WOMN brings readers into the places the headlines never reach.

Come through the door with Julia as she drops the groceries and catches Sisa’s shaking hands moments after ICE shoots a man only blocks away. “Where on this planet do I go?” Sisa pounds her chest as panic takes over. Julia presses her forehead to Sisa’s and breathes with her until her heartbeat slows.

Then she stays.

“As the level of evil and attack intensified in our city, simultaneously the level of care and aid and genuine empathy exploded.” ~Julia

She stays through dishes, bedtime, tears, and the soft weight of a sleeping baby on her shoulder. Julia supports Sisa through a panic attack, and Sisa gives Julia the space to process her own grief.

I am and independent author, self-employed and working full-time to interview women, research what happened, and preserve the stories the headlines left behind. I intend to bring this book into the world the same way Minnesota responded to ICE: grassroots, heart-driven, and sustained by ordinary people showing up for one another. Upgrade to paid and help us bring this book, and this message into the world.

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“Where?!” (gasp)

“on this planet” (sob)

“do I go?”

Her hands shook as she pounded on her chest while pacing the small living room. When she finished the last word, she stopped right in front of Julia and stared her straight in the eyes. Julia was no stranger to fear in the eyes of a child, but in this moment she watched a grown adult’s face and eyes transform to that of a terrified child. Sisa’s pupils were slightly larger than normal, and every muscle in her face tightened.

Julia dropped the groceries on the floor and grabbed Sisa’s hands as she pressed her own forehead into Sisa’s.

“Breathe,” Julia said with a slow breathy voice, just a notch above a whisper.

“I’m here. I’ve got you,” Julia took a long slow breath looking Sisa right in the eye, just inches apart from each other.

“Breathe.”

Sisa took a slow stuttering breath, and then another.

“I’ve got you.” Julia breathed slower as she put her left hand on Sisa’s chest.

THUDTHUDTHUD. THUD. THUD. . . THUD. . . THUD. . . . . THUD.

Julia breathed slower and willed with her mind for Sisa’s heart to slow as well.

Minutes later the two women sat down on the floor of the tiny apartment, knee to knee, with bags of beans and rice and a box of diapers spilled around them. Sisa’s daughter wandered in from the other room wearing headphones and carrying her school tablet, clearly oblivious to the raucous she had just walked into.

Sisa’s eyes tightened again.

“It’s okay,” Julia soothed, “she’s got headphones, she has no idea.”

Sisa exhaled deeply.

Julia’s phone had buzzed seconds before she knocked on Sisa’s door. The rapid response Signal chat alert informed the neighborhood that ICE had just shot a Venezuelan man a few blocks away. Julia knew Sisa had gotten the same alert, hence the panic attack.

The shooting was close enough to Sisa’s apartment building that they could faintly hear the whistles and hollers in real time.

“We’re okay right now. You’re safe right here.” Julia said, and Sisa looked up at her, more color in her face this time, and a tenderness in her eyes that read like gratitude rather than panic.

“The country I’m from — we are indigenous.” Sisa finally explained once her breath came back to a normal rhythm.

“They took advantage of us there. So we fled to the neighboring country. They took advantage of us there. So we came here.”

She took a deep shuddering breath in, exhaled fully, and sobbed a bit before continuing.

“And now they’re trying to kill us.” Her voice squealed and quivered on the last two words.

Sisa stopped breathing, her face turned red as her chin quivered.

“Breathe.” Julia took a long slow breath in, and Sisa followed.

“Where on this planet do I go?”

Julia tapped Sisa’s chest, mimicking a heartbeat and took another long slow breath.

“Right now, you stay right here, with me.”

Sisa nodded.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

Sisa nodded again.

That’s when the sirens started. Just a few blocks away, rapid responders were clashing with ICE agents. The corner of 24th and Lyndale had become a war zone complete with flashbangs, pepper balls, and federal agents in riot gear.

“Let’s get this stuff put away,” Julia said, standing up, picking up a bag of groceries, and reaching a hand down to help Sisa off the floor.

“Should we put on some music?”

“Good idea.”

Julia had been delivering mutual aid supplies to Sisa once a week for several weeks now. At first, she was just a delivery driver. See a need, fill a need, go to the next need. But each week, time stretched. What started as a simple polite greet-and-drop turned into helping unpack the groceries, and then holding the baby for awhile, and then staying for dinner, and then helping with bedtime, and then just not leaving until the grown-up talk slowed into yawns.

Julia was the only adult contact Sisa had all week. And Sisa hadn’t left her apartment, not even to take out the trash, in several weeks, so Julia just got used to staying, and taking out the trash on her way out.

An hour later, as the two women stood hip to hip at the kitchen sink doing dishes, Sisa washing and Julia drying. Julia tried to open a hopeful conversation.

“What are your hopes and dreams?”

Sisa let go of the sponge and started swirling her hand around the diminishing soapy suds at the top of the water.

“I can’t even imagine hopes and dreams right now. I just feel sad most of the time.”

“I get that,” Julia said, picking up a plate she had already dried and going through the motions to dry it again. “The biggest thing I know about trauma is that the brain cannot process it all at once. It releases little parts of it as the body starts to feel safer. So I know that as things start to feel calmer, the work of healing and processing will happen, and that’s when the hopes and dreams will return again. They’re there, just a bit hidden right now.”

Sisa fished the last remaining forks from the bottom of the sink and washed them between her fingers without the sponge, pressing her fingernails between the tines.

“Someone told me once when I was a teenager and feeling sad about having to feel sad, that some day I might learn to embrace it.”

Sisa sighed, handed Julia the forks and swirled her hands some more.

“They suggested that the spectrum of emotions expands downward through negative emotions,” Julia said, reaching into the sink and pulling the plug. The two women watched the water swirl downward.

“As much as it expands downward, it can also expand upward through the full range of positive emotions.” Julia took the small pothos plant of the windowsill above the sink, turned on the tap and let the water drain into the pot. Then she replaced the plant on the windowsill and gently touched the top-most leaf.

“That’s how I see all this. As the level of evil and attack intensifies in our city, simultaneously the level of care and aid and genuine empathy explodes to levels we could never have dreamt of.”

Sisa turned to face Julia, tears streaming down her face, a look Julia had gotten used to seeing. She’d stopped offering tissues weeks ago.

“We have to care for each other for us both to get through it,” Sisa said, and Julia nodded.

They walk back to the living room where the baby sleeps in a small bassinet and her daughter plays with legos on the floor.

The baby fusses, and Sisa lets out a big heavy sigh.

“I’ve got him,” Julia said, picking up the boy and rocking him on her shoulder. He instantly falls back to a purring sleep.

Standing in Sisa’s living room with a baby on her shoulder, the world slowed down to the pace of the soft quiet breath in her arms. She felt it on her neck, warm and steady, and it comforted her in ways nothing else could.

“You have no idea how many people are behind you right now,” Julia said softly, swaying with the baby. “What started as a few parents and teachers has turned into over two hundred people supporting ninety families. Our little school community alone raised two hundred thousand dollars in a couple of weeks just to keep families like yours housed.”

Sisa stared at her.

“It’s not just me, Sisa. Everyone wants you here.”

Sisa’s daughter crawled up on her lap as Julia sat down in the rocking chair with the baby. She had no idea how long she stayed there. Long enough for Sisa and her daughter to fall asleep.

Julia laid the baby back in the bassinet, pulled a blanket over the two of them, took the trash out, and locked the door behind her. This was not the first time she’d let herself out because Sisa and the kids had fallen asleep.

When she got to her car, she started it up and turned the defroster on full blast. She didn’t want to get out and scrape the frost off her windshield, so she pushed the seat heater button and just sat there, watching the fog on her windshield slowly clear.

She sat with her hands in her lap and let the ache arrive.

She wanted to sit inside the sadness and let it be what it was.

Julia knew that Sisa needed someone who didn’t live inside those walls to come through the door and stay. So Julia stayed. But Julia also stayed because she needed something too.

Sisa’s apartment had become the space in Julia’s life where her own grief had permission to slow down and be felt. As the frost on her windshield melted at eye level, she thought about what she’d told Sisa at the sink — that the spectrum expands in both directions.

Other people’s terror had stretched her capacity for a gentler and slower kind of empathy that exists in being rather than doing.

She could still feel the baby’s breath on her neck, as the seat heater warmed her low back.

Julia had always dreamed of a better future. She wondered if that future was growing from the roots of evenings like tonight.

When the windshield had fully cleared, Julia put the car in drive.

Help keep WOMN alive

Julia entered Sisa’s apartment to provide mutual aid and discovered that Sisa’s home had become a place of safety for her too.

WOMN exists to preserve these relationships—the ones that grow quietly through grocery deliveries, shared grief, washed dishes, and sleeping babies.

I am an independent, self-employed author working full-time to gather, research, and write these stories. There is no publishing house, newsroom, or institution funding the work. This project is structured the way Minnesotans built the response to ICE: from the ground up, with heart, trust, and ordinary people contributing what we can.

A paid subscription keeps me at the desk doing the work. It also adds your voice to the collective message carried by this story:

Our immigrant neighbors belong in our communities. They are part of our lives. When they are torn away, we all feel the wound.

Subscribe now

I love you fiercely,
Thanks for giving a shit,
Teri Leigh 💜

WOMN brings readers into the places the headlines never reach.

Come sit on Annie’s porch on her first day off in ten days, where a warm loaf of sourdough transports her to a memory she hasn’t touched for thirty years. As steam rises from the bread, she is carried back to a green bean factory, two toddlers, twelve-hour shifts, and the older Mexican women who loved her when she needed love the most.

This story shows how the immigrant communities of Minnesota are deeply embedded into the fabric of our society as a whole. When ICE abducts them, we lose a deeper sense of ourselves.

I am and independent author, self-employed and working full-time to interview women, research what happened, and preserve the stories the headlines left behind. I intend to bring this book into the world the same way Minnesota responded to ICE: grassroots, heart-driven, and sustained by ordinary people showing up for one another. Upgrade to paid and help us bring this book, and this message into the world.

Subscribe now

“Knock Knock,” Alice says, waving at Annie through her porch window.

“Oh hi!” Annie says, stubbing out her cigarette. “Come on in, pardon my mess. It’s my first day off in a ten day stretch. I don’t know up from down.”

“Oh, I don’t care about your mess, what mess?” Alice says as she steps inside the porch. “I brought you some sourdough.”

“You know, last time you brought over a loaf, I think I only got one slice. My kids ate it all.”

“Well then, you’ll have to hide at least half of this loaf. Same thing happened to me with the bowl of strawberries you gave me. I left them on the counter thinking I’d make a pie that night, but when I got around to it, they were mostly all gone.”

“I got more, just pick as many as you want,” Annie offers, pointing at the strawberry patch.

“I just might do that,” Alice says as she opens the porch door to leave. “Make sure you have a slice soon, it’s always best when it’s fresh out of the oven.”

Ten minutes later, Annie cuts into the loaf and the steam rises from the crumb. Zadie is looking up at her hopefully, her tail wagging and her nose sniffing.

She closes her eyes and breathes in the scent of the fresh bread.

Thirty years ago, another kitchen. She’s a single mother with two toddlers looking up at her while she opens a package of tamales, steam rising out of the package.

