My Lawn, My Anxiety Shire. A podcast. An invitation.

This summer I signed up for Robin Wise’s Finding Your Voice online writing course with guest teacher Emily McDowell. We get a photo prompt every other day, totaling 28 prompts. I hold myself accountable to every prompt, writing both fiction and non. Occasionally, I share one on the medias.

My Anxiety Shire

The lawn never dries in back. All summer the rain and humidity gets trapped in its Rapunzel tresses, breeding mosquitoes and anxiety.

You can mow a dry lawn in 45 minutes. You can zone out and enjoy the back and forth motion, the satisfaction of turning chaos into neat rows–crossing one tangible thing off the household mental and physical load.

Not our backyard.

Wet grass clogs the mower–which promptly shuts down after one pass–kicking back a yard waste Bundt cake before sputtering to stillness. We wait a few seconds and try the pull-start more than a few times to get it going again. Multiply this sequence times ten or twenty to completion.

Our kids help mow the lawn, which eases parenting minds and labor – well, my mind specifically.

I hold a constant tally of all the work I did as a child compared with what we ask of our children, multiplied by all the life skills left to teach them. Next, I cross-reference this labor equation with the number of hours our boys stare at screens instead of playing outside, reading, drawing (or I don’t know performing alchemy, writing treatises, organic farming, mastering astral projection). This culminates with my swan dive into the abyss labeled FAILING THE DIGITAL GENERATION.

The big backyard and the floor-to-ceiling windows facing the big backyard made for big selling points when we chose our house 13 years ago. We never noticed any fine print reading GRASS GROWS AT CHIA PET TV COMMERCIAL SPEED AND NEVER DRIES (GOOD LUCK WITH THE YARD WASTE BUNDT CAKES! AND ALSO PARENTING!!)

Watching our kids mow the lawn from my kitchen–seeing this slow laborious task to completion–gives me a brief shining peace.

Inside Stories Podcast

Local storytelling stars Takeyla Benton and Jen Rubin invited me as a guest on their new podcast Inside Stories. I love working with both of them, even if they grilled me about casting, and then piled on for failing to include them in LTYM their first time around. You can listen here.  

Join 8/1 me at DreamBank

Whether you work in a service profession, give care to dependent family members, or feel helpless scrolling through your social media feed, serving other people’s hardship and suffering can overwhelm. In this energizing talk, Ann Imig, writer and founder of the national live-reading series LISTEN TO YOUR MOTHER will lead a discussion around cultivating strategies for coping with feeling too much, with nothing left to give. Participants will leave with a customized plan in hand toward serving ourselves as we serve others. Get your FREE ticket here.