Right now, in many neighborhoods, literal or virtual, despair is rising like water on the road in a flood. Despair about politics, ongoing genocides, climate disaster.

Despair is cheap. Hope is harder.

When I was a kid, ankle bracelets were a fad and you often saw small, cheap gold bracelets around a young woman’s ankle. My father hated them. To him, they were tawdry, a sign of some unnamed perfidy, and he forbade his daughters to wear them. He wasn’t big on forbidding generally, that just wasn’t his style, so I remember.

Cheap was a word my mother used. She was big on forbidding. She carried a very specific narrative about female value. Virginity, and cultivating the demure, modest exterior that announced it, were valuable. Girls who were cheap wore ankle bracelets, smoked on the street, and wore revealing clothing.

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