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© Catherine Haslag

Gold Stars

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A gratitude practice became a part of my life a handful of years ago. At the time I started this practice all I could see was everything that was “wrong” in the world. I was wasting so much energy on what didn’t appear to be “right” and was looking for a way to shift that energy into something productive. Someone suggested that I cultivate a gratitude practice to shift my attitude and view of life. They challenged me to see the flowers on the wallpaper rather than focus on the cracks in the plaster.

I am a researcher, so I started this work by reading a few books on gratitude (365 Thank Yous: The Year a Simple Act of Daily Gratitude Changed My Life and The Gratitude Diaries are two books I recommend on the subject). This led me to add some basic gratitude practices to my life. I started sending thank you notes on a regular basis to my friends and family (the Dollar Store has a good selection of Thank You cards that work perfectly for this). I sent thank-you notes for gifts, phone calls, kind words, friendship, and just to let others know that I thought they were awesome. I also wrote a few things I was thankful for each day in my journal. This helped me to spend time acknowledging the good things present in my everyday life.

As time went on, I started to see all the things there are to be thankful for, even on the crappiest of days. The hot cup of tea in the morning, the car that starts without issue, a clear, star-filled night sky, indoor plumbing on the coldest days during the Minnesota winter. I discovered that there is ALWAYS something to be thankful for and nothing was too small for gratitude. Over time, I realized it was the little things that could get me through the hardest of days.

My gratitude practice has grown over time. Early in the pandemic, a good friend of mine and I started ending our conversations by sharing “good things” in our lives. Hearing what she is thankful for has helped expand my view of all the things available to be grateful for in the world.

About halfway through lockdown in 2020, I decided to add something else tangible to my gratitude practice, so I brought the gold star back into my life. This was a simple, visible, and slightly quirky way for me to show gratitude to myself and those around me. It was also a way to spread a little childhood joy in the grind of adulthood.

Many of us may be most familiar with the use of gold stars in the classroom. Gold stars would come to us on the top of an assignment we completed well, on a chart posted in the front of the classroom for good behavior, or in a loose form so we could put it on the front of our notebook or wear it on our shirt and show everyone how awesome we are. As a child, we loved to get those gold stars. It told us we had done something good and someone noticed our efforts and work. It was gratitude in a tangible form.

The gold star provided me with something visible to brighten up the day and restore some innocence to the challenges of 2020. I started sending gold star emojis and animations to friends via text for a job well done. I found some puffy gold stars at JoAnn’s and used them to decorate the inside of thank you cards. I ordered gold star stickers to share and included a sheet of them for each person in every family to whom I sent Christmas cards. It was fun sharing this simple joy. I wanted others to know that I saw them, I saw the good they were doing, and I thought they were awesome. Some of my family and friends commented on how the gold stars made their day. They too were taken back to the joys of receiving a gold star from their teacher for a job well done. I hope they shared their gold stars with others and kept spreading the gratitude. I have decided to keep a supply of gold stars on hand and bestow them to people on a regular basis as a way to say “thank you.”

There is an old story told by many indigenous tribes in North America that talks of a grandfather telling his grandson that there are two wolves fighting inside each of us. One wolf is evil and one wolf is good. The grandson asked his grandfather which wolf will win this battle. The grandfather said, “The one that you feed.”

I chose to feed the good wolf with gratitude and it was so simple to do. It can be shared through a symbol like a gold star or a thank you note, but it can also appear in less tangible forms: a pat on the back, saying thank you, or a kind smile to a stranger while shopping. There is no limit to gratitude. It never runs out and it costs us nothing to share.

© Catherine Haslag

What I Didn’t Know

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May 25, 2020

I didn’t watch the full video. 8 minutes and 46 seconds. I saw parts of it, but not the whole tape. I can’t watch the video of George Floyd dying, of anyone dying.

I had the privilege of sitting with my feelings on this for a while. To learn more. To take it all in. I began reading. Looking. Researching for anything I could find.

I found a mountain of information. Podcasts. Books. Videos. Theses. Documentaries. Journal articles. Newspaper pieces. Magazine reports. Websites. There was no end to the documentation. What I could read, view, and listen to. New information to learn, to shatter my old misunderstanding, and develop a new, more accurate picture.

