The Spaces In Between

As always, if you are interested in previous year in reviews, you can find them here:  2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2013, 2012.

Intro: I have struggled to write this post. First, I didn’t write it because I hadn’t completed my 2023 review and my 2024 words posts. Then, when I had written those posts, life was busy. In the Spring, I was an adjunct at Hobart and William Smith while also juggling babysitting, and job applications, and the start of a new job.

But things slowed down in the summer, and still I struggled to write. And that is due to grief, and depression. Last year was the year that many things were ripped away from me, my job, my students, my financial stability, and my community. It is hard to write about that, and I have started and stopped this post many times. But, I have kept at it and finally here it is: my review of 2024, all the hard stuff, and as always, the joy too.

Spring Semester: The year 2024 started with community building, and lots of joyful moments in nature. At the start of the semester, my colleague Meg organized a weekly gathering with some of the other junior faculty who had come to Wells either with my cohort in Fall 2022, or her cohort in Fall 2023. We would go down to the lake to skip rocks and share the challenges and highlights of the week. It was a great way to deal with the stress of our jobs, and also provided a sense of community which was especially important in a tiny college where many of us were departments of only 1-2 people. My cover photo of the heart leaf comes from one of these weekly gatherings; I would try to find a heart rock or heart leaf every time we went down to the lake shore.

We had an unusually warm spring–which meant I jumped in the lake on February 27th, and again in March and April. I love the photos Meg took of my first plunge, my fist up in the air, a red hat on my head, the Wells College bell tower rising above the trees in the distance. (This year, in 2025, February temperatures were in the teens, and the edge of the lake was completely frozen over. There is no way I would have jumped in the lake!)

In the Spring I taught Intro again–with 18 students. It was great to have a big class again (In the Fall I only had 9 students in Intro), and I had a TA who had taken several classes with me, who helped with some class logistics. I also taught Intersectionalities (aka Feminist Theory and Methods), with 4 upper-class students. I also taught LGBTQ Identities and Communities at Wells for the first time, with a class of 8. It was a relief to finally have a semester where I was teaching familiar classes and didn’t have to create new syllabi! I did need to revise LGBTQ Identities and Communities given that I had taught many of the students in other classes, and didn’t want to repeat materials, but that was a fun challenge, and enabled me to put new readings on the syllabus. However, the structure of the class stayed fundamentally the same.

I also co-taught the Gardening Class in the second half of the semester. During my week, we made dandelion jelly which was a ton of fun. Unfortunately I got the water ratio wrong, so it turned into syrup rather than jelly but we still learned about how to gather the petals, and use boiling water, sugar, and pectin to make them into something delicious.

In February, I traveled to the Housatonic Valley School to give a workshop on gender inclusion. I presented there on a panel in 2019, and it was fantastic to return to the school in 2024. I provided an open workshop to parents and teachers, reviewed school policies for gender inclusion, and answered teachers’ questions during their faculty meeting. I also gave a workshop on trans childhood to the Trans Studies faculty study group at Hobart and William Smith.

I also participated in a search committee, looking for an Archivist to come and help organize the Art Collection on campus. It would have been a two year fellowship, and so many fantastic people applied for the position. I was very excited that this person was going to help us track down, and organize, and highlight the fantastic art collection at Wells that unfortunately had not had its due care.

It also gave me the experience of sorting through job applications from the perspective of the person hiring, and helped me understand some of the pitfalls that people can make when submitting resumes and during interviews. (Be specific in your materials!) It also helped me understand in a visceral way how quickly people have to look through people’s applications. It sucks when the applicants spend SO much time putting those materials together, but when you have almost a hundred cover letters and resumes to read, you have to streamline your review of applicants.

This job search, along with events like admitted students day, and faculty meetings where we were reassured that Wells College was doing fine, all meant that while we knew Wells College was in a shaky place, we all assumed we had at least one more year before it might close. So many things were being put in place for the Fall, and when asked about the budget, we were told “We can make it through the summer.” which many of us understood to mean, “We are fine” since they had told us summer was always when cash-flow was a concern. Unfortunately it turned out “we can make it through the summer” meant that literally, we could ONLY make it through the summer.

Everything came crashing down at the end of April. On a Monday morning, in the last week of classes, faculty, staff, and students were sent an email at 7 am announcing the college would close at the end of the Spring semester. It was a traumatic experience, to say the least. And while it was comforting to go through it with an entire community, that also multiplied the grief, as I watched my colleagues and students reel with the enormity of this loss.

Now, a year later, I am still dealing with the grief and trauma from how the closure was communicated, how faculty and students were treated in the weeks that followed, and the enormity of losing my beloved career in such a brutal way.

