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…
Category: Literature
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…
Spiral Places
I once called this a spiral place. Nineteen, full of vague longing (to feel safe, confident, connected) and pointed questions (“So, will I just be single forever, then?”), I sat on a sand dune in late summer and wrote myself a letter. They told us to, the staff members running this retreat for student leaders,…
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…
Magic Enough
We hatched a plan, a scheme born on a late-night text thread (because 9:30 PM is late now) and a chance encounter with a thicket earlier in the week. Last week, my daughters and some friends went for a hike in a park rather far from our home, and on the way back found ourselves…
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…
Blood, Proximity, and Things We Learn to Love
I’ve never known as much about sheep farming as I do now. I could say it was an accident, that I didn’t know quite what I was getting into when I started reading James Rebanks’s A Shepherd’s Life: A People’s History of the Lake District, but that wouldn’t be technically accurate. I worked hard to…
The Way Home 