Father’s Day 2025
On another June morning four years ago, I was seated on the front porch of a coffee shop just a few feet from where I now write this. It was the hottest and brightest that a Driftless summer day can get. My laptop screen reflected the sun’s glare as customers filtered past me and into the shop. Their friendly greetings, usually a welcome part of my routine, did nothing to improve that particular day.
I was experiencing an identity crisis after choosing to quit what I’d once thought was my dream job. I had discharged most of my duties by this point, but it still felt like the world was spinning around me. My task that morning was to help train my successor. In the mid-pandemic era, this meant signing into a Zoom meeting with someone I would never meet.
I was stuck there, trying to explain the details of my work over the past year – details in which I had taken a personal pride, sometimes to the point of tears. The sounds of my neighbors’ voices were reduced to interruptions as I failed to gather my thoughts. Just as things reached a boiling point, a fellow customer came out and handed me a glass of water. I had said hello to him on his way into the shop (as I am known to do), but we didn’t have anything else in common. He had simply seen that I was in need. The world stopped spinning for a moment, and I became grounded by this gift.
I have been trying to identify gifts in my life after reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World. I purchased the book this winter as a gift to myself. Among other wisdom, The Serviceberry encourages readers to think of everything – our spoken and written words, the ways we take care of ourselves and others, and our very presence in a community – as gifts we can give freely that have no relationship to money. Kimmerer describes this work (and the serviceberry itself) as “another model, one based upon reciprocity, where wealth comes from the quality of your relationships, not from the illusion of self-sufficiency.”
It’s about time.
We put something new into the world when we choose to do something for another living creature. These can be gifts that cost very little, like a glass of water (or feeding the birds, say.) The gifts I have received in this vein are too numerous to count. It is my aim to give back in kind.
Driftless Grace 
Grace, I love the simplicity and kindness shown in this writing. As always, so inspiring.
I will share with my Sunday group.
Thank you!
Jen🌻
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Thank you Grace. I love the idea of reciprocity, not in a tit for tat mode, rather in good relationship(s) of one human or living thing to another. In this culture we are so imbued with things to prop up our own ‘uniqueness’, we often sacrifice relationships on the ‘altar’ of I’m ME and there is no one else like ME. Sense of culture and belonging requires collaboration and deference to other people and living things that aren’t screaming, “Oh look at you, so unique aren’t you.”
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Grace, you have sent me just one of these gifts out of the blue a few months ago – another book about plants, in fact! – Sam Thayer’s newest guide to wild foods. You are already living what you describe.
One time a few years ago after my father had first been diagnosed with cancer I was driving, overwhelmed and sobbing. Somehow another driver, a woman headed the other direction, saw me, rolled down her window, and said “It’ll be okay.” I’ll never forget that ‘glass of water’.
<3, D
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Lovely – thank you so much for reading and sharing.
<3, G
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