The Dreams That Wait

I've always been a dreamer.

As a little girl growing up in San Francisco, I dreamed of becoming a weather girl.

Terry Lowry was a personal hero of mine. She mesmerized me. With chalk and clear sliding sheets, she drew out the forecast, showing us where storms were headed and when sunshine might finally be coming our way.

I watched everything about her.

She was fashionable. Beautiful. Confident.

She looked exactly the way I imagined a grown woman was supposed to look.

At bath time, I became her.

Our clear shower doors became my weather map. A wet bar of Ivory soap became my chalk.

Clouds were moving in from the Pacific.

Rain was expected by morning.

Sunshine would return by the weekend.

My brothers were my unwilling audience.

Who knows how many bathtime weather reports those poor boys endured.

I don't remember exactly when I stopped wanting to be a weather girl.

That's the strange thing about childhood dreams. One day they consume us. We practice them in bathtubs and bedrooms and announce them to anyone willing—or unwilling—to listen.

Then, sometimes without our noticing, they disappear.

What happens to our dreams, I wonder?

Do we outgrow them?

Or do some of them simply wait?

---

I had another dream.

I wanted to be a writer.

The first time I read Mary Poppins, something happened to me.

P. L. Travers had created a world in which the ordinary and the impossible lived side by side. A woman could arrive on the wind. A carpetbag could contain more than it possibly should. The everyday world could suddenly open into something magical.

I didn't have the language for what I was experiencing then.

I only knew someone had made this world using words.

I wanted to do that too.

---

At eighteen, my dreams became considerably more romantic.

I dreamed of marrying a rugby player who would take me on adventures around the world.

The details were a little fuzzy.

That wasn't the point.

The point was that life would be big.

There would be adventure.

There would be love.

There would always be somewhere new to go.

At twenty-five, the dream changed again.

By then, I imagined an easy, prosperous life with my little family, filled with camping trips to Yosemite and long drives around the country in a van packed with children, sleeping bags and coolers.

I could see us around campfires.

Children asleep beneath the stars.

National parks.

Open highways.

Years stretching endlessly ahead of us.

I believed there would be plenty of time for all of it.

Life, of course, doesn't ask to see our plans before changing the forecast.

At twenty-six, I was widowed.

I was pregnant and had a two-and-a-half-year-old child to raise.

The easy life I had imagined disappeared almost overnight.

There are seasons when dreaming about the future feels like a luxury. You stop asking what life might become and concentrate instead on getting everyone through today.

But somehow, life kept moving.

So did I.

---

By forty, I understood that dreams don't always survive life unchanged.

Three of my closest childhood friends and I went to Las Vegas to celebrate our fortieth birthdays. We gave ourselves three days to let loose, laugh too loudly, stay up too late and celebrate the fact that somehow we had all arrived there together.

Forty felt significant.

Maybe because we could look backward almost as easily as we could look ahead.

We had known one another when our dreams were still simple. By forty, each of us was carrying something none of us could have imagined when we were girls.

I had been widowed while still a young mother.

One friend was raising a child born with a severe physical challenge.

Another was facing infidelity in her marriage.

Another was dealing with substance abuse in her family.

These weren't the lives we had dreamed about.

So somewhere amid the lights and noise of Las Vegas, we began talking.

Really talking.

We spoke out loud about what our lives had become and what we still wanted them to be.

We didn't solve one another's problems.

We couldn't.

But we gave one another a safe place to put them down for a while.

Then we talked about what came next.

What did we still want?

What could we change?

What did we have to accept?

What were we still allowed to dream about?

I've come to believe that's one of the great gifts of friendship.

Sometimes a friend remembers the person you were before life became complicated.

And sometimes she can see the person you're still becoming before you can.

---

Now, looking back over the years, I realize something I wasn't expecting.

A remarkable number of my dreams came true.

Not precisely as I imagined them.

Dreams apparently aren't very good at details.

But I did have adventures.

I built a family.

I found love.

I traveled.

I found friendships that could withstand decades, disappointment and reinvention.

And somehow I ended up living in one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen.

I wake up surrounded by mountains, with Lake Tahoe just beyond them. I have people I love. I have good health. I have enough.

More than enough, really.

And then there is the dream that waited.

Writing.

The little girl who discovered Mary Poppins and realized that words could create entire worlds never completely disappeared.

She just got busy.

Life had things for her to do first.

Children to raise.

People to love.

Losses to survive.

Work to finish.

A life to build.

And now I write.

Essays. Stories. Memories.

Sometimes I send them out into the world and strangers read them.

That still feels a little like magic to me.

But there is one dream I've carried for almost as long as I can remember.

I want to write a novel.

Not simply finish one. Not simply hold a book with my name on the cover.

I want to write a story that captivates someone the way I have been captivated by the writers I love.

I want a reader to forget where she is for a while. To carry one of my characters around in her head after she closes the book. To stay up later than she intended because she needs one more chapter.

Writers have done that for me all my life.

Rumi showed me how a few words can contain something enormous. Maya Angelou showed me the power of telling the truth about a life. Stephen King taught me what it feels like to enter a story and become reluctant to leave it.

I want to do that.

There.

I've said it out loud.

Maybe that's something my forty-year-old self and her friends in Las Vegas taught me.

Dreams deserve to be spoken.

Especially the ones that scare us a little.

I don't know whether this one will come true exactly as I imagine it.

By now, I know better than to predict the future.

But I'm writing the novel.

I'm giving the dream somewhere to go.

---

And I'm still dreaming.

I dream about kids and laughter.

Trips we still have to take.

Memories we still have to make.

Places I haven't seen.

Stories I haven't discovered.

Characters who haven't introduced themselves to me yet.

For much of my life, I thought dreams belonged to the future—something to chase, something to become.

Now I'm beginning to understand that sometimes we're already standing inside dreams we once wished for.

We just forget to recognize them.

Some dreams change.

Some are lost along the way.

And some remain quietly inside us through careers and marriages, children and losses, disappointments and reinventions.

Waiting.

I think about that little girl in the bathtub sometimes.

A bar of Ivory soap in her hand.

A shower door covered with her forecast.

Her brothers undoubtedly wishing she'd hurry up and finish.

She thought she was predicting the future.

She couldn't possibly have known how unpredictable it would be.

Neither could I.

There would be storms she never saw coming.

There would also be extraordinary stretches of sunshine.

And after all these years, I think she would be delighted to discover one thing.

She's still dreaming.

It’s August and Lake Tahoe has settled into that sleepy rhythm of late summer.

The frantic energy of June, with all the tourists arriving, has softened. The wildflowers have begun to fade, and the afternoons stretch lazily toward evening. Even the mountains seem content to linger a little longer in the warm afternoon sun. Is it because the mountains know something we aren’t paying attention to?

I sit on my back deck with a view of a pristine Tahoe meadow. I notice the burning bushes in our yard are starting to change color. The sky above remains the color of endless blue for days that seem to go on forever.

Not a cloud.

Just mile after mile of impossible Lake Tahoe blue.

At the beach, I sometimes imagine the sun is making sure everyone gets an equal share of its affection. Children are running along the shoreline. Couples are reading beneath umbrellas. Paddleboarders drift silently across the water. Laughter can be heard from ski boats speeding across the water in front of us.

