When I Squeegeed Our Lawn

plus books by ghostwriters and where I will be speaking

I had a lawn in Djibouti and in Somaliland. Our guard sprayed it with water to keep the dirt down.

What happens when you live in Africa for over twenty years and then rake a lawn in Minnesota?

We have huge trees at our new house and they have so many leaves. So many leaves. And the leaves fall, like, all the time.

Last week I decided to do a preliminary fall rake job.

I looked in our new garage.

No rakes.

Ah, but there was a squeegee.

We didn’t have rakes in Djibouti. But we had so many squeegees.

They’re roughly the same shape and require roughly the same motion.

Right?

So I took the squeegee to our leaves.

It wasn’t awesome but it was sort of working.

Until the squeegee, which had been left behind by the previous owners, broke.

The head was all rusty and it fell right off into my pile of leaves.

I picked up that squeegee head and used it to push leaves into a pile while crawling around on my knees.

And then, I burst out laughing.

This is what happens when you take a woman and drop her into Djibouti and then bring her back to Minnesota, where she is technically originally from, but she has no idea how to be an adult here. All y’all Americans thought our stories about Djibouti and Somaliland felt strange. I am telling you, Minnesota is strange.

I remember raking as a child but what happened to all those bags afterward we raked and jumped all day?

No idea.

Last year at our rental property, the Pakistani neighbor came over one day and asked if we knew what to do with our leaves.

We had no clue.

He taught us.

And still, I tried to squeegee.

The next day we bought rakes.

We’re still setting up house around here. When we need tape, we go buy it. When we need a steak knife, we use the butcher knife and share it around the table because we keep forgetting to buy one. When we need rakes, we squeegee.

Don’t worry. We’ll figure it out eventually. We have neighbors from all over the world to help us clueless Americans.

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How do you feel when you find a favorite book was written by a ghostwriter?

We are far more common than you might think. I feel like I’m in good company!

Here are just a few works you may have heard of, produced by ghostwriters:

Nancy Drew, by Carolyn Keene (all of them)

Spare, by Prince Harry

Heaven is for Real, by Todd Burpo

Lean In, by Sheryl Sandberg

I am Malala, by Malala Yousafzai

The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas

This list could be thousands of books long. What are some of your faves that have been ghosted?

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Where I am speaking

Last week I had the honor of giving a recorded message as part of my first academic presentation through Fuller Seminary. It was me and three men and while I had the least number of degrees, I had the most amount of hair. We talked about the work of word, spirit, culture, and witness. It will be shared at Fuller in October during their Intercultural Studies Lectures. You can see more here.

I will be speaking about Hagar with a group of Minnesotans in October. I love sharing what I have learned about her story through my study of Islam and by reading her story through the lenses of men and women different to myself, from Dr. Wil Gafney (Womanist Midrash) to Aysha Hidayatullah (Feminist Edges of the Qur’an) and this book: Hagar, Sarah, and Their Children: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Perspectives.