I live in Bay Village, a place I never imagined calling home. Growing up in Lakewood, we called it “the Bubble.”

In 1989, ten-year-old Amy Mihaljevic disappeared in broad daylight at the town center in Bay Village. It made the world feel suddenly unsafe and planted a fear so deep I once wondered if I could ever bring children into it.

Years later, I married, had three children, and somehow, ironically moved to Bay.

Then, in 2023, my nephew Gabe died suddenly. Last year, Dylan Veselic, a sixteen-year-old from my son Will’s class at Bay High School, died in a tragic lacrosse accident. Dylan’s family lived in the same house where Amy had once lived. Grief echoed through the same place, across generations.

Garden Song is about what we do with that grief—how we grow things, lose ourselves in nature, tend one another, and find small ways to keep love alive when the unthinkable interrupts a young life.

Gabe’s name now grows in a memorial garden in his childhood backyard in Lynnwood, Washington, among strawberries, rhubarb, and fig trees.

Perhaps this is how we keep them with us: by planting something that continues to live.

I Wish I was the Moon Tonight: (Neko Case) For the ladies of SEE YOU NEXT TUESDAY and my Lady Rangers Class of 1985

Adho Mukha Svanasana—Downward Dog—is my favorite yoga pose because it asks the whole body to work while giving the mind a little place to rest. It is a reset and a mini-vacation moment of the yoga flow without the pina colada.

This is why I love gathering with women. We bend toward one another, toward the earth, toward whatever is keeping us upright. We laugh, cry, celebrate, bitch, moan, tell the truth, and somehow, someway, it tells our nervous systems we are allowed to soften.

Women show up with casseroles, garden flowers, hugs, and the kind of truth that arrives like a missile when you need it most. We become our own little coven of radical care and recovery.

Maybe it is because we are biologically wired for this. Maybe I learned it from the women before me. Either way, I keep bending toward the earth—with my girls beside me, pulling weeds and dahlias alike, hunting for seashells, and finding, every now and then, a little grace in the downward dog.

I have written eulogies for people I loved. I’ve sat with funeral directors that are complete strangers and had to make choices that felt impossible: selecting flowers, remembrance cards, readings, suggested rituals. Faced with catalogs of stock images and familiar motifs—roses, doves, sunsets, crosses, landscapes—we are asked to choose something that will somehow stand in for a life. Something appropriate. Something suitable. Something that says this was them.

Perhaps you have done this too. It always feels unfair. How can a bouquet, a photograph, a poem, or a folded card contain the enormity of a person? How can any arrangement of symbols come close to expressing the avalanche of missing that follows loss? We are asked to distill a beloved life into a handful of decisions while grief is still unfolding around us.

And yet, we do it. Again and again, across centuries and cultures, we gather the dust-in-the-wind fragments and order the damn bouquet. We remember this strange human ritual of selecting images and flowers to try and speak- when language fails.

(All Fours) Let’s Get Physical: For Olivia Newton John: For the women at Planet Fitness in Fairview Park

These women are appropriated from my hip-replacement physical therapy exercises, my dad’s AARP magazines, and Google searches for “middle-aged women contortionists.”

Lately I’ve been reading midlife writers—Miranda July, Rebecca Solnit, Nora Ephron, Anne Lamott, Elizabeth Strout, Annie Ernaux, Joan Didion, Patti Smith—women who find humor, wonder, and tenderness inside the mess of getting older. They write about the tension of staying informed without becoming overwhelmed, and of keeping moving when the world asks us to sit still.

Olivia Newton-John and Jane Fonda embodied something I still need: the insistence that movement is not just about staying fit. It is about staying awake, engaged, political, and unwilling to disappear.

Maybe getting older is its own kind of choreography—learning how to bend, fight, wobble, and keep going.

These are tracings made from my mom’s eyeglasses—seven pairs of “readers” I found after she died.

