For More Owls Riding Scooters

On connection, change, and fairy gardens

Outside the window, Grandpa’s tall figure caught my eye. There he was, eighty-six years old, out walking his dog. I called to Noa, who was dressed like an owl, and told her to grab her shoes so we could run out to join Grandpa John. She buckled her helmet and took off on her scooter, owl wings flapping.

The late-afternoon sun was warm on this October Sunday. We caught up with Grandpa and walked with him the rest of his way home, chatting about my youngest sister’s new baby, Grandma and Grandpa’s seventh great-grandchild.

We veered left onto my grandparents’ short street that curves around one of our town’s many ravines. Grandpa and his dog made their way up the driveway to the house my grandparents built 35 years ago. Across the street is our town’s grassy bluff, a public park dotted with benches overlooking Lake Michigan. 

“I love you so much,” Noa called after her great-grandfather before scootering off ahead of me. 

Fallen leaves decorated the sidewalk. I watched my little owl crouch down to admire a fairy garden beside the sidewalk. Troll figurines nestled among moss. Tiny fairies perched on cartoonish fly agaric mushrooms, red-capped and whimsical. Noa took in the scene, her hands on her knees, her teal helmet tipped toward the ground, like its own mushroom cap.

We started moving again, and a woman out on a walk slowed down and smiled. She raised her sunglasses to reveal her familiar face. In elementary school, her daughter and I played on a softball team together. In middle school, in a production of Annie, her daughter was Miss Hannigan. My character held a dead mouse up to her nose. My freshman year of high school, I looked up to her daughter for spirited encouragement on the field hockey team.

“Hello, little owl,” the woman said to Noa.

“But I’m not actually an owl. I’m really a person.”

The woman smiled, admitting that Noa’s red rain boots helped give that away. Then she asked Noa if she had fun on our trip to Maine.

Is there a name for the good will that can build between people over decades of living in the same community? Relationships that subsist on unplanned run-ins and offer a rootedness and a sense of belonging? Smiles spread across our faces upon seeing each other. We ask about various family members and give brief and specific contextual updates. We carry within us a bank of memories of who we’ve each been, where we’ve traveled. We don’t even have each other’s phone numbers, and still, there’s a deep sense of care.

Lake Bluff is filled with people like this for me, people who share a web of overlapping connections that span decades. Many of my former teachers lived and still live in Lake Bluff. So many people who grow up in Lake Bluff choose to move back. People go off and live elsewhere—in big cities, abroad, with shiny jobs—and then, on their own volition, they return.

The first time I called to make dentist appointments, Patty answered the phone. I vaguely remembered that my childhood dentist had a receptionist named Patty. I almost thought I recognized her voice. Focusing on the task at hand, I asked about availability. Patty looked through the schedule to find a good time.

“Okay,” she said, “let’s start with your name.”

“Oh!” Her voice bloomed upon hearing my name.

Suddenly, the wall between receptionist and patient fell, and we were talking about my parents, my sisters. Yes, she said, she had worked for my childhood dentist, who had also been my mom’s childhood dentist. It will be so good to see you, she said. 

I’ve never liked change. Leaving, goodbyes, and endings are all hard for me, and in an ever-changing world, continuity is a balm. Continuity allows time to leave its mark while also maintaining some familiar essence, like someone’s smile evolving over the course of a lifetime and still remaining recognizable, uniquely theirs, uniquely them.

On the last day of eighth grade, the final bell liberated us into an expansive summer with high-school-sized adventures on the horizon. My classmates and I spilled onto the baseball fields across the street from the middle school to trade yearbooks.

“Don’t ever change,” was a common yearbook sign-off that lodged itself into my resistant-to-change heart. I clung to the belief that changing meant abandoning myself. Changing meant departing from some core truth.

I took pride in the ways I stayed the same.

In seventh grade, I said if I had a daughter, I would name her Sophie. Twenty years later, I did. My favorite book in high school remains one of my favorite books today. My taste is consistent, you could say timeless—changeless. I’m also a lover of tradition, another thread of imagined permanence. Even as everything is always changing, we can unwrap the same ornaments, sing the same songs, cook the same recipes.

