The very first moments in the life of Olive James

Note- Olive James Coogan-Clarke arrived safely and happily, but not speedily. Even after skimming off the more arbitrary details, my marathon labor (an endeavor that spanned from home to birth center to hospital room to operating room over a period of three days) is not going to fit into one post. Nor would I have the ability to write it out in one stretch, not in the time afforded to me in the slim hours of her naps, hours which are punctuated by me dashing to her side every other ninety seconds to ensure she has not died of- what, exactly? Too much air? A house squirrel stealing to her bedside and nipping away her breath? Her little neck snapping under the weight of her enormous, roly-poly head? 

You know what, that last one doesn't sound so improbable. Excuse me for a second-

Alright. Let's start at the end (also the beginning)- the very first moments in the life of Olive James.

At 3:28pm on Monday, October 9th, a surgeon slices me from hip bone to hip bone, then reaches down into my body and pulls out an 8lbs 6oz baby whose head has evidently been replaced by the roundest, smoothest, most radiant wheel of cheese from any cellar in any farmhouse across New England. 

They hold the baby up and over the blue curtain, still tethered by her blue chord, so the cheese wheel can take her first look at her mom and dad. Dad immediately melts into a pool of love and delirium on the operating room floor, requiring a nurse's assistant to gather him up in a glass vial and reform him. The top half of mom bangs away on the table with shivers so severe that any inhabiting spirits are accidentally exorcised away,  and she speaks her first word in the brand new world that she shares with her dinner-plate-faced daughter:  "ICE CHIP?" 

Then the baby is whisked away into a corner, dad scoots off to stick his pointer finger into her small, outstretched hand, and observe the warming and drying proceedings. Mom turns her face towards the doula, Roxy, repeats these words: "ICE CHIP?"- then heaves, gags, and begins to vomit.  

From inside her nest of towels and syringe bulbs and glinting silver instruments, at the center of a still-swarming team of baby professionals, the cheese wheel remains quiet, blinks her gigantic blue eyes, and adopts an expression of utter bemusement. 

She's Running a Bit Behind

Today is my due date. I was a little disappointed this morning when I woke up and she had not been delivered, tooth-fairy style, next to me on my pillow. All clean and swaddled. Too bad. 

At noon I went eagerly off to my midwife appointment, hungry for some assurance, motivation, or lightly invasive procedure that would get things moving along. Instead, a family arrived at the exact same moment, ushering a screaming woman into the far end of building- the birth suites. I waited forty minutes for my appointment, and in those forty minutes that woman had the gall to have her baby- on MY due date. She was a first timer, too. 

Even though that baby came speeding on out in record time, it still threw off the whole day and they had to reschedule my appointment for Monday. So I slouched on home, where time continued to collapse on itself until, remarkably, I noticed it had turned backwards entirely and every tick of the second hand swept me back to the beginning of the week, and I had to live it all again. Too bad. 

.......

My mentor since high school, Kerry, told me something when she was pregnant that's always stuck with me. "Waiting for labor is like knowing you're going to be in a car accident. Who knows how severe it will be, but it's a car accident, and it's out there, and it's going to happen- sometime."

She later half-rescinded this comment, as her labor and delivery went perfectly smoothly with very little fuss. But too late, the metaphor had lodged permanently in my brain, and it kept me up at night, fretful and tossing and dreaming of rogue headlights, until around week 37. At that point, tossing was no longer a thing I could do. Moving from my left side to my right now requires props, pulleys, three strong men and a team of oxen. Now, at week 40, I fantasize about that luscious, mystical car accident. Skidding on light snow into the guard rail. A mac truck, wheeling out of control in the opposite lane, heading right towards me. Either way. Just deliver me of this Tasmanian Devil, this ball of elbows and feet and pointy appendiges who never ever EVER stops moving. 

......

The same week that David and I purchased our home in West Asheville, an unknown developer purchased the adjacent lot next door. There is no fence, no trees, not even a single shrub separating the two properties; any onlooker would assume it's our side yard. We moved in, the months marched on, and the lot remained vacant- just an empty square of grass where Hometeam liked to bury her favorite stuffed toys. "You know what's going to happen, don't you," I said to David. "That lot is going to remain empty until the day we bring a newborn baby home. And then the construction will begin." 

Three years passed. Then, when I was eight weeks pregnant, the machines showed up. The world's slowest, loudest, and most confusing construction project began. On the day where the porta-potty was plunked down next to my mailbox, I stepped outside and introduced myself to the developer. "I'm building this thing myself!" He declared with a tinge of rogue pride. "Might take me a while. When's your baby due?"

"About eight months from now."

"Oh that should be no problem- all the loud stuff will be done by then, we'll just be polishing up the interior."

Fast forward to August. After seven months of was seemed- at least from the outside- like a chaotic slurry of pipes, cement, supportive beams strung across our lawn, disrupted mail delivery and trash service (the machines hid our mail box and blocked the trash trucks) dehydrated workers sneaking into our screened-in porch to find shade and non-stop banging, the foundation was laid. The foundation was nearly as tall as our entire house. And it had taken seven whole months.

I kept my head down, slipping into my house after work and turning on fifteen floor fans to drown out the noise. I renamed my home Tornado Alley. Something was always blowing. I dutifully cleaned up the construction trash in our yard every morning, hoping my tiny effort would move things along. I kept my mouth shut and held lots of tension in my shoulders. Eventually, this project would be complete. It couldn't go on forever- could it? If it took seven entire months to build a concrete foundation, how long would it take to frame it? And do whatever it is that comes after framing? The math was dismal. 

In mid-August, the developer abandoned the project. One morning, the machines did not show up. Someone came and picked up the toilet. A single, defiant stock of corn grew up in the midst of the cement and rebar and produced four perfect ears. The bare walls are so close we can reach out from our porch and run our hand against them.

Who cares. It's quiet now. It's as quiet as our neighborhood can be, anyway. May those concrete ruins remain their forever, ugly, dangerously strewn with errant nails, but not bothering us.  

Life can be hard to plan for.  Plots can twist.

.....

During those nauseating first months, I agonized long hours over birth center care verses a standard OB practice. I desperately wanted to use the birth center, but it was not fully covered by our insurance, Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina. It was partially covered, with the faint promise of further coverage in the future, but there was a very real possibility where choosing the birth center over Mission hospital would cost us thousands more.

Maybe. Hard to tell. There were many possible scenarios, at least where expenses were involved. Nobody seemed to really know anything. I whittled away at figures and lists, I called the insurers and my city council woman, hospital billing, Labor and Delivery ,the director of the birth center. If I could only be an informed consumer, then certainly I could make the right choice. The one where we got a baby and maybe some prenatal care and didn't end up paying off both in sizable installments over the next thirty five years. 

Turns out, when you're anticipating the cost of giving birth in America, there is no such thing as being an informed consumer. Nobody is informed. It's a total crapshoot. Eventually, we opted for the birth center.

And thank god we did! Because not only did Blue Cross Blue Shield finally accept the birth center as entirely in-network, they also came barreling out of left field over the summer and announced that they were breaking up with Mission Hospital- the LARGEST hospital in Western North Carolina. As of six days from now, our hospital will be out of network for most of us who live in this town. Anyone with BCBS of NC- over 70% of Mission's current patrons, will have to find somewhere else to pull out their appendixes and deliver their babies. 

See? These things are hard to plan for. 

"You must be so excited!!!" People said this to me all the time in the past eight months. And because I am a chronic over-sharer, I always responded with the truth.  "I sure would be, if dealing with insurance wasn't sucking every ounce of energy out of my soul." 

But today is my due date, the corn is growing high in the abandoned construction project next door, and this week's latest attempt by republicans to strip us all of health care has died yet another death. What a time to be alive! 

......

That's as much of an update as I have the time for today. I'm going to leave this cafe and head home to check under my pillow and see if my baby hasn't been delivered in my absence. She really is due to arrive any time today. 

The first trimester : an insane trick of the brain

Just the other day I saw an image of a Southeastern landscape in mid-winter. Absent was the refreshing tang of snow, there was only a snarl of bare tree limbs against an equally bare grey sky, dead grass the color of straw covering the ground. Seeing it brought a rush of nausea starting in the center of my body, where my core used to be, and rushing up through the top of my head. I looked away. The sight of bare trees makes me sick. 

I was about six weeks pregnant when the nausea set in. It was early February. We'd survived the women's march in DC, and the inauguration. The four pound creature who flails around inside me all day long and hosts nightly basketball tournaments for herself, the yet to be born mystery girl we now call Ollie, was then just the size of a gnat. 

I'd been feeling fine since learning she was on her way- better than fine, actually, as my very first pregnancy symptom was a complete lack of the cyclical chronic body pain I'd experienced for the past 18 months. I'd completely deluded myself into thinking that I'd skirt pass the first trimester without a drop of morning sickness or an ounce of fatigue. After all, what could pregnancy dole out that Lyme hadn't already punished me with? With my extensive understanding of bone broth and selenium, etc, who on earth was better nourished than I? A number of the wholistic pregnancy and preconception books I'd read thoroughly had all but assured me that women who follow a specific regiment of diet and supplements will entirely avoid the uncomfortable symptoms of pregnancy- even the pain of labor. This is because natural, tapped-in women (like me) are just a littlest bit wiser, healthier, and overall better than everyone else. 

Lies! 

The sickness hit at 6 weeks, just like normal, and lasted till week 12. Just six weeks, but in first-trimester adjusted time that equals about 25 months. Time slowed down, time began to crawl, some evenings around 7pm time came to a revolting stop all together. It was a sickness that I'd never experienced, an all consuming nausea coupled with a hunger that I could only describe, at the time, as desperate.

This may have been exacerbated by the fact that I began the endeavor about 15 pounds beneath my ideal body weight. Maybe not, maybe that's just how it is. I have nothing to compare it with. All I know is that every day was a battle against the mind-blowing nausea that could only be cured by eating copious amounts of one thing- one specific thing and that thing only.

Figuring out that acceptable food and where to find it was like playing unsettling game of slots. In my imagination I'd pull the lever and watch as the spinning icons arranged themselves: Italian food? No, spin it again. Sandwich? No- GOD no. Chicken? I'm going to throw up, I can feel the contents in my stomach start to rise, I have to figure this out- soup? Yes- Yes that's it! What kind of soup? Minestrone? NO! Pho? Yes! From where? Wild Ginger? NO! The tea house up the street- that's it! 

Then I'd grab my jacket and a book and drive as fast as safety would permit to the tea house, where I'd place a hand firmly over my mouth and try not to look desperate or deranged as I waited for the soup to arrive in front of me on the table, neatly arranged next to the iced tea and the side plate of lime slices.

Most of the time I could enjoy the allowable food only once, and then it would be off limits- inconceivable, really- for the remainder of the six weeks. Other dishes I could eat into oblivion.  I devoured the aforementioned Pho 13 times in two weeks. Upon hearing this, Dave, who had been out of town, sank down into chair in the kitchen, rested his head in his hands and said, "That's like...two hundred dollars of soup." 

The secret food was the key to the day. If I correctly identified it in my head was able to locate and consume it in a timely fashion, I'd buy myself a few hours of feeling somewhat normal. Those were the good days, the pockets of relief. When the craving was more slippery to identify, was beyond my ability to locate within the city limits, required more effort to create than either David or myself had to give, or hit in the middle of the night when the food world was asleep-those were dark times. 

