I like letters. The shapes of them. The contrast between lower and upper case. The dots for the “i” and “j,” crossing “t’s.” I like writing very small. I like putting more than one line of text inside one line of college-ruled paper. I like college-ruled paper. I like a good pen. Not a fancy […]
Read moreForm A few weeks ago, I took my kids to the Alexander Calder exhibit at Duke’s Nasher Museum. This was the second of our “Mom-days,” a little summer practice I instituted last year when it became suddenly clear to me that, if I did not deliberately claim just a wee bit of my children’s time […]
Read moreI had forgotten completely this in the longing for winter—this winter now just past, this winter that wasn’t. Thirty degrees today and sixty tomorrow: I had wished for just one solid week of winter. I worked my favorite puzzle on the coffee table again, the one with the picture covered in snow, the one that […]
Read moreI’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 more than that, of course, I love Advent: the awareness of the waiting, the quietness of the birth, the miracle […]
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 moreIn 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 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 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 moreThis is not how it should be. Not, at any rate, what I would have it. I am sick. So sick. On a weekend. It started at about 11 on Friday night, not long after the last of my 9th grade students left our house and our end-of-year party, the party during which 22 out […]
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 […]
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