leafed out this year, while the topmost limbs have been decaying and falling for a few years now.

It isn’t near anyone’s house or other structures, so we have been content to let it continue to die a natural death. This is best for the other creatures that live on our property – bugs move in, followed by woodpeckers, followed by cavity dwellers. We have arranged native vines to run up the tree trunk, so it also provides food and cover for birds and flowers and green foliage in the summer and autumn color for us.  

But it is messy. After every rainfall, there are dead limbs beneath it that no longer had the strength to hang on. What, exactly, is one to do with this debris? It’s a huge tree, so we are not just talking about 1 or 2 limbs.

There are many things one could do, I guess. I could have cut them into pieces and taken them to the dump, or burned them in my backyard fire pit, or made hügelkultur garden beds. But instead of any of that, I made a dead hedge.

A dead hedge is simple a decorative brush pile. Now, people from the UK, where they are so ahead of us on wildlife gardening, would fight me over that statement, but that is really what it is. A google image search of dead hedges brings up a wild amount of variation, but the concept is simple: Use tree debris like prunings and dead wood to create piles where wildlife can hide, where compost can happen naturally, and they are out of the way of humans.

Brush piles in and of themselves are amazing for wildlife. They provide cover for small mammals and birds, they provide food and cover for bugs and amphibians and reptiles, and they provide structure for other plants to grow on and through. But they tend to be seen  as ugly by humans. Or, at least, 21st Century humans living in suburban neighborhoods in the USA. Other cultures have long since learned how to manage this.

So as the limbs fell from the hackberry, I laid them along an imaginary line, somewhat crenellating, across my back yard, some 30 feet in front of my rear boundary. It is now almost fifty feet long, some four feet wide, and about four feet high. As I have trimmed other shrubs and trees, I have woven their supple limbs in and out of the bigger, dead ones, and we have allowed the native crossvines and pepper vines to grow rampant , so in the summer portions of it are invisible. A few seedling cherry laurels have come up in it, gifts from the birds who roost there. We have left the cherry laurels, and so now the dead hedge is becoming the foundation of a hedgerow. It is one of the most alive places on our property, filled with lizards and birds, and bugs and the snakes that eat them.

Over time, it will change, as the smaller limbs break down and the bigger limbs shift. It also changes as I add new limbs as they fall, and the leavings when I prune the other bushes and trees. It’s an everchanging organic sculpture.

But it is also more than that.

Between the dead hedge and my back fence I have planted wax myrtles, black cherry, and yaupons, and the birds have planted the cherry laurels and some black cherry and elderberry of their own. There are four pine trees in this strip as well, dropping their pine straw obligingly on the ground to serve as mulch.

This is on the eastern side of our yard, and so there is one side of the base of the dead hedge that only gets morning sunlight, while the other side bakes in the sun all afternoon. We are content to let this 30 by 100 foot strip be woodland, but managed, with a path that weaves among the saplings, which I limb up from time to time to make it more navigable. In the mornings I like to walk this path, and hear the birdsong and see the skinks and the anoles, and hear the brush rattle as some small mammal runs to hide from my intrusion into their home.

When we moved in, this rear boundary was a typical privacy fence against lawn grass, barring the four pine trees and the one hackberry. But now, eight years later, it’s habitat.

When morning comes

It’s hard to talk about mental illness with any certainty – all one can really do is talk bout your own mental illness. Because all of us who are mentally ill are mentally ill in our own way.

For me, living with depression, with a history of suicidal ideation, has meant being afraid of the nighttime.

Not the dark. The nighttime.

Because the nighttime is when the bad thoughts happen. It’s when there are no distractions, no one to call, nobody to notice if you disappear. There is, at 3am, nothing to do but stare at the ceiling and think.

I love thinking, but thinking at 3AM is not my friend. Nothing seems small and insignificant at 3AM.

One reason I dislike the winter is that the nighttime comes quicker. By 4PM, the light has shifted, and darkness is creeping in. There is, I think, a part of me that wants to sit in front of a fire, bundled in a blanket, surrounded by my village of 150 people who know me well, and watch the flames dance while I listen to their stories. Our stories.

Best I can do is sit on a couch and read a book, a cat or two snuggled at my feet.

By nine or ten PM, I am exhausted, and ready for sleep – tired of the weight of the people I dealt with, the tasks I managed, the crises I averted, the political horror I am aware of but am powerless to change, knowledge of all the ways we hurt each other. I slide into the sheets and within minutes I am asleep, in the land of dreams where my dead father and grandmother visit me regularly, where I have imaginary conversations with old friends, where the impossible happens and seems real, where, when things seem to much, I can wake up instead of merely enduring.

The nighttime bathroom visits – and I’m a 54 year old man, so they happen more often than they used to – are mostly stumbling interludes, and I return to sleep almost instantly. But sometimes not.