I shouldn’t have been surprised by the deluge of resources I found, but I was. It was eye-opening. Once I started looking, learned so much about US history. More than in any class I took. Our history spells out the impact of racism and how far its tentacles stretched. Education, healthcare, housing, travel, restaurants, the GI Bill, voting rights, religion, policing, marriage, redistricting. There isn’t an area of life that isn’t affected by systemic racism. Every person in the United States has either benefited from or been disadvantaged by this disease.

There are many perspectives to history. The white perspective is the primary one told in this country because white is the dominant race, the dominant caste. There is a vast amount of US history that isn’t taught because it doesn’t paint white people in a positive light. This creates an incomplete and unfair narrative of our country, its history, and its people.

Redlining. Gerrymandering. Jim Crow. Segregation. Racial profiling. Stop and frisk. Voter ID. Poll taxes. Travel bans. Internment camps. Reservations. The war on drugs. All forms of racism make it harder for people of color to live their American dream. All efforts to keep the privilege in the hands of white people. White privilege. White power. White supremacy.

Equal rights have not been established. All lives don’t matter until all lives are treated like they matter. Black and brown lives don’t matter in the United States. Four hundred years of history demonstrates this. The evidence is there for anyone to see if one is open to seeing it.

I believe that the United States of America is a great country. I believe in the quest to form a more perfect union…more perfect union for ALL those who call the United States home. I also know that quest is a messy one. We are not a country of saints. Far, far from it. To paint this country as such is a lie and dooms us to repeat our sins of the past.

If you are open to learning about how systemic racism permeates our society, I encourage you to access the Google Docs link below. It is a file that contains the list of resources I found in my research on systemic racism. As I continue collecting resources, I will continue to update this document.

#SystemicRacism Resources Google Docs Link

These resources tell another side of US history, it’s not a pretty one but it’s true. My hope is that the research I have done will help open more eyes to the reality of our nation and those who are mistreated in it because of the color of their skin. My dream is that as we know the fuller story of US history we will break the ongoing cycle of systemic racism.

© Catherine Haslag

The Little Free Pantry

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© Catherine Haslag

When Does My Life Course Catalog Arrive?

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Photo of at my Master’s Degree Ceremony in 2005.

When I was in college, way back when Napster was king, Blockbuster was the go-to for movies, and AOL still mailed CDs, there was this thing called a course catalog. It was a book that colleges printed each year that contained every degree program and course the university offered. It was my bible for figuring out what classes to take each semester so I would finish my degree. It gave me direction through the maze of college. Each year I would pick up a new one from Carrington Hall and pour over it to determine which classes I needed to take not just for the next semester, but for my entire college career. I wanted to make sure I was taking the right classes this semester to set me up to take the right courses every following semester until graduation. It was my guide for 6 years for both my bachelor’s and master’s degrees.

Imagine my surprise when I graduated and entered the real world only to realize there is no course catalog for life. Nothing that explains what the next “right” thing to do is. No outline of the next 4 to 6 years. No clear description of prerequisites, options to choose from, or clear path of A to B will get me to C.

I am a planner. I have used many different planners to organize my life over the years, but none of them tell me what to do next. Do I stay with my current job or start looking for other options? How long do I stay in a relationship I am unsatisfied with before it’s time to end it? Is it still taboo to wear white shoes after Labor Day or can I keep wearing those cute white slingbacks until it snows?

Life is improvisation, learning as you go, and working with the information you have at the moment. Sometimes we succeed and sometimes we don’t. Each piece of life is a class with no syllabus, course description, or even a set semester. It took me a long time to realize that we don’t get a course catalog for life. Rather, we get to develop our own as we go.

© Catherine Haslag

Piney

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She started as a foster kitten. My boyfriend’s foster kitten three years before he was my boyfriend. Rather than being adopted by another family, he kept her, loved her, made her part of his. He was happy to turn his apartment into a kitty play place for her, for all of the kittens he fostered. He has a heart bigger than any space can hold.

I met Piney for the first time in Spring 2020. She is a skittish cat. She typically runs when someone walks her way. She hides from guests. She is scared of the loud, the unfamiliar, the new. She took to me quickly. Let me rub her belly. Slept on my feet. The next time I saw her weeks later she came running to me, begging in her cat way to have her head and neck scratched. This was unusual for her and her humans noticed.

