Trust

I take it seriously

Photo by Dinh Pham on Unsplash

L spent three days in the city with a school organization, competing with two of his friends for a spot in the national competition. They did well and are now busily working to perfect their presentation and figure out how to raise the money needed to get to nationals. When L told me where the competition was being held, he joked that I would be nervous. The competition was being held in the part of the city that just more than 18 months ago, I had been really upset with him for wandering around after a concert. But now, I wasn’t nervous at all—hadn’t worried about when he got back to his hotel or where he might be when not at the competition itself. In those 18 months—through conversations and experiences, some marked by disappointment and worry, others full of pride and an easy back and forth, and many others, often just quick check ins or asks to use the car—something had taken the place of that constant worry and anxiety.

Trust.

Each text letting me know where he was, when he’d be home. Each conversation when he’d done something he shouldn’t have, been somewhere he hadn’t told me he would be and we were able to work through it. Each apology when I’d over-reacted or made an assumption, when he hadn’t followed through or been honest with me. They were like threads, binding together the various experiences, feelings, worries, hopes, expectations that not only I had of him, but that he had of me. Sometimes, that binding felt like tugging hard on a thread, pulling the fabric too tight, bunching it up at the seams. Other times, it was too loose and the stitches didn’t pull the pieces of cloth close enough together. But here we are, halfway into his 18th year circling the sun, and most days, it feels like we’ve created this lovely space between us, that all the back and forth has come together like a quilt, stitched by hand, painstaking and careful, but in the end, creating a beautiful masterpiece that will provide warmth and comfort and all the memories of the careful crafting that went into this relationship.

Something about getting older inspired me to reach out to people from my across my life and let them know what they have meant to me. The friend we spent December 31, 1999 with, in a condo in New Hampshire, wondering if Y2K would crash the computers. The lift tickets on our ski jackets the next day said January 1, 1900, because the machine couldn’t print 2000. His wife, with whom I have shared the journey of college applications and acceptances, the challenges of life at this stage, when children are suddenly young adults and life without them at home is on the very near horizon. The high school principal who encouraged me to apply to college, set me up with a therapist, and saw the scared girl I was and helped me to be brave. The friends who were there when M was just weeks old and two-year-old L began convulsing from a febrile seizure. Who calmly told us what to do and then gently stroked L’s forehead, his little cheek, telling him he was okay, that his body was too hot and cooling itself off. The parents of my closest friend growing up, who had never once seemed to mind my constant presence in their home, who fed me and treated me like their own. The parent of one of Z’s friends who reached out to me, though we didn’t know each other well, to tell me her son had shared that Z was being bullied on the bus ride home from school. Her thoughtfulness in reaching out, in wanting to protect my boy, it started a friendship that has persisted through so much. The friend I met one early summer day, soon after her family had arrived to the states from Africa. Our names both started with R, we were both the oldest in our families. She remains a friend I hold dear in my heart and just bringing to mind her smile, her laugh, can lighten my sadness. The professor who first nurtured my academic strengths and then became one of the people I admire and adore most in the world.

Many have been my friends for several decades now. It is still hard for my brain to hold this. That I have been alive for five decades. That I have people in my life whose connection I have cherished for two or three or even four of those decades. That I have a child who is about to celebrate his own first two decades on the planet.

Time is a wild thing.

One of the things that struck me as I reconnected with folks is that even when many years had passed since we had last spoken; when children had been born and grown; relationships had started, failed, withstood hardship, been tolerated, or blossomed; moves across towns and states; careers started, interrupted, accelerated; life had been both harsh and cruel, kind and giving, and often just mundane was the enduring sense of trust I felt. The strength of our connection, even after so much time, so many experiences, so many more people in and out of both of our lives.

Quilt by Lori Odhner, fairy illustrations by Jency Latta

I could wrap myself up in these connections, feel them around me like the warmth of a well-loved quilt. The squares cut carefully from life’s journey, placed together to make beautiful patterns, to create art out of cloth. The threads binding each piece to its neighbors, the stitches designed to be almost invisible, there not to be noticed, but to hold everything in its place. The quilting curled and symmetrical, binding the three layers together to create a quilt, the batting held between the top and bottom.