I feel about Lake Bluff the way Steve Martin describes in the opening voiceover of The Father of the Bride:

I love this town, and not just because it's the kind of place where people still smile at each other but because it hasn't changed much in the past twenty-five years. And since I'm not a guy who's big on change, this town fits me like a glove.

I’ve also found, though, that in places like Lake Bluff, where people tend to hold themselves together in front of each other, to present themselves in a way that does not cause a scene, it can be harder to form the deep connection I crave. 

It seems, the more financial resources people have, the more their lives are managed; messes: outsourced; goods and services: received; packages and groceries and to-go orders: delivered.

Families live in homes separated by lot lines. Garage doors open and close with a button. Everyone smiles and keeps to their schedule, exercising dominion over their own domain. People walk outside and pass each other without seeing anyone else’s untidiness, without sharing the vulnerability that makes us human.

I just celebrated my 37th birthday. I’m an October baby, a Libra, if that means something to you. I don’t know much about zodiac signs, except that those Libra scales resonate with my desire for balance, for harmony, for everyone to have what they need. I woke up to handmade cards, homemade breakfast, and an autumn day that felt better than a painting.

Fall is a wizened season with a warm and toasty palette of gold, crimson, and rust—fiery and reflective, nostalgic. Fall is an ending, death and decay made beautiful.

And with fall, comes Election Day. Early voting is well underway. The air is bated.

Here, I want change.

Is this a contradiction or is this desire for change actually also a form of continuity, the still-lit torch of the child who was always on the lookout for the new kid, scanning, scanning for anyone who seemed down or hurt or left out? Deeply and more than anything, I want people to feel safe, to have a sense of belonging and purpose, to have what they need.

Desiring sameness means mostly liking things the way they are. Desiring something to stay the same means having your needs met enough and feeling safe enough to want to protect what already is. The main threat to people who want things to remain as they are are the ghost of an abstract “what if.”

In my years living outside of the tree lined streets of this town that cradles me, I came to love friends for whom the need for change is aching, vital, visceral. For whom the need for change is the hunger to survive. And in loving these friends, the need for change became aching, vital, and visceral for me. Elisa and Halleemah are two of these friends.

Back in 2017, Elisa and I sat at a diner in Hyde Park, Chicago. I was on the booth side facing out, and Elisa sat in the chair across from me. She shared a story of a traffic mishap involving multiple cars, an intersection, and downtown Chicago traffic. There were pedestrians and road construction. Everyone had different interpretations of whose turn it was when.

Elisa said that, in that moment, she laid on her horn and yelled.

In the car opposite hers, a white woman smiled and gestured for her to go ahead.

Elisa paused her storytelling, making eye contact with me and sighing with a look of exasperation. Then she said, her voice soft and tender, a floating prayer, that she wanted life circumstances that afforded her patience amidst traffic.

My mind turned on its axis.

Elisa grew up just over an hour from Lake Bluff, in Englewood, Chicago. She lives with chronic pain from her auto-immune disease, an untenable work environment, and the stress of being the provider for multiple generations of her family. She lives as a Black woman in the United States of America. She is a poet with a voice like an ocean and a heart that loves like a puppy.

How often am I that woman in the car opposite Elisa? How often do I feel virtuous when what I really am is rested, fed, physically comfortable, able bodied, cared for, and emotionally secure? How often do I feel virtuous when what I really am is trained in the art of pleasing and used to being protected?

Last week, I dropped my kids off at school and met my mom at my sister’s house for a core strengthening workout. My sister, a physical therapist, led us through breathing exercises, teaching us how to properly engage the muscles of our pelvic floor.

Back at home, I checked the mail, sorting through a stack of envelopes, postcard mailers, and magazines. The sunlight filtered through fall leaves. There was a postcard for a candidate for our county’s state’s attorney position. Her mailer stated her pledge to keep our children safe, to be tough on violent crime, to make sure criminals stay behind bars. I see her name on yard signs all over town.

Videos on her website reveal that the criminals she’s referring to live in a community just up the road, a place where Marc and I have talked about seeking out a church, in part because we know people living without society’s protections are rich in faith and love and care. This neighborhood is so close to Lake Bluff, and yet, we live on islands, an ocean apart. 

