Hello, world!

Tonight I found the earring I thought I had vacuumed up weeks ago.

One moment I was getting ready for bed and the next there it was, underfoot, in plain sight on the floor between the end of the area rug and the beginning of the quarter round that runs along the edge of my bedroom.  So many times I had imagined myself on the back deck spreading out a blue tarp and emptying dust from the vacuum cleaner bag onto it so I could piece through the clumps of pet hair and skin and whatever else gets sucked up when we clean, to find the little silver snowflake from Josh two Christmases ago.  But there’s no need, and I’m glad I procrastinated, because now — here it is.

Moving over here is maybe similar.  I knew that the Meta-communication was no longer serving me, us, but it was unclear what to do instead.  I have the wanderer-gene — there’s an itch when unrest grows to just GTFO — but the tethers of this stage of life make bolting less available or advisable.  I got a subscription to Mick Scott on Substack from Mom, my family members found their accounts mysteriously following politicians they would never dare “like,” and like the earring sitting beside the trim just waiting to be found, it became clear, and here I am.  A digital migration.  To higher ground? TBD.

I never went looking for Facebook either.  My friend Julie, then at Middlebury, begged me to join because she was collecting friends on this new platform and she wanted one from Mount Holyoke, my college.  It was 2005.  This was when only college students, and even more specifically college students geographically-adjacent to Harvard, The Facebook’s origin place and ground zero, were eligible to become members.  For 20 years, or at least 15, it offered something that meant something.  It was the platform on which I shared my daughter’s birth. It was where I reconnected with the love of my life.  It mattered.

But do you all remember where it started?  How it even got its name?  I do.  I had a facebook, too, at my prep school in Northfield, MA, 80 miles from Cambridge where Zuckerberg attended college while I attended high school.  The facebook was a physical directory, a bound book, that each student and staff member had a copy of.  It was a book of faces — not glamorous ones but little thumbnail-sized ID photos in black and white with dorm room numbers and dorm room landlines and class years and campus mail addresses.  It was a little book that, as a day student and a quiet studious one who felt strange and out of place, I paged through for hours to learn the people I may never approach in person.  There were 1200 students in my high school, the same number of “friends” I accumulated on Facebook over 20 years.

A little bound volume is a discreet variable.  A platform is vast and increasingly untethered—digitally, even dangerous.  I wish I had saved one, a facebook.  There are copies for each year they were printed in the Archives of the high school I graduated from.  The next time I am on campus, I can go and visit the Archivist, my friend, and hold a 2002-2003 facebook in my hands — real, tangible, just the facts.  I can see my own face, a senior that year, gazing in wonderment about what the future will hold.

I think we all know that feeling when the pressure drops because the storm is coming and we hasten to leave the beach — what was lighthearted and joyous now turns unpredictable and sinister.  Some of us sense it sooner, and some of us act faster, but I think we all feel it, and no doubt we can all agree that indeed the storm was coming when the rain starts pouring down.  Ultimately, there is no denying the truth when we all find ourselves drenched in it.

What I can do today in a new era of unrest and uncertainty, is sense and watch for changes, both sea and small, and respond to those bids for patience, flex, or change.  Keep a lookout for opportunities that feel expansive — the snowflake earring against the floorboards is the possibility in physical realities, the information that promotes dialogue and connection rather than division, the written correspondence that takes a stamp to fund travel between hands, the transport that takes us on old rails between American cities.  The truth was tucked in the pages all along, don’t you think?

We will know it when we’re ready to really, truly see it and with more than just our eyes.

Hello world, and happy 2025.