Emmy-winning Co-Executive Producer/Writer for The Crossover (Disney+), CoEP The Big Cigar (AppleTV+) Author-Katrin's Chronicles; I Believe
Los Angeles
Joined February 2013
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Valerie Woods retweeted
The entire world was rooting for us: all around the world people are in tears over Americans saving their democracy from the authoritarian tyranny of Trump and Republicans.
Valerie Woods retweeted
My wife has taught high school in Tokyo for twenty years.
Every year, a few of her students spend a year living with a family in America. When they come home, she asks each of them one question.
"What do you miss?"
She expects hamburgers.
She almost never gets hamburgers.
And these aren't old stories. Most of these kids came home in the last two years.
"Every time I left the house, my host mom said, 'Text me when you get there.' In Japan, nobody needs to know where I am. In Ohio, somebody always did." (Mina, 17, Ohio)
"If you walk toward a door, an American will hold it open. Even if you are very far away. So you have to run. I ran to so many doors." (Itsuki, 16, Georgia)
"My host brother screamed on the floor of a grocery store. A stranger walked by and said to my host mom, 'You're doing great, Mama.' She almost cried. I didn't know strangers were allowed to say that." (Aoi, 17, Texas)
"We went away for the weekend and left our trash can at the curb. When we got back, it was by the garage. Nobody said who. My host dad said if it had been there one more day, the neighbor would have knocked." (Haruto, 16, Minnesota)
"A car got stuck in the snow in front of our house. Four men came out of four houses. Nobody called them. They pushed, the car drove away, and they went back inside without saying their names." (Ren, 17, Michigan)
"Every American has jumper cables. Maybe half of them know which clip goes where. The other half help anyway." (Shin, 16, Montana)
"In July, my host family put a cooler on the porch. Cold water, snacks, and a sign: 'For our delivery drivers. Thank you!' I asked if they knew the drivers. They said no." (Nanami, 16, Arizona)
"Downtown, there are banners on the lampposts. Photos of soldiers from the town. Some old, some very young. My host grandpa walked me down the street and told me every name." (Yuna, 16, Iowa)
"I got a C-plus on my first test. My host dad said, 'I'm proud of you,' and put it on the fridge. In Japan, nobody is proud of a C-plus." (Takeru, 17, Pennsylvania)
Then the quietest girl in the class raised her hand.
Sora. Seventeen. Missouri.
"Nobody asks me 'home safe?' anymore," she said.
She was wrong.
In September, there was a typhoon warning for Tokyo. At 2 a.m., Sora's phone lit up.
It was her host mom. In Missouri. Watching the weather in a country she had never been to.
"Saw the storm. You home safe?"
Sora told my wife she cried for a long time. Then she typed the answer she had typed a hundred times, from football games and friends' driveways.
"Home safe."
Her host mom wrote back one line.
"Good. That's all I needed."
My wife has asked that question for twenty years. Not one kid has ever said they missed how big America is.
They miss how America says goodbye. And how it checks that you got home.
So, America. You think you've lost something.
You haven't. It's on a porch in Arizona. It's pushing a car in Michigan. It's awake at 2 a.m. in Missouri, watching our weather.
You don't remember doing any of it.
A kid in Tokyo will never forget.
Valerie Woods retweeted
Last night’s victories in the South, in the Sunbelt and across the country transformed what we imagine for America. Here are my thoughts this morning.
Valerie Woods retweeted
“I’m boycotting this Democrat running for the House or Senate.”
Then you’re an idiot. I’m sorry, but you’re an idiot.
The primaries are over, folks. We’re in the general. You got two choices: imperfect and annoying Democrat or fascist Republican led by a pedophile.
You got a healthy democracy craving on a fascism budget, babe. I don’t care that you’re annoyed. I don’t care that you’re angry.
You got two choices. There is no third option.
If you’re not voting for the Democrat on the ballot, you’re enabling the fascist pedophiles. It’s that simple.
Yes.
