There is a sense in which we are all each other's consequences. | Wallace Stegner. All the Little Live Things.  Milwaukee burned while we relaxed in the North Woods.
This is the inequality we live with, in our Milwaukee home and also everywhere. The fires, the rage, the sadness, the explosion – it is not mine. Mine is from a distance: while we explain to Anna that no, not everyone has a vacation home, we are also reading the news of a community in crisis just down the road from our 'regular life' home. We are heartbroken for our neighbors but also unaffected and wrapped in security systems.
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 Photo by Ross Freshwater | All rights reserved You, Wisconsin, with your lime green leaf buds, with your sun heating my hair and your wind chapping my cheeks, with your crowds of Badger red that break up the dull palette of wintery grays, with your lakes that glitter and freeze, with your rains that never stop and snow that always falls and summers that always bake. You, Wisconsin, with your ice quakes and thunderstorms, with your beer fests and freak fests, with your hippies and hunters and hipsters, with your bipolar politics and bipolar weather, with your locally cured bacon and organically ground bratwurst and sustainably caught bluegill, with your moody North Woods music and marching polka bands and banjos thundering the Capitol, with your blaze and your black and your cardinal.
 Photo by Melissa Gibson | All rights reserved There really is no place like home. The endless hands and arms of loved ones—friends and family alike—to scoop up your children, to hug and kiss and squeeze and calm and entertain them, to support you with joy and energy. The night after night of summer barbeques, where platters of bratwurst are ever present and fireflies tease while the sun makes its slow descent beyond the horizon and children big and small fall asleep in their parents’ laps as they laugh and talk into the wee hours.
 Dear Future Chicago Teachers, Congratulations on your acceptance to Teach For America’s Chicago corps! Now that the application and waiting process is over, you are about to make a life-changing decision. Being a teacher is simultaneously exhausting and awe-inspiring, and teaching in Chicago—the country’s third largest school district and once deemed “the worst in the nation”—is rife with its own particular struggles and successes. But I am writing to tell you: the decision to join our movement is absolutely worth it. It’s the best decision I’ve ever made.
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AboutWhile living in Mexico, I joked that speaking Spanish forced me to be far more Zen about life: Since I could only speak in the present tense, I was forced to just live in that present tense. Archives
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