In summary

or, 2024 in two dozen paragraphs

First:

• If you’re heartsick at the images of wildfire devastation in the Los Angeles area, I found this LA Times article to be helpful, with its concise list of where, how, and why to donate. But I try to remember, too, that donating to nonprofits isn’t the only way to help from afar; we can also send money directly to friends, family, and even acquaintances who are affected. When faced with difficult situations of my own, I have been the recipient of this kind of direct personal gift, and it has changed my life. Related: I loved the conversation this week between

  Anne Helen Petersen
  and
  Dana Miranda
  , especially this reminder:

Whatever you own isn’t truly yours; it’s just in your care for now. Money is a tool to shape the life and world around you. When you hold it in your hands, you hold the responsibility to contribute to that world in a life-giving way. When you see money as a communal and transient resource, you don’t have to fear scarcity when you give it away or use it to benefit someone else. Their gain isn’t your loss, because there was never a difference between “your” money and “their” money in the first place.

• There are two spots left in “From Memory to Story,” an online writing workshop that starts next Tuesday, January 14. It runs for three weeks, six meetings in all, 12 students max. We’ll read inspiring works from inspired authors, discuss the craft of personal narrative, and practice using sensory information from our memories to write about and better understand our lives. I love teaching this class for the way we so quickly get to the rich, meaty stuff of life. To read more and register: click

And now —

I entered 2024 as many do in the Pacific Northwest: by putting my body in a large body of very, very cold water.

It was my first New Year’s Day polar plunge, though in retrospect I’d been building up to it, sort of sneaking up on it, for the past few summers.

Though Seattle is not widely thought of as a beachy place, people here flock to the various waterfront parks in the summer, both freshwater and saltwater. None of the bodies of water here get warm by swimming-pool standards: to my knowledge, Lake Washington might hit 65°F at the height of summer, and Puget Sound peaks around 58°F. But in the summer of 2021, there was a massive heatwave in western North America, and suddenly the temperature on land made glacial waters seem very appealing. Every day after work, we’d head to the nearest beach to cool down. Over many years in Seattle, I’d become accustomed to the chill of wading in the Sound, but that week, I remember, it was so fucking hot that I decided to submerge completely, head and all. And then the next day I did it again.

I never stayed in for long. I might have managed two minutes once, when a neighbor — a frequent plunger, I learned — bobbed past on a floaty and cheered me on, saying two minutes was the bare minimum if I wanted to “feel the benefits.” But the sense of accomplishment was intoxicating, and not only on those occasions when I managed a more sustained, more endorphin-promoting soak. I was elated because it felt good afterward, yes, but I always also elated because I felt proud. I had done something difficult with my body. Even standing thigh-high in the Sound is uncomfortable. Ash, a lifelong softballer and one-time boxer, well inured to the physical challenge of competitive sports, refuses to go in past their ankles.

But for me, wading in waist-high and knowing I would go further, willing my knees to bend even as I knew how the cold would seal itself like a second skin around my shoulders and neck and up into the folds of my armpits, the way entering this element would require the entire focus of brain, of my will, at least if I wanted to do it without screaming — it all sounds like a very dumb idea when you write it down, but doing it changed my conception of my self. I wanted to keep doing it.

(I should clarify that there are always kids splashing around in the Sound, regardless of season. But adults are more rare, even in summer. Adults swim in Lake Washington. Those who do make a habit of actually swimming in the Sound nearly always wear wetsuits.) (I’m not much of a swimmer, FWIW.)

I guess I could make this a whole essay about midlife athleticism, because I do think the term applies, even if lowering one’s body into cold water isn’t technically an athletic feat. (I do gallop around on 1,000-pound animals!) But I mean this to be an essay about 2024, a fact I’m noticing I haven’t yet made clear, and the point I’m lumbering my way to is this: most Sundays in 2024, in rain or sleet or wind or sun, I met up with two girlfriends at Carkeek Park and we plunged. They were among the friends I’d plunged with on New Year’s Day — that’s the video above, where I’m in the red bathing suit — and that morning, the three of us decided to keep at it.

I think we began the following Sunday, January 7. None of us had been regular plungers, so we were on an equal footing. On the second Sunday, I remember, my goal was to be quieter, to try breathing instead of yelling. The average Puget Sound water temperature in January is 46 degrees. Some days, we’d have the distant company of a seal, surfacing periodically to eye us. Once, a half-dozen harbor porpoises swam by. There have been eagles, many eagles. Some Sundays, it rained. Once there was sleet. But we all agreed that the worst was wind, which whipped the surface of the water and suffused the whole experience with panic.

We go in only up to our necks, not over our heads. We never stay submerged for long — maybe 30 seconds, maybe a minute in August. Most times I’ll bet we barely manage 20 seconds. But we always stand around waist-deep for a long time on our way in, talking about the week, trying to distract ourselves from the discomfort, and I like to think that counts for something. It counts for us.

I think its effects rippled through the year, which was also one in which my body showed me that it is aging. On January 19, Ames turned 1. We borrowed the dining room at Delancey to throw him a birthday party on a Sunday morning. As I type this, he is nearly two. He is a very happy and funny kid, with a sing-songy voice and an exploding vocabulary. He is supernaturally cute. He has a talent for throwing, which we hope to teach him to use solely on balls. Two weeks ago, after he pushed over the floor lamp that stands behind the sofa for the dozenth time, Ash got out some scrap fabric, thread, and a needle and sewed the lamp to the sofa.

Parenting a toddler at 45 or 46 does not feel the same as it did at 35 or 36. My knees hurt from pressing into the floor while I change diapers and wrestle feet into shoes, and from holding a sentient and whining thirty-pound weight as I raise myself from kneeling to standing again. In January of 2024, I got a new passport photo. I believe I look my age.