I didn’t know if I’d like it. Bill was confident I would. He knows that I like good, hard exercise, that when I finish a workout, I like to be gasping, panting, drenched through with sweat, and enjoying that crazy clean feeling in my bronchial tubes–a clean that only comes from breathing extra hard for […]
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Lately I dream in babies. Almost always they are my own, earlier incarnations of these same beings who, even now–at eighteen, and sixteen, and fourteen–do much to order my day. A week ago it was Emma, suddenly arriving while I visited with a friend who was in the midst of moving house. Boxes and displaced […]
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 […]
Read moreThere was a dinner plan. The spinach was thawing in its pie plate on the counter; the grocery stop would only take a minute. We would be eating (after the soccer game) by 6:30. And then the plan was changed: Bill and I would go out; the kids would be eating at home. And so […]
Read more“a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction….” — Virginia Woolf A long, lazy drive to Charlottesville, taking nearly all back roads and finding myself (I recognized it before I read the sign) at the entrance to Somerset Farm. It wasn’t where I was going, but I headed up […]
Read moreHere’s something delightful– and who doesn’t need delightful now and again? Reader (thank you so much, Tim) and high school chum Timothy Crouse reminded me of this: the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. It is a contest in which you– get this– compete to win the prize for the Worst First Sentence. I love this. It is […]
Read moreHeedless Perhaps we love the shore because the debris here could not be ours no matter how hard our lives. Or because the long shelf of land continues on under the water so even here at the edge of the world the edge is uncertain. Perhaps we love that the water rises to uncertain levels […]
Read moreThey’ve asked me to write them a poem, my boys have. In four-four time. And it will not, in fact, be so much of a poem as it will be song lyrics, lyrics written for the music they have already written during one of their music sessions in the basement. They are on their instruments […]
Read moreI love saying “Merry Christmas.” I do. Call me unfeeling. Call me insensitive. Call me politically incorrect. Go ahead. It might be the “merry” part. We never say “merry” about anything else, have you noticed? It’s not “Merry Birthday” or “Merry Easter” or “Merry St. Patrick’s Day.” So offered this one opportunity to say “Merry” […]
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