End Zones & Time Zones

I was seventeen the first time I watched the Super Bowl all the way through. I’m sure it was on other years, but I could never be bothered to watch. I’d float in for the halftime show or a few commercials. The game itself felt endless, piles of people crawling across the field, lacking the…

Read More

Days on Days

“Snow is falling, snow on snow…” “In the Bleak Midwinter,” Christina Rosetti It’s been snowing for two hours in Kandern. Apparently, two hours of steady snow is all it takes to transform the town from dingy winter to snowglobe splendor. It wasn’t promising when it began, this storm, just a few errant flakes escaping the…

Read More

The Learn’d Astronomer

When I heard the learn’d astronomer, When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them, When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, Till…

Read More

Things That Made Life Better This Year: 2014 Edition

A frigid New Years’ Day, and I’m sitting by our front window, watching the sun set over the leafless hills that stand between the evergreen Black Forest and the vineyard-striped Rhine River Valley. A post-Christmas storm has left our town icy cold and snow-covered, so we’re enjoying these glowing pink and blue days before the…

Read More

Advent: Remaking & Imagination

This dinner is not great. Though I like to think of myself as a decent cook, the reality is that ingredients are capricious, and I’m even more capricious about following recipes. Sometimes I do, measuring with almost-precision and using almost all of the right ingredients. On occasion, when I’m learning to do something new, I glance…

Read More

Dream Job

Future Math Teacher meets me in my office after school. She and a partner are cooking dinner for Timmy and me tonight, a project for their Independent Living (once called “Home Economics”) class. From here, we’re going to shop for the evening at both of Kandern’s grocery stores, then home so that they can prepare the…

Read More

A Novel Month

I told only a few people I was attempting it. And I always said “attempting,” as if this was word was a magic talisman to ward off any accusation of failure. Usually I am all bravado at the beginning of adventures. I’ll declare them, like a European explorer, then push my ship off into the…

Read More

From the Woods of Narnia

5:oo PM on Saturday evening, the sun is down over the leafless Black Forest as we scurry between table s and up on the stage, putting the finishing touches on the decorations for this year’s Christmas Banquet. The theme is “Through The Wardrobe,” an homage to C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, and…

Read More

Rewrites

“So, what’s up with this paper?” my students ask, wafting in from the hall and settling in their desks with a nonchalance only possible after lunch, when a free afternoon beckons and “we can only handle school if it’s relaxed” is the motto of the hour. Don’t ask too much of us; it’s sixth period….

Read More

Leaving The Woods

“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand… Our life is like a German Confederacy, made up of petty states, with its boundary forever fluctuating, so that even a German cannot tell you how it is bounded at any moment.” Henry David Thoreau, Walden…

Read More