When my boyfriend needed to be away from home for weeks to handle a family matter, I offered to take her so he didn’t need to worry about her. So she didn’t need to be alone. She spent the first day hiding in the covers on the floor at the foot of my bed. She snuck around the house, afraid of everything. All the sounds were new, the smells were different, and her male human was nowhere around. It was just us girls and she was uncertain.

It took some time, but she started to venture out. She didn’t run when I walked past her or bent to scratch behind her ears. She snuggled at my feet in the evening when I read and slept between my legs at night. She found the squirrels that live in the tree on my patio and tracked the birds that perch in the front bush. She climbed to the top of her cat tree and watched the cars pass on the street. She made this her home and picked me as her human. She became a different feline. My boyfriend was amazed at the change in Piney and decided she had picked her forever home. She stayed with me.

Piney has become my 4-legged furry teacher. Slowly wedging herself into my life. Between the covers of my bed. Balancing like a gymnast on my headboard and dismounting onto my nightstand. Our relationship expanded from sleepover buddy to roommate.

I am very particular about my home, yet she has charmed me into buying a cat tree for the office, a small hidey-hole for her in the living room, and rearrange my kitchen to allow space for a litter box. I love having her here, but living alone for the past 5 years has caused me to atrophy. I am not as malleable as I once was. Piney has made this clear to me. Loving her is easy but making physical space in my home for her has been a challenge.

I have become rigid in my middle-age. My adult life has been guided by routines, plans, and Google Calendar. Piney doesn’t fit in any of those. She can’t be scheduled and her needs are different than mine. She is teaching me to make space for the unscheduleable, for the belly rubs on the carpet at 6:13a and the catnap at my feet at 7:42p. She has left her paw marks on my heart, her fur on my couch, and kitty litter everywhere.

She is slowly prying me open to her, open to life. Reminding me that the best things in life aren’t planned. That there is time in the morning to sit and stretch for a minute. That your perspective can change with a purr and a good neck scratch. That change can bring good things into your life.

The Life of a House

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This is the family home sometime in the 1910s.

There was an old farm-house that once sat on Fort Avenue in Springfield, Missouri. It didn’t fit the structural style of the nearby ranch homes constructed around it in the 1970s and 80s, so it was likely the home of the family who previously farmed the land before the area was developed. It was a two-story wood-framed home with a small front porch. It was clear no one lived there nor had for awhile. The house sat dark and cold.

Every time I drove past this house, I thought of the life that once filled it. How it kept a family dry during the spring rains. How a mother snuggled her young child in an upstairs bedroom on an autumn evening before turning out the lights. The many warm holiday celebrations held in the home for beloved family and friends. Celebrants gathered, singing Christmas songs with a beverage in hand, the united voices uncontained by the plaster and siding. This house once held space for its occupants when they grieved the loss of a loved one or birthed a new life into the world. The grassy green yard hosted games of baseball, tag, and hide-and-seek. The warmth, laugher, and love that once filled the corners of every room seemed to ooze out of the broken windows, evaporating away. There is a reason why empty houses fall into decay so quickly: there is no love to keep them standing.

This house was demolished sometime between 2007 and 2009. The placeholder for the lives that once occupied that home wiped away. Google Street View of the property shows it hasn’t been redeveloped. All that is left is an empty parcel.

Do we really give houses the gratitude they deserve? They are our basecamp, the place we always know we can return to from our adventures out in the world. They provide warmth, shelter, and safety for those we hold dear. Homes hold our memories and stories and tell them in a mark on the wall or the squeak of a floorboard. A house can hold a family’s history and be a stable nucleus for the generations that grow up in its walls. A place where everyone comes back and again to congregate, share, and love.

That last Thanksgiving my family celebrated in the family home, November 2019. Thank you to Peggy Dunsworth for providing this photo.

Recently, the house my great-grandparents built-in 1908 was sold. This 4-bedroom, 2.5 bath home was the place 5 generations of my family lived, laughed, and loved together. We celebrated nearly 70 Thanksgivings with our cousins in the dining room, opened gifts for over 100 Christmases in the living room, and prepared nearly 41,000 meals in the kitchen (yes, I did the math). My grandmother and all of her siblings were born in that house and at least one person (my great grandmother) was laid out there so people could pay their last respects.

The last Thanksgiving we celebrated there was in 2019. More than 30 family members remembering, laughing, crying, and commemorating what we all knew would be our last Thanksgiving in that sacred place. At one point, I felt like all the Thanksgivings that had ever been celebrated there were intersecting. As if all the generations of my family that knew that home were there in some way to join in one last big party across time.