“La Chica,” she says out loud to nobody in the room, mimicking the accent the Mexican women had when they called her that so lovingly. “Wow, I haven’t thought about them in so long,” she says looking down at Zadie who spins in a circle of hopefulness.

As she slathers butter on the thick cut heel slice of bread, she goes deeper into the memory of working twelve hour shifts at the green bean factory where she was the only white woman under 40. It was an absolutely terrible job. She hated every minute of it.

Except the people.

She loved her co-workers, older Mexican women who were so, well, maternal. They mommed her in a time in her life when she really needed momming. At the time, she hadn’t realized how traumatic being a single mom was, and how much she needed maternal support. And they just gave it to her, naturally, like it was the normal thing to do.

All they wanted to do was feed her.

And they were always bringing her food. The tamales were her favorite. She’s never had tamales like that since then.

She breaks off a tiny corner of the crust and hands it to Zadie, who chomps at it so excitedly that Annie snaps her hand back.

“Damn, being a single mom was hard,” she says to Zadie. “Feeding you is so much easier than it was feeding those two little munchkins, even if you do try to bite off my hand.”

She wraps the over-buttered bread in a paper towel and goes back out to the porch where she can eat it slowly.

She picks up her phone and starts scrolling through social media, stopping at a reel of a ten-year-old Mexican girl protesting at Delaney Hall Immigration Detention Facility in New Jersey because ICE won’t let her visit her mother who is locked inside.

Annie takes the first bite of the bread and holds it on her tongue without swallowing, the way she used to with the tamales. She doesn’t swallow until the reel is finished.

Then, she puts a hand on Zadie’s head before speaking out loud again, to nobody in the room.

“God, I hope they’re okay.”

Help keep WOMN alive

WOMN exists to preserve these quiet relationships—the immigrant women who fed us, cared for us, taught us, and became part of who we are long before ICE tried to reduce them to an immigration status.

I am an independent, self-employed author working full-time to gather, research, and write these stories. There is no publishing house, newsroom, or institution funding the work. This project is structured the way Minnesotans built the response to ICE: from the ground up, with heart, trust, and ordinary people contributing what we can.

A paid subscription keeps me at the desk doing the work. It also adds your voice to the collective message carried by this story:

Our immigrant neighbors belong in our communities. They are part of our lives. When they are torn away, we all feel the wound.

Subscribe now

I love you fiercely,
Thanks for giving a shit,
Teri Leigh 💜

WOMN brings readers into the places the headlines never reach.

Come sit in the passenger seat beside Brianna as she grips the steering wheel through a Minnesota white-out blizzard, terrified she will crash but unwilling to turn around because a Venezuelan family hiding from ICE needs food.

This story shows how driving through white-out blizzards prepared us for the “other” kind of ICE, and why we protect our immigrant neighbors as our own, because losing them is like losing a limb of our own.

I am and independent author, self-employed and working full-time to interview women, research what happened, and preserve the stories the headlines left behind. I intend to bring this book into the world the same way Minnesota responded to ICE: grassroots, heart-driven, and sustained by ordinary people showing up for one another. Upgrade to paid and help us bring this book, and this message into the world.

Subscribe now

“I’m gonna die!” Brianna yells into her car speakerphone while driving through white-out blizzard conditions.

“You’re okay,” Vox reassures her wife. “You’re a good driver.”

“I’m gonna crash on the highway!” Brianna shouts in a panic.

“You’ve got this,” Vox affirms in that deep grounding voice she knows always works with Brianna. “Just go slow, and pump the brakes.”

“I can’t stop driving,” Brianna asserts. “They need groceries. They have to be able to eat.”

A couple hours earlier, Vox’s dear friend Alejandro, a Venezuelan immigrant, had told her that he was super scared. In the early weeks of the surge, Alejandro’s went into hiding with his cousin’s family. They didn’t reach out for help, but Vox and Brianna knew that the Venezuelan family needed support and they wouldn’t take no for an answer.

With the winter storm warning and Christmas around the corner, the family didn’t know how they’d get through the holiday week as they were nearly out of food. To Brianna and Vox, adding to their Costco order and driving it the 30 miles to the south-of-the-river outer ring suburb was a no-brainer. Their friends needed food, and they had the means to provide.

Done deal.

But they didn’t account for the severe weather winter storm.

Brianna grips the steering wheel and hovers her right foot between the gas and brake pedals.

The safest place to be in these kinds of conditions is tucked at home. But home isn’t an option because this family needs food. So, Brianna prays for the second safest option, to be lucky enough to get a few safe car lengths behind a fleet of Minnesota snow plows, aptly named Oh, for Sleet’s Sake, Minne-Snow-ta, and Say It Ain’t Snow.

But that isn’t happening either.

Instead, she settles for driving in the tire-ruts of the slower-than-most semi ahead of her, She curses every idiot who speeds past her as her windshield accumulates and her windshield wipers leave a heavy streak right at her eye-level. Whenever the brake lights flash in front of her, she pumps her brakes, letting her tires slide through the icy patches to avoid fishtailing or side-sliding into the ditch.

What would normally be a 45-minute drive takes two-hours. When she arrives, Alejandro greets her in the driveway that he just finished shoveling and is already covered again.

“Mija! Come in! Come in!” Alejandro insists as Brianna pops her trunk. Before she can start unloading, Alejandro’s cousin is next to her starting to lift Costco boxes out of her trunk. She tells him which boxes are to take as Alejandro rushes her into the house.

The family greets Brianna at the door like she is their own kin, showering her with welcomes and thank yous and taking her coat and scarf before she has an opportunity to insist she just wants to get back home. They have Vox on speakerphone, informing her that Brianna has arrived safely and they are “holding her hostage” until she eats enough arepas to nourish her drive back home.

“Take care of my love,” Vox instructs the family, “that she drove all this way to take care of you, tells you how much she loves me.”

“You’d do the same for me and my people,” Brianna says, and for a timeless moment everyone stops to absorb the fullness of the moment before they hang up the phone and sit Brianna at the table to eat.

“I came to feed you, and here you are feeding me,” Brianna says as she puts her fork down on an empty plate. “Whatever you do to season the meat, um, yeah, and the pastry is perfect. So delicious.”

“That’s how this works,” Alejandro’s cousin says, clearing the plate as his children beg Brianna to play with them. “You must take some home to Vox.”

One month later, Alejandro is kidnapped by ICE.

When he arrived in the states, he crossed the border improperly and immediately went to the immigration office where he was given a valid visa. After being transferred through three different detention facilities with conditions far worse than any prison system, he finally relented and signed self-deportation papers.

Five months later, Alejandro calls Vox from Venezuela. He tells her that the entire experience left him psychologically damaged, but that he agreed to self-deport because they promised him a chance to return one day.

“Why in the world would you want to come back here?”

The question is out of her mouth before she can catch it. And she means it, about her own home.

Help keep WOMN alive

When ICE took Alejandro, it did not take an anonymous immigrant from an anonymous place. It tore the man who called Brianna mija from a living circle and deeply connected community of friendship, family, food, and home.

WOMN exists because these relationships deserve to be remembered.

I am an independent, self-employed author working full-time to gather, research, and write these stories. There is no publishing house, newsroom, or institution funding the work. This project is structured the way Minnesotans built the response to ICE: from the ground up, with heart, trust, and ordinary people contributing what we can.

A paid subscription keeps me at the desk doing the work. It also adds your voice to the collective message carried by this story:

Our immigrant neighbors belong in our communities. They are part of our lives. When they are torn away, we all feel the wound.

Subscribe now

I love you fiercely,
Thanks for giving a shit,
Teri Leigh 💜

“Duck,” Livie says as she taps Carson’s head with the palm of her hand.

“Huh?” Carson says, confused. Livie looks back at him with an equally confused look.

“Duck,” she says flatly again as she taps Brenden’s head.

“What kind of duck?” Brenden says, stopping Livie in her rotation around the circle.

“What do you mean?” Livie stops where she is, halfway around a circle of kids sitting criss-cross-applesauce on the church basement floor. Seven five-year-old faces look up at her, waiting for an answer she doesn’t have.

In the kitchen, watching through the pass-through window, Livie’s mom, Tiffany, sets down the rag and starts for the door. Linda puts a hand on her arm.

“Let them figure it out,” Linda says to her daughter-in-law who is recently transplanted to Minnesota from Anaheim, California, and clearly has never seen a true game of Duck Duck Grey Duck.

“Figure what out?” Tiffany asks, “What game are they even playing?”

“Duck Duck Grey Duck,” Linda says while spraying down the counter.

“Duck Duck What?” Tiffany says, wiping where Linda just sprayed.

“Just watch, you’ll see,” Linda nods to the kids.

Brenden is already up. He steers Livie into his spot on the floor by both shoulders and then walks up behind Maisy, with his hands behind his back, taking his time, looking down at the top of her head the way he’d look into a bakery case.

“Purple duck,” he says, tapping two fingers on top of Maisy’s head and moves on to Carson. He stops behind Carson, tilts his head, thinking.

“Blue duck.”

Carson grins at the floor.

“You’re boring,” Alyssa says, jumping up before Brenden gets to her, waving him off, taking the circle herself.

“It doesn’t have to be just colors,” she says looking back at Livie. “The whole point is to be different.”

She starts with Annalise, looking at her for a good three seconds.

“Sparkly duck.”

“Aw, thank you!” Annalise says as Alyssa pauses behind her best friend Maisy.

“Rainbow duck,” Alyssa says while lifting Maisy’s ponytail up towards the ceiling. Maisy sits up taller with a proud grin.

Behind Winston, her hand comes down, and she is running before she speaks.

“Grey duck!”

Winston scrambles up after her, giggling so hard he can barely keep his feet, and the whole circle turns to follow them around.

Livie watches Alyssa drop into the empty spot where Winston had been sitting.

“What happened to the goose?” Livie asks.

“What goose?” Carson says.

“Geese are mean,” Maisy says.

We Celebrate Differentness

Everywhere in the United States, except Minnesota, children are taught the game Duck Duck Goose, where the emphasis is on sameness. Each child is named as being the same, a simple duck, until the goose is forced to chase its opponent around the circle as a punishment for being different. Be the same as everyone else, and you are safe and get to sit down.

Minnesota doesn’t work that way.
We celebrate differentness.

We play Duck Duck Grey Duck, a version brought here by our Swedish ancestors who called it anka anka grå anka. We lovingly tap and describe every kid on the way around the circle. Pink duck. Blue duck. Polka-dot duck. Sparkly duck. Even dinosaur duck. Being named for what makes us different is the good part — the part we say ‘thank you’ for. Nobody taught Alyssa to say sparkly duck. The game encourages kids to be creative and bring something nobody’s thought of yet.

Minnesota has carried this instinct for valuing diversity into larger choices, including welcoming asylum seekers as refugees. When the Secret War ended and the Hmong who had fought it on behalf of the United Stated needed somewhere to go, Minnesota said come here. When the camps in Thailand emptied, the Karen people came to St. Paul. Somalis, Liberians, Vietnamese, Ukrainians, Ethiopians, Russian Jews, and more. We are a bitter cold flyover state at the top of the map holding one of the largest Hmong communities and the largest Somali community in the country.