Over the past few months, I’ve had folks—most often complete strangers—reach out and ask me some version of the following question:
“This Democratic candidate took an anti-trans position. Should I still vote for them?”
Folks, I acknowledge that you want to be thoughtful about all this. I appreciate that you want to get a trans person’s opinion. I understand that y’all take allyship seriously, and I’m grateful for that. I truly am.
Fortunately for all of us, the moral and ethical calculus here are very simple.
An election cycle is split into two parts: the primary season and the general election.
The primaries are over. A lot of candidates across the political spectrum stepped up, offered their ideas, and pitched the voters. The ballots were cast, and some of those candidates won and most of those candidates lost.
We are now in the general election portion of the cycle, and almost every U.S. Senate and U.S. House race offers a straightforward choice: there is a Republican and there is a Democrat.
One of those two candidates will win, and ONLY one of those two will win.
There is no third potential outcome.
On the Republican side, you have a political party led by a sociopathic pedophile who has dismantled critical federal agencies, gutted health care for tens of millions of American working class families, engaged in widespread corruption that would make Richard Nixon blush with secondhand embarrassment, hobbled our economy with deeply asinine and self-serving financial incompetence, alienated all of our longstanding diplomatic relationships with other countries, involved us in an array of irresponsible and dangerous and unnecessary military actions, lost a stupid and pointless war with the theocratic, human rights quagmire that is the Iranian government, made it clear he’s oblivious to the consequences of data centers and other unaccountable bullshit carried out by AI companies, raised our gas prices, raised our food prices, raised our housing costs, raised our childcare costs, raised our health care costs, and continues to cover-up his role in a massive child sex trafficking operation by keeping millions of files hidden from the public.
On the Democratic side, you have a party led by national leaders who are somewhat uninspiring but nevertheless deeply committed to stopping all the above and building a brighter future for working class families in our country.
On the Republican side, you have an entire political party being held hostage—some of them more than likely through blackmail—to the fleeting whims and temper tantrums and probable dementia of the aforementioned sociopathic pedophile.
On the Democratic side, you have a party that is often at each other’s throats but also the furthest thing from a cult, which, ironically, is a sign of very good health and embodying enduring faith in the democratic (small d) process.
You ask me for my thoughts on anti-trans ads or comments put out by Democratic candidates and whether you should still vote for them against Republicans?
Yes. Of course you should vote for them.
Not only should you vote for them but you should get your family and your friends and your neighbors and your colleagues and your mailman and the door-to-door salesperson currently waiting patiently on your front porch to vote for them.
For example, I am not a fan of Congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp Perez. I do not like her. I think she’s very cynical. Among other things, she has taken unnecessary votes that harmed trans service members and veterans and our families in order to pander to moderates.
Guess what? Her Republican opponent is 10x worse for trans rights. If I lived in her congressional district—WA-03—I would vote for her without hesitation and get everyone I know to vote for her, too. Because I’m not an idiot.
Or take James Talarico, who is running for the U.S. Senate in my beloved home state of Texas. In an interview with Fox News, he stated his conditional opposition to trans youth in sports and pandered to anti-trans social conservatives about opposing already non-existent surgeries for trans youth.
Guess what? His Republican opponent, Ken Paxton, is easily 100x worse for the trans community. Paxton is an anti-trans exterminationist. He does not want the trans community to exist. He would gladly support criminalizing the existence of trans people. He has spent the past four years using his position in the state government to harass and terrorize the parents of trans youth.
Not only am I supporting James Talarico, but if God opened up the clouds above and offered me a deal of exchanging my left arm for the guarantee of Mr. Talarico beating Paxton, I would agree to the deal in a heartbeat.
This is not a complicated decision.
I feel the exact same way about Dr. Annie Andrews, who has spent her career serving working class families in South Carolina and is now tantalizingly close to flipping that U.S. Senate seat currently held by Darline Graham, sister of the late Lindsey Graham.
