Monthly Archives: June 2026

Birth Stories

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This month I am experiencing my first birthday without my mother, Mitzy. She took her final breaths on June 1st at the age of 92, surrounded by five of her nine children. She had been drifting away for several months, and we could no longer communicate over the phone. I haven’t been well enough to travel, so I relied on my siblings to communicate my love to her. I feel so grateful that she had such a long life, and a peaceful gentle death.

It is really quite amazing that I had 72 birthdays while she was alive. She would love to share with me the stories of my birth, her first born. How my dad didn’t make it because he was in the army and I came before my due date. He arrived a couple days later after driving through the night from his base down south. My mom was living with her mother while he was away, and my aunt Nancy and uncle Jim brought my mom to the hospital. In those days, it was common to sedate women giving birth, so even though I was born about 10 p.m., I didn’t really meet my mother face to face until the next morning. She would describe her astonishment at this “little Mitzy” in her arms. She was hoping for a girl, and decided to name me Mike, because she’d babysat a little girl named Mike, and thought it was a cute unusual name for a girl. (I changed the spelling later in life.) In those early days, before I could remember anything, I know that I was loved and cherished and welcomed into this life.

Black & white photo of Mitzy and Rich smiling , holding baby Myke who is smiling too, looking at a little mirror held by MItzy.
Mitzy, Rich, and baby Myke (age about 9 months old)

So now that I have reached my 73rd birthday, I suddenly realize that there is no longer anyone who was present on that day. That cloud of witnesses have all passed beyond this world. My aunt Nancy died only last November at the age of 100. My own siblings were not yet born. Such a strange feeling–to be the holder of these stories without the others who lived them and told them to me. And I know how lucky I am, that I had so many years to share the stories and the love held within them. I think that is why I needed to tell the stories to myself today here in writing, to remember.

I imagine that this moment comes to everyone who lives long enough say goodbye to their parents, and to be the oldest in the family. A kind of entry into another layer of elderhood. I am not a mother or grandmother, but I am an aunt, a great-aunt, and even a great-great aunt. And always, the oldest sister.

Here is another picture of my mother and me, from 2010. We certainly had our challenges over the years. There were many things about my life that took me far away from hers, both literally and figuratively. But there was always at the root, love. Here is a link to her obituary that describes more of her life as she understood and lived it. https://www.leavittfuneralhome.com/obituaries/Carol-Louise-Mitzy-Johnson

Smiling white women with reddish brown hair, one middle-aged, one older, with floral-pattern shirt, and turquoise shirt, sitting next to each other. Trees in the background.

Thanks mom, for giving birth to me, for welcoming me into the world, and into your heart, for always keeping the doors of your heart open for me and so many others, too. You taught me hospitality, fairness, warmth, kindness, and always sticking up for the underdog.

Solstice Fledging

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Four nestling robins on a beam next to their nest.

It is Solstice morning, and as always these days, I look out the back door to check on the robin’s nest. I find the four nestlings have all jumped out of the nest and are perching on the beam. They preen their feathers and move around.

Parent robin with the four nestlings on the beam.

Parent robin flies in to join them. We can’t tell the difference between the mom and the dad–they both come round to feed the babies.

One baby robin perches on the edge of the beam, its claw like feet over the edge. The other three are in the background, two back in the nest.

One of the babies is perching on the edge of the beam, eager! A moment later, they take the leap and fly down to the deck.

Blurry image of baby robin taking flight down from the beam. Others watching from background.
Baby robin now a fledgling poised on the floor of the deck.

“What am I doing down here? I did it! I flew. I think I will fly some more. Up to that little table with a pink rose.”

on the left is a pink rose flower in a turquoise vase. the fledgling is posed to the right of it looking right.

“Now what? I think I will fly some more.”

Fledgling on top of gray canvas cover, green blurry background.