For decades, Minnesota’s church congregations have sponsored immigrant refugee families one at a time. Church basement ladies signed up to collect winter coats, meet a plane at four in the morning, and sit at a kitchen table explaining a lease line-by-line. Somebody’s Swedish grandmother taught somebody else’s Hmong grandmother how to work a thermostat. Somebody’s Hmong grandmother taught somebody else’s Swedish grandmother that a garden could hold more than tomatoes, cucumbers, and rhubarb. Fifty years later, much of the produce at our farmer’s markets comes from Hmong farms, and egg rolls sit next to hotdish at every church fundraiser while all the grandchildren sit criss-cross-applesauce on a church basement floor in our sanctuary state.

The Grrrr—een Duck Test

A few rounds later it’s Winston’s turn to be “it”, and he’s taking his time.

Seven kids sit in a circle quietly listening. The only sound is Winston’s steps on the tile.

“Blue duck.”

Two slow steps. Carson tips his chin up before Winston’s hand lands.

“Pizza duck.”

Carson mouths it to himself, pleased.

Winston steps behind Livie and stops. Livie has her hands flat on the floor on either side of her.

“Grrrrrrr—”

He holds it. Across the circle Annalise’s shoulders come up. Brenden’s knee slides underneath him.

Livie tucks both her feet underneath herself into a squat.

“rrr—een duck.”

She sits back down hard. The circle breathes out. Somebody giggles and Livie starts laughing too, at herself, with her hand over her face.

In the kitchen, Tiffany stops wiping the counters and just stands at the pass-through window, watching.

“What just happened?” she asks Linda.

“Winston tested her.” Linda squeezes the spray bottle twice and works at a spot near the sink. “Green and grey start the same. They drag out the grrr on purpose.”

Tiffany watches Livie settle back in. Both hands flat on the floor again. Her head tilted, just so. Tiffany recognizes that face in her daughter, it’s her listening face.

“So they’re all just sitting there listening.”

“That’s most of it,” Linda says. “That, and waiting to hear what they get called.”

Don’t Fuck with Minnesota’s Gaggle of Geese

Two kinds of listening happen in this game. Every kid is waiting for the word that means run. Every kid is also waiting to hear how they are described by the tapper. We can’t listen well while talking, so our kids play the game with keen ears.

Minnesotans, by nature, are a listen-first culture of people, and Duck Duck Grey Duck teaches to be that way at a young age. We let a person finish, and then we leave a pause after they’re finished. We are more comfortable with silence because we like to gather information and turn it over in our minds before we say what we think about it. When somebody new shows up on the block, we are quiet at first, paying attention, carefully contemplating what kind of duck we think they might like to be named.

Inevitably, a native Minnesotan who grew up with Duck Duck Grey Duck will discover as a young adult that other states play Duck Duck Goose instead. This realization usually results in a heated argument about which version of the game is the right one. We Minnesotans will stubbornly refuse to give up our colorful version, arguing about it with your cousin from Ohio at a wedding.

Which is what happened when ICE surged our state.

The feds came here playing a crueler game of Duck Duck Goose with their own made-up rules. They walked around looking for whoever wasn’t the same as them, and when they found them, they made them run, and hide.

We reject their version of the game.

When the feds came for our immigrant neighbors, we showed them how an angry gaggle of geese behaves when protecting its own.

Help keep WOMN alive

I am an independent, self-employed author working full-time to gather, research, and write these stories. There is no publishing house, newsroom, or institution funding the work. This project is structured the way Minnesotans built the response to ICE: from the ground up, with heart, trust, and ordinary people contributing what we can.

A paid subscription keeps me at the desk doing the work. It also adds your voice to the collective message carried by this story:

Our immigrant neighbors belong in our communities. They are part of our lives. When they are torn away, we all feel the wound.

Subscribe now

I love you fiercely,
Thanks for giving a shit,
Teri Leigh 💜

What you are about to read is a full chapter from WOMN, the interior experience and emotional truths of the women of Minnesota during Operation Metro Surge, holding the grief, the rage, the tenderness, and the fierce love that women know so well.

If you see yourself in these pages,
Pass it to the woman next to you.

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This is the full chapter about OWLs (old white ladies) and how we embraced our white privilege as a super power during the surge. I hope you enjoy.

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Lake Wobegone

“Hello, and welcome to A Prairie Home Companion, coming to you live from the Fitzgerald Theater in Saint Paul, Minnesota.”

Garrison Keillor’s voice echoes from the top of Linda’s avocado-green fridge at the family cabin up north. It’s Saturday night in June, and she’s rolling dough for pies at the counter while her mom sits at the kitchen table, embroidering herb plumes onto flour dish towels.

“How many you got left, there?” Linda asks.

“I finished the rosemary, basil, and lavender. I just have the thyme, mint, and sage left to go.”

“Well, it’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my hometown…

The rest of the family is outside. Linda’s husband, Dad and the uncles at the fire pit, somebody’s transistor radio out there too, the Twins game is on low underneath the sound of the lake settling into evening. The occasional loon call punctuates the air as the younger kids chase fireflies around the edges of the yard.

The screen door bangs every few minutes — someone coming in for bug spray, someone else going to use the bathroom — and each time it bangs, the someone says “smells good, when’s the pie gonna be ready?” and Linda always answers “Almost”.

Mom doesn’t look up from the dish towel. Linda doesn’t look up the dough. Outside, someone laughs at something. The screen door bangs again.

We all know that up-north kitchen. Even if we didn’t have a cabin in our own families, we all got invited to spend a weekend at one at some time or other. If the appliances weren’t avocado green, they were autumn gold, and the kitchen table was always a wobbly worn wood, or some form of sparkled formica.

Garrison Keillor’s voice came on the radio every Saturday evening, blending stories of Lake Wobegone with the smell of Grandma’s best recipes wafting from the oven. And in that voice, week after week, was a made-up town on a made-up lake, that became famous for nothing special across the world.

We listened to gossip in the aisles of Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery, where if you can’t find it at Ralph’s, you can probably get along without it. We heard about the Sons of Knute lodge, where serious men gathered to discuss matters of grave importance and ended up talking about the weather and the price of corn. And we grimaced at the sermons given at Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility, where the congregation shuffled in every Sunday because you still go to church every Sunday, even if you are on vacation. It’s just what we do.

We knew that congregation. We were that congregation.

Keillor tells us about the quiet week, where nothing much happened but everything mattered. He tells us about the Tollerud family and how they found their lost cat, and the Bunsen boys latest not-quite-run-in with the law, and Pastor Ingqvist’s latest attempt to say something meaningful to people who would rather he kept it brief. He tells us about the Norwegian bachelor farmers who eat their meals standing over the sink and about the Swedish farmer who loved his wife so much he almost told her.

Almost.

We are, all of us, fluent in almost.

We Minnesota women are known to almost say something, and be glad we didn’t. We almost ask for help, and are grateful when someone notices and offers without our request. The almost is just part of the air in Minnesota, like lake humidity that almost forms into rain but never quite does.

Garrison Keillor’s radio show is slow and steady, with a tinge of melancholy, finding the humor in the sadness and the sadness in the humor. And, like a hymn we already know by heart he reminds us every week that in Lake Wobegone, all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.

Linda pulls the pie out of the oven as Mom sets down the embroidery hoop and holds the dish towel up to the kitchen light to check her stitching. They have each other’s hands.

Of course the women are strong. What else would they be?

Outside, the screen door bangs. Somebody holler that pie’s ready.

We are Lake Wobegon women. White women. We are women who grew up fluent in the language of almost — we almost said something, almost made a fuss, almost asked for what we needed, we almost told someone how much they mattered.

Then ICE came to Minnesota in Operation Metro Surge.

And we white women tossed the almost into the trash like an over-burnt pie.

ICE broke our almost wide open and we started saying something, making the fuss, asking for what we need, and telling everyone how much they matter.

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What you are about to read is an excerpt from WOMN, the interior experience and emotional truths of the women of Minnesota during Operation Metro Surge, holding the grief, the rage, the tenderness, and the fierce love that women know so well.

If you see yourself in these pages,
Pass it to the woman next to you.

Share

This is a scene from the chapter about OWLs (old white ladies) and how we embraced our white privilege as a super power during the surge. I hope you enjoy.

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Sasha

I’m gonna self-deport. Can you take me to the airport?

It’s after midnight, Sasha’s text notification wakes her, and when she sees what it says and who it’s from, she taps back a response immediately.

Yup, absolutely, I can do that.

She tries to roll over and go back to sleep, but her foot starts quivering again. She rolls over to the other side and takes three slow deep breaths.

It doesn’t work. She knows sleep won’t be happening tonight. So she sits up in bed and stares at the two messages on her screen.

Her foot quivering habit had started six months earlier, back in July when she had received another text from Rafael.

They’re gone. –he wrote

??? –she replied

ICE. –he answered.

She adjusts the pillow behind her back and scrolls quickly through the six months of text exchanges she had with Rafael, looking for the thread from that day. But that was it, just three lines.

She hadn’t replied in text, she called him.

Her eyes froze on the word “ICE” as her body recalled the feelings of that day.

ICE had broken down the door to the apartment at 6am and took Miguel, his two brothers, and his nephew. The four men who had been getting ready for work were taken, but Rafael, Miguel’s brother-in-law, had left for work early that day. He returned to find their phones, their IDs, and an uneaten bowl of breakfast cereal on the kitchen counter.

When’s your flight?

After she has his itinerary, Sasha opens her Delta app and buys a ticket to Fargo with her SkyMiles so that she can go through security with him and make sure he gets on the plane safely. She’s heard that ICE is stationed inside MSP, beyond the security checkpoints. If she’s lucky, she can cancel the flight last minute and get her SkyMiles refunded.

I can’t really live with myself if I just let him go through when I can just risk losing some SkyMiles.

Miguel had spent a month at the detention center in Albert Lea. Sasha had tried to visit him there, but ICE wouldn’t let her in. When they were finally deported and made it back to their hometown in Mexico, they looked like different people. Miguel had lost so much weight that his face looked like it belonged to someone older, someone who had been sick for a very long time.

For sixteen years, Miguel had lived in the U.S. and sent money back to his family in Mexico, enough to purchase his own home there. But when he got back, he slept on a mattress on the floor of his sister’s house, curled into a corner like a child. He couldn’t be alone.

When his sister’s cat jumped onto the mattress, Miguel woke up screaming, thinking ICE was back, because the last time he’d been abruptly woken from sleep, it was to a gun pointed in his face.

Now, six months and two visits to Mexico later, Sasha sits with her back against the headboard of her bed with her foot quivering under the covers. She and Sleep hadn’t been on the best of terms for months, but since the surge, they’d had all out arguments for most of the night every night.

Thursday morning at 5:30 AM, Sasha pulls up to the house where Rafael has been staying. It’s Minnesota winter dark.

She stares at the bare oak tree in the front yard. The last time Rafael was outside was when the tree had all its leaves. For a moment, Sasha was consumed with guilt. She could go to the store. She could go to the movies. She could walk her dog at 7pm in the dark and the worst thing that would happen was that her fingers would get cold. These were small ordinary things that everyone should be able to do anytime.