Do I care that Dr. Andrews put out an ad opposing trans youth in sports and already non-existent surgeries for trans youth? No, I do not care. I do not give a shit.
Because Darline Graham has made anti-trans extermination her entire political brand and seems to spend every waking moment obsessed with how to make the lives of trans people miserable, not the least due in part to her lack of any policy ideas to help working class families in South Carolina and needing a scapegoat to conceal her own strident mediocrity.
You’re goddamn right I support Dr. Andrews for that U.S. Senate seat. I would gladly vote for her if I lived there, and I’d be canvassing every day in support of her, too.
This is not complicated.
Pick any U.S. Senate race and U.S. House race, and my opinion is gonna be the same every damn time. Because the primaries are over, this is the general election, and there are only two choices: either an imperfect Democrat with whom I disagree on a handful of issues or a Republican currently subscribed to a death cult that wants people like me to cease existing entirely.
Some of y’all will bring up that there are trans people who disagree with me. I’m sure there are. That’s their prerogative. They have a constitutional right to express their opinion that certain Democratic candidates should be boycotted. We do, after all, for the moment, live in a free country.
But they’re wrong. They’re dead wrong. They could not be more wrong. Their curious sense of aimless and flailing political strategy honestly makes me wonder if they have a shred of survival instinct in their bones.
Again: this is not complicated. If you care about the future of trans equality in this country, you will march your happy ass to your polling location and fill in the bubble next to every name on that ballot with a (D) next to the name.
Then you will make sure your family and friends and neighbors and colleagues and mailman and door-to-door salesperson still waiting on the front porch have all done the same.
The past two years are all the proof you need that sitting out an election because the better candidate happens to not be perfectly to your liking is completely stupid and self-destructive.
On Election Night, I am going to celebrate Democrats taking back Congress and saving democracy from the anti-trans fascists of the GOP. I will sleep-in the next morning. Then, I will wake up and get to work being an insufferable pain-in-the-ass on the importance of trans equality for the Democrats who were just elected.
God love democracy.
Do not complicate an easy decision. Go vote for Democrats.
Valerie Woods retweeted
OMFG! This response from @AbdulElSayed to a completely bigoted question is probably the best thing I’ve heard all year.
Every bigot in America needs to listen to this three times.
Valerie Woods retweeted
Nine years of working night shifts in hospice care taught me something I’ll never forget:
People nearing the end of their lives rarely ask for the things you’d expect.
Sometimes, they don’t ask for God. They don’t ask for miracles. Sometimes, they ask for something so small it breaks your heart.
Room 4 belonged to an 86-year-old man named Walter. He had lung cancer. His wife, Dorothy, had died in 2019, and he hadn’t had a single visitor in eleven days.
One night, around 2 a.m., he waved me over.
“Are you married?” he asked.
“No,” I told him.
He nodded slowly. “Then you probably don’t wear perfume.”
I smiled and told him I had some in my locker.
“What kind?”
“Nothing fancy. Just something cheap from the drugstore.”
He shook his head.
“Dorothy wore White Shoulders. Every night before bed. Not for church. For bed.”
He chuckled, but the laughter quickly turned into a coughing fit. When he finally caught his breath, he looked at the ceiling and said something I still think about.
“I used to tell her she was wasting it on me. She’d say, ‘The good stuff isn't for God. It’s for whoever has to look at you in the morning.’”
Then he smiled.
Not the polite smile people give strangers. The kind that belongs to someone remembering the best years of his life.
I finished my shift at seven that morning, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Dorothy.
So I drove to three different pharmacies until I finally found a bottle of White Shoulders. It was tucked on the bottom shelf, behind the nail polish remover.
$18.99.
That evening, on my night off, I went back to the hospice.
Walter was asleep.
I didn’t wake him. I sprayed a little perfume on the inside of his pillowcase, then sprayed a washcloth and gently folded it across his chest.
I sat beside him for a while.
He never opened his eyes.
But slowly, almost painfully slowly, his hand rose from the blanket. He reached for the washcloth and rested his palm flat against it.