Every shoulder.

Every freckled nose.

Everyone receives the same warm kiss.

There is something comforting about that.

The sun doesn’t play favorites.

It simply shines.

It’s Friday evening, and my husband and I might wander through the local farmers’ market.

It’s become one of our favorite summer traditions.

We’ll probably come home with fresh peaches, flowers we didn’t really need, and vegetables that somehow taste better because we bought them from the people who actually grew them.

We’ll linger longer than necessary, listening to a local musician bravely sharing his new music with strangers while children dance without caring who is watching.

There is no need for an agenda.

Nowhere we have to be.

No schedule waiting.

I might walk down to the lake with my closest friend later.

Some people come to Tahoe looking for speed.

They skim across the water behind ski boats, laughter carried by the wind as they carve impossible turns across the lake’s glassy surface. I understand the attraction. There is something exhilarating about moving so fast that the shoreline becomes a blur.

These days, though, I find myself wanting something different.

I’ll ease myself into what might be the world’s largest natural cold plunge.

The first few steps always steal my breath.

Then my body remembers.

Lake Tahoe’s cold, which felt impossible thirty seconds earlier, becomes refreshing.

Eventually, I stop noticing the temperature altogether.

I’ll float for a while beneath that impossible blue sky and daydream – it’s one of my favorite things to do. Then, I’ll stretch out on Tahoe’s coarse granite sand to dry in the sun.

I notice - the lake is never silent.

Small waves lap steadily against the shore.

Every now and then, the wake from a passing ski boat rolls toward the beach, briefly interrupting the rhythm before the water quietly settles again.

It always settles again.

I find myself thinking that lakes are a lot like people.

Life sends its share of unexpected wakes.

Loss.

Change.

Disappointment.

Joy.

We all get stirred.

Sometimes violently.

But given enough time, enough grace, enough ordinary days spent beneath blue skies with people we love...

Perhaps we remember how to become calm again.

I have spent much of my life believing that meaningful days had to contain something extraordinary.

A promotion.

A celebration.

A mountain summit.

A life-changing conversation.

Now I’m beginning to suspect I had it backward.

Perhaps the extraordinary days are the ordinary ones.

A swim in cold water.

A basket of peaches.

Music floating across a farmers’ market.

A delicious dinner under the stars.

A husband reaching for my hand as we wander without any particular destination.

A perfect August afternoon that asks absolutely nothing of me except that I notice it.

Tomorrow the tourists will still come.

The boats will still race across the lake.

The farmers’ market will pack away its tents until next week.

The sun will rise over Tahoe once again, offering the same quiet blessing to everyone willing to step outside and receive it.

And if I’m paying attention, I’ll remember that life isn’t waiting somewhere beyond this ordinary day.

It has been here all along.

The Year of Seven

Somewhere between the painted rocks and the climbing wall, I realized Hannah wasn’t the only one discovering things this past weekend.

I was remembering as well.

Before we learn to be afraid of looking foolish. Before we decide what we’re good at and what we’re not. Before the world begins telling us which things belong together and which don’t, there is seven.

Seven eats strawberry donuts in bed for breakfast and wears a climbing harness in the afternoon.

Seven plays the violin this week and goes to science camp the next.

Seven makes something beautiful and immediately gets excited thinking about who she can give it to.

At seven, the world hasn’t narrowed yet.

Everything is still an adventure waiting to be explored.

My Granddaughter, Hannah, turned seven this week.

I arrived in time to spend a long weekend with her, and almost immediately we began painting rocks.

Aunt Ashley gave Hannah a glow-in-the-dark rock-painting kit for her birthday. This is the perfect gift for any seven-year-old artist, by the way.

Hannah takes her art seriously.

Colors matter. Details matter. After all, a plain rock is just a masterpiece that hasn’t happened yet.

We painted several, transforming ordinary stones into little treasures.

What happened next surprised me.

Hannah wanted to give them away.

Not the rocks she liked least. Not the mistakes or leftovers.

The beautiful ones.

She wanted other people to have something she created.

I’ve noticed this about children her age. They haven’t yet learned our adult tendency to hold tightly to the things we value. When they love something, they want their friends to have and love it too.

Maybe generosity is easier before we start keeping score.

Hannah and I loaded her painted treasures into a pink basket and headed into the neighborhood to find them homes.

Our first stop was the park.

Three older boys were already there.

I watched Hannah assess the situation. Moments earlier she’d been full of plans for distributing her artwork, but walking up to three older boys and offering them painted rocks was apparently not part of the vision.

She hesitated.

I didn’t push her.

Instead, we went to another part of the playground, set down the basket and waited to see who might arrive.

Nobody did.

Hannah needed another plan.

So we started walking.

House by house, I watched her conduct some mysterious seven-year-old calculation about who should receive a rock.

She would stop.

Look at a house.

Think.

Move on.

At the next one, she’d stop again.

I wondered what she was considering.

Does a child live there?

Do I know these people?

Would they like this one?

Eventually, she would reach into the pink basket I was carrying and carefully select a rock.

Then came the hard part.

She had to walk up to the house.

I watched her gather her courage and climb the steps of one lucky recipient’s home. She did not pick the first step. She climbed to the front door, then carefully placed her painted rock where it would be discovered.

Once the mission was completed, she turned and sprinted down the stairs of the house toward me.

The expression on her face was somewhere between exhilaration and terror.

She was certain someone was going to catch her.

I couldn’t help laughing.

This tiny girl who had set out to anonymously deliver happiness throughout the neighborhood was behaving as though we’d just committed a crime.

But I saw something else too.

She had been afraid.

And she’d done it anyway.

All of this has caused me to think about courage.

Is seven too young to learn to be courageous?

I remember my own seven.

My mother was dying of breast cancer.

One day, she fell down the staircase in our San Francisco home. I suppose she had been carrying laundry downstairs to the washer when she slipped.

My younger brother and I were upstairs in a bedroom.

I don’t remember understanding everything that was happening.

I understood enough to know something was terribly wrong.

And I was scared out of my wits.

But my little brother was there.

Somehow, I knew I needed to keep him occupied.

So I did.

I entertained him. I stayed busy. I waited for help.

And that day, of all days, I learned how to tie my shoes.

I still think about that.

Of all the memories a child could carry from a frightening day, one of mine is a shoelace.

Loop.

Pull.

Knot.

Try again.

Perhaps it was simply something I could control when everything else was beyond me.

I knew instinctively that the ordeal would eventually end. Someone would come. Something would happen. We wouldn’t remain upstairs forever.

Until then, I could stay busy.

I could learn something.

I could take care of my brother.

I could keep going while I was afraid.

My mother died when I was seven.

For most of my life, when I’ve thought about that year, I’ve thought primarily about what it took from me.

Watching Hannah turn seven has made me wonder about something else.

What did seven give me?

On Saturday was Hannah’s birthday party.

Thirteen children arrived at a climbing gym to celebrate.

Best friends. Little sisters. Big personalities. Quiet ones. Courageous girls. Timid boys.

And parents.

Lots of parents.

Apparently, birthday parties have changed since I was raising children. I remember a much more efficient arrangement: pull up, release child, wave goodbye, return at the designated time.