This shouldn’t be happening, she thinks, her hands on the wheel. He should be able to just — go outside. He should be able to stay and live a normal life.

Rafael gets in the car with one small duffle bag.

Thirty minutes later, they are in line for TSA. Sasha goes first.

“Good morning,” the officer at the facial scanner says, with an easy early morning tone, “Where you headed today?”

“Fargo,” she says.

“Fargo! Brave woman in January.” He says, glancing at his screen and waving her through.

Rafael steps up to the scanner, nervous and shy. The same officer looks at him, but his face isn’t friendly anymore. He was stern and sharp.

“Look straight ahead.”

Rafael looks at Sasha, unsure.

“Straight ahead!” The officer points two fingers at his own eyes, then jabs them toward the scanner. “Right there.”

“Sir.” The TSA agent is irritated now, “Hold still.”

Rafael doesn’t move as Sasha stands frozen waiting for him, bag straps in both hands.

Do I say something? she thinks. They’re not even trying to hide it, treating him completely differently than me. . . . Don’t. Don’t make it worse.

He finally finds the right angle and the scanner beeps. The officer looks at his screen, says nothing, and motions his head toward the belt.

Sasha smiles tightly and beckons Rafael towards her. He shoves his wallet back into his pocket and follows her. They don’t talk about it. They just start walking toward the gates, side by side.

As they turn the corner to enter the concourse, they pass a Starbucks with a large cluster of about twelve men standing around with their arms crossed, watching the people coming from the security checkpoints. Every single traveler around them had a winter jacket, a scarf, or a puffy coat of some type. It was January in Minnesota. You don’t leave the house without one. But these men were in Carhartts. They were not travelers, and they were not airport security.

Sasha elbows Rafael and urges him to walk faster.

ICE - she thinks, feeling the thought stuck in her mouth.

They keep walking. Same pace. Eyes forward.

Part of her wants to walk right up to them and yell at them like the people at Whipple do. Part of her wants to run. Part of her wants to grab Rafael’s arm as her protector, or maybe as his protector. She just wanted to do something. But there was nothing to do but walk normally toward their gate, two people with boarding passes, nothing to see here.

The gate is quiet. For a little while it almost feels ordinary — two people in airport chairs, the low roar of the terminal around them, a flight board blinking overhead.

When Rafael FaceTimes his wife to let her know he’s at the gate, Sasha walks to the windows to give him some privacy. Rafael hadn’t seen his wife, Miguel’s sister, in three years. She puts her hand up on the window and feels the coldness underneath her fingertips. Would Miguel be able to come back in three years time?

After he finishes his call, he checks-in with the gate agent to make sure the flight is on time. Everything’s fine.

Everything’s fine. But everything is most certainly not fine.

Sasha thinks as she takes a seat next to him again. She can’t settle. She keeps watching for the Carhartt guys.

He has his papers. He is choosing to leave. Everything’s fine.

At 8:25, five minutes before boarding, the gate agent calls Rafael’s name over the PA.

“Do you want me to come with you?” Sasha offers.

He shakes his head. “No, I got it.”

As Sasha watches him walk toward the gate agent, the world starts moving in fast forward. Two Carhartts materialize at the gate. They say something to Rafael. He says something back, reaching into his pocket. When Sasha stands up to walk towards them, they grab him by the arms. Rafael looks at Sasha and shrugs his shoulders and waves as best he can as they lead him to the jetway.

I didn’t get to say goodbye.

When she can’t see him anymore, time slows to a crawl.

After two minutes, she goes to the gate agent.

“Do you know where they are taking him?”

“Oh,” the gate agent says without looking at her, “ICE took him.”

“Where? Am I going to see him again?”

“Aren’t you on this flight?”

“No.”

Sasha goes back to the window and puts her left hand back up on the cold glass and stares out into the white nothingness of Minnesota winter. Eventually the Carhartts come back off the jetway. They got their self-deportation credit so that they could get their money.

Just then, her phone dings. It’s Rafael.

I’m okay. Headed home.

She takes her hand off the glass and looks down at her left hand. It’s shaking just like her feet do at night. So she plays with the imaginary ring that she knows will be there on her next visit to Mexico.

This is an excerpt from WOMN- a book about the women of Minnesota and what Operation Metro Surge made of us.

It’s a mutual aid effort — written by us, for us, moving hand to hand the way love does when it’s real. New excerpts will be released as I write them, every Tuesday, here on Fierce Love. When the manuscript is complete, I plan to release it the grassroots way. Self-published, and supported by grief at grounding community gathering events and independent bookstores.

If this chapter found you, it found you for a reason.

Please add your voice by sharing in the comments. I’m listening. We all are.

That’s how this works.

That’s how we work.

I love you fiercely,

TeriLeigh 💜

Leave a comment

What you are about to read is an excerpt from WOMN, the interior experience and emotional truths of the women of Minnesota during Operation Metro Surge, holding the grief, the rage, the tenderness, and the fierce love that women know so well.

If you see yourself in these pages,
Pass it to the woman next to you.

Share

This is a scene from the chapter about OWLs (old white ladies) and how we embraced our white privilege as a super power during the surge. I hope you enjoy.

Subscribe now

CeeCee

“I am scared.”

CeeCee can barely get the words out of her mouth, as she looks into her camera phone, Facebook Reels open. She’s not even sure why she’s recording. She’ll probably just delete this later. But she can’t just sit with these feelings. They are too big.

“I am scared for every single human in the cities right now.”

She pauses, even longer this time, her face twitches through a number of expressions. Fear. Rage. Love. Sadness. And then again, that look of resolve.

“I know we have a lot of fight in us, but this is heartbreaking.”

Her voice cracks on the word “heart” so she stops to take a breath, eyes closed, before looking directly into the camera to continue.

“If you don’t know, ICE shot another person in Minneapolis, a black man.”

She stops, pushing her fingers to her lips as she takes another breath.

“I just watched a video where they were holding a gun to a woman’s head that was sitting on the ground.”

She takes a heavy breath, sobs openly, for a few breaths and then looks right at the camera.

“They are intentionally brutalizing and terrorizing us, and nobody’s helping us.”

She sobs again, and pushes her hand through her hair.

“We’re on our own, feeding people, walking the front lines.”

She looks away from the camera, for longer than a second, and then back.

“It’s just us. . . normal people. . . who really just want to be sitting on their fucking couch watching TV.”

A small broken laugh escapes her, because it’s true.

“But instead,” she inhales a stuttering inhale as a tear falls out of her left eye, “some madman decided that we’re the fucking problem in this country because we care about people.”

The laugh is gone now and her voice has turned even sharper.

“And the rest of you that voted for this that are still saying. . . well. . . ‘they should just follow the rules.’”

Her voice drops as she feels that familiar churn in her gut. It always churns like that when she gets angry.

“What fucking rules?! They canceled all the rules! THERE AREN’T ANY FUCKING RULES!”

She pauses to think. How do I even say this next part? What am I even saying here?

“I don’t actually know what’s going to happen to us.”

She says this quietly, more quietly than anything she has said so far. “For the first time since this happened, I do not know what’s going to happen to us.”

She needs a second. Am I crazy for making this video? Sure. But I have to put this out there, or it will make me sick inside.

“I live five blocks from where the third precinct burned. . . I stood on my steps and watched it burn. I sat up night after night as proud boys went back and forth trying to cause a bigger problem in our city. . . I know what that feels like and this is way, way worse. . . Way worse.”

She sniffles, blinks, and leans slightly toward the camera. I need them to hear this!

“People need to understand what the fuck is happening here because it can happen to you.”

“They’re trying to make an example of us.”

“Why?”

“Because we’re a good fucking city, that’s why! Because we care about our people. Do we have crime?”

“Yeah, all cities have fucking crime. But we love our immigrants in our city. We love them.”

She rubs her chest with her free hand, like something hurts there. She gazes off camera a bit as she takes a moment to remember hugging the mom she delivered to just yesterday.

“Their food, their culture. We’ve adopted them into our city because we love them.”

She pauses again, smiling to hold the memory again for a moment. But then the smile fades and her face gets really dark and heavy.

“Everybody needs to be very careful tonight. Nobody come to my home tomorrow until you hear from me or you’re in the neighborhood and know it’s safe.”

She swallows, hard.

“We have a lot of contacts that we need to check on and make sure they’re okay. I have people that need to have food delivered tomorrow and some of them in North Minneapolis, actually the majority of them.”

She pauses again to sob openly for several breaths until she regains her composure enough to speak again.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen with that. We need to wait because we need to all be safe too. These are all lose-lose situations that we’re doing nonstop. Everything we do right now is risky.”

She stops to think about her next words. She can feel them on her tongue, but they don’t feel real.

I can’t believe this is our world right now! What I’m about to say is just to surreal.

“It’s risky to get food to people.”

She looks at the camera for a long moment.

“Nobody understands what’s happening here. . . They’re trying to kill us and nobody gets it. . . They think we’re just making it up and we’re not.”

One more breath. Long and slow.

“I am sorry.”

She stops the recording, hits publish, puts the phone face down on the nightstand and curls up into bed.

CeeCee wakes up the next morning to her phone dinging every few seconds. She has more text messages and Facebook messages than she’s ever had before.

“You’re everywhere!”

“CeeCee! OMG, are you okay?! Your video…call me!”

“CeeCee, I didn’t know you were on TikTok.”

What does that even mean? I’m NOT on TikTok!

She lay there staring at her phone lighting up over and over in her hand. Her Facebook video had nearly a million views and had been copied to multiple platforms. She had thousands of new followers and friend requests. And comments. So many comments from all over the world.

“We’re here. I’m holding you all the way from London.”

“You’re not alone. How can we help?”

“I’m here, in Vermont. I grew up in the Twin Cities. I want to help.”

“What can I do? I’m in Denmark.”

She tried to read through more of the comments, but there were too many. After a few dozen, all the words just blurred together. So, she turned her ringer off and put her phone facedown on the comforter. But she could still see the light peeking out from the edges, so she tossed a pillow on top of it.

Oh shit.

What did I get myself into??

CeeCee shows her wife her phone, and her wife looks at her in disbelief.

“What are you gonna do?”

“I need to post our Venmo,” CeeCee says, staring her wife in the eyes. Her wife knows that look.

“What about taxes?” her wife asks.

“If we still have a federal government next year, we’ll figure it out. People need help NOW.”

“Go Help.”

Okay. I guess I’m the face of this.

CeeCee gets back onto the bed and lets out a deep vocal sigh, and her dog lifts his head to look up at her from his crate.

I’m doing this.

She sits up, and with bleary eyes and bedhead, she hits record.

“Okay. . . Hi. . . So, it’s Wednesday morning, I think? What time is it? Is it still morning? It doesn’t matter. And, I don’t really know what happened.”

She exhales a nervous laugh.

“I don’t — I don’t really know what to do with this. I’m not gonna lie. I posted that video last night because I was broken and I needed to say something and I thought maybe fifty people would see it and I almost deleted it three times before I fell asleep. And now it’s — (exhale) — yeah. Okay.”

I’ve got this.

She looks directly into the camera.

“Evidently a whole heckuva lot of you saw that video last night, or this morning, or whatever. And I’m feeling really exposed and vulnerable right now.”

