These moments are immortal, and most transitory of all;… Beams of their power stream into the ordered world and dissolve it again and again. Martin Buber, I and Thou On the morning of Everett and Olivia’s wedding, I had to pull Everett’s box out from under my bed. I have a box for each of […]
Read moreEverett has been away from us now for five months, one week and four days. I didn’t know the exact count until preparing to write that first sentence: I haven’t been marking the calendar with an x every day; I haven’t been keeping a countdown. Which isn’t to say I don’t miss him, that we don’t miss […]
Read moreLately I am thinking of contingency. Standing in her office, my editor reminded me that writing is a job just as ditch-digging is. The ditch must be dug. Must not also the writing be written? She is right, of course. The ditch-digger goes to work and digs her ditch; so must the writer go to […]
Read moreHealing Maddie Brees and I are headed to another book club tonight. I am very much looking forward to it. It’s tricky, though: when invited, I always tell my host that I recognize the liability. Having an author present for her book’s discussion can decidedly hamper dialogue and limit expression: how many attendees will be willing […]
Read moreHis email arrived sometime in May, or maybe late April. An invitation. He’s a writer, a someday filmmaker, and he wanted to talk Art. I’ve known Joel since he was born, I guess. His family and ours go to the same church; his age falls just between that of Everett and Emma. I’m sure they […]
Read moreIt has always been the field at the bottom of our neighborhood, the backyard of the community pool. Earliest memory finds us there with baby William at his first Easter, eight months old and unable to walk and sitting in the sand that is the volleyball court. We were late for the egg hunt, but […]
Read moreThis is the picture window in our breakfast room. It hasn’t always looked like this. I don’t think we wrote on it–ever–until Emma was home-schooled in the 7th grade. That’s when she helped me see that this window would make an excellent substitute for a white board. And so, throughout her three years of home-school, […]
Read moreThe 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 […]
Read more“I only have six more months to be a kid,” he said. Out of the blue, just standing there in the living room. What was I doing? Passing through, I suppose, on my way to the next busy-ness, the way it usually goes with me. But I was arrested by the question, and then made a […]
Read moreLately 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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