It has always been the field at the bottom of our neighborhood, the backyard of the community pool. Earliest memory finds us there with baby William at his first Easter, eight months old and unable to walk and sitting in the sand that is the volleyball court. We were late for the egg hunt, but … More Field Day
This is the picture window in our breakfast room. It hasn’t always looked like this. I don’t think we wrote on it–ever–until Emma was home-schooled in the 7th grade. That’s when she helped me see that this window would make an excellent substitute for a white board. And so, throughout her three years of home-school, … More Window
My family and I attended a play last night: Arthur Miller’s The Crucible at PlayMakers Theater. It’s difficult to say that this is a wonderful play, or even, perhaps, a good one. You don’t witness a drama about false accusations, terrible lies, and gross injustice and feel good about it afterward. Which isn’t to say that the play doesn’t resolve. It certainly resolves–but … More The Absence of Precise Answers
“I only have six more months to be a kid,” he said. Out of the blue, just standing there in the living room. What was I doing? Passing through, I suppose, on my way to the next busy-ness, the way it usually goes with me. But I was arrested by the question, and then made a … More You Coming?
There are a lot of ways to know people. There’s the Facebook kind of knowing, the Instagram kind. You know the names of their children, and their dogs. The seminal events, the proud moments, the way their cat curls over a sofa when it rains. Then there’s the pass-you-in-the-hallway, we-work-together kind. The kind you might chat … More Each One
“You can’t really see the days. I mean, look at the days with your eyes.” -Theo, age 4. 1 July 2015December 1990: For … More Holidays
“How is your book doing?” she asked me, and I loved the question for the way she worded it: As if the book itself was doing, as if it had agency, a life of its own. As if, left to its own devices in my desk drawer, in my laptop files, it might nonetheless continue … More At Our House
All of summer in a week and a half. That’s how it feels this morning, regardless of the cicadas’ buzz outside. Our summer lies dismantled on the living room floor: weary suitcases sag, waiting to spill our recent history, all disheveled, from their zippered seams. Again I am newly amazed at the miracle of modern … More All of Summer in a Week and a Half
Nineteen months. This is a phrase I likely knew before I could talk. I probably heard it before I was born when, my mother balancing baby girl over burgeoning stomach, people asked. My mother and father both probably said it countless times at the playground, at the church, in the grocery store. “How far apart … More 19 Months, 4000 Miles
“Do not hurry; do not rest.” — Goethe Here’s news– or is it?: I did not make my Thanksgiving deadline. There are lots of reasons for this, one of them being that, while Thanksgiving is on a Thursday, preparations and their busy-ness for it begin Well In Advance of that, which meant that I was doing nothing … More The Reason Why