Even beyond my own physical complaints, those were dark times. The new president was appointing his cabinet members - Betsty Devos, who believes that schools should be stocked with guns to prevent Grizzly attacks, was now in charge of American public schools, climate change denier Scott Pruitt is the head of the EPA. A white haired lady in my gerrymandering action group who knit her way through every meeting and constantly swayed back and forth in a manner I found oddly soothing described listening to the news every day as a fresh horror. "What fresh horror awaits me tomorrow?" She asked, rocking in her seat. "That's what I want to know."

That's the very question I found myself waking up to every day, my first thought of the day. I suppose I should have been thrilled out of my mind that I was pregnant at all, I'd been terrified that the absurd amount of medications I'd swallowed the past year would have left me sterilized. But the gnat-embryo was nothing to me at the moment but a hazy potential of an imagination baby, nothing but a constellation of nausea and fatigue and soreness. The news headlines were the absolute opposite: hard, happening, real.

I suppose they had the fatigue and nausea in common. 

I never actually threw up. I wonder if that would have been better in a way. Instead the nausea swelled and took up epic proportions, reaching no conclusion, finding no retched relief. It wasn't only smells that set me off, although that was an insane trick of the brain. The world was a carnival of unfortunate and eerily specific smells. (One day David walked in the house and I stopped in my tracks, halfway to the door to greet him. "Why does it smell suddenly like someone ate a lot of meat in a hurry, then had a hard work out at the gym?" I asked, a full on accusation.  "....Accurate," he said, feebly, setting down his bag on the living room table. I wonder if, before walking in the door every evening after the work day he'd ask himself, "What fresh horror....") 

Certain sounds brought on the nausea, the spinning all-consuming sense of ill-ease. There was a certain early-morning bird call. I grew to detest it. Then I detested all birds and the racket they made. Colors and shapes did the same thing- the faintly orange straw-like grass that covered the mountainsides, the tangle of bare branches against the winter sky. How had I never noticed before how sickening these sights were?!

The only solution, then, was to avoid as much stimulation as possible. I put myself to bed by 6pm. Eyes lightly closed, fan on, an episode of Pod Save America playing if it were a Monday or Thursday. This is when time began to slouch. Making it out of the first trimester was looking more and more impossible as the minutes crawled by, a slow cockroach marching down an endless hallway. I had to change something. I had to go back in time and change the election outcome. I had to transport myself to Antarctica, where there was nothing but clean whiteness, freezing air and no smells.

If those things were not to be, then I'd have to get a job. I had a job, of course, but I worked from home, and home housed my cast-iron skillets, and they smelled terribly, as if the ghost of every bit of meat they'd ever roasted were coming back to haunt me. If that wasn't bad enough, I was lonely. I needed a job with co-workers who would break me out of stupor of political podcasts and white noise machines. Something that required me to get out of bed, put on clothes and leave the house.

Around week ten, I sat up in bed. I had an idea. 

The Mid-Winter Report & Something for Seattle

Well folks, Umbridge has taken control of Hogwarts. I, like the great majority of you, had hoped for a win on this one, but let us not lose heart. The only way that the new regime has claimed a true victory is if we let this setback dampen our enthusiasm for the next fight. There are other appointments to consider and executive orders waiting in the wings, and we must face the ensuing battles with the same level of perseverance and grit. Remember, we lost this one by one unprecedented tie-breaking vote; we are battling on the knife's edge.

And in local news, the weather here in Asheville has got me unsettled and jittery with claustrophobia. The days begin grey and drizzly with a sky that hangs just a few feet over our heads. If I were much taller I'd be constantly hitting my head against the gauzy, smoke-hued clouds. The temperature bounces between sixty and sixty five but the landscape still grips tightly to its February finest: bony branches and hillsides covered in brittle straw grasses.

Every afternoon around 3 o'clock I pick up my car keys and weigh them in my hands. I could go out to the car, fill up the tank, head East on 1-40 and be back in New England by this time tomorrow. The stinging cold is waiting for me there, the snow glittering over the fields, ice in the trees, and all day long the crack of flames in the fireplace. Midwinter was never my favorite season growing up, but at the very least it's something definitive. I wish I could say that there's too much to do here and I'm too busy to drive North, but that would be (to use the parlance of the day) a 'falsehood'. Some days are bustling, but overall it's a slow time. 

Dr. June teases me for being the most type A patient she's ever encountered. I continue to show up for my appointments hauling pages of typed notes, abstracts from new papers on Lyme treatment from Johns Hopkins, each medication and supplement recorded in exact frequency and milligrams. She's graduated me to pre-maintenance antibiotics: amoxicillin and azithromyocin, twice every day. The time between our appointments are growing longer and longer, and thank god- her services keep going up in price and she does not take insurance.  

I say this with some degree of shame, but as I recover I am not turning into the patient advocate that I thought I'd be. I don't want to talk about Lyme Disease or anything remotely related to it. The other day I was at lunch in South Carolina with a few women- healthy women- and they got to talking about gluten insensitivity - they were picking at their lunches of chicken breasts over salad just as I've done for the past how many months- and I wanted to stand up and flip over the table and scream SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP!! 

I didn't. Why would I? There's nothing wrong with talking about diet and there's nothing wrong with salads or lean proteins- my god, that term- it's just that these things make me lose my mind. 

I met a young woman at a OWL bakery a few weeks ago. She was slender and shaky and sick. There we were in the best bakery in Asheville- this place is insane- and she legitimately couldn't eat a thing on the menu. She drank tea from a little white pot while I downed an almond-rose croissant, which I'd purchased without taking a moment to reflect on the cruelty of eating a sweet, flaking pastry in front of this person. I listened as she told me about her past four months spent in bed, the eyesight that comes and goes, the various pains and convulsions. I listened and nodded and asked questions in complete empathy, and I thought I might vomit. 

I gave her my phone number, urged her to call if she needed anything, assured her that it does get better than this. Then I sat in my car and shook and shook and shook. That was the last Lyme patient I've met with. All this talk about emerging from the tunnel only to dive back in and help others navigate their way out- scroll back on this blog and you'll find plenty of that tunnel metaphor- and here all I want to do is sprint in the direction of health and normalcy and never look back.  

Just give me some time on this one. 

For a more complete story on that part of my life, or if you're sick yourself and need some encouragement, read my article recently published on the very visually appealing site MoreThanLyme.

Meanwhile, I'm beginning to figure out light. Despite the strange spring weather, the parkway remains closed, shutting me off from Craggy Gardens, Black Balsam, Mount Mitchell and most of the other places to hike and study the sunset. On the evenings when I can make it all the way to Max Patch or Roan, I am a scientist in the field- carefully dissecting the luminescent quality of each minute that comes before sunset and recording how it would translate into images.

Sometimes I have photo shoots with family and engaged couples and sometimes I do not. Dave gently reminds me when I look bleakly at the calendar that I started a photography business in the dead of winter. I tell him it's hard to be patient and rational when you've finally found something bright after being in the dark for 1.5 years.

And now, an early announcement : 

I'm taking my Wild & Bright Photography on the road. I haven't announced this elsewhere because I wanted to tell you all first, but I'm planning on flying to Seattle at the end of April to offer photo sessions during the golden hours (sunset and sunrise) at Discovery Park- or your favorite wild place in Western Washington.  Click here to see my Portfolio.

You can email me ( thewildercoast@gmail.com) if you're interested to learn more. There will be more details to come, including dates and prices. I am so, so, so excited even thinking about Seattle in the spring, evening light over Puget Sound- but I can only make this trip if I can break even, so I'm just gauging interest right now. 

Holy- I miss the Pacific Northwest. 

It would be so nice to visit. To sit at the coffee shop above Golden Gardens and- wait, which cafe is that? The one at the top of the hill, across from the staircase that leads to the beach? Is it Allegro? I'm forgetting these details and I don't want to. Which cafe is it, could somebody remind me? 

Have a wonderful week. I'll talk with you soon. 

Keep up the fight in the morning

Another snow day here in Asheville, after two weeks in the high sixties. The snow was a light dusting that barely clung to the windshields and disappeared beneath the first rays of sunlight, but schools were cancelled nonetheless. The parking lots were scattered with grains of electric blue salt.  

I went to Trader Joes in the morning to get the groceries for dinner. It was early, the store had just opened and it was mostly empty. As usual, I visited my friend Dan who was working behind the sample counter. We drank those little paper cups of coffee and talked about 45 and his outrageous ban of immigrants, refugees and green card holders, and his slippery slight of hand, quietly securing Steve Bannon head of the National Security Counsel while we flooded the airports in protest and shouted in the streets. 

Dan cut up a honeydew melon and placed the pieces on paper plates. We're doing what we're supposed to do, on this average Monday morning. We're talking about these things as they happen, we're refusing to let this feel normal. When I leave, pushing my cart towards produce, Dan calls after me, "You're brave, and we got this." 

Between photo shoots and writing deadline, the nature and amount of my work fluctuates so much it would drive a lab rat to insanity. Without the predictability of a 9-5 job, my weekly routine is strung in place by a random constellation of daily deals, standing doctors appointments and weekly NPR news shows. 

Mondays are for Chicken. 

On Mondays, without fail, Earthfare offers a deal on chicken: 5 dollars even for a whole roast bird. I'm not going to lie to you, this was a big discovery for David and I, as it shaved six dollars off our weekly grocery bill. Six dollars, I'm telling you. You have to be really strict with yourself, however. You need to walk in to the store with your head down, dash to the prepared foods counter, grab your chicken and make a beeline for the exit, so that you don't feel tempted to grab a single item, not one single thing- that's the only way this truly remains a deal.

The ordinary things feel ridiculous right now. You're making dinner and you look down at the pot you're stirring and you think, "I'm stirring this pot right now as if nothing is happening."

But then again, you have to eat. 

So on Monday, after chatting with Dan at the first grocery store, I drive to the second grocery store to get my chicken. There is an ancient man who works as a cashier at Earthfare, and he's quite famous in the area because he moves like a tortoise. He will slowly and thoughtfully pick up and scrutinize every item you're trying to purchase, inquire about its use and taste and country of origin. If you have any unmarked produce, forget about it. Occasionally he'll think of a question he needs to ask another staff member and he'll shuffle away, leaving you at the counter, shifting your weight from foot to foot and wondering if you and your food will ever escape.

If you're in a hurry, you must avoid the tortoise line at all costs, as it will be absolutely not end favorably. But if you've got nowhere to be, it's worth seeking him out. He's very friendly and I love answering his questions about my food choices. Today I take my place in his queue. I only had one chicken after all, and nobody was waiting for me.

He asked me to tell him about the highlight of my weekend, so I thought for a minute and told him about the anti immigration ban rally I'd attended downtown on Sunday afternoon. David and I had planned to hike to Hawk's Bill in the Linville Gorge to watch the sunset, then drive the three hours home,  stopping for barbecue and ice cream along the way.  When he heard about the rally we changed tack and went downtown instead, with the dog, who barked in perfect rhythm to the crowd's chanting and made a few new toddler friends.