Thankfully, the house has a new family to fill it with love. It will not meet the empty fate of the house on Fort Avenue, at least not now. While that house is no longer the nucleus for my family, I am thankful for all the years it held us within its boundaries and grateful that a new family will love it into the future.

© Catherine Haslag

What’s In a Smell?

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It is a few weeks before Christmas and I am cat-sitting for my boyfriend. He has a beautiful 3-year old female black, grey, brown, and white feline named Piney. She is a skittish cat. She doesn’t like to be picked up or carried. She isn’t a lap cat by any means; however, she is incredibly curious, especially when it comes to smell. She sniffs everything. The spider plant hanging from the office ceiling. The Christmas presents stacked in the corner. The baseboards running around the living room. She sniffs carefully, completely as if she is getting the whole history of the room and its contents through her nose.

Piney, the curious sniffing feline.

She begins to sniff around the cabinet I use as a TV stand, a small art-deco style piece with sliding front doors. I began to ponder what her nose detects.

Can she smell the homes it sat in before I purchased it from a flea market on Commercial Street? Can she detect the distressed red paint that covered it when I first brought it home? Does she smell how I stripped and refinished the cabinet on the balcony of the first apartment my then-husband and I shared? Does she inhale the aroma of the white china with silver decoration I once stored in it in the dining room of that apartment?

Does she detect notes of the first house I owned with my ex-husband? This cabinet sat in the living room, to the right of the TV. A silver dish my then mother-in-law gave me sitting on top of it. Can she smell the parties and movie nights we threw during the 2 years we lived there together? Does she detect hints of the fire that started on the deck the morning after my birthday party? A cigarette someone didn’t put out properly in the container on the deck.

Does she breathe in any notes of the end of our marriage? The arguments, tears, and stress of two humans realizing they don’t work together…or who maybe never really worked at all.

Does she smell the home I lived in on Main Street? Single again. Finding my way forward.

Is there an odor from the moving truck, a cold, crisp January whiff of winter leaking into the tractor-trailer as it cruises up the interstate towards its new home? Can she detect the work of settling into a new town, new state, finding a new way?

Or does she just smell wood, stain, and dust from 7 years of the cabinet sitting in one place?

© Catherine Haslag

Living On the Edge of Science

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I teach chemistry. One of the first things I teach my students is about the scientific method, the systematic process by which scientists learn about the world. I wrote the following back in April near the start of the pandemic. I wanted to share it here for your consideration.

Science is the systematic process by which we learn about the world. Scientists are basically professional students and explorers. They are constantly investigating the world around us to learn more about how and why it works as it does.

When you first started learning something, did you instantly know everything about it? At your first piano lesson, were you able to play Ragtime by Scott Joplin? On the first day of Spanish, were you able to speak and read fluently to your classmates and teacher? When you first got behind the wheel of a car, were you able to brake without jerking, shift smoothly, and merge on and off the interstate without concern?

The answer to all of these questions is no. You needed time to learn the keys and the notes on the piano, to learn vocabulary and how to conjugate verbs, and how to coordinate your hand, eye, and foot to smoothly maneuver the car and navigate traffic.

This is what scientists do on a daily basis. They learn, share the knowledge they have obtained, and continue to study so they can learn more. They work with what they know, understanding that tomorrow, they will know more and that may change their working hypotheses/theories about a concept. Scientists are on the frontier of what we know. This is the difference between a scientist and a Spanish teacher – the teacher already knows the vocabulary and how to conjugate the verbs. When they teach their classes, they are regurgitating what they already know. Scientists are not only speaking the language but also expanding the vocabulary and trying to teach others what they know as they learn it. They are on the edge of knowledge.

Most of the science we learn in school and see in the world around us is tried and true. It’s already gone through the process of rigorous testing and investigation. We missed the learning and changing that went along with that process. Coronavirus is on the edge of the science we know. It is still being studied and we are learning new things about it every day. This is why the information changes so quickly. It’s not that science doesn’t know what it’s doing but rather that it is constantly learning new details and getting a better picture of coronavirus. Humans just aren’t used to this rapid change in information and behavior. We like certainty and we don’t have all the information yet about coronavirus to be certain in the situation.