Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about tending. I was on the phone with a friend and she asked me what I’d been making, and I really had nothing to share. I’ve knit a few rows on a scarf here and there, started a baby sweater, knit the heel turn on a sock I’ve been slowly working on since November of last year. But by and large, I have just been tending to things - dusting, sweeping, tidying, arranging, running loads of laundry, doing dishes, helping to keep us fed. Tending to our home and the state I believe it likes to be in (I like to anthropomorphize our apartment, I imagine that it appreciates being scrubbed down, like a big, dirty dog might. I even once suggested we buy our house flowers for our move-in-iversary).

I have been tending to my body, because it’s been screaming at me to, through migraines and a stiffening neck - my body has made it abundantly clear that it requires some extra tending right now. I took a day off work because of a migraine, and on that day I thought a lot about the unglamorous, unphotographable (unshareable?) work of tending - the things I spend most of my “free” time doing. I spent some time that day sewing buttons onto my raincoat, willing myself to not feel guilty for “putting it off”, instead rewriting that narrative that it simply hadn’t been a priority because it doesn’t rain much in California. I took a picture of this act, and thought “this will be a nice thing to post on Patreon”, and then didn’t post it, for who knows what reason, but certainly one was that it just wasn’t picturesque, and I’ve come to associate sharing my making practice on the internet with taking a “good” photo of it.

I sewed the buttons on, took a moment to tug on them and ensure I’d done them justice. I hung my coat back up in my closet and laid back down. I closed my computer, then my eyes. I fell asleep at 2pm. I woke up and cracked open the book I’ve most often been reaching for on my nightstand, Tender at the Bone, by Ruth Reichl (fittingly). Tender, tending, to tend - these conjugations of this word feel so ripe, and yet when I google them I find unfulfilling definitions. I think about how I have overused the word ‘tender’ in my life - how the millennial American vocabulary is sopping with it (and, perhaps the word “wholesome”, too). “Oh that’s so tender”, I text a friend in response to a picture of their niece. I wonder if I have a precise meaning in mind when I use it - I use it to convey care/love/sweetness (I had to stop myself from typing “tenderness”, this is how deep in it I am), but I think there is something in particular that is special about this word and its proximity to “attending”, and how it can also mean “naturally inclined to”. There’s something just below the surface with this word, something I’m still scratching slowly away at.

What I do know is this: much of what I want to do in life is tend to things: the material things I steward, the people around me, myself, my space. I want to attend to the present moment, to the natural world. I want to be a tender place for others to land - in my podcast, my teaching & in my life. Perhaps I am just an especially tender human.