These parents stayed.

So did Grandma.

Which meant I got to watch.

Hannah was one of the smallest children there, except for one younger sister. But being small didn’t seem to occur to her as a reason not to try something.

She climbed wall after wall, reaching for holds that looked impossibly far away for her little arms and legs.

Tiny but mighty.

Then she came to a different kind of climbing structure.

Instead of a wall, it consisted of a series of circular towers, each one higher than the last.

Hannah started climbing.

One platform.

Then another.

Then another.

She kept going until she reached the highest one.

And then she looked down.

Everything changed.

Suddenly, my fearless little climber wasn’t fearless at all.

She froze.

Then she began to cry.

She wanted someone to come get her.

Her dad couldn’t reach her.

Her mom couldn’t reach her.

Neither could I.

There we were—all these adults who loved her, standing below—and this was one thing we couldn’t do for her.

Hannah was going to have to find her own way down.

I watched her.

She took a deep breath.

Then another.

And then she did the thing that frightened her most.

She let go.

The harness caught her and began slowly lowering her toward the floor.

Down she came until finally her feet touched the ground.

Safe.

I assumed that would be the end of that particular adventure.

It wasn’t.

Hannah turned around and climbed the structure again.

And then she did it again.

And again.

No one told her she needed to conquer her fear.

No one gave her a lesson about resilience.

She seemed to understand something instinctively:

Don’t let the scariest moment be the last one.

Watching her up there, I realized there was another difference between Hannah’s seven and mine.

Hannah was afraid on top of that tower.

But she could look down and see us.

Mom.

Dad.

Grandma.

We couldn’t climb up and rescue her, but she knew we were there.

And something else was holding her too.

The harness.

She had to trust it.

She had to believe that she could let go and something would catch her.

At seven, I learned something different.

I couldn’t let go.

My little brother needed me.

While something frightening was happening downstairs, I stayed upstairs and kept him busy.

I tied my shoes.

I waited.

Hannah was learning:

I can be frightened and let go because something will catch me.

I learned:

I can be frightened and keep going because someone needs me.

Neither girl was fearless.

Maybe courage was never about that.

Later there were painted nails and sparkly pretend high heels.

Hannah wanted to wear those shoes everywhere.

I loved that too.

The girl scaling climbing structures wasn’t required to surrender the sparkles.

She could love both.

This summer she has moved from one adventure to another. At MusArt camp, she tried drums, piano, guitar and violin.

The violin became her favorite.

Next comes STEM camp.

She’s excited about that too.

Why wouldn’t she be?

Nobody has told her yet that she’s supposed to choose.

Artist or scientist.

Athlete or musician.

Brave or feminine.

Strong or tender.

She can paint her nails and climb the highest platform.

She can play violin and study science.

She can be frightened of three older boys at a playground and still walk up a stranger’s steps to leave something beautiful behind.

Everything still belongs together.

I wonder when that begins to change.

When do we start defining ourselves by what we think we can’t do?

When do we become embarrassed to try something we’re not already good at?

When does curiosity become caution?

When do we start saving the prettiest rocks for ourselves?

I’ve spent much of my life learning and relearning some of the things Hannah seems to understand instinctively at seven.

Try it.

Climb.

Make something.

Give it away.

Be scared.

Do it anyway.

And maybe, when fear wins for a moment, climb again.

Grandmotherhood has given me many things I expected.

Small arms around my neck.

Birthday parties.

Paint under my fingernails.

The privilege of watching my children’s children become themselves.

What I didn’t expect was that sometimes my grandchildren would lead me backward.

Back to ages I thought I understood.

Back to memories I had filed away long ago.

Back to the child I used to be.

For most of my life, when I pictured myself at seven, I saw a little girl who lost her mother.

I saw what she didn’t have.

This weekend, watching Hannah, I began to see that little girl differently.

I saw a frightened child who found something she could do.

I saw her keeping her younger brother occupied.

I saw her waiting for help.

I saw her working those shoelaces through her small fingers until she finally figured them out.

Loop.

Pull.

Knot.

I saw what was already inside her.

Resourcefulness.

Creativity.

Kindness.

Courage.

Tiny but mighty - in her own way.

By the time Hannah and I finished delivering her painted rocks, the pink basket I carried was nearly empty.

Hannah walked ahead of me, pleased with our work and ready for whatever came next.

I watched her go.

Seven years old.

A whole world still waiting.

And more than fifty years after my own year of seven, I found myself looking backward at the little girl I had been.

For the first time, I didn’t see only the child whose mother was dying.

I saw the girl tying her shoes.

Maybe the world doesn’t have to stay narrowed after all.

Maybe, every once in a while, a seven-year-old comes along to remind us how wide it still is.

I knew something was wrong when I saw Max smile.

He was young, relatively new to management, and already sitting in the conference room when I walked in. I remember his expression more clearly than almost anything that was said afterward—a strange, smug smile that made something inside me tighten before I even sat down.

Then came the words.

I was being let go.

Fired.

At fifty-nine years old.

It was March 29th.

There is something particularly disorienting about losing a job late in life. When you’re younger, people tell you another opportunity will come along. You update your résumé. You reinvent yourself. You start over.

At fifty-nine, starting over feels different.

I had believed this was the job I would retire from. I had invested years there—years of work, relationships, knowledge, routines, and loyalty. Somewhere along the way, without realizing it, I had also attached part of my identity to the place.

Then suddenly it was gone.

I walked out of that conference room without my job.

What followed me home was much heavier.

Shame.

Anger.

Fear.

And an avalanche of self-doubt.

What had I done wrong?

Was I no longer valuable?

Who hires a fifty-nine-year-old woman?

What was I supposed to do now?

The questions were relentless.

They were there when I woke in the morning and remembered I had nowhere I needed to be. They appeared when someone innocently asked about work. They sat beside me as I searched job postings and tried to imagine beginning again somewhere unfamiliar.

My mind would not shut up.

And old habits have a way of finding you when the noise becomes unbearable.

For a while, I looked for ways to numb what I was feeling. Nothing dramatic. Nothing I couldn’t rationalize to myself. I simply wanted relief from the questions that followed me everywhere.

Why wasn’t I good enough?

What had I done wrong?

Who would want me now?

What was I supposed to do next?

I told myself I was fine.

But the people who loved me could tell something was wrong.

My friends noticed.

More importantly, my daughter noticed.

That stopped me in a way my own fear hadn’t.

The last thing I wanted was for her to watch me disappear into an old version of myself because I couldn’t figure out how to become the next one.

Looking back, I understand what I was really searching for.

Silence.

Just a few minutes when my mind wasn’t replaying the conference room, Max’s expression, the humiliation, the fear.

Eventually, I found another way to quiet it.

I walked.

One of the trails I returned to regularly was Powerline.

It isn’t one of Tahoe’s grand destination hikes. There is no dramatic summit waiting at the end, no famous overlook where everyone stops for photographs. It winds through the forest above South Lake Tahoe, familiar and accessible, climbing and dropping beneath the pines.

I often walked it with my friend Gina.

Spring gradually became summer, and we kept walking.

