August tidbits
It has been a busy month here. The best part was a visit from nieces from Illinois. We loved having them here.
That’s One Red Cow.
And, I prepare for a two-week plus journey to Scandinavia, Berlin, Copenhagen and other parts on a Viking cruise. It may be a bit before I check in again. I always try to send something from parts abroad and I’d like to do so, but no promises. As you all well know, travel keeps you busy.
Stay well. Go Cubs.
Pleasurable watches:
I get missives from Amanda Evanston. I enjoy her writing and perspective.
She sells classes but I like all the other things she says. I found this latest one to be especially worthy. I’ve put a few thoughts below. You can read all of her emails and the rest of this one here.
Subject: A Very Tasteful Emotional Collapse
Happy Friday People Friends,
If you’ve never experienced a three-year-old vomiting in a moving vehicle, first of all, congratulations on whatever charmed life you’ve managed to construct.Older kids sort of aim. There’s intention. A bag enters the story.
A three-year-old treats vomiting like a weather event.
There was vomit on the child, the car seat, the ceiling, her hair, the window, and somehow her sister, who had done absolutely nothing to deserve this. Honestly, if she’d managed to hit the dashboard from the back seat, I wouldn’t have been surprised. There was commitment.
…
Normally, after a stomach bug, you throw open every window in the house and let fresh air chase away the misery. Instead, we had to keep everything sealed shut while the smoke slipped indoors anyway, finding every crack and crevice.
If you've never lived through an air quality crisis, it's deeply unsettling. The sky turns the wrong color, a sickly orange-gray, as if the opening scene of a horror movie is about to begin. The air quality index starts sounding alarms around 150. Schools close around 300. Most apps stop measuring at 500 because, presumably, they've decided humanity has had a good run.
That day our town registered 727.
By evening, even inside the house smelled like an Elks Lodge in 1989. I kept expecting someone to wander through the living room, light a cigarette, and ask if I wanted another Schlitz.
By this time I’d reached the stage of motherhood where a dropped spoon feels like a personal attack.
The hangnail? Devastating.
The email? Offensive.
Someone asking where the scissors were? I wanted to answer, “I don’t know. ASK GOD.”
…
I went downstairs, pulled a blanket over my head, and had what I would describe as a very private, very tasteful emotional collapse.
After a while I remembered something I seem destined to relearn every few months.
There will come a day, perhaps when I’m eighty, when I would give my right hand for one ordinary afternoon on this couch with these three little girls and their smelly blanket forts.
There will come a day when these problems will seem wonderfully, gloriously small.
And there are people who would trade their hardest day for mine in a heartbeat.
More than that, a bad day is still happening on a spectacularly wonderful planet.
A world where cows have best friends.
Where dolphins call each other by name.
Where bees dance directions to flowers.
Where octopuses taste the world with their arms.
Where elephants return to the bones of their dead and stand beside them in silence.
Where, after a forest fire, the very first thing the earth does is bloom.
None of those things cleaned my car.
None of them cleared the smoke or made the dryer work.
None of them kept us from missing my sweet new niece.
But they reminded me that this wasn’t my whole life.
It was just Thursday.
Outside of humans, no other living thing on this planet even knows what a Thursday is.
Soon enough, the air smelled like summer again and the girls were back in the sprinkler, shrieking as though the previous carnage had never happened. The stomach bug had already moved on to terrorize some other innocent household. Life, as it usually does, quietly resumed.
And somewhere, at that exact moment, a committee of bees was holding a meeting and somehow making democracy work.
Good for them.
We’re taught from a young age to sort emotions into two neat piles: good feelings and bad feelings. Real life has never been that organized.
Most emotions show up carrying friends. Frustration drags gratitude in by the hand. Exhaustion sits beside wonder. Grief somehow leaves room for laughter. The older I get, the less interested I am in untangling them and the more interested I am in giving them somewhere to exist.
That’s one of the reasons I make so much art.
In twenty minutes I can collage a face that reflects four different things back at me: frustration, sadness, exhaustion, and gratitude. None of them cancel the others out. They’re simply sharing the same space, just like they do in real life.
Copyright © 2026 Amanda Evanston, All rights reserved.