Fran Wescott

Finding The Path I have discovered that my grandfather (born in 1896) was a Princeton classmate of F Scott Fitzgerald (also born in 1896). I should have known this. And in fact, he mentioned once when cautioning his grandchildren not to take on too many distractions in college that he’d told Scott Fitzgerald the very same thing. To wit: “drop something or drop out.” Fitzgerald decided ultimately on the latter. I should have put two and two together and arrived at the fact that Pa had attended college with this great American author. While I found several points of similarity, there were important differences between these two men. My grandfather took time from school to serve as a 2 nd Lieutenant in France during WWI, finishing his Princeton degree when he returned (thankfully) in 1918. Fitzgerald left Princeton around the same time, but largely because he was doing so poorly in his studies. Fitzgerald reportedly floundered a bit and then took a commission as a 2 nd Lieutena...

Zen Movement? Nothing in my aesthetic could be considered "Zen," but even so, I find myself clearing shit out of our house with slow-but-steady efficiency. One good reason for my commitment to this odious process is so that we can save a space for the big, grown-up lives that The Girl and The Boy will be cultivating over the next few years. I am also, however, more keenly aware of the need to cultivate space in our home for my own life, my own thoughts. That's such an odd thing to pronounce. I could just have my thoughts. But I do believe that in much the same way we all need to cultivate sleep hygiene; I am finding the need to cultivate thought hygiene. And this will influence my decision-making around which shit must go. I shall weed mercilessly (but carefully) the shit I've saved for the kids. Neither child wants all their elementary school art projects: I shall exercise thoughtful curation of each young'un's "collection" of repr...

Teahouse This weekend I treated myself to an excursion into the Orange County countryside with my sister. Nestled in the middle of nowhere is an open-air teahouse crafted out of reclaimed wood and perched on top of an assortment of re-purposed shipping containers. Visitors to this aerie get a second-story view of more than a dozen raised flower and herb beds. There’s the vivid saffron yellow of the flowers that eagerly wave in the breeze as if to say to passersby and onlookers: “pick me!” Next to them is the spiky purple flower of the lavender plant. Lavender is the quintessential show-off plant: both herb and flower. Tall, impossible color, overly proud – perhaps even confident that it will be noticed before the saffron yellow of the neighboring bed. In spite of the cheerful beckoning of that sunny flower, lavender will garner the most attention with all that exotic fragrance and color. Standing watch behind this competition is a bed of very tall, very consistently-sized...

Stew All I’ve got is a stinkin’ analogy: You know how you make a giant pot of stew (of any kind) and you eat stew for a week in an effort to empty the pot? You eat stew every day and you exercise massive gratitude and you thank the universe for stew and you practice intentionality and savor every morsel. You observe reasonable portions and try not to gorge yourself on stew and at the end of the week you look in the bottom of the Tupperware and you still have about three bites of stew left. Before you move on to the next awesome – perhaps even improved -- meal for the coming week, you need to figure out how to dispense with those three fucking bites of stew. There’s no eating the stew – you’re done with stew. You can’t just pour the soapy wash water into the Tupperware – you’ll end up with nasty, soapy stew instead of a clean Tupperware. What do you do? You have to empty the damn Tupperware. So, in my experience of reality, the stew is this most recent phase and view of my life...

Launch Code It seems so very odd and even counter-intuitive that in one of the most important relationships of our lives the goal is to say good bye. That doesn’t even cover what that actually means. Think of it this way: you have a cellular connection with this little human that came from your body. You nurture them, protect them (yes, to some degree we protect them) and try to teach or at least inform them. You follow closely even when they are experimenting with distance and freedom. You listen and watch and try to learn from them – who they are, where they say they want to go. You try to foster and maintain a connection so that as they pull away and if by some miracle they ask for help, you’ll actually be there and poised to offer it. Or, at least to know what’s going on enough to provide comfort, if not a miraculous “fixit” solution. So, you’ve done all this work, you’ve crafted and maintained a flawed but intricate connection to this beautiful human who’s only just begi...

The Wild Woman I’ve been thinking a lot about my Grandmother recently. While I’m grateful for the many inspiring women in my world, one of the qualities I admired most about my Mother’s Mother was her ability to have fun. Of course, I know my Grandmother endured all manner of life-altering challenges – she was not immune from life’s weathering ways. But she was made of an especially tough mettle. In fact, I wonder if her mettle wasn’t forged from her ability to enjoy life when the opportunities for doing so emerged. For as many sad times as she survived, boy did she also enjoy some awesome wild times. My Grandmother was, in fact, a Wild Woman. When my Grandmother and her best friend went to Europe together in the summer of 1929 they based themselves in Paris. In the fall, they made their way to Italy, where they ditched the chaperone and went to Algiers. During this excursion, news of the American stock market crash finally reached them and in response they made their way to ...

Little Big Adventures The kids used to give me a hard time about how I defined an “adventure.” An adventure was to me the lens through which even an everyday event might be seen as extraordinary. But they would cut their eyes at me, shake their heads and assure me “No, Mom – getting lost on the way to a new grocery store does not constitute an adventure.” I beg to differ. So, last week when we endeavored to do our own thing during spring break, I had what I would call an adventure. While the older of the two young’uns took off on her own journey, we remaining three headed to the foothills of the North Carolina mountains for a week of camping. Our first afternoon there, The Boy and I decided to get a feel for our surroundings with a walk on one of the trails that originates not far from our camp site. We picked our way through the woods, making note of where we were in relation to the lake, weaving back and forth on the well-worn footpath that traced the undulating shoreline. I...