Foreword I’m wrestling with traditions. Rituals. Marking the time as it goes by with more than the weekday-weekend split, more than simply naming the days by their slot in the seven-day cycle and their appointed month and number. For years, I had church and family traditions to give shape and meaning to the seasons. Candlelight services on Christmas Eve, family lunches at my mother’s family’s houses on Thanksgiving and Christmas, Lenten sacrifices, Easter sunrise services. Those have all fallen away with time and geographic distance. Alex’s and my family have scattered across the country from Alaskan islands to South Carolina pinelands, from hip college towns in California to forested suburbs in Missouri, and even the 100 miles between Philadelphia and Baltimore is increasingly a distance I am reluctant to cross. How to commit any given holiday to one part of the clan or the other? Each holiday we spend with my father is a time zone away from a holiday we could spend with Alex’s fa...
Y’all, I got a confession to make. I’ve been logging onto Facebook. I never deleted it. I stayed off of it mostly since I dramatically published my “ Why am I leaving Facebook and Instagram? ” post almost two and a half years ago. I didn’t delete my account because I had pictures on there and some old friends whose contact info I never got, and it was on my to do list to get those handled and delete the account since February of 2021. And it was nice that I didn’t since that still allowed me to occasionally dip onto the site if I wanted to look at a business’s Facebook page (yo, some places don’t bother doing websites anymore, just socials). But lately, I’ve been doing more than reluctantly logging on when FB tries to block my ability to view a restaurant’s updated hours. I’ve been scrolling. Just a bit. The top three or four posts and then that’s it. I might even click on the “Show All Comments” section. I haven’t commented or liked any posts myself because that would give away that...