Welcome to the Journal.

I want to share a recipe with you that was passed down to me from my husband’s older sister via her grandmother. It is for Irish soda bread, or, as we call it, Granny Bread.

I injured my knee nearly three years ago. But if I’m being honest, the pain began in 1987.

That was the year I bent over in front of my pediatrician as he showed my mother the growing curve in my spine. I was ten years old. I remember feeling cold, wearing only fuchsia underwear that were a size too big for me and, I felt, slightly risqué for my age. As they went over the details of the progression, treatments, and complications (which included death from suffocation), all I could do was wish that I had chosen different panties.

There are many memes about 2020 being a do-over. I laugh too, but I always add an extra punch line: There are no do-overs. There is only what we are given and what we do with it.

Many people have buried themselves in a fog these past six months. It’s the mind’s natural response when faced with too much: COVID-19, racial reckoning, the cruel joke of online schooling, presidential disasters, wildfires…

I meant to do something a year ago. I made careful plans for it, stacked up my dates and times, and set out to get it done. But it never happened (at least until now). Like all things that haven’t gone my way, the delay was perfectly timed.

I lived in New York City for nearly seven years. The experience had a number of side effects, one of the strangest being that I became terrified of dancing in public. Despite a childhood spent in dance classes and many successful moments on dance floors, I suddenly found that I would stand unmoving in the corner of any club judging myself for what I assumed would look like asinine movements, had I dared to do them. Though I could feel the screams from inside my body to move, the daily assaults of living in the Big Apple had left my body frozen in place.