Most of the drivers downtown leaned their heads out of the windows and cheered when they saw us gathered there in Pack Square. The laid on their horns and yelled. But not everyone, of course, and later on in the day a man and two women emerged from a tavern, cloaked from head to toe in bright orange Clemson gear and staggering drunk. The women were leaning on each of the man's shoulders but when he saw us he shook them off so he could pull his phone out of his pant's pockets. Suddenly without structural support, one of the women collapsed immediately there on sidewalk- she didn't fall, she just sort of deflated to the sidewalk and lay there like a melted snowman. The man had pulled his phone out in order to film us, lots of people who don't agree with us stand there and take video, I suppose it's a tactic.

Then he was shouting at us, but it was an incomprehensible garble, a little bit about Trump but mostly about Clemson Football, he seemed to like them both. The other woman, the one who was still standing, pointed her phone at us and started yelling, "build the wall! build the waaaaallllllll!" Her voice was high, and wobbling drunk, and she held onto the last word until she ran out of breath, and I couldn't help but think, "they won- these people won."

Dave and I left the rally before sunset and drove to the Mountains to Sea Trail off of the blue ridge parkway. It was snowing by then, and the forest was black and white and lovely quiet, but despite my best efforts that last, prolonged word remained caught inside my head, ringing between my ears. 'Wwwwaaalllllllll....'

The old man scooped up the whole, roasted chicken for five dollars even and placed it with magnificent care onto the scanner. He looked me in the eyes and said, "Young lady, I have to thank you for being at that rally. I was on the phone all day yesterday with moveon.org, we're putting together a rally at Richard Burr's Hendersonville office for Tuesday and I'm one of the organizers."

I told him I was familiar with that upcoming rally, I thanked him for organizing it. 

"Are we going to give up?" He asked me.

No, I answered. 

"Are we going to get tired?"

No! I said, more effusive this time. 

He laughed. "Well, I certainly will, I'm an old man, but I'll just have a good night's rest and keep up the fight in the morning."

 As I was leaving the store, nearly out the door in fact, I heard him shout out: "Keep the FAITH!" He raised a fist into the air. 

"Keep the faith," I shouted back. And then the groceries were behind me, and I moved on with my day. 

(Here is the most helpful tool I've found so far in taking immediate and simple action. In just a few clicks, you will have a phone number, a name, and a script- everything you need to make a few quick calls.)

The unimaginable crowd : marching in Washington, DC

On Saturday I participated in the biggest protest in our nation's history. I marched in Washington DC alongside an estimated 1.2 million of my fellow Americans. On Sunday, white house spokesman Sean Spicer made his first appearance in front of the US press corp. He didn't mention us, the estimated 3 million marchers across the country or the crowds gathered in over 700 hundreds of cities across all seven continents, and instead blasted the press over accurately reporting the size of the inauguration crowd.  

Despite clear photographic evidence to the contrary, Spicer claimed that "this was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period." 

The first official appearance by the white house spokesman and it was a lie. Kellyanne Conway called it an 'alternative fact.' I fear that our new administration is composed of revisionists. I wonder what words they'll choose to minimize or mock the women's march, a staggering show of democracy that was conducted with total peace and civility. There was no violence, no property destroyed, no arrests made.

I'm grateful that I was able to attend for this reason- because I experienced the crowd, I witnessed the unity and the camaraderie, I prayed for peace and safety every moment that I was inside the capitol, and peace and safety prevailed. I saw police officers wearing pink knit hats, giving out high-fives, and members of the national guard cheering us on. I waved to the residents of the DC neighborhoods as they stood on their doorsteps, welcoming us in the morning, and in the evening, hoisting up their children to their open windows and shouting thank you. 

Mostly I will remember the crowds. I've never seen or felt or even imagined a crowd as big as this one. You could not move your arms or breathe deeply. The official parade route was scrapped because every inch of every street was packed with women, men and children. Instead we stood still, and waited, listening to the swell of cheers that would began at the stage and travel through the crowd across the city like the wave at a packed stadium. After a few hours the sea of people unlocked, mysteriously, and began to move in the direction of the Whitehouse. Our movement signaled the start of the official march, which now covered every street and every possible route. 

I expected counter protesters. I expected curious onlookers, neutral but not engaged. I expected rows of stone faced policeman forcing us to stay within the official parade route boundaries. For a week before we left for DC, I'd attended training in nonviolent communication, civil disobedience and safety tactics. Excellent information, but a situation never came up when it was necessary to use. Three women stood quietly on the sidewalk wearing Trump Pence scarves. The Bikers for Trump organization had no actual bikes to speak of, only a a picture of one, and they too were quiet. 

These counter-protesters were comically outnumbered, to the point where most people would not have noticed their presence at all. The bleacher seating on either side of Jefferson St. were packed with people holding signs begging for peace, decency and equality. The sidewalks were filled eight deep, people crowded at the windows of the government buildings yelling in support, the rooftops were filled with still more people clapping and cheering. At every street corner you could look left or right and see another artery crowded with people, all moving in the same direction, people in every direction for as far as the eye could see. 

Since I've been home, I've had friends ask me if the march was fun. No, not for me. I wouldn't have wanted to be anywhere else in the world, but it was not fun. In Asheville, just like in so many cities around the country, we boarded busses on Friday night and drove all night into the city. We arrived at 7am, walked for miles into the city, stood with locked knees drawing shallow breaths all day, walked back to the bus at night and drove south, arriving back at home at 4:30am. Between the anxiety and adrenaline of being one of the organizers of the Asheville contingency, and all my worries about personal safety, not to mention my ubiquitous struggle with insomnia, there was no sleep during the journey. It was too exhausting to be enjoyable.

I'm proud to report that I survived, however, and that my legs kept walking, although they did buckle at the end. I'm still treating Lyme, still symptomatic. My body breaks faster and in more creative ways than most. I was so worried that the stress of the whole thing would cause a flair, that my body would fail me in DC and that I would become a burden to those around me. Considering how cautious I am about my schedule, the energy I exert, my routine, my bedtime, this trip was ambitious- monumental, even.

To finally be able to pay attention to issues beyond my own health, to throw my energy into something bigger than me after 16 months of focussing solely on my immediate survival, how good that felt. How energizing, how blissfully normal. How not-lonely. We don't have word for that- not lonely- but that's exactly how it feels. 

It's Tuesday now, the march is behind us and the work is in front of us. After a few days or maybe weeks of resting and processing, I'll have more to say about what it meant to be part of that crowd. All I can say now, inside the haze of exhaustion, overwhelm and lingering Lyme, is that it mattered, being there. I've done many challenging, important and satisfying things in my life, but this one mattered more than any one of them.

Until next time, here is what to do next.

If you live in my town, we'll be at Odds on Tuesday evening writing postcards to our representatives.  

The Snow Days

There was a great storm predicted here in Asheville. On Friday, pale clouds blotted out the sun and snowflakes began whirling out of the late afternoon sky. Snow means something different here than where I grew up. Where I grew up, we enjoyed snowstorms, particularly the ones in early winter before the land grew grey and iced and tired, but life could not stop for them.

By Friday evening, the backroads were white and still, and the main roads were a mess of wrecks and spinoffs. Our house was already well stocked with food, so I didn't have to dash up the street to the grocery store. I put the dutch oven on the stove with broth, onions, carrots and celery and let it simmer. When Dave got home from work we wrapped ourselves up in our jackets and tore outside.

The snowflakes were still falling thickly. Dave had read that up to 15 feet was going to fall in the High Sierra, and we wondered aloud what that could possibly look like. I imagined being inside a mountain cabin and watching the snow as it overtook the windows on the first floor, then the second, and eventually buried the house until there was nothing left of it but a white swell on the hillside.

When I lived in Seattle I was a back-country skier. When I took my avalanche safety course at Mt. Baker there had been over 10 feet of powder to contend with. That had been too much snow. All I learned from that weekend was how exhausting it was to burrow out of endless snow every time you took a fall, which, under those conditions, was often.

The quiet streets of our neighborhood sparkled under each circle of light from the streetlamps. Our little dog romped ahead of us, burying her body into the drifts and then bursting out the other side looking surprised and joyful.

Every year in the Blue Ridge we get one big snowstorm. Schools and businesses are closed for the better half of a week, and the shelves in the grocery stores where the bread and milk had been stand empty, like big gap-teeth.  The town is very pretty and still, and people holding all manners of sleds (trash can lids, canoes, the rare actual store-bought sled, plastic cutting boards, trash bags) flock to the steeper streets to go sliding.

Saturday we decided to have friends over to play some games. Dave and I and the dog trundled up in the street in seven inches of squeaking-cold snow. It was only 15 degrees, which is considered to be practically arctic down here. At the store we bought whipping cream and a bottle of sake. Then since it was downhill all the way home, Dave sat on the sled, I placed the grocery bag and the dog on his lap, took hold of his shoulders and ran him through the street until he took off on his own. 

Dave whizzed past a man on a road bike with narrow tires, trying to pedal straight up the slick, unplowed street. The thin wheels refused to grip onto the snow. "I don't understand!" He remarked as I passed by. "This bike is new! This is a new bike!" 

Our friends came over that night. Our house is so small that we had to pile all the jackets behind us on the couch. The coat closet was full and the floor was covered in dripping winter boots. I made hot chocolate in the dutch oven. Hot chocolate must never be made from a package. You must mix plain cocoa with sugar, milk and a little bit of maple syrup- that's the secret. We whipped the cream by a shaking it in a mason jar, since we still don't own a hand mixer. If I never cave and buy a handmixer, maybe one day I'll own a Kitchenaid Mixer in the same pistachio color that my friend Cassie owns. But I also know that day will only come we find one abandoned on the doorstep, and then we get a bigger kitchen.

join me on instagram @thewildercoast

Our kitchen is very small, just a step above pocket-sized, and David laments over any new gadget or utensil that enters it, regardless of how necessary they might be. He says that counter space is our most precious commodity.

Everyone drank the hot chocolate, and the sake, and the honey gin we got from my dad for Christmas. We played Snake Oil, and MadGab, and after a few hours most of our visitors started bundling up to head home. Because the roads were effectively closed, they had all walked from their homes a mile away. By midnight, only Dan and Molly were left. Dan told a story about how he had been stranded on the highway the night before from 8pm to 3am, only three exits from home. By the time traffic began to finally move, Dan had to get out of his car and run down the highway, knocking on windows and waking up the other drivers.

Even though the storm happened on a Friday night, Dave's school closed for a day and half the next week because it had been so cold and the snow hadn't melted. I can't get any work done when he stays home all day. If I shut myself up in my room with my laptop he usually wanders in after ten minutes or so. "I brought you the dog," he'll say, depositing the warm little bundle next to me. Then ten minutes later, "I brought you a cutting board covered in different snacks." Even when he stays in the living room, I can hear the movie he's watching with our roommate, Erin, and I can hear them laughing. 

So I gave up on most of the work, and instead spent the day and a half cooking and baking. We played a round of Bananagrams which ended in an argument (because Pondscumming is not a word) and Farckle. By the end of the second day, the hygge began to wear thin and the togetherness was getting to us all. That was the end of the snow days, and the next morning regular life began again.

(Winter is one of my four favorite seasons, and obviously I have cozy on the brain. Southeasterners, check out the article I wrote for Blue Ridge Outdoors that blends Hygge and adventure. Pick up a copy of the magazine or read it online.  In Search of Hygge: 4 Cozy and Warm Winter Adventures in the Southeast. Congrats to my friend Derek, who nabbed the cover with his ridiculously cool photo, and my friend Anna who won the Blue Ridge Outdoors Most Influential Outdoors Person of 2016! )

Are we dating? - The friendship series, part 2

A climber friend of mine out in Seattle, one of the most self-confident and. . . for lack of a better word, cool, women I’ve ever met, sent me a text after I published my last blog post on friendship. “Are our 30s the decade of friend dating?!?” She then went on to lament about some of the pitfalls of modern day friendship, the same sentiments that I saw again and again the comments you left me here.

