The text had two questions, the first from the daughter, who is ten: “Are you related to Robert Louis Stevenson?” And the second from the mother, who is old enough to be a mother: “(The Daughter) is reciting her most favorite tomorrow… ‘The Swing.’ I’ve been coaching her to try to recite it without the […]
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I drove the girls to school on Thursday, a late-summer, light-filled morning. It was just the third week of school, day thirteen if we’re keeping count, which might not be a good idea. The conversation en route was cheerful. Chatter about driver’s ed, gladness that it was already Thursday, and the painted parking […]
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I feel as if I’ve done a lot of traveling lately. It’s that time of year, right? Summer vacation. We’re gone, we’re here, we’re gone again. Definitely not complaining. I love to travel. But lately it’s got me thinking about how I pack. Like most people (everyone?), I’m guessing I have the normal categories: clothes, […]
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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 […]
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Naming a child is a pretty big deal. Anyone who has ever done it will say so. Because while a person can change her name legally (someday) if she wants to, I think the process is a genuine and maybe expensive hassle. Meanwhile, she’ll have to live with the name long enough to decide she […]
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We are gearing up for a big transition at our house: In less than forty-eight hours, Will will be on his way to Madagascar, and we will be navigating life as a family of five– minus one.This means that there’s lots to do these days, and there’s lots to think about. Around the errands and […]
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“How is your book doing?” she asked me, and I loved the question for the way she worded it: As if the book itself was doing, as if it had agency, a life of its own. As if, left to its own devices in my desk drawer, in my laptop files, it might nonetheless continue […]
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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 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 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 […]
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