Really enjoyed The Flame (the last) poetry collection by Leonard Cohen, and Daily Prayer with the Corymeela Community (prayers and meditations) by Padraig O'Tuama. Enjoyed Salt Houses (fiction, multigenerational diaspora Palestinian family) and Sarah Kay's No Matter the Wreckage (poetry). Also read or listened to the Mind-Body Problem by Jonathan Westphal, Atomic Habits by James Clear (overrated), Poetry Handbook: Understanding and Writing Poems by Mary Oliver (not as good as I'd hoped based on her own poetry which I often really admire), and am nearly done with the marathon of Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.

OMG separated at birth. EVERYONE in my entire extended family and ALL of my offspring can do anything from Bobby McFerrin to the Queen of the Night Aria. And I literally cannot make the sound. It is the weirdest thing. I do not function at.all before coffee. Fortunately this is a disability one can manage around, like never traveling anywhere without a small bag of grounds and a costa rican coffee sock. Just in case. I'm very very very bad at remembering names. Even names I KNOW, not just names of new people I'm meeting for the first time. Like, I'm **in the kitchen** of the mother of my kid's best friend, that I've known for years, that had to my own house for dinner, and I'm chatting away and all of a sudden my brain seizes and in sheer terror I think, what is your name again? Relatedly, I'm extremely bad at small talk. If I'm thrown into a circumstance where it's required, like a benefit or event that I have to attend for my husband's sake, I generally find one person and button the poor soul down into a possibly involuntary Serious Conversation rather than flit about brightly striking up pleasantries with zillions of folks whose name I can't remember.

re finding a therapist that works effectively **with you** Well, I realize how very not-helpful this is, but I think all it really comes down to is 1) persistence (in a time when getting out of bed and remaining upright is challenging) and 2) luck. The way I personally see it, nobody (neither depressed person nor practitioner trying to help them) really KNOWS what interventions -- medication, different types of therapy, alternative treatments like EMDR/ ketamine etc -- is what they "need," or if sufficient time/ exercise/ improvement in diet and other daily habits will eventually enable the clouds to recede and healing to occur. Everyone is more or less throwing different interventions at the issue and seeing/evaluating/hoping the interventions will work. Healing (generally) is an art, not an arithmetic problem; and it is very rare that real mental health issues respond to a single intervention the way certain infections respond to the right antibiotic. So the persistence is necessary to hang in there and keep trying different approaches, and not giving up and walking away from trying. And the luck part is happening by good fortune on an intervention that helps earlier in the miserable quest rather than later. I found therapists who didn't click through general physician referral, through support group referral, through insurance coverage lists, and through Psychology Today lists. I gave up a number of times. (Although -- this is I think important -- in hindsight I see now that I wasn't really ready. I was looking for reasons to give up. I didn't believe I "was" the problem; and I didn't yet accept that whether or not that was true, I HAD a problem and could benefit from how I caught and responded to the problem.) I eventually found one who did click through the referral of a friend's therapist. The friend is similar to me in many ways; the two therapists trained together and are friends with one another. In my case at least, while she tends to lean CBT with me, it's the fit that matters most -- she's trained in DBT as well and I expects leans more that way with other patients. And honestly you can read about CBT and DBT and other variations and sort of speculate about which you think sounds "best" but you cannot really know until you DO it. (( I know how hard it is to summon up the energy. ))

(( I'm so sorry. )) Talking to someone sufficiently skilled... with whom you get to a relationship of trust... who then is able to push you a little bit (but not too much or too early or too fast) further/harder/into places than you'd be inclined or able to go on your own... and is able to pierce through the defensive armor you cannot help but put on... along with applying particular tools/ methods/ approaches... ... enables you to work out how to better respond YOURSELF to facts that can't change. But you have to be ready. You have to want it. Premature therapy is vanishingly unlikely to do much because ( ellipsing only because every recovery journey is different, and people respond differently to therapy and medication and other tools and sheer time; but this is a wonderful image of the GOAL ) CBT v DBT (behavioral "tools") v other analytical methods of how to confront disordered patterns I also have found a mostly CBT-leaning approach to be very helpful. I know many others for whom a more DBT-leaning was the one. Based on my personal circle, I wonder if there's maybe a "fit" issue where folks who think more analogously/metaphorically/systems-y find the CBT "framing" stuff helpful, and those who think more linearly and concretely find the DBT tools more helpful. But in any event. It starts with finding a skilled person with whom you can get to a relationship of trust. And who can read your (inevitable, none of us can help it) defenses for what they are, and figure out a way to move forward nonetheless. (( good luck. )) I also really wish I'd tried seriously, which -- fair warning, and, I do understand how very hard it is to work through this when you're under water and impaired -- included several rounds of finding a person with the right fit, years earlier.

re deutzias Once they're established they're pretty drought tolerant; I almost never water any of them. I'm in CT so we don't get sustained HEAT heat; they might droop at the high end of their ~3-8 range. They really are quite sturdy though.

