In collecting his wife’s diaries for publication, Leonard Woolf wrote, “At the best and even unexpurgated, diaries give a distorted or one-sided portrait of the writer, because, as Virginia Woolf herself remarks somewhere in these diaries, one gets into the habit of recording one particular kind of mood– irritation or misery, say– and of not […]
Read moreA small mountain remains: some research papers and two days worth of exams. It will take me hours to scale this mountain, but these are hours I can count, a discernible number– so different from the unknown and countless hours of grading I do over the course of the school year. I have some boxes […]
Read moreIt is Wednesday, 5:09 p.m. We are nine minutes late. It is the middle of May. Only 6 and a half days of school left– unless you are a fourth grader and going to Camp Don Lee on Monday and Staying For Two Nights. She heaves her guitar from the back of the van and […]
Read moreFor the two basketballs and the soccer ball that (seem to) (always) live in my dining room… For the 9-10 pairs of shoes that (occasionally and for far too long) linger near our front door (how many pairs of feet live in our house?)… For too much time in Party City and too much time […]
Read moreHow surprisingly easy it was to ignore him! What I was letting rip, in fact, was my willingness to look foolish, in his eyes and in my own. Having chosen this foolishness, I was a free being. How could the world ever stop me, how could I betray myself, if I was not afraid? It […]
Read moreDuring the few years we lived in Japan when I was a child, I learned to be afraid of the wind. Some of it was the fault of Jeff, a neighborhood boy one year older than I and a teller of tall tales. But much of it was due to the wind itself. The wind […]
Read moreIn winter, Route 19 splits West Virginia in two,and the mountains lean back from the road:old men with thinning hairyou can see right down to the roots. Everyone lives up close:a farmhouse with tire swing and tractor, pushing snow and pulling snow and piled upto windshield with it, white and idle; double-wide trailer wedged on […]
Read moreMy friend and worship minister asked several weeks ago that I write something about Jesus as a man for our advent celebration at church. I was happy to do this, glad to ponder what I have always thought to be a fairly elusive fact: Jesus was a man. That’s all that many people even today […]
Read moreMost of the time I forget all about it. I forget about it in the way that you forget Christmas, or what you had for dinner last Wednesday. I forget about it because it is irrelevant. Most of the time. Most of the time I am up before light, anyway. I make breakfast and bed […]
Read moreCotignac, France Provence has a basically Mediterranean climate, one wafted by winds that give it a special character. The most notorious is the mistral (from the Provencal mistrau, or master– supposedly sent by northerners jealous of the south’s climate), rushing down from the Rhone and gushing east as far as Toulon and west to Narbonne. […]
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