Villa Time

just let me know

Hey perfect angel!

[TW VIOLENCE - following paragraph only] ➡️: You probably know this news by now, but Minnesota Democratic House Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark Hortman, were shot and killed in their home this weekend by a gunman with political motives. The killer also shot DFL State Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette Hoffman, in their house multiple times. He was systematically going down a list of names he’d made. A horror.

Shit is terrifying out there. On Sunday, Davin and I were driving home from Minneapolis, and I asked him if he thought things had always been this bad in America, and we maybe just didn’t know about it because we were children?? or if he thought things were rapidly getting worse. He didn’t say what I was hoping he’d say, and I immediately began searching on my phone, looking once more into my fallback plan of selling our house and buying one of those cheap abandoned villas in the forgotten Italian countryside, but then Davin reminded my cis ass for the upteenth time that most countries are not exactly safe for trans people who need access to healthcare, so. We’re not doing that yet.

…unless we all want to buy a big cheap abandoned villa in the Italian countryside together?? and move there and turn the town gay and somehow obtain gender-affirming care and never come back???

Just let me know.

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I was sitting on my front porch yesterday, brooding and watching as it endlessly drizzled for the third consecutive June week in a row, when I saw it: a flash of white, streaking by.

“OH no,” I said, instantly on my feet and busting the screen door open. I tore down the steps after a mostly naked baby, a towheaded year-and-a-half-old dressed only in a diaper and running down the sidewalk towards the intersection (where cars were approaching!!) at a speed Elon Musk wishes he could achieve with his stupid missile launches.

This child belongs to our neighbors. Our neighbors belong to a religion that believes in having babies until you’re plum wore out, and as far as I can tell, they’re going for the record. There are just so many white-haired children living nearby; I genuinely can’t tell them apart. Their mom is home during the day, but she just had another baby, and she’s so outnumbered at this point that there is no physical way she can move fast enough to catch her hell-bent-on-escape toddler. So when I’m writing out on our front porch, which is most days, I keep an eye out for her mini streaker. Lately, there’s rarely a day when I don’t stop this child from running into the street.

And it never fails to make me feel like a hero. The mother or the oldest daughter will eventually appear around the corner and thank me, then lead the toddler back into the house. That’s all that happens; then I go back to my porch again. But it feels good to help my neighbors in a tiny way; to contribute to keeping an infant runaway who moves at the speed of light safe for another day. I like knowing that—even if I can’t tell them apart and it makes me shudder when I overhear them singing Jesus songs—these kids know my face, and know that I’m friendly, and that I’m watching out for them, like any decent neighbor would.

I’ve been thinking, this weekend especially, about all the tiny things we collectively do to help one another. Not the huge stuff — the infinitesimal actions that make our daily lives feel better, kinder, more livable. Tiny actions that also help us when we do them, because they offer the outsized payoff of making us feel great. The little stuff matters! Especially in the daily atrocity of being alive right now; even if we have no day-to-day control over the big stuff!!

Here are some more tiny things that always make me feel like a hero (or at the very least holy and/or superior, which I will absolutely take):

• Pausing and letting someone turn into the flow of traffic on a really busy street

• Rescuing a honeybee that’s drowning in a pool (bonus: very cute)

• Refilling the ice tray

• Not saying anything or calling anyone and just putting in earplugs when your much-younger neighbors have a loud-ass party (have we not all been loud and fucking annoying in our youth)

• Allowing your sister to borrow the book you just bought and are also dying to read

• Letting someone with fewer items go ahead of you in the grocery store line

• Speed-straightening the entire house before your partner or roommate comes home from a trip

• Quietly taking the known Bad Chair™ in a social setting

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• Returning both your grocery cart and another cart that someone else (a lazy!!!) just abandoned

• Wheeling your neighbor’s bins out for them when they forgot and oh shit you can hear the garbage truck coming

• Holding the door for someone with their hands full

• Taking a shower at night when you have people staying with you because you know the shower will be an absolute clusterfuck in the morning

• Getting up and standing next to someone who’s being harassed on public transit

• Pulling out the exact item someone desperately needs (tampon, safety pin, band-aid, breath spray, tissue, snack) from your bag

• Using the last of something and breaking down the box right away

• Accepting a compliment on your outfit without explaining that you got it on sale (in the Midwest, resisting the urge to say “you like this? two bucks at a garage sale!!” makes me feel like a powerful god)

• Making a fresh pot of coffee for the work breakroom even though you do it almost every day and god knows the IT guys never fucking do

• Noticing when your friend’s kid is about to do something dangerous (get a little too interested in the sewer grate, eat a bead, fall off the pier) and intervening

• Getting sent two of the same useful item in the mail by mistake and giving the extra one away instead of hoarding both, thus fighting your natural dragon-like instincts

• Pretending not to care that a baby is screaming on the plane

• Restocking the toilet paper

• Slicing the pizza badly and giving your partner the bigger piece (still working up to this one)

I’m sure I could come up with more if I had more time, but I’ve got a meeting in a minute and I can hear a pack of blond children running down the sidewalk as we speak, so my small contribution to saving the world is required!!

So is yours, bb.

The smallest kind things you do are noticed. They have a cumulative effect.

I’m really glad you’re here.