Hope

I love this tiny tree! It's on my dog-walking route. It wasn't planted. There are a few of them in random spots in the yard, spruces and maples so tiny that you would miss them if you didn't look carefully. This one is shorter than the lawn around it.

The homeowner has taken care of the seedlings. Tiny oases of red cedar mulch surround them. Lawn mowers make tight circles to avoid destroying them. If they are lucky, they will be buried in snow before the real cold comes, so that they have a chance of surviving the winter.

This is hope.

It's hard to feel hopeful these days. People are afraid of each other. People are afraid of the other. They are alarmed. They joke nervously about moving to Canada after the elections, as if our country will be uninhabitable, and only the great frozen North can offer them sanctuary. I met a guy from Canada last summer. "I only have room for about five tents in my backyard," he said before I even asked. He's used to the joke.

There are real things to fear. Bad people with guns kill. Good people with guns kill. The end is the same. Bodies in the street, in the mall, in the nightclub.

Then there are the imaginary things we choose to fear. Race, religion, difference. None of those should keep us up at night. None of those should influence our choices during the day. Yet lean a little to the right, and you can see hordes of brown people pouring into our country, knives in their teeth, grenades strapped to their belts, assault rifles strapped to their backs, ready to rape and kill.

Turn to the right, and you enter the bathroom, America's most dangerous public space, where evil men pull on a skirt so they can attack your young daughters. And who is applauding them? That woman who only wears pants, who presumes to be our leader.

People grab for seventeen guns to protect themselves. They believe that the greatest danger they face is being unarmed in the America they have imagined. They need their guns to face the world.

It's hard to hope, but somebody nurtured a tiny tree. The snow will come, and it will disappear. If it survives the winter, it will grow again, no matter who is elected president. No matter who is on the Supreme Court. No matter who has guns. I'll look for it in the spring, with hope in my heart.

Missing (Jacob)

My oldest daughter wore this coat. She was a year and a half when Jacob Wetterling was murdered. Of course, we didn't know it yet. He was simply missing. His parents were forced to imagine places much more painful than death.

Now the family knows. The world knows. It has been suggested that this knowing is good. We can stop imagining horror around every corner. We know where it lives. It is contained. The family should feel better just knowing.

I don't know what Jacob's parents imagined all those sleepless nights. Twenty-seven years worth. I don't know if the truth they learned last week is any better. Now they can think about exactly what happened to their child. The sight and smell and sound of his killer telling the story is seared into their souls. He has become what they imagine when they close their eyes at night and nightmares come instead of sleep.

Other parents lie awake, too, fighting demons in the dark because their children have been taken by predators as loathsome as Danny Heinrich. Children who disappeared into addiction, and never returned. Who became commodities for sale in the sex trade. Who were taken by mental illness.

Some parents don't know why they lost their children. They just know that they walked away. Separated themselves from their family, refusing to look back.

But all those nighttime hours—full of hideous images, which wash over prone forms like ocean waves upon a tiny atoll—accomplish nothing. In time, there is no awake. No asleep. Only a longing for something that will never come. Peace.

The Wetterlings must have had these nights. Over and over again. Yet somehow, when the light came to stab their eyes in the morning, they got up. They did everything they could for their lost son, and then went on to help other lost children.

The thing is, we can all open our eyes. We can all get up, and maybe some of us can help the lost children.

Free Range

Along with throngs of Minnesotans, I went to the State Fair last weekend. It's advertised as The Great State Get Together—when outstate and urban Minnesota join forces to consume as many calories as possible in ten days. They may squabble about legislative priorities, light rail vs. agriculture, but they agree on cheese curds and smiling dairy princesses sculpted from enormous blocks of butter.

Except the Minnesota State Fair looks like a picture of the past. Those halcyon days when fair-skinned Europeans populated every corner and the word immigrant meant someone from Scandinavia or Germany. It's still fun to people-watch. They come in all shapes and sizes, munching on spam sushi or deep-fried cheeseburgers. But not too many colors.

When I'm teaching my adult ESL class, I sometimes describe myself as European. But other times I just say pink. It's a better descriptor. "I'm not white like this paper," I say. "I was only white when I was very sick in the hospital." The fair seems more pink, less brown than I would expect if the entire state came to eat together.