Leave it to Jen, a talented editor, to sum up exactly what I’d been trying to say in one hard-hitting phrase. Our 30s certainly are the decade of friend dating, at least for anyone who has ever moved to a new town, or had kids, or didn’t have kids but everyone else did, or had interests that changed over the years, or came down with a chronic illness, or worked a demanding job, or got married.

That’s an awful lot of us.

Just like dating dating, it can be time-consuming, frustrating, often fruitless, and every so often can lead to loving, meaningful relationships, without which life would be an empty husk.

Nobody wants to be husking through life.

But dating can take so much energy. And there are rules.

I really felt this instagram comment by @happythis: My good friend Emily and I were on a long car ride today, and commented how hard it is to find friends who like to DO stuff anymore. It seems so many don’t have fun unless it requires a lot of wine or a very expensive dinner. What ever happens to embracing play or even sledding?

 What may have stood out to me the most about this comment was that she was on a long car ride with her friend Emily. Long car rides with girlfriends are the best. I haven’t had one in quite some time.

Remember how luxurious it was when we had days and days to spend with our friends? That was the best thing about college- how an afternoon together could melt into evening activities, and sometimes we’d fall asleep at one another’s houses without having planned it, and then there we were running to the store to buy breakfast and another full day of hanging out had begun.

Whenever we had long stretches of time and no solid plans- that’s always when things got interesting.

We won’t have spools of time like that again for a long, long time, and I understand that. Everything has its own season. But I find it difficult to build those types of easy and intimate friendships just by coffee dates alone. I know that many people can find all the connection they need by sitting and talking for hours, but for a restless body like myself, I need to get out and do something together to truly start forming that bond.

That’s easier said than done.

The adventure I’ve had my sights on for a while, one that I’d really like to do with a buddy, would looks like this: I’d pick you up super early and we’d find coffee in town. Coffee is essential for this outing. Then we’d drive 2 ½ hours to Boone, listening to the radio and becoming more talkative as the morning progressed, and spend the day scrambling up the icy side of Grandfather Mountain. Then the long drive back to Asheville, dinner somewhere on the way home- we’d be starving- and ultimately I’d leave you back at your place.

Or maybe just half a day to wander around town together, browsing in the bookshop and looking into shops with no real agenda, no purpose or errand or greater cause driving us other than simply wanting to spend time together and be laid back and not have to make eye contact the entire time.

Those days are very precious and very few and far between, for most of us. Even for old friends, it’s rare to find someone who will commit to more than a few hours. There are too many demands on our time, 40 hours is a lot of time to be at work each week, and most people work more than that.

This is true, but I know that if I was more efficient, and better at organizing my slices of free time, I could easily pack them all into one entire carefree day. And I’d love to give that day to a friend. It would take some coordination, communication, commitment, time investment- all freaky things if you’re ‘dating’.

Now, speaking of time. I believe our time together today is over. It’s been snowy here in Asheville, and I’ve been home for many days in a row. Probably time for me to walk into town. I’m in my thirties, after all, it’s important for me to put myself out there.  

Wait a second- am I a loser? - The friendship series, part one

Am I the only 31 year old who feels stressed about having a birthday party? And I don't mean that I get stressed in the two weeks before the big day- I feel vaguely concerned about the concept all year long. Here's what worries me about having a birthday party - or any sort of party for that matter : I'm not sure if I have enough friends.

Then again, how many friends am I supposed to have at this point in my life? Do you ever see a photo online of some merry gathering going on around a wood-stove, everyone wearing wool and flannel, and do you ever ask yourself how in the world does this person have all those friends? How did they all meet? And how did they all organize themselves to be sitting in front of that wood stove all at the same time? How is it that half of them didn't bail because they were too tired after work?

Even more troubling is when I see the Merry Gathering happening in person. I swear the West End Bakery hires people to sit in large groups, share muffins, and laugh. How else could those people all be gathering and enjoying themselves in such large numbers on a Tuesday afternoon?

Here's my social life history, in a nutshell. I lived in Seattle for eleven years, age 17-28. I went to college for 5 years and I stayed. I had boatloads of friends. It was ridiculous. I had friends from my college ultimate team and Riot and five year's worth of city league teams, and friends from the climbing gym, I had my crew on the boat as we were thick as thieves, I had my lifelong college friends and I had friends who kayaked, skied, and hiked, I even had a handful of high school friends who had drifted out West over the years, and I had my best friend, Lisa.

Finding it all a bit overwhelming (also, I was priced out of that city, a different story) I moved to Asheville, North Carolina when I was 28. I knew one person, my old friend Yonton, a true champion in my life. I started seeing Dave my second night in town. I was thrilled to have a real boyfriend, until then I'd only had quasi-boyfriends. Having grown up and gone to college in North Carolina (and gone to camp nearby- we all know how important camp can be) Dave had lots of friends. Some of them became my friends. But they are always his friends first- that's just how it goes.

So I had Yonton, and I had my boyfriend, and we had Dave's old friend Erich. Erich became my very best friend (with the exception of Lisa.) We spent all day together working and studying, and when Dave finished his work day he'd join us and we'd hang out for the rest of the evening. Erich is sardonic and dark and very, very smart. We got along so well, and that along with living in the happy haze of dating Dave and living with Yonton meant I never really wanted for anybody else. 

Then Dave and I moved in together and got married, Erich had the gall to leave us for medical school, and I got very sick. I got so sick in fact that some people did not want to spend time with me. I was skinny, my teeth chattered, and I scared them. I could no longer run around and go mountain biking or drink beer afterwards, which is all the things I used to do with my friends. And those who did stick by me had to put up with a lot of my canceling at the last moment. That wears on a friendship, regardless of the circumstances. 

I didn't have much to talk about in the last year. I was a little bit depressing, I can own up to that. 2016 really took a toll on my social life. However, as I start to bounce back, I'm realizing that making friends in your early 30s is hard, and keeping friends is complicated- chronic illness or not. Some days I feel really lonely. Other days I'll feel perfectly satisfied and connected. Some evenings I want to go out with a friend more than anything else in the world, and the next day I'm praying the phone does not ring. If I make plans on a Monday to hang out on Friday, I'll spend the whole week wondering why in hell I made plans! Then Friday comes along, I drag myself out of the house, and end up always having a really good time. None of it makes a lot of sense. 

In some ways, Dave and I are still very social. People are always coming to visit and staying in our extra room, which is technically my bedroom. My husband and I each have our own bedrooms, which I would recommend to anybody, but that's a different story. 

I'm always changing the sheets and preparing that room for another visitor. But to be honest, they are mostly David's camp friends who are visiting Asheville on the way to somewhere else. I can't count on them to be in town for my purely hypothetical and much-dreaded birthday party. 

I spend a lot of time by myself, as I've mentioned here many times. I choose to have it that way. But sometimes, after sun set on a Thursday or Friday night when I'm cooking dinner and listening to the radio, the question falls from the ceiling and lands on my brain: 

Oh my God. Do I have any Friends at all?? 

Of course. The answer is yes. But let me rephrase that question. 

Do I have any friends who live nearby, who would absolutely definitely attend my birthday party if I were to plan it two weeks from today?  One or two, yes- but a whole birthday party's amount?

That is a stickier question. It seems as if the entire business of making and keeping friends in this stage of life- adulthood, post-college, late 20s, thirties- is a whole lot tricker than it used to be. The very concept of having a friendship, what you want to get out of it, what you're able to put into it, has become more of a challenge. Sometimes I wonder- and I'm not proud of this, but I wonder if I even want to have many friends. It feels easier sometimes to just go about things alone. I think that's a deceptive feeling, but it's there.

I mentioned this topic on Instagram yesterday and the response was quick. Here are a few of the forty-odd comments I received :

@Jennikawatson : SO TRICKY! The more life experiences we have, the harder it is to find people we have stuff in common with who are in similar mindset/stage of life (I think??)

@Snider.love : Ughhh it's so true. I also find it being so exhausting. I love my friends from college...even if they live a million miles away. And yes I know I should have local friends. But ohhh the effort alone sounds yuck! 

@hello_rebekah : It's so tough! For me I think it's actually been a period of redefining what friendship is - and what it is not. You know, what I expect from friendships (not much it turns out) and what expectations I am not willing to have others place on me. Also I've spent the last decade or so moving around like a nomad so that adds an interesting layer.

@jesgearing  : Totally just got waaaay out of my comfort zone this week and asked an acquaintance out on a friend-date. I mean, I didn't word ti that way, but that's how it felt. She came over, we drank kombucha & made cauliflower steaks, and we chatted it up for hours. Turns out we're both feeling alone &unsure in this town. Asking was so hard...but totally worth it. 

@midbynorthwest : so awkward! And getting into new friend circles is the worse.

@lissmiss : Really hard, you have to be so much more intentional with your relationships, and there aren't natural places (like school!) where friendships are so easy they're taken for granted. I'm also increasingly more picky about the people I spend time with, which further complicates things. 

@ashley_mersereau : it's sooo hard! Like people have mentioned above, it kind of feels like dating. 

To my great relief, I'm learning that it's not just me who has been grappling with this for the last few years. I used to wonder if my blog readers had picked up on my dwindling social life, but I was too scared to bring it up. For the record, I do have people here in town with whom I've grown extremely close (I almost titled this post 'Thank God for Whitney') - it's just that I have less of them than I ever have. And despite some evidence to the contrary (I won't say all evidence) those Saturday evenings when I'm cooking and listening to the radio and generally enjoying myself, this one ghastly thought will often come barreling into the kitchen and ruin the whole evening: 

Oh my God. Am I a complete loser? 

Loser. That's a terrible word. I would never use that word about anybody else, except for myself during particularly vulnerable moments.

And then I'll think- But how could that be true, how could I be a loser when I feel very satisfied and content most of the time? Sure, I have the normal frustrations and failures and non-starters (actually, probably more of those than average lately, although it's hard to gauge since nobody talks about it) but generally- I'm doing alright....right?  

I've been thinking like this for quite a while now. I never had the guts to bring it up before, because I always figured my blog was my brand and my brand was me, and if I opened up about my insecurities over my social life everyone would run screaming from my general direction and it would become a whopping self fulfilling prophecy. 

I guess now we'll see if that's true. There is a lot to say on this topic, as was made clear on the instagram comments. Consider this the introduction post in a small series. If you'd like to join to conversation then leave your thoughts in the comments, and we'll discuss them in the next post, just a few days from now. 

Until then, take care of each other, keep warm, and remember : listening to the radio and cooking up a little something for dinner is a perfectly respectable way to spend an evening. Especially in the winter.  

the demogorgon

How do I put myself back into the world after being absent for an entire year? That's the question I find myself facing in these early days of 2017. In some ways, 2016 was easy. Well....no. Not easy, but at least straightforward: I was so sick that working a full time job was out of the question. I'm proud of the way I kept freelancing, met every deadline and started a photography business, but if I had a slow couple of weeks I could still feel satisfied that I'd accomplished my most important goal, which was to stay alive. By the time I was finally diagnosed with Lyme the December before last, the infection had reached my brain and it easily could have killed me. Fighting it off didn't leave me too much time to do anything else, but I outsmarted it. I lived.