Then he held it there.
His breathing softened. His face relaxed. For the first time in days, the tension seemed to leave his body.
I've watched many people die over the years. Nurses learn to recognize the moments when someone stops struggling against what is coming.
That night, I watched Walter settle into a memory that was bigger than the room he was lying in.
Maybe he was remembering Dorothy getting ready for bed. Maybe he was remembering the way she smelled when she climbed beside him. Maybe, for a few precious minutes, he wasn't an 86-year-old man dying alone.
Maybe he was simply a husband lying next to his wife again.
Walter passed away on Thursday morning.
Nobody came to collect his belongings.
His room was cleaned, his bed was remade, and eventually another patient moved in. The world kept going, as it always does.
But I never forgot him.
People think hospice care is about managing pain, administering medication, and making someone comfortable during their final days.
And yes, it is.
But sometimes, comfort isn't a medication.
Sometimes, it's a familiar song.
A voice you haven't heard in years.
A hand holding yours when the room goes quiet.
Or the smell of the person you loved most in the world.
We spend our entire lives building what we call home. We fill it with furniture, photographs, clothes, and all the ordinary things we barely notice until they're gone.
But when everything else is stripped away, home can become something incredibly small.
A familiar scent.
A remembered touch.
A voice saying your name.
Sometimes, home is the person you keep expecting to find beside you when you wake up.
And sometimes, when you can't bring that person back, the kindest thing another human being can do is help you remember them one last time.
I've worked nine years of night shifts in hospice care.
If there's one thing I've learned, it's this:
At the end of life, people don't always need someone to save them. Sometimes, they just need someone to remind them that they were loved.
Valerie Woods retweeted
You know you're loved when
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The video in this post is AI-generated, not real footage.
x.com/Raebo56/status…
x.com/mugsysway/stat…
x.com/Tallulah_66_XX…
Valerie Woods retweeted
I think RM felt uneasy with what the Love Yourself era had become. In 2021, he told Zach Sang that when they first reached BB in 2017, they thought Love Yourself might be their direction for “half a decade or 4-5 years.” Instead, “it ended really soon, like in 2 years”
In his Persona behind, he explained that the LY message had become too grand & that things were becoming “too big for us to handle.” They deliberately turned inward and toward “smaller things”
On The Dictionary of Useless Human Knowledge, he shared, “There was a time when BTS had become representatives for minorities around the world.” He found this “extremely confusing.” He had simply been saying what he wanted to say, yet their support helped carry them to places like the UN & the White House. He questioned whether he was qualified for that position & whether believing he possessed some moral or social mission demanded by the times might be arrogant
And I understand the temptation to put him on a pedestal. He asks profound questions. Some of the ideas he’s been working through for years about identity, love, art, contradiction & how to live are enlightening. It’s easy to start expecting him to be a role model or even President
But he’s resisted this framing for years. When asked how he reconciled his identities as RM & Kim Namjoon, he replied, “I don’t have the answer”
He had ended the Love Yourself tour with a similar answer. More than 2 years after the start of the tour, he confessed that he still didn’t really know if he loved himself
He put it even more bluntly in Groin:
“I can’t be a monk”
“Not a f— diplomat”
Rejecting the assumptions that he knew or could represent something beyond himself
I think this comes back to the role of the artist in society. Artists experience life, notice things & make something from it. Their work can move people, help us see ourselves like a mirror & preserve a moment so others can encounter it years later. Almost like time travel. But making art & being articulate about the human condition does not make him a saint
He’s been saying this for years. He doesn’t have the answers. He questions his right to represent others. He’s trying to protect his own humanity. He wants to keep making music
This sounds like a very human artist to me
Valerie Woods retweeted
More than a hundred babies were born in the months after September 11 to fathers who died that day.
They never met.
The children are twenty-four years old now.
Nobody knows the exact number. The best count is 108. A hundred and eight women were pregnant on the morning of September 11, 2001, and their husbands went to work in the World Trade Center, or the Pentagon, or boarded a plane, and did not come home.