Deep sigh.

“I need to say something first. I am a white woman. I am also LGBTQ. I am also disabled. So I am part of marginalized communities. I know what it feels like to be the person people are coming after. I am not a delusional human. I know how this shit works.”

She pauses for a slow breath.

“Right now, I don’t lead with being gay or being disabled. I lead right now with being white. And I am really aware of that.”

Did I just say all that?!

“Here’s what I keep coming back to, I have a community that shows up when I ask. And evidently, last night that community just got a whole heckuva lot bigger. . . Thank you for that.”

She looks up, and her face makes a half eye-roll half gratitude gesture and she chuckles to herself a bit. She pauses, and her eyes narrow.

“But I’m not the one being hunted, and I’m sure it feels really scary to be hunted.”

She looks at the camera for a long moment. Her eyes are red.

“Right now, I’m just feeling all your love. And it’s softening all my edges.”

She stops. Presses her lips together. Collects herself.

“I just — I need to say thank you. I went to sleep last night thinking maybe fifty people would see that video and I woke up and you were — you were everywhere. You showed up. From New Mexico. From Canada. From places I don’t even know yet. You saw these humans and you gave a shit and I just —”

She shakes her head slowly, almost laughing at the size of it.

“I don’t take this lightly. I want you to know that. Every single comment, every single share, every single person who said I don’t know what to do but I’m here — that matters. That is not nothing. These families are locked inside their homes and a six month old baby went to the hospital last night because tear gas was deployed underneath the car carrying a whole family! And the world just keeps spinning like nothing happened. But you stopped the scroll and you said something and I am just — I am so grateful. I am so grateful for every single one of you.”

She pauses to openly cry. Then she shakes her head a bit, slow-blinks, and comes back to that resolved look in her eye.

“Okay. Here’s what I know. I know that there are families in North Minneapolis who are really really scared right now, and they are waking up to the aftermath of their neighborhood being a warzone last night. They have tiny humans with asthma, and they need groceries, and rent, and snacks, and toys. And they might need some humans who are not black and brown to help them figure out how to get their babies some medicine.”

She takes a long slow breath, staring directly into the camera the whole time.

“And apparently a gazillion of you humans watched me cry last night and so many of you are telling me that you want to help. So. Okay. Let’s do something with that.”

A small laugh. She pauses again and sits up a bit taller, changing hands holding the phone again, takes a breath and continues again. Then quieter:

“I want to be clear, we are NOT saving them.”

She waits.

“They’re very, very capable. They’re very brave. They’re very resilient.”

She waits again.

“I feel like we need to be in service to all of these immigrant families, to all of these people that are struggling, because other people that look like us are the ones causing a fuck ton of harm here.”

She looks directly into the camera the whole time, that resolved look in her eyes getting stronger.

“So yes, you can help. I’m adding my Venmo to this post. These families need rent money, and grocery money, and money for diapers and formula.”

Her voice gets a notch deeper.

“Here’s my commitment to you, I promise that every single penny goes directly to the humans in need. I keep a spreadsheet. I track every transaction in and out. I don’t keep any of it. Not one cent. You can ask me anytime where the money went and I will tell you exactly where it went.”

A breath.

“I have a crew of humans coming to my garage to pack delivery boxes. If you can’t donate and you live in the Twin Cities, come pack. If you can donate, even five dollars helps. I promise, what you donate will be helping one of these families today or tomorrow, cuz that’s the kind of turnaround I do.”

She looks at the camera for a long moment, her eyes filling up with wetness again.

“If you can help somebody, anybody, in your community today, I really really hope you do.”

Then, she pauses a long pause before she whispers, “thank you,” and hits stop on the record.

She puts the phone face down on the nightstand.

Almost instantly her phone starts dinging two distinct sounds.

One for Facebook notifications and one with Venmo notifications.

This is an excerpt from WOMN- a book about the women of Minnesota and what Operation Metro Surge made of us.

It’s a mutual aid effort — written by us, for us, moving hand to hand the way love does when it’s real. New excerpts will be released as I write them, every Tuesday, here on Fierce Love. When the manuscript is complete, I plan to release it the grassroots way. Self-published, and supported by grief at grounding community gathering events and independent bookstores.

If this chapter found you, it found you for a reason.

Please add your voice by sharing in the comments. I’m listening. We all are.

That’s how this works.

That’s how we work.

I love you fiercely,

TeriLeigh 💜

Leave a comment

This is a scene from the chapter about OWLs (old white ladies) and how we embraced our white privilege as a super power during the surge. I hope you enjoy.

Subscribe now

Amber

Is that the same guy who was here last week? Amber thinks to herself as she watches him walk towards her from his beat-up Ford Escort parked in the street. He’s got his hands shoved deep in the pockets of a Carhartt jacket.

He doesn’t have a reflective vest, and no one is greeting him. Amber makes a mental note.

“Ope,” he says, and Amber gets a funny tickle in her gut. “It’s a cold one today.”

Did he just actually pronounce the “p” in ope? She thinks.

“It’s actually not that cold. It’s above zero,” she says, her European accent revealing that she isn’t a native Minnesotan either, “but the windchill is minus ten, and this snowstorm is picking up. I think we’re supposed to get six inches.”

Amber is bundled like everyone else. The good wool socks, the puffy coat she’s grateful her daughter made her buy, and hand warmers in both her pockets and shoved into the lining of her Sorel boots.

“I’m fine,” he says, even though she didn’t ask. He shifts his weight and stomps his sneakered feet in the snow accumulating on the pavement.

“I’ve seen you all out here every day,” he says, smiling. “I want to help.”

Something about him felt off to Amber, but then he looked her in the eye and his smile was so warm. She slipped into social worker mode, overly helpful and uber friendly.

But before Amber can respond, one of the other observers whom Amber knows only as “PurpleOtter” from the Signal Chat handle, steps up next to him and puts a hand on his shoulder, “That’s very kind of you, Sir. Do you know anyone on our team?”

“Uh, no,” he says, “But I’ve seen you out here every day, and I just, I just want to be involved.”

PurpleOtter takes a measured step angling her body in a subtle way to guide him back towards his car.

“We appreciate that, but for this operation, you have to find someone that trusts you and that you can trust,” she says, taking another half-step, just enough for him to step back and turn towards his car. She takes her hand off his shoulder, pressing ever so slightly before she does, to gently nudge him towards his car.

He hesitates, opens his mouth to speak and then closes it again.

“We are a really tight community here,” PurpleOtter says, looking at his eyebrows, making sure to not look him in the eye.

“I understand,” he says as PurpleOtter takes one more half-step, and he finally turns and walks away.

Once he is back in his car and driving away, PurpleOtter turns to Amber.

“No one in Minnesota would wear jeans, tennis shoes, and a Carhartt jacket to something like this.”

“Oh my God,” Amber says as her face flushes and her ears get hot. “You’re so right. Sometimes we’re out here for three hours. He doesn’t even have snow boots, or a parka. Dang, I was just being friendly! I was going to open my mouth and just tell him how to get in.”

“It’s okay, you’re learning,” PurpleOtter says. “This is why we work in teams.”

“But, I recognized him.” Amber says, “I think he was here last week too.”

“He very well could’ve been,” PurpleOtter says, “I saw in another Signal chat, they’ve had encounters with another guy who had the exact same story.”

“My God. Thank God I didn’t say anything!” Amber says, “Dang, they are getting sneaky, huh?”

“Yeah, they are trying to blend in,” PurpleOtter says, “The beater car and the friendly personality, but once you realize they have no clue how to be Minnesotan, they stand out like sore thumbs.”

“He didn’t even have a hat. Duh!” Amber says, “Even if he were legit, he wouldn’t last twenty minutes out here in this kind of weather.”

“Amber,” PurpleOtter turns to look Amber right in the eye, “Do you carry your green card on you?”

“Uh, No,” Amber said as her face flushes again, “Here I am with my accent, and I’m just chatting away, and I’m not really paying attention, but he wasn’t saying anything about it.”

“Aren’t you scared?” PurpleOtter asks.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been scared,” Amber says as she feels the residue of the interaction with the infiltrator bubble up in her gut. Even after that, she doesn’t feel scared. “What about you, are you scared?”

“Not really,” PurpleOtter says, “But I don’t have the risk that you do.”

“I don’t feel scared for some reason. I’m just angry!” She tells PurpleOtter and turns her body to where the man’s car was parked.

“How dare you?!” Amber screams at the empty parking spot before turning back to PurpleOtter. “Maybe that’s my white privilege. I have been really aware of my privilege. I could just stand here a whole afternoon and nobody will bother me even though I’m not even born in this country but probably most of the people who live in this mobile home park were born here and they’re citizens.”

She pauses and PurpleOtter waits with her, letting the empty space get still between them.

“And that’s just a really odd feeling,” Amber says with a distant look in her eye and tone in her voice.

PurpleOtter doesn’t say anything, again, letting the moment sit between them like the frost of their breath lingers in the winter air.

“I am aware that I’m white. And I think, what are they gonna do? Take me and take me to Whipple? I guess I don’t feel like I’m particularly at risk. Maybe I’m being oblivious. I don’t know. Maybe I should carry my papers with me,” she looks at PurpleOtter for reassurance.

“I think that’s a good idea.”

“Hey?” Amber says hesitantly, “What’s your real name?”

PurpleOtter doesn’t answer right away, taken aback as no one in the group has ever asked.

“Is that okay to ask?” PurpleOtter says, slapping her gloved palm over her mouth.

PurpleOtter smiles warmly, and Amber feels the warmth flood every part of her.

“I think we’ve earned first-name status.” PurpleOtter smiles, “It’s Elaine. ”

“I’m Amber.”

“It’s nice to know you Amber.” Elaine smiles again, and Amber feels that warmth move through her again.

“Do you ever think about going back to your homeland?” Elaine asks.

And Amber doesn’t answer right away.

“Is that okay to ask?” Elaine says.

“Yes, it’s okay to ask. Before all this, I was contemplating moving back, especially since my kids are grown. But now, after all this, I can’t imagine moving away.”

Elaine waits.

“If I went back now, I would feel alone with this experience. Nobody there lived through this,” she says, looking out at the mobile homes she’s protected for all these weeks.

“I would feel like I was abandoning people.”

“I get it, you almost can’t leave now,” Elaine says.

“You know what’s strange,” Amber says. “I have made more friends in the last two months than in the twenty years I’ve been here, and I don’t even know most of their names.”

Elaine chuckles before adding, “aftereighty, bingocard, twinkling mudrock.”

“Don’t forget sadphat!” Amber laughs before she continues, “Minnesota is more home now than anywhere I’ve ever been. It only took twenty years to feel this way.”

It’s a mutual aid effort — written by us, for us, moving hand to hand the way love does when it’s real. New excerpts will be released as I write them, every Tuesday, here on Fierce Love. When the manuscript is complete, I plan to release it the grassroots way. Self-published, and supported by grief at grounding community gathering events and independent bookstores.

If this chapter found you, it found you for a reason.

Please add your voice by sharing in the comments. I’m listening. We all are.

That’s how this works.

That’s how we work.