At first, I resisted using them. The blur, when I tried them on, felt like loss and another reminder that time keeps moving on whether we’re ready to or not. My mom loved to read—she was in book clubs, read the Plain Dealer newspaper from beginning to end, clipped articles and mailed them to me, devoured her stock reports and was always looking closely at the world through words.

Now my own vision is softening, and I’m beginning to see it differently-not as loss, but a weird little gain. Yeah, the edges may seem blurrier but so is all the noisiness of this wild world. Maybe aging isn’t only about losing clarity,  but gaining another kind of vision.

I still get pissed off when I can’t thread a needle or drive at night. But maybe, I’m learning to look less closely at everything—and more tenderly at what really matters. You see what I mean?

Most kids don’t want their parents’ things.

My late mother Fern, was a realtor, and she needed help emptying a home of a man named Bob, a WWII veteran and engineer whose wife had also died years earlier. Bob’s two sons lived on the West Coast and wanted nothing from the house,  just to get everything out so my mom could sell it.

I packed up sixty years of their life. Their photographs, travel souvenirs, Bonsai hobby books, stamps, board games, cocktail glasses, china, jewelry, and beautiful old hats. Objects that told me who they had been. Things that had been used, loved, and held onto—waiting, perhaps, to carry their stories forward.

I use some of Bob’s things now. I remember him, even though I never knew him. I have some of my mom’s things, too. Together they make up my own unruly family archive.

Someday, my kids may have to decide what to keep of me. I hope a few things will still whisper, I was here. I loved this. Remember me.

I was a lucky duck to grow up along Lake Erie, where the water was visible from my backyard. Summers meant Clifton Beach, sailing at Edgewater, and learning that the lake could turn on you in a heartbeat. I loved watching sailboats—tiny against all that water, yet somehow steady. The storms taught me early about balance, instinct, and hanging on.

This year the USS Cleveland was commissioned in its namesake city, just as my youngest son, Will, graduated and headed into the world after studying welding (and building many things with Legos). I think about his hands making things someday that have to withstand pressure, weather, and the goddamn unknown.

A mothership carries, protects, guides, and somehow keeps going. I’ve watched people my age  navigate illness, terrible accidents, divorce, job loss, and grief. And still, somehow, someway, my fellow wayfarers find a hospitable, lucky-break current, beyond that riptide shit storm, and do whatever it takes to float their boat. Even those who don’t think they have a working compass anymore, they find their way-finding their way too.

This work lives in that space between turbulence and tenderness. Sometimes we are the ship. Sometimes we are the storm. And sometimes we just need someone to say, Come away with me. For a little while.

I loved two games growing up: Candy Land and The Game of Life. Before I knew anything about mortgages, caregiving, motherhood, grief, or long-term plans, these little cardboard worlds suggested a path forward.

This piece is my last-ditch homage to the retrospective—a gathering of fragments from forty years of making, collecting the processes, recurring images, mistakes, obsessions, and versions of myself that somehow became a life. I have fought the good fight with nostalgia, but I think I’m finished looking backward. I’ve cleared the last of my studio archive and am ready to clean-slate it!

The idealistic girl, mother, daughter, caretaker, empty nester. So,  I’m flipping the board over and rolling the dice for new trouble and adventures.

I’ve been talking with my 91 year old dad about his childhood, even as dementia slowly takes pieces of the present. Remarkably, somehow his memories of his youth remain intact. Listening to him has become a strange and beautiful gift—a little doorway into the past.

In Memory of Elizabeth Reed has always haunted me and I always wondered about who Elizabeth Reed was. The haunting seems very appropriate now. The Allman Brothers made music in a graveyard in Macon, Georgia, and this song had not been named yet. Dickey Betts, lead guitarist had a tryst in said graveyard and looked up and named the song after the name on the gravestone.

My grandfather, my father, my brother, and I share the same monogram: E.H.M. It was a deliberate cross-generation move for naming people in our family. It made me wonder whether there had ever been another Elizabeth Maugans.

