I remember seventh grade better than the other grades. That’s not true, actually. I had only five whole school years where I went to school and sat in a desk beside classmates. Five sets of teachers and schedules. Five school pictures and years with both a first and last day of school. So I remember…
Category: Learning
Things That Made 2024 Better
I’ve long finished the year with a list of what made it a better year than it could have been. I’ve always hedged it so carefully, not wanting to label a year “good” or “bad,” when it was so often both, and everything in between. All I have ever been willing to say is, in…
Fake Grass & Real Friends
The odd thing about this form of communication is that you’re more likely to talk about nothing than something. But I just want to say that all this nothing has meant more to me than so many somethings. You’ve Got Mail (1998) I don’t remember whose idea it was to sit down in the first…
Things That Made 2023 Better
Notes from the past year, from a gloriously cool and cloudy New Years’ Day. It has been a surprising year in many ways, full to the brim with change and growth and activity, only a little of which made it into words here. Still, looking back before looking ahead has been my practice, a moment…
The Road Taken
I few years ago, I stumbled on a superpower. I could become invisible by uttering a simple incantation in answer to a question. “And what do you do?” someone would ask. I’d sense my vanishing drawing near. “Me?” I’d reply, looking around as if any number of people were nearby. “I’m a stay-at-home mom.” And…
Small Lives and Unhistoric Acts
Every recent generation, I expect, had an Important Movie that somehow explained, shaped, or defined it. According to the rules—movies made about young people when I was that kind of young (now I’m just a different kind of young), I think I was supposed to resonate with the mood of Garden State, or a panoply…
Things That Made 2022 Better
2022 hasn’t been the most prolific year of my writing life—few poems, chapters and blog posts found their voice in the midst of a busy life. Perhaps I’ll write more about that later, but lest anyone think I’ve been doing nothing (I know that no one thinks that), here are some of the things that…
Plans and the Pet Store
The pet store wasn’t supposed to be today’s highlight. I actually didn’t plan to go there at all, as I almost never plan to go the pet store. Certainly not this one, anyway, a dimly-lit, big box affair off of a wide and depressing avenue in the north part of our city. (Yes, our dog…
A Little Like Teaching
Late at night, I open my laptop again and retrieve a Google Slides presentation. It looks eerily familiar, the same layout of a slide that used to gleam each morning at the front of my classrooms. On one side, a word of a orientation for those entering the room. Where am I? Language Arts 9!…
The Way Home 