Every day, I marvel at the interconnectivity within Lake Bluff. I also see how this insulation can produce such an isolating disconnection from our neighbors who live a short jog up the road.

Campaign messaging about locking them up—those criminals over there—reminds me of a Q&A that Halleemah and I attended in the suburbs years ago about taking action for social change.

The microphone amplified words like fix, bad, those, and them as part of sweeping assumptions about the parenting, values, and aspirations of people who were not present in the room. This was a stark contrast to the descriptors of blessed, fortunate, good, our, and us that generously flew around in the remarks audience members used to describe themselves and their community. How often do communities like Lake Bluff feel virtuous when, really, we just have our basic needs met?

Back in the car, Halleemah bowed her head and closed her eyes. She massaged her temples and the bridge of her nose. Her body was hunched over, rocking.

“They don’t realize that when they talk that way, they are insulting me to my face,” she said.

I left the campaign postcard in the pile on the counter, my brain turning over how this candidate, who supposedly cares about safety, does not support common sense gun laws.

Upstairs at my desk, I checked my email and read a message informing me that there will be a Code Red Drill at my children’s school. I thought about school shootings. The email concluded: “We have been conducting these discussions and practices for many years, and the children find that their time talking with the police officers is informative and a positive, relationship-building experience.” I considered what it means for a community to have a police presence that is able to build relationships with school children.

A couple years back, I was wrestling with whether to move from Chicago to my hometown. The noise of the city had become too much now that there was also a cacophony of small children’s clanging, banging, and squealing within my home. I wanted to move back near my family. I didn’t want to want to leave the life we’d imagined in the city. I didn’t want to allow myself the ease of Lake Bluff.

Halleemah and Elisa both listened to my thought circles. On one phone call, I told Halleemah that I was afraid being back would be intoxicating.

“Intoxicating?” she clarified.

Yes, I was afraid that I would be swept up, that Lake Bluff would become my whole world, that my focus would become narrow, that I would lose touch with the world beyond Lake Bluff.

Halleemah lived in Los Angeles at the time and returned to Chicago often for work. I developed the habit of driving her to and from the airport. On one of our drives to O’Hare, she turned to me and said with urgency in her eyes, “Enjoy your life, Kaitlin. Please. Not letting yourself access the joy available to you serves no one.”

We hugged goodbye at the curb. I almost didn’t let go. My car then wound around and merged back onto the highway towards Chicago. Her plea echoed.

Summer came. Elisa made the trip from Chicago to Lake Bluff to see this place that raised me. We went to the park. The kids ran around. The stream between the baseball fields and the playground trickled towards the ravine. 

“You know,” Elisa said, “the goal isn’t for Lake Bluff to be less like Lake Bluff. The goal is for other places to be more like Lake Bluff.”

I worry people who live in communities like Lake Bluff will read that and feel virtuous when really what that means is that, in Lake Bluff, families are fed and clothed; houses are warm in the winter; showers are hot; mental health needs are addressed; mistakes are met with safety nets; rehab is there for substance addiction; parents have time to read books on parenting and the resources to choose extracurricular activities and schools that meet their kids’ interests and needs; the local yoga studio is packed at 9:15am on a Tuesday (ask me how I know).

I worry people who live in communities like Lake Bluff will read this and simply count their blessings while hoping their good fortune stays, without consideration that, for so many in this country and in this county, in this exact moment, being able to breathe—the ability to fill the lungs and keep on living—hinges upon change.

Change could mean protection. Change could mean care. Change could mean health. Change could mean healing.

Change could mean living from a belief that we can allow ourselves to access the joy available to us while also choosing to increase our neighbors’ access to joy. Change could look like bridging realities and learning from each other. Change could look like learning to share what’s hard.

Change could look like more communities with police officers building relationships with school children. Change could look like more eighty-six-year-olds out walking their dogs, chased down by their great-grandchildren. Change could look like more owls riding scooters. Change could look like more fairy gardens. 

I can fight for change and also stand at the grocery store checkout—buying fresh ingredients for homemade soup—and see the daughter-of-the-woman-I-saw-on-the-walk standing with her toddler a couple registers over. We can fight for change and still catch each other’s eyes, craning our necks around the end-cap displays to wave and say hello.