And now I'm a year behind. In my career, my social life, starting a family, saving money, traveling (in so much as I want to travel) whatever- all of it. I was a sharp student my entire life and now that school is long over, I've been held back a grade.

Being behind is one thing. The lack of momentum that accompanies having been benched for a year, that's another. That's even worse. Inertia's a tough thing when it's working against you. I find myself drumming my fingers on the table without noticing- over Christmas I did it during Bananagrams and it drove my sister crazy. It's something your fingers do when you're restless, when you don't know what to do next.

If you think I'm complaining, look, I'm not complaining. Any day that I wake up and I can move my limbs and my eyesight doesn't go in and out is probably a day that you won't find me feeling sorry for myself. I'm just telling you what it's like for me, trying to merge back onto the highway after being broken down for so long. I spend a lot of time by myself, which I've always done, but even more so these days. I work, cook, clean, read, edit photos- all of it alone. It's just how I want to be right now. 

Thankfully it's winter, a good and natural time for hibernation. Every three days I make a broth out of a chicken carcass and three marrow bones. I leave it to simmer for fourteen hours and then I make a soup out of it and we eat that for two days. Then it's time to roast another chicken. That gives a nice little rhythm to the week. That probably sounds bleaker than it should- we like the broth. It's good for us. It'd be good for you, too. 

Every night, Dave and I lie in bed and listen to an hour of the King Killer series on audiobook, the dog snuggled between us. My husband is one of those lucky bastards who has to put in a concerted effort not to fall asleep after 7pm.  He always drifts off before we're done listening the story and the next night I have to catch him up, which gets complicated.  

I like spending time with my friend Anna. Together we're organizing the Asheville contingency headed to the women's march on Washington on January 21st. I'm pretty new to community organizing. Anna claims she's new, too, but she's a natural leader and she's very eloquent. On one hand I'm grateful that the march is coming up, because the news about Trump - whether it's the nukes or the tweets- makes me feel lightheaded with panic and deflated with fear, and at least we're doing something. 

Action is the only antidote to fear. When I finally realized this I threw out all my Deepak Chopra books. Actually I only had one and I gave it to Goodwill. I'd never throw out a book. I'm not a spiritual person and I don't necessarily want to be. If someone tells me to Be Present again I'm going to lose it. I can't think my way out of the horror of this new administration, nor am I going to radical self care myself into enlightenment. I don't wait to ruminate and make myself feel fluffy and soothed, I want to do shit. More and more, I don't feel like I fit in with the zeitgeist of flowery talk about authentic selfness and white linens and Rumi quotes beneath instagram pictures of faded mountain scenes. But that's another story, for another day. 

I'm excited for the march, and I'm happy to spend my mornings with Anna sitting at the cafe and organizing the rally busses. And on the other hand, I'm terrified someone's going to drive a truck into the crowd and kill me. Or, worse, something bad will happen to my parents, who will also be there. I think everyone who is going is a little scared. And we're all going anyway, I guess.   

When I want to relax and feel happy, I think about taking photos. Nothing in recent memory has made me this excited as the photography business that I started, Wild and Bright Photography. The last time I did a family shoot, I left the keys in the door because I was in such a hurry to get to my computer and start editing the images. On New Years Eve I was the second shooter at a wedding of two young men from Atlanta. I was working with an exceptionally talented local photographer and I felt very much like a grasshopper. I worked as hard as I possibly could. I watched him and everything he did very carefully. I loved every second that went by. Photography makes me feel woozy with excitement, far more so than writing ever did, although maybe I'm just remembering that wrong. 

As for writing, I think I want to take the pressure off for a while. I need a break from the click-bait and the listicles. And I don't need everything on this blog to be my finest work. I just want to talk to you guys a couple of times a week, and record this particular time in history because it's a strange time. It's a fearful period, certainly, at least for me and every single person that I know. But hope is a strange creature that shows up on the doorstep when you're least expecting it. There's work to be done and every now and then I experience a few moments of keen interest and commitment to doing that work, whatever it takes. 

For me personally, that work involves a lot more healing. I still go to treatment about four times a month. I am still exceptionally careful about what I eat, how I sleep (if I sleep, let's be real), what medicines I take, how much energy I'm exerting. I'm symptomatic, although it may not be as obvious as it once was. I no longer shake, seize or convulse. I don't stutter or wince or say the wrong words. Most people think I'm all better, and while I'm much better, I'm not all the way there. I feel like the kid at the end of Stranger Things who puts a brave face on for his mom at christmas, but then you see him going into the bathroom and barfing up a slug, and you know he's not entirely free of the demogorgon.

The work is also work, itself. I need to start writing longer pieces in a shorter amount of time, and photographing more families throughout the southeast, and maybe find part time work somewhere where I could have a co-workers, and a holiday party to attend next year. It's a rough thing to have a holiday party when you work alone. Sometimes I daydream about being part of the crew at Trader Joes, part-time. Once I'm entirely sure I'm healthy enough to have co-workers that depend on me, I think I'll put in an application.

And as for the rest of the it- we do that work together. Read the paper and the articles that aren't created in the basement of some teenager in Maldova. Keep an eye out. Don't be fooled into thinking that it's normal to have a president elect who refuses daily security briefings. Take care of one another. Don't isolate yourself. Be present.

Nah, I'm just fooling with that last one.   

Petrified

My trip across the Great Plains was painful, but the thing about chronic illness is, even when you never ever could have pictured yourself as a sick person before it hits, you do eventually grow accustomed to it. The world keeps spinning even when you're shutting down, and after a year of thinking only as far as the next fifteen minutes, having the energy to worry only about your anemic marriage or how to afford the next round of injections, you will eventually turn your focus back to the world again. Because you belong to that world, after all, and you care about things beyond your bedroom. Deeply. As soon as you're feeling a little bit better, you'll turn on the radio. 

That may or may not be a good idea.

Join me on Instagram @thewildercoast

During my trip to Nebraska, it felt like the world was spinning more quickly than I'd remembered. I'm sure the violence at Standing Rock had been a reality for a long few months but we were only just now beginning to hear about it. Donald Trump, at that time the GOP nominee for president, was holding an invisible rifle up to his eye and telling his 2nd amendment supporters to 'take care of it.' Racism, bigotry and anti-semitism had been given a new breath of life; it was emerging in livid pockets across the country, like sores. 

I watched the TV at the airport terminals in Asheville, Atlanta, Denver, DC and Boston. I spoke with a woman sitting next to me who said she considered Donald Trump to be a Godly man, despite the 'naughty boy' things he was prone to saying. At that point, Hillary Clinton held a steady lead and no one on NPR seemed to think Trump had a chance, still, I began to feel a bubble of panic begin to take shape beneath my rib cage.

I felt it as I visited Ash Hollow and knelt down to touch the twin indentations in the earth, ruts left by the wagons as they rolled West on the Oregon Trail. The fledgling panic distracted me as I visited the grave of the unknown cowboy on Boot Hill, and the crumbling headstone of a pioneer woman who died in childbirth, whose body by some glitch of chemistry did not decay but became petrified instead, hard as marble with her death grimace perfectly preserved.

At sunset I visited Carhenge, as one does when one visits Northwest Nebraska. Carhenge is exactly what it sounds like: a dozen or so automobiles, planted hood-down into the earth and arranged in a ring, like Stonehenge. An older lady struck up a conversation with me, apparently inspired by the surroundings, about what a shame it was that Ford was moving all its plants to Mexico.   

Ford has never planned on moving to Mexico, for the record. The unease swirled inside of me like a storm kicking up over the ocean.  

The lightning pain in my joints pulsed with every breath, yet Somehow the idea of Donald Trump becoming the next president of the United State acted as a mild analgesic- the thought was so terrifying that the soreness paled in comparison. Still, the pain prevented me from doing everyday things with any sort of grace- clicking the shutter button on my camera with my index finger caused my elbow to explode. So did lifting a fork. I left a number of plates of steak and baked potatoes untouched. 

A few things stood out as being very enjoyable : the Hudson-Meng trail that threaded through the Oglala Grasslands at sunrise. Exploring the Nebraskan Badlands, which looked like Mars and Moab combined. Eating a piece of cinnamon cream pie (joint pain be damned). Stumbling upon an old clapboard cabin in the middle of a thousand acres of nothingness and hearing how a mail-order bride had arrived there from Scandinavia, set up a tidy home, bid farewell to her husband as he journeyed West to find wood to make a barn, was all alone for four months, and lost her mind. I pictured her shuttered inside her living room, rocking back and forth. I imagined her howling into the thundering silence of her endless front yard.

What a cush life we lead today. Incurable disease or not. At least I have neighbors. 

I took notes, called the magazine, organized my photos, and after five long days called it good. The trip back East, not to Asheville but to White River Junction, Vermont, inexplicably took 36 hours. As I said before, the whole entire trip and the timing with regards to the Mycoplasma was a terrible idea. I figured I'd bounce back to my new normal (New Normal, what a term, I'd love to slash that permanently from my life) when I reached New England, but not so. The joint pain in my fingers, wrists, elbows, neck, knees and ankles went from wracking to obscene to grotesque. Lifting the fork was now no longer an option. 

The Bad Decision

A couple of months back I flew out to Nebraska on what turned out to be a rather ill-fated journey. It was a work trip, and I'd been really looking forward to writing about a different landscape and breaking out a few new adjectives (in case you're wondering, the Blue Ridge Mountains here in Asheville are: rippling, lush, panoramic, soaring, and, well- blue.) But it turns out I was in such crippling pain the whole time I was exploring the Great Plains I nearly lost my mind, just as the many mail-order pioneer brides that had come before me. 

That's right, friends, I still have fracking Lyme disease. I've gotten used to being in constant pain, as it's been well over a year now. The fact that we as humans are this adaptable is both a a terrible curse, and the only reason I haven't put myself into a forever sleep inside a snowbank. It's easier to exist in peace when you can't imagine what normal feels like any more, but there's also less motivation to try and get better. What's better? 

The trip to Nebraska was particularly haunting, as I'd just reached a milestone in my ubiquitous, longwinded, nebulous and, always, agonizingly expensive 'treatment.' We'd just managed to destroy all 13 species of mycoplasma I'd been suffering from- the stealthiest of all the stealth bacteria. Cause for celebration, because mycoplasma can cause such inconveniences as repeated miscarriage, but also tricky, as they create the biofilm where the Borrelia bacteria can live inside of you forever, cozy and protected from whatever onslaught of antibiotics you throw at them.

Not heard of biofilm? You've seen it. It's essentially a slime colony of bacteria, nature's lowest, basest, most repulsive level of life. Biofilm covers your teeth in the morning and sends you dashing out of bed to the toothbrush. It's the ring of discoloration that accumulates inside the toilet bowl, the one you'd rather die ignoring then face it and live. That's what I have clinging to my organs and vessels and bone. That's where the still-living-after-all-this-time pockets of Borrelia live like seniors in a Florida retirement community, totally insulated, playing bridge, enjoying Holiday potlucks. Swapping genetic information.  