I still love it, though, and wouldn't miss it. Like many fair-going families, we have a routine. We used to park across the street and come in near the animal barns. The sheep, horses, pigs and cows were first, followed by the all-you-can-drink milk booth and a Pronto Pup.  Now we take a shuttle bus and come in a new entrance. Near new food. So now we start with a walleye taco.

Before we head off to the French fries, ice cream, and points beyond, we go to the Miracle of Birth barn, where urban Minnesotans get to see farm animals being born right in front of them.  "Eew! Gross!" say my kids. They like to see the newborns, but not their births.

It was the brilliant idea of a veterinarian who happens to be a member of my husband's extended family.  This year, we spotted her at work. Two sows were giving birth, and the crowd around was cheering the arrival of the first piglet, but she was kind enough to come and chat with us.

"Have you been to the hen house?" she asked. We shook our heads.

"You have to go check it out. You can learn where your eggs come from."

If you're thinking that the correct answer is "chickens", then you, like me, have something to learn.

I like to feel good when I spend my money. I'm not in a very lucrative profession, and I work very hard for what I earn. There are two ways I can feel good about parting with it. First, I can get a good deal. Find the best product at the lowest price and I feel smarter than everyone who paid regular price. I feel like I'm good with money. Second, I can pay more for something worthwhile. Something that will last. Something that will make a difference. Free range. Cage free. It makes me feel good to spend more on eggs if I know the chickens led better lives.

But here is what I learned: chickens aren't people. They don't languish in their cages, beaks pressed against the bars, longing to roam free in the barnyard.
It turns out that what is most important to chickens is pecking order. Their very small brains can only remember seven or eight other chickens. Keep the group small enough and they don't care how much space they have. They are content.

But what about free range? I had assumed that I was paying more for eggs from free range chickens because they were pampered. Not so. Free range chickens are more vulnerable to predators, disease and injury. I'm paying more for the higher mortality rate.

Cage free? A large flock of chickens in unrestricted space makes them miserable. They are stressed and fight more. Chickens need to know their place in the pecking order to be content.

"Every time they open their eyes, they see a new chicken," explained the vet.

In the hen house we saw two cages. The enriched space was larger, but contained more chickens. They could go off to a small private space to lay their eggs. The other cage had about eight chickens. They could walk around in it, but it was very small.

"See how content they are?" asked the young worker? "Even in the smaller cage?"

I'm not sure what a happy chicken looks like, but they certainly weren't fighting. They weren't droopy or listless either. They just looked like they were getting on with the business of being chickens.

It's the same with dogs. We can't resist thinking of them as people, and we derail their training with our affection. We don't want to hurt their feelings. We want them to return our love.

But dogs aren't people. The most important thing to them is their place in the pack. They don't feel ashamed if they aren't the alpha. They don't secretly scheme House of Cards style to take over power. Submitting is as natural to dogs as dominating. If they don't know their place, they are stressed. They need to keep checking on their status in relation to every pack member, human or canine. If they know when to submit, they can get on with the business of being dogs.

We like to impose our own ideas about happiness on other cultures, too. We look at women who cover themselves—Muslim or Amish or Catholic or Jewish—and say, "They are imprisoned. They are dominated." We assume they must long to be free from their cages. Free from domination. If only they could strip off that clothing, they could be happy like us.

But the problem isn't too many clothes. I've heard many women in hijabs talk about their dreams. They sound similar to women in jeans and t-shirts. They want to be doctors or nurses or to start their own businesses. They want that ubiquitous thing known as "a better job."

No. The problem is when women and girls are forced to take off their clothes. I was sickened to learn about the link between sex trafficking and sports. While athletes competed in the Olympics, young girls who had been brought to Rio were satisfying the throngs of spectators. The same with the Super Bowl. The Ryder Cup.

It suits those who pay for sex assume that these women and girls are free. That it's their career choice to sell sex for money. That they are entrepreneurs.

No. They are imprisoned in a nightmare of abuse—physical, emotional, substance abuse. They are not free to go about the business of being women.