Today was a good day. One of those days I feel like maybe I’m not totally failing at single parenting. I bribed J. with the prospect of a milkshake to go for a bike ride with me. It’s not sunny, but it’s not raining either–the kind of day in Alaska where you just have to get outside. And maybe he did decide to ride home by himself while I did errands on my bike, but I got half a ride in with my teen, and that’s a win. Then we did yard work together for half an hour. So basically, I can’t ask for more.

At Baja Taco, I got a work phone call from one of my communications clients, Perseverance Theatre. This is J. after informing me I shouldn’t be saying “Teenage Dick,” or “The Underpants” so loudly in a public place. He didn’t care that they were just names of plays.

And we may still be having angst about moving and being thirteen, and having a new smaller room, and missing his big brother Theo, but we’re going to watch a movie tonight on the computer he built himself this summer with money he made working for his dad. He gets to pick the movie–sort of. He gets to pick some movies and I’ll choose which one we watch. Compromise, right?

So while I read and hear from people close and distant about miseries too sad to enumerate, I feel grateful for small things like the way the water on the lake rippled as I rode my bike back home, and getting to see a family walking their two goats and carrying their duck along the runway. And the boy who shouted “Hi, J!” making him (I hope) feel a tiny bet less alone in this new old place where we’re carving a new home.