The fledgling sits on top of the woodpile cover, a few chirps that I imagine are saying, “Mom, Dad, where are you? I’m out here in the big world. Help!”

Small fledgling seen through deck rails with backyard in the background, netted raised bed, trees, grass.

Eventually, the parent robins come nearby, enticing the baby with juicy worms, calling to them from nearby perches, and even coming to the woodpile cover to encourage them. Finally, one of them calls from the garage roof, and the baby flies up there to be with them. But quickly flies up to the deck roof, and then somewhere else, I don’t see it.

Adult robin perched on garage roof, and you can see the feet and part of the body of the fledgling coming into view from above.

I lost track of them then, and went outside to look around the driveway, and then I see what turns out to be another fledgling flying toward the neighbors house, and trying to grab onto the side, but floating down. Later, it emerged from their flower bed onto the grass, and the parent went to that one to lure them into a safer place. They seem to want them to be in hidden places, no doubt.

The other two nestlings decide to huddle in the nest to recover from all this excitement. Meanwhile, I come inside to eat breakfast and marvel at the miracles of birds and growth and life. So this is my gratitude for this Summer Solstice of 2026. May life and growth and wonder fill your hearts today. May this season be filled with such moments of wonder.

Beauty of the Roadside Border

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Roadside flower bed with purple siberian irises blooming, and yellow turkish rocket, and many other plants crowded together next to a sidewalk.

The border I created next to the road is perhaps the most beautiful it has ever been. Right now, Siberian Irises are blooming in their blue-purple glory, set off by the cloud of yellow of the Turkish rocket, volunteer white daisies and a patch of white irises, along with the green of other perennial leaves filling in the gaps. The purple is reflected in 3 patches of Bachelor Buttons/perennial blue cornflowers, and 3 patches of Spiderwort. I just love looking out our front window and seeing this flourishing of my favorite color. Later, there will be a lot of yellow flowers. That was the original theme–yellow and blue/purple hardy perennials. We also encouraged milkweed to seed itself in the in between spaces, hopefully offering nurseries for monarch butterflies.

close up of purple Siberian Irises.

I’ve been trying to garden this spring, bit by bit, with what energy I can muster. For the roadside border, that just meant some weeding of crabgrass this year. I appreciate plants that take care of themselves and give so much! We also harvested sea kale earlier on, and chives, and asparagus. But something about the state of the world inspired me to plant more vegetables from seed, so now we have kale and carrots in one raised bed, broccoli and beets seedlings in the hugelmound, snap peas and zucchini in one raised bed in the front yard, and beans and yellow zucchini in the other. We also have potato plants in a grow bag on the patio, and cucumbers in a pot on the deck.

What has been harder to plant, I am not sure why, has been the seeds of ideas for writing in this blog. But this week I have been reading a book by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, “Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice.” Perhaps it is her stories of trying to write as a chronically ill queer femme of color, her openness about the ups and downs of activism, creativity, and survival. Perhaps it is the feeling of a community of writers that once upon a time I felt connected to. It is a great book for so many reasons other than those. The kind of book that sparks one to think differently about disability and justice and care. Please do check it out. But for whatever reason, each day when I read a section, I find wisdom for living the life I am living right now.

There is so much that is horrific happening in our world these days. It all feels overwhelming to me. I don’t have the capacity to write about all of that. Perhaps that is part of why I haven’t been able to write here. I can bear witness, I can pray. But it is so overwhelming. Or perhaps I can’t write because of the further diminishment of energy in this chronic but always variable illness that surrounds my living. It seems to rob me of motivation and the urge to create. Perhaps I am not sure of the connection between illness and “the spiritual journey to earth community,” which I defined as the guiding topic of this blog site. Leah Lakshmi’s voice somehow affirms the validity of illness as a topic for writing, for activism, for imagining.

So who knows if I will be able to blog some more, but for some reason, today, between the beauty of the roadside border and the beauty of Care Work, I found some inspiration, and I am grateful for that.