Ailana’s Journal—2026-09-04 (and Island Kids) (Patreon)

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GOOD MORNING by Ailana Geven Keller

It’s Friday! Yesterday’s shoot is over, the gear is packed up, and it’s time to get busy preparing for future content.

I said I’d share Chicago history as part of my good-morning posts. Yesterday, we looked at how the area was important to the indigenous people long before any idea of it being a city existed. We’ll pick up from there and go a little further today.

By the late 1600s, French explorers and missionaries were traveling through the region, drawn in part by that same water route Native peoples had used for generations. Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet passed through in 1673, helping make the Chicago portage better known to Europeans.

Chicago’s first permanent non-Indigenous settler came later. Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, a Black man of African descent, established a home and trading post near the mouth of the Chicago River in the late 1700s. He traded with Native communities and travelers, built a successful settlement with his wife, Kitihawa, a Potawatomi woman, and is widely recognized today as the founder of Chicago.

The place remained tiny for years. In 1803, the U.S. Army built Fort Dearborn near the river. The fort was destroyed during the War of 1812, rebuilt a few years later, and the community around it slowly began to grow.

Then things started moving quickly. Chicago was incorporated as a town in 1833 with only a few hundred residents. Four years later, it became a city.

That seems like a good stopping point for this morning. Tomorrow, we’ll get into how a little settlement beside the river turned into one of the fastest-growing cities in the country.

For now, we’ve got places to go, notes to make, and pictures to take.

See you soon!

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THE WILD MILE by Ailana Geven Keller

I’m checking in from The Wild Mile in Chicago, and yes, I am definitely going to do a full article about this place.

The story starts with the North Branch Canal beside Goose Island. Dug in the 1800s, it became an industrial corridor built for barges, factories, lumber, coal, and grain—not people or wildlife. When that industrial use faded, the hard seawalls and polluted river bottom remained.

The idea that became The Wild Mile began taking shape in 2013 as research into whether floating wetlands could create habitat in urban canals. The nonprofit now called Urban Rivers followed, and by 2016 it was putting floating gardens into the canal. A larger city and community effort turned that experiment into a vision for a mile-long floating eco-park. The first public section opened in 2022, and a 2024 expansion brought it to about 700 feet.

These gardens aren’t just pretty. Native wetland plants grow on floating structures with their roots extending directly into the river. Those roots provide habitat for fish and other small creatures while helping filter pollutants and manage nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus. There are submerged habitats, too, including restoration work with freshwater mussels that filter water as they feed.

Standing here, I keep coming back to one thought.

This wasn’t a beautiful ecosystem somebody wisely protected before it could be damaged. People looked at a place that had already been altered, polluted, and stripped of much of what made it healthy—and decided that wasn’t the end of the story.

There’s something hopeful about that.

Sometimes doing good means protecting what we still have. Sometimes it means looking at something that went bad and asking, “How do we make it good again?”

I’m going to look around a little more before we move on. I’ll try to check back in tonight, so see you then!

BEDTIME STORY by Geoni Ryan

I have a daughter. I’m still working on what that means.

Tonight, it meant sharing her with my son’s girlfriend, and it wasn’t even strange.

Josh, Kel, Emily, Aria, and I went to Josh’s parents’ house—they sent a car and driver so that Clay, Sasha, Jason, and Ailana could go out into the area to work. Aria thought riding in a stretch Town Car was amazing. Emily was impressed as well.

“Wait till you see the house,” Kel said.

The property has been in Josh’s family since 1908. The house has evolved over the decades as additions and renovations expanded and improved the original.

The visit went well, and I suppose there will be other remarks about it. Once we got back home, we started getting everyone ready for bed.

I checked in on Emily and Aria—they are sharing the room—and read a story from an old book. Aria said she was all set to go to sleep.

Five minutes later—text from Emily: “She wants to wear a nightie like I have on. I have another like it. Can she?”

I said yes, then five minutes later: “She wants me to read another story. Okay?”

I said yes, then three minutes later: “She wants you to come listen with her.”

Guess what I said?

GOOD NIGHT by Ailana Geven Keller

I started my day at the window. I’ll end it here in the middle of the bed.

Emily met Kel and Aria’s grandparents. She said they live in a mansion, were amazingly kind and welcoming, and pretty much fell in love with Aria at first sight.

Josh’s sister, Nicole, was there, and she made a special point of chatting with Emily. They talked about Emily and Kel’s school.

“She was really nice,” Emily said.

Jason spent most of the day collecting images for the stock photo catalog. He was pleased by how everything turned out—even the traffic was kind to us today.

And some days should end like that. A job well done and some well-deserved rest.

May you end your day knowing you did what needed doing, surrounded by people who make the effort worthwhile, and ready for the rest you earned.

Good night.

Be your best you!

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