We talk a lot in our house. I mean, a lot. The mornings I work at home, I always close my laptop when my oldest comes downstairs, generally holding a cat. This daughter works late and stays up later, while I’m awake hours before January’s dawn appears. Even if only for a few minutes — often while I making more coffee or washing a few dishes — we talk, and much of it is simply my own curiosity. What’s up with you? What’s happening in your world?
What she gets from me is possibly not much, but one thing both daughters seem to be absorbing like osmosis is the interconnectedness of everything. This leads to that which prompts this… and so on. That the past is alive and real, and the future holds a myriad of possibilities.
So when my teenager mentions Trump’s denunciation of shithole countries and asked if I could believe it, part of me said God, yes, I believe it, while another part of me is perpetually shocked by such a fatuous fool as commander-in-chief.
I forwarded her this Chris Hedges’s essay my father sent me, in hopes of widening the thinness of a public high school education. Hedges begins, “I covered the war in El Salvador for five years. It was a peasant uprising by the dispossessed against the 14 ruling families and the handful of American corporations that ran El Salvador as if it was a plantation.”
Sunday, when we’re lucky to live in Vermont.
Stony Soil Vermont 
I come from a shithole country that had ice skating ponds like yours and we spent lifetimes on them as kids. Only now it barely freezes there anymore.
As the librarian, I asked a meteorologist to speak in our town. He had reams of data to share, but when he showed the annual ice melt-out dates on Lake Champlain — and the increasing number of years when the lake doesn’t freeze at all — the room got very quiet. That’s an enormous lake we all know, the data was incontrovertible, and the changes within a lifetime were stunning. There’s definitely an expiration date on ice skating here, too. — And I’m sorry you’re missing this great, free fun.