The snow disappeared from the trail. The earth dried beneath our boots. Mornings grew warmer, and the familiar smell of Tahoe in summer returned—sun-warmed pine, dust, and that unmistakable dryness that settles over the mountains by July.

There is a particular kind of conversation that happens when two women walk together through the mountains.

You don’t have to look at each other.

You don’t have to solve anything.

You just walk.

Some days I talked about what had happened. Other days we talked about everything except what had happened.

And sometimes there was nothing to say.

Our boots moved over dirt and pine needles. We climbed familiar inclines. The scent of warm pine hung in the air. Sunlight moved between the trees.

One foot.

Then another.

Then another.

It sounds almost ridiculously simple now.

But walking gave my mind somewhere to go.

For months, my thoughts had been circling the same small room.

Why?

What did I do wrong?

What am I going to do?

What if no one wants me?

On the trail, those questions had to compete with other things.

A steep climb.

My breathing.

A patch of loose rock.

Gina saying something that made me laugh.

The way sunlight landed on the forest floor.

The mountains didn’t demand that I figure out my life.

They simply asked me to keep moving.

So I did.

And while I was paying attention to everything that had gone wrong in my own life, life itself seemed to be happening everywhere around me.

A coyote had her pups near the end of our driveway.

For a while, keeping our dog safely away from them became one of my daily responsibilities. I watched for the mother. I watched for the pups. I learned to look carefully before opening the door or heading outside.

It gave me something immediate to think about.

Something besides myself.

Then there was the morning I looked beyond our gate toward the meadow and saw a mama bear and her cub sleeping soundly just outside it.

They were completely at rest.

I stood watching them from a safe distance, amazed by the intimacy of it—a mother and her baby sleeping peacefully while the human world nearby carried on with all its noise and worry.

And then the sandhill cranes came back.

They had disappeared from Tahoe for a time, and suddenly there they were again, those extraordinary tall birds moving through the meadow as though they had simply remembered the way home.

I watched them with a kind of wonder I hadn’t felt in a while.

The coyotes didn’t know I had been fired.

The bears didn’t care how old I was or what I was going to do next.

The cranes had no interest in whether I still had a title attached to my name.

Life around me was busy being life.

Birth.

Protection.

Rest.

Return.

Maybe that was part of what the mountains were giving me too.

Perspective.

My world had changed on March 29th.

The world had not ended.

Spring still became summer.

Coyotes still raised their young.

Bears still slept beside their cubs.

And creatures that had disappeared sometimes found their way back.

My friends kept pulling me outward too.

I went back to the Bay Area to spend time with friends who had known me through other versions of myself.

Once, I went to the Russian River.

Another time, I went to see my beloved 49ers play a preseason game.

These weren’t grand acts of reinvention. I wasn’t standing beside the Russian River announcing that I had found myself. I wasn’t sitting at a football game suddenly certain what the next chapter of my life would be.

I was simply living.

Laughing.

Being with people who loved me.

Remembering that I was still myself.

That mattered more than I understood at the time.

Because losing my job had made my world very small.

For a while, everything seemed to lead back to March 29th and that conference room. Every thought became another referendum on my value.

My friends didn’t see me that way.

To them, I wasn’t the woman who had been fired.

I was Elise.

The friend they had known for years.

The woman who laughed too loudly at something funny, loved the 49ers, went to the river, hiked mountains, loved her family, and had lived an entire life before Max ever sat across from her in that conference room.

Little by little, my world began expanding again.

I walked Powerline.

I climbed other trails around Tahoe.

I traveled down the mountain to see old friends.

I laughed.

I watched football.

I sat beside a river.

And I walked with women who loved me enough to listen when I needed to talk and loved me enough not to require me to talk when I didn’t.

Gradually, almost imperceptibly, something shifted.

The conference room became smaller.

The mountains became larger.

Max’s face, once so vivid in my memory, began to lose its power over me.

And I started writing.

Or perhaps writing had been waiting for me all along.

Thoughts began arriving while I walked. Memories surfaced between switchbacks. Sentences appeared beside alpine lakes and beneath stands of quaking aspens.

I started bringing them home.

I wrote about grief.

Friendship.

Childhood.

Marriage.

Loss.

The mountains.

The strange ways human beings survive things they once believed they couldn’t.

And the more I wrote, the more I began to understand that perhaps I didn’t want the rest of my life simply to be about replacing what I had lost.

Maybe I wanted something different.

I wanted to write.

Really write.

Not someday.

Now.

There is something almost absurd about deciding at sixty that perhaps the thing you have been circling your entire life is the thing you are finally supposed to do.

But there is also freedom in it.

For most of our lives, we are encouraged to know where we’re going.

Build the career.

Keep the job.

Save for retirement.

Follow the path.

I thought I had done that.

Then one afternoon, someone sitting across from me in a conference room told me that path was over.

For months, I believed that meant I was lost.

The mountains taught me otherwise.

A trail rarely reveals itself all at once.

It curves behind trees.

It disappears around granite.

Sometimes it climbs so steeply that all you can see is the few feet of dirt directly in front of you.

There are false summits.

Wrong turns.

Places where you have to stop and catch your breath.

And sometimes there are friends beside you who simply keep walking until you are ready to walk again.

Today, I am sixty.

I am writing essays.

I am working on a novel.

I am beginning to think of myself, tentatively but increasingly confidently, as a writer.

I don’t know exactly where it will lead.

A year ago, that uncertainty would have terrified me.

Now I understand something I didn’t understand when I walked into that conference room.

Not knowing what comes next isn’t always something to fear.

Sometimes it means there is still something ahead of you.

I thought losing my job at fifty-nine was an ending.

For a while, I tried not to feel it.

Then I walked through it.

Mile after mile.

Friend beside friend.

Word after word.

And eventually I understood:

I hadn’t reached the end of the road.

I had reached a trailhead.

Friendship reminds me of climbing

No one reaches the summits of Freel Peak or Mt. Tallac without earning them. Your lungs burn. Your calves tighten. Your feet begin to question every decision that brought you there. The switchbacks seem endless, and there comes a moment on every difficult climb when turning around feels like the wiser choice.

But seasoned hikers know the summit isn’t the only reward.

It’s the hidden alpine lake that suddenly appears through the trees, untouched and impossibly still. It’s the field of wildflowers clinging to cracks in the granite. It’s the place where the forest opens just enough to reveal Lake Tahoe shimmering below, stealing your breath more completely than the climb itself.

Those unexpected moments are why we keep putting one foot in front of the other.

Friendship has always felt the same.

When I was young, friendships were my trailhead. Sitting beside classmates, I learned far more than the lessons written on a chalkboard. Algebra never made much sense to me, but people fascinated me. I learned that kindness could soften loneliness, that words could leave bruises no one else could see, and that belonging wasn’t something you stumbled into. It was something built, one conversation, one shared secret, one act of forgiveness at a time.

Back then, I thought life was about finding the right destination.

It took years to realize it was really about finding the right people.

As I grew older, the trail became steeper. I fell in love and discovered that romantic love carries its own beautiful kind of hope. But friendship is different. Falling in love is finding someone who wants to walk toward the future with you. Friendship is discovering someone who will walk beside you while you figure out who you are.

Somewhere along that climb, I made another difficult choice.

