Re-Discovery

Long ago, a bunch of friends and I spent a Saturday moving all of my roommate’s and my things from one part of Seattle to another. It was a pretty typical move, complete with trips to the dump in someone’s borrowed minivan, and furniture crammed in someone’s borrowed truck. The crowning achievement, at the end…

Read More

Choosing To Imagine: An Ear of Corn & A Border Camp

I’m feeling very American, standing at my kitchen island and shucking corn. I hardly knew anyone with a kitchen island the whole time I lived in Germany, and the corn—well, that’s about as American as it gets. Because though I’ve spent plenty of summers running and hiking past cornfields in southwestern Germany, Europeans don’t eat…

Read More

Twenties Questions

With many recognitions dim and faint,  And somewhat of a sad perplexity,  The picture of the mind revives again:  While here I stand, not only with the sense  Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts  That in this moment there is life and food  For future years. William Wordsworth, from “Tintern Abbey” It takes me…

Read More

Grown Up Summer

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet “What’s your favorite season?” I’ve asked this question countless times, to kids all over the place,…

Read More

Appreciation

I went to ninth grade afraid.  Like many students who leave Christian schools, I entered the “real world” (in my case public high school) with a head full of warnings. I was somewhat apprehensive that in my first month of school I—a fourteen-year-old honors student, a decent violinist and a mediocre volleyball player—would be ridiculed…

Read More

Honest Doubt

          You say, but with no touch of scorn,           Sweet-hearted, you, whose light-blue eyes           Are tender over drowning flies,  You tell me, doubt is Devil-born.  Alfred, Lord Tennyson, from “In Memoriam A. H. H. OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII: 96” I’ve never been a huge fan of Mom Blogs. (Yes, I know that they’re…

Read More

Stolen: A Diaper Bag

It took us almost two weeks to realize that the diaper bag had been stolen. In Seattle, apparently having one’s car broken into is a rite of passage, an initiation into the club of people who really live here.  And a few weeks ago, we finished our transformation into full residents. We’ve taken the bus, endured…

Read More

Sometimes You Can Go Back Home

Winter Greenlake Saturday afternoon, I venture out to Trader Joe’s. There are two, about equidistant from our new house by Greenlake, but honestly neither is terribly convenient. I know this, because I’ve had this problem before. This EXACT problem. Because I grew up about a mile from where we live now. So I remember thinking,…

Read More

Rolling Over

A newly-engaged Timmy and Kristi, February 2013 Six years after I got engaged, I’m awake before dawn in a too-bright room, in a house I just moved into last night, listening to a baby roll over. To be accurate, I’m listening to my daughter, who is both proud and a little annoyed that she’s just…

Read More

An Eclipse and An Inauguration

My daughter wakes up at 9:00 PM. I hear her upstairs, stirring, waking up from what she must assume is a nap, in her pajamas, in the dark. Someday, I’ll put her to bed and she’ll just stay asleep. But not today. Oh well. Anyway, I’m hardly busy. I’m literally lying on the couch in a…

Read More