Some of those women were days from delivering.
Steve Russin was an executive at Cantor Fitzgerald on the 104th floor of the North Tower. His wife Andrea gave birth to twin girls, Ariella and Olivia, on September 15. Four days after he died. He never knew if they were girls or boys.
Ariel Jacobs died in the towers. His son Gabriel was born six days later.
Jim Patrick was a bond broker on the 105th floor. He and his wife Terilyn had celebrated their first wedding anniversary on September 9. Their son Jack was born on Halloween.
Port Authority Police Officer Donald McIntyre ran into the South Tower to get people out. He did not come back out. His wife was pregnant. Their daughter Lauren was born before Christmas.
At the Pentagon, an Army officer named Ronald Milam was killed. His wife Jacqueline was five months pregnant. She was working in the same building, on the other side, when the plane hit.
Todd Beamer said "Let's roll" on Flight 93 and led the passengers into the cockpit. His wife Lisa was five months pregnant. Their daughter Morgan was born in January.
A hundred and eight of these.
A magazine put some of the babies on its cover a few months later. Tiny faces in tiny hats. It put them on the cover again when they were ten. Again at fifteen. Again at twenty.
The children grew up in a strange way. Every year, on the same day, the entire country stopped to mourn their fathers. Every year there was a ceremony, and a reading of names, and their father's name was read. Every year there were cameras. They learned to say the sentence "my dad died on 9/11" before they fully understood what any of the words meant.
Ariella Russin, at nine, told a reporter that when she was little she thought her father was just on a very long business trip.
Lauren McIntyre grew up wearing her father's badge number on a chain around her neck. Her father's fellow officers, the ones who lived, became her uncles. A whole precinct helped raise her.
Ronald Milam Jr. played high school basketball wearing the number 33. His father's age when he died.
A charity was founded to look after them. It was called Tuesday's Children, because September 11 was a Tuesday. Roughly three thousand children under eighteen lost a parent that day, and the hundred and eight babies were the youngest of them. The organization gave them summer camps, mentors, counseling, college money. It gave them each other. Many of them say the other kids were the only people who understood.
That charity still exists. It has a new name now, Tuesday's Promise, and it has expanded to help the children of soldiers killed since, and the children of terrorism around the world.
And here is the part that gets you.
Many of the babies of 9/11 are on its board now.
Twenty-four-year-olds who never met their fathers, raising money and running programs for the next child who will never meet theirs.
One of them, Jack Nevin, who was about a year old when his father was killed, put it simply. We want to provide that support network. Even just to one family.
Gabriel Jacobs' mother, Jenna, was asked what these children were. She said it in one sentence.
They are the joy, the salve, the ointment. They are the love.
A hundred and eight men walked out the door on a Tuesday morning knowing a baby was coming.
Not one of them got to hold the child.
The children are grown now.
They are holding each other. 🇺🇸
Valerie Woods retweeted
At Ground Zero, after the last living person was pulled out, the search dogs stopped eating.
So the police did something nobody had written down in any manual.
They climbed into the rubble, lay down, and pretended to be alive.
More than 300 dogs worked the World Trade Center site. They came from every corner of the country, on trucks and in cargo holds, with handlers who had been trained to do one thing. Find people who are still breathing under the ground.
That is what a search and rescue dog is built for. Not bodies. Life. They are trained on live human scent. When they find it, they bark, they dig, they light up, and the handler rewards them, and the whole thing means something.
The last living person recovered from Ground Zero was a woman named Genelle Guzman-McMillan. She had been buried for 27 hours. A dog found her.
She was the last.
After that, the dogs kept going out on twelve-hour shifts, across sixteen acres of smoldering steel, at temperatures that burned their paws, and they found nobody.
Nobody.
Day after day.
The handlers noticed it first. The dogs were changing. Their tails were down. They were not eating. They would come off the pile and lie flat and not look at anyone.
