We left Wisconsin just before ten this morning. We should’ve left earlier — would’ve, if the parents had been pretty much anyone but us — but we didn’t, and that’s why I’m in the backseat, at least an hour from home at 7:52 pm.

It’s my daughter's shift, her first one. First on a roadie, first in an SUV and the first at night. The Boss is on the playlist, and she and my husband are singing, and for the first time this Thanksgiving trip, I don’t feel anything is expected of me. I don’t need to work, like on the way up. I don’t need to navigate or keep company. Drive or socialize or offer to dry, catalog the things not to forget when we pack or not mention at the dinner table.

I’m just back here, looking out the window at the stars and the dark trees, listening to the rattle of a gas station cooler and a shot suspension. Ari and Taylor and Elton and Lita, just like those shirts I’ve never really understood.

The back end of this Nitro sways like a cat with no back claws. It smells of cheap disinfectant because my husband spilled gas on his shoes. Roadside cottonwoods give way to Christmas lights at the frayed edges of the northern suburbs. Freddie Mercury tosses the mike to Vivaldi, culture lite in a minor key.

In the back of my mind, the pandemic rolls over and stretches out a talon, reminding me of last Thanksgiving, of all that crazy shit that went down in 2020 when it rose up and ruled the world.

But outside the window the lights battle for attention, and inside the truck my daughter sings about a lift kit, and we’re rounding the back stretch of her childhood. I swat the talon with a Twizzler to drive it back down deep until a different night as the city yawns before our headlights and we are home.

I’ve been to a few concerts over the past five years where I’ve realized that my favorite singers’ voices have changed. Aged.

They don’t sound the same.

I felt something like … grief, in that.

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Recently Lisa Stone in an Instagram comment referenced a post I wrote, God, over a decade ago, about the fall of the Disney princesses photography series by Dina Goldstein.

Lisa’s blog is still intact, so I had the bizarre experience of getting quoted back to myself from before Twitter existed. Her post is still intact, her link referencing my old blog is not.

 Why are these images so powerful? The insight that cracked me like an egg was Rita's:

"In real life, happiness is the time spent being thankful you aren't going through hell anymore. In real life, we don't know happy unless we've been sad, really sad, or really angry, or really sick. Once we've been all of those things, we learn to appreciate moments when nothing is wrong --- and see them as happiness instead of the status quo."

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This month, this November, this season of leaves falling, has hit me different.

Last November, I was, like all of us, confronting the reality of a lost year, lost trick or treating, lost Thanksgiving football games spent drowsing by your in-laws’ TV, lost Christmas mornings. Lost weddings and graduations and funerals. A million lost funerals.

Applauding strangers at 7 pm and hoping they would still be alive in the morning to go to the hospital and try to stop people from dying of a previously unknown disease.

Reading about the refrigerated trucks that became morgues, the triaged ventilators, the opaque X-rays. The things we’ve never seen before, that will be what we’ve never seen before until we use the word “unprecendented” again.

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When I hear these artists sing, I wish their voices sounded the same.

But then I realize my voice doesn’t.

Even though mine echoes through a keyboard instead of vocal chords, mine has changed forever, too.

I grieve that, a little. That girl Rita used to bring the voice.

I wonder if the singers feel that way, too.

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Because, truth be told, until Lisa commented I forgot what I wrote about the Disney princesses. I forgot about the time when I had a job and it was to write. There was a blissful decade in my life when my job was to notice important things. To comment. To care.

I remember the night Osama bin Ladin was killed. I found about it in the shower, around midnight. I stayed up, because I needed to write.

I can’t find the post now. The sands of the Internet have ever so gradually, post by post, tweet by tweet, pin by pin and snap by snap, covered it in other people’s thoughts, and not even the Wayback Machine can help.

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I’m okay with losing my relevance.

I’ve realized I’m not okay with losing my voice.

I have a photo from at least a decade ago. A woman I knew and respected picked a word representing me to paint on my back at a conference, back when it was socially acceptable to do things like that.

She wrote: “Fierce.”

Since leaving blogging professionally and re-entering corporate America, I haven’t really felt fierce in a while. My dad once called me a heat-seeking missile, and I haven’t felt like that, either.

Until now.

I’m listening to an audiobook about an imaginary world where plants try to kill people. (Thank you, M.R. Carey.)

That seems fair.