I love you fiercely,

TeriLeigh 💜

Leave a comment

What you are about to read is an excerpt from WOMN, the interior experience and emotional truths of the women of Minnesota during Operation Metro Surge, holding the grief, the rage, the tenderness, and the fierce love that women know so well.

If you see yourself in these pages,
Pass it to the woman next to you.

Share

This is the introduction from the chapter about OWLs (old white ladies) and how we embraced our white privilege as a super power during the surge. I hope you enjoy.

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Lake Wobegone

“Hello, and welcome to A Prairie Home Companion, coming to you live from the Fitzgerald Theater in Saint Paul, Minnesota.”

Garrison Keillor’s voice echoes from the top of Linda’s avocado-green fridge at the family cabin up north. It’s Saturday night in June, and she’s rolling dough for pies at the counter while her mom sits at the kitchen table, embroidering herb plumes onto flour dish towels.

“How many you got left, there?” Linda asks.

“I finished the rosemary, basil, and lavender. I just have the thyme, mint, and sage left to go.”

“Well, it’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon, my hometown…

The rest of the family is outside. Linda’s husband, Dad and the uncles at the fire pit, somebody’s transistor radio out there too, the Twins game is on low underneath the sound of the lake settling into evening. The occasional loon call punctuates the air as the younger kids chase fireflies around the edges of the yard.

The screen door bangs every few minutes — someone coming in for bug spray, someone else going to use the bathroom — and each time it bangs, the someone says “smells good, when’s the pie gonna be ready?” and Linda always answers “Almost”.

Mom doesn’t look up from the dish towel. Linda doesn’t look up the dough. Outside, someone laughs at something. The screen door bangs again.

We all know that up-north kitchen. Even if we didn’t have a cabin in our own families, we all got invited to spend a weekend at one at some time or other. If the appliances weren’t avocado green, they were autumn gold, and the kitchen table was always a wobbly worn wood, or some form of sparkled formica.

Garrison Keillor’s voice came on the radio every Saturday evening, blending stories of Lake Wobegone with the smell of Grandma’s best recipes wafting from the oven. And in that voice, week after week, was a made-up town on a made-up lake, that became famous for nothing special across the world.

We listened to gossip in the aisles of Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery, where if you can’t find it at Ralph’s, you can probably get along without it. We heard about the Sons of Knute lodge, where serious men gathered to discuss matters of grave importance and ended up talking about the weather and the price of corn. And we grimaced at the sermons given at Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility, where the congregation shuffled in every Sunday because you still go to church every Sunday, even if you are on vacation. It’s just what we do.

We knew that congregation. We were that congregation.

Keillor tells us about the quiet week, where nothing much happened but everything mattered. He tells us about the Tollerud family and how they found their lost cat, and the Bunsen boys latest not-quite-run-in with the law, and Pastor Ingqvist’s latest attempt to say something meaningful to people who would rather he kept it brief. He tells us about the Norwegian bachelor farmers who eat their meals standing over the sink and about the Swedish farmer who loved his wife so much he almost told her.

Almost.

We are, all of us, fluent in almost.

We Minnesota women are known to almost say something, and be glad we didn’t. We almost ask for help, and are grateful when someone notices and offers without our request. The almost is just part of the air in Minnesota, like lake humidity that almost forms into rain but never quite does.

Garrison Keillor’s radio show is slow and steady, with a tinge of melancholy, finding the humor in the sadness and the sadness in the humor. And, like a hymn we already know by heart he reminds us every week that in Lake Wobegone, all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.

Linda pulls the pie out of the oven as Mom sets down the embroidery hoop and holds the dish towel up to the kitchen light to check her stitching. They have each other’s hands.

Of course the women are strong. What else would they be?

Outside, the screen door bangs. Somebody holler that pie’s ready.

We are Lake Wobegon women. White women. We are women who grew up fluent in the language of almost — we almost said something, almost made a fuss, almost asked for what we needed, we almost told someone how much they mattered.

Then ICE came to Minnesota in Operation Metro Surge.

And we white women tossed the almost into the trash like an over-burnt pie.

ICE broke our almost wide open and we started saying something, making the fuss, asking for what we need, and telling everyone how much they matter.

This is an excerpt from WOMN- a book about the women of Minnesota and what Operation Metro Surge made of us.

It’s a mutual aid effort — written by us, for us, moving hand to hand the way love does when it’s real. New excerpts will be released as I write them, every Tuesday, here on Fierce Love. When the manuscript is complete, I plan to release it the grassroots way. Self-published, and supported by grief at grounding community gathering events and independent bookstores.

If this chapter found you, it found you for a reason.

Please add your voice by sharing in the comments. I’m listening. We all are.

That’s how this works.

That’s how we work.

I love you fiercely,

TeriLeigh 💜

Leave a comment

Today, America crosses the threshold of 250 years since its birth.

And we are giving birth to a New America.
We’ve been in labor for months.
We have to own this.

It’s time to push this baby out of our wombs
and hold HER skin to skin to our souls...

Kelly

The People are rising and lighting the way. We are the Americans that hold the spirit of what this country can be in our souls. No government, regime, or asshole gets to tell us how to think, nor how we choose to move in this world.

We guard this spirit with our lives. We will take care of our humans, and we will not be robbed of our joy in the process. We will sing, dance, rejoice, and love one another because this 250th birthday of America is not a death, it is a profound transformation, and we are the ones ushering that in.

Six months ago, ICE showed up on the streets on Minneapolis, and they were here to teach us a lesson. They were here to cause destruction, create chaos, and to sew more division.

We had lessons of our own to dish out. We are a kind, generous, and hearty people. But as the world has now experienced, we are also a people that will not stand by and let our neighbors be hunted. We are a people who will tell you “Hey Dude, I’m not mad” before being shot dead. We are not a people that run.

I’m one pissed off American right now. I have rage in one hand, tightly held in a balled up fist. But the other hand, that one is open and constantly extended, pulling anyone up that needs a hand. Both hands have a task. You can’t ignore the dark when searching for the light, you must acknowledge it. You must pierce that darkness, and that takes a lot of might. But together, we can do anything. We only need one pinprick and the light is there, ready to expand and flood the dark with its brightness. It all starts with that one pinprick.

The United States of America doesn’t feel so united these days. But, I invite you to zoom in. We’re usually told to zoom out... not this time. Zoom in!

Get local. Hyper local. The Magick that is happening on the local level, all over this country, is the true, and unbreakable spirit the citizens of this country carry.

We carry this spirit in our DNA. The blood of my Rosie The Riviter Grandma flows thru my body. We have generations of examples of how this America spirit continues to live in all of us. Immigrants make us the melting pot of America, words I was taught as a child. Words that are now sacred to me.

This spirit lives in the donations for rent money, in the supply drop-offs, in the groups of emotional support being formed. It’s alive in the schools where there is strong debate, and civil actions being taken by our children. It’s happening as neighbors meet, and ask “are you OK?” It’s happening in every single corner.

Fuck red or blue, the lesson is universal. We’re not colors, we’re humans.

They came to teach us a lesson. We learned the lessons, just not the ones they thought they could force onto us.

We learned that WE are America. We are showing one another what this country really is, daily. We are writing, speaking, yelling, protesting, praying, and connecting.

We are guarding the light. We are not dimming. We are not shrinking. We are certainly not surrendering. We are fucking Americans, so we are fighting! We are creating. We are profoundly shifting.

That’s cause for hope and celebration. Never forget how much one human can do to change the world. Now... activate all of us, and a new future will quickly be upon us.

Celebrate that.

~Kelly

TeriLeigh💜

We are fed up.

Not just me, but all the WOMN of Minnesota that I’ve been talking to and writing about for months.

You know that line about hell and wrath and a woman scorned? Yeah, that’s a tiny little campfire in a portable fire-pit compared to the barn-fire we have burning inside us these days.

But today I realized what this is that is burning inside us. I thought it was rage, but it’s bigger than that, and it’s growing. And kicking, and elbowing, and punching at the walls of our wombs.

We have been pregnant, for well over a year, and now we are getting ready to give birth to a New America! And now the contractions are starting, and we can’t complain about our backaches and our foot cramps anymore.

We’ve spent the last months getting all our screaming and raging and fighting and yelling and moaning and pissing out of our systems because this new baby demands all the things that WOMN know is the core of humanity.

Now listen, you all saw glimpses of this New America that is raging inside us to get out in Minnesota this winter. You saw us march 75,000 strong in 30 below zero temps. You watched our faith leaders get arrested while singing Amazing Grace while kneeling on the concrete at MSP in sub-zero temps. You watched our mothers and teachers and nurses chase ICE away from schools and bus stops while organizing food and supplies deliveries to tens of thousands of immigrant families who were sheltering in place.

And you watched Renee Good and Alex Pretti die.

That’s the kind of Fierce Love that is begging to be unleashed in America today.

And Kelly was right, it’s not about zooming out, it’s about zooming in. Zoom in to that itch and pain and ache happening inside you to be the antidote for all this cruelty. Get hyper-local.

Be a helper.

Be a lover.

Be a care-giver.

~TeriLeigh💜

We love you fiercely,
Thanks for giving a shit,

TeriLeigh💜 & Kelly

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summary written by claude.ai

I’m an ally and he’s a force. Reverend Kevin Taylor and I have been talking in comments and on Zoom for a while now, and we finally sat down together to talk about the corruption of law enforcement and how it’s shaped the way our whole society is shifting right now.

This one got heavy. It also got hopeful. Here’s what we covered.

A Jeep in a Parking Lot

I opened by telling Kevin about the ICE vehicle I saw that morning on my way to walk my dog. No front plate, windows blacked out so completely, even the windshield. The windshield was total black! It was parked in a strip mall parking lot facing the street, lights on, surveilling the street I drive to my dog-walking park every morning. It was not normal. I went through a whole gamut of emotions in about half a second: first that’s an ice vehicle, then fear, then rage, then this is our normal now.

Kevin pointed out that the vehicle didn’t have to do anything. It just had to be there. And that’s the whole point of it.

History Doesn’t Repeat, It Rhymes

Kevin brought Mark Twain into the conversation, walking through the parallels between what’s happening now and the post-Reconstruction era, when Black voter turnout hit 90% before disenfranchisement tactics like poll taxes and black codes brought it back down to single digits.

His point: the tools have changed, but the strategy hasn’t. Voter ID laws like the SAVE Act, he explained, aren’t about preventing fraud that barely exists. They’re about making it harder for the people most likely to vote against those in power to get to the polls at all.

We talked about how the same dog whistles get recycled with new packaging. States’ rights. Compassionate conservatism. The caravan. AI as the boogeyman. Different decade, same playbook, designed to make people vote with fear instead of their actual interests.

The Rage of Women Finding Their Voice

I told Kevin what I keep hearing from the women I talk to: fear, then rage, then a fierce protectiveness for their kids and their people.

Kevin and I agreed that this anger, especially among white women who’ve held it in for decades, is becoming a real force. He was honest that not every woman channels that energy the same way, and that some have been taught to surrender their voice entirely. But the women showing up here are doing the opposite. We’re writing. We’re speaking. We’re using our words like spells, and it’s working.

