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…
Category: Learning
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!…
Popsicles and Playdates
We’ve only been here for forty minutes, but I’m wondering if it’s time to go. I’ve already met a dozen other parents, wearing a name tag bearing both mine and my daughter’s name on it. I’ve squinted across the top of my mask at half-familiar faces, a couple I recognize from college and a woman…
The History of Home
It’s not a long drive. I start on the old North Trunk Road, once one of the few paved routes leading out of Seattle to the north. This part of the road is trash-strewn and poverty-withered, and it makes me heart-sinkingly gloomy, even though I’ve traveled it, open-eyed, it for most of my life. I…
Dark Though It Is
Listenwith the night falling we are saying thank you from “Thanks,” by W.S. Merwin I first learned about the origins of Thanksgiving in 2011, when I happened to be working on Thanksgiving Day. Of course, I’d heard the same story as every American kid in elementary school, about the brave pilgrims and the generous Native…
Voting {or, Loving My Neighbors}
Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility consider one another as more important than yourselves; do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others. Philippians 2:3-4 (NASB) On election day, Layout Editor came in a grey suit and a fedora, looking straight out of a 1940s newsroom instead of what this was, a Seattle…
The Way Home 