A Trip To Iowa For A Family Graduation

Jotting down and scheduling this post ahead of time, as when it's published I'll be away on a lovely trip for a friend's wedding (plus a vacation we tacked on to the end of it). May is a busy, travel-filled month for us. Here's a recap of our recent trip to Iowa to attend my cousin's college graduation!

We arrived on a Wednesday morning around 1:30pm after flying into Des Moines. Even though Chris and I travel a decent amount, we don't typically fly together. Often, he's visiting me or we're meeting up somewhere! So it always feels like a treat when we actually are on the same flight and sit together. 

After landing, we picked up our rental car. For some reason getting a completely ridiculous but fun Ford Bronco off of Turo was the same price as renting something far more boring from the airport, so how could we not?

We spent the rest of the day meeting up with my cousin Ena and her boyfriend at Zombie Burger, then heading to my great Aunt Mary's house where we were going to stay for the weekend. We went for a walk, had a coffee run to Reading in Public (which was so cute), and then dinner at ice cream at home. 

The next morning, we had a slightly lazy morning before heading out to pick up my mom and aunt from the airport and then getting brunch as a big group at The Breakfast Club. After splitting up into a "nap" group and "explore" group, we headed out to the Des Moines Botanical Garden. My Aunt Mary volunteers there and it was so fun for her to show us around! After that we explored the Sculpture Park, before Chris and I stole away just the two of us for a happy hour drink at Exile Brewing. We followed that up with a coffee run to Smokey Row before taking a family drive about an hour south for dinner in my cousin's college town. 

Friday morning Chris and I went out for breakfast just the two of us to La Mie Bakery. The pastries were incredible! It was so hard to choose and honestly I wish I could have tried everything. We also ordered Cafe Au Laits which have been our go-to coffee order when we want something special but want it last longer than a latte. We picked up my mom and Aunt Mary for lunch at the local drugstore where I think every single customer knew Aunt Mary, and we each ordered a huge ice cream soda along with our sandwiches. 

This photo cracks me up.

The rest of Friday included resting up before heading back down to my cousin's college town to grocery shop for a family BBQ, check into a motel for the night, grab dinner with some other family, and then go out with a bunch of college kids. It was a good time! 

Saturday morning we woke up in town and had a much-needed greasy breakfast sandwich at Smokey Row while watching a downpour. We showed up early to graduation to save seats, then has a family BBQ while keeping an eye on a tornado watch. We even heard the tornado sirens going off a few towns over! A very midwestern moment. After a lovely day chilling with family and sitting outside, Chris, my cousin and I stopped at a tap room for a few last drinks before Chris and I drove back to Des Moines. Sunday morning we were up bright and early, on our flight, and sitting in our apartment by 1:30! 

All in all, a great few days with family and a wonderful little re-set while life at home and work was starting to feel chaotic. Looking forward to an even longer reset this week!

the right aesthetics

 

Tonight I am sitting in bed, stubbornly refusing to allow defeat on my Friday writing streak. Just three weeks ago, I decided that I missed writing and was re-committing to posting something on this blog every single Friday. I am sitting in bed, overtired, trying to make that happen. 

I didn't sleep enough last night, and my body is tired. My heart, though, feels almost unusually contented with the day. In my chest there is a distinct feeling of brimming. A persistent, if exhausted feeling of curiosity and the desire to mix things up and try something new. 

I've been feeling burnt out--a little crispy. Spring is a busy work season that comes on the heels of the other busy work seasons, winter and the holidays. Tomorrow is my last Saturday of the summer working (!) and I could not be happier. I am teaching my typical Saturday mornings schedule, and then there are shows at both skating clubs I primarily teach at. It'll be a busy day involving two rinks and essentially being on from 8am to at least 5pm. But when we are done--oh! I'm finding a cute restaurant with Chris and having a drink and releasing myself into a bit more languidness. 

Like seemingly the majority of younger-millennial women, my TikTok feed is filled with both *aesthetic* day in the life content and supposedly anti-aesthetic (bust still pretty cute...) lifestyle content. I eat it all up. I can't lie: I've been a lifestyle girlie from the beginning. When I first discovered blogs in late middle school, I would scroll to someone's first post and attempt to read the whole archive. In high school I wrote lengthy, existential emails to my favorite bloggers asking for advice that when boiled down came to: "how do I...live? Like, exist?" I do want to get ready with you. I do want to see what you eat in a day. I definitely want to see your 5-9 after your 9-5 and I love a dramatic anti-hustle culture audio over footage of your pretty productive day. I soak every bit of it in, and then I look around at my life and wonder how I could wrap this up in a bow. 

I think I have a more positive view on all this than most. I tend to believe most people are simply creative and trying their best; that people are just as authentic online as they are in real life (a place I've find to be surprisingly inauthentic) and that everything is fake and posed and filtered and we need to accept that and move on. But the piece that does strike a chord, is the desperation of everyone to find a little more light, space, and joy amidst a day of fitting into all of the boxes. 

A swipe of my thumb shows me younger and younger women buying flowers, making beautiful food, sitting on their apartment porches and reveling in the clink of ice against their metal straws. They pull their hair back and get to it, grinding through day jobs and side jobs while still pulling out their gratitude journals, taking a walk, making their beds. We can laugh at the pointlessness, the typical-ness, of a too-early morning routine that has you lighting the same candles as everybody else. We can wax poetic on how much of this we should believe, how they're too young to sound so war-worn and how maybe they would feel less overwhelmed if they put their phones down. 

Or--in a world that was built without their voices; after a girlhood where their preferences and dreams were trivialized, then commodified, then sexualized; after the lie of "doing the right things" leading to any stability--we can honor the bravery in showing up with bells on any way. This is a fight for survival, and we're refusing to even look ruffled. 