Substack as Sacred Space

We both talked about why Substack feels different from other platforms. It’s a place for authentic voice, not algorithm-chasing. Kevin shared the story behind his publication, the Unpaid Ledger, named for the part of Dr. King’s 1963 speech that came before the dream, the part where he called America’s promise of equality a check that bounced. He also told us about his second Substack, a space for people who are grieving, struggling, and need to hear they’re not alone.

I shared a little about Fierce Love and the WOMN Project, the fifteen Minnesota women I’ve interviewed who showed up during Operation Metro Surge. Their stories aren’t about what happened. They’re about how it felt, and how it changed them.

The Bricks on the Corner

Kevin and I also talked about George Floyd, about the memorial near his and Renee Good’s, and about something I haven’t talked about publicly very much: what it was like here in Minneapolis during those days, watching cars without plates flood streets that were nearly empty because of COVID, and seeing pallets of bricks appear on corners with no construction in sight. Kevin affirmed that this fits a documented pattern of outside actors using moments of unrest to deepen division.

Where We Landed

For every 3,000 ICE agents, there are 300,000 people who love each other. That ratio is the whole hope of this thing. The real power isn’t power over someone else. It’s love with someone else.

Thank you for being here, for staying for the whole conversation, and for giving a shit.

I love you fiercely.

Thanks for giving a shit,

TeriLeigh💜

What you are about to read is full chapter from WOMN, a collaborative effort of the women of Minnesota who kept showing up during Operation Metro Surge, holding the grief, the rage, the tenderness, and the fierce love that women know so well.

If you see yourself in these pages,
Pass it to someone next to you.

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Fort Snelling

It’s been too long since I’ve been…

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If you see yourself in these pages,
Pass it to the woman next to you.

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If you see yourself in these pages,
Pass it to the woman next to you.

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is a film and video producer and Substack writer behind Stories That Matter.

Stories That Matter

Journey with me as we explore and hear stories of personal business transformation. Stories of how individuals have overcome great odds and huge obstacles, giving us hope, inspiration, and love.

By Eddie Burns

He and TeriLeigh met through Creator Retreat in 2025, where he developed his publication from its original name, Think on This, into a home for hidden human interest stories and leadership lessons. Twenty-nine people joined today’s live conversation.

How This Friendship Started (And Why Goat Videos Matter)

When the ICE surge hit Minnesota in January, TeriLeigh posted on Substack that her neighborhood wasn’t okay and that she needed people to check on their Minnesota people. Eddie, joining from Texas, did exactly that. He started texting her daily, and then the goat videos started arriving.

• TeriLeigh says those videos were the one thing that made her smile when her neighborhood felt like a war zone

• Eddie reflected that he’d learned years ago how to show up for people — checking in, not overwhelming, just being a steady presence

• That simple, consistent care deepened into a real partnership: Eddie is now TeriLeigh’s AV collaborator, helping translate her written stories of Minnesota women into video format for YouTube

The through-line of the whole conversation: the tiniest things are the biggest connectors.

The Mycelial Network of Mutual Support

TeriLeigh described what she and the women she writes about have come to understand about mutual support — that when you reach out to help someone else, you often receive the very thing you needed without knowing you needed it.

• She and Eddie talked about the “infinity symbol” of mutual holding — two people in different kinds of pain, supporting each other, and watching the healing compound

• Eddie introduced the concept of seva (selfless service) from his years volunteering with a spiritual teacher’s touring organization, where he and his wife served the volunteers themselves

• TeriLeigh connected seva to the mycelial network metaphor: the underground web where big trees feed baby trees, and energy moves intuitively to where it’s needed most

The science backs it up, too. TeriLeigh referenced the work of Haven Watch, which has documented that detainees received with community support within five to ten minutes of leaving Whipple Detention Center experience dramatically less trauma than those who walk out alone.

Stories of What’s Happening on the Ground in Minnesota

TeriLeigh shared several stories from the book she’s writing about women and quiet acts of fierce love since the surge began in December:

• The mobile home park neighborhood watch: Neighbors near a Latino mobile home park organized through Signal Chat, going by handles like “Sad Fat” and “Mud Raker,” standing watch in reflective vests through bitter cold — and still doing it. Every Friday they bring day-old bread from a nearby bakery and share it together. A week ago, 100 of them had a picnic and finally learned each other’s real names.

• A family’s self-deportation: A mixed-status family on that same street, facing impossible uncertainty, packed a van and drove to Mexico. When neighbors found out a “we buy ugly houses” company was going to take three months to clear the home, the whole street mobilized — cleaning out the house, holding garage sales, and selling things on Marketplace. They had it done in two weeks and sent the money to the family.

• First aid kits in backpacks: After ICE showed up at a school during dismissal and tear-gassed high schoolers, one woman began making and distributing first aid packs for students to carry in their backpacks. When she saw that protesters at Delaney Hall in New Jersey didn’t have basic supplies, she packed five oversized suitcases, flew out, and set up a proper medic station.

Texas, Political Shifts, and James Talarico

Eddie brought in the Texas perspective. He’s been watching James Talarico, a young Texas state legislator running for Senate who is drawing attention across party lines. A Christian who attends seminary and was formerly a teacher, Talarico pushed back publicly against Christian nationalism and the Ten Commandments classroom mandate — and memorably caught the bill’s sponsor on the floor by asking whether they were aware they were passing the law on the Sabbath.

• Eddie sees Talarico as a voice that could reach moderate Christians who feel the Greg Abbott version of conservatism has gone too far

• Both Eddie and TeriLeigh reflected on how their perception of Texas had shifted — TeriLeigh noted that during the January surge, some of the loudest responses and support she received came from blue dots inside the red state of Texas

• TeriLeigh also named Minnesota’s current reality: it’s more purple than people realize, with a 50-50 state legislature and deep rural-urban division

The Closing Thread

Both Eddie and TeriLeigh circled back to the conversation’s central question: what do we do with the instinct to connect?

• Trust it. When someone comes to mind, text them. You don’t know what they might be carrying.

• Find the thing that comes naturally to you — whether it’s first aid kits, goat videos, mutual aid organizing, or telling stories — and do that thing.

• Eddie summed it up: “The tiniest little things are the biggest connectors.”

• TeriLeigh closed by pointing to their own friendship as evidence: goat videos during a surge became a collaboration connecting Texas with Minnesota, and 29 people listening on a Tuesday morning.

Find Eddie’s library of interviews and hidden human interest stories at Stories That Matter on Substack. TeriLeigh posts stories from Minnesota women every Tuesday at fiercelovemn.com*. Video versions are coming soon to YouTube.*

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If you see yourself in these pages,
Pass it to the woman next to you.

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I wish I could bring my gun to work.

A cluster of protesters screamed at her. Did they assume she was ICE?

I can’t believe I just thought that.

Marie shakes her head, trying to shake the idea out of her brain. She is a licensed gun owner, but she has never, ever, carried her gun in public. It stays locked in its case at home.

Do I need to wear a sign that says “I’m a nurse”?

Instead of just having her keys out ready to unlock the car as soon as she gets within range, she has started holding one of the keys wedged between her fingers, a potential weapon, just in case.

I can’t believe I am holding my keys like this. I’m a nurse. My job is to heal people, not harm them with my keys!

Before the surge, this was just a normal employee parking lot, an extension of the Minneapolis VA Medical Center. But somehow this average parking lot had turned into a place where Marie had to be on high alert. She’d always been one to pay attention to who’s sitting in a parked car with the engine running, who was walking the same direction as she was, and the distance between herself and the nearest lit entrance. Like all women, Marie has been doing this math her whole life, but during the surge, the calculation had become much more complex.

The old math was simple: Is that person a threat to me?

The new math had variables she was never trained for: Is that person ICE? Is that person a protester? Is that person someone who, like me, just works here? And the unknown variable that changed everything, who do these people think I am?

Her building sits directly across from the Whipple Federal Building, ICE’s Minneapolis headquarters and detention center. Before the surge, the parking lot was a nothing-space. She parked, she walked, she went inside. She recognized the majority of the cars parking there, and she knew many of the people who walked the lot with her.

After the surge started, there were fifty or more cars and dozens of people she didn’t know. She didn’t trust any of them, and she wondered if any of them trusted her.

She is a nurse. Her job is to serve every single one of them with the same compassion. The veteran, the protester, the federal agent — if any of them collapsed in this parking lot right now, Marie would be the one running toward them.

But no one in this parking lot knows that.

Inside, sitting quietly at her desk, on the phone with a veteran, Marie jumped out of her seat when the first bang cut through the wall.

Was that gunshots?

It wasn’t. It was flashbangs fired by ICE agents in the parking lot, just outside the building where Marie sat with a veteran’s file open on her screen. The same parking lot she’d just crossed with a key between her fingers. The nothing-space was no longer nothing. She looked out the window at clouds of smoke. She’d never seen an actual war-zone before, but this is what she’d imagined it might look like.

Marie abruptly ended her patient call and promised to call him back.

“We are taking care of veterans,” she said to no one in particular, “Giving them our best. And they are disrupting how we care.”

She stopped speaking, stared off into space for more than a moment, knowing she was talking to the no one. And then she continued, because her words needed to go somewhere.

“What do they expect the outcome to be?”

The next day, her supervisor told her to work-from-home.

She didn’t know when she’d go back.

When Marie saw the video of Alex’s death on social media, she could hear the helicopters overhead indicating this was close. Nine blocks close.

Marie thought working from home would be safer, but now, with Alex’s death in her own neighborhood, nowhere was safe anymore.

She watched it once. Then she watched it again. Then she did what we all did that Saturday, she scrolled, looking for the next piece of information to arrive, hoping the details that might make the thing she’d just watched make sense, even though we all knew that nothing was going to make it make sense.

He was 37.

His name was Alex Pretti.

He had seen a woman being pushed to the ground by ICE agents, and he had run toward her.

He was a nurse.

. . . Marie stopped scrolling. . .

He was a VA nurse.

. . . She set her phone down. . .

He was her colleague.

. . .

He was her colleague. . .

She had never met Alex Pretti, but that didn’t matter. She knew him the way every nurse knows every other nurse.

Alex Pretti ran toward a woman who needed him, just like any and every nurse would do, out of instinct, training, and automatic reflex.

And they shot him for it.

She paused the recording.

They killed the helper.

Her thumb hovering over the play button.

They murdered the helper.

That could’ve been ME!

When the VA announced the memorial service for Alex Pretti, Marie joined on Teams from her kitchen table, with Grief sitting next to her, a cold hand on the rim of her tea-cup.

Her laptop screen filled with faces, over a thousand of them.

The room on the other end was packed — standing room, people crowded in doorways as the online boxes kept multiplying, name after name, department after department, colleagues she recognized and colleagues she didn’t, all of them logged on from nurses’ stations and break rooms and desks and home offices, all of them doing the same thing Marie was doing: stopping.

She wondered if even the custodians and the nursing assistants were able to stop and watch from their phones in the middle of the shifts. Did the whole hospital, every floor, every unit, every function, stop for this moment? Did the Minneapolis VA Medical Center, a federal institution that runs on schedules and shifts and the absolute non-negotiable forward motion of patient care, completely stop?

It did.

Alex’s nurse manager spoke first. She was emotional, and she didn’t try to hide it. No one tried to hide it, which is remarkable in a building where the job requires you to hold yourself together in front of people who are falling apart.