And there was!

She was born October 23, 1777—nearly 250 years ago. She had ten children, lived in Clermont County, Ohio, and helped establish Stonelick Church. Suddenly, It feels like a hand reaching through time and place. I can’t help to wonder…Will there be another Elizabeth Maugans 250 years from now and will that Elizabeth Maugans ever wonder about us?

Feed Your Head: For Alice, Ana and  Grace

I was in Kindergarten the last time I laid down on a big piece of paper and traced myself.  I turned myself into a super hero.

The Cuban-American conceptual artist Ana Mendiata,  did this too. Her performative body tracings were part of the Earthworks movement where she often used flower petals and other materials to mark her naked body outline on the beach, in the woods and in other natural environments. So, I did it too. It was a freing ME-moment when I felt bare and open to myself. It made me surprisingly emotional,  and was like a  “this is what I got to offer you world” anthem.

This song Feed Your Head,  was Inspired by the book Alice in Wonderland and lead singer Grace Slick embraced Alice’s same psychedelic perspective,  as Ana Mendieta embraced her body and the earth. They both were charmed with forever vulnerability and  curiosity, and a longing to find a connection with the universe.

I have never been as curious as I am today-at this very moment.  I am fascinated by everything, all at once, and it seems to only be increasing, What about you?

Proud Mary: (For Tina) (For Grandma Mary Jane)

My grandma MaryJane Shaw married at fifteen. A farmer’s daughter, then a farmer’s wife, she lived all 87 years on the same farm. She raised five children, had sixteen grandchildren and twenty-nine great-grandchildren, and worked her tail off.

She farmed, gardened, canned, cooked, quilted, crocheted, and took a second job at Rutters to help send my mom—the first in their family—to college. Making things by hand wasn’t a hobby. It was survival, love, and labor. Nothing was wasted- every scrap, piece of twine, and almost every material was used for something purposeful. They were also proud of the well-crafted and beautiful things they could make for their quality of life.

It takes on average five to eight hours to crochet a ten-inch doily. These doilies have been passed down through my family and some have been thrifted. Doilies are useful and protect sofas and chairs from hair oil and are also made for wood furniture as a barrier for water stains and wear and tear.

Maybe that’s what women have always done. Made something beautiful from what they had. Held things together. Kept going.

As Dolly Parton says, “I ain’t got time to be old.” Neither did my grandma.

When I was twenty, I went abroad with my sister and two close friends and backpacked through Europe with a Let’s Go guidebook and thirty dollars a day. We had no plans or obligations.

In Munich, we met a group of stunning young men from Sweden.  I paired up with Sven, an engineering student who carried a camera everywhere we went. We spent only a few days together, but at twenty, time stretches differently.

In that time of my life, romance wasn’t about permanence—but about presence. This song brings me back to an age when love seemed to exist in fleeting moments rather than some big grand declaration. Bésame Mucho was written by Consuelo Velázquez, a Mexican songwriter. She composed the song and wrote the passionate lyrics about kissing before she had ever been kissed herself. It’s pretty cool stuff that her own longing and intimacy was able to capture so completely something that has lived on so universally and recognized as one of the most recorded and covered Spanish-language songs in history.

When I was 20, five other Kent State art students and I rented a little studio for $50 each a month. We called it Gallery 425. It became our studios and our gallery after the university turned its space into a computer lab.

I remember working there late into the night, completely in love with making art. Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians were always playing. I felt like I had finally arrived.

Forty years later, I still feel that same swell of love when I walk into my studio and get lost in the waltz of being an artist.

Recently, I learned that the Old Bohemians were a pioneering group of 19th-century artists and intellectuals who gathered in downtown Cleveland. Later came the Brush and Palette Club and the Kokoon Arts Club, carrying that creative spirit forward.

What a sweet surprise—to discover that the energy I fell in love with at 20 has deep roots here, and that somehow, all these years later, I’m still dancing with it.