Sometimes, I am awake and it is 3AM and I am staring at the ceiling, my mind full of things both done and undone, and I hear death breathing and sometimes – not always – my brain tells me that it would be lovely for it all to stop and for me to leave.

I know this is not true. I don’t want to leave, even if I do want it all to stop. But brains are like that. They lie to you. Or, at least mine does.

But it always feels like a miracle when the alarm goes off, and you realize that you did, in fact, manage to slip back into sleep and now you are awake, having survived yet another night, and you have a second chance, a new opportunity – anything is possible.

I will believe this until about 4PM, when the light begins to turn once again.

Kittens – the origin story

Last year I took a couple of non-fiction writing classes from Janisse Ray, which I highly recommend doing. One of the assignments was to write a five-part essay.

I wrote about rescuing kittens, which is, if you don’t know, a thing we do. This is the first section.

I also want to say that I was only able to take those classes because of the membership team that supports my work. They pay a bit each month as a form of patronage, which enables me to not have to put ads all over my website or set up affiliate deals or pump out sponsored posts. In exchange, they get first dibs on lots of things, like member-only sales, writing that was just for them (on average, two essays a month) and more. They first saw this essay shortly after it was written last year.

If you like my stuff and want to see more of it, the best and most impactful way to support my work is to become a member. You can learn more here. Thanks! – HH

It had been a lovely tree, with a multi-trunked base that spread its limbs wide. In the fall, its brilliant red leaves were perfectly framed in our bedroom window. But alas, it was a Bradford Pear, an invasive tree that is spreading throughout our southern woodlands and destroying native habitat. Worse in the near term for me was that it is fragile, dropping huge limbs at every storm, and it had had to come down.

I had chopped it at 6 feet and then girdled the stump, so the trunk could slowly decay and thus feed the tiny critters in the yard, as well as the birds that delight in meals of tiny critters. The spreading trunks formed a perfect pocket at ground level, much the way your hand would if it were holding a ball by your fingertips.

But that had been a few years ago, and now the stump was covered in Virginia Creeper, which also turns red in the fall, and created nesting and hiding space for the tiny woodland creatures that live in my yard.

On this particular May morning, the sky was blue, the humidity was low, and the air was filled with birdsong as they let each other know they had made it through the night. Even though it was time for me to leave for work, I lingered on my morning walk around the yard. We get so few perfect days to be outside here, it felt irresponsible to not enjoy as much of this one as I was able.

It was then I heard it. During a lull in birdsong, I heard a rustle in the underbrush near the pear stump, and then I saw Calico peering out of the Creeper, between the trunks.

Calico is one of half a dozen stray and feral cats that we see in our neighborhood, a collection of 70 year old ranch houses on heavily wooded lots on the north side of Jackson. As people have moved away and abandoned their pets, their descendants now run wild in a local colony, relying on the kindness of strangers and their own wits to survive.

We have given them functional names, mostly descriptive in nature, so we can keep track of them. We have Calico, Tortie, Garfield, and Big Tom, as examples. They are grateful for our feeding them on our back deck, and when we are tardy with he morning meals, they peer in the sliding glass door to our living room, to make sure we are OK, and are aware they are waiting on their daily bread.

However grateful they may be, it is rare you can get within a few feet of one of them, and here Calico was, watching me, frozen, realizing she had made too much noise as I was walking past, and now she must decide how to play this. I squatted, to be at eye level, and she bolted to a clump of shrubs 20 feet away, but then focused her death stare back at me.

I peered in the pocket formed by the dead trunks and saw why – inside the nest were six tiny kittens, less than 3 days old. They were a panoply of colors seen in our local colony – two tuxedo cats, two tortoise shell, a ginger, and one perfect calico.

Immediately I knew that I had a problem.

My problem – well, my immediate problem – was not that these six adorable kittens in our backyard that, if they survived, would double the size of our colony, would wreck havoc on our songbird population, and would be pumping out kittens themselves before fall. While all of that was true, my immediate problem was my wife, Renee.

She loves animals of all sorts, strongly preferring them to people. I once asked her why, and she explained to me, in tones that would suggest I am an idiot, that no animal had ever hurt her on purpose, and that was not true of humans, and so it was clear to her where she should invest her time.

Were I were to force her to choose between me and six kittens, I am not sure the deal would turn in my direction. I am definitely not in any mood to test that scenario.

I know that when I tell her about these kittens, she will want to save them, to make sure they are cared for, that they go to good homes. I can see it all playing out in front of us – our summer vacation dashed, the constant attention, the additional cost. Our sixteen year old grey tabby Felix was in the process of slowly dying, and the vet bills were mounting. If I went inside and told her, my goose was cooked. The smart thing was to ignore them and go to work.

But for 18 years I have found it difficult to lie to her, to look her in the eye and not tell her something she would want or need to know. It is possible I could get away with it, and these kittens could grow and be weened and then I would act surprised along with her when “new” cats showed up at the sliding glass door in late summer. However, I do not want to get away with it, do not want to deprive her of the joy she will get from these kittens, and do not want to ever lie to her.