At least, that's how things were until the day I successfully destroyed my 13 species of mycoplasma, the biofilm dissolved, a swarm of living lyme was released into my bloodstream, homeless and vengeful, and I blithely hopped on a plane to America's heartland, all excited about seeing the Oregon Trail in person.  

I'm catching us up a bit over a series of blog posts. The story continues soon. 

Bloggers, Instagrammers and Everyone with a Platform: Here is How We Return To Documenting Normal Life Again

Dear bloggers, instagrammers, and anyone with a social media profile,

Photo by Margaret Anderson 

Boy, we've had it rough since the election, haven't we? Is it just me, or does it feel like an awkward time to be in the business of writing about life- big, fun, beautiful, messy life?! Ever since the lucid, waking nightmare that was Tuesday night, getting back to business as usual (in my case, posts about mountains, Lyme Disease and my dog) feels tricky! Because a big, bad thing happened! So, with all of us in mind, I decided to break the ice and write a post about how in the world we can return to filtering and documenting our happy (sometimes!) and messy (so messy!) sometimes funny, mostly precious, warm and wonderful lives:

We don't. 

We can't get back to our normal lives because our lives are not normal any more. The appointment of an Alt Right leader as Whitehouse Chief Strategist is not normal. Having as a president-elect be the only world leader who claims that global warming is a hoax is not normal. Talk of forcing Muslim Americans to register, the same way that Jews were required to register during world war II Germany is not normal. 

And we as writers and photographers and bloggers, we cannot be the ones to normalize it. 

The administration that is going to lead our country starting January 21st have made it clear to us that they don't need to bother 'normalizing' their proposed policies by softening their language or mincing their words. They were elected on a platform or blatant fear-mongering, divisiveness, bigotry and hate speak. They are not appealing to us- they never have been. They realize that over half the country will disagree with them fundamentally. They're not depending on us to outright support them- they never needed our support. But they are depending on us to ignore them. To make it easy for them.

They're hoping that we just return to our lives and pretend this is not happening, or be too exhausted or scared to speak up, to get out of their way and shut up and return to what we find safe, and comfortable, and soothing. 

Here is exactly what that would look like:

Rape culture just claimed a major win, and while that bothers me, I never took a women's studies class, so I wouldn't be very articulate, or very profound, so I'm going to leave that up to the feminist scholars and instead, I'm going to write about the camping trip I took last week.

A wave of hate crimes is washing over this country, shattering our society, causing my friends and I to feel scared when we leave the house to pick up groceries. How would I ever address something like that on my blog, or in an instagram picture? Instead, I'm going to write a particularly cozy piece about the holidays so we can all enjoy a few moments of comfort, we certainly need it.

I do not agree with the idea that we should rip apart families by deporting millions of people, but what you have to understand is, I'm a brand-rep, and I've been told to keep it neutral, because it's the holidays, and we have to sell these T-shirts. Or baby slings. Or moccasins. Or whatever. 

My blog is small, and personal, and could not possibly have any sway on the way others think. So I get a pass on this one. 

Or, let's get real here-

I worked for years building up my platform,  my readers, and this is my job, so I'm not going to 'out' myself as having any persuasions or opinions that could lose me a portion of those followers.  

Alright, so what- are we all supposed to go back to school and study political science and become experts in the field? Are we supposed to ignore our own lives because they're just not important any more? If I post a picture of my cute dog, am I enabling conversion therapy for gay people?  

Nah. Listen. Our individual lives are just as important as they were a week ago. Our cute dogs are probably even more important than they've ever been before. (Shout out to my dog, Hometeam, for absorbing with her fur a thousand tears that I've cried this week.) It's just that we have to learn to do both. Let's dissolve the label we've assigned- this blog is about babies, this one's about climbing, crafts, economics, religion, tips on decluttering the household- No.

We are all writing, in our own way, about the our current world and how we make sense and find meaning in that world. Period. And, for the majority of Americans anyway, our current world just blew up. 

It might be awkward at first. Let it be awkward. "And that concludes my photo essay about my toddler's winter wardrobe, and by the way, the idea of dismantling our national parks really bums me out because I really want to take said toddler to Yosemite, wearing the little fur jacket you saw in photo #4." 

Maybe it's your tagline : thanks for reading, everyone, love you all, Melina (who fervently believes that abortion should be kept safe and legal.)

Do we have to be so vocal every damn post? Nah. Will I? Nah. Here and there. When an issue of particular relevance to us comes to the forefront. Maybe when we feel particularly lost and outraged (as I do, every time I learn something new about Steve Bannon and the Breitbart News Channel, whose Headlines have read "Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy" and "Bill Kristol, Republican Spoiler, Renegade Jew." I don't know, just doesn't sit right with me.)  

Do we need to be addressing our outrage on every post and picture for the next four years? Of course not. We'd implode. We'd lose our minds, and what good would that do? But we have to be willing to try and strike a balance, even if it does feel awkward, or your hands get clammy, or you have to run to delete it the first three times. Courage accumulates gradually, like snow. 

Let's make it totally normal for regular people like you and me to have an opinion and to talk about it on our blogs and our instagram feeds. That should feel right. And while we're at it, let's have faith in the people who follow us that they won't instantly leave us, that they may actually be interested in what we have to say and appreciate the opportunity to engage with us on that deeper level.  

And finally, for those of you thinking: my blog is my own, and I can write or not write whatever I damn well want. Well, you're right. That's certainly what I shouted at the screen a few years ago when The Wilder Coast made its first appearance on the internet hate site Get Off My Internets. This is mine, haters, I can write whatever the hell I want to. 

As long as you're not being silent because you don't think you have any influence- you do.

As long as you are not backing down because you aren't an expert, or particularly well worded- you don't have to be.

Or because you're not unbiased- we're all biased. 

As long as you're not silent because you're scared of losing followers because what has happened and what is about to - potentially- happen, is a far cry more important than the number of people who look at your Instagram photos. I'm sorry. But you know it is. 

As long as you fully understand the ramifications of looking away because it's uncomfortable, or because it hasn't effected you personally yet. History has told what happens when we do that. 

I'm calling on you. 

Much Love,

Melina
(Who really, totally depends on affordable health care that does not discriminate against pre-existing conditions.)

(And, since we're doing taglines, is still, yes still, slowly, steadily, and with great purpose, moving through her thank you letter list!) 

What I should have been saying all along

Do not tell me not to get political. Do not write me to say that you read blogs to escape the news and the election. We cannot pretend that this isn't happening. For the last two months I've been too paralyzed with fear to write. Everything feels trivial, every post that I started felt completely useless, and so instead of writing about what matters I just stopped. Did I fear that a post like this would polarize me and this space (which it will), lose followers (which it will) and fill my inbox with nasty emails (which it will), or ever worse, the patronizing messages about how I need to keep it happy and cute and neutral, please, always? Was I really so afraid of that? Did I let that stop me? 

God help me. 

The fact that it took me this long to realize that it wasn't my paralyzing fear of what my country could be heading towards, or the despair that it's gotten THIS far with a hate-spewing madman like Trump that stopped me from writing, but my own fear about losing popularity- that shames me. I have a platform, regardless of size, and I kept quiet. I'm so ashamed. But I'm done being such a coward. 

If Trump wins, maybe I will be ok. I'm white, I was born here, I was raised upper middle class, I have resources, I live in a blue bubble in a red state. Then again, maybe I won't be ok. If Obamacare is repealed no insurance company would take me- not with my rap sheet of disease. What if I became pregnant, and got sick again, and there was a choice between my life and the pregnancy? What if Roe Vs. Wade was overturned, what would happen to me then? This is not an alarmist attitude. These are things that women everywhere have to think about, because it could happen to any of us, but particularly those of us with unpredictable illnesses. There more of us out there then you'd think. 

What if there was another unjustified, criminal war like the war in Iraq, and the economy tanked again, and both David and I lost our jobs? What if medicaid vanished, or social security? We both work very, very hard, but we live paycheck to paycheck, mostly because my disease has cost us everything. What if we lost our house?

But then again, we'll probably be ok. But what about the people in this country who are not as privileged as I am? Who already live in daily fear of being shamed or shot or picked on or left out or beat up? This is no comparison, but I drive around with a Hillary and Bernie bumper sticker on my car and I've been bullied, harassed, nearly driven off the road, I've considered taking those stickers off for my own safety but what about those people who can't peel off their ethnicity, religion or social status? If you're anti-Trump but you're choosing a protest, 3rd party vote- you may be just fine when he gets elected because of a privilege you may not even be aware of, but think about who will be effected, who will be punished by your choice. 

And what about our country itself? I LOVE this country, I have no doubt it's the most beautiful, giant piece of land in the world. I'm happy here. I'm proud of my country in so many way- not all way- but so many ways. My country does not build walls, or turn away those who are suffering, or ban entire sections of human, or label entire religions as terrorists, or give up on the poor or doom the sick- we're not perfect, we have a lot of work ahead of us but we're moving in the right direction. 

But enough with my liberal, bleeding heart. Forget about my opinion, just looks to the facts. Suddenly the far right seems to care about nothing except Immigration- the man's entire platform is built upon walls, xenophobia and fear mongering- but immigration is no more or less a 'problem' in this country than it's ever been before. Look at the facts. 

And stop saying it's a christian nation. The founding fathers (immigrants themselves) created this nation to be a place where anyone could freely and openly practice whatever religion they chose, the pilgrims themselves were fleeing from religious oppression, we all learned this in the 5th grade. "This government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion." - John Adams. Freedom of religion means freedom of religion, period.

Look, where I live, I hear people talking. People are angry because their jobs went overseas and the American dream starts to feel pretty damn out of reach when your job gets exported. I'm not pretending to have experienced that myself, but do you want to know why I'm a full time freelancer who pays out of pocket for private insurance? Because I CAN'T GET A JOB. I've tried, for years, I couldn't even get a job at Trader Joes, and I have a college degree and I'm really good at interviews. There are not enough jobs and too many qualified applicants, period. The moment I stepped out of college the economy tanked. I'm not lazy and I'm making it work as a freelancer but NOT for want of trying to get a full time job. It has been agonizing. I get that. 

But Trump is not bringing those jobs back. Nothing is bringing those jobs back- free trade is happening, right or wrong, and it's not turning back. We have to look forward. We have to invest in renewable, American-made energy- can you fathom how many jobs are waiting for us there? In state likes mine. North Carolina could be the top state in the nation for off-shore wind power and yet lawmakers here are trying to ban the construction of wind turbines. There go the jobs. While we're at it, HB2 (unnecessary, nonsensical, fear-mongering, polarizing) has cost our state 400 million and counting. We really could have used that money.  

Obviously I could go on, because everything is at stake. I won't go on, but I'll say this: if Trump is elected, I'm not moving out of the country as goes the liberal rhetoric. I'm not giving up and turning over my country to the people who would choose to elect the man endorsed by the KKK. I'm staying here and I will work to mitigate the damage, I'll involve myself in my community in ways I should have done years ago, I'll look after my neighbors, I will fight to take back our country in four years. I'll do what I am capable of to honor all the millions of people, democrat and republican, who have worked to create and preserve the freedoms and liberty that we all (should) have today and to keep moving forward because it will never be time to rest.