One of my absolute favorite flowering shrubs is deutzia, which comes in regular mounding, upright and dwarf forms; most variants are white but I have a few (two upright, two dwarf) that are pale pink, very graceful sprays of blossoms. They are absolute workhorses -- can take pruning whenever you get around to it, do fine if you don't get around to it, deer resistant, can take anything from full sun to dappled shade, with fairly long bloom cycles. Mine (I have a bunch of variants, so the lot of them) bloom from mid May through early July. Here is a nice pink dwarf and there are plenty of white ones. The also propagate very easily with my hack-"layering" system of pulling a low a branch down to ground level, making a few cuts with a knife, plonking a large rock on top of the branch, and waiting 6-24 months; the weighted branch pretty much invariably has rooted and I have a nice baby plant to put somewhere else.

LOL if this person knew you in college and you've stayed on visiting terms ever since then I expect the person can roll with it.

I'd start by asking at the nearest "50+ place" about reserving a room... ... and then posting a "let's meet-up" general invite at the place you get supplies. The tweens will self-select out, if the location is the 50+ place. Ask the supply place, they might well be willing to give you a fistful of discount cards and/or send over somebody to demonstrate a particular process.

Scarlett, your b / a is gorgeous! And the paint looks great. Dawn, I love the idea of flanking bookcases, can never have too many bookcases, but wrt to your second rendering-picture, I'm not quite sold on the transition between the raised hearth and the ~2x as tall cabinets. To my eye, it makes the hearth feel cramped -- discourages the sit your butt on down here sense that a good raised hearth invites (see: Scarlett's cushions). How wide is your hearth? Do you need the storage in the cabinets? Would it work if rather than the cabinets beneath the shelving, you did bench seating beneath the shelving that continued the height and sense of the raised hearth?

I like the idea of classic books that *you* loved as a child - you can tell them so, and after you've left they'll have something to remind them of your visit and help them understand you/connect to you a little bit more. And maybe a game you enjoy as @wathe suggested, and/or some nice quality art supplies too, in the event they're not big readers. You're a good sister, and it's totally understandable to be nervous and overthinking, and I hope it goes well. Holding you both in the light.

https://bsky.app/profile/kenwhite.bsky.social/post/3kpvg4bl7xd25 (language alert)

TY - I'd missed that.

Absolutely. Because itty bitty 6 year olds have ALWAYS had incredibly strong emotions, the cognitive capacity to make and act on a plan, and on-average weak impulse control; and in the current environment they can and do also have guns in their backpack.

re systemic ways in which "accountability" is hindered These are are real issues. Systemic faultlines like the bolded* and systems failure are real, and the all-too-human inclination to cast around for a single scapegoat -- one Individual, one Bad Apple, one focus on whom everything can be blamed -- is a sort of abdication from the hard necessary work of tackling the systems stuff. Insufficient access to, and stigma around, mental health support is another huge systems failure. For the issue of gun violence and gun suicide at the hands of children, the BIGGEST system failure is guns in the hands of unsupervised children. Making progress there -- safe storage laws, civil liabilities and criminal penalties on adult gun owners who do not store responsibly, red flag laws enabling LEO to remove weapons when warranted -- will have the biggest yield. But all of the above issues also need work. * not bolding social promotion only because the kid was in kindergarten so it hadn't come up yet in this particular case

My daughter and I put some -- I think it was these -- in a rental. They were easy-peasy to put up (if you've ever put up wallpater, this was MUCH easier) -- and they looked great (not like real tile; it didn't really read like a hard impermeable surface; but they looked GOOD) and they held up fine for the 2-3 years she was there. Probably wouldn't hold up for the 20++ years that actual tiles would hold up but they were a lot cheaper / easier.