I also had to deal with personal grief, alongside this community and career grief. In March, I tried again to reach my friend Cedar, who I had been trying to get in touch with since early January. It wasn’t uncommon for us to go months without talking, and in fact we hadn’t been in touch since July the previous year when we had a conversation about the LGBTQ camp they were going to in Florida. I reached out in September 2023, but figured we were both busy when I didn’t hear back. Now, having not heard from them despite several messages since January, I was starting to get worried. Searching for a different way to get in touch, I found out on Facebook that they had died in a car crash heading home from the LGBTQ summer camp they had attended just a week after I had last talked to them. I was devastated and my grief compounded from the way I found out, and my guilt at not knowing sooner.

Summer:

Summer started with a family emergency (thankfully everyone is okay now), and cleaning out my office. There was a lot of stress, and grief, but also joy. My first nibling was born, I got married, spent lots of time outside with children, and traveled with family.

Indigo and I were married in June, in a very small courthouse ceremony, accompanied by 2 local friends, Mellie and Josh, and 2 friends from Massachusetts, Heather and Moth. We hope to have a larger celebration sometime in the future. We picked the date, 06/12/2024, in part because 12 is my favorite number.

Given that I was the sole income in our household, as Indigo had one more year to finish their grad program, Wells closing meant intense financial stress. I decided to work at a local summer camp, Camp Gregory in June and July, to help stretch out the time I might need to be on unemployment. Camp was a very busy (and sometimes overwhelming) 5 weeks, but my time as a camp counselor also brought much needed joy and distraction.

I love working with children, and being in the outdoors every day was fantastic for my mental and physical health. I was the counselor with the rainbow loom bracelet supplies, who had a circle of kids around me every time there was a break between activities, the counselor singing marching songs to inspire the cabin of 8 year-olds to put on their shoes more quickly, and the nature-loving counselor who would pick up spiders and remove them from the bathroom. I loved all of the time we spent on the lake-shore with the kids swimming in the lake every afternoon, and the chance to bond with kids of many different ages.

In August, Indigo and I connected up with a local group, The Tompkins County Masked Collective, which hosts masked gatherings at local parks and playgrounds. It was SO affirming to connect with other local folks who are still taking covid precautions and working to keep each other safe. Some of the folks in the group have become fast friends, and also provided me with some covid-safe babysitting jobs in the Fall.

I also went on a family trip to Minneapolis with my parents, siblings and my new nibling. My brother in law is from Minnesota and it was good to see where he is from, and have adventures in a new city!

Another way that I coped with my grief about Wells closing and about Cedar was to put a lot of energy into gardening. My friend Mellie gave me a lot of seedlings, and together we cleared new beds, and created a container garden up by the house. I also foraged a lot on the local school grounds and friends’ land. I pulled garlic mustard out of my garden (a terrible invasive) and made pesto out of it. I picked blackberries and black cap raspberries in the trails by the school. We made red-bud jelly and this time didn’t screw it up by boiling the flowers–we steeped them properly, and made a vibrant fuschia jelly. I dug up burdock root for the first time and put it in pickle juice. In my garden, my strawberry patch exploded and for weeks I had a handful of strawberries with my breakfast every day.

Fall:

Late summer/early Fall brought bright dahlia blooms, tall goldenrod flowers, and pink and green shimmering lights of the Aurora Borealis. I spent a lot of time applying to jobs, deep cleaning the house and foraging for mushrooms. In September, I was invited to give my first Quaker Message, and wrote about my experiences with grief. It was healing to write about what I have learned about grief over the years and it helped me discover a new type of Teaching. You can read my Message here.

I finished editing a chapter for a Routledge collection on Gender and Childhood and applied to a ton of jobs. I was a top three finalist for a job in Women and Gender Studies at Hamilton College, and then didn’t get it which was a huge blow.

My sister, Emily, was home from Pakistan in September, so I went down to Maryland for some family time. We spent Thanksgiving with family in a cabin in Thurmont, MD and Christmas at my parents’ in Maryland. It was good to be with family several times in the Fall, and especially to spend time with my new nibling.

Along with our new connections with the Tompkins County Masked Collective, I started supporting the work of the Better Breathing Bloc in Syracuse, which provides free masks and free covid tests to the local community and organizes covid-safe indoor events. In October, I started babysitting for a family with a three year old who needed a covid-conscious baby-sitter. It was a perfect fit for all of us, and I loved all of the imaginative games that the two of us played together.

We ended the year with a Winter Solstice gathering in our garage, just like we did in 2023, gathering for soup and hot chocolate with friends. It was in the teens, but we bundled up (One friend had so many layers of sweaters on she couldn’t put her arms down by her sides!) and enjoyed the fire and company on the darkest night of the year.