Finally, I'm so happy that I'll have so many of you to work alongside with when that time comes, or- even more likely- to celebrate with when Hillary Clinton triumphs on November 8th. It shouldn't have taken me this long to say all of this. Speak out, friends. No platform is too small. Do not fear the fallout. Speak out. 

brighter days

In the midst of it all, I picked up my camera again. I'd ignored it for a year- it was suddenly too complicated for my slow, foggy brain. Besides which, I wasn't entirely sure I wanted to remember this strange season, not in high definition anyway. 

Ever since David and I started dating I've meticulously documented our life together and created books of printed photos every six months. But the previous autumn, winter, and spring were nothing that I'd want glossily displayed on our living room table for friends to browse through. No wedding books or printed wedding photos either- I was terrified that if I kept getting sick, or if the medicine did not work as it does not work for so many people, I would have to leave Dave and go home to my parents house. I had to wait until I knew I would be okay enough to be a wife, till that time when everything wasn't so fragile; then the wedding would be real, then I could display photographic evidence of our marriage. 

By summer I was feeling better, better enough that not every one of our excursions was tinted with anxiety and fatigue. In the summer we would go days without mentioning Lyme disease; it began to feel like an afterthought. And so I created a beautiful book, filled mostly with swimming holes and waterfalls and rivers and lakes. When the book arrived in the mail, I declared summer officially over.

So I picked up my camera again, still rusty with the dials, but that will work itself out. I'm taking on work and marveling at how simple, even enjoyable, the articles feel as I type them out on my back porch. I still can't work from the coffee shops- noise is still very difficult, and I like sitting on our yoga bouncing balls instead of chairs. Chairs are too rigid, they make me squirm. One week I took on one article with Rootsrated, apprehensive to say the least. I remember earlier this year, sitting in front of the screen and crying, not understanding why my brain had forgotten how to write, how to form sentences, why my hands were shaking too hard to type. 

The one article took me a week instead of a day, but I got it done. The next week, somehow, I took on seven more. After that week, researching or writing from noon to ten pm I realized with a jolt- oh, hey, I'm back to work. How funny.  

When Rootsrated called and offered to send me to Nebraska to work with their Destination Marketing Organization, I was confident that I was well enough to travel. Believe it or not, it's rare to get to actually travel as a travel writer. I cover the Asheville area and the greater Southeast for the majority of my work, so I'm able to write from memory or imagination. But Nebraska? I know nothing about their outdoor scene, I'm excited to travel there on Tuesday and see a brand new landscape. 

I am looking forward to working again as a photographer. If you are local to Asheville and interested in a cheap session, send me an email : thewildercoast@gmail.com We can do a natural setting or someplace funky in town with all the crumbling stone, graffiti and railroad tracks. Because I'm just getting back into it, the rates are super cheap. 

I'm a strong proponent of photo shoots just for the hell of it. I don't think they need to be restricted to engagement, wedding and babies. I love shooting people just out with their friends or with their partner, no particular reason except they want to capture a nice day, a nice season of life. 

For New Englanders, I'll be home in Vermont from October 3-October 14th if you'd like to meet me there. 

I hope you enjoy these shots from a recent Saturday in the Blue Ridge Mountains with Erich and Melanie. It's so beautiful here. Autumn is off to a troubling start; this has been the warmest September on record and Asheville ran out of gasoline. My hope is that when I return from my three week trip to Nebraska and New England, the days will be crisp, the leaves on fire, and the blood they take every two weeks from my brachial artery will contain no more of this monster. 

If you're new, this blog is nearly 10 year old. You can read the whole story of my battle with Lyme Disease by clicking here.

Grasshopper

 As happy as I was to reach the point in my treatment where I could be off antibiotics for two weeks at a time, the addition of Rifabutin to the mix crushed me. Rifabutin is a bright orange diamond shaped pill most commonly prescribed to HIV patients, and it leaves you so nauseated that even water feels iffy going down.

During the first two weeks of this new protocol, I started losing weight rapidly. I’d already lost a little over fifteen pounds since starting treatment in January, a lot of it muscle mass, but I seemed to have leveled out around 125.

Now the pounds started melting away and new bones emerged in my shoulders, my pelvis.

I went to three doctors about my newly enlarged lymph nodes, until the last one told me they weren’t actually enlarged, I just didn’t have any fat to cover them anymore. The barista at the café wistfully asked me one morning what I did to stay in shape. “I try and eat healthy, I run- but I want to look like you.”

I didn’t know what to say. I’ve never been weaker or in worse physical shape in my life.

“A pulsed regiment of Cipro, Omnicef, Septra Double Strenght and Rifabutin” would have been an honest response, but a very unhealthy one, perhaps vaguely illegal. A beautiful young woman with a gorgeous figure longing after the shape of a girl who has been sick for a year felt like a dismal report on society.

One day I stepped on the scale at a practitioner’s office in South Carolina and saw the needle fall below 120. I’ve never seen sub 120 numbers since I passed them on my way up. 119, 117- I was now lighter than I was in middle school.

I started to panic. I pictured myself in an OB office, a doctor informing me that a sudden drop in weight could be responsible for my inability to have a baby.

My theoretical infertility and the inexistence of this theoretical baby was constantly looming in the shadows of my mind, the greatest punishment from a god I thoroughly do not believe in.

There’s something about weight loss, it makes people suspicious. My mother sounds angry on the phone, so does my sister. David remains tight-lipped, refusing to say anything that might endorse this new shrinking wife. Unless you’re sick from chemo, there seems to be this idea that you are secretly in on it, quietly crazy about all the pounds flying off.  If you really wanted to gain weight, how hard could it be? Just eat some ice cream. 

At first my doctors tell me to supplement my diet with even more ‘good fats’. That translates to avocado, coconut milk and almond butter. Unfortunately for me I can’t stomach those things any more, besides it would take an awful lot of avocados to really pork somebody up.

Anything I ate back in the winter and spring when I was severely ill and terrified all of the time taste like rancid medicine to me now. Same with all the powdered maca and random superfoods I ordered off the Internet and now keep in glass jars on exposed shelving in the kitchen. Those powders and infusions provided more than just nourishment over the past year. I became obsessed with them, stirred them into concoctions that I would stage, photograph and upload to an instagram account I’d created just for them. Their powdery promises of miracles soothed me to sleep at night. I perused the Moon Juice website for fun. They became my friends when I was too sick to have real friends. Now they repulse me, they taste sick and sad.

On the two weeks off from medicine, I pitch my strict diet right out the window. My doctor looks at my charts and tells me to eat whatever I can whenever I can. That evening David and I walk to the ice cream store up the street from us, and I boldly order a kiddie cone. Salted Caramel. I lick it and then I throw it away. The sweetness burns in my mouth.

In the next few days, however, my body begins to steady itself. No more HIV meds, no more Cipro, for two whole weeks. One night, out to dinner with Erich and our friends Cliff and Kate, I order a grasshopper milkshake. It goes down easy. Thus begins a regiment of daily, light green grasshopper milkshakes.

But 2hat about the inflammation? You might be asking yourself, clutching your glass vials of camu-camu. The casein! The sugar, for chrissakes! Fuck it. When you can’t win you may as well enjoy the taste of losing.

I go deliberately off the rails. I seek out desserts around the city even when I don’t really want them. The only thing I avoid is gluten. Long-term antibiotics can make you gluten intolerant for the rest of your life, even if you had no problem with a slice of bread when you were healthy. In ten days I take down a boatload of sugar. It would have shocked the pants off of my new community of autoimmune paleo lyme and MSIDS patients. I would have been kicked out of the club.

 One afternoon I take Whitney to a swimming hole up on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Whitney has been extremely sick for about two weeks, but I know if we can just get her to the water, the cold shock of it will help relieve at least a portion of her pain. It works out, we both feel better. In fact as we are driving home I feel so normal, so vivacious even, that I suddenly find myself daydreaming about an Oatmeal Porter from Highlands Brewery. Emboldened by my moment of good health, I blurt out, “Whit, what do you think would happen if I drank a beer?”

I expect a sinkhole to open up and swallow us down for voicing something so ludicrous. I expect Whitney to shake her head and tell me what a grave, grave error it would be. I haven’t tried alcohol for well over a year. I have the MTHFR gene mutation that makes methylation difficult, meaning I have problems detoxing even the everyday, unavoidable toxins. I spent the past ten months in what felt like one long continuous magnesium-salt bath, trying to rid my body of poisons. Now I wanted to drink a whole bottle of it?

Instead, Whitney says something truly shocking. “Nothing. I think nothing would happen.”

Later that afternoon, I hike up to Haywood Ave and buy myself a six pack of Oatmeal Porter from the Brew Pump, a gas station/bar hybrid that’s become the place to be in West Asheville. I half expected the cashier to stop me – “Woah, not for you!” in the same way that I half expect god will prevent me from having my baby. “Not for you!”

But she doesn’t even ask for my ID. I walk home with the sixpack in my hand, cutting through the Tuesday farmers market at the end of my street and ignoring the woman who normally sells me mason jars full of raw milk. I was going rogue.

Back home, I open one bottle and drink half of it. I wouldn’t say nothing happened- I become immediately intoxicated. While preparing my world-famous paleo pizza, I lose control of the knife and slice my finger so deeply that it would still be bleeding the next morning. I felt liberated and terrified. Then I poured a bath and sat in it, waiting for the world to end, or at least the hangover from hell. I had consumed half of a bottle a beer.

In the end, Whitney was right. Nothing came of it. I woke up the next morning and felt fine. Besides my new status as a mega-lightweight and a scar across my fingertip, it was entirely anticlimactic, which is exactly what I wanted. I didn’t want another beer, I just wanted to know that I could pose as a normal, healthy person for a few minutes and get away with it.

In fact, as the days fold forward, I do feel like a normal and healthy person, if perhaps a rambunctiously hungry one. I put on a few pounds and float through a string of miraculously easy days. Life seemed to be marching forward. Then Monday comes around again, with its twice daily handful of capsules. The nausea returns overnight.

“You would have been fine just losing a little weight,” says the stern god-doctor in my head. “But the yo-yoing, the up and down, that’s what’s costing you.”

Sometimes it all feels a little useless.

Click here to see all the posts relating to my Lyme Disease story. 

Rose Gold

This post is written with love to and solidarity with Heather Ann Brauer

We spent another weekend up at the farm, this time for Charli’s tenth birthday. Charli is one wild piece of moonlight, and Dave and I could barely keep up with the birthday party itinerary that Charles and Sarah had put together. There were presents and cake, a piñata, painting, a water balloon fight, slacklining and games of flashlight tag and Cherokee-Iroquois. After dark the forest was filled with flashing LED balloons and streamers, the kids covered us all in glow in the dark body paint, held spiting gold sparklers and roman candles, and long after I crawled into the tent, Charles let off a whole fireworks show. 

Do you think we’ll be able to pull something off like this for our kid?

David asked me at one point, genuine concern in his voice.

No flippin way

- I told him.

We’re hiring Sarah and Charles to throw our kid’s birthday parties. 

 Along with our Boone friends, Erich and Melanie camped out with us that night along with Rosie the dog, who has seizures. Erich suffered from acute Lyme disease this past summer but he’s getting much better. As for me, I’ve finally reached the two week on/ two week off portion of my treatment. I’m only one week in and I’m nervous about going a whole fourteen days without medicine, my immune system is very wobbly right now, like a fawn. But I can’t be on this regiment forever, I have to start weaning off the killers at some point.