And then the VA Nurse Honor Guard came forward.

Marie watched them enter the room in their traditional nurse uniforms including the white caps that no one wears anymore. Each one held a Florence Nightingale candle, a callback to the Nightingale ceremony given for all new nurse graduates.

The Honor Guard lit the candle.

One of them stepped forward and the room went quiet, both in-person and online, a thousand people holding the moment in noble silence.

Alex Pretti, RN —

She read his license number..

— report to duty.

A bell rang.

Alex Pretti, RN, report to duty.

The bell rang again.

And then the third time.

Alex Pretti, RN.

You are . . . released from duty.

The bell rang.

The candle went out.

Silence.

Everyone was listening.

This is an excerpt from WOMN- a book about the women of Minnesota and what Operation Metro Surge made of us.

It’s a mutual aid effort — written by us, for us, moving hand to hand the way love does when it’s real. New excerpts will be released as I write them, every Tuesday, here on Fierce Love. When the manuscript is complete, I plan to release it the grassroots way. Self-published, and supported by grief at grounding community gathering events and independent bookstores.

If this chapter found you, it found you for a reason.

Please add your voice by sharing in the comments. I’m listening. We all are.

That’s how this works.

That’s how we work.

I love you fiercely,

TeriLeigh 💜

Leave a comment

summary written by claude.ai

Making Friends with Grief

I have this image of grief in my mind that I’ve never really talked about publicly until Amanda Saint and I went live together last week.

He’s tall. Bony. Ancient-looking, with cold clammy skin and gnarly knuckles. He wears a cloak. And when I was writing my novel The Shadows Shine — about a 12-year-old girl who watches her best friend die — I realized the main character had to stop running from this cloaked figure and actually go out into the woods and talk to him.

Because he wasn’t going anywhere.

That’s the thing about grief. We can’t make him leave. And the Western approach — the sterile funeral home, the casket on a button, the pastor who didn’t even know the person, the fake grass placed carefully over the hole so you can’t see the actual dirt — is designed to pretend otherwise. To contain the feeling rather than express it.

Amanda’s processed 19 bereavements since 2016. Seven of them came in 24 months. She talked about how writing a tribute to her friend Tim — four years after he died by suicide — was the moment she finally understood what their friendship had actually given her. All the things she’d never said out loud. Even the things that drove her crazy, like his electronic music with no discernible rhythm. Writing it made him more alive to her, in a way she couldn’t access just by thinking.

That landed for me. Because I’ve been doing that with Julie’s irises.

Julie was my best friend for decades. I got the call on my birthday in 2019 that she’d fallen and broken her neck. I fed her breakfast almost every day for six months until she was gone. She’d planted an iris garden right before she fell and never got to see it bloom. So I took some of those bulbs. I’ve been tending them for five years now, and last year they didn’t bloom after I transplanted them — which was its own grief, another losing of Julie. But this spring they came back in abundance. I go out with my coffee every morning and name them and find personalities in their little faces and hear her voice saying things like oh, that one’s got a fuzzy tongue. I share them on my Substack. And now readers are telling me they have irises too, and wanting to send them to me. Julie is becoming someone my readers almost know.

Writing does that. It makes the dead more present.

Amanda brought up something that stopped me cold — she described a grief ritual from Bali that a friend witnessed, where women danced with familial daggers pressed to their chests while a cacophony of drums and clanging pots drove them into an altered state so they could embody their ancestors. And then she told me about the Famadihana ritual from Madagascar, where a year after a loved one dies, the family exhumes the body, dresses it in beautiful clothes, and dances with it before reburying it. That ritual inspired a flash fiction story Amanda wrote that got accepted by a literary journal in half an hour. Because she wrote from what was really there, really felt.

What I keep coming back to is this: expression means to push out. All of these practices — dancing, drumming, shrine-building, writing — are forms of pushing the grief out of the body so it doesn’t twist up inside you.

In my ancestral work with my shaman, I had this moment in the woods upstate New York where I’m in full regalia banging on a stick (representing my grandpa Edgar) and a stool (representing my grandma Alice) with another stick, yelling at them to go fix my failing yoga studio. And at some point I became very aware that I was wearing feathers and hitting furniture in the middle of the forest and I just started laughing. And then I’d switch back to grandma and start sobbing. Laughing, crying, laughing, crying. I’ve never felt so profoundly both at the same time in my life. And within six months I’d filed bankruptcy and was traveling the country teaching yoga — set free.

That’s what the full expression of grief actually does. It opens something.

If you feel grief you’re not recognizing as grief — for a job, a version of yourself you thought you’d become, a home, a friendship that changed — that grief is real and it has nowhere to go unless you give it a channel. Writing is mine. What’s yours?

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What you are about to read is full chapter from WOMN, a collaborative effort of the women of Minnesota who kept showing up during Operation Metro Surge, holding the grief, the rage, the tenderness, and the fierce love that women know so well.

If you see yourself in these pages,

Pass it to the woman next to you.

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“We need micro joys. Micro joys get us through the macro grief.”

~Kelly Wilson, founder of the Do’Gooders, a Minnesota Mutual Aid effort

“Would you like to hear a G-rated joke?”

In the produce section at Trader Joe’s an elderly man who looked to be well into his eighties holds a pile of leaflets and a peculiar sparkle in his eye.

Target was always the go-to everything store in Minnesota. Especially when SuperTargets came to be and groceries were brought into the department store.

But Target had betrayed us, allowing ICE to stage in their parking lots and use their restrooms. Target no longer felt safe, especially since we’d seen and shared the viral videos of high school kids working as cart-retrievers being abducted from their jobs at Target while insisting they were U.S. citizens.

So, we started shopping at Trader Joe’s instead. The more claustrophobic parking lots at TJ’s were too cramped for a caravan of unmarked SUVs.

When we adjusted our vision from bullseyes to hibiscus flowers, we found ourselves greeted by a community atmosphere that included a jokester giving a warmer welcome than we knew how to handle.

“Sure,” we say, hesitantly. We want to be polite, but we also want to be left alone, a perfect example of Minnesota Nice.

Long winters have trained us into staying humble and not making a scene, because a scene requires heat and energy and effort, all things in short supply in the deep cold of winter. So we endure, and keep things in, and swallow reactions, soften edges, and use polite phrasing.

In Target, we could move through an entire errand and through the self-checkout without anyone making eye contact. That was the deal, and we were fine with it. But in Trader Joe’s during Operation Metro Surge, this little old man somehow enters our protected inner-shopping-world without violating it.

“You can take this one home to the toddlers in your family. They’ll love it!” he says with the eagerness of a preschooler racing toward his own punchline.

We add a polite nod, which outsiders might construe as passive-aggressive. But, the truth is that the Minnesota Nice Golden Rule — if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all — is so deeply coded into our bone marrow that we don’t know how to relate any other way.

“Why did the boy take a job at the bakery?” he asks.

“Why?” we say with a smile, relaxing a bit into the moment.

“Because he kneaded the dough.”

He belly-laughs at himself and his punchline, and then introduces himself as a former preschool teacher and a current Sunday School teacher.

We exhale a soft sigh. He really is harmless, and so we accept his leaflet filled with a couple dozen more G-rated jokes and thank him kindly.

“You betcha,” he says in that perfect Minnesota-Scandinavian accent.

After filling our cart with non-name-brand things while uttering a half dozen “well, that’s different” under our breath, we get into the checkout line. Instead of pulling out our phones, we pull out his list and start reading, because he might notice and we want to make him feel good.

On the front: G-rated food jokes.

On the back: ways to save democracy and the Constitution, complete with progressive news sources, action steps, and phone numbers for elected officials.

“That guy has been here for hours,” the checkout clerk says. “I’ve been laughing at his silly jokes all day long. Best day ever!”

Our Minnesota Nice makes us come off to outsiders as a people too polite to push back, too pleasant to be dangerous. ICE didn’t realize the stubbornness that lives inside that kind of self-restraint. We are most certainly not a people to submit to an unreasonable demand.

ICE made the mistake of invading a winter people in the winter.

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The World Needs Mothering Right Now

I got together with my friend Jeannie Ewing this week for a live conversation on her Substack publication, Ghost Mother, and we talked about how our culture is starving for the kind of love that mothering brings into the world, and the women (and men) who are showing up with that energy right now are the quiet heroes.

Jeannie and I have a maternal connection that goes both ways. She held space for me over Zoom during the worst of the ICE surge in Minnesota, when the trauma was so raw I could barely think straight. And I helped her see that her essay about ghost mothering could become an entire community. We mother each other. That is the whole point.

Documenting the Quiet Heroes

I shared with her audience how my work on Fierce Love has evolved into documenting the stories of everyday ordinary women who are stepping up as helpers in the midst of all this collective pain. Every Tuesday I publish one of their completed stories, and every day I share a small excerpt as a Substack note. These women are anonymous. They do not want attention. They just want their stories told so other people can remember what love looks like when everything feels like it is falling apart.

Mothering Energy in Unexpected Places

We talked about Senator Andy Kim from New Jersey, because his energy is such a clear example of what mothering looks like in a public figure. After January 6th, he was photographed alone on the Capitol floor in the middle of the night, picking up debris, cleaning up the mess. And this week, he stood between ICE officers in riot gear and protesters outside the Delaney Detention Center with his hands up, trying to de-escalate. That is mothering energy. That is someone saying, I love this space and these people, and I want us to figure out how to come together.

Collective Trauma and the Healing Power of Oxytocin

Jeannie and I went deep into what collective trauma is doing to all of us right now. She sees it in Indiana, in the faces and body language of people at the grocery store and the doctor’s office. I see it everywhere in Minnesota. There is a grief that hangs in the air, and it is weighing people down. And one of the most important things I have learned through interviewing the women for my book is that love and trauma can exist in the same moment, and the presence of love actually decreases the impact of the trauma on the body.

I brought up the research on oxytocin, the hormone that floods a mother’s body when she gives birth. The baby rips you open and then lands on your chest, and suddenly you feel nothing except this enormous wave of connection and euphoria. That oxytocin goes straight to everything that is broken and starts healing it. And it gets released when someone touches you, when someone speaks to you calmly, when someone simply says, I am here. Jeannie connected this to the work of Peter Levine, who wrote about how the presence of a calm, nurturing person at the moment of trauma can change whether someone develops PTSD or processes through it.

Julia’s Story

I told the story of a teacher I am calling Julia, who delivers mutual aid to families from her school in Minneapolis. One night during the surge, she arrived at an apartment just blocks from a shooting, and the mother she was delivering to was having a panic attack. The father had already been taken by ICE. Julia held this woman and told her that 200 people in the neighborhood had provided the food she was carrying. That many people love you. And the teacher told me afterward that she needed that connection as much as the mother did. Sitting with her for three hours every delivery was reminding her of how beautiful humanity can be.

Just Show Up

Jeannie closed by saying something I want everyone to hear. You are the essence of love and light, and it does not matter what your circumstances look like right now. You do not have to perform or have it all figured out. You can simply show up with an open heart, moment to moment, and respond from a place of goodness. That is fierce love. That is what mothering looks like when the whole world needs it.

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