When you look closely at a quilt, you can see all the work that goes into it. The precision involved in cutting out each piece for an intricate design. The careful stitching that brings those pieces together and creates a pattern, a scene, a cloth-based work of art. The quilting that creates its own path across the fabrics, holding together the top layer which is an artistic composition, the batting to provide warmth, and the back the provides the solidity. It represents hours and hours of someone’s time, the vision and artistry. The backache of the person who sat on the floor placing all the pieces together, trimming this one back and redoing that one because it had been cut too short. The frustration as a seam was ripped out because two pieces were joined that shouldn’t have been. The satisfaction when it all started to come together. The calm of an evening with a basted quilt across a lap, stitches going in and out of the fabric while soft music played or conversation was enjoyed. Those hours of creating, cutting, stitching, basting, quilting all leading to a large rectangle that covers a bed, wraps around someone, brings warmth and coziness on a cold night.

From the bright, sunny warm day in May when I met up with an old friend a few hours west and we shared food and conversation and the company of a sweet, curious little one who started out skeptical of me and ended up sharing my ice cream to the early briskness of stick season in the Catskills hiking and laughing full, deep belly laughs with two friends I’ve known since elementary school to a warm December trip to celebrate the birthday of a friend who officiated my wedding and his husband, who made sure everything else went off flawlessly, all of these reconnections have reminded me that this is what all of it is about. The neighbors who have explored the dunes and cemeteries of the Cape and shared most Thanksgivings and Christmas Eves with us, our children like cousins to each other. The friends who moved in only a week or so before we did, who we met on our first walk around the neighborhood, our newly turned one year olds still relying on us to help them navigate the world. We welcomed their siblings, watched them all grow up together, and now, those first babies are both on the cusp of 20 this month. The women who have laughed and cried with me while we ate bacon-wrapped dates and sipped passion fruit margaritas, conquered ski trails, and personal challenges alike. The colleague who I brought a bouquet of flowers to her first day back from maternity leave and who, years later, encouraged me back into federal service. The woman who came into our lives as a bubbly, energetic summer nanny for the boys when M was just four years old and who now is like an older sister to the boys and a dear dear friend to me. And so many others. My parents. My siblings and their partners. My nieces and nephews.

My husband. My children.

These are people for whom I would drop everything. Each one has a square—or maybe more—in the quilt of my life, to whom I am inextricably bound by years of interwoven stories and shared experiences and love.

Trust.

Connection.

Love.

Quilt Mother Earth and Her Children by Sieglinde Schoen Smith

The past week was hard. I imagine things in this country are going to continue to be hard for quite some time. It’s easy to see the places where the threads that have held this country together since its founding are being carelessly and senselessly ripped out. So many attempts to eliminate institutions, jobs, people. Our nation watched as the two most powerful men in our country bullied and harrassed a leader defending his country against another powerful kleptocrat. And with those horrible words, not only disgraced a nation, but changed the course of this country’s history, siding with the kleptocrat over a republic. We have watched and then protested as they gleefully delight in deportation; callously strip away human rights; try to erase the history of people who are not white, cisgendered, heterosexual. We have seen them dismantle institutions that provide medicine, vaccines, food, and aid to children around the world and in our own country. Stop funding for cancer trials and programs teaching under-resourced children to read. They have come after our national parks. They promise to take from the very safety net of our country, programs that we—the tax-paying citizens of this nation—have paid into for our working lives to provide the wealthiest of the wealthy more tax relief. They have called Social Security a Ponzi scheme. They have said they want to traumatize federal workers, they want them to have trouble sleeping at night because they so dread going to work in the morning. They have applied this mentality to so many.

