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The first thing most kids say at the top of the stairs is nothing at all. You walk down a narrow stone staircase cut into the earth, the air turns cool and damp, and then the ground opens into a cavern with a pool of water so clear you can see the rocks forty feet below. Roots from the trees above hang down through a hole in the ceiling. A shaft of sunlight hits the water and turns it the color of glass bottles. That is a cenote. In the Yucatán, it is also completely ordinary

There is a particular kind of tired that sets in around the third week of January in Michigan. It isn't the cold, exactly. West Michiganders know how to do cold. It's the grey. It's leaving for school in the dark and pulling into the driveway at dusk, and realizing you can't remember the last time the sun actually came out. In Grand Rapids, January delivers only about a fifth of the sunshine it theoretically could, and December is even stingier. The kids are restless. You're

Sometime in the next few weeks you're going to look at your remaining vacation balance and do the same math you did last year. You'll find you have days left. You'll take a few in December because you'd lose them otherwise. You'll roll over what you can, promise yourself you'll use it in the spring, and you won't. And next November you'll be looking at the same number, having a slightly worse version of the same thought. This is one of the most common patterns in American wor