An Ambitious Life

Aunt Mary showing us the topiaries she cares for at the botanical gardens. 

This week, we are traveling with family in Iowa for my cousins college graduation. We are staying with my Great-Aunt Mary in Des Moines, about an hour north of where my cousin went to school. Aunt Mary is 83, bikes 10 miles a day "whether she needs it or not," volunteers at the botanical garden and has stories from travels all over the world. Her and her husband had a great relationship, and lived together in their cute little cottage complete with a potting shed. Aunt Mary worked full time up to a few years ago, when she felt she was too busy with her hobbies and volunteering to continue working full time. She's been a widow for 20 years, and while she clearly misses her husband--and talks about him often--she has also led a vibrant life filled with international trips with friends, birthday lunches, and so many hobbies. 

I've been thinking about ambition often. I've talked about how it feels like we are in the beginning of a whole new season. At times, I have felt lost with what I want work to look like and found it hard to claim anything I want in the future other than a vague sense of *vibes.* But there are so many ways to lead an ambitious life, and certainly, so much more to living well than having a big job. 

As we enter this new season, I want to take myself seriously enough to pursue my work as a proper career, to set myself up in a situation that will allow me to do work that is meaningful and fulfilling and fits into the rest of my life. In doing so, however, I want to acknowledge the rest of my life. I want to put energy into decorating a cute apartment, starting our marriage off on the right foot, taking time to foster our friendships and to figure out our new roles in our families. I want to plan fun vacations and spend our free time exploring the places we'll live. I want to have go-to coffee shop orders that feel fun and whimsical, and read books while curled up on the couch in the summer. 

My cousin, Ena, is graduating college. To oversimplify it, she is at a threshold of getting to make so many decisions about how the rest of her life will turn out. Move home? Go somewhere else? Which job to take? The meaner part of my spirit can be jealous of that clear, fresh start. I didn't leave home to go to college, I didn't have a clear first day at my new grown-up job, and I often feel behind because I never had a clear starting line. But I can give that fresh start to myself. At any moment, I can decide that we're moving, we're mixing things, we're changing our lives and upending everything to run faster towards the lives we desire. Lives that involved work but also lots and lots of play. 

In so many ways it feels like my Aunt Mary defies ageing. She is fun and comfortable, she has a great sense of humor, she still has new experiences and still has new thoughts at 80. She marvels at the world. I want that in my future, but I also want that today. 

noticing

 

We are in that typical New England time of year where we oscillate between desperation that it is still so cold out, and unbridled joy when the sun feels like we're already in mid-summer. Neighbors we haven't seen in months are suddenly outside on their annual dog walks. New noises drift through open windows. I am getting excited to have some outdoor plants this year. We don't have any private outdoor space, just a little bit of gravel around our parking spot and then a large porch connected to the shared entrance to our building. I want to put some pots of flowers out (maybe zinnias? and marigolds?) and attempt some tomatoes as well. I am being patient, though. Most of the time, the first warm day hits and I plant everything too early, dooming myself to watch their slow and anticlimactic demise. Instead, I've been taking my dog walks past the houses with the best, most cared for gardens and front porches. Like my own personal groundhogs, I'm waiting for the first sign of freshly bought mulch or clay pots pulled from the garage, the first hopeful tray of grocery store pansies sitting in the driveway waiting to be repotted. These garden houses certainly know better than me, and I'm trying to notice and follow their lead. 

I spend a lot of my time running around from one thing to the next, so much so that sometimes it's easy to miss that the underlying feeling of frustration underneath is my impatience that this is also a season of waiting. When I take the time to notice, I can see that both Chris and I have landed in a place we used to dream of. This June will mark five years since we've been together, and while that is such an incredibly small percentage of a life it is also a huge percentage of the time we've been adults. It feels like we've made it to the end of a chapter, and have checked off a lot of dreams: getting married, getting a dog, Chris working at a fire department, me skating in shows and coaching full time, an ambitious road trip honeymoon. I want to not just notice but to revel in these achievements, these things that felt so out of reach just five years ago when we whispered them to each other. But it's hard to revel in something when I am also finding myself anxious for the next step, itchy and restless and desperate for some direction so I can know who I am in the world. 

I am noticing that I spent a lot of the beginning of my twenties in survival mode, desperate to become someone and changing rapidly as I discovered who that was supposed to be. My inner world has settled more now that I am 26, and I feel more capable of looking at the whole picture of the person that I am. There are so may pieces I am dissatisfied with; how I cry almost every time I say what I think, how I can get so angry and combative before I've even noticed myself starting to get frustrated. I'm proud of the person I've become, but I also think I'm not always a good friend. I would like to be more level headed. I would like to feel like more of a grown-up to myself. 

This noticing sucks so much more than noticing when the first crocuses pushed through the snow, or when you can first smell the wet dirt in March. I hate it and I want to push it away. It's not a task that I can add to my monthly list, or an aesthetic little reset I can make a tiktok about. There is no quick fix. While I know it's good to look into the deeper recesses of yourself, I also just DON'T WANT TO and I really hate that in so many ways I am the problem. hi! It's me. 

I am noticing what makes me uncomfortable and what makes me comfortable. I'm noticing the thousand ways each of those is good and each of those is bad. I am noticing that I am in a season where I need to listen a lot more than I usually do, and I'm noticing it's high time I challenged my gut reactions, old dreams, ways things have always been, and the inner dialogue that tells me if I'm behaving the way I want to. I am taking the time to notice what is next, to notice where I am going, instead of racing there and misunderstanding the path. Someday, I would love to turn 36. I would love to have decade-old friendships and feel like todays demons are well behind me. And I would love to be in-tune enough with myself and with the world to know when a season is coming, and to sense when it is time to plant.