This protocol is composed of extra heavy antibiotics. and after eight months of treatment my stomach has officially gone on strike. I’m on a diet of mush, just like a baby. I’m eating rice overcooked in bone broth and lentils overcooked in bone broth. Bone broth better be all it’s cracked up to be because I’m putting a lot of stock in it. (THAT PUN! YES! Yonton that was for you.)

From up at the farm, you can see a view of Roan Mountain and miles of rolling Appalachian on either side. On Saturday there were storms stretching across those mountains, with big silver showers of rain and strikes of hot, quiet lightning. Through big patches in the storms, the sunset glowed rose gold.

We burned old Christmas trees and Erich played the guitar. Erich is an incredible guitar player. This time he had babies crawling on him, and the babies were playing egg shakers and were so entranced by the music that they acted stoned out of their gourds. Maybe that’s what it's like to be a baby- you hear or see or feel something that pleases you and it makes you instantly stoned. Man. If only.

I was knocked flat with a migraine after the sun went down, but it was still a lovely evening. I just brought my pillow and blanket down to the fire and lay there, absorbing all of the nice things and people through my ears, and to be honest it was great to have an excuse not to play freeze tag. Those ten year olds swear that they’ll play by the rules but they never do.

 David later told me that it was hard for him to see me down for the count, again, but it wasn’t so bad for me. I’m not saying you get used to pain, the whole point of pain is that you don’t adapt to it, but once you can scrape clean a few layers of fear, guilt and disappointment and you’re left with straight physical discomfort, it’s not terrible. As long as the kids didn’t blow their whistles near my head I was totally content to lie by the fire with my friends all around me.

I anticipate perfect health sometime in the future, but right now I’m still recovering and I never expect to feel well. When I do feel well, and there are hours and days that go by when I do, it comes as such a welcome luxury. It’s like preparing for sleeping out under a damp and overcast sky and getting a meteor shower and a warm breeze instead.

I explained this to Dave and he explained that while he was relieved to hear it, he just couldn’t understand reaching that level of acceptance.

When you’re not given a choice, it’s incredible what you can learn to accept.

Huxley barked the whole night through and that big tent filled with girls never stopped shrieking with exhausted laughter, but I finally managed to coax myself to sleep with reading and trazadone, and another summer weekend up at the farm drew to a smoke and star-filled close.

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Photobook : 100 Years

Great Smoky Mountain National Park

Big Pharma and the Epi Pen outrage: maybe one day that will be a hipster band name and nobody will understand the reference, because the days of unfettered capitalism and a CEO's casual raise of 8 million dollars while kids die from bee stings will be long buried in the past. I love this country but it's got some big ass problems.

Today is a very special day, however, a day to celebrate something that this country did very, very right: our National Parks! And monuments, markers, memorials, preserves and scenic trails byways. Today our National Park System turns 100 years old. David and I celebrated (a few days early) by hiking into the Great Smoky Mountain National Park right over the Tennessee border and finally exploring Midnight Hole.

Great Smoky Mountain National Park

Great Smoky Mountain National Park

While I've written about Midnight Hole many times for outdoor magazines, I've never actually visited there myself. Reason being is that our sidekick shorty, Hometeam, is not allowed inside the GSMNP, and it's no fun exploring without her. Well.....except just this one time. That place is so heavenly green, it really is just like swimming inside of an enormous, ice cold emerald. David and I had such a nice, easy breezy afternoon inside the Smokies. I came home feeling so grateful to the park for providing us with a place where we could feel so happy, healthy and normal again.

That led me to think about what a role the National Parks have played in our relationship: Dave and I never would have met if I hadn't run Colorado river through the length of the Grand Canyon in February eight long years ago. We got engaged on the Appalachian Trail, the National Scenic Trail that connects our home in Asheville to the backyard of my childhood home in Vermont. We explored Acadia on our honeymoon and have depended on brief excursions up the Blue Ridge Parkway to keep us sane during this past year.

Of course we were both busy exploring the parks long before we met one another. I spent a semester in the Southwest in high school learning to climb and camp in Zion, Arches, Escalante, balancing along the razor sharp ridge of Angels Landing and running through the Hoodoos. Then eleven years in Washington - between the Olympics, the North Cascades, Rainier and all the monuments and reserves, they may as well go ahead and turn that entire state into a National Park. I worked on the Endeavour on the inside passage of Alaska getting my mind blown every single hour of every single day with calving glaciers, the frigid stillness of Glacier Bay's silty turquoise water and the enormity of it all. For my high school reunion we roamed through Yellowstone and on a solo drive across country I managed to witness the strangeness of Mt. Rushmore, accompanied by my gentleman's flask.

Here are some shots from over the last sixteen years of exploring. These photos make me want more! I cannot believe I still haven't been to Yosemite, maybe that should be next. (After the Badlands, of course, since I've only been to South Dakota once, and also Glacier National Park - I'm ashamed I've never been there because I've spent weeks in Whitefish, just never went inside the park boundaries, and obviously I should visit the volcanoes in Hawaii, and.......) Alright, I need help: what's your favorite National Park?

Yellowstone National Park

Yellowstone National Park

Grand Canyon National Park, Ammen Jordan Photo

Grand Canyon National Park, Fay Roepcke Photo

Grand Canyon National Park, Ammen Jordan Photo

Mt. Rainier National Park

Mt. Rainier National Park

Mt. Rainier National Park

Glacier Bay National Park

Glacier Bay National Park

Glacier Bay National Park

Glacier Bay National Park

Mt. Rushmore National Memorial

Acadia National Park

Acadia National Park

Acadia National Park

Acadia National Park

Ebey's Landing Historic Reserve

Ebey's Landing Historic Reserve

Ebey's Landing Historic Reserve

Grand Canyon National Park. Photo by Ammen Jordan

Grand Canyon National Park

Grand Canyon National Park

Appalachian National Scenic Trail

Blue Ridge Parkway

Blue Ridge Parkway

Escalante National Monument

Folly Beach

this post is written in gratitude to Teal Emyln, who has shown me such warmth, love, and art.

Over the course of the past year, I haven't given much thought as to whether or not the people in my life, from the readers of this blog to my closest friends, have believed -for lack of a better word-just how sick Lyme Disease has made me. The pain, fatigue and insomnia are so vicious and destructive when they swell that to even consider having to validate them to others is a ridiculous notion. 

I know people who have struggled intensely with this issue, their level of disability and despair are challenged by the very people who should be providing them with the warmest care and most tender support. 

I've managed to escape, for the most part, this particular callousness, but there will always be those whose judgement can never be avoided. If you post pictures of yourself from inside the deepest of gloom, hospital gowns, oxygen tubes, the rumpled self portrait of the third consecutive day in bed, pale skin, dark eye circles and sweat- then you're asking for pity, stuck in a self-perpetuating cycle of negativity and inactivity, driving yourself towards decay with full compliance.

Just get out of the house, go for a walk, you'll feel better!

But when you project instead the image of all the things you still can do, standing in the sunlight, happy and at ease, color in your face and your hair is wet, eating at a restaurant with a friend or sitting with your back against a tree in the middle of a forest, good heavens, even exercising- then you're not so sick, are you?

We knew it. 

I won't go any further into it, because the last thing I want to do is set an example for other Lyme sufferers that they should ever have to feel the need to validate the new world that this illness has created for them, and all the outrage, pain and struggle that can exist inside of it. But I am becoming curious as to how my story, which has been stretching on now for over a year, is being perceived. 

More specifically, I wonder how I - the old me, pre-illness- would feel reading this story if it were about someone else. Every week I meet with one or two Lyme patients, and through hearing their experiences, as well as certain excruciating moments of my own, I have been exposed to a level of suffering that the old me simply could not have understood.

 I can see the old me growing frustrated with the character on this blog, the girl who keeps assuring everyone she's getting better and yet she's still not in remission, she still cannot work full time, still has no children, why isn't she working just a little harder? Her words are becoming monotonous, sometimes even inconsistent. What could she possibly be doing with her time? She must not truly want to be healthy. At this point, this has to be of her own making. 

Are these the type of thoughts that would be running through my mind if I were to have read this just two years ago? I think yes, although it's painful to admit that. I've had similar notions in the past towards others whose pain completely outside my realm of understanding, whose misfortunes seemed endless, although I would never have had the indecency to question, blame, or accuse them directly. 

I have a friend with a similar strain of Borrelia as I do. She is quick witted and funny, curious and smart and proactive. Recent photos show her laughing on a dock that stretches into a foggy lake in the early morning, cuddling a baby nephew at a birthday party with a look of dreamy contentment on her face. Yet she sleeps every night with a razor on her bedside table, the idea that she could choose to escape the pain and indignities of her illness being the most comforting thought to her, so soothing that it is what puts her to sleep. That is the maddening and nearly incomprehensible juxtaposition of invisible illness, and it makes sense to me if you do not understand. Two years ago, I certainly would not have understood.  

These photos are from a two day trip last week to Folly Beach outside of Charleston, South Carolina. Whitney had been spending some time on the ocean after a wedding, and was feeling so renewed and healthy being so close to the water that she invited me down for a mini Lyme retreat. The past week I've been on an antibiotic "holiday"as directed by my doctor, hoping that my immune system will kick into action and do some work on its own. These holidays are not holidays at all, it was a week of extreme fatigue and spasms and a pounding heart. You may have even seen me up on Haywood Avenue, sitting down on the sidewalk every few yards as I try and walk the dog. The five hour trip to Folly Beach sounded daunting, but I knew that water and sun and a change of scenery would be a real benefit to my health overall. 

We had a wonderful few days, but you probably would not have wanted to come along. Whitney's health began to crash when I arrived, and despite the slow improvement in my strength and energy that accompanied the joy of being on the ocean, I still couldn't venture more than a few minutes out of the beach house. We went swimming in the salty, sun warmed Atlantic, relishing the power of the waves crashing over our heads, and then laid down in the house with the shades drawn for an hour. Another excursion, this time to a local park on an estuary, but it was too hot and there was no shade- we paid the entrance fee but we had to leave. 

The trip was not without triumphs. On the advice of one of my readers, we found our way to the enormous, ancient "Angel Oak" on Johns Island. We found a farmers market with a cooling breeze and a Venezuelan food truck, we both slept well from the intense heat of the day, we ate Cuban Food outside in a rain storm and enjoyed one another's company immensely. I was able to return to the state park in the evening, when it was overcast. On the third day we had planned to venture into Charleston to explore a local homeware store I was interested in, and stroll down Broad Street, but instead we drove home. We were both crashing quickly, and what a luxury it was to not feel guilt about ending a trip early. 

I treasure these trips with Whitney, feeling such a close and almost cozy kinship with her. But the illness flared viciously for both of us upon returning home. This week, I gratefully began what should be my final, four month long protocol with the addition of Rifabutin, a brand new antibiotic for me. As soon as I was back on the killing drugs, I felt better, lighter and stronger. I am doing the work. I am doing all of the work. I want to be healthy again more than I've wanted anything else in my life- but then again, you understand that.  

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Thank you for helping me afford this treatment, which is not covered by insurance. 

Melina's Lyme Ninja Radio Podcast

How about a listen today instead of a read? Check out my brand new episode of Lyme Ninja Radio. This podcast has been a huge source of comfort and information, I've listened to every episode! I hope you enjoy and are able to glean something helpful from mine. Always feel free to contact me by leaving a comment here, or emailing me: thewildercoast@gmail.com