They don’t seem to know what it is to be part of the fabric of a country. To understand that we pay for our libraries, our schools, our National Parks, our post office, not because they are money-making enterprises, but because they make life worth living. The books a library holds offer a glimpse into the life of a young Hmong refugee who comes to California with her family, asking us to consider how to reconcile two different cultural understandings of this child’s seizures. Libraries provide an introduction to the world of reading and books for a young child and much needed adult socialization for that child’s caregiver. Our National Parks not only protect our forests, rivers, mountains, glaciers, and the wildlife that lives in those habitats, but provides a refuge for thousands of people every year as they camp, hike, canoe, and walk through some of the most inspiring and beautiful vistas of our country. The letters I wrote to my friends, the multitude of cards we receive each December, the packages we order from all over the country—all these come through the postal service. And schools. What would our world be without school? Without teachers? The chance to learn about our natural world, our history, art, music, theater, sports. Teachers have been some of the most important people in my life.

We seem to have forgotten that not everything is about benefiting ourselves, about profit, about efficiency. Sometimes, it is about what is right, what is good for others, what is good for the country. People become park rangers because they feel a calling to care for the earth, to share the wonders of nature with others, inspire a passion in a young child for the majesty of the redwood, the grandeur of creamy sandstone cliffs in Zion National Park. Librarians study library science to provide others with a quiet place to escape to the Middle Ages and read the illuminated texts prepared by monks, for a child to learn about rocket ships and trips to the moon, someone to plan a trip to Thailand and map out their journey. Thousands of people show up to work at the Veterans Health Administration every day to care for Veterans and their families, to carry out Abraham Lincoln’s directive “to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow, and his orphan.” Scientists and researchers spent years in graduate school to prepare for careers trying to understand how to cure cancer or stop the next pandemic, help people recover from traumatic experiences, discover what causes and prevents dementia. People enter these careers not because they want to amass wealth or fame or power. They feel called to a life of service, a career that helps others grow and thrive and find more joy and less struggle in life.

They are the threads that hold this country together. They are our teachers, principals, artists, park rangers, librarians, research scientists, doctors, nurses, psychologists, social workers, project managers, professors, teachers, analysts, administrative assistants, aid workers—our thousands of civil servants who set out to do a job that will benefit others.

Without them, the fabric of our country falls apart.

Quilt by Abby Glassenberg, https://whileshenaps.com/progress-pride-flag-quilt/

Generations of people have stitched together the fabric of this nation. People from so many different races, cultures, religions, economic and class backgrounds, genders, sexual orientations, political beliefs. Those differences are what make this country what it is today. They bring a richness, a deep and varied texture and color to the fabric in each square, each block of our nation’s quilt.

We have to start trusting each other again. We have to remembering that philosophers from Buddha to Jesus to Plato to bell hooks have emphasized over and over again that community and loving our neighbor is essential to our survival.

What is our world if we do not have connection to each other? If we do not trust that we are each contributing in some way, to the great, beautiful quilt that provides warmth, comfort, and artistry when the weather gets cold, the outlook stormy, the sky, gray?

We must stand up for each other. Find our spools of thread and start repairing those connections that have been ripped apart. Pull out scraps of cloth, old t-shirts, and create new squares to fill in where old ones have been frayed or torn out. When we can, take the old squares and repair them, stitch them back into the quilt. And start now, identifying any places that are in need of some extra stitching, some new batting. Don’t wait until it’s your square to take action.

Look around you. If you have friends working for the federal government, whose work depends on federal funding. Friends who may be targets of this administration because of who they love, how they identify, the color of their skin, the country they were born in, their legal status, their gender. Check in on them. Ask them how they are doing. Bring them a pot of soup. A batch of cookies. A hug.

And then get out there, like the flinty and hardy Vermonters and make your voices heard. In a town with a population of roughly 2,000 people, more than 1,000 people showed up to protest.

Be like Warren, Vermont.

Photo by Evan L’Roy/VTDigger from https://vtdigger.org/2025/03/01/more-than-a-thousand-people-protest-vice-president-jd-vances-visit-to-vermont/

Because things are so much better when we can trust each other. When we can trust our foundation. When we aren’t worried that our lives or the lives of people we love, the lives of our neighbors may be gutted to make billionaires richer.