I decided I no longer wanted alcohol writing chapters of my life. I didn’t like who I became under the influence of that spirit. The climb wasn’t dramatic. It was quiet. One decision followed another until I slowly found my footing again.

Looking back, I realize the friends who mattered most never tried to rescue me.

They listened without judgment. They reminded me who I was when I had momentarily forgotten. They believed in the woman I was becoming before I fully believed in her myself.

Sometimes that’s the greatest gift one person can offer another—to see the summit hidden inside someone who can only see the next exhausting step.

The longer I live, the more I realize that not everyone is meant to finish the hike with us.

Some friendships belong to a particular season. They teach us something we needed to learn before disappearing around another bend in the trail. We can love those people and still let them go, grateful for the miles we shared.

Then there are the rare ones.

The friends who have seen us discouraged, grieving, joyful, frightened, hopeful, and uncertain—and still choose to stay. They know when to make us laugh until we forget our troubles and when to simply sit beside us in silence. They don’t always have answers. They simply have presence.

Mt. Tallac has another lesson it likes to teach.

The mountain is famous for its false summits.

More than once, you look up, convinced you’ve finally reached the top. You gather what’s left of your energy, eager for the view you’ve been chasing, only to discover another ridge, another switchback, another climb waiting beyond it.

Life has false summits, too.

There were seasons when I thought I had finally figured everything out—that grief was behind me, that I had become the person I wanted to be, that the hard part was over. Then life would quietly reveal another ridge I hadn’t seen, another lesson waiting just beyond my confidence.

The friends who matter don’t laugh when you realize it wasn’t the summit after all. They don’t tell you that you should have known better. They smile, adjust their backpacks, and say, “Well...I guess we’re not there yet.”

Then they keep walking beside you.

And then I think about Freel Peak.

I remember the last thousand feet more clearly than I remember standing on the summit.

The altitude stole my breath with every step. The trees had disappeared, leaving us exposed to the relentless Sierra sun. The trail was no longer forgiving earth but loose granite and steep rock, where every footfall demanded intention. My legs ached. My lungs argued with every switchback. More than once I wondered if I had enough left to finish.

But I wasn’t climbing alone.

I was hiking with a group of remarkable women who had quietly made a promise without ever speaking the words: no one gets left behind.

Whenever one of us needed to stop, two others stopped too. There was no impatience. No one hurried ahead to wait at the top. We sat on warm granite, caught our breath, shared water, laughed a little, and waited until the exhausted one found her strength again.

Then we all stood up and kept climbing.

Over the years, I’ve realized the women who have remained in my life are friends exactly like that.

They don’t leave because you’ve made a bad decision. They don’t disappear when grief changes you or when life asks more of you than you think you can give. They don’t measure your worth by how quickly you recover or how steadily you climb.

They wait.

They trust that your strength hasn’t disappeared—it has only grown tired.

And when you’re ready, they shoulder their packs, smile, and continue walking beside you as though there had never been any question that you would make it.

Standing on the summit of Mt. Tallac or Freel Peak is an unforgettable feeling. The wind rushes across your face. The Tahoe Basin stretches endlessly below. For a few quiet moments, you understand why the climb mattered.

Life offers summits, too.

Sometimes they look like publishing your first novel. Sometimes they’re choosing sobriety. Sometimes they’re surviving heartbreak, finding your voice, raising a family, beginning again, or simply becoming the person you were always meant to be.

The older I get, the less impressed I am by people who reach the summit alone.

I’m grateful for the ones who notice when someone has fallen behind.

The ones who stop.

The ones who wait.

Maybe that’s why I still climb mountains.

Not because I need another summit, but because every trail reminds me what a good friendship looks like.

I’ve climbed a lot of mountains in my life. The greatest gift wasn’t reaching the summit.

It was learning who would wait for me when I thought I couldn’t.

Ben Davis

Every afternoon I climbed Mangels Avenue until I reached the top of Sunnyside Park. Then I’d run.

I’d race down the long grassy hill with my arms stretched wide, the wind pressing against my face as though it were trying to lift me off the ground. At the bottom I’d turn around, catch my breath, and do it again. I must have made that climb hundreds of times.

Looking back, I realize I wasn’t just running down a hill.

I was running toward the only place that always felt safe.

Sunnyside Park sat across the street from my childhood home in San Francisco, but it felt like another world. Home could be unpredictable. The park had its own dependable rhythm. Children laughed from the swings. Basketballs echoed across the courts. Parents called everyone home when the streetlights flickered on. No matter what was happening on the other side of the street, I could count on the park to be exactly what I needed it to be.

The swings taught us to trust momentum. The monkey bars taught us to keep moving even when our hands began to ache. The merry-go-round taught us there was always one fearless child willing to spin it far too fast while the rest of us held on for dear life. Scraped knees were expected. Bruises faded. Tears rarely lasted long. By the next afternoon, we’d be back, racing toward the swings as if nothing had happened.

Without realizing it, we were practicing for the rest of our lives.

Above the playground sat a modest recreation building with a ping-pong table that would quietly change my life.

I was a petite girl, easy to overlook. The boys rarely expected much from me, especially Chris Dennis, who carried himself with the easy confidence only twelve-year-old boys seem to possess.

We played game after game.

At first I lost nearly every game. Then I started winning a point here and there. Before long, I was winning games.

Beating the boys wasn’t really about ping-pong. It was about discovering something I hadn’t known about myself—that determination could outweigh size, that being small didn’t mean being weak, and that confidence isn’t something you’re born with. Sometimes it’s earned one point at a time.

It’s funny what prepares us for life.

Not the grand accomplishments.

A ping-pong table in a neighborhood recreation room.

As we grew older, the park seemed to grow with us.

Beyond the playground were basketball courts where older kids played faster, louder games. The crack of tennis balls drifted across the courts where I imagined adulthood lived. Wide stretches of grass became football fields on autumn afternoons. I can still picture one barefoot kicker launching a football so high and so far that it seemed to disappear into the San Francisco fog before dropping back to earth. To a young girl, it looked like magic.

Every corner of the park offered a glimpse of who we might become. One year we were chasing each other through the playground. The next we were lingering near the basketball courts, pretending we were older than we were. Without noticing, we kept moving from one level of the park to the next, each one carrying us a little farther from childhood.

And then there was the wall.

It wasn’t much to look at—a low retaining wall near the bottom of the park. Concrete. Ordinary. Easy to miss if you didn’t know its importance.

Every neighborhood has a place like it.

A place where childhood begins giving way to something else.

The cool kids gathered there.

They laughed louder than anyone else. Music drifted through the air from someone’s portable radio. Cigarette smoke curled above their heads. Beer bottles appeared as if by magic. The sweet, unmistakable smell of marijuana lingered in the evening air.

From a distance, it looked like freedom.

Friends of mine started spending their evenings there.

Eventually, I did too.

We’d meet at the wall before wandering into the San Francisco night, never entirely sure where we were going. Maybe a bonfire at Ocean Beach. Maybe a party at someone’s house we’d never been to before, hosted by people we’d never met. Somehow, someone always knew someone.

It felt thrilling to stand there.

It also felt like standing on the edge of something I couldn’t yet name.

One afternoon, as I perched on the wall trying my best to look older than I was, something caught my eye across the park.