A veterinarian named Cindy Otto, who spent ten days there working night shifts to care for the animals, put it plainly. The dogs had been sent to find life, and every day they were finding the opposite.
It was breaking them.
An NYPD officer named Famiglietti described what happened next.
They pulled everybody off the rubble. Then they asked for volunteers.
The volunteers, police officers, went out into the debris and hid themselves. Under beams. In voids. Curled up in pockets of concrete. They were told to lie down like they were hurt. Then the handlers sent the dogs in.
Picture that.
A grown man with a badge, a man who had spent the last week pulling friends out of that same pile, lying down in it on purpose. Face down. Holding still. Waiting for a dog.
And the dog comes over the top of the wreckage, and catches the scent, and barks, and digs, and finds a person who is warm and moving and alive.
And the handler says good girl, good boy, and the whole team celebrates.
They called them mock finds.
They did it for the dogs.
They did it so the dogs would remember what they were for.
One of those dogs was a two-year-old golden retriever named Bretagne. She came from Texas with her handler, Denise Corliss. It was her first deployment. They worked ten days at Ground Zero. They found no survivors.
But firefighters would come off the pile, stone-faced, not speaking, and see the dog, and something would break open in them. They would kneel down. They would put their face in her fur.
One day a man walked up to Bretagne and started petting her. He told Corliss his best friend loved golden retrievers.
Corliss asked where his friend was.
The man pointed at the pile.
"He's in there somewhere."
He kept petting the dog.
Bretagne went on to work Hurricane Katrina and Rita. She retired at 10. She was the last known surviving search dog of 9/11.
On June 6, 2016, at age 16, she was carried into a veterinary office in Texas to be put to sleep.
Outside, a dozen firefighters from her fire department stood in a line in their dress uniforms, in the heat, and saluted as she went past.
They draped her in an American flag on the way out.
Three hundred dogs went into that pile looking for the living.
They found one.
And when they could not find any more, the men they worked beside laid down in the rubble and let themselves be found, so the dogs would not lose heart.
That is the whole story of Ground Zero, really.
Nobody could save the dead.
So they saved each other. 🇺🇸
Valerie Woods retweeted
From Karl Streed -
I BET YOU DIDN'Y KNOW ABOUT THIS: AFTER FLIGHT 77 HIT THE PENTAGON ON 9/11, THE FOLLOWING HAPPENED.
A daycare facility inside the Pentagon had many children, including infants who were in heavy cribs. The daycare supervisor, looking at all the children they needed to evacuate, was in a panic over what they could do.
There were many children, mostly toddlers, as well as the infants who would need to be taken out with the cribs. There was no time to try to bundle them into carriers and strollers.
Just then a young Marine came running into the center and asked what they needed. After hearing what the center director was trying to do, he ran back out into the hallway and disappeared. The director thought, "Well, here we are, on our own."
About 2 minutes later, that Marine returned with 40 other Marines in tow.
Each of them grabbed a crib with a child, and the rest started gathering up toddlers.
The director and her staff then helped them take all the children out of the center and down toward the park near the Potomac .
Once they got about 3/4 of a mile outside the building, the Marines stopped in the park, and then did a fabulous thing - they formed a circle with the cribs, which were quite sturdy and heavy, like the covered wagons in the Old West.
Inside this circle of cribs, they put the toddlers, to keep them from wandering off.
Outside this circle were the 40 Marines, forming a perimeter around the children and waiting for instructions. There they remained until the parents could be notified and come get their children.
The chaplain then said, "I don't think any of us saw nor heard of this on any of the news stories of the day. It was an incredible story of our men there.” There wasn't a dry eye in the room.
The thought of those Marines and what they did and how fast they reacted; could we expect any less from them? It was one of the most touching stories from the Pentagon.
It's the military, not the politicians that ensures our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
It's the military who salutes the flag, who serves beneath the flag, and whose coffin is draped by the flag.
If you care to offer the smallest token of recognition and appreciation for the military, please pass this on and pray for our men and women, who have served and are currently serving our country, and honor the memory of those who have given the ultimate sacrifice!