I peer at the little kittens once more, and then slowly stand, my 52 year old knees resisting the movement. I look at the house, then back at the kittens, and then with a sigh of resignation, begin walking toward the house.

Thunk

When I was a small boy, my dad drove a red Ford pick-up truck, a ragged out work truck we had bought from his employer when they decided to upgrade. I remember it vividly – the split in the seat with foam poking out, the cracked dash, the black vinyl floor mats.

But they say the age of nostalgia is 12, and that is surely true for me. Because by the time I was 12, my Dad had a company truck that came with his job, and it was a white Ford with a blue interior. It’s the truck I remember best.

I can, even 42 years later, remember the smell of it, a combination of Dad and dirt and a slight mustiness that came from the heat and the humidity. But the thing I most remember is the parking brake.

Dad always set the parking brake, wherever he parked. It was a habit, and one he encouraged. Because, he told me, “if you always set it, you never have to remember to set it. It just happens.” Or, as Cory Doctorow once said, habits are things you get for free.

And because Dad always set the parking brake, before you could go anywhere, you had to release it.

At the time, my dad worked for a local propane company, where he was the branch manager. And with the job came not only the truck, but many keys – the keys to the building, the tool room, his office, the shed out back, the garage where they repaired the trucks… so many keys.

One day when I was maybe eight or nine, I asked Dad why he had so many keys. He told me that each key represented a responsibility he had.

He had a giant keyring he carried on a clip on his belt that jangled when he walked and had another, larger keyring with more seldom used keys on a ring clipped to the emergency brake handle on his truck.

And every time we went anywhere in his truck, before you could move at all, you had to release the parking brake. The parking brake in his Ford was a pedal you pushed down, that ratcheted as it went – tic, tic, tic real fast. And it released by a t-shaped handle you pulled, which released the brake all at once with a metallic “thunk!”. But because the keys were clipped to the handle, the thunk was accompanied by a jangle of keys.

This morning, I got in my white Ford truck, started it, and pulled the parking brake release t-handle. It sounded its metallic thunk, like it always does, but this time, for some reason,  I noticed the lack of the jangling keys – a sound, mind you, I have not heard since 1990.

Next month will be six years since my dad died. Maybe that was it, or maybe it just hit me at the right time, but 10 minutes later, when I had quit weeping at that memory, I put the truck in reverse and headed out, to start my day.

On specialization

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

― Robert A. Heinlein

I have, at various times in my life, read books and articles on how to be an internet writer. In days past, we would have called this person a blogger, but for most of the last 11 years I am best known for my newsletter, and the blog has gotten scraps. And now all the cool kids are on Substack. But at the end of the day, it’s still just writing on the internet.

Anyway, there is lots of advice out there about how to “build a platform”  and “build a brand” and “increase your readership.” And the single most common piece of advice you will get – hell, that I have gotten — was to stick to a niche.

I am sure this is good advice. And yet, I am constitutionally incapable of doing it.

For years, I write heavily about homelessness to promote a nonprofit I was running. I saw it as part of my job, but the whole time I was doing that, I also blogged and ran a newsletter. It would have been smarter to have only written about homelessness, or maybe even expanded to writing about poverty.

But I also want to write about gardening. And nature. And food. And memories. And hope and fidelity to purpose. Maybe some spirituality thrown in for good measure.

There is no section in the bookstore for nature – food – urban poverty – spirituality writers.

I put out a book at the beginning of the year, and it too is a hyphenated book a memoir -cookbook. If I was smart, I would only write about food, but that idea bores me to tears. See also spirituality or nature or gardening.

Part of it is my ADHD, I’m sure. I want to write about whatever I’m excited about at the moment, because writing is one of my ways of thinking. And when I am not excited about something, writing about it is exhausting.

But it cuts the other way too. I am a person who is generally interested in gardening. I own in excess of 150 books on gardening and horticulture. I have a half-acre lot filled with plants I put there on purpose. And sometimes, I am awash in the glories of my garden and yard, filled with butterflies and native bees and flowers and old roses and so many things.

But early this year, I fell into a depressive episode that held me in its clutches and would not let go. Not for love or money could I be convinced to care about my yard. Cutting the grass often enough to not piss off the neighbors was the upper limit of my care. If writing about my garden was my niche and I had readers who depended on me to write about gardening, I would be destitute at the moment.

But instead, I write about lots of things, and I do it well enough that some people stick around to see what I am going to write about next. It does make it damned awkward when you are asked what you do, and you say you are a writer and the next question is, inevitably: What do you write about?

Hell if I know. I’ve been writing online for almost 25 years now, so if I have not figured it out by now, the odds are against my figuring it out.

In any event, If you are reading this, I guess you are OK with my not having it figured out. So, thanks for that. Really. It means more than you know.