Walks in Downtown Atlanta

I managed to meet a mom friend - not someone from the previous birthday party weekend, but a mom friend from the kid’s school - and have a walk and talk on the Beltline on President’s Day. I’m pushing myself, now that the Lake Claire property is sold, to try and do one social thing per week outside the home. It’s nice to notice every time I publish online that I’m not alone in what I’ve been experiencing financially, but it’s probably healthier just to talk to other women my own age in person. Every time I do this I find that while the specifics of our situations are different, we’re all sort of moving in the same direction as moms and spouses and professionals together. Well, together when we can manage to actually meet up in person, which takes real effort on both sides. It’s also nice to know the other person has made just as much effort as you to get out of the house and talk to another human being.

I could feel for the first time this week a kind of Spring, even though I know the cold weather will come back. It’s not just that the house is sold, and that I can see for the first time the possibility of months at a time where we won’t be going backwards. The annual taxes will be filed soon and we’ll have an actual refund for the first time in years. There’s the possibility of a raise at the husband’s job, now that he’s been with his new employer for a year. Real, concrete steps are beginning to happen regarding our oldest child maaaaybe moving out in eighteen months or so to a dorm. I can see for the first time a future changed by the last three years, but not utterly ruined.

I am, two weeks after the weight of the Lake Claire house was lifted off my back, slowly feeling my way forward again after I spent the second half of 2019 working on that anchor, and then 2020 to present trapped there by COVID and its economic aftermath. I think about who I was before we moved into that house - someone who marched in Beltline lantern parades and went on long urban hikes and was politically active - and I have to wonder if I really am the same person. I think I am, mostly. While friends of mine went to Love Burn and Mardi Gras and rallies last weekend though, I managed two long Beltline walks, one with a friend and one by myself. I can reclaim who I was, I think, and I can come out of all this better.

Thinking about marches and political action now makes me think about the recent unrest, and there’s some great reporting on everything going on in Atlanta in this podcast. The city continues to fight for its soul over Cop City, something that no one on the east side wants but keeps happening anyway. I look at the kids being charged for domestic terrorism just for marching on Peachtree Street and I am totally baffled. If I hadn’t been sick in bed the weekend of the last cop car fire, would I be in jail just because I’m slow and easy to catch? What about my kids, who will soon be college kids and sure to march in protests as well? I’m so confused over the situation. I legitimately can’t understand why the prosecutors are lying to judges in pushing the arrests from the march, and saying that facts don’t matter. The only things that matter are facts, or that’s how it’s supposed to be in courts. It would seem to me the moment someone says that truth is the enemy they’re admitting a loss, but - well - that’s been part of the madness for years now.

I can crawl my way out of my own personal deep dark well, but of course there are so many still in their own pits struggling. The nature of truth is something we’re all going to be wrestling with for another decade I suppose. I’ve dedicated most of my professional career, life, and writing to nailing down the nature of truth for myself and others, using all the tools of information science, digital asset management, research, and publication I have been able to master. I’ll keep working in that direction while I can. It was nice, this last week, to feel the sun again on my face for the first time in such a very long while. I can walk out in public again, by myself or with friends. I can keep putting one foot in front of the other until my stamina is back and I’ll be in parades of one kind or another again before long.

I'm only walking the Beltline now, but I can feel the need to walk alone or with others on Peachtree Street again in my future. It will take some time to get my stamina back, and I'm older, but I will get myself and my city back fully again, eventually.