The Musings of a Latte Queen: Narratives of Everyday Life

  T oday is the Activities Fair at my husband's college, Housatonic Community College. It is my daughter's second day of senior year and when we register her for her UConn dual-enrollment. My daughter at Thee Jackson State University is still sheltering-in-place for the aftereffects of Hurricane Ida that traveled north and is headed to the Atlantic states.  All of us are in this season of shift, of change, of beginning. When I was younger, many moons ago, my late father convinced me to go to technical school (think trade school with academic rigor but not the English classes of a community college). I told him, "Dad, I don't want to be anyone's secretary." I said it with all the arrogance and indignity that my teenage self could muster. I had avoided all the Gregg Shorthand classes and secretarial classes at my high school with the entire trade school in the building. I wanted more. I was a product of the dreams of second wave feminism, before womanism was utt...

 This morning, I got up early and instead of my usual muse, I began the preparations. It is the first day of my last child's last year of high school. Back-to-school pancakes are a tradition, so I gathered ingredients while she and my husband grabbed a few extra snoozes.  This one, my second daughter, last child, is very precise about when she wanted to leave - 7:00am. I whisked together the butter and sugar and vanilla, added the milk and eggs, then the flour mixture, each turn of. my wrist, thinking of it being the last. Blueberries and strawberries were washed and put in a glass bowl, her favorite turkey bacon in the griller, water boiling for coffee, eggs seasoned and whipped for scrambling, Monday light streaming in the window, life beginning. Life, every day, beginning. As I poured batter on the hot griddle, those perfect little rounds keeping company with each other, I could hear her upstairs, stirring and gathering. What was she thinking? I flipped pancakes, set the ta...

 I've been thinking a lot about time. It is that thing that is not renewal, even if Auntie Maxine says it, we can not always reclaim lost time. My late father told me once, "Daughter, I have more years behind me than in front of me." He was only in his mid-sixties. I smiled at him, the way adult children sometimes do. Little did I know that Daddy would be gone from this earth at only sixty-nine years, six-months. Far too young. Time, not the way our capitalistic society, Androcentric, production driven culture of America, is not something that can be controlled, maximized, or even sold. But it can be taken. Wasted. Gone. It is a funny thought, to look back through the lens of years and years to contemplate what you have and haven't accomplished with your presence on this earth. Perhaps it is Covid and the Delta variant, maybe thinking about so many gone, or it is just that my youngest child, second daughter, is starting her senior year of high school. How did she sudd...

 Some days it really is hard. The past eighteen months have been like this. Almost as if breathing has been impossible, through a stack of bricks on the chest, wondering about the next move and if it will cost life, livelihood, living. Covid has been much. Adjusting to what it means in the middle of it and on the other side of it has been like swirling through a hurricane without preparation, a tornado, and being without any protection. Some days are really hard. Just naming that. Going back to normal, whatever that is, wondering if the comradarie felt during parts of the pandemic has warned when folks feel their power and control no longer needs to be under wraps on this side of emerging from what never should have been. How do we breathe? I have been counting breaths, trying to inhale deeply, feeling this big ball of holding it all in, my stomach filled with what has not been uttered. I'm not alone in this. Do we name our concern? If we do, does it even matter? Does it empower or...

 "This Hurricane was not giving," lamenting my teen daughter as she was snuggling in her bed this Sunday morning "Are you sure?" I asked "yep." "Well, better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it, " I replied So began our discussion after I emerged from Zoom/phone church where I worship at First and Summerfield United Methodist Church.   I forecast. I anticipate. I warn. I prepare. I wait. It is superpower, it is maybe annoying. Every big pot is filled with water. I live in the woods and we have a well and if we lose electricity, we won't be able to have drinking water or flush the toilets or even bathe. I take two showers a day, that is such a first world privilege, but it is my thing, not being able to clean myself is one of the things I prepared for. We have enough snacks for if all five kids were at home for the holidays and merging in and out of the kitchen. We have bottled water, sparking water, and I have lots of cara...

 There is a phase to preparing for a hurricane. The meteorologist watches the clouds, the way the wind twists and turns over the ocean, the trajectory of it on it's way to land, prepares.  Then, he or she gets on the news and begins to send out the warning. I hadn't had the news on for the past few weeks, honestly, with so much going on in other parts of my life, I was always exhausted at the end of the day. The news I gathered was online and even then, was limited, so I had no clue. Until I tuned in one day this week. Hurricane Henri. Sounded so exotic. Even the way the pronounced the name with the proper French accent. Then I began to get alerts, especially on Thursday and Friday. Prepare. The National Weather Service was already reporting on the tropical storm that went through Connecticut and left some parts north of me with flooded streets. Floods, being from Missouri, I knew how to ride out. A hurricane, not so much. By Thursday afternoon, I was taking an inventory of wh...

 Shift. Reclaim. Become I love these words. They were my anchor, my center, my guiding thoughts in each of 2019, 2020, and 2021. Leading up to January 2019, I knew some things were changing in me and my life but the word change was not enough to describe it.   I meditated upon that time of my life, entering my final semester of seminary, in the middle of an important stage of denominational ministry, in the second year of a public theology and racial justice cohort, and in a vocational wondering. Shift. to move or transfer from one person, place, or position to another . - Webster's New Word College Dictionary, fourth edition, 2012. That aptly described that year.  Little did I know how much life would change from January 2019 to January 2020. In 2019, my husband was President of a University in Missouri, my daughter was doing college searches, my youngest son was preparing his vocal Master's thesis, and we thought the world would move with the movements we understood to ...

 It was an especially difficult week to be Black+woman. In one week, I learned of a dear elder family member who contracted the Covid virus, during the rise of the Delta variant. She was one of the ones who hadn't been vaccinated, part of the generation of Black people who remembered American's deathly experiments on our bodies. She was in ICU fighting for her life. Thankfully, she is recovering now, miraculous. Then, we learned of the death of two prominent figures in our former town, one was the mother of a dear family friend who was a trailblazer for women in elected office. Then, the other, was a trailblazer in Black education, but a challenged leader for those who worked day-to-day with him, navigating that terrain was a journey of souls. I had a visit to my pulmonologist who said "if I didn't know your history, I would think you had COPD." I am a lifelong severe acute asthmatic, one of the reasons why I have been extra vigilant and careful about being around...