Epictetus says that everything has two handles, one by which it can be borne and one by which it cannot. If your brother sins against you, he says, don’t take hold of it by the wrong he did you but by the fact that he’s your brother. That’s how it can be borne.

Because of your kids, you get to know someone you probably wouldn’t have stopped to talk to on your own. You get past the initial shy, gawky stage of the relationship—you have to; you’re inside another mom’s house—and you get a window into how someone who is actually different from you thinks. We get too few of those opportunities, I think. And so I try to be open when my opportunties come around instead of inveighing against pacifiers or chocolate cake or the right moment for toilet training. In the end, we’re all muddling through as parents, right?

From In Defense of the Play Date by Emily Bazelon

The hardest part, perhaps, is coming to terms with her parents’ limitations. “I can’t make them into frugal people who are good financial planners,” she said.

I’m a Sacramento Valley girl, born and bred, so while I’ll curse the heat later on this summer, right now I just love it.

Of course, it helps that it’s just a short walk to a river with icy Sierra-born water to dip my feet in. Helps even more that I have air conditioning these days, and no baseball to watch today (except on TV).

For now, I plan to lie in the hammock, read, drink lemonade, and watch the bees and butterflies buzz around my flower garden. l’ll plan what to plant and trim and pull out, but I won’t do any of it. That’ll have to wait until it cools.

It’s raining.

The dog had to get stitches in his paw, so he can’t go for long walks. Also, he’s stir-crazy. Also, he’s starting to smell really awful.

All of the above mean I can’t go for long walks, either, and long walks are the key to balance and sanity for me.

So I’m seeking sunshine and color in other places, like here. Odd for a Californian to turn to an Englishwoman’s blog for sunshine in April, but there you go.

Like Kiki Vo, one of the students interviewed in the above article, the young people I work with have grown up aware of economic realities. Dropping out of school to support their families is something many have considered.

Since I work at a state college in California, where the budget problems mean tuition increases for already stretched students, I worry about losing students. This semester, the state college grant program went unfunded, and students who started the academic year thinking they had a certain amount of financial aid available were suddenly told, “Oops, we miscalculated. No money for you!”

And yet several of the students in the article spoke of their trust in our leaders and institutions to get us out of this, along with hard work and charity on the parts of citizens. I was struck by that, mostly because I was much more clueless about the impact of government on my life when I was their age. (Also more cynical, but I didn’t really know enough to know what I thought I was cynical about.)

One hope I have that the teens seem to share is that even if another Depression is here, we’ve been there before and made it through. I grew up with grandparents who had been shaped by their Depression-era childhoods; today, I can see my grandfather’s obsession with financial stability as the expression of love it truly was. Passing on that generation’s stories of making do with what’s at hand seems like a good start to helping us all through the coming years.