God Bless The USA!
Never forget!!!
Valerie Woods retweeted
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Roselle, a calm, golden‑furred guide dog, rode the elevator up to the 78th floor of the North Tower with her owner, Michael Hingson. To everyone else, it was just another Tuesday. To Roselle, it was a job: stay close, stay steady, keep her human safe.
When the first plane hit, the entire building lurched like a ship struck by a wave. Lights flickered. Ceilings cracked. Papers rained down like snow. People screamed. But Roselle didn’t. She simply pressed her body against Michael’s leg, a silent message: I’m here. Follow me.
Smoke began to fill the hallway. The air tasted like burning metal. Sirens wailed from every direction. Yet Roselle walked forward with the same steady pace she used every day, guiding Michael to the stairwell.
Behind them, dozens of terrified people followed her tail like a beacon. Step by step, floor by floor, she led them downward through the choking darkness. The stairwell shook. The heat intensified. But Roselle never sped up, never panicked, never once broke her rhythm. She knew that if she stayed calm, her human would too.
Somewhere around the 30th floor, a woman froze, sobbing, unable to move. Roselle stopped. She nudged the woman gently, leaning her warm body against her leg until her breathing slowed. Only when the woman whispered, “Okay… okay,” did Roselle continue the descent.
It took nearly an hour to reach the lobby. Firefighters shouted for everyone to run. The tower groaned above them. Roselle guided Michael through the chaos, out into the blinding sunlight, and down the street, refusing to stop until she sensed they were finally safe.
Minutes later, the North Tower collapsed.
Roselle didn’t know she had just saved her owner’s life. She didn’t know she had led more than a dozen people to safety. She didn’t know she had become a symbol of courage around the world.
She only knew one thing: her human was alive, and she had done her job.
Most people know Roselle guided her blind owner down 78 floors of the North Tower, but very few know what happened after they escaped. As the tower collapsed behind them, a massive cloud of ash and debris roared through the streets like a tidal wave. Michael couldn’t see it coming, but Roselle could. Instead of panicking, she leaned her entire body into him and pulled forward with absolute determination, guiding him through a darkness so thick he couldn’t breathe or hear. Even as the ground shook and people screamed around them, Roselle never once broke her pace. Her training didn’t tell her what to do, her loyalty did.
#archaeohistories
Valerie Woods retweeted
these lovely 60+ ladies from Taiwan did their own version of 2.0 as a tribute to BTS!
Valerie Woods retweeted
Everyone knows Washington, D.C.'s cherry blossoms came from Japan.
Almost nobody knows the story nearly ended in a bonfire.
In 1910, Tokyo sent 2,000 cherry trees to America as a gift.
Inspectors found them infested with insects.
President Taft ordered every single one burned.
Two thousand gifts. Ashes.
Imagine the diplomatic disaster. The wounded pride.
Here is what Tokyo's mayor, Yukio Ozaki, actually did:
He apologized. For the condition of his own gift.
Then his city grew 3,020 new trees, healthier and finer,
grafted and inspected and perfect,
and sent them across the ocean again.
Not a word of resentment. Try again, properly.
Those are the trees you photograph every spring at the Tidal Basin.
Two of the 1912 originals are still standing.
But the story doesn't end there. It comes full circle.
The parent grove in Japan, on the banks of the Arakawa River,
was devastated during World War II.
So in 1952, America cut budwood from the Washington trees
and sent it back to Japan, to resurrect
the very grove the gift had come from.
When a flood damaged the Japanese trees again in 1982,
Washington sent more cuttings home.
Read that again.
The daughters of the burned gift saved their mothers.
Today the two rivers, the Potomac and the Arakawa,
are officially sister rivers.
Their trees carry each other's blood.
One hundred and fourteen years of two countries
quietly taking care of the same flowers.
That's what sincerity looks like
when you give it a century to bloom.
🤖 Made with AI