My father’s green Ford pickup truck.

It rolled slowly toward us.

Not through the parking lot.

Across the grass.

Conversation stopped.

Heads turned.

“Who’s that?” someone asked.

I knew.

Every ounce of confidence I’d borrowed from that wall disappeared.

The truck came to a stop a few feet away.

My father sat behind the wheel wearing the same striped Ben Davis work shirt and matching work pants he’d worn nearly every day of my childhood. His huge hands rested on the steering wheel, rough from years of digging ditches and handling shovels. His forearms were dark from decades beneath the California sun. He didn’t honk. He didn’t wave. He didn’t call my name.

He simply waited.

I wanted the earth to open beneath me.

Instead, I slid off the wall, suddenly aware that every step across that lawn felt impossibly long. I could feel dozens of eyes following me as I opened the passenger door and climbed inside.

The vinyl seat was warm from the afternoon sun. It smelled faintly of motor oil, dust, and the familiar scent of my father’s workday.

I stared straight ahead, too embarrassed to look at him.

Neither of us said much as we drove home.

At sixteen, I was certain it was the most humiliating moment of my life.

At sixty, I think it may have been one of the greatest acts of love I’ve ever received.

He wasn’t trying to embarrass me.

He wasn’t angry.

He was a man who worked hard, loved quietly, and rarely had the words for what he felt.

He was reminding me—without saying a word—that no matter where I wandered, there would always be a place for me beside him.

There would be plenty of walls in my life after that one. Places that promised acceptance if I was willing to become someone other than myself. Places where it would have been easy to linger a little too long.

What I couldn’t understand then was that my father had given me something far more valuable than freedom.

He had given me a way home.

Years later, I brought my own children to Sunnyside Park.

They raced across the same grassy hill I had flown down so many times as a girl. Their laughter echoed through the playground while parents watched from familiar benches. Basketballs still bounced across the courts. Tennis balls still disappeared over the fences. Somewhere, another little girl was discovering how high a swing could carry her before gravity gently called her back to earth.

The park was doing what it had always done.

Teaching another generation how to grow up.

Children who had never heard my name were making memories that would one day belong only to them.

The recreation building was still there, though the ping-pong table where I had first discovered my own determination was long gone.

And the wall...

The wall was still standing, exactly where I remembered it.

Only now it was empty.

No teenagers.

No music drifting through the evening air.

No cigarettes.

No beer bottles.

The barefoot kicker was gone.

Chris Dennis was gone.

The ghosts I expected to find had vanished.

Standing there, I realized they had never really belonged to the park.

They had been living inside me all along.

Memory has a curious way of preserving places exactly as we left them while quietly rearranging everything else. We return expecting to find the past waiting patiently for us, only to discover it has been carrying on without us all along.

The park hadn’t changed nearly as much as I had.

It had simply been waiting for me to catch up.

Looking back now, I don’t think Sunnyside Park was ever just a neighborhood playground.

The swings taught us to trust joy.

The monkey bars taught us to keep moving even when our hands began to ache.

The ping-pong table taught me that confidence can be earned one point at a time.

The basketball courts taught us there would always be someone stronger, faster, or more skilled—and that showing up mattered anyway.

The open fields invited us to imagine bigger dreams than we could yet reach.

And the wall...

The wall taught me that not every place that welcomes us is meant to keep us.

Most of us encounter a wall somewhere in our lives—a place that promises excitement, belonging, escape, or reinvention. Sometimes we linger there longer than we should. Sometimes we’re fortunate enough to have someone who calls us away before we wander too far.

Maybe it’s a father who quietly drives across the grass in his green pickup truck, still wearing his striped Ben Davis work shirt after a long day at work.

Maybe it’s a friend who says, “Come with me instead.”

Maybe it’s the small, steady voice inside ourselves that finally grows loud enough to hear.

I’ve spent years hiking the mountain trails around Lake Tahoe, where every climb eventually opens to a wider view. It occurs to me now that my first trail wasn’t in the Sierra Nevada.

It began across the street from my childhood home.

Every afternoon I climbed a hill.

I thought I was simply running down the other side.

Now I see that I was learning the geography of growing up.

A place where I learned to be brave.

To lose.

To win.

To recognize quiet confidence.

To understand that love doesn’t always arrive wrapped in tenderness.

Sometimes it wears a striped Ben Davis shirt.

Sometimes it waits patiently behind the wheel of a green pickup truck.

And sometimes it says everything without speaking a single word.

I’ve always loved forests.

There is something magical about wandering beneath a canopy of towering pines, incense cedars, white firs, and quaking aspens. I find myself studying each tree as if I’m meeting an old friend, admiring the rough bark of a Jeffrey pine, the sweet fragrance of cedar, the delicate leaves of an aspen trembling in the slightest breeze.

For years, I thought I simply loved their beauty.

Only recently have I realized they have been trying to teach me something.

From above, a forest looks like thousands of individual trees, each standing alone.

But forests have taught me that appearances can be deceiving.

Quaking aspens, for example, often grow not as separate trees but as a single living organism. What appears to be an entire grove may actually share one vast root system hidden beneath the earth. Each trunk reaches toward the sky on its own, yet below the surface they remain forever connected.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.

About roots.

About family.

About the invisible connections that shape us long before we understand they exist.

Perhaps people aren’t so different.

I was adopted at birth.

For most of my life, people assumed that fact left something missing.

It didn’t.

I was loved.

Completely.

My parents never made me feel like anything other than their daughter. My childhood was filled with bedtime stories, family traditions, scraped knees kissed better, laughter around the dinner table, and the quiet certainty that I belonged.

Then, when I was seven years old, everything changed.

My mother died of breast cancer.

At an age when children still believe their parents are indestructible, I learned they are not.

My father suddenly found himself raising a little girl alone.

He was a rough man.

His hands were weathered. His words were few. He wasn’t the sort of father who wore his heart on his sleeve.

But his eyes always betrayed him.

Whenever he spoke about my mother, they filled with tears he never quite let fall.

Years later, I saw those same eyes soften whenever he looked at my children. He rarely said much, but he didn’t have to.

Love spilled out of his eyes.

Looking back, I realize that love is rarely measured by grand gestures.

It is measured by showing up.

Day after day.

Year after year.

If roots are what hold us steady, then my father spent the rest of his life deepening mine.

Because of him, I never questioned whether I belonged.

Love was never the mystery.

Identity was.

Like many adopted children, I occasionally wondered whose eyes looked back at me in the mirror.

Whose smile.

Whose hands.

Later, I wondered where my love of writing came from.

Who first stood beneath mountain peaks and felt awe.

Who passed along my stubbornness, my curiosity, my tendency to feel life so deeply.

Were those things planted by the people who raised me?

Or had they been quietly waiting inside me from the very beginning?

Those questions rested beneath the surface for decades.

Like roots.

Invisible.

Patient.

Always there.

Now, after sixty years, I find myself searching for the people whose faces I have never known.

Not because my life was incomplete.

Not because I lacked love.

But because every tree deserves to know the soil from which it first emerged.

People sometimes ask adopted children whether they are searching for their “real” parents.

I’ve never liked that question.

