This is an old one, pulled from the annals of this blog because, just now, I discovered chewing gum stuck to the drum of my washing machine. At the time I wrote this post, my children were 8, 6, and 4; now they are 17, 15, and 13. But they still like gum. And I’m also […]
Read moreWe’ve had so much talk about the weather because it’s been weird and difficult.Too cold for too long(in my nineteen years living in Durham, I can’t remember a March like this one)and gray In the twenty-first century, weather might be the one thing we are universally subject toalong with things less obvious–the pull of gravity, […]
Read moreI wrote this two years ago today, but I’ve decided to re-post it because it’s still true today. Happy 2014!1.2.12 I’ve loved January for a while now. It’s not that I don’t love December and all that those 31 days mean– I do. I love the Christmas tree and the decorations and the lights. And […]
Read moreGiovanni GiacomettiChristmas Now burn, new born to the world,Double-natured name,The heaven-flung, heart-fleshed, maiden-furled,Miracle-in-Mary-of-flame,Mid-numbered he in three of the thunder-throne!Not a dooms-day dazzle in his coming nor dark as he came;Kind, but royally reclaiming his own;A released shower, let flash to the shire, not a lightning of fire hard-hurled.-Gerard Manley Hopkins, excerpt from “The Wreck of […]
Read moreEvery year it comes to this, I would imagine–though I can’t say I remember it, surprised as I am every time: the air cleared of humidity so you could see for miles if the way lay straight; the leaves in that state of going, that thinned-outness–falling or still clinging–that makes every breeze into its own […]
Read more“‘Does anyone ever realize life while they live it? Every, every minute?’‘Saints and poets, maybe, they do some.’”—Thornton Wilder, Our Town Seamus Heaney died last Friday. He was only 74– a bit young, in my opinion, in this late age, to shuffle off this mortal coil. His death is our loss entirely. I don’t know […]
Read moreIt was an indifferent Wednesday. A day of continued recovery (we had come home in the wee hours only the day before; my suitcase was still unpacked), a hot day, summer. A day of things for the kids to do elsewhere so that I could do the housework that awaited me, or maybe do some […]
Read moreAll of summer in a week and a half. That’s how it feels this morning, regardless of the cicadas’ buzz outside. Our summer lies dismantled on the living room floor: weary suitcases sag, waiting to spill our recent history, all disheveled, from their zippered seams. Again I am newly amazed at the miracle of modern […]
Read moreThis beach is a mess. It wasn’t like this yesterday, and now look. I don’t have to walk ten feet before I’m practically tripping over the refuse washed ashore. Here is a plastic soda bottle, unearthly green and in the sand neck-deep. And here the sodden remnant of a ruptured mylar balloon has draped itself […]
Read moreI hadn’t wanted to go. An evening out on a Tuesday? It would have been easier (always) to stay home, and I am a willing servant to the novel. It’s quiet work, and at this point it means stepping carefully and lifting heavy stones to gather soil underneath them, adjusting their alignment, standing back to […]
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