The people who tucked me into bed, celebrated my birthdays, taught me right from wrong, and loved me without reservation were real.

The people who gave me life are real too.

Love and biology are not competing truths.

They are different roots nourishing the same tree.

I’ve spent sixty years admiring forests.

Only recently did I realize I had been walking among family trees all along.

The roots I inherited gave me life.

The roots that found me gave me a home.

There is one more thing the forest has taught me.

Roots are only half the story.

A tree spends its entire life growing in two directions at once.

Downward into the earth that anchors it.

Upward toward a light it will never quite touch.

Perhaps people do the same.

Each person I have loved and lost has rooted me more deeply in this world while, somehow, teaching me to lift my eyes toward the heavens.

Loss changed the direction of my gaze.

When my mother died, I began asking questions no child should have to ask.

When Jim died, I searched for him in dreams, in morning light, in the quiet places where love sometimes feels closer than memory.

As the years passed, I stopped needing answers quite so badly.

Instead, I began noticing.

A hawk circling overhead just when I needed reassurance.

A dream so vivid it felt more like a visit than a memory.

An unexpected peace arriving without explanation.

Perhaps they were coincidences.

Perhaps they were something more.

I’ve stopped feeling the need to decide.

What matters is that loss never separated me from the people I loved.

In an unexpected way, it drew me closer to them.

It also drew me closer to something greater than myself.

Some call it faith.

Some call it spirit.

I simply know there is a quiet presence that has carried me through every season of my life.

It has whispered hope when I was certain there was none.

It has reminded me, time and again, that love does not end simply because we can no longer see the ones who gave it to us.

I don’t know where this search for my birth family will ultimately lead.

Perhaps to answers.

Perhaps to more questions.

Perhaps to people who have wondered about me as often as I have wondered about them.

Whatever I find cannot diminish the life I have already lived.

Nothing will ever change who my parents were.

Nothing will lessen my gratitude for the woman whose love shaped my earliest years or the man who carried both his own grief and mine with remarkable courage.

If anything, this journey has made me appreciate them even more.

The older I become, the more I understand that forests are held together by what we cannot see.

The strongest roots are hidden beneath the surface.

Some reached me through blood.

Others through love.

Others through loss.

Still others through grace.

Together, they made me who I am.

Perhaps that is why forests have always felt like sacred places to me.

Their roots disappear deep into the earth, drawing life from what came before.

Their branches reach endlessly toward the heavens.

They remind me that we are all living between two mysteries.

One beneath us.

One above us.

Between earth and heaven, I have discovered that we are held not only by our roots, but by what we continue reaching for.

And perhaps that is where a life finally becomes whole.

The Space He Left Behind

Sometimes the deepest acts of love are the ones that teach us how to love again.

I didn’t think I would fall in love again.

Not because I didn’t believe in love.

Quite the opposite.

I had already found it once.

Together, Jim and I had built a life from ordinary things. Shared dreams. Future plans. The quiet assumptions couples make when they believe they have years stretching endlessly ahead of them.

I wasn’t just in love with a person.

I was in love with the future we were creating together.

Then one day, that future disappeared.

A few weeks after Jim died, I woke to something that stopped me cold.

His pillow looked occupied.

There was an indentation where his head had always rested, so distinct that for one impossible moment I thought he was there.

Not alive exactly.

Just... there.

The shape of him.

The memory of him.

The space he had occupied for so many years.

I stared at it, suspended somewhere between sleep and waking, grief and hope.

Then Shane saw it too.

Shane was Jim’s wild Malamute. After Jim died, he mourned in his own quiet way, wandering from room to room, searching for someone who never came home.

The moment he noticed the pillow, everything changed.

His ears shot up.

His tail began to wag furiously.

In an instant, he leapt onto the bed with the kind of excitement I hadn’t seen since before Jim died.

For one breathtaking second, it was as if he believed Jim had returned.

And if Shane believed it, maybe I did too.

I don’t know what we saw that morning.

Perhaps grief had shaped an ordinary pillow into something neither of us could bear to lose.

Perhaps it was a trick of the light.

Perhaps it was something else entirely.

What I do know is that when the realization finally settled over us, the room felt empty all over again.

Shane lay down beside me and rested his head where Jim’s shoulder used to be.

Together, we grieved him one more time.

Grief is a strange landscape.

At first, it feels impossible to imagine ever leaving it. You carry your loss everywhere. It sits beside you at dinner. It follows you into bed at night. It arrives uninvited in the middle of ordinary afternoons.

For a long time, I believed moving forward meant leaving Jim behind.

I know now that isn’t true.

The people we love become part of us. We do not outgrow them. We do not replace them.

We carry them forward.

Still, I never expected love to find me again.

When it did, it arrived quietly.

There were no grand declarations.

No lightning bolt.

No certainty.

Only the gradual realization that my heart, despite everything it had endured, was still capable of opening.

That discovery frightened me.

Loving someone after profound loss feels a little like stepping onto a frozen lake after you’ve already fallen through the ice once. You know exactly what is at stake. You understand the risk in a way your younger self never could.

You know that every love story eventually ends.

One way or another.

Yet we love anyway.

Perhaps that is the bravest thing human beings do.

At first, I felt guilty.

As though happiness might somehow diminish what Jim and I had shared.

As though opening my heart again meant closing a door on the life we had built together.

But love doesn’t work that way.

The heart is not a house with only one room.

It expands.

It makes space.

The love I found again did not erase the love I had lost.

It honored it.

The grief taught me how precious love is.

The loss taught me not to postpone joy.

The years taught me that hearts are capable of holding both sorrow and happiness, memory and hope, what was and what still might be.

The man I eventually loved knew Jim too. Perhaps that is why he understood something I needed years to learn—that love does not replace what came before. It grows beside it.

Today, I understand something I could not have understood then.

Falling in love again was not a betrayal of the past.

It was an act of faith in the future.

Jim will always be part of my story.

His absence shaped me.

His love shaped me.

But so did the decision to keep living after he was gone.

For a long time, I believed love happened only once.

Now I believe love is less like a lightning strike and more like a garden.

Sometimes winter comes and leaves it barren.

Sometimes we stand in the frozen earth convinced nothing will ever grow there again.

And then, one day, against all expectation, something blooms.

Not in spite of what came before.

Because of it.

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If this essay resonated with you, I’d be honored if you’d subscribe. I write about love, loss, resilience, and the quiet moments that shape our lives—often inspired by the landscapes of Lake Tahoe, but always about the human heart.

Every summer, I become a treasure hunter in a place already discovered millions of times.

By midmorning, the parking lots are full. Kayaks dot the shoreline. Visitors gather at scenic overlooks, phones raised toward the same famous blue water that has appeared on postcards for generations.

Tahoe’s greatest irony is that everyone comes here searching for wilderness together.

The crowds gather where the guidebooks tell them to stand. Meanwhile, I spend my weekends wondering what exists just beyond the edge of the map.

Some people collect souvenirs. I collect forgotten trailheads.

The small pullout with room for three cars. The faded Forest Service sign half-hidden by manzanita. The path that begins with confidence before dissolving into granite, pine needles, and uncertainty. These are the places that call to me.

The older I get, the less interested I am in destinations and the more interested I am in what remains undiscovered.

Not undiscovered by everyone. Just undiscovered by me.

The secret places aren’t really secret. They simply require enough effort to discourage most people. An extra mile. A steeper climb. An earlier alarm clock. A willingness to wonder what’s over the next ridge.

Sometimes the reward is a hidden alpine lake.

The first time I hiked Mt. Tallac with my children, we discovered Floating Island Lake, a place I never knew existed despite years of living in Tahoe. As we approached the shoreline, a mother bear and her two cubs waded into the water for a swim.

We stood quietly and watched.

Even now, years later, I can still picture the ripples spreading across the water as the cubs followed their mother into the lake.

There she was with her cubs, teaching them something about the world. And there I was with mine, trying to do the same.

Later that day, my children and I stood together on the summit of Tallac, posing for a photograph with the lake stretching blue and endless below us. Looking back, I sometimes wonder who was more proud that afternoon—the bear watching her cubs paddle confidently through the water, or me standing beside my children on the peak.

That is the kind of treasure no map can promise.

The best Tahoe views never announce themselves. They make you earn them.

They wait at the end of relentless switchbacks and aching calves. They appear only after you’ve begun to question whether the climb is worth it. Then suddenly the trees part, the horizon opens, and the lake appears below—so impossibly blue it seems illuminated from within.

A mountain doesn’t care whether its view is trending on social media.

The granite doesn’t know how many likes a photograph receives. The pines don’t care if anyone posts about them. They simply stand where they have always stood, indifferent to human attention.

The lake has become famous for its beauty, but fame is a strange burden for a wild thing to carry.

Millions come searching for Tahoe every year. Yet the Tahoe I love most is often found in the spaces between the destinations—the quiet stretches of trail where conversation fades and the only sound is wind moving through the trees.

I don’t hike to escape people.

I hike to remember how small one person can feel beneath a very large sky.

Up there, the things that seemed urgent that morning—a deadline, a disagreement, a worry I carried up the trail—suddenly feel ridiculous against thousands of feet of granite and sky.

For a few moments, I stop thinking altogether. I just stand there, breathing hard from the climb, staring at the lake below as if I’m seeing it for the first time.

Every summer, I tell myself I’m searching for Tahoe’s last secret trail.

What I find instead is something far more elusive: the ability to be astonished by a landscape I’ve known my entire life.

Most of life is built from language so ordinary we barely notice it while it’s happening. A quick text. A passing comment in a grocery store parking lot. A friend saying, Drive safe. A mother reminding her child to bring a jacket. We throw words into the world carelessly sometimes, never realizing how deeply they may land inside another person.

But every once in a while, someone says exactly the thing your soul needed to hear.

And years later, you still carry it.

I have been thinking about this lately while hiking the trails around Lake Tahoe, where conversations seem to unfold differently than they do anywhere else. Maybe it is the mountains. Maybe it is the rhythm of walking beside someone instead of sitting across from them. Or maybe nature strips away enough noise that people finally say what they truly mean.

On the trail to Charity Valley, my friends and I talked the way old friends do — wandering between laughter and heartbreak without warning. We spoke about children, marriages, aging parents, grief, disappointment, and dreams we still secretly carried. Bears rustled somewhere deep in the trees while sunlight filtered through the pines in broken golden pieces. Around us, the wilderness remained unchanged, ancient and indifferent, yet somehow it made every human confession feel sacred.

At one point, someone said quietly, “You survived things nobody even knows about.”

The conversation moved on almost immediately. Someone pointed out wildflowers. Someone else joked about sore knees and hiking poles. But the sentence stayed behind with me, suspended in the air long after the others had forgotten it.

You survived things nobody even knows about.

I realized how true that is for nearly everyone we meet.

The cashier smiling through a divorce.
The father grieving silently while coaching Little League.
The woman at work who seems “fine” because she has become skilled at carrying impossible things gracefully.

We underestimate each other constantly.

And we underestimate ourselves.

Years ago, our small mountain community became obsessed with a simple heartbeat symbol designed by a local artist. It appeared everywhere — hats, sweatshirts, stickers, mugs. Tourists bought it by the armful. Locals wore it proudly because it seemed to capture something true about Lake Tahoe: connection, vitality, love for this place and for each other.

The heartbeat symbol became shorthand for belonging.

Then one day, the man behind it publicly unleashed hateful words online — cruel, prejudiced rhetoric that spread quickly across local news feeds and social media. Our town reeled from the contradiction. How could someone associated with a symbol of love harbor such bitterness underneath?

Almost overnight, people began throwing away the products they once proudly wore. Stores pulled merchandise from their shelves. Social media filled with photos of hats tossed into dumpsters and shirts abandoned in garbage cans.

What struck me most was not the scandal itself, but the permanence of words once they are released into the world.

Objects could be discarded.
Brands could disappear.
But words were harder to erase.

Our words are more powerful than we realize. They have the power to wound, the power to heal, and sometimes the power to destroy entire reputations, relationships, or communities. Once spoken aloud — especially publicly — they take on a life of their own.

And yet words can also save us.

Experience has taught me that sharing our deepest fears and hidden grief with trusted friends can feel medicinal. Nothing heals a wound faster than finally speaking the thing you believed had to remain buried and hearing someone quietly respond, “I’ve been there too.”

It is like a honey elixir coating a tear in the soul.

Sometimes survival itself begins there.

I know because certain words have carried me through dark seasons of my own life. During one particularly difficult period, someone I barely knew looked at me and said, “You don’t quit. I can tell.”

It should not have mattered so much. But it did.

At the time, I felt exhausted in ways I could not explain to anyone. Yet somehow those six words became something I returned to over and over again. Proof that another human being had seen strength in me before I could recognize it myself.

But not all words become lifelines.

Some become scars.

Who among us has not been wounded by something said carelessly during childhood? The insults thrown in hallways. The humiliations disguised as jokes. The casual cruelty children often inflict upon one another before they understand the permanence of language.

I can still remember certain words said to me decades ago during elementary school with startling clarity. Long after the faces faded, the words remained. That is the frightening thing about language: the body forgets many things, but shame has a remarkable memory.

Words leave fingerprints on the human spirit.

That is why kindness matters so deeply.

Not performative kindness. Not polished social-media compassion. Real kindness. The kind that notices exhaustion in someone’s face and softens its tone accordingly. The kind that understands we may be standing inches away from a private battle we cannot see.

The older I get, the more I believe survival is often communal. We continue because someone, somewhere, handed us a reason to keep going. Sometimes that reason arrives as a sentence spoken during an ordinary Tuesday conversation the speaker will never remember.

But we do.

We remember.

We remember the final conversations.
The unexpected encouragement.
The apology that arrived too late.
The “I’m proud of you.”
The “I should have told you sooner.”
The “I love you” spoken at exactly the right moment.

Words alter emotional geography. They become landmarks in our lives.

As we navigate the uncertainty of stormy days and difficult years ahead, perhaps we should speak more carefully. More courageously. More honestly. Perhaps we should say the loving thing while there is still time.

Because words do not disappear after they are spoken. They live on inside people. They shape identities, relationships, memories, and futures in ways we may never fully understand.

Our words are more powerful than we know.

And sometimes they are powerful enough to help another person survive.